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Ten Steps Heads is a fascinating journey into the developments of neuroscience (+ psychology, biology) and how it helps explain visionaries.
I had the privilege of getting an early copy and cracked it open on the way home from a recent trip. I was more than halfway finished when I get back to SF. By the end of the next day I was done.
I love the fact that Erik uses multiple schools of thoughts (mental models) to explain something complicated like a 'visionary'. This is the kind of approach and thinking is a must do to solve complex problems and Erik makes it look easy.
The most enjoyment for me were the detailed dives Erik takes into a ton of recent (and old) studies/expirements that inspect some nuanced behaviour in our brains which in turn explains why we have certain behaviors and make certain decisions.
The tie in with using these discoveries to explain visionaries to me was secondary. Although the tales of Jobs, Branson and Rutan (among others) were quite enjoyable.
If you're curious what traits you should start honing and working on if you want to dominate this is a great start. But please remember you're not going to read it and wake up tomorrow Steve Jobs.
Anyone trying to better understand human behavior and what characteristics appear to help some people accel beyond our wildest imaginations should definitely pick-up a copy and give it a read.
My biggest takeaways were the reinforcement of how awesome we humans are and how much we're capable of achieving, as well as the learnings around our ability to continue to make on-going improvements to ourselves as if life was a roll playing game (RPG).
So get that XP and level up baby, cause the ride ahead is yours to command.
Been an Evernote user for over 2 years, but started heavy duty use within the past 6 month. I should start by saying that the web app for me is unusable (shortcuts, feedback, speed) and therefore I wouldn't be using Evernote if not for the desktop client (i use the desktop, iPad and iPhone clients).
For my girlfriend the killer app is her ability to clip recipes from the NYT and then pull them up on her mobile when she's at the food store and then back out when she cooks. I love this use case :)
+ a few shared notebooks with the Flowtown team
I find that i use it more of as an archive then an active workspace. the editor is clunky and in app navigation slow, so that might be the cause for that.
Just using a few folders on my hard disk + dropbox + textmate could probably solve most of my use needs, however the search, character recognition search, and tagging features make re-discovery of old notes way more effective.
I also really like the google search adding of evernote results to google search results on chrome. it's fast and awesome.
I tried for a week keep a folded square piece of paper with me, that I would later scan into Evernote, but found the piece of paper to small to get anything on with my poorly written oversized hand-writing and quickly gave up.
Some of the most fun you can have with Evernote is at geeky dinner parties, ask those around you how much you would have to pay them to blow away their entire Evernote account without any backup. You'll be surprised at the responses.
So that's me and Evernote. We're really good friends right now and you'd have to pay me ~ $25k to blow away my Evernote w/o backup.
big thanks to @hemeon for helping me accept my addiction to and obsession of mac apps. more confessions coming...
Jamming to a serious 80s mix this morning. Compliments of my good friend Ben (@oneclipboard).
via Paul Bucheit
