The Art of Doing

Sometimes It Pays to Waste Time Or How We Got Into the New Yorker

People’s relationship to time and its effect on their work has become a buzz-topic for everyone from Malcolm Gladwell advocating for the 10,000 hours to Frank Partnoy exploring the art and science of delay to Tim Kreider in his hugely popular story in the New York Times about people’s obsession with how “busy” they are. Continue reading “Sometimes It Pays to Waste Time Or How We Got Into the New Yorker”

Hello, World

In the year 2012, with an estimated 180 million blogs online (more than the combined populations of France, Italy and Spain), and 40,000 blogs started daily you can’t help but ask yourself, “Does the world really need another blog?”

Well, as of today, it’s getting one more.

Luckily for us, we had already interviewed Mark Frauenfelder of the blog BoingBoing on “How to Create One of the World’s Most Popular Blogs,” for our book. BoingBoing, for anyone who’s been hiding under a rock for the last 17 years, has been on the Web since the mid-90’s, now with 2.5 million unique visitors a month.

One Mark’s best pieces of advice to wannabe bloggers like ourselves is

“Make the blog that doesn’t exist yet, but that you’d want to read.”

We hope that our blog—born of curiosity and obsession—about how successful people do what they do, will not only be something we’d like to read, but will appeal to all kinds of other people.

At the risk of being ouroborosian, we’ll leave off by quoting ourselves from our own book:

“Reading about how to produce a smash hit on Broadway, write a runaway bestseller or start a startup you may feel inspired and think: I’m going to get off this couch and go do one of these things!

Or, you may think: Actually, I’m not likely to do any of these things, but I can use some of these strategies in my own work.

Or, you may simply be delighted to be entertained by the achievements of others.

Whatever your motivation, whether you are college student, middle manager, entrepreneur or retiree we hope you enjoy the opportunity as much as we did of hearing directly from these extraordinary people and peeling back the layers of their vocational and life experiences to discover their Art of Doing.”