— Nathaniel Hawthorne (via ninagarcia)
he was my neighbor too
33 years’ worth of “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood
scared to death
If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), “Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?” chances are you are.
The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident.
The real one is scared to death.—Steven Pressfield, “The War of Art”
Kittens on DJ Decks
“Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?”
theme song for the TV series of the same name, by Rockapella
[via]
Much has been written about employee motivation and retention. It’s written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don’t have a clue about the daily necessity of keeping your team professionally content because they’ve either never done the work or have forgotten how it’s done. These are the people who show up when your single best engineer casually and unexpectedly announces, “I’m quitting. I’m joining my good friend to found a start-up. This is my two weeks’ notice.”
You call on the motivation and retention police because you believe they can perform the legendary “diving save”. Whether it’s HR or a well-intentioned manager with a distinguished title, these people scurry impressively. Meetings that go long into the evening are instantly scheduled with the disenfranchised employee.
It’s an impressive show of force, and it sometimes works, but even if they stay, the damage has been done. They’ve quit, and when someone quits they are effectively saying, “I no longer believe in this company”. What’s worse is that what they were originally thinking was, “I’m bored”.
Boredom is easier to fix than an absence of belief.
