Kathy Sierra has a nice post on risk aversion which I especially like because of her awesome ‘USAToday approach’ to explaining concepts (using pretty pictures). If you don’t feel like reading everything she has to say, you can at least loose yourself in a picture of a tree for a few minutes. That point aside, Seth has always said that safe is risky, etc. In my case, I love being a ‘leaf node’ and the ‘manager’ at the same time. I guess being creative and creating your own products allows you to do that. Fortunately for me I’m not tied down by a big company. I’m in college and can play around with whatever I feel like. I can’t wait to release my current ‘project’…

Dave points to a great article from Fortune on soft skills: The war for top executive talent. The consulting group I work for actually provides classroom based soft-skill training to large (Fortune 500) companies. Interesting quote: “Ask your company’s best leaders to name the most powerful learning experiences they’ve had.” They will hardly ever mention a class and will almost always name a real-life experience in business. The challenge is to find ways to replicate those experiences.”

Here’s a classic from the Muppet Show, “Mahna Mahna“. There’s some fascinating background on this over at Wikipedia.

Another dual-purpose post. First off, Facebook has added ‘Spring Break Plans’ to profiles so you can let your friends know how cool you are. Personally, I’m tossing around the idea of going to Spain. I have a friend studying in Barcelona and I figure it would fun. Anyway, I hope my friends check my profile and realize how cool that makes me.

Scott nails it again: read his inappropriate responses. I often find myself caught in the ‘how are you loop’ or I’ll pull one of these: “Hey Devin, whats up?” “Fine thanks, you?” I almost feel bad at that point but then I remember… most people don’t really care how you are nor want to really know what’s ‘up’. It’s just one of those ‘filler greetings’: a greeting that takes up more words than it needs to. My treatment of this superfluous Q&A session often throws people off guard. Often in line at the grocery store it’ll go as such: “Hi there, how are you?” “Pretty good.” Which then leads to 20-60 seconds of awkward silence as the “momentum” of the conversation comes to a screeching halt. I just wonder why they didn’t ask something more meaningful like “So, looks like you’re out of toothpaste, sliced ham and milk? I go through that stuff pretty quickly too” or “Wow, you’re the first teenager I’ve ever seen buy 12-dozen eggs and 14 rolls of toilet paper. Is that typical?”