What can we learn from Bertha Benz?

I recently read a blog post by Dave Trott and was blown away by the story of Bertha Benz and the role she played in the wide-spread adoption of motor vehicles. You can read his post here. The story, in short, is as follows: Karl Benz built his internal combustion engine based vehicle (3 wheeled) and was continuing to iterate to try and make it perfect, without being able to sell them. Bertha at one point in time lost her patience with this continuous tinkering and decided to take things in her own hand. One fine day, early in the […]

Wishing you a very happy “World Creativity and Innovation Day” #WCID

Today, April 21st is celebrated as the “World Creativity and Innovation Day“. Do we really need a creativity and innovation day? Shouldn’t every day be about creativity and innovation? I think this is a discussion for another day. For now, lets stick with celebrating the day (recently, any excuse to celebrate is a good excuse, if we need one at all). Here is a short video of how and why the UN announced April 21 as the World Creativity and Innovation Day. Over the past decade, I have written many blog posts that talk about different perspectives on creativity, creative […]

Insanely Interesting People: #9 Matt Church

For the rest of the year, I would like to take a moment and thank the people who have had a significant impact on me as an individual. The way they have lived their lives and their body of work has had an outsized impact on how I think about life in general and and work, in particular. Some of these are contemporary thinkers and some of them are just a memory. Some of them are famous in their own rights and some of them are yet to be found by others. Some of them are young and some of […]

Insanely Interesting People who Influenced me: #3 Swami Vivekananda

For the rest of the year, I would like to take a moment and thank the people who have had a significant impact on me as an individual. The way they have lived their lives and their body of work has had an outsized impact on how I think about life in general and and work, in particular. Some of these are contemporary thinkers and some of them are just a memory. Some of them are famous in their own rights and some of them are yet to be found by others. Some of them are young and some of […]

Life Lessons from The Last Lecture of Randy Pausch

This was the title of the last lecture delivered by Randy Pausch at the Carnegie Mellon University lecture hall. He was terminally ill and only had a few days to live. If you have not watched this video, I would strongly encourage you to spend the hour and 15 mins that it takes to watch the video and while you do so, please do have a notebook close to you and take notes. In his humorous talk, he shares some great wisdom on life and how to live a life worth living. You can watch the video here. When there […]