Tech writer and coder. That’s the header on Gina Trapani’s website, and it’s strikes me as exceedingly humble for someone who was named one of Fast Company’s Most Influential Women in Technology in 2009 and 2010.
Gina is the founding editor of Lifehacker.com, the popular blog on productivity in the digital age, which was nominated for Blog of the Decade and led to the bestselling book, Upgrade Your Life.
Even though things were going great at Lifehacker, Gina left after 4 years to find her next challenge. Currently, she is a Project Director at Expert Labs.org, where she’s leading development on ThinkTank, which is an open source crowdsourcing platform that the White House will use.
I could go on and on, but you’ll have to listen to the interview to hear what else Gina is up to.
- Why Gina left Lifehacker, even though she loved her title, her staff, and her paycheck (and how she decided when was the right time to leave)
- Why it’s a good thing when a new job makes you uncomfortable and maybe even makes you cry
- How doing work for free can lead to work that pays
- Being a distracted email-overloaded fool, and how to trick yourself into being productive and get peace of mindGet all the details on Gina’s latest projects at www.ginatrapani.org.
Listen to my interview with Gina Trapani
Posted on August 11, 2010
Alan Webber is the founding editor of Fast Company.
Fast Company has had a fundamental influence on my belief in Great Work—work that’s less hierarchical, more innovative, more creative, more design focused, more full of meaning and more engaging.
Alan has just published a fantastic book called Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business Without Losing Your Self, which contains his wisdom and insights from 30 years in business.
In our talk, Alan sheds light on his top rules of thumb from the book:
- Ask the last question first: what’s your definition of victory?
- How to create an a-ha moment to create a solution that actually works
- Keep 2 lists: 1) What gets you up in the morning? 2) What keeps you up at night? And learn how these questions can help you find work that’s motivating and makes an impact on the world.
You can learn more about Alan
at www.rulesofthumbbook.com.
Posted on July 28, 2010
Hard to get away from the happiness movement right now. That’s not such a bad thing – but there is something of a glut of books and blogs and websites on happiness.
So let me point to one that rises above the crowd – Tim Sharp also known as Dr Happy. Part of Tim’s wisdom comes from his different experiences in thinking about and working with the topic. He’s an academic, he’s a clinical psychologist, he’s a business coach, he’s an expert on positive psychology, he’s a communicator and he regularly appears on radio and TV.
And of course, the occasional podcast. In this one (and with apologies for the occasionally poor sound quality) he talks about:
- how an insight about how the absence of depression doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness started it all
- Whether or not you ‘need’ to have happiness in your workplaces to be effective
- One small but critical thing you can do to make a difference to your happiness – and those around you.
- The role of mindfulness in increasing happiness
You can learn more about Tim’s work at TheHappinessInstitute.com and follow him on Twitter at @DrHappy
Posted on April 20, 2010
In my own small way I’m trying to be a responsible citizen in the world and lessen my impact. I recycle and compost, I rarely drive a car, I think about things like my carbon footprint.
Ron Dembo does too, but he does it in a much bigger and bolder way. He’s the founder and CEO of Zerofootprint, a not for profit organization that combines brilliant financial engineering, brilliant environmental engineering and really snappy business intelligence to create products and services that help organizations and individuals significantly reduce their environmental footprint. Before that Ron was the founder of Algorithmics, one of the largest enterprise risk management software companies in the world,which he started after time worked at Goldman Sacks and as a professor of economics at Yale University.
My favourite part of the interview is when Ron starts talking about the deadening effect of routine – just listen to the moment he knew he had to leave academia – and its inspiring to see how he not just manages but embraces the ambiguity that doing Great Work generates.
- In this interview, we also talk about how TED.com inspired him to start ZeroFootprint
- How the move from cavalry to tanks provides a powerful metaphor for finding Great Work
- And the way to use ‘hedging’ in what Ron calls “a stochastic world”
Listen to my interview with Ron Dembo here
Posted on September 4, 2009
