A few of you may know that I’m dipping my toes in the water with creating a company (CurrentBlend). I’ve always had quite a few interests and believe that I can create something successful combining many of those interests. What my plans with CurrentBlend have been to create a quasi-marketing firm focused on getting smaller companies set up digitally to maximize their customer relationships and reach of their product(s). My long-term thought on CurrentBlend also involves co-working space. I’ve had it in my mind for years that owning a coffeeshop is something I’d like to do. With CurrentBlend, I’d envisioned a coffeeshop on the lower level of a two-story building with the CurrentBlend office on the second floor. Somewhere in the building there’d be co-working space for people to share and network to grow their business.

Just so happens Stable Cafe in San Francisco has taken what I’ve been thinking about and put it into practice: creating a cafe and workspace in one.

Julia Roy has it right.

OMFG! That my friends, is how you get a blogger, Twitterer, Flickerer, YouTuber’s attention. Do something special for them and create a bit of mystery and/or excitement around it. Don’t cut, copy and paste your marketing, but rather re-create, re-mixx and reinvent the way you market your brand to your intended audience. Impress them with how much you really know them and show them that you truely understand what their interests are. Get ‘em excited to talk about you :)

Quotes like this aren’t necessarily steering me away from benzedrine.

And then, of course, there’s Jack Kerouac: he got hopped up on Benzedrine so that he could write On the Road in an epic twenty day writing session.

A cup of coffee is an opportunity to meet someone, talk about a few other things, make a friend or a business acquaintance. Done right, the face to face reference check is a lot more than a reference check. It’s a way to grow your network and your business. And it’s also the best way to find out exactly what you need to know about a person you want to hire, invest in, or otherwise go into business with.

The only place to play the game in the United States is the Cadieux Cafe in Detroit, Michigan.

Of the 30 teams in Major League baseball, 12 of the managers are former catchers.  A normal distribution would be 2 or 3.  Sounds like a case of a Gladwellian Outlier, doesn’t it?  The authors explain their theory here…that catchers face their teammates, that they are closest to the competition, that they have to keep track of a lot of things at once, be psychiatrists to flailing pitchers, etc.  Essentially that the kind of person who is a successful catcher has all the qualities of a successful manager.

Only Once explores the Catcher Hypothesis.

The Boston Globe Ideas section has a thoughtful piece, Ready…Aim…Fail, on if setting goals are a bad thing…do they distract from the real work at hand, discourage independent and creative thinking, take you down the wrong road if not constantly re-evaluated?

But a few management scholars are now looking deeper into the effects of goals, and finding that goals have a dangerous side. Individuals, governments, and companies like GM show ample ability to hurt themselves by setting and blindly following goals, even those that seem to make sense at the time.

bon viviant (n) : a person devoted to refined sensuous enjoyment (especially good food and drink)

Continuous partial attention describes how many of us use our attention today. It is different from multi-tasking. The two are differentiated by the impulse that motivates them. When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. We’re often doing things that are automatic, that require very little cognitive processing. We give the same priority to much of what we do when we multi-task — we file and copy papers, talk on the phone, eat lunch — we get as many things done at one time as we possibly can in order to make more time for ourselves and in order to be more efficient and more productive.

Linda Stone goes into much further detail on her site. It’s fascinating stuff when you think about blackberries, power lunches, bluetooth headsets while driving, etc.