In short, music costs money for you because there are people who are better than you at it. This is basically the same reason why your car (probably) wasn’t free: you wanted a car that actually functioned at a high level, and the one you could have built with your bare hands out of materials you’d gathered yourself just wasn’t good enough. So you bought the higher-level work of a professional. Nobody charges you for whistling melodies you’ve made up to yourself–but if you want something that’s been vetted as the highest-level work, by millions of people, you need to pay for it or learn how to do it yourself.

A fun thing happened to me when I became a professional musician: I started hearing really high-level music for free all the time. This is the secret that professional musicians don’t want to tell you. Sure, we want you to pay us, but we don’t really pay to see stuff anymore. I spend all day in rehearsals, listening to great artists make great music, and if, in the evenings, my ears aren’t bleeding yet, I can usually get comp tickets to whatever my friends are performing in.

The people who are offering the Zen-like answer (“the big thing that can be predicted is not the real big thing, it does not have true buddha-nature”) are being a little too skeptical. Historically, there’s been a fairly good record of people seeing “the next big thing” (NBT) a respectable fraction of the time, so it CAN be done, without 20/20 hindsight. Here are some successful big-thing anticipations that I am cherry-picking to illustrate when, why and how you can predict NBTs.

1. The moon race/Apollo was the NBT of its time and everybody knew it. It trained a generation of technologists and spawned a huge ecosystem of offshoots we use to this day.
2. Distributed computing was the NBT of the 70s, and Xerox invested in it for a decade to make it happen.
3. As the man told Dustin Hoffmann in The Graduate: “Plastics.” Another NBT that plenty of people saw coming.
4. Container shipping. The entire shipping industry saw it as a grand vision that could change everything, and they just had to wait for the people with the right talents. See my review of the history of the revolution: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/0…

What caused the early warning visibility in each case?

Learn Logo Design

• Learn how to make a logo that doesn’t suck: Logo Design Love
• You’ll want to take it a step further than a logo though. Learn to create a consistent brand – from the website to the business cards. Check out this book, Designing Brand Identity.

Learn Mobile App Design

• Start with this tutorial to get your feet wet on visual design for mobile apps.
• Read this short but very comprehensive and well-thought out book on iPhone design: Tapworthy. It will teach you how to make an app that not only looks good but is easy to use.
• Geek out on the apps on your phone. Critique them. What works and what doesn’t?

Learn Web Design

• Read Don’t Make Me Think to learn how to make a website that people find easy to use and navigate.
• Read The Principles of Beautiful Web Design if you want help making a website look good.
• Make a list of the websites you think are beautifully designed. Note what they have in common. Some great examples are on SiteInspire.

Now for the hairy question of whether you need to know HTML/CSS as a designer: It depends on the job. Knowing it will definitely give you an edge in the job market. Even if you don’t want to be a web developer, it helps to know some basics. That way you know what is possible and what isn’t.
There are so many great resources to learn HTML and CSS:

• My favorite free one is Web Design Tuts.
• My favorite paid one (pretty affordable at $25/month) is Treehouse. If you’re starting from the beginning and want someone to explain things clearly and comprehensively, splurge for Treehouse tutorials.

Shutter Island

The ending was totally unpredictable. It made my day !

If I tell you why then It would be a spoiler.  You better watch this one. 
and Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley… So worth a shot! 

Shutter Island (2010)

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”