Here are the words (with some clean up) of my favorite video of Steve Jobs.

It’s a meaningful reminder that you can do anything and accomplish whatever you want in life.

The think I would say is…

When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.

But life. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact.

That is everything around you that you call life was made up by people no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

And the minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will if you push in something will pop out the other side. You can change it, you can mold it.

That’s maybe the most important thing.

Is to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you are just going to live in it versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your market upon it.

I think that’s very important and however you learn that once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better cause it’s kind of messed up in a lot of ways.

Once you learn that you’ll never be the same again.

Watch the video:

Nathan Speller hits it on the head.

You must run your company like a laboratory. Ask the right questions. Create hypotheses. Create experiments to test your assumptions. Measure, measure, measure. Accept that most of your experiments will fail. Keep track of everything you learn. And repeat.

via The Few Paths to Success – Nathan Speller.

I spoke at MicroConf for the third year in a row this last week. MicroConf is a conference for self-funded entrepreneurs who are trying to build something from nothing without outside funding. My friends Rob Walling and Mike Taber started the conference which hosts 100 – 200 entrepreneurs in Las Vegas every year.

It’s my favorite conference. I leave with new friends and a long list of todos for my businesses.

The attendees and speakers are people in the trenches sharing their lessons learned running SaaS businesses. I’ve had the pleasure of watching entrepreneurs grow their businesses, quit their jobs and share their own experiences with the audience over the last three years.

Here are a few things that make this conference awesome:

• As early as the first presentation somebody tweets that what they already learned will pay for the cost of attending.
• It’s an open atmosphere where there are no egos and everyone is eager to share and learn.
• People who attended or spoke during past years feel left out if they don’t get to attend.
• Past attendees turn into future speakers based on their growth during the year.
• The focus is on making money not raising money.

The conference has developed its own culture that I have no doubt will only get better every year.

My new friend, Christoph has put together some awesome notes and other resources here.

You should attend the conference if you have a self-funded SaaS business.

Read Quote of Leo Polovets’ answer to Social Networks (online): What did LinkedIn use as first minimum viable product? on Quora

Are we removing soul with our efforts to simplify?

The ipod, like the coffee pod, offers not the experience of the thing itself but instead a simulation of such, neatly packaged and conveniently sized. Both pods promise a tidy singular experience: just enough coffee for one, thank you very much, just enough music for me. Gone is the chaotic café, the boisterous concert hall. Gone are the coffee grinds littering the kitchen counter, the friends gathered around the living room stereo. What remains is a pared-down product from which the soul—and the society—has been neatly extracted.

via A Writer’s Life.

Consider the user’s super objectives, and your objectives and tactics should trickle down from that. A super objective is a person’s ultimate, unattainable goal and the root motivation behind their actions.

via Siqi Chen on Quora.

Creating habits is key to building successful products. Here are Ryan Hoover’s thoughts on “Habit Startups”:

• The easiest way to become a habit is to attach to an existing behavior. [Tweet This]
• Habit Startups design a product using an existing behavior as leverage. [Tweet This]
• Habit Startups use the momentum of existing habits to amplify and sometimes create entirely new behaviors. [Tweet This]

The beauty of Habit Startups is that it doesn’t take a radical step-function in innovation to engage users as they are built off of things people already do.

Read the rest at Ryan Hoover on Startups.

Braden makes the connection between design details and customer feelings:

Getting design details right can create positive emotional states that actually make products easier to use.

via Braden Kowitz

Facebook Home is a trojan horse designed to steal the Android experience, and the Android user base, right out of Google’s hands.

via Apple Outsider.

Build a product that’s greater than just the sum of its features because at the end of the day, it’s just as important to understand the reason why you’re building your product as it is to actually build it.
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