I don’t like making decisions. It takes a lot of time and energy, and produces lots of stress for me. Yet, making decisions is a necessary part of life. I’ve found decision-making to be increasingly important as I grow older and my decisions affect not just me, but also my family at home and my team at Awesome Inc. I’d even argue that with robots trying to steal our jobs, our ability to make certain types of decisions will become one of the most critical skills for humans in the 21st century. I have had to make a few difficult…

I frequently get this question from aspiring entrepreneurs. I think it is an innocent question, but one which is misguided. Here’s the bubble burster: ideas on their own have little to no value. So while you may be able to find a donation, you do not yet have something which is a good fit for investment capital. For an entrepreneur at the idea-stage, “How do I fund my idea?” is the wrong question. There’s a better question you should be asking: “How do I make my idea worth funding?”

Commercial value is created when ideas meet execution. Scientists may make…

I start each day nearly the same way. I’ve come into this routine over the course of the past decade, and pieces have come and gone. I’m sharing this in the hopes that other people (who don’t yet have a morning routine) will form one, as this series of habits has been a major contributor to my health, happiness, and productivity over the past few years.

1. Wake up. Don’t hit the snooze button, though it’s tempting.
2. Do 50 pushups. This gets your blood flowing.
3. Drink a glass of water. You get dehydrated at night
4. Take a shower. Because hygiene matters…

The greats weren’t great because at birth they could paint.
The greats were great cause they paint a lot

The lyrics in Macklemore’s song 10,000 Hours promote quantity of practice over intrinsic ability. I feel the same about learning to code. While many great programmers got started at a young age, it was not that they were born “prodigies”. Rather, their early interest in programming, access to tools and training, and prolonged practice are what made them great.

As we dive into our second semester of the Awesome Inc Academy, we have students with a variety of prior programming experiences…

While the Learn To Code movement has certainly picked up steam in the past year, I think it’s interesting to realize that “code” is not something new. What’s new is that we have a strong incentive to learn a particular type of code: billions of people now have Internet-connected computing devices, which we carry around with us wherever we go, and we spend an increasing amount of time using these devices. If we want to interact with these people and influence these people, then we have to communicate with the code (in this case, computer code) that gets their attention…

Why incremental progress takes us further than giant leaps

I used to think that significant things in life were done in large chunks as sheer acts of will. Study cram sessions, Spring Cleaning, hackathons. But a single step doesn’t finish the marathon, nor does a single battle win the war. I’m now a fan of small, but consistent, progress.

So much of our progress in life comes from setting and achieving goals. James Clear suggests that if we truly want to achieve, we should focus less on the goals and more on our process. When we talk about the Tortoise…

Step 1: more programmers. Step 2: more software. What’s Step 3?

I’m on a mission to help more people acquire software development skills. This has become a popular thing lately. It’s important for Kentucky, and important for America. Overnight (ie over the past 50 years), software has proliferated most aspects of your life. You may be in the software business and not even know it. In fact, some consider software to be an epidemic. But what happens once software eats the world? What will our technologically-digested world look like?

One option posited by Rick Webb is that we’ll develop a…

A few weeks ago, I actually played Minecraft for the first time. I had watched friends play the game a few years ago, before it was an iconic franchise and merchandising machine, but had never dug in myself. As I was preparing to teach the Week of Code summer camp at Awesome Inc U, my team and I were having conversations with our incoming students, asking them why they wanted to learn to code. While a few were interested in getting a job as a web developer or selling their own mobile app, the majority were interested in one thing…