KBall's Blog
Creativity, Communication, Leadership, Entrepreneurship. For posts on software, check out ZenDev
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You Don't Have To Be a Workaholic To Win: 13 Alternative Ways To Stand Out
The tech industry is rampant with pressure to become a workaholic. On-site food and laundry at big companies. The idolizing of people like Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey. The regular innuendos that people who don't code nights and weekends just aren't "passionate" enough to make it in the industry.
Read MoreEffective Feedback: Thirty Percent vs Ninety Percent
When I was first getting started as an entrepreneur, co-founding a business with someone who I had relatively recently met, I'd consistently run into a challenge getting feedback. I'd have built a prototype, have some ideas for what we could do with it, and take it to my cofounder to show it to her and ask her thoughts. We'd almost inevitably get bogged down looking at and talking about details that had nothing to do with the prototype itself - this font isn't right, why is this other part of the site interacting with it this way, etc.
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Moving From Overwhelm to Breakthrough
Not long ago, I had a meeting with my boss, who also happens to be one of my mentors, and after some other discussion asked him one of my favorite open-ended questions:
Read MoreAct Learn Plan – How to Think Like an Entrepreneur
We spend 12 to 16 years of our lives learning without any sense of what the reality when we finally get to acting will be like. We create an expectation that people will be able to plan their lives, and somehow know what they want to do before they have tried doing it.
Read MoreTechnical Leads
The skills that it takes to become a good engineer are not the same as what it takes to lead a team.
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7 Tricks to Kickstart Your Creativity
I haven't always been good at being creative. In fact, my business partner used to complain that I would "say no to everything" but never come up with any alternative proposals. It turns out the problem was that I didn't realize that there were two "modes" of thinking, what I call execution mode and creativity mode, and that I needed to deliberately swap between them.
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A Habit Formation approach to New Year’s Resolutions
According to Forbes, just 8% of people achieve their new year's resolutions. I haven't kept careful track of my resolutions historically; in fact, I can't even remember any of them, which is probably a good indication that I haven't succeeded in the past.
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