Bryan Strawser

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Bryan Strawser

Hyundai Sante Fe

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Last week I managed to completely shock my parents and purchase a new vehicle – my first SUV – the Hyundai Sante Fe.

hyundai-sante-fe-showroom

After nearly a week of driving the vehicle, I can say that I’m quite happy with it. It’s a “midsize” SUV so it’s not overly huge – gets reasonably good gas mileage, handles quite well, and has a decent sized cargo area. I’m still adapting to the fact that I sit up much higher than I did in my Civic Hybrid – but I do like the expanded view of the road and what’s ahead. And I imagine that it handles much better in the snow than what the Civic did.

And yes, I really did buy the one that was off the showroom floor. In fact, I got to drive it out of the showroom, which was quite fun.

The Notebooks

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Over at Design Observer, Michael Bierut writes about his 85 notebooks that he’s used over the last 26 years:

When I look at these notebooks, many of the references bring back memories, some decades old. But other times I frankly can’t remember why I was writing these things down. Did I ever call Dilland? Whatever happened to Executive Sign? What was the Lefand Alliance? In many ways, the act of notetaking and sketching is an end in itself for me. Many of these pages, filled with trivia as they are, are destined never to be looked at a second time.

I’ve been writing in my own notebooks for the last three years.

On Friday, I was rearranging my office at Target – looking to make some more collaborative space and generally simplify a few things – I came across the drawer with my notebooks in them. They provided me with a nice romp through the last three years of projects, meetings, trips, feedback, things to do, and drawings.

I saw the measurements for my home office before furniture shopping, a great quote from a mentor of mine over breakfast, notes from my annual reviews of the last few years, reminders of things I needed to take care of, and a sketch for the room layout of our crisis center. Great memories.

Think about what you should be doing…

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Late in the afternoon of May 6th, 1864, Confederate General Jubal Early successfully attacked troops under the command of General John Sedgwick.

During that night, General Grant was receiving reports about the “disaster” that had befallen Sedgwick, one of the Union generals expressed grave concerns that Lee would follow up on the Confederate success and move to cut off the Union Army.

Grant said:

Some of you always seem to think that he [Lee] is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time.

Now, go… and try to think about what we are going to do ourselves – instead of what Lee is going to do.

The Lesson: It’s important to know and think about what your competitors may be planning, and the impact that could have upon you… but it is even more important to be thinking about what you could be doing yourself.

Failures

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An inventor is simply a person who doesn’t take his education too seriously. You see, from the time a person is six years old until he graduates from college he has to take three or four examinations a year. If he flunks once, he is out. But an inventor is almost always failing. He tries and fails maybe a thousand times. It he succeeds once then he’s in. These two things are diametrically opposite. We often say that the biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.

— Charles Kettering