How I Get Excited

I am not a venture capitalist; I don’t invest money in new ideas as a matter of course. And yet, every day, I invest time and attention in trying out and caring about new things. How do I decide what to get excited about?

I get excited when I can see how a product will change me for the better. I learned about the Couch to 5k iPhone app and then one day I woke up and decided to become a runner—and kept at it. I warmed to the idea of Kindle as I realized it would let me identify as a reader (rather than a beleaguered book-hoarder) again. Products that promise to change other people, even people I care about, leave me unconvinced only because their impact is gated by other people’s desire to change, over which I have little control.

I get excited by products that strangers get excited about. It’s one thing to be celebrated by friends, another to be championed by strangers. I love Kickstarter because every single project is a proof of concept; every person who pledges expands their sense of what’s possible, and their wheels start turning too. I love SoundCloud because once people know what it can do with sound, they start to rethink the limits of what they can do with sound.

I get excited by projects that elide dimensions. Two dimensions into three: 3-D printing. Three dimensions into two: Pixar. If you count time as a fourth dimension: TiVo, Instapaper.

I get excited by sustained wonder. Launches are fun, but anniversaries mean more. Meeting a project for the first time, can I see a history of accumulated care? When I see complacency or ambivalence instead, I get impatient.

I get excited by reasons to come together. Everything I’m proud to have built—ROFLCon, techbookclub—or to have participated in—826michigan, the Berkman Center, and recently Foo Camp—has this in common. Frank Chimero said it best his wonderful talk at Webstock this year: “We get together to get better.”

Thank you to Anthony Volodkin for the invitation to put this into words. I strongly recommend reading his original post, which is how I got excited about this idea in the first place.

  1. zacharyalexstern reblogged this from fascinated and added:
    I find it frightening that somebody is looking for “products” that will “change them”. Change yourself.
  2. b-benjamin reblogged this from dianakimball
  3. fascinated reblogged this from dianakimball
  4. dianakimball posted this