Erin Pettigrew

"The position of the leader is ultimately an intensely solitary, even intensely lonely one. However..."

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 10:42:51 -0500

“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.”

"Users still only have 24 hours a day. So if you launch a new product, you have to interrupt and..."

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 22:37:13 -0500

“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.

"You can take something that is thought of as a creative process and turn it into a manufacturing..."

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 23:15:45 -0500

“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.’

"And that’s what a computer is to me — the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds."

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 13:35:00 -0400

“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.

"Abstinence from new book buying has proved one of the hardest challenges I have ever..."

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 19:29:13 -0400

“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.’

"Satan runs a website too, but I can’t tell you the URL… COUGH COUGH Gawker.com COUGH."

Tue, 24 May 2011 23:36:00 -0400

“Satan runs a website too, but I can’t tell you the URL… **COUGH COUGH Gawker.com COUGH**.”

- Dilbert blogs.

"I have the funny sense now when I’m reading a good book that I’m reading the..."

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 12:03:00 -0400

“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.’

"Why does the average drug store contain 55 floss alternatives and more than 350 kinds of..."

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 22:07:05 -0500

“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.

2011 is finally the year when I get around to doing...

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 21:18:35 -0500

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.

"The Sunday New York Times contains more factual information in one edition than in all the written..."

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 23:33:42 -0500

“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.

"When a key corporate asset isn’t owned, it could leave a company vulnerable to changes made by [the..."

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 13:51:38 -0500

“When a key corporate asset isn’t owned, it could leave a company vulnerable to changes made by [the third party owner].”

- Lessons from an earlier time — the virtues of both owning and operating your assets! This in particular is a reminder that Facebook pages are increasingly trumping corporate branding sites, which can put the corporation in a position of dependency on Facebook. That’s not to say Facebook doesn’t provide value and shouldn’t be used. No, the trick is just leveraging third parties smartly to augment — not lose control of — your business.

"‘The cloud’ has most broadly come to stand for the web, a metaphor for a metaphor,..."

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 19:53:00 -0400

“‘The cloud’ has most broadly come to stand for the web, a metaphor for a metaphor, reminding us of how unfathomable our era’s signal invention has become… This may be a sign that our technology has become so advanced, and so abstract, that we need antique metaphors to talk about it.”

- From my current commuting preoccupation, Virtual Words: Language on the Edge of Science and Technology by Jonathan Keats. Chapter titles include ‘Unparticle,’ ‘Tweet,’ ‘w00t,’ ‘singularity,’ ‘Lifehacker’ (!), and ‘k.’

"Anything that removes complexity or cycles from your day is really valuable. I have freed a lot of..."

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 18:12:36 -0400

“Anything that removes complexity or cycles from your day is really valuable. I have freed a lot of bandwidth in my head.”

- NYT explores a trend in minimal dressing, which also helps to explain why my sartorial life is so frequently monochromatic.

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness, emotionally starving..."

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 12:07:14 -0400

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness, emotionally starving for attention, dragging themselves through virtual communities at 3 am, surrounded by stale pizza and neglected dreams, looking for angry meaning…whole intellects underscored and wiped clean in the total recall 24/7 365 assault all under the gaze of once brilliant eyes”

- Oyl Miller reprises Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ as a self-aware commentary on our impending intellectual death by Internets. A must read: ‘Tweet.’

Heading into brunch at Commons on the last day of my first ever...

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 18:55:14 -0400

Heading into brunch at Commons on the last day of my first ever Yale College reunion.

Waiting my turn at the bottom of the ladder while someone else...

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 00:35:55 -0400

Waiting my turn at the bottom of the ladder while someone else prepares to fly. The instructor kept looking over and asking if I was ‘so stoked’ to be a human pendulum. You bet I was.

The flying trapeze rigging. Poles, nets, bars, ladders, pulleys,...

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 00:29:00 -0400

The flying trapeze rigging. Poles, nets, bars, ladders, pulleys, and carabiners that allow humans to fly.

Photo

Sun, 09 May 2010 20:35:49 -0400

Sneaking up on the pit crew.

Sun, 09 May 2010 20:28:49 -0400

Sneaking up on the pit crew.

Photo

Sun, 09 May 2010 20:27:45 -0400

Erin Pettigrew

"The position of the leader is ultimately an intensely solitary, even intensely lonely one. However..."

"Users still only have 24 hours a day. So if you launch a new product, you have to interrupt and..."

"You can take something that is thought of as a creative process and turn it into a manufacturing..."

"And that’s what a computer is to me — the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds."

"Abstinence from new book buying has proved one of the hardest challenges I have ever..."

"Satan runs a website too, but I can’t tell you the URL… **COUGH COUGH Gawker.com COUGH**."

"I have the funny sense now when I’m reading a good book that I’m reading the..."

"Why does the average drug store contain 55 floss alternatives and more than 350 kinds of..."

2011 is finally the year when I get around to doing...

"The Sunday New York Times contains more factual information in one edition than in all the written..."

"When a key corporate asset isn’t owned, it could leave a company vulnerable to changes made by [the..."

"‘The cloud’ has most broadly come to stand for the web, a metaphor for a metaphor,..."

"Anything that removes complexity or cycles from your day is really valuable. I have freed a lot of..."

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness, emotionally starving..."

Heading into brunch at Commons on the last day of my first ever...

Waiting my turn at the bottom of the ladder while someone else...

The flying trapeze rigging. Poles, nets, bars, ladders, pulleys,...

Photo

Sneaking up on the pit crew.

Photo

"Satan runs a website too, but I can’t tell you the URL… COUGH COUGH Gawker.com COUGH."