George Appiah, Author at GEORGE APPIAH

You’re Good Enough: Just Step Forward And Share Your Gifts

I recently received this email below from the marketing machine at Air France, a subsidiary of the multi-billion dollar Air France – KLM Group (2017 group revenue was over US$30 billion):

Test image mistakenly sent by Air France to customers

Pay special attention to the subject line, “test image.” And, no, I’ve not cropped out anything: what you see above is the entire email I, and probably millions of other people, received from Air France.

If it’s not immediately clear to you what’s going on here, here’s a follow-on email I received from the French flag carrier the next day:

Air France Email — Actual Email Air France wanted to send

Got it now? Someone from this multi-billion dollar giant in the airline industry hit the wrong button — sending a test email out to, possibly, millions of actual customers and email subscribers. Yikes!

But, here is the thing, and the lesson for you and me: in spite of this blunder, the world did not come to an end for Air France. And I’ll wager that the majority of people who received this “test image” email recognized it as a mistake, laughed it off, and went back to their (hopefully) awesome lives.

So, why am I writing about this then?

In my years of teaching, coaching and generally perambulating through life, I’ve come across many smart young men and women who have interesting life stories and amazing skills that they would like to share with the world — and I have every reason to believe that their bank accounts would get extra digits if they did.

Yet, these people perceive themselves as not being good enough, and, consequently, instead of being on the stage and changing lives, they have chosen to burn their candles under the table — denying the world of their brilliance and their bank accounts of those extra digits.

In the past, in my zeal to help (or maybe it’s just because I really, really hate to hear excuses), and upon multiple assurances, I would spend my own money and time to purchase domain names and hosting, set up a WordPress site, and teach these people how to publish new content on their sites. About a year later I would receive notification of upcoming domain expiration from the registrar, only to check the site and discover that no additional posts were made after I handed over the websites.

Now I know better.

If you are one of these people — if, deep down, you feel a desire to share your life story and/or skills online but you’re held back by fears of failure or being ridiculed because of your perceived imperfections (you don’t write perfectly, you don’t have a perfect voice, you don’t look perfect on camera, you’re not an expert yet, you don’t have X yet, etc) — here is the best advice I can give you:

You'll make mistakes anyway, so why not make most of those mistakes now when no one knows you? In all likelihood, you and Google's bots will be the only visitors to your site and readers of your articles in the first several weeks, if not months 🙂

I strongly believe perfection is mightily overrated, and often, good enough is, well, good enough. And here is the thing: no amount of reading or even private practice is going to make you “perfect.” Neither will a multi-million dollar budget or US$30 billion revenue make you immune to little blunders and mighty goofs, as the Air France story above clearly illustrates.

You will only learn, grow and inch forward towards your idea of perfection when you step on the stage and perform publicly.

Yes, there is a fair chance that you will make mistakes. And people will laugh at and ridicule you for those mistakes. But this is the only way to learn, grow, and prosper.

Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent, as Calvin Coolidge says. And if you don’t immediately achieve the perfection you crave for, you might achieve excellence along the way. And your bank account will thank you for it!

So go out there and make your dent in the universe. I, for one, will be behind you every step of the way, cheering you up and urging you forward.

No, I Didn’t Buy This $750,000 Property At Tower Hill Circle, Kingstowne, Virginia

Life & Home

I woke up one fine morning in January to see a notification from Google Alerts that I had purchased a $750,000 residential property at Tower Hill Circle, Kingstowne, Virginia.

In Trump’s America!

Later that same day I received a congratulatory email from a dear friend of mine in America, who had spotted the same home sale announcement on The Washington Post’s website.

The house in question:

I’m yet to have the keys though 😀

Why and How Evernote Moved 3 Petabytes of Data to Google’s Public Cloud

Technology

How do you move an entire data center to the public cloud? And if you’re a SaaS provider like Evernote, how do you do all that safely, securely, and without your millions of active users even noticing?

Here is a fascinating account of the why and how Evernote, the popular cross-platform note-taking app, moved their infrastructure from two private data centers to Google’s public cloud platform, transferring 3 petabytes of data in the process. The entire operation involved moving some 5 billion notes and 12 billion files, and took some 70 days, and a whole lot of engineering work. That’s a whole lot of notes and clippings!

Why this decision to go the public cloud route, and why Google Cloud in particular?

Machine learning was a highlight of Google’s platform for Evernote CTO Anirban Kundu, who said that higher-level services offered by Google help provide the foundation for new and improved features. Evernote has been driving toward a set of new capabilities based on machine learning, and Google services like its Cloud Machine Learning API help with that.

While cost is often touted as a benefit of cloud migrations, McCormack said that it wasn’t a primary driver of Evernote’s migration. While the company will be getting some savings out of the move, he said that cost wasn’t a limitation for the transition.

The decision to go with Google over another provider like AWS or Azure was driven by the technology team at Evernote, according to Greg Chiemingo, the company’s senior director of communications. He said in an email that CEO Chris O’Neill, who was at Google for roughly a decade before joining Evernote, came in to help with negotiations after the decision was made.

This is something I’ve heard over and over again, and even seen myself with the insignificantly tiny infrastructure that I manage. In the grand scheme of things, cloud computing is hardly about cost savings. Companies move their infrastructure to the cloud for such other benefits as scalability, elasticity (the ability to scale your infrastructure up and down based on load — which is often the primary reason for cost savings), and, in Evernote’s case, availability of and proximity to “upstream” services and APIs.

The PCWorld article has details of the actual migration, including the critical role that Google’s engineers played to make this a success. Of course, Google had EVERY reason to ensure the success of this migration: just imagine what the headlines would be if there was a catastrophic failure, whether Google had anything to do with the failure or not!

The State of the Family Address

Life & Home

We’re already 28 days into the new year. I thought it’d be fun to give a little update on what I’ve been up to, what’s going on in our little nest, and more importantly, what’s to come in the coming weeks and months. For fun, let’s call it the State of the Family Address.

How The Mega Tribe Of Three Came Into Being

As the folks who have lingered here for a while will surely remember, nearly 3 years ago I did the abominable: against my own better judgement, I put my signature to the deed that I knew was guaranteed to permanently erase every trace of the simple, quiet and tranquil life that I so much relish. That’s how I’d always perceived marriage anyway, and tell you what, I’ve never had a single day of disappointment in that regard.

As if to protest my silly decision, my father passed away just two days before the wedding. That should have shaken me up and brought me to my senses. But, it didn’t. And thanks to, in my own opinion, our silly customs that cherish the dead over the living, a new breed of trouble was out of the production line before I could even say my final goodbye to the old one.

And there you have it: the short story of how I let go of the very simple life I’d always cherished and ended up with this little tribe and a whole lot of troubles and responsibilities. Below I’ll now present to you a brief state of affairs.

Mother’s Daughter-in-law

Here’s a little riddle for you: what is it that those in want desperately to get out, while those out want desperately to get in? (If you need a clue, read Apostle Paul’s first letter to the Church at Corinth.)

The past three years of marriage life have been, let’s say, challenging. Indeed, very challenging. From my perspective, it’s absolutely obvious what the problem is and the reason our kids are ugly. But as anyone who has ever had an argument with another human knows, those ‘retards’ never see what’s so blazingly obvious to you.

Yeah, I know.

I won’t get into the itsy bitsy minutia here, at least not in this post. Except to say, mother’s daughter-in-law has decided to return to the classroom, the very place I’m working like crazy to keep little Elvis out of (more on that below).

She’s convinced the keys to her happiness in life (and her acres of diamond) can be found in there. What’s a broke like me got to say? “Go, girl, go”, I tell her (and silently to myself: I hope you don’t quit halfway.)

Expect a heck lot’a drama in this column soon 🙂

The Little One

Little Elvis is 25 months old now, and proudly wielding the “terrible twos” moniker day and night. As very little talking goes on in our nest (blame the screens and gadgets!), his speech has delayed a tab bit. But what he’s unable to say, he certainly overcompensates with what he’s able to do.

He was sitting fully by his fourth month, and by his sixth month he was climbing up and down the stairs (we didn’t install any fancy safety gates — #badparenting), using the wall or rail for support. By the 8th month, little Elvis was pretty much running everywhere independently, including up and down the stairs!

I don’t remember seeing him crawl even once. In fact, by the time a baby crawl mat I ordered from China (via AliExpress) arrived here in Accra, Ghana, the little one was already walking briskly.

When Elvis was 6 months old, he tried jumping out of his crib and ended up with a big swelling on the side of the head where he landed on the floor. This scared the bejesus out of us! Thankfully, God sent an angel far smarter in the field of parenting than all three of us combined to come to our rescue and save the day. That is — after the very pinnacle of Ghana’s healthcare system had failed us completely.

Though just 25 months, Elvis is already the kind of the nest. He’s usually the first to get up in the wee hours of the mornings, and won’t get to bed until, well, until he’s made to. We recently got him his very own Amazon Kindle Fire tablet, along with Amazon’s FreeTime Unlimited subscription, and now even getting him to eat is a tough battle!

For his education, we’ve decided to pursue some alternatives. To paraphrase Mark Twain, we’re being cautious to not let his schooling interfere with his education. Stay tuned for more on this when I finally resume publishing regularly on this website (and on little Elvis’ own website, www.ElvisAppiah.com).

The Poor Old Buttler

And then there’s me… your poor old butler. Other than struggling to pull the bits and pieces of this near-dysfunctional little tribe together (and apparently doing such a terrible job at it!), there isn’t much going on that’s worth talking about.

But if you don’t mind me boring you with the ordinary, here are a few random happenings and thoughts:

I’ve assembled a whole lot of gadgets and accoutrements now, but I’m yet to publish a single video. I even read Stephen Presfield’s War of Art, but that didn’t do the trick. Resistance is still here with me.
My WordPress book and course are practically done, but I feel very strongly that they’re not good enough, and that I should re-do the whole thing. Perfectionism, just another face of resistance?
In December last year, I shut down the “shared” and “reseller” segments of my hosting business, sending all customers away to other providers. But that self-destructive move wasn’t enough. I also parted ways with all, let’s say, ‘troublesome’ VPS and dedicated server clients, leaving me with just two clients and two VPSes under management. In essence, I killed my entire hosting business. Maybe I’ll start over. Maybe not.
Having shut down my hosting business, I’m now finding myself with way too much time… that I don’t know how to use. I don’t know how to not be busy. And oddly enough, I find this far more tiring and stressing than the days when I was busy day and night fixing clients’ sites and servers.
With my hosting business dismantled, I’m also without a source of income now. And with a mountain-high pile of expenses quickly approaching, I need to replace this income immediately. Trouble is, I’ve got too high a pile of ideas to sort through.
With Mother’s DiL returning to school, I’m going to have to take on the babysitting business. On the one side, little Elvis and I get to have a whole lot of fun together. But on the other side, I… help… I can smell something!

As you can see, your poor old butter has a truckload of stuff on his mind and plates now. Should he re-build the hosting business he dismantled himself? Should he develop any one of the dozens of new business ideas on his mind now? Should he (finally) embrace what he’s always considered his true passion and calling, TEACHING? Or should he, but may God and all the angels launch and offence to forbid this, return to the corporate world he ran away from more than a decade ago?

Gotta roll the dice, plan and act now!

So, there you have it — the perfectly accurate account of the true state of affairs in our little nest. And, here’s my promise to you big and little critters: this will be the very last of my silly, witty, cryptic, self-serving pontifications. You’ll soon realise there’s always been a reason to my madness.

My Newly Adopted Color: Rebecca Purple

Life & Home

Grandma was right: you should never judge a book by its cover. But the reality is, most of us pay no heed to grandma’s sound advice, and more often than not, we do judge a book solely by its cover.

Therefore, as sellers of products and ideas, it’s essential that we pay as much attention to the packaging and branding of our stuff as we do to the actual stuff that we sell.

And when it comes to branding and packaging, color is undoubtedly one of the most important visible elements. When it comes to making purchasing decisions, a great many of us decide by visual cues, the strongest and most persuasive of these visual cues being color.

So, what is the color of your personal brand? And more importantly, why did you pick this, of all colors, to be your favorite color?

Recently I set out to answer these very questions for my own personal brand and online platform.

My immediate instinct was to Google the meanings commonly assigned to colors. So I guzzled a ton of blog posts, podcasts, YouTube videos and even read a whole book on color psychology. My intention was to pick a dominant color that would best align with my personality and purpose, the world I’m trying to build for myself and my family, and the kind of impact I want to make in the world.

But as I dived in, I quickly discovered that I was on a fool’s errand. That’s because for every positive attribute I found for any color, I also found an equal number of negative attributes for the very same color, often from the same source.

Want a “happy” color? Go for the sunshine color, Yellow. It stands for optimism, warmth, friendliness. But, not so fast! Yellow is also associated with criticism, impulsiveness, and egoism.

Blue is deemed to be the color of loyalty, trust, and integrity. But it can also stand for rigid, deceitful and spiteful. Hmmm.

Green supposedly stands for growth, vitality, renewal, and restoration. But blue is also envious, selfish, greedy, and miserly.

And so on, and so forth, ad infinitum. And don’t even get me started on the contradictions in meaning from the various experts out there. Color, it seems, is too dependent on personal experiences to be universally translated to specific feelings and meanings.

So, in the end, I gave up on the search for meaning and instead, decided to simply pick a color or two from my favorite brands. That is, until I reconnected with Rebecca purple and this amazing story of digital remembrance.

The Color Rebecca purple (CSS: rebeccapurple)

REBECCA ALISON MEYER passed away on her sixth birthday. Having survived rounds of treatment for cancer, the little girl, the adored daughter of Kathryn and Eric Meyer, finally succumbed.

For those of you who make all or even part of your living from designing websites, ERIC MEYER should be no stranger to you. For the rest of us, Eric A. Meyer is an American web design consultant and author. He is best known for his advocacy work on behalf of web standards, most notably Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a technique for managing how websites are styled and displayed.

His daughter Rebecca Alison Meyer died on June 7th, 2014 on her 6th birthday, less than a year after her diagnosis of grade 3 (anaplastic) astrocytoma, a kind of brain tumor.

To honor the life of Rebecca, and in appreciation for her father’s tireless contribution to the development of web standards, the CSS standards community officially adopted the name “Rebecca purple,” for the hue (#663399), Rebecca’s favorite color.

I’ve known Eric Meyer (albeit from a distance) and his works for over a decade now. I was even familiar with the unfortunate passing of Rebecca, and the story of the named color, Rebecca purple. I may have even used this named once or so in my CSS stylesheets.

But it was only recently, while searching for meaning, that I reconnected with the story and the color. But after this reconnection, I knew I had found my true love, I knew I had found my true color.

Instead of a mishmash of contrasting perceptions and beliefs, Rebecca purple is a story of love that I can relate to.

So, now, Rebecca purple is my favorite color. It will be the dominant color of my personal brand into the foreseeable future. I’ve even decided to use this story as the introductory hook into all my presentations, both online and offline, to highlight the importance of service and devotion to one’s commission.

So what is your favorite color? And what’s the story behind your choice of this color? Kindly share your story with us in the comments section below.

TU Delft’s One Million MOOCs Enrollments

Life & Home

I recently received an email from TU Delft (Delft University of Technology, Netherlands) celebrating 1 million enrollments in their MOOCs program — an effort to open education and allow learners from all around the world to gain access to TU Delft professors’ knowledge and expertise.

One million enrollments is impressive, even by MOOCs standards. Equally impressive, at least to me, is the diversity of learners enrolling in the various courses offered, with learners from 229 countries and ages 8-94. Here’s an infographic with a lot more data.

The keyword here is enrollment. One data point I wish to know, but which was curiously absent from the slew of data presented in their infographic, is course completion rate. That is, out of the 1 million course enrollments, how many followed through to the end of the course… submitting all assignments and writing all exams (wither they attained the minimum pass mark or not)?

Curious George yearns to know.