• Develop in Public, Refine Later

    by Alexander Becker

    Do something, do anything. Everything you ever do is always under construction. Everything is work in progress.

    Why not publish your new website under its working title on a makeshift domain? Not having decided about the final name and title is not an excuse.

    Develop in public, redirect and refine later. It works not only with domain names, website content, or actual product prototypes. To get started, nothing works better than output. Publish, release, deliver, make something real and let the customer, recipient, beneficiary, have at it.

    In fact, that's what the scientific method is all about --

    The scientific method relies on the hypothesis. What's more intuitive than an initial hypothesis? Everything follows the scientific method, after all.

    Determine a goal, make a plan, follow the plan, evaluate, improve the plan, follow, evaluate, ... is there anything which or anyone who doesn't work this way?

    Scientific researchers propose specific hypotheses as explanations of natural phenomena, and design experimental studies that test these predictions for accuracy. These steps are repeated in order to make increasingly dependable predictions of future results. Theories that encompass wider domains of inquiry serve to bind more specific hypotheses together in a coherent structure. This in turn aids in the formation of new hypotheses, as well as in placing groups of specific hypotheses into a broader context of understanding.

    Setting up a hypothesis, testing it and replacing it with a better one. If real progress is involved, is there any one thing which works differently in the first place?

    What about starting from scratch? Without a hypothesis?

    Sometimes -- and only sometimes -- you have to start all new, start all over from scratch and tear everything which already is, down.

    Where exactly does the act of creation take place... Is it the letting go? Is it the pristine ground?

    It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything.

    Let's pretend to lose everything and examine the difference it makes -- compared to adhering to structures, conventions, and rules of existing systems.

    That, in part, is the beauty of remixing: You start from scratch without holding on to any weights from previous structures yet you make use of the best parts of what's already manifested.

    Thus, the act of remixing in public, recombining elements which are already tested and trusted, is a virtually guaranteed way to successfully create something more than the sum of its parts. Every subsequent remix will be better and better than its ancestors, hypothesis is being built on top of hypothesis.

    The key is initial output.

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  • Free ebook: Celebrate Your Beauty

    by Alexander Becker

    Peer pressure, vanity and behavior, motivation tricks and hacks, success and pain, and how to excel, Celebrate Your Beauty -- whatever it takes.

    Whether you work on stage, or walk the runways, whether you make things real on the big screen, behind the scenes, near a microphone, or in the proximity of a camera, this little book is for you.

    Also, producers, can you hear me? Make your artists happy with this book. Celebrate Your Beauty provides targeted and clustered content, a well-readable, pre-selected set of articles written to help promote beauty and maintain motivation on and off stage. Share it, mail it, give it away, and make them love you even more.

    This book will make you look even better.

    Celebrate Your Beauty is a long tail edition, a small, topical ebook, 26 pages, remixed and arranged from articles appearing on WOW. As much as with a delicious dinner, all the ingredients are readily available -- yet, you still let the chef do the work, don't you?.

    Celebrate Your Beauty will never go out of print -- it doesn't have to. You print it if you want to do so, I may even print it, but no one is going to stock this one.

    With no shelf space to pay for and, in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees, a miss sold is just another sale, with the same margins as a hit. A hit and a miss are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.

    The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

    Like I said before: Everything has its moment.

    Download the free ebook: Celebrate Your Beauty, written to help promote beauty and maintain motivation in the world of looks.

    One last thing -- from now on, comments are open, I invite you to tell me what you think, what you feel, and whether you strive to leap forward and show the world that it is possible.

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Peer pressure, vanity and behavior, motivation tricks and hacks, success and pain, and how to excel, Celebrate Your Beauty -- whatever it takes. Download your free ebook.