A jam featuring my disembodied hands, Digitakt, and an iPad running a bunch of Audio Damage Audio Units.

I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here’s Why.

“Good grammar is credibility, especially on the internet. In blog posts, on Facebook statuses, in e-mails, and on company websites, your words are all you have.”

Fantastic piece. I’m often dumbfounded by how poorly people write. If someone interested in a job makes a typo or grammatical error in an inquiry email, NO HIRE. If there’s a single misplaced comma or misspelling on their résumé, NO HIRE. If I check out their twitter account and it’s full of ‘U’ for ‘you’ or other lazy writing, NO HIRE.

Somewhere, right now, someone is founding a company in your industry (and Facebook’s, and SAP’s, and Salesforce.com’s…) that is 100% focused on the personal device (“mobile”) experience. These companies will seem wrong-headed for their messianic zeal and focus… or at the very least like they’re just servicing a low-margin niche market. Meanwhile, you—the successful incumbent—will wisely tend the garden that made you successful. And when we look back in five years, that same laser focus, that same zeal, that same “niche thinking” will have been the competitive advantage that enabled some of those upstarts to utterly disrupt their field.

I’m excited about the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite, announced earlier today. I don’t currently own a Kindle, but I use the app on my iPad and iPhone a fair amount, and I’ve been jealous of my wife’s third-generation model for a while now. After today’s announcement, I immediately pre-ordered two of them. Expect a full review here when I receive mine. In the meantime, I’ve been thinking a lot about the inescapable “death of the print book,” and what it means in my house.

I have a new methodology for you1. It’s called “Shut The Fuck Up And Make Shit.” I’m not going to a spend a lot of time explaining the methodology because a) it’s pretty fucking self-explanatory, and b) I need to Shut The Fuck Up And Make Shit myself2. You don’t need to buy my book on Shutting The Fuck Up And Making Shit, because there won’t be one. I’m too busy Shutting The Fuck Up And Making Shit to write it, and I dearly hope that the audience for such a book is too busy Shutting The Fuck Up And Making Shit to read it.