Steven Lipton

- My professional experiences that I've had in the past affect my current role, through many different things that I've done. A big part of that is this idea of training and understanding, and building people's understanding. It's what excites me when I'm doing things and I've seen over the years, in tech support, eventually in some of the training jobs that I've done, where I've trained peoples one on one, I've trained them in the classroom, I like that part. That part is really important in getting across a lot of the information that we need to do. The best piece of advice that I ever received coming in this industry, was not in development, what was actually in tech support. I was in this course to learn how to be a good tech support person. It was part of their corporate training system and their head of tech support gave me an incredible piece of advice, which at first seems kind of odd, he said study comedians, and the reason he said that was because of communication. I'll quote John Cleese, here, "It's not about being laughed at, it's being laughed with." Where you learn to laugh with, where you're in the joke, where you're in the situation and that's what makes it funny. That requires a lot of communication skills. That requires a world building in a very short amount of time, and those skills, work anywhere. Where you can explain something extremely easily for the other person. Those kind of interactions, those kinds of communication skills, are just vital for anything you do because it means that you get the connection that you need to get the right answers. My favorite project to build is always the one that I'm working on right now. I'm one of those people who likes to discover and that's the part that's just, that gets me the most, is that whole discovery part of it. When I'm doing a project that I don't know everything, that's the cool part. Where I have to sit down and say, oh I don't know this part, so I'm going to have to learn more. Right now, I'm working on a couple different things. The best one that I give as an example is a running app that I'm working on. That was actually, kicked out of the app store by Apple, for being too old. So what I'm doing is I'm both blogging and reporting how I am fixing the app. At the same time I am fixing it and so it'll be ready for reintroduction rather shortly. Blogging, social media, in general, plays three roles as far as I'm concerned. One is just me writing down my notes and learning, and doing all that unknown stuff, on at least, on a more permanent record, so I can see what I'm doing. Number two, I'm sharing that and when I'm sharing that, a lot of people would be interested in what I am sharing, and number three as I'm sharing it, people are reading it, people see me as an authority and seeing me as authority is very important for contact marketing, in any way or form, because it says, okay, this person I can trust about what he's saying. So when I go ahead and I write a book, and say okay, I have this book on auto layout, they'll say, oh that's the book I got to read cause he's really good. So it's not just writing for writing sake, writing for myself, I'm writing for other people so that they learn. I'm building my own authority so that I can go ahead and sell product based on that authority. My next projects, that I'm going to be starting to do a lot more learning for my next things that I'm doing to do, are going to be based, really on location information. One of the things that I like to do is run and because I'm a runner I want to know distance and pace. There's not very many good ways directly with an API to get distance and pace. There's a few, there's a few upper level ones, but to really get it, I need to be at the GPS, I need to get the information and then say from this point to this point I moved this fast, this point to this point, I moved this fast, I got to get down in the guts. There's not a lot of good calculations for that kind of stuff, and so I'm learning how to do the stuff to get to that point.