(Some Of) The Best of 2010 – January through March

In January, I started bookmarking articles and videos I thought were exceptionally insightful, entertaining or relevant.  Reviewing them all at the end of the year would be too daunting, so here are some of the highlights I stumbled across in the first 3 months of 2010.*

(NOTE: I expected to summarize January through June here, but even that’s too much to plow through all at once.  Thus, I’ll be doing this in 3-month chunks.)

The Articles

Kurt Warner, The Great Unknowable Freak of the NFL

Will Leitch’s pitch-perfect assessment of Kurt Warner, the NFL quarterback who never should have existed:

I’ve seen Kurt Warner get angry on the field, I’ve seen him frustrated, I’ve seen him in pain … but I’ve never seen him nervous.  Warner plays like he knows how this story ends. Kurt Warner makes me want to be a better person. He makes me want to try to figure it all out. And he makes me want him to win, win, win, before it’s over, before the mystery vanishes, in a wisp, gone.

Ira Glass on the Creative Gap

Pete Michaud interviews This American Life host Ira Glass, who shares a great anecdote about how long it takes any creative person to stop being “good” and start being interesting.

A Short Collection of Unconventional Ideas

At The Art of Nonconformity, Chris Guillebeau posts a stark, inspirational, (admittedly pro-capitalist) real-world rundown of common sense observations designed to help you rethink who you are, what you’re doing and where you’re going.

A year after you leave college, no one will care what your GPA was.

Once you fully understand what you want, it’s not usually that difficult to get it.

Potential is good when you’re 15 years old. After that, you need to start doing something.

Less Talk, More Rock

Boing Boing urges a return to action instead of text.  And while they’re talking about video games, they could just as easily be talking about your life.

Go right from the inspiration — the vision — to actually making it. Don’t think it through. Don’t talk about it. Don’t plan it. Dive in and start making it happen. If you do that — if you can start rocking — you’ll get some momentum, and when you have some momentum then the project has a chance, because now you’re into it. It’s going somewhere, it’s tangible. Sure, you’ll still run up against problems to solve and decisions to make, but you’ll approach these in the moment and solve them in the moment. You’ll solve them so you can keep moving.

The Collapse of Complex Business Models

Clay Shirky on why the simplest solution to overcomplication isn’t “fixing it” but “blowing it up and starting over” — and what that means for businesses, governments and lives.

When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

Vintage Posters for Modern Movies

Brain Pickings highlights some modernist-retro movie posters that don’t actually exist… but should.

Everywhere You Look, There You Are

One guy, a cigarette, and a story he just had to tell.

Last night Tyler and I met this odd guy at the eastbound MAX stop outside my apartment who I find strangely lingering in my mind today. Or maybe it’s not so strange…

Hard-Wiring Happiness

Brain Pickings features a video and quotes from Srikumar Rao’s talk about happiness at Columbia University.

You have spent your entire life learning to be unhappy. And the way we learn to be unhappy is by buying into a particular mental models. [...] The problem isn’t that we have mental models, the problem is that we don’t know we have mental models, we think that’s the way the world works.

Drive-By Culture and the Endless Search for New

Seth Godin makes a case for “deep experiences,” and explains why they’re so hard to find.

Mass marketing used to be able to have it both ways. Money bought you audience. Now, all that buys you a mass market is wow and speed. Wow keeps getting harder and dives for the lowest common denominator at the same time.

How I Retired at Age 25

Pete Michaud explains how a leap of faith and a surprise realization helped him quit his day job and never look back.

If I could offer only one piece of advice, this would be it: it doesn’t need to be perfect. Save perfection for your aimless hobbies. What you need to succeed is “barely passable“.

At First, I Was Like…

*NOTE: Not all of this media was created in 2010, but I first encountered it in 2010, so it was “current” to me in that moment.

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Tags: art, audience, Business, common sense, inspiration, language, perception, pop culture, Social Media, Sociology, video