Perhaps you could elaborate a bit on how it's not better than craigslist.
Also, twitter, kayak, hipmunk etc. all take advantage of UI animations quite similar to the ones used here. A bit more complex than simply changing the color of a car ;)
One big - 100% effort, balls to the wall, worked your ass off to get there - rejection will hold far more wisdom than a myriad of small insignificant rejections.
Why does sending Steve Jobs a single email and not receiving a response within in a day count as a noteworthy rejection? Seems hardly worth the effort and predetermined to count as a 'rejection'.
People really need to learn the concept of "Expected Outcome" before they go headlong into "rejection therapy". For instance, what was his expected outcome if Steve Jobs had replied back? I'm willing to bet it was 0. He just did it because he could. This is like me tracking down insert female celeb fantasy here's phone number and asking to talk to her. Pointless.
i believe there is some unconvencional value in the advice in the article for the intraverted dudes with low self esteem like me. Given any hypothetical opportunity people like me will evaluate the chances of the positive outcome of the opportunity lower than extravert dudes with higher esteem, and will reject the opportunity outright. While your advice suggests the default behavior, the advice above stresses the need to increase the number of attempts, irregardless of whether they are successful or not, and by the law of large numbers, this might result in higher probability of positive outome/s.
Therefore, setting the goal of being rejected more often, might be more productive than waiting for the "right" opportunity to acieve the desired outcome.
I'd say 85%+ of the better paying gigs I've gotten have been through existing connections and people I've known. For instance, a college friend started a new business and needed a site - he contacted and ended up hiring me. His partner then referred me to his friend, who also hired me for a project. Word of mouth can be pivotal in building a business so my first suggestion would be to explore your own social circle. (give your friends business cards!)
Same story here. Partner and I did a fairly complex micro-lending platform for a non-profit as our first major gig. Some of the work was pro-bono, some $35/hour range. We did well, gave them what they needed, and now we're booked with clients for the next six months from referrals and others who wanted to work with us based on that site. We've moved comfortably into the $60-80 range with pretty clear indications that we can keep pushing it higher.
I have a biz partner that finds them because he has the connections. Though we did get one gig because someone found something I'd written on my tech blog.
I was expecting the philosopher, but was pleasantly surprised when it was the Lost character.
That being said, this article is more of a funny article about Lost targeted at programmers than it is an article about important software development practices inspired by Lost.
Somehow I think a case could be made that radical empiricism is a useful model for software development...i.e. one's a priori ideas about customers, markets, and the utility of software are not as useful as customer feedback:
And if our dreamer pleases to try whether the glowing heat of a glass furnace be barely a wandering imagination in a drowsy man's fancy, by putting his hand into it, he may perhaps be wakened into a certainty greater than he could wish
