Last night I was at Aqua Books for the official launch of the new website for The Writers Collective of Manitoba, pictured in the tiny thumbnail. Last night I projected some much larger screenshots of it onto a large screen while I droned on about all it could do. Then Eve turned on the “Applause” sign. Not long after that, we ate cookies and drank hot chocolate and punch and beer and wine. But not all of them, and not all at once. My point in mentioning it is that I developed the site for the Collective in the course of my work under the name of WebRiggers.net. I think the site will work out swimmingly for them.
A few weeks ago I accused bookseller McNally Robinson of missing the plot twist following their entry into bankruptcy protection. What I said was (1) that they had expanded at the wrong time, in the wrong way and (2) that they didn’t have an effective strategy for competing with online book sales.
Well, last week McNally emerged from bankruptcy protection and Paul McNally made some public comment on what went wrong, as he saw it. The biggest single factor he cites was the failure of their Don Mills store to meet the sales targets for which they had hoped. He speculated that their strategy of community involvement maybe didn’t play as well in T-Dot, but it has also been noted that the Don Mills mall in which they were located has been a disappointment to many of its retail tenants.
Via TED’s Best of the Web Talks, I discovered J.K. Rowling’s Harvard Commencement Address in June 2008 on The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination. The subject brings up an important concept — the fact that although we list only successes on our CVs, it is typically the failures that teach us more. Comparatively, success perhaps teaches us very little. When was the last time you judged someone as qualified because of the lessons learned in their last failure? Granted, this might not be the single best criteria, but someone who’s never failed may well be an underachiever stuck within the constraints of mediocre thinking.
J.K. Rowling:
Last night I was at Aqua Books for the official launch of the new website for The Writers Collective of Manitoba, pictured in the tiny thumbnail. Last night I projected some much larger screenshots of it onto a large screen while I droned on about all it could do. Then Eve turned on the “Applause” sign. Not long after that, we ate cookies and drank hot chocolate and punch and beer and wine. But not all of them, and not all at once. My point in mentioning it is that I developed the site for the Collective in the course of my work under the name of WebRiggers.net. I think the site will work out swimmingly for them. 
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