Erin Pettigrew

Jan 07 2012 LINK
“ The position of the leader is ultimately an intensely solitary, even intensely lonely one. However many people you may consult, you are the one who has to make the hard decisions. And at such moments, all you really have is yourself.
— Former Yale professor turned critic and essayist William Deresiewicz on the importance of spending time alone to articulate a leadership vision. “Solitude and Leadership.”
Dec 28 2011 LINK
“ Users still only have 24 hours a day. So if you launch a new product, you have to interrupt and replace something they’re already doing.
— Keith Rabois, COO of Square, on the difficulty of gaining user attention in an oversaturated consumer startup market. TechCrunch Disrupt. 
Nov 21 2011 LINK
“ You can take something that is thought of as a creative process and turn it into a manufacturing process.
— A sad but fascinating idea from the CIO of Demand Media in Wired’s piece ‘The Answer Factory.’
Oct 29 2011 LINK
“ And that’s what a computer is to me — the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.
— Steve Jobs likens the computer’s effect on the human mind to the bicycle’s effect on human locomotion. Memory and Imagination, 1989.
Oct 09 2011 LINK
“ Abstinence from new book buying has proved one of the hardest challenges I have ever undertaken…Bookshop windows have become bright bordellos of temptation…
— Edward Stourton of the FT recounts a year of giving up physical books for an ereader. In an age when bookstores and hard copies are losing their allure, his perspective is a charming one. ‘The year of reading differently.’ 
May 24 2011 LINK
“ Satan runs a website too, but I can’t tell you the URL… **COUGH COUGH Gawker.com COUGH**.
— Dilbert blogs.
Apr 27 2011 LINK
“ I have the funny sense now when I’m reading a good book that I’m reading the news—it’s fresh and important and happening now—and when I read the news I’m reading sort of tepid fiction.
— An excerpt from Peggy Noonan’s media diet, from The Atlantic’s most excellent series ‘What I Read.’ 
Mar 02 2011 LINK
“ Why does the average drug store contain 55 floss alternatives and more than 350 kinds of toothpaste?…Instead of realizing that picking a floss is an easy decision, I confuse the array of options and excess of information with importance, which then leads my brain to conclude that this decision is worth lots of time and attention…the modern marketplace is a conspiracy to confuse, to trick the mind into believing that our most banal choices are actually extremely significant.
— Jonah Lehrer for Wired: ‘Why Easy Decisions Are So Hard.’ Marketers are realizing that extreme differentiation within product categories actually intimidates the consumer and hurts sales. Trader Joe’s avoids this fallacy well. The indie grocery retailer culls its inventory to one or two variations per product at most, which greatly simplifies the consumer’s purchase decision. No standing in an aisle mulling over dozens of salsa jars or hundreds of shampoos and conditioners. There are very few choices, which likely leads to many more purchases.
Jan 26 2011 LINK
PhotoAlt

2011 is finally the year when I get around to doing Taylor’s daily photo thing: Project 365. I’m doing this on my iPhone to decrease the various frictions surrounding completion. January has been pretty colorful so far.

Jan 12 2011 LINK
“ The Sunday New York Times contains more factual information in one edition than in all the written material available to a reader in the fifteenth century.
— From The Attention Economy, a book concerned with our decreasing supply of attention in a world that increasingly demands it.