Details at --

http://tour.givegetwin.com

Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Austin, Washington D.C., New York City, Boston, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Lansing, Chicago.

Go check out the details on that page and reserve your spot. Email me if you'd like to speak, help coordinate, promote an event, or host some of the Tour participants -- we're now at a core group of 4 traveling the whole Tour length, and another half-dozen people doing various legs of it. All pretty outstanding people.

Seriously, don't be shy. You can register here for your date --

When you see someone not doing work they really should be doing, the natural inclination is to say "He's lazy."

And if someone is putting in excellent, diligent, highly productive work -- you say, "She's really excellent."

But how much of these are really attributes of the people involved, and how much of it is how well their mechanics are in harmony with their environment?

It seems to me that saying a person is lazy or unskilled isn't very useful most of the time in terms of understanding that person.

The judgments seem to be, like, the equivalent of the stories we read to 5-year-olds.

Derek Sivers is holding a one-time class to teach you the "magic touch" in business, with examples, war stories, and lessons you can apply right now to do better by your customers and profit as a result of it -- and all the proceeds will go to charity.

The class will be on February 19th at 5PM California time (8PM East Coast). You can find out more at GiveGetWin by clicking here.

The Mentality Behind the Magic Touch; Derek Sivers interviewed by Chiara Cokieng

Derek Sivers sold CDBaby for $22 million dollars in 2008. In this interview, he explains what he's been doing now, how he's engaged with his new projects, and -- most excitingly for business owners and entrepreneurs -- the mentality behind the "magic touch" he had that made CDBaby so loved by its customers, and a huge part of how it grew so quickly. Here's Derek --

In 2008, when I sold CDBaby, I was about to start a new company immediately. Literally the day after I sold CDBaby, I was ready to start my next company. I incorporated it, I started programming, got a few months into building it, and then realized that if I were to do that, I wouldn’t be making any real change in my life.

Sometimes I have a cup of coffee or a liquid near my computer or important documents. Then I think, "Hmm, wait, what if this coffee spilled and ruined everything?"

At that point, the natural human subconscious muscle usage system is replaced by the clunkier deliberate thinking one.

Then it becomes somewhat terrifying, because I'm now potentially on the verge of generating the thing that I don't want. (A common pattern -- people causing things they dislike or fear.)

I don't want to overstate or understate this. It goes like this: "What if the coffee spills?" Then I become self-aware and self-conscious of my actions. Then I get mildly terrified. (Seriously, it's not a good reason to be afraid and not much scares me -- but this one always does, a bit.) Then I get aggravated.

What I've wound up doing is physically getting up from where I am, carefully, and taking the coffee to another part of the room or setting it on a table far away, or perhaps drink it all quickly -- something where it's physically impossible to knock over.

One of the strange emerging factors of the current world is that higher stakes, larger dollar, fully custom projects tend to be messier and more disorganized than regular common transactions.

It makes sense, when you think about it -- a credit card company with millions of users can streamline, test, and design an interface to make their online payment and review near perfect. There's many competitors, it's easy to benchmark against what works and doesn't, and many people will use it.

As project scopes and dollar amounts get larger, the whole thing gets murkier. There's more ambiguity -- large custom projects, by definition, have unique elements to them -- but also less benchmarking (because people tend to be more confidential and not share their documentation, technology, and workflows) and finally, the scale just isn't there to invest heavily in to automate away small amounts of time and friction.

Thus, it becomes really easy to apply for and receive a basic credit card online, buy some ecommerce product online, and then link up your online banking to review to pay your credit card online smoothly in a nice interface.

But transactions in the hundreds of thousands of dollars or more are handled with a mix of physical paperwork which is custom and must be reviewed manually by multiple parties, and then a much less descriptive and less user friendly wire transfer.

High concept ideas are exciting, but they very frequently resolve to tedious details -- the mature* approach is to handle those details and continue focusing on the gains and outcome you want, and complete things before moving on.

Ideas from far away look exciting and interesting, and like they'd "just work" -- but there's very often those same types of details that crop up.

I say "mature" approach because it comes with time. For certain classes of smart abstract thinkers (you may be one of them), it's very tempting to jump into something else when the details become part of it. But finishing strong is key to reaping all the rewards; and if not, the next project will hit the details phase sooner or later anyways.

Focus. Finish.

There are moments where a single act of brilliance or heroism will make all the difference in whether you win or lose.

And those are the moments that stick out. We remember Caesar crossing the Rubicon and Washington crossing the Delaware. We marvel at brilliance and heroism.

But what put Caesar or Washington in a position to lead their troops and nations?

The balance sheet is pretty clear: a thousand, perhaps ten thousand smaller actions.

These little actions are not celebrated and most will never be known. But on a very cold winter's morning in Gaul or Virginia, the commander would have risen despite not wanting to, and on that day applied himself to working a little harder, training an officer a little bit more, writing just another letter or dispatch -- and certainly, if you remove many of these single very small heroic actions, the cause would have failed.

"To entrust to chance what is greatest and most noble would be a very defective arrangement." -- Aristotle, 384–322 B.C., from the Nicomachean Ethics

Over 2,300 years ago one of the most important and widely studied philosophers in history argued against leaving the most important things to chance and fate.

Are you doing things intentionally?

I'd like to draw your attention to a really smart comment made on the recent Opportunity Cost post by Random --