The fine folks at Jossey-Bass are working on some web ads for The Year Without Pants.
We’ve narrowed it down to two candidates – which do you think is best?
These ads will run on major business websites when the book officially launches (Sept. 17th)
Leave a comment with your thoughts: one lucky commenter will get a signed copy of the book.
For every book I do something different for PR and marketing. For The Year Without Pants (pre-order now), it’s a film. To help kick off our Sept. 17th book launch, we’re making a little movie.
I hired Stephan Gray of Gray Matter Productions, maker of music videos for Macklemore and others, to create a short promo film for the book. We came up with a few ideas, and came up with a story about the nightmare of cubicle life.
Here are some behind the scenes photos from the shoot last week.
He’s hard at work on finishing up the project and we’ll post it when it’s ready. Stay tuned.
[This a chapter from The Dance of The Possible: the mostly honest, completely irreverent, guide to creativity]
Three magic words for people who create things are: don’t be precious.
Being precious means you’re behaving as if the draft, the sketch, the idea you’re working on is the most important thing in the history of the universe. It means you’ve lost perspective and can’t see the work objectively anymore. When you treat a work in progress too preciously, you trade your talents for fears. You become conservative, suppressing the courage required to make the tough choices that will resolve the work’s problems and let you finish. If you fear that your next decision will ruin the work, you are being precious.
When a young writer is struggling to finish a book, or a painter wrestling with an incomplete painting, wisdom would say “don’t be precious.” If you love your craft there are an infinity of projects in your future. There will be other chapters. There will be other canvases and other songs. Perfection is a prison and a self-made one. Whatever you’re making, it doesn’t have to be perfect. Perfection is an illusion.
Obsessing about every little choice is a sure fire way to prevent great work from happening. Try a bold choice. Put the beginning at the end, or the top at the bottom. Blow your work up into jagged pieces and put them back together. You might just find this opens doors you didn’t even know were there. If you’re too precious you miss the hundreds of big choices that might reveal the path to completion, or convince you the project is a puzzle that needs to be abandoned for a time. But if you spin your wheels faster and faster on smaller and smaller details, you’ll never move anywhere. You’ll never call anything finished, denying yourself the essential experience of looking back from a distance and learning from what you’ve already made.
Some Buddhist monks make mandalas, intricate paintings made from colored grains of sand. When completed the mandalas are destroyed. These monks make, and destroy, these wondrous works to remind themselves not to be too precious, and not only about their works of art, but about life itself. This isn’t an excuse not to work hard, or to not strive for greatness. Mandala’s take skill and patience to create. Instead it’s a recognition that while your work might mean everything to you in the moment, in the grand scheme of your career, your life, and the universe itself, it’s just another thing that will someday fade away.
Of course it is important to strive for greatness. You should care deeply about people and ideas that matter to you. To make good things requires intense effort and practice. There’s a long history of masters, from Michelangelo to Twyla Tharp to Kubrick (whose film 2001 is pictured above), who obsessed about the smallest details of their works and demanded the best from everyone who worked with them. In some ways they were very precious indeed. But they didn’t let those ambitions stop them from finishing their works: if they stayed stuck in their obsession for detail forever on a single project we wouldn’t know their names. Productive masters know how to be both intimate with and distant from their own work and we all need to learn the same flexibility.
It’s rarely discussed but all good makers leave a legacy of abandoned drafts, unfinished works, mediocre projects and failed ideas, work that enabled them to learn what they needed to finish the projects they are famous for. If your high standards, or self-loathing, is preventing your progress, don’t be precious about it. It takes hundreds of experiences with the cycle of starting, working, and finishing creative works before you have the talent to make finished things that match the grandeur of the ideas in your mind.
Say “don’t be precious” to yourself when you’re stuck. Let your obsession go, or blow it up into fun sized pieces and let the chips fall where they may. Move on, learn, and repeat. You’re a creator, which means you can make nothing into something whenever you want. There are infinite possible projects ahead in your career, but only if you move past the one you are making far too precious now.
[I learned about not being precious from the artist, and my friend, Teresa Brazen]
Each week I take the top voted question from readers and answer it (submit yours here). With 40 votes, this week’s winner was “How a manager can facilitate communication between technical and non-technical stakeholders” submitted by Grant Landram.
Any tips for how a manager can “level the communication playing field” between technical and non-technical stakeholders within project teams so the team can better communicate and “get stuff done”?
It’s fun to get a project management question. Its been awhile. It used to be these were the only questions I ever got.
The existence of multiple people who hold the stakes (meaning money, not stakes that go in the ground , nor the ones that are tasty to eat) means every major decision is more complex, not less. Even if you love all of your stakeholders the addition of each one makes progress slower, not faster.
The specific rub in this scenario is translation. If one stakeholder spoke only German and the other only Esperanto it’d be obvious you need to find one person who can speak both fluently before you’d attempt anything. But with domain differences like technical or business knowledge, we presume basic English is sufficient. It isn’t.
Good project leaders, and consultants, are versed in many domains. They can translate between the designer, the engineer, the business analyst and the executive, each of which demands a different frame of thinking. They also see how tradeoffs between domains are required for the project to succeed. Perhaps most importantly they known their limitations: sometimes they need a better translation, or translator, and will pause the proceedings until one is found.
You need four things when dealing with diverse stakeholders:
Do you wrestle with many stakes, and their holders? What say you?
Each week I take the top voted question from readers and answer it. With 45 votes, this week’s winner was “Why do we accept and perpetuate bad systems?” by Peter Saumur:
Examples – 2 lanes of checkout on a busy day. Automated parking systems that break down with no backup. Sitting in traffic for over an hour each way to get to work. It’s madness yet we accept it as the way things are.
The easy answer is we’re lazy. It takes energy to reject a system, especially if it’s a complex system you do not control. Sitting in traffic is not an active choice, it’s a passive decision that comes with the choices for where to live and work. Like waiting in a long line, it’s far simpler psychologically to plod along with your head down, than to challenge the dozens of people in front of you who may have no objections to lines at all, or worse, diverging ideas for what the alternatives might be. It takes courage to challenge a system and wisdom to improve it, a rare combination.
The depressing answer is some systems are difficult, or impossible, to change. Even if you were sufficiently motivated, problems like traffic operate on a large enough scale, with multiple conflicting objectives, that it might not be solvable. Certainly not without the cooperation of many other people, some of whom benefit from the inefficiencies you find frustrating (e.g. the land developers who profited by overpopulating an area).
For all frustrating systems ask: Who benefits (Cui Bono)? That is the first step to understanding how a system truly works. There are always people who benefit more from a system staying the way it is, and as long as they are in power nothing will change. Any hope of improving a system starts with understanding the reasons forces are actively protecting the status quo.
The stoic answer is that all systems are designed, and all designs are tradeoffs. They are good for some things and bad for others. There is no perfect system, and even if there were, as soon as the world changed in a significant way the same elements that made the system seem perfect would suddenly become a frustration. Gas powered cars seemed a wonderful idea in 1925, before anyone could imagine global warming, rush hour traffic, or fatalities from drivers distracted by text messages on their phones.
The relative answer is: bad compared to what? We naturally take good things for granted since there are evolutionary advantages to constantly seeking to improve one’s situation. But for any bad system, go back in time. What was that system like 10, 20, 50, 100, 500 years ago? In some ways things will seem better, but in many ways that older system will seem worse. It’s better to wait a few minutes in poorly managed checkout lines at the grocery store, than to hunt and gather all day long with little guarantee of having enough to eat.
The positive answer is that many people do reject bad systems. They make sacrifices to give themselves the power to avoid systems they find distasteful. With sufficient motivation and the willingness to make tradeoffs, many modern frustrations can be avoided or minimized. For deeper systems, they protest in public to draw attention to how a system is failing. They complain to representatives in the system and try to influence them to prioritize change.
What “bad” system bothers you the most? Leave a comment.
[minor edits: 3-6-2021]
The official launch date for The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of work is September 10th, but early copies went out recently to reporters, media and reviewers. The first to post about the book is Robert Scoble, and here’s what he wrote:
Finally a business book with something new to say. Generally I get sent a lot of books, skim through them, and say “sounds just like Tom Peters, or Guy Kawasaki, or Seth Godin, or or or…. The book didn’t disappoint. Scott’s first-person view gives us an insider look at how a modern startup works. Highly recommended.”
Other early endorsements here.
You can pre-order the book on Amazon or other bookstores. Or signup here to be notified when it’s available.
