I like slow weekends when I’m not under the gun with work. Matt Webb says this feels like “zero gravity”, and I have to agree. I typically take this time to catch up on my reading, so in case you’re interested, here’s what’s caught my eye in the past week.

1) This interview with Jeff Bezos on Smartmoney (about the future of Amazon.com) is interesting. I’ve always been a huge fan of Amazon and I do admire a company that manages to pull away from what most would call its core business (online sales) to fill a need of others – which is the case of their Web Services platform, that we‘ve been using for a few years now^[1] – or the Kindle, which follows Bezos’ vision that people will read again.

2) My copy of Adaptive Path’s Subject To Change has finally arrived and I can’t wait to go through it. I’ll post some more thoughts as soon as I finish reading it, but usually those guys don’t disappoint. It is safe to assume that if you’re into the business of building products, you’ll like (and get value out of) this book.

3) If you’re a fan of number crunching (we’re doing a few interesting things with map/reduce with a client of ours), you’ll probably be interested in a post about data mining over at New Scientist. It talks about what kinds of data companies are collecting based on your online habits. It also briefly mentions Stephen Baker’s new book The Numerati which I personally haven’t read yet (but will). If you fancy number crunching, though, you may want to look at Supercrunchers as well, that I personally loved.

4) For the rubyists out there, the Rubyconf 08 videos are now online, so you might want to start your downloads if you (like me) missed the conference. The guys over at Confreaks – who go through all the trouble of filming, encoding, uploading and serving these videos – deserve a few drinks.

^[1] For those curious, an interesting tidbit: Goplan was the first rails-based application to publicly run on EC2 instances (while EC2 was in beta, in September of 06). How cool is that?

I just came back from an impromptu meeting (over 2am-nachos) of the three remaining founders of Webreakstuff (the fourth of our founders is now working at Soocial, for those curious). I wanted to share a thought that was on my mind while we were eating and talking: the fact that talent – of a group or individual – needs nurture, both from the individual himself and from the environment around him/her.

From the individual himself

Coming from a shared academic background, we’ve had common friends throughout the years. Some who could be considered excellent in their own areas of work – design, development or management. Most of them, however, lack something that I deem fundamental in order to be recognized as individuals – the ability to self-promote.

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” ^[1]. Likewise, someone can be a fantastic engineer, or designer, or facilitator, but if they can’t promote themselves enough to show and share that talent they may never succeed. Talking about how to self-promote is out of the scope of this post, but I’ll come back to it in the future.

Woody Allen once said that “80% of success is showing up“. Some people never do, while others – some less deserving – take all the credit. Sometimes, even the dungeon-loving, garage-living engineer needs to stand up for himself.

From the environment around him/her

In his recent book Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcom Gladwell talks about how in the high majority of cases, individuals who excel at something share one thing: they’re often people raised in an atmosphere of concerted cultivation ^[2]. I have always believed that the key to success is in the hands of the individual, but recently I’ve come to understand the full importance of his/her surroundings.

People who don’t work in teams often create the wrong habits, and people who work in the wrong environment never reach their full potential. Quite often it is complicated – or costly – for team members (or managers) to create the right set for people to excel, but the rewards are there ^[3]. One thing we found on our company was that in the past it was complicated for someone to voice their opinions without someone stepping in and crushing their ideas with a “here’s why you’re dumb”. Taking care of that problem (not with specific actions, but slow change) made brainstorming natural, which in turn contributes to people being, well, empowered to get better.

Concluding thoughts

In the end, whether someone excels or not is a result of his/her actions and the environment or workplace around the person. Not all individuals are lucky enough to do something relevant (and promote it), and to work somewhere where their value is recognized. A shame, though, is the astounding number of talents you and I will never hear of because the person was either shy, or just hampered by his/her surroundings.

Footer notes:

^[1]: Or as George Carlin would say, “If a man speaks in the forest and there is no woman there to hear it, is he still wrong?”. Man, I miss George Carlin.
^[2]: For more information about what concerted cultivation is, make sure you read Malcom’s book, or this Wikipedia paragraph on it.
^[3]: There are inumerous books that talk about these topics, but I’ll recommend 3: 1) The Art of Innovation (definitely one of my top 5 favorite books), 2) The Ten Faces of Innovation, and 3) Hot Spots. If you are looking for a short reference of the 10 faces of innovation, and particularly of the Set Designer, see this.

One of the greatest memories I have from when I was a kid is of me riding in the back seat of our family car through the highway down south for the summer. I remember thinking that it would be amazing if every person had their own personal road that they could take everywhere.

I imagined a few different ways that might work. They varied from wide individual roads (an obviously insane waste of space – admittedly I took waste of space pretty lightly then), to intricate monorail networks between points (much like a graph system for futuristic cars to navigate). I even remember drawing some of these ideas and regret having lost those, as they’d be perfect to illustrate this post.

Anyway, when you’re a kid there’s not a lot you can do about an idea like this except dream about it and believe that maybe one day “big people” might do something like it. I’m a little bummed that over 20 years have gone by and I still experience the same transit system I did when I was young.

We are in weird times and I believe, in a potential tipping point. The climate crisis and the financial crisis combined require innovative solutions to some of the pressing problems of our age, and I like to speculate that solving the transit system problem is going to be pretty important soon. Interestingly, 2008 was (apologies, I can’t remember the source) the first year when travelling by car between cities declined dramatically in several countries due to the economics of transportation.

Anyway, all this to say that all is not lost, and while there’s no definitive solution to what I believe is a real problem, there are a bunch of projects walking in this direction, highlighted in this Tech Talk by Bengt Gustafsson of Beamways at Google. It may prove an interesting weekend read, if this is the kind of thing you like.

A personal note: I like to theorize about these problems and naturally I come bearing no mass-transit soutions of my own. But I do predict I’ll keep thinking about these problems regardless of their complexity, and cheering on those whose vision is to redefine how we move from place to place. Even if only to remind me that we’re all creative (and maybe even a bit of visionaries) when we are younger. Shame we lose that a bit with age.

Image credits: The images in this post are (lacking my own kid-sketches) from “Tomorrow’s Transportation: New Systems for the Urban Future”, a report from (brace yourselves) 1968 for the US congress. Even though this is only an excerpt, it’s fascinating how prescient is is. Have a look, if you’re interested in a bit of old visions of the future.