The Indiefield Blog

What do you do with legacy products and services? Things you started that never really caught on, or died out slowly over time? That's a very easy way to judge the posture and speed of a company. If there's a one-way track - stuff gets added, but it never gets taken away - then the ship is going to get slower and heavier and become much harder to handle and it will eventually sink. Either you're focused on maintaining the legacy features or you're focused on figuring out how to replace them with the future. Your clients want the future, not the past.

There is a lot of fear associated with 'overstretched'. Too much financial risk and you'll end up stressed, bankrupt and overstretched. But what about the more prevalent, more subtle and ultimately more damaging notion of being under stretched? The old school factory-mindset encourages every employee to protect their time and their effort. Don't go the extra mile because no-one will ever thank you. Don't push harder because you'll only damage yourself. Don't let them make you do more because that will be the new normal and you'll have to work harder forever. It's true: in most businesses productivity only increases as the result of more effort, and that effort is rarely compensated in an immediately obvious way. Here's the thing: modern work is different. In fact, the exhaustion from overstretching yourself in a modern working environment is some of the best exhaustion you will ever feel. So yes, we need to figure out how to push ourselves until we're overstretched.

On paper it is quite easy. Sell a story that some people want to believe. In fact, sell a story they already believe. The story has to be integrated into your product and services. The iPad, for example, wasn't something that people were clamouring for... but the story of it, the magic tablet, the universal book, the ticket to the fashion-geek tribe - suddenly there was huge queue out the door for it. The same way that every year, we see a new film sensation, a new fashion superstar, a new hit record, a new online phenomenon. It's not an accident. That story is just waiting for someone to hear it. They key point here is "some people". Not everyone will understand your story, and that's okay too.

If you play music in a tube station with a bucket or card reader for donations, every song must be a showstopper. There's no chance for nuance and pauses while you build up to a crescendo. If the commuter doesn't stop, it's all for nought. So your music changes. You're always at 11, always jamming it, always pushing the moment. Most of us behave like this, sometimes anyway. But occasionally someone will stop to actually listen to you, and then you have a choice. You can take that person on a journey, forego the next stranger and instead seduce the one you've got... or you can keep pushing for more attention from more commuters. Both work. The challenge is in making a choice, your choice, a choice based on why you're doing the work in the first place. It's not up to the commuter, it's up to you.

Yeah whatever. This is tough advice. Sometimes it seems as though the only way to take it is personally. Here's the thing: it's never personal. It's never about you. How could it be? That critic doesn't truly know you, understand you, or hear the voices in your head. All they know is themselves. So you just carry on doing your work, the best way you know how, producing the best you can. Is there really any other choice?

I love the lottery, because it's easy. Not certain, but easy. If you win, you've hit the lottery, literally. Most of us are searching for a path to success that is both easy and certain. Most paths are neither.

When you are truly living on the edge, maybe going into space, or traipsing to the North Pole, there's no room at all for error. It's a luxury you can't afford. Make a mistake and you die. For the rest of us, though, it's not quite as serious. Being wrong won't kill us, it's just something we'd prefer to avoid. We have the privilege of being wrong. You won't advance your cause or discover new truths if you're obsessed with being right all the time. And the only way not to be right all the time (and to compound your advantage and accomplish even more than you already have set out to) is to be as open to being wrong as often as you can afford to be.

...if you stopped actively messing up your own work.

You are a talented, powerful, and resilient creature. I mean look at how far you have come, and how much you manage to do despite the lack of time, constant self doubt, ridicule and needless criticism you aim at yourself.

When I was a kid my dream was to be Head of the British Library. Lofty ambition I know! I had this dream of being in charge of something that was truly worth sharing, where people could come and read things that they did not have to own. I now realise that a librarian is so much more than a cataloguer of books. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa, a sheepdog, and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the highly motivated user. Somehow that's exactly what we have ended up doing at Indiefield.

The original library was all about educating the working man who would work all day and become a more civilised member of society by reading at night. Things like Netflix are an even better library, with a librarian who knows almost every single film, and also knows what you've seen and what you're likely to want to see. It connects viewers with films. The way Indiefield connects clients with respondents.

We need librarians more than ever to figure out creative ways to find and use data. The modern library is so much more than just a warehouse of data and the modern librarian is a producer, concierge, connector, teacher, and fixer because with literally every book now available on a Kindle (cheap, not worth warehousing) the scarce resource is knowledge and insight, not access to data. The librarian is the gateway to the information economy and for the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime.

Many years ago Arthur C. Clarke said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." And wow isn't that true? If you time travelled back to the 1600s with an iPhone or a Tesla you would probably be worshipped (or burnt at the stake, who knows?). And the magic continues today with biotech, quantum mechanics, and of course AI. There's so much magic around us that we've probably started taking it for granted.