Tommy George . com

I accidentally stumbled across the blog of Kevin DeYoung the other day, and noticed an interesting looking book, of which he is the author: Just Do Something.

I’ve never read any of his books, and very little of his blog, so I’m not here to vouch for anything he says. What I’d like to point out is the full title of this book:

Just Do Something: How to Make a Decision Without Dreams, Visions, Fleeces, Open Doors, Random Bible Verses, Casting Lots, Liver Shivers, Writing in the Sky, etc.

The title alone is worth thinking about.

This happens way too often: I’m looking for something programming-related, I accidentally wind up somewhere else on the web (but still programming-related) and end up finding something that, even when taken out of the programming context, can apply to the lives of even my completely non-geeky friends.

I don’t use Perl for any personal or work projects, but stumbled upon a Perl Buzz post that contains a great quote:

If someone asks you about your project, can you explain its awesomeness, and why he should use it? If not, why are you bothering? And if you can, are telling everyone you can about it? If not, why are you bothering?

Obviously, this applies to not only a “project”, but almost any context you can think of. Essentially, if you’re not doing something worth talking about, is it worth doing at all?

Headfauxns (pronounced “head-phones”) is my latest project. Nothing to announce yet, but do stay tuned.

In scanning through my feed-reader earlier this week, I saw two posts that I really wanted to share – they seem to line up a lot with how I feel about the web/the world, etc:

A recent post by Robert Scoble, especially this phrase:

We’ve gotten so far ahead with our social media toys that we’ve forgotten about the many many businesses that still have web sites that look like they were designed in 1994-2000. Even the Toyota site doesn’t really have much on it that wasn’t possible before 2005 (with the exception of some high resolution video).

The world has changed in the last four years and businesses, I’m convinced, will need to react to this new “2010″ world. It might take them until 2015 to really get on board, but I want to help now.

(link)

Second is a post over at Church Marketing Sucks, which does a good job of summing up some of the things I’ve been screaming about for a few years now (It’s good to know I’m not alone):

People who live outside of the Christian bubble roll their eyes. You lose them forever. They see you as demeaning something they value, and they think less of you for it. You trade the entire mission of God for the comfort of a walled garden, and you chose your Christian social network over actually networking with non-Christians. It doesn’t go unnoticed.

Your marketing is screaming, “I don’t care about you or your things. I mock them.”

(link)

I strongly encourage you to read both, even if you’re not as “technically-minded” as you might think I am.

PS: I’ve decided to take writing and my presence here a bit more seriously. In the mean time, be sure that you’re keeping up with me via @tommygeorge on Twitter.

“Clients will often see our real value when we can show them something they didn’t see before – a solution to their problem they didn’t have the state of mind to understand.”

from Good Designers ask “Why?”