How’s your songwriting going?

- with thanks to Seth Godin http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

There's not a lot of room for slightly-out-of-the-ordinary.

The only real help is self-help. Anything else is just designed to get you to the point where you can help yourself.
Irrational passion is the key change agent of our economy. Faith and beauty and a desire to change things can't be easily quantified, and we can't live without them.

If you spend your days avoiding failure by doing not much worth criticizing, you'll never have a shot at success. Avoiding the thing that's easy to survive keeps you from encountering the very thing you're after. And yet we market and work and connect and create as if just one failure might be the end of us.

If your happiness depends on your draft pick or a single audition, that's giving way too much power to someone else.
If it's popular with everyone right away, it might not be art, it might just be good marketing. But if it earns attention and respect over time, if it wins over the skeptical, then you've really created something.

When you can't figure out the best way to treat all your customers, the best way to price things, the best thing to offer, realize that the problem is almost always this: you're trying to treat everyone the same. Don't. Break them into groups with similar attributes, and suddenly the path becomes a lot more clear.

The only vibrant tribes in our communities are the ones closer the edges, or those trying to make change. The center is large, but it's not connected. If you're trying to build a tribe, a community or a movement, and you want it to be safe and beyond reproach at the same time, you will fail.

And finally the launch of the iPad and Apples approach to marketing.
http://bit.ly/aU9x7b