Accidental Events, Dreams & Travels in The Life of

I get a lot of question on how to stay productive, agile and still keeping it simple when on the road. Here are a few thoughts as it relates to apps. General travel trips in another post.

The problem I’m trying to solve is avoiding schlepping around my Air (yes, it’s the lightest thing available but still doesn’t fit into my jeans pockets). I’m also trying to keep it real by using as few apps as possible. Simplicity leads to genious as per Fiat’s latest car ads.

My favorites:

• Docs2: Syncs brilliantly with GDocs and has offline file mgmt, lacks doc sharing, could be faster, access to all my docs to read and edit in the palm of my hand is critical
• Camera: I use the camera to take visual notes from whiteboards (one picture is more than thousand words) and share travel photos with friends and family
• Byline: Syncs with Google Reader and caches all feeds for offline (flight) news reading, email sharing, xlnt way to catch up and stay up to date
• Foursquare: Great to let friends know your in their part of the world and to get travel recommendations, it’s also very entertaining while on the road
• Things: The best task manager available, wish it had iCal integration
• iCal: Syncs with Google Cal feeds, just need to setup feeds for flights and hotel stays for offline usage

Room for improvement:

• An app that aggregates all my status updates across all social networks, like Tweetdeck or Silentale
• Hotels: Lack Remember Me, in general a bad user interface, lacks calendar feature
• Kayak: Great new interface, tricky to book or cancel trips but that’s not their fault, United should create an app with quick checkout
• OpenTable: great but lack inventory outside the US
• Skype: Really great but I’d prefer GV to leverage my GV number, well see what happens with the Gizmo5 integration
• Contacts: Duplication and l10n is driving me crazy, updating my AB as well, Plaxo was onto something but too early, a shared cloud-based AB like Goggle Apps would be awesome

What I really lack is a price / convenient comparison app for airport transfers and local transportation. What is the fastest, cheapest or most convinient way to get from LHR to my hotel in Notting Hill? What are the services offered? Food, WiFi, coffee et cetera. Google Maps is heading in that direction.

The cool thing is that this all works but forces you to change the way you think about productivity. In reality it means fewer emails and leveraging apps to schedule meetings, take notes, share data et cetera. Everything becomes realtime. The Meeting Minutes are available right away and not another to do on someones schedule. It’s all about giving access to all knowledge to accelerate the conceptualization process. Being on the road should not slow or hinder that process.

In the bigger picture what we are really doing is connecting our minds. Technology is there to enable collaboration and delivery.

[From Tom’s Deli in London]

Traveling with a selected few apps and only relying on WiFi has worked much better than I could have anticipated. I never really had a need for my Air as I only had people meetings.

The Google Docs (Doc2), foursquare, Facebook and Skype apps worked brilliantly. Less in genious.

The access of high-speed free WiFi was surprisingly generous at my hotel, meeting venues, restaurants and friends places. Even on the airport bus. Probably devoided AT&T of at least $200 in fees.

It was also nice to not being able to check emails and status updates numerous times a day. That said, I would be open to an affordable global data-only plan.

The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell is a must-read for anyone that is interested in human history, religion and philosophy. I’m embaressed that I haven’t read it until now. It would had answered so many questions and started do many new thoughts.

Religion is starting to make sense to me and the fact that all different religions are based on very similar mythology is fascinating. Few think about that Islam, Judaism and Christianity are all Abrahamic religion. Maybe if they would we would not have religious wars.

I don’t remember how I found Connect!: A Guide to a New Way of Working by Anne Truitt Zelenka on Amazon.com but the combination of the $2.03 price tag (no longer available) and it being a Web Worker Daily production made me interested. I’ve for the past 20 years been thinking, practising and experimenting with new ways of working thanks to emerging technology.

In 1995 I sent the first SMS on top of a mountain and later that year travelled across Europe working from London, Paris, Barcelona, Milan and other wonderful cities. Nokia had just released their first PCMCIA card (i.e. a 9,600 baud mobile modem) that I just had to try out. Today’s Edge network is about 40 times faster than my old modem just as a comparison. If that doesn’t impress, just think about that Internet (20MM worldwide) and cellphone usage was considered early, early adoption. Hell, it was even before the majority of the world had ever heard of the web.

Anywho, the book is really good. I expected the usual mobile work / telecommuting utopia / drivel but these guys have done their homework. The essential premise is that by leveraging the web the way you work can and will change - for the better. The difference between corporate busy work and independent bursty work rings very true. But it’s also about working smarter not harder, focus on quality and not quantity, and exploding your career.

It’s a great practical and philosophical guide to the future of work!

I recently read the fantastic book The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe. They hypothesize that American history can be divided into cycles of history - roughly 80-100 years (the length of a man’s life). The current cycle started around WWII and will end within the next 5-10 years to make way for a new cycle. Every cycle is divided into four turnings. The fourth turning (2005 - 2020) will be a period of civil unrest, financial crisis and lots of change.

Just as the period between the American Civil War and WWII had it’s unique characteristics and challenges, so does the current cycle and so will the next.

Robert Prechter makes a similar argument as a result of his studies in Socionomics (about human social behavior and social mood). He argues that we have been in a bear market since 2000 which will continue for another few years (bear markets are on average 16 years).

Bear markets are defined by periods of social unrest, lack of tolerance and anti-globalization. Prechter is predicting a stock market crash in 2010 that will make the previous look like child’s play.

“The bear market will bring back nationalism, racial exclusion and perhaps even religious conflict. Thinking technically about events, that is, observing what they reveal about social psychology, prepares you for those changes, whereas trying to predict the future from the events themselves leads you to the opposite, and wrong, conclusion.”

The above creates a great framework to understand what’s going on in society today. Why the Swiss wants to ban mosques, why nationalism is on the rise and why people are becoming less tolerant.

When I took time off from studying economics and business administration I choose literature, art and theory of science as my focal points. Very unconventional (most people would say crazy) but the latter taught me - through Thomas S. Kuhn among others - that scientific discovery is not linear but goes though paradigm shifts.

It starts with an anomaly that deviates from the previous way of thinking, analyzing and making decisions. An anomaly is the event that tells us to break the rules and to rethink. It’s part of scientific discovery and progression.

The web is a fantastic example of an event that challenged the way we think about business, living and working. Back in the 90s few people saw the web as a place to make money or have a career. Those were the fun days, the passionate days, the creative days. Once it became evident that the web would change the world, the MBAs marched in to create structure and profit. The fun ended. (I’m not against making money but have aversion towards personal greed.)

All the above is part of creating a bigger picture and trying to understand what is really going on in society today and why. The CNN sound bite details doesn’t really matter in major social paradigm shifts, having “keep it real” perspective does.

The unrest is due to change of the current rules. People are angry cause they were told to follow - for example - the financials rules (“buy-and-hold”, invest in your 401K and real estate et cetera) but now those rules are no longer valid. New rules are emerging and before the fog of war has settled it’s hard to understand what the new rules are.

I think we are going through a process of collective grief, initiated with denial back in 2007-2008, the present is infected with enormous anger and will be followed by bargaining, depression and acceptance. The current political blame game doesn’t matter. Was it Clinton or Bush’s fault that the financial markets crashed? Who cares? The dirty deed is done and nothing is going to change that.

There were clear events that pointed towards the financial crisis for people who cared enough to try to understand the bigger picture. But who wants to look at the forest when the trees are filled with hundred dollar bills.

The past few years have taught me that our lives have become too dependent on financial and individual success. We manifest any financial progress with taking on more debt. We celebrate celebrities that alter their appearance to be more bankable. We determine the social pecking order by what car you drive or what corporate title you have.

In the light of all this I’ve to say that I welcome the current change with open arms. The article “21 Things We’re Learning to Live Without” is just one great example of how we are slowly becoming human again.

“We keep being amazed at how having less stuff, with no deprivation, actually gives us better quality of life,” says Deborah Merchant. “We’ve gained emotional and spiritual maturity.”

But mostly I’m excited about all the cool new endeavors that are peculating under the surface of mainstream society. In every time of unrest or crisis there are people who are defying the conventional thinking to realize what they believe in. Sure, the real estate crash has made a lot of people renters again, but it has also enable a new wave of frugal and affordable entrepreneurship and artistic expression. Necessity is the mother of invention, bear markets and recessions fertile soil.

I think the next decade can be glorious if we accept the new brave world. A place that we can influence and design to our liking. I feel for the people that got defrauded and swindled by the government, financial institutions and mainstream “common sense” stupidity but I also salute the cool future that we could create as we are getting ready to accept change.

The Greatest Trade Ever by Wall Street Journal’s Gregory Zuckerman was the perfect follow up on Too Big to Fail that I enjoyed reading in a palapa in Mexico in December last year. It’s a much faster read that ties well into Too Big to Fail. The book chronicles John Paulson and a few other maverick trader’s sub-prime mortgage trades that made them millions and in Paulson’s case billions - $15BN to be exact.

I love the fact that the book quotes Andrew Lahde’s farewell letter to his investors. It’s absolutely and utterly brilliant in it’s prose, expression and message.

I was in this game for the money. The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.

And who said reading is harmless?

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton - the celebrated contemporary philosopher and writer - is a fantastic book about work. His language is eloquent, thoughtful and elaborate, his mind fresh like a spring morning.

I’ve to share my favorite paragraph that so well describes a very common sentiment about work and career:

We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to. We confront our lost energies in the pathos of the retirement party.

My first book - out of the promised 101 - was The Monk and The Riddle: The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living. It’s a wonderful pseudo philosophical book about finding your professional passion. It’s written by a Silicon Valley veteran, making it even more relevant for me as a reader. The perfect feel-good, Saturday afternoon book.

The article about entrepreneurship in Detroit in the New York Times was inspiring and started a number of new thoughts. The first thing that came to mind was all the passionate people behind these new small businesses. It’s just fantastic that despite all the negative economic news that is peddled across the major media outlets there are still people who just rise up through the ashes to rebuild and build new. To claim their human right to their own destiny, to take risk and to create. To follow their passion.

Secondly, I was reminded of how energizing pre-gentrified or turn-around neighborhoods can be. It’s in these beaten down, urban environments that magic happens and that innovation takes place. It starts with a few creative minds that are looking for a place where they can spend enough time - what now is called runway in venture speak - to reach their goals. Think artists, bohemians and mavericks.

Just imagine energizing neighborhoods like Quartier Latin, Shoreditch, Palermo Viejo, West Hollywood, The Village, El Born, Notting Hill and Södermalm. Before they became gentrified and world known they were where bohemians, artists and other renegades hung out. House and food was cheap, the camaraderie heartfelt and the architecture inspiring. Due to the lack of wealth these hoods are usually fairly run down.

But they offer a refuge for people that need time to create on the cheap. And that’s what entrepreneurship and creativity is all about. It’s about creating tomorrow, following your passion, realizing your ideas and have enough time to fail to succeed. It’s never about over-paying, flaunting your wealth or being cool.

Once a neighborhood has become gentrified the creativity moves out and the money moves in. Just look at Notting Hill. When I lived there in the end of the 90s it was still shady, somewhat dangerous and oh so fun. We had Jac’s which was a hard to find late night hangout behind Westbourne Grove. You knocked on a wooden door and if approved let into paradise for any late night desolate.

Today this hood has become the home for people with more money than time. Rents and prices have been skyrocketing and the international brands have all moved in, making most of the Westbourne Grove extremely uninteresting. Thoughtless and tasteless creations aspiring to satisfy the need of being perceived as cool.

That’s why I felt inspired by what’s going on in the Cass Corridor in Detroit. This is the beginning of the neighborhood life-cycle. It’s the reboot that starts with the risk-takers, the artists and the bohemians, dying to create and explore the wonderful life of borderline urban living.

I’ve never been to Detroit but after reading that article I’ll definitely visit and my desire to travel to keep exploring the world grew even stronger. If that is even possible.