Research assistant wanted

[Update: This position is closed. Do not apply. Thanks]

I’m hiring a research assistant to help with my current book about working for WordPress.com, a company where everyone works from anywhere around the world.

This is an experiment at finding a win/win for working on a book: lets see if it works.

The goal of the research is to find data, and good summaries, to answer questions about remote work across different industries and cultures. It’s a task I can do, but one of you folks who likes researching things might enjoy helping with a book, and getting paid for it.

Here’s the rundown:

  • The job starts ASAP
  • It’s probably a total of 10-20 hours of work over the next month
  • The tasks will be things like “find out what companies have trait X or Y” or “what evidence is there of V or Z”
  • You need basic statistics knowledge (how to poke holes in study claims and evaluate research quality)
  • You need to have google-fu and possibly fu for academic search engines
  • You need to write well enough to organize what you find so it’s easy for me to consume, with references
  • You’d get to help shape some of the book and chat with me about various book things
  • You can tell me what you think you should be paid

To apply: [Position now closed]

  1. Answer this question: “What % of companies allow telecommuting of any kind?”
  2. Write up a brief summary and cite your sources
  3. Include the words “inchoate” and “papaya” somewhere in your message
  4. I’d expect this would take an hour or less to complete
  5. You have until EOD Friday

There’s only one position and I will update here as soon as I’ve found someone (So check back before you do this work). I don’t want to waste your time.

Position closed.

How to revise a first draft

The only faith a writer needs to have is in the next draft.

The quality of any draft does not matter much provided it’s not your last.  The goal of any writing session is to work hard, now, to give the future version of you something better than the last draft to work with. Each draft is a gift to yourself, a gift to the future version of you.

I’m working on my sixth fifth book now and I’ve developed these rules for how revise draft #1:

  1. Let it sit for a few days. The best editing happens when you are unattached. You want to read it as if it was written by someone else. You need to be willing to rip entire sections out and rewrite others. If you’re afraid to cut or change anything, you’re not ready. Let it sit longer.
  2. Print the whole thing out. We read more carefully on paper. Writing notes on paper can be easier, depending on your habits (see ‘true reading’ below). There’s also a pride you’ll feel in physically holding the book you don’t get with digital versions. A printed version will also restrict you from falling into rewriting, which is not the goal. You need to be a reader for awhile. Set wide columns and heavy line spacing so you have plenty of room for commentary and revisions.
  3. Read the whole thing (aka ‘The Big Read’). I read the entire book in one or two sittings. I need to have the entire experience in my mind to properly consider how to reorganize things. This read is often painful: you must confront all the things that aren’t finished yet, which will be many. The good news is everything is easier after the Big Read.
  4. Take high and low level notes. Catch grammar and typos, but primarily note issues of pace, flow, and unneeded paragraphs. Put question marks down for things that don’t make sense. Does the flow from one chapter to the next make sense? Is there a chapter that needs to be added? removed? Sections within chapters that make no sense? Do I rewrite this or cut it completely? But I don’t rewrite as I do the Big Read. I make notes but try to continue as much as possible, as if I were just a reader.
  5. Get feedback. A draft, even with dozens of typos and known issues, is still a complete work someone can read. Ask two or three people you know, who you trust, who you can count on to give you honest feedback to have a go. Start with a few chapters: if that goes well, give them more. Be specific about the kinds of feedback you want, when you need it by, and how they should deliver it to you. Make it easy for them: they are doing you a big and intimate favor. Make sure to separate your supporters who cheer you on, from people who will give you the tough but fair feedback you need to make the book better. They are probably not the same people. Giving the book to your bigest fan or best friend puts them in a bind: they want to be positive, but what the book needs most is an honest, knowing eye, something they may not be qualified or comfortable giving you. It does not improve the draft to be told only “your draft is great.”
  6. Get to work on the second draft. With my notes, and notes from early readers, by my side, I get to work in digital form. If I’m moving chapters into a new order or writing new ones, I do that first. Then I work in the order of the chapters, revising, rewriting, rereading and editing as I go. See How To Write a Second Draft.

Many writers never do #3. It shows. The goal of a book is to provide one experience that lasts hours. If the author doesn’t read through the entire book in draft form it will be sheer luck if the chapters hold together well.

Working on paper also forces truer reading. If you work with a digital version you’ll be tempted to clean things up as you go. This seems efficient but it takes you out of the reading experience and puts you into a writing mode. It’s more important to be inefficient, but stay in the reading mindset to truly understand what the book currently is, so when you’re done you’ll have clarity on what it needs to become.

The second draft is always a delight to actually work on.  It’s as if a gift was given to me: much of the heavy lifting is done. Even if a chapter needs rewriting the creative energy required is much less than working with blank pages. And since often the best move is to rip things out, the book gets better in big swings at every turn.

In many cases for non-fiction books, two major drafts are all you have time for.

Here’s what the first draft for my next book looks like from 10,000 feet. 76k words.

what draft 1 looks like

I’m doing the Big Read today. Wish me luck.

What rules do good friends follow? (thoughts wanted)

I’ve been thinking about friendships and why some last and others fade away. It seems there is an unwritten set of rules people who stay friends are able to follow, even if they don’t even sit down and discuss them.

I’ve certainly never had a friendship where there was an official meeting, where a  friendship charter was drawn up detailing what everyone expected of each other, or planting seeds for how to deal with difficult situations that might arise. Have you ever been a friendship where a compact for how the friendship should work was discussed?

It seems strange to me how sometimes the most important relationships in our lives are assumed to not require the same investment of consideration for how they function (or fail) as the relationships we have at work.

I’m looking for your thoughts on what the implicit, or explicit, agreements friendships that last have. And any stories you might be willing to share about how you arrived at those ‘rules.’ Or how the lack of them impacted you.

Looking forward to your thoughts.

Learning about management from open source projects

In the course of working on the new book about my time working for WordPress.com, I’ve been reading various books on open source projects and how they’re managed. The most useful book by far has been Fogel’s Producing Open Source Software.  There’s plenty of good advice for all managers of software development no matter what philosophy is used.

Fogel does a fantastic job of taking the core challenges head on, from what culture and community are, how to grow them, dealing with conflict and the roles leaders have to play for healthy cultures to grow. Some of the book does focus on tools, which I didn’t need, but that let me read the entire book in a single enjoyable sitting.

second edition is underway and you can contribute to the kickstarter project to make sure it happens. I did. The 2nd edition is slated to come out this fall.  The current edition is available online for free here to read right away while you wait for the update.

producing open source

 

Choice quotes from the book include:

Try not to let humans do what machines could do instead. As a rule of thumb, automating a common task is worth at least 10 times the effort a developer would spend doing that task manually one time. For very frequent or very complex tasks, that ratio could easily go up to 20 or even higher.

On the faith in fancy projects and heroes:

The most well-known organizational models of getting things done—whether it’s building a house, producing a motion picture, or writing software—tend to concern the prediction of and commitment to specific outcomes, mitigating risk to the plan, and correcting surprises along the way. In such models, innovation is seen to happen at the moment of inspiration of the idea—and the remaining 99% of the effort is perspiration, to paraphrase Edison. Say it along with me: “Yeah, right.” This view looks at innovation as a very solitary sport; we want to talk about Steve Jobs as the guy behind the iPod, rather than the mix of good engineers and product marketing types who collaborated with Steve to find the right sweet-spot combination of features and fashion.

On the myths and realities of crowdsourcing:

Without descending into hand-waving generalizations like “the group is always smarter than the individual” (we’ve all met enough groups to know better), it must be acknowledged that there are certain activities at which groups excel. Massive peer review is one of them; generating large numbers of ideas quickly is another. The quality of the ideas depends on the quality of the thinking that went into them, of course, but you won’t know what kinds of thinkers are out there until you stimulate them with a challenging problem.

And on managing releases out the door:

Thus, the process of stabilizing a release is mostly about creating mechanisms for saying “no.” The trick for open source projects, in particular, is to come up with ways of saying “no” that won’t result in too many hurt feelings or disappointed developers, and also won’t prevent deserving changes from getting into the release.

The Meaningful is greater than the Improbable

In Kevin Kelly’s recent article The Improbable is the New Normal, he points out how we can now see amazing things every minute of the day.

Every minute a new impossible thing is uploaded to the internet and that improbable event becomes just one of hundreds of extraordinary events that we’ll see or hear about today. The internet is like a lens which focuses the extraordinary into a beam, and that beam has become our illumination. It compresses the unlikely into a small viewable band of everyday-ness. As long as we are online – which is almost all day many days — we are illuminated by this compressed extraordinariness. It is the new normal.

He’s right. The ubiquity of video cameras mean Youtube is the largest event filter in history, allowing us to create an endless playlists of amazing things.

That light of super-ness changes us. We no longer want mere presentations, we want the best, greatest, the most extraordinary presenters alive, as in TED. We don’t want to watch people playing games, we want to watch the highlights of the highlights, the most amazing moves, catches, runs, shots, and kicks, each one more remarkable and improbable than the other.

This is not true for everyone. Highlight reels get boring, fast.  They show people we don’t know doing things in places we’ve never been. We have no emotional stake in what happens. The lack of contrast with the ordinary makes each clip less potent than it would be on its own.

Amazing things can be meaningless. The spectacle of a stranger has no personal significance.

But watching your son play in his first high school basketball game, or your best friend get up on stage at karaoke for the first time, even if neither results in any performance worthy of anyone else’s interest, will mean a great deal to you. Someone you care about will have done something that mattered to you and to them, transcending any universal evaluation of how probable it was or wasn’t.

For many people the video they care about most is meaningless to the rest of the planet. And same goes for their memories too.

I am unsure of what this intimacy with the improbable does to us. What happens if we spend all day exposed to the extremes of life, to a steady stream of the most improbable events, and try to run ordinary lives in a background hum of superlatives? What happens when the extraordinary becomes ordinary?

It’s possible it has little or no effect. For decades television has been a box of improbable events, churning out endless scenes of unlikely situations, played out by absurdly beautiful people. Mostly the effect has been nil, or worse, has drawn many people to spend much of their free time watching more television.

It’s meaning that matters. An endless hi-def video stream of amazing things may have zero effect on our courage to decide what has meaning, and to get off our asses to do something about it.

How to Run a Good Workshop

Workshops are hopeful things. They’re sold on so much promise, but that promise is often dashed as students discover their expert instructor is far from an expert at teaching them how to learn anything.

For years I was a workshop guy: I taught them, I studied them, I even hired people to do them for other companies. I watched many instructors run them and I know the common mistakes. Here’s my best advice on how run a workshop people will love.

Rule #1: A 3 hour lecture is not a workshop

The word workshop implies that work will be done in a shop like atmosphere. This means the center of attention should be on the students doing work, not on the expert talking  about their expertise. A cooking workshop means students cook things. A writing workshop means students write things. If most of your “workshop” is people not actually making anything, you should perhaps call it a class, a lecture, or a mistake.

Many experts are bad at teaching workshops because they are used to lecturing. A lecture has the spotlight on the speaker, but a workshop has the spotlight on each of the students.

The skills involved in designing workshops are very different for this reason. Instead of crafting a message for people to listen to, a good workshop is crafted to give students the opportunity for guided instruction in doing things.  Many workshops are born from lectures, which explains why those workshops are so boring.

Rule #2: The more students you have, the less of a workshop it is

Better workshop instructors make larger groups feel more interactive, but beyond 20 or 25 people the instructor is spread thin. The common approach for large groups is to have people work in teams, as they at least get to be interactive with each other while the instructor is helping other students. In bad cases group work is a copout: the exercises aren’t interesting enough, or students struggle to work with annoying strangers who are too pushy or too passive. In better situations, when the students are motivated and the exercises well designed, it can work well (but likely not as potent as time spent being coached in a small group directly by the expert).

Designing exercises for groups of people to work together is hard. And also demands more testing to get right (see #5).

Rule #3: Work the triad: explain, exercise, debrief

The simplest way to construct a workshop is to think in units of 3.

  1. Walkthrough: Show how to do something.
  2. Exercise: Have everyone actually try to do that thing (while you wander around and help people one on one).
  3. Debrief:  lead a discussion of where people got stuck, what parts were fun/hard/frustrating, and what things people learned, or realized they want to learn. Show people’s individual work, rather than your own, to the class to help explain your insights and observations, and as way to invite them to share theirs. Lead a healthy critique session.
  4. Repeat, with a more challenging thing.

These triads can be of different lengths 45 minutes (15/15/15 or 10/20/15) or longer. Its best to start with small things and build to a larger projects as the workshop goes on. It’s fine for the ratios to change. A more challenging exercise might be 1:3:1 (10 minutes, 30 minutes, 10 minutes).

Take breaks regularly. When people stand up and use their bodies for a minute or two their heart rate goes up, and they get energy back. It’s good for their bodies and minds to move around at least every hour or two. Gadget junkies can get their fix and people with biological needs can get that off their mind. Don’t see this as dead time: see it as taking a breather so everyone can bring more energy into the next exercise. Once every two hours is a good rule of thumb.

Rule #4: Stay out of the center

Workshop students come to learn and they can learn from other students often as much as they can from you. But they start as strangers to each other and you are the social link. Be friendly. Be conversational. Ask students who are good at something to help students who have questions on that thing. Do what you can to make everyone comfortable getting feedback from each other and not just from you (you can design exercises to make this happen naturally). The easy mistake is to center everything on you. This works for TV or lectures. This is a failure in a workshop.

Facilitation is the name of the game. It’s your job to create an environment where everyone is comfortable enough to take risks and learn some things. You should laugh, so they can laugh. You should be passionate so they can be passionate. At times you need to be a teacher, other times you’re game show host facilitating what’s going on, and other times you are quietly out of the way, helping people one on one.

Rule #5: Beta test your exercises

The top complaints workshop instructors hear is often “it was too easy” or “it was way too hard.” Using one exercise for 10 or 20 people guarantees a spectrum of experiences.

It takes a surprising amount of work to develop an idea for an exercise into something specific enough to be interesting, but flexible enough for different people. Since every student in a workshop will have different levels of skill, you want each exercise you use to have built in ways to make it harder or easier.

Great teachers let their students know it’s ok to raise their hand and say “Can you make this more/less challenging?” They’ve prepared wrinkles and twists to handle those cases.

It’s a great idea to beta test your exercises, if not the entire workshop. Do a dry run of half the workshop, for free, with the kind of people the workshop will be for. You’ll learn many little things to fix and adjust that will make a huge difference when you do it for the ‘first’ time.

There are tons of books with workshop exercises. If you poke around you can likely find a book for your discipline that will give you many ideas to start from.  Many workshop exercises are horrifically lame, especially ice-breaker type games, but even those can inspire you to think of worthy ones.

Rule #6: Match promises to exercises

Each exercise should be about acquiring a skill, or at least having an experience that helps acquire a skill. List what you believe students will have learned, or experienced, by the time the workshop is over. Use that as your description for the workshop: it’s the promise you are making to students. If your workshop description has a promise than doesn’t map to a specific exercise, either change the description or change your exercises. You’ll find you need to limit your promises, which is good and realistic for everyone.

Rule #7: Always have a whiteboard or flipchart in the room

You never know when you, or a student, might need something big to write on to explain something. In corporate settings you’d be amazed how often the room you are supposed to teach in doesn’t have anything to write on. Digital whiteboards aren’t the same as they often break and take 5 minutes to figure out how to use. Flipcharts are cheap: always make sure there is one available.

Rule #8: The room should look like a workshop when you are done

If its been a true workshop there will be papers, drawings, diagrams, sketches, post-it notes and other made things all over the place. Tape the output of each exercise up on the walls so people can refer to them later. The room should look like a place where a real group of workers had been working on projects all day.  Students should leave feeling like they’ve done work, and have some work they can take home with them if they choose.

Rule #9: Build a workshop checklist

There are many things to bring and remember. When you do your beta test of exercises, make notes on all of the equipment you need to bring (e.g. markers, pens, post-it notes, flip-charts, etc.), and what things students need to bring (of which you will have an extra set or two for forgetful students). You never want to have to waste time in the workshop searching or waiting for things. Build a checklist of all the things you need to bring, and put it all in briefcase or box so its ready to go.

Rule #10: Give students the next thing to do after they leave

Students didn’t come for the day: they came to keep learning. Have the next logical exercise or project available on your website, or  in whatever materials you give them. Also include a small list of the best books or other resources they’re likely to need.

You are not what you measure

On the day you die, what will your friends and family remember about who you were?

At work, they may try to measure you with numbers, but to your spouse, children and friends those measurements are meaningless. They know you from how you have helped them and hurt them. How you loved them or rejected them. What is measured about you in numbers has little bearing on the experience the people who matter most have.

There is value in careful measurement. Carefully chosen data can help us see. We are easily distracted, and good information can remind us to tend first to the important things we’d overlook in our daily chaos. I like the ideas in the film Moneyball, where wise use of information helped people see more clearly what the true value of people’s talent was.

But the trap is what is easiest to measure is nearly always the least important thing. You can measure kisses per day, but that won’t tell you how much you’ve loved someone. It won’t tell you what they’d prefer you do instead, or how they felt about you when you ignored them the rest of the day. Bad, easy data is always the most abundant kind.

And even good data can be used in dumb ways. Any measurement can be gamed. The person with the highest score may be the one who has the least integrity.

It’s a mistake to allow data to be a god. Data is dead. Numbers don’t know why they were created. Data, if granted the power, can lord over people mercilessly without any awareness that it’s out of date, behind the times, or having the opposite effect its creators intended. It is wise to be informed by data, but only a fool is data’s slave. You are more than what is measured about you.

Damp garbage and the writing process

John Steinbeck, in Writers at Work, recounts a fictional dialog with a publisher, illustrating the gauntlet of publishing a book.

His tale is cranky and entertaining, and I’m sure some authors can relate:

The book does not go from writer to reader. It goes first to the lions – editors, publishers, critics, copy readers, sales department. It is kicked and slashed and gouged. And its bloodied father stands attorney.

Editor: The reader won’t understand. What you call counterpoint only slows the book.

Writer: It has to be slowed. How else would you know when it goes fast?

Sales department: The book’s too long. Costs are up. We’ll have to charge five dollars for it. People won’t pay five dollars. They won’t buy it.

Writer: My last book was short. You said then that people won’t buy a short book.

Proofreader: The chronology is full of holes. The grammar has no relation to English. On page so and so you have a man look in the World Almanac for steamship rates. They aren’t there. I checked. You’ve got the Chinese new year wrong. The characters aren’t consistent. You describe Liza Hamilton one way and then have her act a different way.

Editor: You make Cathy too black. The reader won’t believe her. You make Sam Hamilton too white. The reader won’t believe him. No Irishman ever talked like that.

Writer: My grandfather did.

Editor: Who’ll believe it.

2nd editor: No children ever talked like that.

Editors: Lets see if we can fix it up. It won’t be much work. You want it to be good, don’t you? For instance, the ending. The reader won’t understand it.

Writer: Do you?

Editor: Yes, but the reader won’t.

There you are… You came in with a box of glory, and there you stand with an arm full of damp garbage.

He then takes all the criticism together to show how contradictory it can seem:

The Reader:

  • He is so stupid you can’t trust him with an idea.
  • He is so clever he will catch you in the least error.
  • He will not buy short books.
  • He will not buy long books.
  • He is part moron, part genius, part ogre.
  • There is some doubt as to whether he can read.

From Writers at Work, The Paris review interviews, 4th series.

How To Write A Good Bio

Many good people write bad bios for themselves. Anyone asking you for a bio, or reading it, wants you to sound awesome, but what they need and what your ego wants to say are often different things. With these five simple rules you can write a good bio for yourself in less time, with less effort and everyone wins.

1. Impressive people have short bios

Compare this:

Bob Smith won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, twice. He invented air. He’s currently the head of Amazingness at Wonderment University.

With this:

Bob Smith spent 2001-2004 staring blankly at piles of yard waste in Atlantic City, NJ. During the better part of the 90’s he read several mediocre comic books. He studied in 2002-2008 licensing regulations for circus clowns in West Palm Beach, FL. and garnered a second place industry award while merchandising mouse yogurt in Las Vegas, NV. He consulted in near-UFO experiences with random tourists on the street in Ocean City, NJ. and spent two years unsuccessfully licensing cannibalism for farmers, while maintaing his Pez dispenser collection.*

Everyone wants your bio to be shorter. The shorter your bio, the more people will read it. No one is impressed by a long series of unimpressive things. If you have a great one sentence bio, people will be curious enough to find out more. On the other hand, if you have a bad and long bio they are certain never to want to learn anything about you. When you are famous enough to appear on TV or write an article for The New York Times, your by-line will be a few words long: Author. Senator. Musician. Keep this in mind. The goal is to make your bio shorter, not longer.

2. Write for the real audience

If you are asked for a bio because you are speaking somewhere, perhaps Ignite Seattle, shape your bio to best fit what you are speaking about. Your bio will be read by people at that event to help them understand why you’re credible on your topic.

For example, if you are speaking on fly fishing, don’t do this:

Sally Shmeckes is a software developer and designer who has written code in every language known to mankind.  She works mostly as a hired gun for startups in trouble, who need a superhero to help turn trainwreck projects around. She studied 3-D Film Theory and Anti-Nuclear Architecture at the University of Ridiculousness, and has 3 children if you count her husband.

Do something like this instead:

Sally Shmeckes is a veteran software developer and designer. Her Dad taught her to fly fish before she could walk and she has fished every day since he died. She’s on twitter at @sallyschemkes56.

3. Invert your pyramid

Put the important facts first. The fancy term for this is the inverted pyramid. Assume with each word in your bio that fewer and fewer people will keep reading. It’s a great assumption because it’s true.

This is good:

Bono is the lead singer for the rock band U2. He is an advocate for many important political and social causes. His real name is Paul Hewson. He owns many interesting pairs of glasses.

Not this:

Bono likes the color red, especially on Tuesdays. He loves to drink whiskey (on all days). He learned to drink whisky from his childhood friend Zippo, when they went to school together at Mount Temple Comprehensive School. His real name is Paul Hewson, He is best known as the lead singer for the band U2.

Have two versions of your bio, one two sentences long and a longer full paragraph version. When asked for a bio, provide both. For most marketing materials a short and long version are needed.

4. Be clever only if you’re certain it’s actually clever

From the Department of Made up Facts:

  • Percent of people who think they are clever: 64%
  • Percent of people who are actually clever: 7%

If you think you are clever: write your clever bio and get feedback on it from someone else you know who you’re certain is clever. If they approve, you’re in, but don’t try to be clever all on your own. One good joke in a bio is more than enough.

5. Watch the slashes, Jack

A sad trend born of Twitter are bios where people self describe themselves by a dozen different traits. This makes you look like someone who sucks at everything. It’s fine to be a Jack of All Trades, but to insist on telling everyone you’re a Jack of All Trades mostly makes you Jack of Many Annoyances. Our species has small brains: we need you to tell us the one or two of your trades that will be most relevant to us, or to what you will be talking about.

Instead of this, which seems written like SEO metadata:

Nina Nana is a designer / juggler / smuggler / hellraiser / accountant / anti-ninja / metallurgist / snake charmer

Try this:

Nina Nana is a designer who has mastered juggling, smuggling and many glorious pursuits of diverse ingenuity.

That’s all. Happy bio writing!

[*Note: The second example from #1 is a revised creation of the auto bio generator.]

The Best Books On Public Speaking

A feature of some of my books is a ranked bibliography. I rank books that I read while doing research in the order of their usefulness. Below is the ranked bibliography from Confessions of a Public Speaker, which suggests which books are the most valuable to read.

Warning: trying to learn a skill by reading about it is never as valuable as doing the thing itself. Putting in the time to speak in front of people and getting good feedback is far more efficient and valuable than reading alone. Even posting a 5 minute web video of you practicing giving a talk and asking friends for feedback is a great investment of time.

Popular recent books like Reynold’s Presentation Zen and Duarte’s Slideology didn’t rank high on this list even though I recommend those books often. The reason is both books emphasize slide design which in my experience isn’t the primary place to help speakers improve (which explains why I only spend a few pages in Confessions with advice on slides. Also see: How To Present Well Without Slides). I needed to cover a range of subjects including history, anxiety, business, performance, neuroscience and teaching – and books on my list scored better when I learned the most.

The best books on public speaking, ranked in order of number of notes I made while reading them:

40: What’s the Use of Lectures?, Donald A. Bligh

31: Speak Like Churchill, Stand like Lincoln, James C. Humes

28: Public Speaking for Success, Dale Carnegie (This might be the best of the bunch. Highly recommended)

28: Lend me your ears: All you need to know about making speeches, Max Atkinson

26: Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving, John Medina

26: History of Public Speaking in America, Robert T. Oliver

25: Money Talks: How to Make a Million As a Speaker, Alan Weiss

23: Um: Slips, Stumbles and Verbal Blunders, Michael Erard

22: Conquer Your Speech Anxiety, Karen Kangas Dwyer

22: The Francis Effect: The Real Reason You Hate Public Speaking (Oakmont Press)

20: What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain

15: The Lost Art of The Great Speech, Richard Dowis

14: Speak for a Living, Anne Bruce

13: How People Learn, National Research Council

12: Secrets of Successful Speakers, Lilly White

(The list goes on for another 25 books – but the value of a ranked bibliography is you’ve now seen the highest ranked ones!)

IMG_6075

ranked

Your Notebook Fundamentalism Is a Shame

In a recent on HBR article titled Alexandra Samuel explains how she can tell instantly that someone is wasting her time:

I knew right away, when you walked in here with a paper notebook — a paper notebook! — I realized that this meeting was not going to be a good use of our time.

You’d make better use of your time if you took your notes in digital form, ideally in an access-anywhere digital notebook like Evernote that makes retrieval a snap. If you had that, I could shoot you the link of the book I want you to read, or the contact card of the person you want to meet. And if you planned to act any of the ideas or outcomes from this meeting, you would want to pop the follow-up tasks into your task management program.

Dear Alexandra:

I often use paper notebooks. I don’t care what other people use. The means are not the ends.

I judge coworkers on their results, not their tools. I recommend everyone does the same.

If I worked with someone who used smoke signals and carrier pigeons but did better work than their fully upgraded neural implanted cyborg peers, I’d make sure they had all the firewood and bird feed they needed.  And by the same token, if the cyborgs did better work, I’d offer cyborg implants to the rest of the team to try.  It’s only after I see what people produce that I’d consider commentary on the means they used.

Most meetings I’m in are about people’s ideas. We prioritize what goes on it the meeting over worrying about notes for who isn’t in the room. We pitch ideas at whiteboards, we sketch strategies, and we use every tool each of us thinks helps us get whatever task we’re doing at the moment. Sometimes the latest gadgets are involved. Often it’s just paper and pens. But we’re all open minded about how we work together, and I think you should be too.

I’ve yet to work in a place where taking notes was a major concern for meetings. I’ve never heard of a notes crisis, or had teams complain they were overwhelmed with the burdens of writing, transcribing and reading notes. Most notes in most meetings in most of the history of the world are never read. I have no data to support that claim, but perhaps I’ve avoided workplaces that have fueled their own paranoia about what might get missed.

When I first read your post I thought it was a joke. Maybe it was and I didn’t get it. But if I take it seriously I’d be afraid to work with you. I’d assume you’d judge me before I even had a chance to show you what I can do. And given how many people will read what you wrote, you should keep this in mind when you start your next meeting.

Signed,

-Scott

Liberals vs. Conservatives is a False Dichotomy

Most things we commonly split into two piles fall apart if you think about them:

In the U.S. we divide people politically as Liberals and Conservatives, but the terms are so poorly defined it’s easy to find examples of people who have some liberal views and some conservative views.  There are other important alternatives for defining a person’s politics (what do you want to liberate? what do you want to conserve? how do you think it should be done?), but the convenience of the false dichotomy of liberal vs. conservative hides them from consideration. The convenience of binary logic blinds us from how poor a foundation for thought it can be.

All dichotomies can be sub-divided into smaller groups. This is rarely observed in debate, but if you believe you can divide anything in half, this applies recursively. You can have conservative liberals and liberal conservatives. And conservative liberal conservatives and liberal conservative liberals. If you stop to carefully examine anything polarizing, even when you’re certain you’re on the right side, you’ll discover nuance, contradiction and subtlety that will cause any wise mind to challenge the merits of the initial dichotomy.

An excerpt from the post The False Dichotomy of False Dichotomies.

How to get from an idea to a book

Success in the majority of circumstances depends on knowing how long it takes to succeed. » Montesquieu

I’m sure you have an amazing idea for a book. I’m proud of you. Now please put that idea aside and pay attention:

  1. Pick up any book
  2. Flip through its pages
  3. It took hundreds of hours to make that book (e.g. 10 hours x 50 weeks = 500 hours)
  4. The big question: Do you love your idea enough to put in 500 hours? 700? 1000? more?

If YES, skip to the next list.

If NO, stop obsessing about ideas for books. Having an idea is easy. If you, the person who came up with the idea, won’t put in the time, odds are no one else will. There are infinitely more good ideas for books, movies, companies and everything else than people willing to put in the effort. I think you should put in the time, but it’s up to you.

How an idea becomes a book

There are only two ways an idea becomes a book: time and money. Someone has to decide to put time and/or money into making a book. Self publishing is easier than ever today, but it means you will have to invest the time required to publish the book. Many writers prefer to partner with a publisher to trade royalties for doing some of the work, but to get a publisher requires effort of its own.

If you want a publisher to publish your book:

  1. Publishers put money up front, authors don’t. Publishers pay for everything:  the production costs, editorial costs, the author’s advance and more. They are investors and they look at books as possible investments. To ask a publisher to publish a book is to ask for an investor in your project.
  2. Publishers are businesses. They primarily care about profit. They don’t care about you or your idea and the judgements of your work are not personal.
  3. You are competing for a precious slot. Many people want to write books. Bring your A game to the process.
  4. Your idea will be evaluated on your book proposal. A book proposal is a 10-30 page pitch for the book (explained here).
  5. If you can’t write a decent book proposal, you can’t write a decent book. Seems fair.

If you are willing to publish the book yourself:

  1. You don’t need anyone’s permission. You have the power, right now, for very little money, to publish anything and sell it on Amazon or even in bookstores.  It’s really very easy to publish books today (getting people to buy them is another matter).
  2. All you need to do is the work of writing the book.

There are good books about writing book outlines and proposals. Go read one. This is the beginning of the many hours you must put in. O’Reilly Media has an excellent summary of what they expect in a proposal.

Planning A Book

There is no one way to plan the book itself. The simplest way is to make an outline. An idea for a book by itself is vague as there are an infinite number of ways to write a book based on the same idea. What sections will the book have? What are the chapters? What is the one page (or 5 page) synopsis of the plot or major points? It’s useful to do research for books similar to the one you want to write and study them. They will sharpen your focus on what form you want your idea to take, possibilities for how to structure your book and more. (See also How To Start Writing A book).

Common questions

Q: Can I skip writing a book proposal?

No. Unless you are Lady Gaga, Bono or your Mom owns a book publishing company and she still likes you. Of course if you self publish you’re free to skip this step too (though writing it anyway is a great way to force yourself to think hard about what you’re getting into). A book proposal includes an outline for the entire book and writing an outline can be more difficult than writing the book itself. An outline forces you to think broadly about what will be in the book and what won’t. This takes time and thought.

Q: But won’t someone steal my amazing idea?

No. Ideas are cheap and editors/agents see hundreds of them every week. They have no motivation to steal your idea. Even if your idea is amazing someone still has to put in a year or more of effort, and as this essay explained at the beginning, that commitment is far harder to obtain than a great idea. Agents and editors rarely write books – that’s why they became agents and editors.

Q: What about self publishing?

Self publishing is awesome. I highly recommend it. If you really love your idea nothing can stop you from publishing. This is AMAZING. People buy books based on reviews, not because of the publisher’s name on the spine. The rub is you are on your own. A publisher can improve your book idea in many ways, and help you with every step of the process. If you self publish you must conceive, write, edit, design, market, proofread and promote the book all on your own, or be able to find and hire people to help you. This is liberating if you are willing to put in the additional time and like to learn. It’s a nightmare if your network is small, you’re not a good project manager and you fear the unknown.

Q: Is the proposal a formality? [new question]

Book proposals help the author tremendously. They force the author to get out of their dreamy stupor about their idea and think hard about the many elements that make an actual book. What are the chapters? What research do you need to do? What books are out there that are in the same category? How will yours be better? Many authors find writing the proposal a harder challenge than writing the book, since after writing a solid proposal many of the hard decisions have already been made.     

Q: Do I need to write the book first?

No, unless you are writing fiction. This is a surprise to most. The majority of non-fiction book deals are signed based on 3 things: a proposal, an outline and a sample chapter. Publishers of non-fiction believe if you can do those three things well, you can write a decent book. The vast majority of people with book ideas fail at those three simple tasks.

Q: Do I need to write an outline? 

Yes. If you can’t think of a list of chapters ideas that fills two pages, what makes you insane enough to think you can come up with a 250 page book’s worth of material?  One trick is to start an outline, as sparse as it is, and add to it whenever you get another idea. Little by little you may just build something awesome. Or you might just realize the idea for the book is better than the reality of the book (haven’t you read books like this?).

Q: Do I need to write a sample chapter?

Hell yes. Books are made of chapters. Have you written a chapter before? It’s wise to try it out before you sign on the dotted line to write 10 or 50 of them.

Q: I’ve tried writing, but I get stuck. Is there a trick?

No. Here’s why you are failing at writing.

Q: Shouldn’t I just get an agent?

The first thing an agent will ask is “send me your proposal.” There is no escape! Agents are busy people: you will get one shot at their interest. Contact them when you are ready, not before. Have the finished, polished proposal before you start looking around.

An agent will take 10-20% of your possible revenue for a book. In return they will guide you through the process, they will pitch your book to their network of editors and publishers, and help you negotiate for the best deal. If these services are worth 10-20% of the financial reward of the book to you, then hire one. If you think you can do those things well yourself and you have the time to do it, then don’t.

Q: How do I make sure I don’t get screwed?

Writing a book is entrepreneurial. Working with a publisher is a business deal. All business deals have risks. Working with an agent increases how much experience is on your side, but even an agent can let you down. But most of the horror stories I hear are from authors who didn’t carefully read the contracts, didn’t do the legwork to pitch the book to multiple publishers and allowed their hubris to get in their way.

The Authors Guild, which I recommend joining, is an advocacy group for writers. They offer this excellent advice on book contracts and how to negotiate them.

Q: When the proposal is finished what do I do with it?

 If your book is about something you are an expert in, start with your network. Ask colleagues who have published books to pass your proposal on to their editors. Look at books similar to the one you are proposing and read the acknowledgements. You’ll always find mention of the agent and editor who worked on the book. Some research will reveal how to get in touch with them. Many smaller, industry specific publishers have proposal submission details on their websites.

Q: What about fiction?

Fiction is harder to find a publisher for than non-fiction. A non-fiction book is marketed largely on your credentials. If you are an accountant writing about tax tricks, a publisher knows they can market you as an expert on the topic. Fiction has no experts. The market for novels is more competitive and marketing is more difficult. Most fiction agents and publishers demand a complete manuscript, and a short synopsis, before they’ll talk to you, for good reason.

Questions? Leave a comment.

[Note: edited estimate of hours in first numbered list 2/20/2014]

The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: Book Review

greatbig

This book, The Great Big Book of Horrible Things, by Matthew White, is a masterpiece.

We think the world is tough right now. But compared to what? If you think things today are upsetting, this book is for you. And if you think things are great, this book is for you too. If you skim even a few chapters you’ll arrive at a profoundly better understanding of what it is to be a person in a “civilized” world.

This book is a tour de force of history, using warfare and atrocity as the thread to understand civilization itself. The author, White, weaves his way through every major conflict with insight, wit, and delicate humor. He takes complex events and explains the causes, however dumb and disappointing, and provides a better understanding of current events and what we should want in the future.

As the title suggests, the book explores warfare, fratricide, genocide, and other terrible collective actions. White provides ranked lists of the most horrible events and the worst leaders, but not for sport. Instead he shows us what people, powerful people, have done in the past out of hope we can do better in the future.

The book provides a list of the worst 100 atrocities of all time. The last 50 pages lists his sources and methods for the historians who want to follow his trail (the references are online too).

Here are some choice quotes:

“People have been killing each other ever since they came down from the trees, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find bodies stashed up in the branches as well.”

“War kills more civilians than soldiers. In fact, the army is usually the safest place to be during a war. Soldiers are protected by thousands of armed men, and they get the first choice of food and medical care. Meanwhile, even if civilians are not systematically massacred, they are usually robbed, evicted, or left to starve; however, their stories are usually left untold. Most military histories skim lightly over the massive suffering of the ordinary, unarmed civilians caught in the middle, even though theirs is the most common experience of war.”

“Civilization before the Enlightenment was rather flexible when it came to historic accuracy, and ancient historians never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

“Why Did Rome Fall? The best way to understand the fall of Rome is to skip the first half of any book on the subject. Yes, background and long-term trends are important, but some historians go so far back looking for the cause that they make it sound like Rome was tumbling toward its inevitable fall right from the start.”

“If we categorize the entries in this list according to which religions came into conflict, we get this simplified breakdown: Christian vs. Christian: 9 Muslim vs. Christian: 3 Christian vs. Jewish: 3 Eastern vs. Christian: 3 Jewish vs. pagan: 2 Muslim vs. Chinese: 2 Muslim vs. Muslim: 2 Human sacrifice in India: 2 Human sacrifice in Mexico: 1 Ritual killing in Rome: 1 Muslim vs. Hindu: 1 Manichaean vs. Taoist: 1

We can probably go even farther and group them into four larger categories: indigenous human sacrifice (4), monotheistic religions fighting each other (17), heathens fighting monotheistic religions (8), and heathens stirring up trouble all by themselves (1). In early history, the majority of religious killings involved sacrificing people to bribe and placate the dangerous forces of the universe. Then, Judaism and its offshoots, Christianity and Islam, devised a worldview where a single all-powerful god required a strict, uncompromising belief rather than tangible offerings.”

Thanks to Rob Lefferts (of the Lefferts law) for the recommendation.

Note: Light revisions 1/17/2025.

Is a college degree worth it?

Many of the posts I write are inspired by reader questions and requests. Smaranda Calin, one of my awesome fans, asked: what’s the role of a university education in this day and age since so much is changing?

Every generation believes they’re exceptional for the same stupid reason: they know nothing about any other generation. They might be right but if they are its by accident. We all suffer from chronocentricism, the assumption the present is special or the most important time in history. This is charmingly narcissistic when you realize every generation in history thought the same thing.

Certainly many things change quickly today, but we confuse speed with scale. The first generation to have electricity in their homes, or to switch from horses to cars dealt with a scale of change much greater than anything in the last 20 years. We still type on QWERTY keyboards and mail things to each other using mostly text, which has been true for 100 years. Upgrading from a Blackberry to an iPhone 5 certainly represents tremendous technological progress, but it’s not much of a cultural leap for most people to follow. Speed and scale are not the same thing.

The value then of a college degree comes down to two questions:

  1. What important things change slowly that are worth learning?
  2. Can a college degree give them to you?

Things you always need in life

There is a long list of things people hope to get from college. Most of them are things you need no matter what era you are born into.

  • To learn how to ask good questions
  • To learn how to find or develop good answers
  • An understanding of what happened before you were born
  • To develop a skill, craft or discipline
  • Learning to manage your time and work vs. life
  • Chances to build nurturing relationships with people who know more than you
  • Chances to build good relationships with friends for now and later
  • A path towards a profession
  • Opportunities to figure out who the hell you are

Good college experiences provide many of these. But of course there are other ways to get them.

Most attempts to measure the worth of college focus on the financials. 86% of U.S. college graduates say its worth it, but they’re biased of course since they’ve just invested more in college than anything else in their lives.

A better answer depends on how many of the things listed above you can get without college. Maybe you see clear ways to get these things through other means. Or perhaps you recognize you have no idea how to get these things. Or that you’ve lived a sheltered, protected life so far and very much need to immerse yourself in an intensely new environment  perhaps geographically distant from your hometown. If that is important to you and you can’t get it any other way, college might be worth it no matter how much it costs.

Most high school students make blind choices about college because they’re too young to understand what they really want from it. They’re told “you should go” so they follow along like the good robots they’ve been in going from elementary school to high school. Or they decide, at 19, “I want to be a doctor” as if they have any clue what that means beyond TV shows and that it makes their Mom happy when they say it. A gap year is a fantastic idea and I’d bet it improves the odds people who choose to go to college get what they need. They have a clearer picture of who they are, what the world might be like when they graduate and what they want from life, all of which makes choices about college easier to make.

It depends

Like all investments, college is a bet. Depending on who you are, what you want, where you choose to go, and what choices you make while there (this never gets enough emphasis as college is four years worth of daily decisions), it may pay off and it may not. Some people go to a great school and have an awesome experience, but find it doesn’t help much seeking employment. But if they’d chosen a more practical major, they might not have had that awesome experience they did. Who knows. There are many variables beyond going to college or not going. Other people are miserable in college but stick it out anyway, and then spend their lives regretting their ‘wasted years’. College is an investment, not a guarantee.

I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University. It was a fantastic place to be if you knew exactly what career you wanted to have. If you weren’t sure, it was a miserable place. It wasn’t designed to support exploration in the way a school like Evergreen University is. Before Carnegie Mellon University I had a very rough ride. I stumbled my way through two other colleges, Drew University and Queens College spending most of my first two years making big mistakes. Those mistakes helped me sort out what I wanted and why and I was lucky to turn it around. But even so I made even more mistakes before I finished. If I were to do it again I’d interact with my professors very differently: I was paying them and I should never have feared them the way I did.

In the broadest strokes big decisions like these depend on many factors. If forced I’d say it’s worth it to go for everyone. A student can always drop out if they realize it’s not for them and that realization will help them understand what it is they should do instead. But if you never go you deny yourself the chance of discovering something clearly valued by the vast majority who have done it. I firmly believe in erring on the side of doing, rather than not doing.

The three things you always have

You always have three things. The three things are your answers to these questions:

  1. What happened?
  2. How you feel about it?
  3. What are you’re going to do next?

It’s common to confuse #2 with #3. Some people get stuck on the feelings for the past and never move on.

Feelings are important as that’s how we know who we are. Venting, dwelling or celebrating serve the purpose of being present with how we feel. But after a day, a week, or a month, you have to recognize feelings aren’t actions. Only if a feeling is converted into a decision, even if it’s just the decision to share the feeling with someone, can it impact the future. Even if your situation is ‘life is awesome’, the answer to #3 might be ‘figure out how to keep this going’ or ‘tell my friend who wants me to be happy how happy I am’.

For example, lets pretend I was attacked by a gang of wild terrorist bears:

  1. What happened: I was attacked by wild terrorist bears.
  2. How you feel about it: sad, scared and angry. And somewhat dead.
  3. What you’re going to do next: stop running naked in a suit made of beef hot dogs, which terrorist bears are known to love to eat, at the terrorist bear exhibit at the zoo.

There you go. #3 leads to an action that leads to a new set of three things. That is of course if you’re not dead. If you’re dead you have precisely zero things. Be glad you have at least three more things than dead people do.

And to conclude, here’s my three things:

  1. What happened: I wrote this post.
  2. How do you feel: Glad someone is still reading this.
  3. What are you going to do next: Wait to see if you leave a comment. I’ll give you a suit of hot-dogs if you do.

Next book to be published by Wiley / Jossey-Bass (with FAQ)

My upcoming book on my year at WordPress.com will be published with Jossey-Bass. I signed with agent David Fugate, who helped negotiate a fine deal with them. We had a few offers, but after talking with editors Genoveva Llosa and Susan Williams at JB I was convinced they’d be great partners to work with on this book.

Jossey-Bass is the business imprint for Wiley: they’ve been responsible for 13 of the top 25 business books last year (as well as other classics like Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team).

Frequently asked questions:

  1.  Why didn’t you self-publish? I considered it. If I could I preferred to find to a publisher that could help bring the book to a wider business audience than I could alone. I’m hoping I can connect directly with the WordPress community and my own audience about why they’ll want to read the book. But for the truly general business audience, beyond just the tech sector, my reach is limited. Jossey-Bass’s track record can help there. Working with a publisher again is also a chance to learn some new tricks.
  2. Why did you get an agent? I’d looked for agents before, but never found one that I liked and who was interested in the book I was working on. Both of those things changed when I talked with David. I managed to get offers on the book myself but he helped look for others, advised me on the book proposal, and took over negotiation and contract details, which I was happy not to have to do myself for once.
  3. Why didn’t you go with O’Reilly? I did talk with them, but for the same reasons in #1 they weren’t the ideal choice for the book, as their reach, while much greater than mine, hits the same tech-business crowd I can reach myself. I think they’re an excellent publisher and I bet I work with them again.

More on the book soon. I’m on the homestretch of the first draft and hope to be finished within the next two weeks.

If you have other questions, leave a comment.

Best of Berkun

I’ve written 1400+ posts, and eight books, on many topics over the 16 years this website has existed. If you’re new to my work, here are my most popular posts, including those featured in other websites or magazines. I’ve worked the hardest on the books, so that’s my best writing, but I’ve published many gems as posts and essays and they’re listed below.

In 2011 I published Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds, a collection of my best essays, which you pick up here. If you like what you see, follow me by email or on twitter. Thanks for reading.

Compiled from 2003-2015.

Free Chapters from the books

Creativity

Philosophy of Life

Innovation

Public Speaking

Writing

Working Life

Interface Design / Making Software

Project Management

Posts marked with * appear in Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds.

Did I miss a post you think belongs here? Leave a comment.

Good Beats Innovative Nearly Every Time

[This post originally published on Bloomberg / BusinessWeek, February, 2010]

One troubling phenomenon is the push for everyone to be innovators. I suspect more books have been sold with the word innovation in their title in the last 10 years than in the previous 50, including, I confess, one of my own. And while much has changed, it’s hard to say the quality of things in the world has improved as fast. Keen-eyed consumers bemoan the low quality of many of the things we buy and try to use. Web sites divide short articles across 25 ad-filled pages. Gadgets quickly run out of power. Smartphones have anemic reception or fragile screens. Many things we buy and use never work in the way we’re promised, which suggests there are opportunities in merely being good: Much of what’s made falls short of that mark.

From my studies of the history of business innovation, I’m convinced you can beat competitors and even dominate markets without fancy tricks. All you need is the ability to make things that are good consistently, since few companies do.

While we’re fond of trumpeting the praises of Apple, whose iPod revolutionized music, we forget how dismal the competition was. It was not a field of masterpieces; it was a motley crew of ugly, clunky, painfully hard-to-use devices. Apple applied basic design sense to an immature field at a time when the world was ready for something better. Firefox, which rekindled innovation in Web browsing, arose from Microsoft‘s near abandonment of its Internet Explorer browser after the browser war with Netscape ended. Their version 6.0 release was a major step backward, opening the door for someone to win by merely providing something good, which Firefox did in 2004. Google was launched a decade after the invention of search engines; Amazon was not the first online bookstore. But they were both the first to do a good job at selling their good services for a good profit. In retrospect, their successes seem amazing, but at the time, the goals were simple and the objective humble and clear: Be good, or at least better than the other guys. For they knew that alone was hard enough.

Loose Usage

The word “innovation” is used to mean many different things, which is part of the problem. Executives and consultants throw it around like magic dust, hoping to cover their ignorance of why products and companies have done well or failed. But it’s clear most companies fail not because of their lack of inventiveness; it’s their lack of basic competence. Most leaders fail to prevent bureaucracy, hubris, and too many cooks from killing good ideas before they ever get a chance to make it out the door, resulting in the mediocrity we know too well.

Innovation, in the simplest definition, means new or novel, to take an approach others have not seen before. But by this definition, the iPod and Firefox barely qualify. Even the iPad is late in the game of tablet computers, as Microsoft’s Tablet PC and Amazon’s Kindle have been aiming at this market for years. In all cases, these are entrants into fields of established players. Their creators borrowed parts and ideas from other products and even from other companies. Their success or failure is driven less by revolutionary ideas or radical disruptive breakthrough thinking and more by a focus on making solid, reliable, simple, good products that solve real needs people have.

If your competitors are mediocre, the merely good can seem exceptional. All things being equal, in a battle between a good product and an innovative one, the good one will usually win. The makers of the good are less worried about abstract perceptions of how novel they are. Instead, they focus on results, caring less about whether the ideas involved are new, old, or recycled. Those obsessed with innovation contract the disease of hubris, ignoring many good ideas because they have been used before. They forget that an old idea cleverly reused, or borrowed from a different field, will be new to the world. Most projects aimed at innovation fail because creators become distracted by their egos from the true goal: to solve real problems for real people.

Solving a Problem

If you insist on doing something new, take this advice: Start with the important problems your customers, or your competitors’ customers, have and try to solve them. If conventional approaches fail, you’ll be forced to invent and be creative as a side effect of your goal. If you ask the creators of so-called breakthrough ideas, this is a common reason they found those breakthroughs in the first place. Their ambition wasn’t to be called an innovator. They weren’t planning to be disruptive or game changing. They merely had a tough problem to solve on their way to beating the competition in the forgotten practice of simply making better things.

Making better things is difficult enough. Learn to do that well, and when you’re done, and your customers and stockholders love you, the label “innovator” will magically land next to your name.

The Amazing Invention of Braille

While studying to write the Myths of Innovation I read hundreds of accounts of how world changing inventions were created. While many of those stories are in the book, there are countless more worthy of telling.

Today is the birthday of Louis Braille, one of the inventors for the amazingly clever system of writing for the blind.

DSC_4050-MR-Braille

We forget that languages have a design. Good ones are efficient, robust, precise, easy to learn and fast to use. Most languages emerge over centuries and are shaped by culture, which makes it all the more impressive when someone successfully creates a new one in just a few years.  (As an exercise: how you would you design a better language than English or your primary one? This was once an interview question my former boss Joe Belfiore used to use).

The story of the invention of Braille goes back to Napoleon and his desire to find a way for soldiers to safely communicate at night, silently, without light (as soldiers were spotted by snipers and killed when using lamps). A captain in the army named Barbier developed a system called night writing, but it was rejected as being too complex to learn and use. It required two values of 6, or 12 dots, to make a letter.

Louis Braille either met Barbier, or learned of his ideas, in 1821. In 1824, after years of work, Braille developed critical simplifications to the design, including moving from 12 dots to 6 per character. At first the system was used to literally translate each character, but as its use spread unique shorthands and contractions were added. Louis Braille was only a teenager when he finished the system, publishing it in 1829 and a revised, further simplified version in 1837.

His own school didn’t adopt his system until 1854, after his death. During this time many variants were tried, including some based on the tactile alphabet, with letter forms printed raised on the paper. Louis Braille learned a system like this as a child. A popular one was called Moon writing (published in 1845), shown here.

These systems take up more space, but have the advantage of requiring less training and finger precision. For various reasons systems like this never became dominant. Slowly Braille’s system gained adoption in Europe and America by 1916.

The invention of the typewriter has some connections to Braille, as Pierre Foucault, a former student at Braille’s school, had an early prototype for a typewriter that printed Braille in 1847.

Technically Braille is the first system of digital writing, since the letters are encoded and can be manufactured and stored or printed mechanically. It is not a universal language however, as the encodings typically translate letters, demanding the reader know the language they are written in (see International Braille, which explains how in 1878 they standardized some elements for Braille across languages).

With the rise of screen reading software the use of Braille is in decline. But it remains a stellar example of design and invention.

braille alphabet grey

[Minor edits and image improvements: 1/4/21 – all photos now creative commons from Wikipedia]