When my sister and I we’re young (elementary school age) we were friends with another brother-sister duo who lived one neighborhood over from ours. We went to the same school. All four of us were different ages, but we still had fun playing together. They had a dog…some type of […]
Scott Adams, the brilliant creator of Dilbert, has written a lot about persuasion. One of the concepts he talks about quite a bit is that two different people can watch the exact same thing at the same time and draw opposite conclusions. Two movies on one screen. We see this […]
Stop at the end. Know when you’ve reached the conclusion of your story, and end it. Too much information at the end risks ruining the experience of the audience. Perhaps the story has been leading up to the city council vote to allow short-term rental. The twists and turns were […]
There are many writers throughout the country, with good educations, with clear brains, and with the ambition to see their work in print, who are failing merely because they are not familiar with the technique of the short story. -Leslie Quirk With the exception of tweets, your shortest stories will […]
Plunge us into the action of the story. Leave the qualifiers and background description for later. Getting to the point is timeless advice, more so in our era of flittering attention. Is the story about planning a new park? Start with the kids playing soccer at the edge of a […]
I came across a YouTube video, and like most stories that end with me hunched over a YouTube video, this begins with some banter on Twitter. As you may already know, Twitter is one of my favorite online destinations. I was crowdsourcing a research project on professional planning. I asked the Twitterverse to […]
Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) is an emergent part of the transportation ecosystem. Let’s call this post MaaS 101. MaaS is a digital platform where you can plan a trip, choose multiple modes – like trains, bus, car, bikes, and pay for the trip. All within one platform. Three key things: plan, book, […]
I’ve shared this quote before: If you want to learn about a culture, listen to their stories. If you want to change a culture, change the stories. Avoid the point-counterpoint stories. One way to change the stories is to get out of a defensive posture. Any boring politician or statistician […]
One of my favorite quotes is from a writer named Michael Margolis. He’s left-handed and color blind, so he basically has everything going against him. Anyway, here’s the quote: “If you want to learn about a culture, listen to their stories. If you want to change a culture, change the […]
When you’re looking for a new product, you do some online research, watch some YouTube tutorials, read some customer reviews, and then get on Amazon and place the order. What happens when Amazon wants something? Well, they read some blogs, make some phone calls, meet with some people, and then […]