From the monthly archives:

August 2007

Football Season is Back. Where is Bear Grylls?

by Ryan on August 31, 2007

Exciting times they are when we can stop watching reruns of Friends and focus on some real world combat. College football kicked offs off for real this weekend and the Tennessee vs. Cal game is surely the one to watch – Saturday night at 8pm EST on ESPN. The only other show on TV that even compares to the mindless joy of watching football was Man Versus Wild, but Bear Grylls‘ killer show was apparently kicked off of The Discovery Chanel and replaced by some backpack and tent wielding pansy that calls himself “Survivorman“. This guy is a real goon and the real outdoor survival expert, Bear, needs to be put back on DSC full time.

UPDATE:  Bear came back in 2009 in full force.  He’s the craziest guy on TV.

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know…

by Ryan on August 15, 2007

I got a great piece of advice from a custom furniture maker today. He commented on how high school popularity contests carry over into real world business. It’s not enough to just have the brains and the bright ideas, being able to convince others both inside and outside your organization to vote you for class president and thereby actually winning the high school election race is a far more determing factor in business success than brains and smarts. I would love to be able to argue against this point and then I realized that it came from an artisan who was basically telling me that his creative skills have nothing to do with how his furniture sells; it’s the salesmanship and networking that actually permit him to make a living off his craft.   A interesting reality of both the business and art worlds.