Following your passion means learning every aspect of what you’re doing.
- Tony Hawk
Texts From Bennett
Best. Website. Ever.
Steve Jobs:
When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.
That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact and that is everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
The only way people will have the trust to give their all to their job is if they feel like their contribution is recognized and valued.
- Mark Pincus
Zuckerberg’s Law (via The Joy of Tech)
The Birth Of Qwikster
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings first apologizes for a lack of communication, and then gives his thoughts about the recent price changes and separation of DVDs and streaming (which is still the right move, as Hastings reiterates).
The wording is good. Amazingly, it doesn’t sound like the total bullshit you usually read in such posts. But here’s my favorite part:
For the past five years, my greatest fear at Netflix has been that we wouldn’t make the leap from success in DVDs to success in streaming. Most companies that are great at something – like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores – do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us) because they are afraid to hurt their initial business.
When I read this, I have one larger thought than Hastings: Microsoft.
Why is legacy Windows and all its baggage a part of Windows 8? Because of Hastings last sentence above.
He continues:
Eventually these companies realize their error of not focusing enough on the new thing, and then the company fights desperately and hopelessly to recover. Companies rarely die from moving too fast, and they frequently die from moving too slowly.
We see this time and time again. Complacency. These thoughts are nothing new. But what’s great is Netflix’s gumption to execute — stupid name or not.
Also great: Hastings is on Microsoft’s board. There is still hope.
Netflix Splits DVD And Streaming Businesses
Reed Hastings:
…we realized that streaming and DVD by mail are becoming two quite different businesses, with very different cost structures, different benefits that need to be marketed differently, and we need to let each grow and operate independently. It’s hard for me to write this after over 10 years of mailing DVDs with pride, but we think it is necessary and best: In a few weeks, we will rename our DVD by mail service to “Qwikster”.
