Wrapped Thoughts

One thing that has really been hanging me up lately is how much emphasis people put on the power of affirmations, without regard for physiological effects. In my opinion it’s all about the physiology behind your passions and feelings. You can stand and say “I’m happy I’m happy” all day long, but until you truly feel happiness you won’t be happy. You can’t trick your heart. You can trick your mind, but don’t be fooled as it plays the trick right back making you think that is the depth of its care. To really feel things and experience changes you have to believe in what you’re saying, you have to feel it, you have to yell it and sing it (or at least be ready to).

Many years ago there was a great MIT study where they found people’s emotions were easily changed. But not how you’d expect. Not with a thought, but instead with breath. They found the quickest way to reset your emotional state was to breathe out all the air you have and let that sit for a moment. Then take in another breath. It’s funny because we take it for granted (or rather our ego does) but they found that every individual emotion produces an almost imperceptible change in breathing patterns. And to break that flow is the easiest way to get back to baseline. And the whole point of knowing that isn’t so much to negate negative feelings (although that is one), its really to see how you feel at that baseline state. You will only experience it for a fraction of a second each time you do it, but that is truly your benchmark for personal happiness. Depending on how hard it is to tell how you feel there you may be able to figure out how much work you have to do as an individual. But at least now we can see serenity - it only lies on the other side of our breath.

Something that’s fascinated me recently is the pervasiveness of the human spirit.  For instance, we might all face downtrodden behavior, horrible people, greedy looks, or inhumane behavior - but in the end we all prevail.  We don’t all prevail in the sense of success, fortune, or happiness, we all prevail with the human spirit.  We move the spirit with us through time.  We prevail at being, at having emotions, at having incapabilities and being and accepting those as we live.  We prevail at justice, and wrongdoing, at godliness, and at passion.  Some prevail at abuse, drugs, felonious behavior - but that doesn’t make them any less prevalent.  The human spirit lives through us all and as we dance, so to it dances, on the edge of our bodies - watching our energy as we walk the world.  It reflects with our energy, and accepts our duality.  It doesn’t care what color we are or where we came from, it only cares about understanding and reflection.  A reflection of us, and a reflection of the power within.  A reflection of all the good deeds and beautiful moments that have ever existed, a reflection of the wonder in the curiosity of nature, a reflection of the steadfastness of those whose opinions were more right than wrong.  And as long as we are here, so to will the human spirit.  And for that, I am the most grateful.  

Before C there was B, and before B there was BCPL. It was a language originally inteded for writing compilers in other languages. It was also the first programming language that implemented brackets/braces, {}, for block scope within functions.

B was created at Bell Labs by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie around 1969. It was based mainly on the syntax and ideas that were taken from CPL to BCPL, and then later migrated to C and C++. Like BCPL, B has only one datatype the computer word. Most operators treated this as a memory address via classical reference.

Here’s an example, taken from Wikipedia, of what B looked like:

printn(n, b) { 
    extern putchar;
    auto a;

    if (a = n / b) 
        printn(a, b);
    putchar(n%b + ‘0’);
}

Looks very similar to C, in a lot of ways. And C of course was a language developed by Dennis Ritchie, between 1969 and 1973 at Bell Labs. C allowed for lexical variable scope and recursion, with a static type system. C is a procedural language, and was designed to be compiled using a relatively straightforward compiler which allows it access to mapping low-level machine code. And what’s most important to us, is that JavaScript borrowed some of these design characteristics while it was being created in 1995.

JavaScript for instance took Lexical Scoping from C, and its history from HyperCard. It was developed at Netscape by Brendan Eich, who was at the time a part of the battle for the internet between Microsoft and Netscape. Which was really a battle between Java and Visual Basic. JavaScript was originally developed under the name Mocha, but then shipped under the name LiveScript. The final choice of name caused confusion given that it was to be marketed as a spin-off of Java, hence the name JavaScript.

It has a large history, one which would be hard to fit in a blog post. But the interesting part for reference here is that within Bell Labs there were often large debates about the language. And one of these debates was over the placement of the function brackets / braces in JavaScript. There was a healthy number of people who wanted to put it on the left of the function decleration, and some who wanted it on the right (including the creators). The creators could have defined this within the langauge itself, but they left it up to us to make the decision - thus the debate has continued on for years.

Though there is one caveat, and let’s take a look at the code below to see what that is.

function foo (bar) {
  return 
   // New & Empty line, silent error gets thrown here
  {
    ok: false;
  }
}

Here you can see that with a simple typo a hidden or silent error can get thrown that will often cause Bugs later on in programs. As a programmer we should always prefer non-destructive systems over destructive ones, so wherever we can head off a bug such as this (caused by human error) we should do so.

Let’s take a look at the common way to stop this error from being thrown:

function foo (bar) { 
  return { 
    ok: true;
  }
}

And it’s as simple as that. This is why you should always put your brackets or braces in JavaScript to the right, not the left.

The language designers could have built this in, but they choose to leave it for us to find out. Now that you have, I will leave the debate humbly to you.

*all information here was cited via Wikipedia, and Doug Crockford’s own opinions on the Braces in JavaScript.  I couldn’t find him saying this (regarding braces) publically online, but it is available at an online destination for a conference he taught. 

https://frontendmasters.com/courses/javascript-the-good-parts/

Screenshot of video: http://cl.ly/image/0B0x2p0S0L2J

We often take for granted things that we don’t exactly know fully.  In some cases, that is our abilities.  And in others, it’s our inabilities.  To that point, I’ve found that the most compelling thing to do is to rest on your laurels, even though we don’t really like to do so theoretically.  The fact is, we simply all love to be comfortable.  We love to do things that make us happy and feel comforted, but ironically doing so keeps us locked within our shell and stops our ability to be comfortable.  We can eat instead of work on a new idea, because that is comfortable and we feel like ourselves again.   Because the fact is, we lose ourselves every time we start an idea, or jump into unknown waters, and one thing we all do to fix that is compensate.  

For instance If you take just 2 risks today that make you feel very challenged, perhaps even slightly threatened (subconsciously even), then later in the evening you may have some ice cream instead of that challenging vegetable based meal you want to have to get healthy.  Why?  because Ice cream is familiar, pasta is familiar, these foods you love because you eat a lot of are familiar.  All the things that you normally do are familiar to you.  And you fall into that trap that our minds provide, and so do I.  If I do x it is okay that I did y, because of x.   But I am less concerned with the fact that we do this justification in our heads; I am more concerned with the actions and thoughts that lead up to the need for that justification.  In my opinion justification after the fact is one thing, but the thought that happens to get you there is something entirely different.  We can’t always challenge ourselves.  We can’t always feel threatened, let our ego feel threatened, or simply be emerged in the unknown 24/7.  Some people live that way, and that is great for them, but the large majority of us can’t do that.  We need some sort of filtering mechanism and homely comforts to balance us out.  We need that structure and understanding to be able to put everything else in focus, and that is perfectly reasonable and fine.  And here’s where the answer to the problem we didn’t realize we had comes into play.  We all need to make sure that our homely comforts and structure that we use to put everything else in focus/perspective/context is something we really enjoy and feel happy doing, even potentially so for the rest of our lives.  No guilt allowed, no unhappiness or depression allowed.  If you are doing things that are causing those states, they aren’t truly homely comforts - they are lazy versions of self-pity.  For instance, If that homely comfort is ice cream, then you may feel balanced eating chips later - because Ice cream is WAY worse than chips (you assume).  But if your comfort is forcibly some nice delicious vegan meal, (which you can develop over time - not magically), then you may feel balanced having nothing but veggies or lean protein for a few days, and you wouldn’t DARE contextualize chips as part of that decision process.  Your balance and perspective and context changes based upon your current situation, and we all seem to forget that - or at least don’t see moment to moment enough to realize that there is a corollary effect to that and what we are doing.  Don’t get caught in the trap of contextual mediocrity, and certainly don’t get caught in an unbalanced spiral causing you to be more unbalanced as you go, and it can be as easy as being mindful.  Be mindful in the future.  Be mindful now, and try to create that inner space in order to have a moment to breathe and consider your actions.  It can even be as simple as changing one small comfort at a time.  I think one of the big things we all underestimate is the power of small changes.  So be there for yourself, and take your own future in your hands.  Take responsibility, and anything’s possible.  

Never stop, never give up, and never let yourself down.  You made a promise to yourself the day you were born, … do you really want to break that?  

“That’s been one of my mantras - focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains. ” - Steve Jobs

One of the most important questions I was ever asked was “What do you do for a living?”. Not because it made me want to answer it citing a lengthy resume, but in fact the very opposite, it made me think about what I focus on daily. Because to me, what we do for a living is what we put our attention on - and to some that’s our jobs, but to others, it’s our passions. It’s what we really truly care about and what we want to think about. That’s what I do for a living, but what I do 9-5 is very different. What I do 9-5 is a passion of mine, but is it ‘the’ passion? Perhaps not. So how do we balance that? Can we balance that? How do we preserve our attention on things we truly care about in a world of disruption? The answers to all these questions started with the realization that the quantified self is somethig that I really needed to look into. I heard things like, “With self tracking not only can you identify and prevent certain diseases with things like blood testing, but you can increase productivity using mini-tests or trials.” And that was all I needed, especially being more interested in the physical human machine that was fascinating to me. I started spiraling into the movement and using the principles therein to track things like Sleep, Diet (slow-carb), Workouts, Productive times, and even all the way down to Focus and Attention. It got so granular that I was able to identify key things that have thrown me off for years with regards to getting meaningful work done, but that I had never fully grasped. The feeling of being focused has a strange misconception in our lives, simply because harder than it is to perceive, it is to keep. And that is primarily due to our habitually instantaneous culture (in my opinion). People will have you consider a thousand different reasons for losing focus. I don’t say that to discredit the multitude of reasons, I say that to show you the importance of testing and tracking. Each person is individual and very different. Track for yourself what makes a difference, and then execute against that. To some people it may be that they are entirely too unable to multi-task, while for others it may be that they have too much caffeine - which can be a huge deterrent to focused thought. I realize that in order to get you interested I have to show you the methods, results, the why, and then an actionable takeaway - so let’s do all that now.

The Method:

Everyday keep a journal’d list (or single piece of paper) that has the following items on it:

• Single Task: ___ name of activity ___
  • Words written: (amount)
  • Feeling of focus: (strong, weak)
  • Overall energy level afterwards:
• Multi Task: ___ name of activities ___
  • Words written: (amount)
  • Feeling of focus: (strong, weak)
  • Overall energy level afterwards:

The General Rules:
This is the important part, and where the experimentation comes into play. Dedicate at least one task a day (one medium to semi-large task) to single-focusing and one to multi-tasking. Then track your sub-items and keep them very detailed. In order to get meaningful results I recommend using the same task for both activities. I love writing as a method to track focus, because it is a great single tasking activity and it lends itself well to this method (as it required concentration). Pick an hour stretch of time to write a story. Make up a story if you have to, it doesn’t matter what it is - the point here is the outcome. Then do it first from beginning to completion for the entire hour all the way through. The Multi-tasking Rules:

The most important part of this section of the experiment is to designate scheduled multi-tasking times so that it would be more or less like real life distractions (which is impossible if you are observing yourself, hence our pre-defining). Set a timer, kitchen timer, computer timer, what-have-you for 3-5 minute interruptions. On each ding, ring, or gong like noise you are to check Facebook or Twitter (your preference) for 3 minutes and then check your favorite news site for another 1 minute. I prefer to have people check Facebook as opposed to Twitter though here, because it has more intensive consequences on our time and attention (but again, that is personal opinion). Once you have successfully multi-tasked and read Facebook for 3 minutes or so and your favorite website for 1 minute, jump right back into writing. Get right back to it - and then get distracted again 3 - 5 minutes later. The overall goal isn’t to just show “how much more you can write if you don’t check Facebook,” It’s actually to monitor your energy levels. If you are anything like me, then by the end of the multi-tasking portion of this experiment you will have a noticeable decline in energy. Because remember focus begets attention and attention begets energy.

The Results:

For me, and the people I’ve tested this on, the results were profound. The amount of energy they had after a day of 100% single-tasking was incredibly high. Compare that with a day of nothing but distractions and lack of focus, and they are almost a miserable heaping pile of depression towards the end. Of course this isn’t going to be everyone’s result, but it seems to be the case most often. Expand this experiment, and try it for an entire day, use both techniques, invent your own techniques. You have the entire world at your fingertips and an unlimited amount of text files to keep notes in of your progress. There is no reason you shouldn’t be tracking all of the things. I have read accounts of people who have tracked their sleep for over 10 years, to then finally figure out why they had insomnia. It is a very powerful tool, and depending on how much you are willing to throw at it, it can certainly help you in the allotted time you give it.

The Why:

As we’ve alluded to thus far, true focus isn’t just attention (read; solely), it is rather the preservation of energy. Again, remember, this is why we are doing these exercises to essentially get all the way to the root of the problem - lack of energy preservation. If you want to be more productive doing anything that is the reason you are not. If you only came here for one sentence it’s this: Single focus on tasks, and it’ll domino all the way down to energy preservation. Let’s dive into exactly what we mean by energy preservation though. We all get that burn out feeling, or that feeling of lethargy where we just don’t care about anything anymore. We’ve lost ‘it’. People often refer to it as a magical spark, which makes sense because it takes a lot of energy (that by definition if you are at this point you wouldn’t have) to see what’s causing it. And I certainly took 24 years to realize this as well, so I’m not any different - far from it. In fact, I have been notoriously horrible with remaining focused and even more importantly energized (mentally) for the past 6 months or so. My energy levels have been deteriorating so dramatically that I found myself in a completely scrambled state of affairs. I had to do something to fix it. I didn’t care about being tired, or being exhausted physically - those were normal states. What wasn’t normal (to me), was being so incredibly mentally drained, and lethargic. I lacked -any- ambition. And I tried a lot of things to fix it. I tried coffee, tea, physical excercise, and even diet changes but none of them helped me regain that energy I had just a year ago. Then I got more desperate and I tried to mimick what I had done before in those years. I rewatched the same inspirational videos, and podcasts, redid the same activities and danced (but not enough). I found that to help dramatically, but it didn’t help me PRESERVE that energy. It helped me when I needed it, like a adrenalin shot in the arm, but I needed a constant source of it, and that just wasn’t cutting it. But this method that I showed here, really showed me how I can preserve it. That is what I do now, and it has helped immeasurably.

The Takeaways:

• - Do every new task you have from this day forward all the way through without checking email/facebook/twitter/or stopping. (to the extent that it’s physically possible).
• - Turn off ALL distracting notifications from your phone, and remove every ding from every device you own. Emergencies are rarely that, but people certainly will have you believe otherwise. Of course leave call alerts on in case family or friends call, etc.
• - Remove all distractions from your Mac or PC (including auto updates from Facebook in Notification Center/emails/etc).
• - Keep your email client or tab closed other than at pre-decided times (I use 11am and 4pm) in which you will check all the batched email you have received and do any needed replies then.
• - Keep Facebook/Twitter/all other social networks closed 22/7. Leave yourself two hours in total for the week for browsing these sites - which comes down to about 15 - 17 minutes per day. MAX.
• - Plan out your new tasks and goals that you will accomplish with all this newfound energy and mental space. Keep in mind you will have roughly 20% - to sometimes 50% more space mentally to harbor the accomplishment of these goals. Use it wisely.
• - If you have a commute, read. And don’t stop.

The ability for you to be distracted should now be almost zero, and remember doing all these things are fine if you are the exception to the rule, but most of us sadly aren’t. And if you are of the mindset: “Well, I’m commuting anyway and have to sit still for over 30 minutes - mine as well check Facebook the whole time.” That is fine, but think about it this way - you could do that or you could realize that it is a brilliant time to extend focus

any time that you have, especially sitting still, you should use it to extend focus rather than losing it

Therefore preserving energy instead of losing it. To give you an idea of how detrimental the simplest slip up can be, today for instance, I’ve checked email and facebook once completely unecesarily (Well perhaps facebook 3 times). And I am already totally burnt out, and those all happened within a timespan of 3 minutes (before which I was of a rather normal energy level). That’s how much of an effect the smallest mental drop out can cause, so be very careful with how you allocate it. Nobody is perfect, and nobody is asking you to be, but what is being asked of you is to be aware of the fact that you have the choice to be anything you want in life. The difference between you and Michael Jordan? You and Richard Branson? You and Steve Jobs? Focus. This day has presented a challenge: to focus, and accomplish your goals. Do you want to be sailing the Greek Islands, or skydiving high above Fiji? Well, it’s up to you to do it - nobody else.

I have been thinking about JavaScript a lot lately, and that is partially due to my job. My job entails being the sole front-end developer on a pretty large web application. It is a project for the second largest bidding site in the US, and as you can imagine employs a lot of JavaScript usage throughout. When I started there I was mainly a back-end guy who wanted to trasnfer to front-end out of passion for the languages (HTML5/CSS3/etc). I quickly came to realize I would have to pick up JavaScript rather quickly as a result of the framework already set up for the project I was working on. And as you can imagine, I have been focusing on learning as much jQuery, JavaScript and Backbone as I can. We use Backbone, and at first that was a pretty deep-water jump into the pool of JS, for a beginner. But it has really made me a better programmer overall.

Here is a sample snippit of something we use in Backbone pretty regularly:

setTemplates: function () {
    this.itemTemplate = $(".template[data-template-name=leaderboard]", this.$el).html();
},

bindRenderOnModelChange: function () {
    var _this = this;
    this.model.on("change reset", function () {
        _this.render();
    });
},

render: function () {
    if (this.itemTemplate == null || this.itemTemplate == undefined) return;
    var templateHtml = Mustache.render(this.itemTemplate, this.model.toJSON());
    $(this.$el).html(templateHtml);
};

As you can tell, this is pretty beautiful code. We aren’t doing raw injection into the HTML, we are using Backbone models, we are using Mustache templating, and we are defining that updates only occur on model change or reset. That model then talks to the controller (in this case a C# controller), and does all the communication for us. Later on in this code we use an events call to say app.events.on instead of app.model.on, as we wanted to abstract all events through an events handler. This just gives you a small idea of how much fun I’ve been having with Backbone, and JavaScript in general. It is quickly growing to be my favorite programming language alongside Ruby. I am still rather new to jQuery methods and chaining, and such, but with Backbone I am really getting it. And that makes me a better JavaScript programmer, not just a ‘jQuery guy’. And that makes all the difference.

As you can tell, we do a lot of work with Objects; mostly in the form of Ajax calls and JSON results. Having Backbone to make sense of all that is really an amazing thing. It is like learning things the right way the first time, instead of the wrong way the first time. Though, I will admit when I first started there all of this ‘backbone stuff’ was so far over my head - I couldn’t even grasp it. And I feel like that is how a lot of people who approach JavaScript for the first time feel. What I would say is you need to find a project that you are passionate about that employs the use of the language you are trying to learn, and go from there. It really does make all the difference. For instance, just yesterday we were working with a complex object result set in JSON that was sending back Arrays inside of objects, and inside of that array were more objects. That was a lot of fun, and using Mustache templating it was a total joy.

So what is the point of this post? Well, to remind you all to learn backbone. It will make you a better programmer. It will help you with conventions, and functionality, which at the same time will help you with code design and reusability. And as a sidenote: those two are practically unheard of going side by side. Go create an application, and play around. Backbone and JavaScript are amazing tools. And if you need any help, feel free to reach out and we can chat. I can perhaps give some advice on how to approach it so you know not to feel overwhelmed. Let’s go build stuff.

“CERN’s Higgs boson discovery passes peer review, becomes actual science” - Sebastian Anthony via this article.

This is monumental for science, and science geeks alike. I hope to see an increase in science fiction around this mythical particle, and will be quite disappointed should such a thing not happen. But no this is definitely an amazing discovery. For the first time we have observed the particle that actually gives mass, well… mass. It is pretty brilliant in theory, and now that we have peer reviewed experimentation of it who knows what it will lead to. I am excited.

When researchers quantum teleport a photon, they aren’t making it disappear and reappear like on Star Trek. Instead, the information contained in the photon’s quantum state is transmitted from one photon to another through quantum entanglement – without actually travelling the intervening distance. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that information is travelling instantaneously. That’s because the transfer of information occurs when the sender measures the quantum state of their photon. That causes the receiver’s entangled photon to instantly change.” - Alex Knapp via this article.

This is a thing. A great big fascinating thing.

I’ve always had a problem using the terminal on Windows. It is cumbersome, ridiculous, riddled with unnecessary items, and on top of that it didn’t have all the joys of a *nix terminal. So, fast forward 10 years to when I bought my first iMac. I was in a world of pleasure. The *nix terminal that it has was just what I needed. It was beautiful, and it welcomed a world of possibilities. Git, SVN, grepping, curling, diffing, and much more were possible with just a few simple but perhaps hard to remember keystrokes.

On that note enter oh-my-zsh. Oh my zsh is a command line utility that helps in a ton of ways. It creates aliases for simple but often used bash commands such as ls and history viewing, grepping, etc. It also offers a robust structure for themeifying your terminal so that you can always see what you are doing when in a version control system. Often times I will be in a git repository that has 5 branches or at least 2 or 3, and it is certainly cumbersome to have to type git branch to see which ones are active. With oh-my-zsh I can see what branch I am in right alongside the terminal text . Here is a screenshot so you know what I mean:

It is incredibly useful. I would suggest that everyone go and pick it up as soon as you can, but before you do let me say something. For a long while I heard and saw the power of oh-my-zsh but I didn’t pick it up because I didn’t want to learn another language. I’ve already learned bash, ruby, python, and coffeescript to an extreme extent this year and I didn’t feel like taking on another one. So let me just be the one that tells you; there is literally nothing to learn. “l” does the same as ‘ls -la’ on the dir. “ls” does the same it always has. “g” greps. ‘history’ views entire history on the dir. “…” is the same as “cd ../..” and “..” is the same as “cd..”. It is just brilliantly useful. As you can see it is effectively like textexpander or some time saving utility for the terminal. It humanizes the terminal and helps you figure out how to use the most advanced feature. For instance, I never did ‘fc -l 1’ before, but I am doing ‘history’ all the time now. It is essentially git status but for local dirs. Brilliant. Now go to their github page, and grab it up. Contribute if you can, and let’s keep spreading the love.

Branding is a tough job, but someone’s gotta’ do it.  Should it be you?  Why not, you know all you need to in order to execute on a great brand strategy.  You thought you didn’t know?  Well, you just aren’t thinking outside of the box.  You are aware of the services, responses, businesses, and ideas that make you stop and go “Wow”, and when building a brand that is what you need to embrace.  Now, we aren’t talking about the hypothetical vaporware-esque “Wow factor”, but more of the literal “Wow” that comes when something goes beyond your daily comprehension or expectations. 

Let’s bust out an example here to hammer this home. Let’s say you hire a web design firm to redesign your website.  You have more than likely vetted multiple firms in order to reach your decision, for why would anyone pay $20,000+ on a whim.  They wouldn’t.  So you can assume they have done their homework and are happy with your past client work and portfolio(s).  That being said, is your brand strategy to give them ‘The best possible website’.  If so, just stop and think for a moment - that is what you **do** for a living.  It is not what you need to re-state.  It is what you need to re-create, every time.  No matter what.  The ‘best possible web design and development’ needs to be your **default**, not your brand strategy or key pointer.  Your key pointer needs to be more creative, more unique, more truthful to yourself and to your agency.  It needs to be something that stops people on their phone in the street while talking to you and makes them say, “Wow.  These people are ______”.  You just have to fill in the gap.  And no the gap can’t be “Good”, “Great”, “Excellent”, or any other *defaults* that you live in on a day to day basis.  The gap there has to be something like  “Hilarious”, “Powerful”, etc.  Get rid of all the normal adjectives that you want a customer to feel when creating a brand strategy and just focus on who you all truly are.  Are you into music, knitting, or the arts?  Are you entrenched entirely in the tech scene or the responsive web design world specifically?  Embrace that.  Embrace it all.  

The hard part of all this is when someone comes up and says, “How do we figure out if an employee is good for our brand?”  Well, that is a tough question, if you aren’t thinking outside the box.  Remember, always think creatively.  Don’t think in the typical habitual patterns we are forced to on a day to day basis.  Think new, think bright, think color, think fresh, think power, think whatever it is you need to do to become more insightful on your brand.  Let’s say your brand is a goofy one, and you even let people know it with small things like your iOS updates where you have goofy language that makes people assume your brand is very humanized.  This is a great start for a goofy brand, and a very human one as well.  Sidebar: don’t ever think there is *anything wrong* with being goofy, silly, weird, strange, or anything else.  Being that way has made certain people billionaires, and even more people simply wealthy every day.  Back on topic: “How do I evaluate if a new hire is silly/goofy enough as a person (read: open minded enough, and an attitude fit) for our brand?” Simply ask yourself if you would hang out with him after work.  That is one of the most powerful questions that we often forget when doing hires.  Would we hang out with these people after the job was completed, and not just to celebrate a job well done, but when the shit get’s rough would you go out for a beer with this person?  When there’s nothing to talk about, would you talk about it with this person?  If not, then get rid of them.  Your brand should be an extension of you and everyone that is already there and who they are.  If you can’t fold someone into that with love then get rid of them.  

In fact, the word branding shouldn’t even be used, because it keeps people thinking inside the box.  We need you to break out of that habitual cyclic thinking, and get some bottom-up awareness.  What I mean by that is you shouldn’t view from the top down.   Top down: Me -above-> Him -whose above—> His Team -whose above—> Their members -whose above—> the customers, No.  That isn’t reality.  The reality of it, no matter how hard it may be to admit, is you empower your team -> whose empowering their members -> whose empowering another team and their members -> who all empower the customers (aka, you holding up your team -> who holds up their members -> **who holds up the customers** so on so forth).   How many businesses have you seen lose a large customer base?  Probably quite a few, and in almost all cases the reason was because they stopped holding up and empowering the customers.   Simply put, **we are holding these businesses up from the bottom, never forget that, because the mistakes come when we do.**