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The Islands is a hole in the wall you hope no one else discovers. Not just because the portions are huge, the dishes are amazing and the prices are affordable, but with only five tables, an alarmingly low ceiling and a dining room the size of your grandma’s attic, you’re basically on top of each other the whole time. And with only two ladies doing the all ordering, cooking,…

Everyone needs an interesting way of interacting with the world. Some creative lens, personal filter, permanent fixture or unique coefficient, that we carry with us at all times, that affords us the opportunity to navigate and meet and understand the world with a slightly skewed perspective on just about everything. Think of it as your ongoing micro experiment. For me, it’s the nametag. Wearing one all day, everyday for…

People will always value a brand if the experience of it adds something to their lives. The problem is, too many companies fail to actually consider people’s lives when they make decisions. And as a result, their marketing is tolerated at best and loathed at worst. Turns outs, it’s not about starting with the customer in mind, it’s about actually starting with the customer. It’s not about how they…

Motion organizes and creates order. Once you start moving, creating and poking around at the problem, all things tend to their equilibrium, find their perfect place in the universe and conspire towards some unifying geometrical situation. Or so says the quantum physics theory of gravitational order. Innovators have no choice but to make up everything, because most of what they’re doing has never been done before. So they jolt…

Living life on spec corrodes your spirit. Low and erratic income, sporadic employment, feast or famine cycles, fear of the work drying up, lack of job security, essentially, tossing coins in the wishing well and hoping bills float to the surface. It’s murder out there. But that’s the brutal truth about working for yourself. You’re always trying to resolve the economic problem of livelihood. Having to live and die…

People are yearning for texture. When we deliver things that are tactile and usable in the everyday world, they’re satisfying in a way that pure pixels are not. And in the battle of bits versus atoms, in our hyper accelerated culture where we all hunger for life beyond the screen, anything we can do to promise people a moment of slowing down is worthwhile. Firecracker is the master of…

Everybody needs a good on ramp. A ritual that prompts a work mindset to start our day. A process that merges us into the real world and ensures our days have a cadence and rhythm. A routine that gets us in the mood, in the flow and in the zone so that by the time we actually hit the highway of life, we’re traveling at the same speed as…

Most traditional marketing actually becomes less effective over time. As companies continue to spend millions of dollars irritating their way into people’s inboxes, and as buyers behaviorally and technologically tune out these interruptive campaigns, the law of diminishing returns settles in. And organizations end up hurting their brands the more that they market them on depreciating platforms. Unless you give your army the means to convert for you. What…

Human beings are driven by a desire to create. To contribute to the world’s intellectual and artistic commons, to express their individuality and vibrancy, to come alive through the pursuit of their ideas, to satisfy the biological compulsion to render their feelings and to use their imaginative endowments to make cool stuff. The question companies should be asking is, how can we help people use our products to scratch…

Social media isn’t the answer. With every marketer in the world clamoring to make their message heard, social media has gone from the golden child to the pool filled with golden water. The place is so crowded, nobody goes there anymore. And the days of buying likes, tricking people into consuming content and bothering customers into doing business are over. Ten years ago, when the web was just a…