Jurgen Appelo over at Noop.nl put together a list of the top 100 blogs for software developers. My blog, the one you’re reading, slides in at #18, which is surprising given how little I write purely about software development these days.
Happy to be on the list – and if you now realize you hate this blog because of it’s lack of emphasis on making software, you now know where else to go.
The UK culture secretary has fanned an old flame: PG/PG-13/R style ratings for websites. It’s an old idea, one some of you may know I had some involvement with back in the day. Internet Explorer 3.0 was the first browser to support PICS, a W3C standard system for allowing websites to be rated, and I was the PM for the IE team that built the feature.
The thing never took off, which most of me thinks is a good thing. However it did help in some way to prevent the Communications Decency Act from being enforced, and possibly influencing the 2003 decision to remove the indecency provisions from the Act.
PICS makes for a great study in the challenges of public policy, technology and censorship. The coolest concept it had was the ability for any rating system to be used, and for anyone to create one, dodging the entire problem of defining obscenity, good, bad or anything. It was a meta rating system: a system for creating and using rating systems, and tools for parents or administrators to decide how many systems to use and what permissions were allowed. But that was also the Achilles heel: there was never anything to market to parents. And when we did put one of the PICS supporting systems in the box called RSACi, a system designed by Stanford professors, it confused the issue on what PICS was, what Microsoft was doing and who these RSACi folks were. The only system everyone know was the movie system, and that was really all they wanted to see.
More problematic, no solution was offered for how to rate a zillion websites, or a zillion websites with a thousand pages. There was no real business in making a web rating system.
Worst of all, the project was an easy target for censorship and Orwellian nightmare fantasies (Lawrence Lessig wrote “Pics is the Devil”, Wired 5.07). It all turned out to be moot: few even remember what PICS was, much less use it. I’m not saying those fears were unwarranted, but the idea died for reasons that had little to do with what folks were so worried about. Here’s a good summary of the whole is PICS censorship question, written by one of the folks who wrote the PICS Spec.
PICS also makes an excellent case study in the history of innovation. The technology of PICS was truly novel and at minimum an interesting approach to a difficult, subjective, and highly charged problem. But it also divided people sharply, created new problems, had major flaws, and took on big risks, all factors in most innovations, successful or not.
And of course, in my entire experience with the whole world of parental controls and censorship, the funny thing was people rarely ever talked about the neighbor’s kid theory. It goes like this: who cares what you do as a parent if when your Johnny goes over to his friend Fred’s house, Fred being the child of parents who didn’t bother to install whatever magic software you do, they go to whatever websites they like. Kids are exceptional at figuring out which friend’s parents have the most lenient rules. They’re also always better at hacking new technologies than their parents are. It’s all running up a steep hill if you asked me. Technology doesn’t seem to be the solution here. (I do realize the “neighbor’s kid theory” doesn’t apply if the blocking takes place at the government level).
Anyway, there’s a ton of history in this story and lots to learn. And don’t get me started on the problems with the USA PG/PG-13/R/X system, oh boy does that have some problems. Anyway, it’s a shame none of it gets mentioned by the Telegraph. I’m sure this issue will come up every few years from now until forever.
See also:
I’m sure you’ve seen this before:
If so, check out the good post it’s from: Not playing the blame game, by Thousandyone.
If you’ve taken my advice (See vacation strategy) you should be enjoying a nice short week at work without any annoying people getting in your way.
Back in the day when I had a real office job this was my favorite week. I’d plow through all the stuff I hadn’t managed to get to for weeks, clean out my inbox and send those half-written emails. I remember many enjoyable days with few or no meetings, quiet hallways, followed by a week or two of feeling ahead of the curve in the new year.
If you’re looking for tips on other ways to use a quiet week, check these out:
One minor annoyance this week is everything everywhere in the U.S. is all about holiday this, holiday that. Well not here. Instead you get 99%, near full grade-A, typical weekly linkfestage.
As a near the end of 2008 note: thanks to all you readers for buying my books, helping me get speaking gigs, and allowing me to live an independent life. If you’re bored this week leave a comment and a topic and I’ll post something just for you.
This is informal research, but it sure raises some good questions (Why isn’t there a business school or psych dept. doing this sort of thing?).
My friend Konrad over at uber Seattle design studio Artefact put together a mini-study on the effects of different pitches for the same idea. The surprising result? Well I can’t tell you, only that it has something to do with mad-libs.
Go here for the full article (with charts!):How an idea is presented impacts its appeal.
Related post: the ever popular essay: How to pitch an idea. A topic I explored in the University of Washington course I taught on Creative Thinking (Syllabus in PDF).
For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD.
A curiosity of the coverage of the $50 billion Madoff scandal was the sense of shock and surprise that professional investors made big, possibly illegal, mistakes in 2008. The same year half our banks fell apart, major investment firms went bankrupt, automobile companies beg for money, and governors offer to sell senate seats for cash. In August of 1920 Charles Ponzi was charged with similar crimes and it’s clear in the future it will happen again.
In discussions like these a book gets mentioned by some experts called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the madness of crowds. It’s a big fat book chronicling the silly, absurd things large groups of people have bet their money on and lost. Some read the book to feel smart smart that we ourselves didn’t do any of the stupid things our ancestors did. But these days an update to the book is well overdue: an entire chapter can be written about the delusional wonders of our generation.
I’m left with this opinion: there will always be pyramid schemes, frauds and market collapses. It’s inherent in complex systems, things like democracies, free-markets and blogospheres, that these things will happen. It’s unavoidable. I’m not saying we should accept them or not try to reduce their impact (hello, SEC, where have you been?), but they will always take place. The reason? Trust.
A pyramid scheme, often referred to as a ponzi scheme, is well defined by wikipedia as an unsustainable business model, where the people who invest are not aware of how unsustainable it is. (In a ponzi scheme, victims are mostly just out of luck, in a pyramid scheme, victims are often part of the crime since they promoted the pyramid).
As the story goes the legendary Charles Ponzi told his potential investors in 1919 he could return 40% on their money in 45 days. FORTY PERCENT. At a time when the interest rates hovered around 5%. Why was he able to get their money on such a ridiculous promise? For one reason: they trusted him. That’s it. He found a way to earn their trust. The details don’t matter for the moment. Lets ask what is trust?
Trust is using what you know about someone to compensate for what you do not know. I trust my brother. I’d trust him to, I don’t know, say, watch my dogs. Now once he has my dogs I can’t be 100% certain what he might do when he watches them. He might decide to cover them with chocolate syrup, or set them loose in the meat section of my local supermarket, I can’t prevent him from doing these things. But I trust he won’t.
Similarly you trust the staff at McDonald’s not to spit in your food, the woman behind you at line in the bank not to make silly faces at the back of your head, or the gas you pump into your car to be actual gasoline and not turpentine. Our daily lives hinge on trusting all sorts of things we are too ignorant or busy to verify. And from time to time some people will take advantage of this trust because they are mean and because they can. It might only happen 1 or 2% of the time. Small enough not to make us stop trusting these things. But fraud, abuse, and pyramid schemes will always exist as long as we are free to choose who to give our trust to. Laws penalize people after they betray our trust, not before.
Look at the list of people whose trust was betrayed by Madoff: Steven Spielberg; Jeffrey Katzenberg, Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.); New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon, fashion mogul, Carl Shapiro; real-estate developer Mortimer Zuckerman; the European bank HSBC; and on it goes. These high powered people, despite their teams of lawyers and advisers had their trust betrayed. It’s sad and shameful what happened, especially since many of their funds were tied to charities, but there’s nothing we can do to permanently prevent this from happening again. To hire someone to manage your money will always be based primarily on the wonderfully imperfect, intuition dependent, amazingly tricky thing called trust.
How do you decide who to trust? All I know is after writing this post, I’m looking at everyone I see with a suspicious eye :)
[Note: minor edits made 8/4/2014, changing references to 2008 to present]
In the never ending pile of meeting tips, here are 5 five more:
See also:
Some books are referenced so often that eventually you just have to go and read them, just so you can challenge people who use the book as leverage in an argument. Thoreau’s Walden was on that list, and I read it recently. Here’s my review.
It’s a curious book. It’s well known in our environmentally aware age, to be about a person who spent years living in the woods, in harmony with nature. But that’s not quite the reality of the text. Early in the book Thoreau makes clear his spot in the Walden woods, donated by a friend (Emerson), is just a few miles from town. He was not a hard core hermit or back to nature zealot, as one might assume. His ambitions were more philosophical than tied to a specific set of rules for what nature is, or how often he could talk to people or have them over for dinner. It was an inquiry, a thought experiment, and arguably an American pioneer in self-discovery and taking responsibility for learning how to live. This idea is popular today, perhaps in slicker form, in books where people spend a year following the bible or traveling by bicycle to see what happens.
I was surprised by the three distinct themes I found in the book.
One is an attempt to provide a do it yourself guide. There are several lists of things purchased with prices and sources. Thoreau is thrifty and proud. He refers to how inexpensive his life is often, and there are long stretches where he describes, on a line item basis, how much it cost to build, supply and maintain his house. It seems he had some interest in providing a how to manual of sorts, but he gets lost in his ideas. Kind of like a lonely shop clerk who keeps telling personal stories instead of getting you the ham sandwich, sitting in front of him on the counter, you came into the store for. And the details don’t age well as a practical guide as the prices for nails have gone up, and home depot puts a new spin on what it means to do it yourself. There are frequent journal style mentions of hunts, food procured from his garden, and other daily facts of his existence.
The second theme is transcendent prose. This was what I hoped for. He was a student of Emerson and it shows, with page long riffs on the strange nature of man, the potential for greatness, the limits of our cities and times, and on they go. Some of these totally rock:
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them as much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile and then given his body to the dogs.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.
The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I look him in the face?
These are moving, potent, memorable words. If Thoreau achieved his goal of transcending normal existence through a return to nature, and sharing that experience with the reader, it comes through in these passages.
But the third theme of the book is thick, meandering, writing. He runs with the same rambling narrative for pages at a time, beating his own point into the ground or losing it altogether. Anne Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek captures the experience of being alone in the woods with a completeness well beyond Thoreau’s, simply because she provides a consistent, reliable and intensely fascinating narrative. Thoreau seems like the kind of fellow who spent too much time on his own, and his wandering mind, unaware of the confusion he creates in the minds of others, rambles around on its own selfish whims. He was a true recluse and I think it shows. Emerson, though long-winded, keeps his points in straight lines. Thoreau writes like strings of thread, thrilling when they lead somewhere interesting, but often they just get tangled up so tightly you wish he’d take more frequent care to tie them up into neat, memorable bows.
For a short book it is not tightly written and although it has great themes, I find it hard to call it a great read. And Emerson, for all his own verbosity, should have suggested more edits in Thoreau’s work than it seems he did (I understand Emerson played a key role in getting the book published at all, but I can’t find the reference). Perhaps I came to Walden too late, having read many books clearly influenced by Thoreau’s work. And although I respect the fact the book was written more than a hundred years before I was born, I can read Emerson’s collected essays with fewer complaints.
Check it out for yourself: Walden, by Thoreau. This is an online, and annotated edition.
I tend to avoid annotated editions on first reads, so here’s the edition I used: Walden, by Thoreau (amazon), which includes his famous essay on Civil Disobedience that inspired Gandhi and MLK.
[Edited 8-8-16]
Through the magic of netflix and xbox, I can now watch the 80s TV series MacGyver. And what a joyous snarkfest it has been.
I watched the show as a kid, and I’ve written about him in reference to creativity (See do constraints help creative thinking?). But watching the show now was mind blowing for reasons I never expected.
The pilot episode is an amazing cultural artifact all on its own. Pilots are always weird. Watch the first episode of your favorite shows and you’ll consistently find the humor and pacing off, the acting stiff, and the focus of the show often much different than what the show became known for later.
In this case it’s clear the pilot, and the whole show, were made well before the hyper realism of CSI, and the procedural logic of Law and Order. Back then you could get away with a TV hero who lives in a mansion sized NASA grade telescope laboratory, defuses the cheesiest looking nuclear missile in twelve seconds with a paper clip, does his own voice overs, works as apparently the only agent for a squad of the most incompetent secret agent bureaucrats ever on TV, charms the girl, defuses more bombs, stops acid leaks with food, while cracking corny geekish jokes and smiling in a way that suggests he wouldn’t mind an early death, a suggestion that redefines the meaning of bizarre given how frequently the writers remind us how good natured, polite and wholesome this country boy is as he does good things like save the world 5 times an episode.
Forget the fun of wild ingenuity and brains over brawn I remembered the show for – which is there in moments – instead the show works on an entirely deeper level as a time warp back through television history when this sort of fantasy was acceptable entertainment. The only way this show could work today would either be to go towards CSI, and become an inventors 24, or run towards satire and camp like Get Smart, making fun of hero shows by winking at the audience. But MacGyver sits right in the middle in no mans land, which makes the pilot episode a fascinating watch.
The pilot episode is also available online, for free on fancast.
Some professions have all kinds of fun slang for what goes on at work. Waiters call being behind “In the Weeds”. Fighter pilots call targets “bogeys”. What about project managers? Do we have any slang?
Over on pmclinic, we’re looking this week for slang words you’ve used, or have heard, regarding projects. Any kind of project will do.
And if you can’t think of any, I’m happy to hear suggestions for new slang we should put into use.
Slang I’ve heard or used:
Slip: to have to add more time to the schedule.
Schedule chicken: when two teams on the same project bet the other will have to slip their schedule first first.
Run up that hill: to follow a line of thinking for due diligence even if you suspect it won’t lead anywhere for political/bureaucratic illness. “You can run up that hill if you want to, but I’m not mentioning the idea to Fred.”
Crawl. Walk. Run: to plan to do something that barely works on purpose, building it over time into something better.
Per Richard’s complaint, I’ve finally answered the questions mentioned back in September (hanging head in shame), when I spoke at Microsoft Research’s speaker series.
These were some of the questions I was asked during Q&A, with fresh and extended answers:
Q: How do you rationalize your statement that there is no single method for innovation, with your advice for managers (delegate) at the end of your talk?
The advice I gave (delegate, take risks, reward initiative) is the best basic advice for the most common problems I see in my travels. The three most common failings in managers that say “I want my team to innovate” are failing to trust their teams (delegate), failing to make big bets (take risks), and penalizing people for following their ideas into controversial territory.
This isn’t a magic recipe that works 100% of the time, but if I’m talking to a crowd of 200 people and know nothing about their individual circumstances, this is the first advice I offer. Its’ simple stuff, but still rare even when the I-word is thrown down as a goal.
Q: In your Luddite example you pointed out how hard it is to make change happen. Any advice for innovators on working around this challenge?
1. Pick your manager carefully. Your direct boss has more influence on your ability to take risks than anyone else in the company. I’d rather work on a boring, v12 product with a great aggressive manager who wants change to happen, than be on super-duper cutting edge big budget team, with a scared, conservative, Paxil addicted manager who says No to everything.
2. Don’t call what you’re doing change. Call it satisfying customers. Call it making money. Find some other attribute that your idea will provide the company and focus on talking about that instead. Don’t say “This is a huge revolution in blah blah blah.” Instead pitch something like “This plan will eliminate our top 5 customer complaints and improve sales by 10%”. Make a non-change centric argument. It’s not hard. Fish through the project and division goals for a good angle to pitch your ideas.
3. Find allies. Study any revolution and you’ll find cabals, coalitions, and partnerships. Who are your partners for change? You have to weigh the size of your ideas against the size of your political power. Have big ideas? Get more power. Can’t get more power? Pitch smaller ideas until you have proven yourself and earned more power or credibility (which is a kind of power). Look for who else is pitching ideas and what results they get. Pay attention to what arguments work in your culture.
Q: Is Microsoft an imitator? Given your experience here and elsewhere, how do you view the perception of MSFT and other companies as innovators or imitators?
Study the history of any idea and the notion of originators and imitators gets fuzzy fast. Neither Microsoft nor Apple invented any of: GUIs, Mice, Web browsers, Digital music players, cell phones, touch-screens, video games, icons, ethernet, Wireless networking, windows/menus, multi-tasking OSes, and on it goes. An entire chapter of the Myths of innovation explains how futile it is to worry so much about being first. How about being good? Making the best thing or the best manifestation of an idea? It’s a more potent criticism of Microsoft to say their products are bad or hard to use. Or boring. Or unreliable. Those are criticisms of design attributes that might lead to productive conversations.
Regarding being first, consider the i-pod and i-phone. The i-pod is a fantastic design for a portable music player but it’s far from the first implementation of the idea (The Sony walkman doesn’t get mentioned nearly enough in that conversation). The i-phone is far from the first cell-phone, and probably the 500th design of a telephone. Who cares who was first? Most of the time I don’t. History favors people who do things well, more than who does them first. Edison and Ford weren’t technically first with the idea for light bulbs or cars. Do you care? Probably not.
For this reason critiques like Microsoft The Innovator? that try to prove Microsoft is not innovative are just silly. Apple doesn’t show up well either as the first originator of big ideas in technology. Few major corporations ever do. By the time it’s in productizable form, an idea has been touched by many many people and often many different companies. And the skills required to manage a mass market product are very different than those required to invent a new kind of mass market product.
What I think people mean to say about Microsoft, really, is that their products are never inspiring to consumers. They do not generate excitement in the way people think innovations are supposed to. Instead they have earned a reputation for being generic, bland and corporate, with lots of blue and gray and little personality. This is hard to refute (There are exceptions, like XBOX, Encarta, Citysearch, Expedia, and Zune, but Microsoft has never used PR and branding to promote them as more than that). Stereotypically when Microsoft enters a market behind other companies they do little to differentiate themselves in consumer visible ways. They match features, offer generic branding, and chase. Microsoft has always been great at the chase. Part of the reason is that Microsoft has always been mostly a mediocre products company, but a strong platforms company. The big bets are not on the products, but on the strategies behind the products, which explains the occasions they’ve been successful in markets with superior competing products: the superior business model won against a superior product.
Anyway, this is a fun question but it doesn’t lead anywhere practical unless you are a CEO. For the rest of us the best thing to focus on is making something great. Make a great thing. Fuck, make a good thing: half the companies out there can’t even do that. Don’t worry about being new, or who you are imitating (unless you’re breaking the law), just make something that solves a real problem for people and you’ll be way ahead of the curve. If you make a superior product it’s guaranteed some of your ideas with be seen as creative or original, but they’re most often found as a by-product of trying to solve a problem really well. Innovation as a concept is a red herring. It’s slippery, misleading and distracting. I use the word as little as possible and recommend you do too.
Q: What is the role of culture in making innovation happens? Are there really as many recluses and lone geniuses as we think?
Easy one first: true recluses are rare. Most famous genius types had friends and collaborators whose role is often ignored in our hero worship. They had parents, friends, and sometimes even collaborators. Isaac Newton, one of the most reclusive of the recluses, had allies in the Royal Academy of Science that helped publish his papers and advocate his interests.
Thinking as a manager, culture is everything. If you think of ideas as a kind of wildlife, only certain types of environments are habitable by ideas. The job of any manager or leader is to create an environment for ideas to thrive. In chapter 7 of the Myths of Innovation I break creative culture into the following elements: Life of ideas, environment, protection, execution, and persuasion. Many of the famous centers of innovation in history scored well on these factors and the book explores some of those stories. If you’re culture is idea-averse, or loves to shoot down ideas quickly, you could have DaVinci and Einstein on your squad and invent nothing. The corporate world should be hiring more anthropologists to help us see the cultures we’re unintentionally making.
Have more questions on Microsoft, Innovation or culture? Fire away in the comments.
Since my cranky post last week titled Do we suck at the basics? I’ve had an eye out for writing on incompetence and suckage. Over at Harvard Business John Baldoni, author of a slew of bestsellers, had a recent post called How to fight management incompetence.
He offers three bits of advice:
Ok. Got it. This is good and sensible, sure. But the platitude part is easy. The real thing missing is conviction. Being accountable takes courage, something that doesn’t come with a degree or years of experience. Plenty of cowards have lurked in executive circles for decades. I believe most people just don’t have the guts to do the thing any idiot knows is right and this includes many managers. How many courageous people do you know? It can’t be more than 1 out of 10, maybe 1 out of 5. There is no special courage pill yet for VPs, so they have the same kinds of spines as the rest of us.
The big incompetence crime committed by VPs is leaving incompetent managers in place for too long. My theory: by the time the CEO knows a VP stinks, the whole org has known about it for months. The smart people have been making plans to leave or are working to cover their assses. By the time the CEO gets around to taking action, it’s way too late. And often the action taken is whitewashed: no mention is made of how the VP or middle manager utterly failed (e.g. “Fred has decided it’s time for something new.”) The denial lives on, the lie propagates, making it easier for more denials and lies the next time around.
All most employees want is for the people above them to be honest more of the time. Even if things stink, honesty makes it possible for people to maintain their sanity (“ok. So you at least see what I’m seeing. Thanks.”). But it also makes solutions possible, since people are trying to solve the same issues. Bob can go to his boss with suggestions and feedback only if he understand what it is his boss is really concerned about.
The key to fighting many management ills is transparency. Much of what’s said between high level managers should be said to line level employees. Perhaps not in the same cavalier or blunt terms, but the core messages should be heard all the way down. We can learn much from sports teams, as their performances are televised and recorded. Stats for each player are kept from every game, and season win-loss records for every coach. No last place team can ever be whitewashed by a cowardly VP, the business is far too transparent for those kinds of lies to be accepted even by fans. But a last place team in a company can hide and pretend in all sorts of ways if the manager chickens out. Digital workplaces are the opposite of transparency unless efforts are made to express true opinions of what’s going well and what isn’t. Only the people in power can do this. And you don’t need magic metrics. The opinion of team leaders is a sufficient barometer: and if it isn’t, they shouldn’t be team leaders.
Want to fight management incompetence? First move is getting the truth out in the open. Second, demand people in power take responsibility for that truth. If they resist, they should give up their management stripes or find another company to work for. End of story. Sports team managers are fired too often, but there’s a nugget of the right idea in their firings. They are held intensely accountable for the results of their team, no excuses. Most corporations can learn from this kind of commitment to the truth.
All this talk of bailouts over the last few weeks, and now the talk of bailouts for the major U.S. automakers, makes me think of one of the lessons regarding Christensen’s Innovator’s dilemma.
One of the excellent points Christensen makes is that successful companies, so invested in the ideas that made them successful, invest in old ideas despite evidence they’re no longer viable. This explains why WordPerfect resisted making a Windows version of their best selling word processor, why Microsoft initially resisted investing in the Internet, and why dozens of once market leading companies fell off the map.
So when I hear talk of bailouts of failing organizations, particularly auto manufacturers, I can’t help but see it as an innovators dilemma type problem. By investing in an old idea, and the old guard of the U.S. auto industry, we slow the next wave of change from happening. We enable thousands of people to believe their old ways and skills are still viable, instead of motivating them to seek out new skills, products, or roles that have a chance at thriving in this decade and the next.
When you’ve been successful with an idea for years, an idea you’ve put your life into, its hard to recognize it’s time to pull the plug. Odds are high you’ll need someone else to pull the plug for you. Like in that cliched scene in a zillion medical shows when the heroic doctor refuses to stop giving CPR to a favorite patient, someone has to tap you on the shoulder and say “Hey. It’s over. Time to move on.”
If it were not for the larger financial crisis I doubt there would be much support for auto bailout plans. Chapter 11 can work quite well. It was the primary system used to resolve the collapse of the U.S. Steel industry in the 1970s. Pittsburgh survived, and with 15 years began to thrive, in much the same way Detroit might. It won’t be fun, but needed changes rarely are.
$25 billion to hold on to the past is guaranteed to return less on that investment than $25 billion spent to pave the way for the future.
I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling.
I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you.
I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think that you’ve not got any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I’d starve to death before I’d sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow.
– Woody Guthrie
Check out Dust Bowl Ballads – despite the tough topics he lives up to the quote.
Sometimes I think we all have a worrying quota. An amount of worry we feel compelling to apply to the world. And if our lives get safe, and there isn’t much really worth worrying about, we fill up our quota by worrying about things that don’t really matter much at all. Experts call this chronic stress, an ongoing negative response to small negative events in life, not big ones like divorce or losing a job. And we develop habits that keep that chronic stress level high for no good reason.
Case in point: I had a deep, worried conversation with my brother about the criteria for accepting Facebook invites from people who were jerks 25 years ago when we went to grade school with them. Boy – do we need other things to fill our quotas of worry. Like the Facebook example, I catch myself worrying about ridiculous, trivial things now and then, and the trick that helps, that shrinks my worrying quota is Maslows hierarchy of needs.
It’s an old trick: put whatever is on your mind in some kind of perspective (What’s worse? What’s better?) and it loses its venom. Most of the time, whatever I’m worrying about scores on the top half of the pyramid, and while it might belong in my quota of worry, it certainly doesn’t deserve the amount of energy from my life it’s absorbing.
Sometimes decisions are so insignificant that simply flipping a coin to decide and getting the decision out of the way is the best and healthiest thing all around: neither end of the decision matters. The only bad choice is taking too much time to make one. I find I can shrink my quota of worry by deciding a) some decisions matter less than I think b) worrying won’t help me make a better decision c) get someone else to sanity check if I’m worrying too much about something.
How do you find ways to worry less about things that aren’t worth worrying about?
References:
(While I’m a fan of Maslow’s, anyone know of interesting alternative hierarchies of needs?)
[Updated with new link on stress 12/11/14]
