links for 2011-06-29

• Inside Google+ — How the Search Giant Plans to Go Social | Epicenter | Wired.com
  Google+ is more than a social product, it’s an extension of Google itself. Hence, Google+.

  “We believe online sharing is broken, even awkward,”

  Bradley Horowitz opened Google Image Search and typed “Emerald Sea”. The first result, a depiction of an 1878 painting created by German immigrant artist Albert Bierstadt, so impressed Horowitz that he commissioned a pair of art students to copy it on the wall facing the fourth floor elevators.

  This mother-of-all-streams would be the equivalent of an intravenous feed of information, with inclusion of all the vital content from our social graph and the world at large (Google calls this the “interest graph”). It would scroll forever, and everything would be relevant. If Google’s original goal was to expeditiously dispatch us elsewhere, with this near-clairvoyant stream, Google could turn us into search potatoes who never leave.

  
  
  (tags: wired google socialnetworking)
  
  
• 
  
  We know very little about self-development
  
  
  But we do know one thing: People in general, and knowledge workers in particular, grow according to the demands they make on themselves. They grow according to what they consider to be achievement and attainment. If they demand little of themselves, they will remain stunted. If they demand a good deal of themselves, they will grow to giant stature—without any more effort than is expended by the nonachievers.
  
  
  (tags: quotes career)
  
  
• 
  
  Alex Payne — Obligation
  
  
  There are several obvious problems with obligation as it relates to work:

  1. Some people don’t feel obligated to do much of anything or they don’t like to feel obligated to do something, even if it’s the optimal thing for them to do. We like choice, or at least the illusion of choice.
  2. If what you’re doing isn’t making you happy, you probably won’t do a good job at it.

  At the end of the day, the best thing you can do is to figure out what makes you happy and then do the hell out of that thing.

  Problem is, it’s really really hard to figure out what makes you happy. It’s way easier to guilt yourself into a sense of obligation which you then use to rationalize the decision to do something you don’t actually enjoy.

  This advice is so completely and utterly not new, but it’s repeated over and over again because so few of us actually seem to remember it. Trying to do what you love as a guiding principle makes a helluva lot more sense then acting out of a sense of obligation.

  
  
  (tags: quotes career)