An always beautiful, sometimes sad, sometimes uplifting site documenting the daily life of Philip’s 98 year-old father after his mother passed away. It’ll tug at you.

Aside from the personal story, the site’s navigation is worth exploring. Move your mouse to the bottom of a photo to partially expose the next one. Click it to move forward. Same thing goes for the top of an image, except that you move backwards. Move your mouse all the way to the left to reveal thumbnails. It’s not obvious, but when you can’t figure out what to do next you begin to explore. Then your mouse will eventually discover the system. You can also keep your mouse fixed at the bottom of an image and just click-click-click to move through.

Grady Booch delivered the following axiom at BrainstormTECH last week: “The average work of the average worker is average”. At first, it sounded perfectly rational. But on second take, I got really bothered by this. It’s based on an assumption of bad, average, and good as being static attributes of a person that I find whole fully offensive and narrow minded.

In my experience, we’re all capable of bad, average, and good work. I’ve certainly done bad work at times and plenty of average work. What I’ve realized is that the good and the exceptional work is at least as much about my environment as it is about me. Average environments begets average work.

Good people do bad work or worse all the time
Just think of all the great people and startups that have disappeared into some big borg of a company, only to come out after a few years on the other side with little to show for the trip. Even so-called exceptional people can do unmemorable work when they’re placed in inept environments.

Or think of how easily good people can be made to do bad things when put under the right circumstances. The Stanford Prison Experiment is a good example of the banality of evil.

That’s not to say that we’re all created equal and that star power can be unlocked with hippie music and sandals alone. Just that there’s a ton of untapped potential trapped under crappy policies, poor direction, and stifling bureaucracies. People waiting to do great work if given the chance.

No one can be a rock star without a great scene
So if you want your team to excel, quit thinking about how you can land a room full of rock stars and ninjas (note to recruiters: even if these terms weren’t just misguided, they’d be tired by now anyway). Start thinking about the room instead!

Here are three questions to think about as you begin to self-diagnose your environment:

• Do you value effort over effect?
  Someone who stays up all night working is a hero, but getting the work done and leaving early marks someone who isn’t a “team player”.
• Do you trust people to do the right thing?
  We don’t count vacation days and we give everyone a company credit card but require no real expense reports.
• Do you encourage questioning?
  Ending discussions with “because I want it like that” or explaining policies with “because that’s the way it is”.

But most importantly, stop using the perceived quality of your team as an excuse for why you can’t try or follow new ideas. That’s a self fulfilling prophesy that’ll never fail to disappoint. Humans are incredibly eager to live down to low expectations.

P.S.: You’ll know you’re committing this fallacy when you start your comment to a Getting Real post with “but that would never work here” (it probably would, you just need the courage to try), “sure, you can do that because you have a team full of star players” (we have star players because we do it like that), or “we can’t all just do it like that” (don’t worry about all, just worry about you — and you probably could).

Charlie Rose talks with David Chang, chef/owner of Momofuku Noodle Bar, Momofuku Ko and Momofuku Ssäm Bar in New York City.

Some choice bits excerpted below.

He describes what you don’t get at his restaurant:

We wanted to strip away all the nonsense. Do we really need a sommelier? Do we really need all the other accoutrements that you see at a 3 star or 4 star restaurant? Our goal was not to be a three star. Our goal was to serve the best food we can. Our goal was to try and make the best food in New York City regardless of anything else, regardless of the environment.

On how Henry David Thoreau has influenced him:

There’s a great line in Walden: “I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.” And that’s always stuck with me. That basically means if you really try and you want to do something, then go for broke. At the restaurant, that’s something we go for.

On how he feels about vegetarians:

I respect them, just not in our restaurants…You don’t go to a BBQ restaurant and be like, “I want everything vegetarian.” You don’t go to a sushi restaurant and say, “Please remove the fish, I just want the rice.” Our restaurants are what we serve. And if you don’t like it you can go eat somewhere else.

On avoiding the fear of losing what you have:

I want to be sure we don’t lose that recklessness. And I think that was the catalyst for a lot of the things that happened when we first started. No one cared about us. When you have nothing to lose, you can be as reckless as possible.

Related
David Chang’s recipe for sustaining food/business mojo [SvN]
David Chang Is So Stressed Out [Serious Eats]

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Highrise
[Case Study] Interior design firm: “I cannot tell you how much Highrise is helping me work”
“I create a case for each mini-project or design project. Then I assign the contacts I usually require for that type of case and begin assigning tasks. I like using the next week or later choice when I don’t have an exact date for completion. Each day I focus on my due tasks or overdue to clear them or re-assign them.”

Backpack
“37signal’s Backpack Journal is a great illustration of the Twitter principle, as applied to business”
“A lot of people don’t get Twitter. A lot. They ask me why I love it, use it, and why I tweet so much. I think it’s one of those things that you have to do in earnest in order to appreciate, but I think this screenshot of 37signal’s Backpack Journal is a great illustration of the Twitter principle, as applied to business. What if you could see what everyone was doing, without having to ask? Exactly.”

“Backpack is awesome for wedding planning”
Jessica Merritt offers up “Wedding Planning on the Web: 100 Tools and Resources for Brides to Be.” Backpack is on the list and it’s described as “awesome for wedding planning.”

How one team sends SVN commit emails to a Backpack page
“I realized that I could make it a bit easier for my client to read when we make a change, and what we changed. We use SVN and so I just forwarded my SVN Commit emails to a Backpack page, which my client could then subscribe to the RSS feed of that page.”

Basecamp
New in Basecamp: Email replies can now include file attachments
Now you can attach files to your replies and have those files attached to your comment. So, for example, if you are commenting on a message about a logo redesign, and you have a new design to share, you can just include that new design with your email reply. The file will be posted to the project and attached to your comment. Plus, if the file attachment is an image (gif, jpg, or png) a thumbnail of the image will be posted to the project as well.

Getting Real
Entrepreneur says Getting Real provided guide for translating ideas and passion into a succesful web app
“The Getting Real ethos of keeping things simple and uncluttered has been invaluable…We have a small team, few meetings, and relatively few features. Our limited resources force us to be creative — yet we are starting to garner positive reviews on some of the most popular blogs on the web. I’m also enjoying myself immensely, and am happy to have found another avenue for helping students succeed.”

Subscribe to the Product Blog RSS feed.

I spent almost 45 minutes on the phone with my bank today because of an error with their online banking. I didn’t want to, I had to, after their email support told me my issue couldn’t be handled online. It was such a mind-numbing, protracted, time wasting experience that it made me ask myself, “How can anyone ever ask us why we don’t offer phone support?”

In a perfect world, calling a business for help would be quick, painless, productive, and human. But it’s not and it’s not going to be. That old time ideal of calling the local retailer or company and talking with someone after two rings was demolished by the call centers and overseas help desks that sprung up in the information age. It’s time to stop thinking that phone support is so essential. We’re lucky that we have an email support system that works and is incredibly efficient considering the volume of customers we interact with daily. It works because we’re committed to making it work, and if we can do it every company with a mailserver can do it too.

Now, I know people want to pick up a phone and talk to a live human being. We all want assurance that our money is being spent on something maintained by human beings who speak our language and hopefully live in our same country. I get that instinct, because I share it at times. I also totally and completely understand some people’s experience with email tech support is way too techy, unreliable or frustrating and dialing an 800 number is an escape from that. What I don’t get it is why a person would rather sit on the phone for however long it takes – maybe 45 minutes!!! – rather than send an email and go about their life while it’s read and replied to.

Phone calls require you to stop what you’re doing, go to a quiet place, and concentrate. It requires waiting on the line, listening to hold music, being transferred and possibly having the call lost, all so you have to start over again. You can’t share a phone call with your colleagues, you can’t get someone else’s input or feedback.

Emails can be printed out and saved. They can be sent to someone else who can chime in on the thread. They’re a historical document you don’t have to copy down hurriedly while information is spewed out to you. They can be sent quickly, tagged, labeled, archived. You can send an email whenever you want, there’s no business hours to abide by or schedule to confer with.

We get requests every day from people who don’t think email support will cut it and demand a phone number to call us. Their worries are assuaged when they get a reply from me in less than 15 minutes that is informative, helpful and obviously written by a human being. It’s absolutely 100% possible to provide excellent customer care without a phone or phone number, and our company proves that daily.

Paul Graham thinks that startup founders need to sell their companies to get freedom and security:

They want enough money that (a) they don’t have to worry about running out of money and (b) they can spend their time how they want. Running your own business offers neither. You certainly don’t have freedom: no boss is so demanding. Nor do you have security, because if you stop paying attention to the company, its revenues go away, and with them your income.

I think he’s wrong in general and I know he’s wrong for me personally.

Fallacy #1: Owning a profitable company is like earning a salary
Getting your company to the point where you can pay yourself a decent salary is a great milestone. You created something sustainable that doesn’t rely on spending other people’s money. You deserve to pop a bottle and celebrate!

You certainly shouldn’t curb your ambitions because of that, though. The real economic pay-off for taking the risk of starting a business is what comes after this. That the company starts making enough money that you can take some and put away. After a while, that coveted financial independence you thought would make your life perfect should be achieved (and you’ll realize that it didn’t make it perfect).

But I can see how this line of thought would arise. If you’re building to flip, then profits aren’t really that interesting. If you can just get to break-even, you’re probably doing better than the majority of other companies in your made-to-flip space. So instead you focus on getting more eyeballs, more sign ups, or more of whatever you think an acquirer would place the highest premium on.

I would want to sell a company built like this too. But there are other ways to build companies. Lots of self-made millionaires made their money selling products for a profit.

So let’s strike out the security claim. Most successful business owners could walk away from their business tomorrow and still live very comfortable lives off the money they put away.

Fallacy #2: There’s always something you’d much rather do
You don’t have to work 60, 80, or 100 hours per week just because you run your own business. Many business owners do that, but if they’re successful, it’s usually because there’s nothing they’d rather be doing. Look at the top tech CEOs. None of them need to work, many of them are billionaires, but still Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and others continue to helm their companies for decades because they love what they’re doing.

I don’t personally like to work 60 or more hours per week. Even 40 hours is pushing it. At 37signals, we all try to work just four days a week. That’s a perk in addition to the fact that we don’t count vacation days (I probably spent 4 weeks last year) and many of us often attend conferences and other out-of-the-daily-rhythm activities.

But when I actually do sit down to work, it’s very often that there’s nothing else I’d rather do. And I don’t think that’s really an uncommon phenomenon. I think lots of people really like what they do and for bursts of the time consider it the most interesting thing they could be working on.

If you’re building a company to flip, though, and feel like you have to put in endless hours to please investors and potential acquirers, I can certainly appreciate that there’ll often be something you’d much rather do. And that it can feel like you’re trapped trying to chase a prize that keeps moving. I don’t personally think that’s a rewarding way to live, but to each his own.

For me, the secret has been to do many other things besides work on 37signals. I enjoy working on Ruby on Rails and pursue a lot of hobbies. When you work less than 40 hours per week on something you actually like doing, it doesn’t feel very much like work at all. It feels like I’ve already retired and get to do a little of many things that I like so none of them really gets boring. There’s what I perceive to be healthy balance instead of a constant sprint.

This comes back to the earlier topic of early retirement as a false idol. I’ve talked to many entrepeneurs who’ve thought that they could just sit back and live the sweet life of no work after selling out. Most of them were right back working another idea after six months. Often times, the second idea wasn’t as good as the first one.

Bottom line is that you really should try to find something to work on that at least for substantial amounts of time constitutes that “nothing I’d rather do” feeling. I think it’s hard to be truly happy if the only reason you work is to win a paycheck. Whether it’s as an employee or a business owner.

Seth Godin has a great bit of insight at the end of a post today about how smart companies separate pleasure and pain.

He cites Disney as a good example:

Disney charges a fortune for the theme park, but they do it a week before you get there, or at a booth far far away from the rides. By the time you get to the rides, you’re over it. The pain isn’t associated with the fun part.

And airlines as a bad example:

Airlines, on the other hand, surround the very thing they sell (getting you home) with armed guards, untrained TSA agents, long lines and sneering gate agents eager to take your money when you have absolutely no expectation or choice and when your stress is at its highest. This is a problem in the long run.

Obviously some of the security measures are out of the airlines’ control, but the insight is still a great one. It’s similar to the best advice I’ve heard on PR: Blast the bad news out quickly (to get it out of the way) and trickle the good news out slowly (to keep in the way).

Audi is set to release the next version of their MMI (Multi Media Interface). The MMI powers their nav, radio, and car systems.

While I prefer Garmin’s UI simplicity, Audi’s Nav UI is my aesthetic favorite. They pay attention to type, proportions, opacity, shapes and shading in a way that says “we really care about how this looks.”

From an information design perspective, I’ve always been a fan of how they present and combine distance and time. I’ve used lots of nav systems and somehow, for me, Audi’s is the one that presents the right information at the right time in the right way. I do like Honda’s too.

Here are some screenshots from Audi’s latest effort:

And here’s part of their lab where they test the designs. The different dashes are from different models.

Read more about the new MMI at Fourtitude or Audiworld.

Aza recently posted on modal overlays, those dialogs that pop up and disable the background behind them. You can click anywhere inside modal overlays, but you can’t click anything in background until the dialog goes away.

Usually when we think of modals, we think of dialog boxes like the one below from Google Documents. Aza’s critique applies to this kind of modal. After you call up the find/replace box, you can’t click anywhere but inside the dialog. That means you can’t scroll the document underneath the dialog or copy and paste a word from the document into the dialog box while the dialog box is displayed.

But that’s not the only kind of modal overlay. Check out this Preference pane from Apple’s Me.com. It has nothing to do with modifying the content behind it. It could just as well be a separate screen.

Actually, this fact that it could be a separate screen caught my interest. At 37 we never use modal overlays. All our settings screens are completely independent from the other screens in the app. In order to explore the difference between these two approaches, I mocked up an alternate version of Apple’s preference screen that fills the entire window like a typical web app might.