Author: Scott Berkun

Why You Are Not Drowning In Data

Posted on June 25, 2014February 1, 2018 in Culture, Philosophyby Scott Berkun

[This essay appeared in issue #9 of Offscreen magazine]

We love to blame the world because the world can’t blame us back. I recently read Sarah Gooding’s article titled Drowning in Data: When News is Noise. She feels information overload makes it hard to cultivate creativity. It’s a sweet article and you should read it, even if I disagree. She writes:

It’s never been easier to be productive, but it’s also never been harder. With technology and a flood of information at my fingertips every time I turn on an Internet-connected device, my resolve crumbles.

There is a difference between how something feels and how something is. Of course life feels overwhelming at times. We all struggle to concentrate on what we want to now and then. But that doesn’t mean the world, or the technology in it, is accountable for our problems. Throughout history some people have struggled to be creative and to concentrate, while others haven’t found it to be much of a struggle at all. What explains the difference? I don’t think technology has much to do with it.

My theory is it’s best to think of information overload as a myth. As long as the things that distract you have an off switch, the problem isn’t the world, the problem is you. The world has always had far more information than we can consume, much less comprehend. The only thing that’s changed is our self-righteous stress in response to it. Consider these situations:

When you go to a concert with friends are you distracted by the crowds around you?
When you go to a bookstore, are you overwhelmed by the books you see?
When you walk in nature, do the thousands of plants & insects stress you out?
When you breathe, does the abundance of air in the atmosphere around the planet worry you?

There are floods of information at our fingertips all the time, even when you go camping in the wilderness or when the power goes out in your apartment. The same arguments about how mobile devices or social networks are overwhelming could be made about anything on the list above. But we don’t make those arguments about anything other than technology and media. Why? Technology is an easy target. It’s easy to blame. It reflects our product centric culture that it is products, and not ourselves, that are the problem. We imbue technology with god-like powers which gives us the psychological crutch of blaming it first. But we forget only we turn the devices on and only we can turn them off. Gooding briefly mention The Slow Web, but even this puts technology in the center ring. Your mind should come first, always your mind. Our minds excel at tuning things out. We tune out an infinity of information all the time.

Much of our talk about information overload echoes the excuses of addiction. We complain that the web is trash, yet we complain about how hard it is to turn it off. We crave, we habituate, we justify, and we get nervous and uncomfortable when we don’t get our fix. And when we fail and feel bad we blame the technologies, and the world, for our problems. We wonder “why is there so much information? Who did this to us?” when the answer is always the person asking the question. We’ve been well trained to consume far more than we need. Our apartments and garages are filled with things we never use, yet we feel guilt in getting rid of them. Instead we want even more things. And we feel guilt there too, but not enough to change our behavior. It’s wise to ask who benefits from all this negative energy around consumption. It’s probably not you.

We consume information the same way: our inboxes and reading lists are several lifetimes long, yet every day we go out and chase more for no good reason at all. It’s a paradox: we fear missing out so much that we miss out. We are compelled to be information fiends, hoarding it, feeling shame over it, feeling dopamine rushes when we capture new batches, conquests that only repeat the same pattern. There’s really no reason to worry about reading all the books you own but haven’t read, yet we do. Speed reading is shallow reading, and we know, as Gooding points out, that we want depth over volume. The problem is very little of our behavior is in line with that goal. But if you can’t make your behavior align with your goals, whose problem is it? Nothing stops you from reading The Power of Habit, except, of course, your habits. Maybe useful books of self-awareness like it sit sadly in your queue, as you’ve forgotten it’s only reading books that helps your mind, not the buying.

Gooding writes:

The Internet is a black hole of information, sucking me in with its digital distractions.

Socrates never said “I’d do great work if I didn’t have philosophy overload from hanging out at the agora.” Emily Dickinson didn’t complain of vocabulary overload in the English language. Picasso, Da Vinci, Tesla and Marie Curie all possessed amazing curiosities and could have easily been distracted away from their work by the abundance of sex, food, conversation, money, news, books, and paintings in their lives. Yet they worked. They produced. Van Gogh was mad and starving and produced. Every generation has had its grand distractions. We forget ancestors painted on cave walls, as the struggle for survival didn’t stop their creativity. Bukowski was a drunk and a bum in nearly every sense of the word, yet wrote and wrote and wrote even more. With as little as he had, he sacrificed his time, and arguably his life, in the service of his ideas. What are you willing to sacrifice to create? If you don’t sacrifice something, it’s the creating that will be sacrificed for you. For our grandparents it was radio. For our parents it was TV. For us it’s the web. For our children it will be something else. There is always a justifiable distraction but history does not give you a pass for the ideas you let yourself get distracted away from.

As a writer I have days where no matter how much I want to work, I’m unproductive. I know it comes with the territory. I know my daily habits are a shield and my passion and love for ideas must fuel that shield and make it both stronger and more flexible. But I’m human and sometimes my habits fail me or I them. But I will never blame Netflix, or Twitter, or a phone, for the same reasons I would never blame the wind or the sky. It’s up to me to gain control over my mind. It’s my job as professional to take responsibility for both the inputs and outputs of my brain. It’s the willingness to work, over months and years, to make my mind an ally in my pursuits and not an adversary. But the first step is to stop blaming the information or the world. The world and the technology in it has never been the problem and as long as every device we use has an off switch, it never will be.

If you feel like you are drowning in data, stand up. Stand up for yourself and own your consumption. You’ll discover when you stand that you’ve been “drowning” in a kiddie pool all along.

The doors of Paris: a photo essay

Posted on June 24, 2014June 24, 2014 in On Tourby Scott Berkun

I spent a few days in Paris last week (to speak at USI 14). For fun I took photos of every interesting door I walked by. I didn’t seek out interesting ones with a plan. I didn’t want to be deliberate about it. Instead I chose to pay attention as I walked through the city.

Doors fascinate me for many reasons. They’re ignored by most people walking past them, but to anyone who lives or works there this is their daily portal into another slice of their life. For many of these doors I wondered: who lives there? what are they like? What does this particular door say or not say about them?

Without any further commentary here are the doors of Paris.

Back my next book on Kickstarter today

Posted on June 12, 2014 in Ghostby Scott Berkun

This morning I launched the kickstarter campaign for my next book, The Ghost of My Father. I’ve written several posts about the book over the last few weeks, and if you’re interested in the book now is your chance to be a part of it.

There are plenty of great rewards – if you’re a fan of my other books I think you’ll dig them, but of course the coolest ones are in limited quantities. Take a look now and I hope you’ll help me with my next project. Thanks.

The Ghost of My Father – now on kickstarter.

Results: What do readers want from author kickstarter projects

Posted on June 9, 2014June 9, 2014 in Ghost, Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

Thanks to everyone who voted last week about my upcoming book, The Ghost of My Father (background here). Here are the results:

Results:

An hour Skype lesson on something, 21%
A bundle of all 6 books, signed, 20%
A signed copy of the book, 18%
Your name in the book’s acknowledgements, 13%
Have me fly to your town and give a lecture, 9%
Write a short story about your family, 9%
Write a blog post on the topic of your choice, 6%

No surprises here. Of course with no associated price tags, an hour personally with the author (me in this case) came in first place. Curiously a signed copy of the book came ahead of items that are far more personal: writing something at the reader’s request.

About ten people emailed me to tell me they really just want the book. They don’t care about rewards and a reward is not going to make them decide to support a project they wouldn’t otherwise. I respect this opinion and often share it myself. However to run a successful kickstarter campaign requires appealing to different people who have different preferences. People who just want the book aren’t hurt by offering rewards to those who are willing to pledge more money, but want something special in return.

I’m sure different authors with different audiences will see different results than I did. But as I couldn’t find anyone who’d published survey data like this I though it useful to share.

Can technology reduce consumerism?

Posted on June 3, 2014January 30, 2018 in ask berkunby Scott Berkun

I regularly take the the top voted question from readers and answer them in a post. With 62 votes, today’s winner was:

Can technology reduce consumerism?

I am certain the answer is a 100% definitely maybe. I need to pre-order a grande soy latte from Starbucks on my blue-toothed iPhone 5 while driving in my series M BMW Coupe before I can think clearly enough to answer that.

Before I make up my mind, here’s a story. Recently I went on a twitter tirade (a twirade?) about consumerism, particularly how it relates to America’s struggle to conceive of solving problems without having to buy something first.

We didn't always believe in products as the only way to solve our problems. There was a time we believed in ourselves and each other too.

— Scott Berkun (@berkun) June 3, 2014

But a better definition comes from Wikipedia, which says: consumerism is a social and economic order and ideology that encourages the acquisition of goods and services in ever-greater amounts. Since the 1940s the amount of consumable goods America, and the world, consumes has risen dramatically. But is this bad?

It has been wonderful economically, certainly for America. WWII decimated the industrial capacity for Europe, making the untouched factories and infrastructures of American cities incredibly valuable to the world, and to the American economy. But it has also been bad for the environment, as having an economy that depends on consumer goods motivates the sales of more consumer goods that people could possibly need, particularly plastics, which has environmental consequences we may never recover from. Even seemingly progressive products like mobile phones depend on minerals and elements that are rare and are expensive to mine. Upgrading phones or laptops every three years, which is common, has costs that go beyond economics. On the personal level, the amount of debt the average American carries is higher than ever, spurred on by the cultural values of consumption and owning new products that contribute little to happiness, fulfillment or the needs people have.

“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes. working jobs we hate, so we can buy shit we don’t need.”

― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

But can technology, which is a form of product, help reduce these problems? No. Not directly. This may sound like semantic noodling, but only people make choices about consumption. The point of my tweet is the consumerist trap of believing we can’t do anything unless we have an app, a system, a product, or a program. If a person wants to consume less, they will. No technology is required to spend less, or to choose goods not on trends but on which will last longest. Buy Nothing day requires no tools or devices, just a willingness to try and spend 24 hours without buying anything.

Of course you can find iPhone apps that help with recycling or finding environmentally preferable products. Books are a kind of technology too, and there’s plenty to read about the subject of consumerism. Me writing this post on the technology of blogs and you sharing it (hopefully) via email and social networks are all technologies too. Any kind of progress, or regress, depends on technology in some form.

But I don’t see consumerism as a technological problem any more than I see poverty, unemployment, cruelty, warfare, and other forms of human self-destruction and hypocrisy as technological problems. They are social and philosophical problems. We have always had the ability to solve them, but not the will, the maturity, or most cynically, the capacity as a civilization to put our collective interests ahead of our selfish ones.

Once a person chooses, for themselves, to commit to something, technology becomes an asset. But the technology can never make that commitment for us, as we always have a way, in our moments of weakness, to turn off the machines (At least until we ask Skynet to take over).

[Note: I don’t drink lattes, nor drive a BMW, nor have an iPhone 5]

What’s the best kickstarter reward for a book?

Posted on June 2, 2014June 7, 2014 in Generalby Scott Berkun

I’m considering using Kickstarter for my upcoming book, The Ghost of My Father, a memoir about the most difficult relationship in my life. Using Kickstarter was a great experience for Mindfire thanks to all your support – I know many of you were excited about getting your name in the book and owning personally signed copies.

The audience for The Ghost of My Father is new as it’s a different kind of book. I don’t know that it will sell more than a few hundred copies. This makes using Kickstarter an even more desirable possibility as I can make sure those of you who are interested get something special for supporting this challenging project.

If you’re interested, what special reward would you love to get? What’s the best reward you’ve seen an author offer for a book project? You can write in your own suggestions too. Thanks.

Lessons from working on the 3rd draft (The Ghost of My Father)

Posted on May 30, 2014May 31, 2014 in Ghost, Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

The book in progress, The Ghost of My Father, is a memoir and it’s no surprise the process of writing it has been different than my other books. To help me sort out what I want to do and how to do it I’ve read dozens of memoirs and several books about memoir writing (recommendations post forthcoming). I thought I had a strong grasp of my own goals and the nature of writing these things. How wrong I was.

The funny thing is every book I’ve ever written has a moment where I realize how wrong I was. That’s part of the journey of writing. You have to possess a certain madness to believe you can take on something as big and unknown as 300 blank pages and shape it into something other people will want to read. For all of my books there has been a point like this, somewhere late in the middle of the work, where it hasn’t all fallen together yet in the way I want and I naturally wonder if it ever will.

The thing I’ve learned is when any creative work isn’t falling together yet it means something bold has to be done. Usually it’s concision: removing something big to give everything that remains the space it needs to blossom. Sometimes it’s shuffling: changing the order in which things are told. Other times it’s far more subtle, and I need to write a new beginning for the book that has better aim for carving through the rest of the material. For most of my books the first chapter that appears in the published version was written from scratch late in the process, to my dismay each and every time. The original first chapters, as hard as I’d worked on them, no longer fit the book they’d started. Maybe if I fill that shelf, I’ll have enough abandoned first chapters to make a book out of them.

This week I’ve been reading through the entire 2nd draft of Ghost. It’s the draft I’ve had 5 people read and give feedback on. I call these sessions where I read through the entire manuscript The Big Read. It’s a big deal psychologically and I force myself to do it. Rewriting and revising is far more fun than reading drafts. I’m convinced it’s worth it as reading the whole manuscript is the only way to put back into my brain what the book actually is at the moment. Books are big and my brain is small. Without rereading the whole thing I’m working with my imagined idea of what the 2nd draft is, which may be pretty far from what it really is like. Reading the entire draft also lets the feedback I’ve heard from others land properly, as while I’m reading I can see for myself where the feedback is accurate, or not, and make notes accordingly as I go. As strong as the urge is to jump to the computer and fix things, I resist. I want to wait until I’ve experienced the whole thing before I change anything.

As I’m reading the 2nd draft I’m noting the problems I find. Some problems are structural: why is this section before that one? Why is this story even in the book, but not this other one? How does X fit with Y, if at all? Other problems are craft: underwritten paragraphs, overwrought metaphors, experienced told but not shown. Craft is far easier to fix than structure. Craft is polish and you can revise a book, even a deeply flawed book, into polished writing. Some excellent books are structural disasters with craft so fantastic you barely notice (I’m looking in awe at you, Mr. Updike). But structure, pace and tone, things that have to line up throughout the entire narrative, are far harder to get right or to experiment with.

I have a novel I’ve worked on now and then for years. I once decided to switch the entire book from 3rd person to 1st, a task I decided could only be done by typing in the entire manuscript again, shifting the point of view as a I went. Some experiments and changes can only be tried at large scale. That’s the burden of long narratives like books, or films. The upside of books, and all writing, is you can always go back. Unlike a painting or a sculpture where a bad choice is irrevocable, in writing you can always go back. Writers should be brave in revision for this reason: there’s always a safety net, so be bold.

It took until I was halfway through this big read that I understood what I needed to do for Draft #3. And as much as I want to dig in right now and get busy, I won’t do it. I need to know if these plans I have now, at the halfway mark, will still hold together when I’ve read the whole thing. As soon as I hit publish on this post, I’m going back to the read. I’ll report back when I’m done. Have a good weekend.

Feedback wanted: redesign sketches for scottberkun.com

Posted on May 29, 2014June 3, 2014 in Generalby Scott Berkun

For the last two weeks I’ve been working with designer/developer Ryan Sommers on a redesign for scottberkun.com. I asked you readers for feedback on the current design a few weeks ago, and wanted to post again with an update.

Here are three concepts we’re working with. Have a favorite? I want your input since it’s you folks who will be looking at this new design for the next few years :)

The redesign goals included:

Make the visual styles coherent and cleaner
Make first choices for visitors easier
Prioritize interactivity through Ask Berkun and comments
Emphasize conversions to the mailing list

These concept sketches just show the basic design choices – the details, copy, sidebar, etc. haven’t been decided yet.

Concept C

Concept A

Concept B

You can vote for your favorite, but leave a comment if you have suggestions or commentary. Thanks:

Vote on The Cover of My Next Book

Posted on May 27, 2014June 3, 2014 in Books, Ghostby Scott Berkun

Today I’m working on the third, and likely final, draft of my next book. For this project I’m again working with designer Tim Kordik (see our previous work together for the Mindfire cover). He does great work and I love his approach to creativity and design.

The book is titled The Ghost of My Father. It’s a memoir about the most difficult relationship of my life. It’s a departure from previous books and I hope you’ll follow my lead. You can read previous posts about the project if you missed them. Please join the special email list for the book to be first to know when it will be available (and get early excerpts and other insider surprises). It will be a self-funded independent production and I can use all the support I can get.

Today I was thrilled to discover Kordik sent along his first round of concepts. While these are not final designs, I’m happy to let you have an early look and give your opinion. Just vote for the design direction you think is most promising (again, these are first rounds, not final designs). Leave a comment if you’re so inspired and I’ll read them all.

(For fun, you can see all the previous covers and titles readers have voted on)

Concept E

Concept D

Concept A

Concept B

Concept C

How do you transform fear?

Posted on May 7, 2014August 16, 2016 in ask berkunby Scott Berkun

In this edition of Ask Berkun, where I pick the top voted reader question and answer it, this time it’s one of my favorite subjects:

How Do You Transform Fear?

I grew up thinking fear was binary and that heroic people simply knew how to turn it off, or, perhaps more disturbing, never felt it at all, which is part of the definition of a psychopath. This absurd notion is reinforced by nearly every major heroic film of the last 50 years, where coolness are stoicism are the defining characteristic of the main character. Since films rarely share the interiors of character’s minds we can’t know what these characters felt, if anything, as they faced their enemies alone. It’s implied they were so brave they didn’t feel fear, but that’s a mythic lie. Read any non-fiction book about any great hero in any arena and the stories are fundamentally different as far as emotions are concerned.

The great lesson I’ve learned about fear is that courage is being afraid and doing it anyway rather than the absence of fear. This demands having a relationship with fear, or more precisely a relationship with the fears inside us. We all fear different things in different ways and without exploring those fears, where they come from and what kinds of bribes they take, we can’t have interesting lives. The people who seem the most victimized by fear are often the ones who’ve spent the least time trying to understand it, or the ones most lost in the heroic mythology of attractive psychopaths with guns charging confidently over the hill towards certain victory.

The only way to learn courage is to do something you’re afraid of. This is obvious but fears are emotional, not rational. Children learn by doing what they fear and it’s how adults learn too. Perhaps you start small and increase the stakes each time. Only then can you compare how the fear before doing the thing compared to the feeling of actually doing it and finishing it.

It’s rare for anyone to say, in retrospect, “that was much scarier than I thought it would be.” Generally we say the opposite. Why is that? It’s because fear is a kind of imagination. Our fears can instantly invent amazing vivid worlds of danger and disaster. And since fear is irrational it is not bound by logic, reason or knowledge, even though real life is. Therefore you can’t usually overcome fear with rational thought alone: it’s mastery of your emotions that matters more. It’s telling that the scariest thing for most adults is simply to share how they really feel with people they know. We’ve afraid to explore our feelings which creates a natural trap for us, since fear is emotional.

Comparing the fear you felt before doing something with how you feel afterwards is the tool for transforming fear. It’s only through that comparison, again and again, that you grow more confidence in deciding you’re going to do the thing anyway. You have to have some other feeling you’ve developed that you trust more than the fear. It could be love, hate, anger, passion, commitment, friendship, just about anything. Sometimes I do scary things purely out of self love: I want the future version of me to look back and say “wow, I did that. If I could do that, then I can do this.” And on it goes. It never ends. I know I will never run out of things that scare me that I should probably do, which means I need to continually re-experience the cycle of being afraid, doing it anyway, feeling good and then finding something new to be afraid of.

But this process is personal and that’s where people fail. We want our discoveries of ourselves to come directly from a book written by a famous stranger we admire. Or through a course or a lecture. We want transformation to happen without any risks or pain. These expectations are consumerist traps: no one in history became more confident simply because they consumed something. You only become more confident by doing things where you, as an individual, are exposed to truths about who you are. TED talks are consumption. Books are consumption. Listening to your adventurous friend, who seems so brave, talk about jumping out of airplanes, or running with the bulls, might briefly inspire you, but it’s still just you passively consuming a story from someone else that makes you feel good in some way.

Part of the fallacy is the belief that fear goes away. That once you’re brave and you’ve done something scary you’ll never fear it again. This is part of that heroic mythology again. If you read interviews with the greatest performers, whether it’s musicians or athletes, they’ll tell you they feel fear every time they get on the stage or the playing field (See Attack of the butterflies). It’s a romantic illusion that anyone is stoic enough not to feel any fear at all when doing dangerous and risky things. What’s impressive about these people is they’ve cultivated ways to manage their fears, to work with, under, over or around them, to achieve amazing things. I’ve always found FDR’s quote “There is nothing to fear but fear itself” strangely recursive: if you have fear, and fear fear, then aren’t you worse off? Being afraid of fear is precisely the problem. We presume if we’re afraid there’s something wrong with us or what we’re doing which is nonsense. What Churchill meant is not to give in to fear. We can’t be primarily motivated by it.

Nietzsche had this notion about energy, and that a person who could convert positive and negative energy into fuel would be the most powerful kind. I figured this out for myself on the basketball court, learning that when I got angry over a bad play I’d ruin the next play too. My response to a mistake was to increase the odds I’d make another one, the worst kind of response. It was only by learning how to use that anger to help the next action, say by using the anger to run back faster on defense, that I could convert that energy into something that helped me rather than hurt me. When I read it in Nietzsche it confirmed something I already knew: that the work of self discovery was to learn how feelings of hate, love, anger, joy, jealousy, and even pride can be fuel that you can direct in ways that help rather than hurt.

Years ago I read in the excellent book Brain Rules that the biology of fear and excitement are similar. In both cases our good friend the amygdala prepare our bodies for something interesting to happen by opening blood vessels, raising the heart rate, and adding adrenaline to the hormone mix. But the amygdala is too primitive to have notions of good or bad, exciting or scary. It’s our conscious minds that apply the labels afraid or excited. If you think about it many of the most interesting moments in our lives are combinations of fear and excitement: it’s not one or the other. Our bodies are built for fears from 10000 years ago, when our lives were at stake in every moment. So little of our lives involves anything with these kinds of risks anymore, but the amygdala hasn’t figured that our yet. This means when there is fear in your heart there is opportunity too, if you’re willing to do the work to find it.

LITANY AGAINST FEAR

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

– Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear – From Frank Herbert’s Dune Book Series

[This topic partially inspired by a Facebook comment by Heather Bussing. Here’s a related article she wrote]

Redesign: How can my website better serve you? An invitation

Posted on May 1, 2014May 1, 2014 in this siteby Scott Berkun

It’s time to redesign scottberkun.com. Yay!

I’m looking to hire a designer to work on a redesign of scottberkun.com and have my own list of goals and issues. But before I go too far I wanted my make sure I invited you readers, the people this site is for, to speak up about your suggestions, complaints and things you wished the site did better.

Here’s my primary list of goals:

Coherent style: too many incremental changes have been made over the years to fonts styles, colors, and highlights. The base text color should be black, and the various styles should be simplified and coherent with each other. It needs to be resorted from scratch and return the focus to easy readability.
Make first choices easier: There are 1500 posts and essays in more than 20 different categories but good luck finding them. There are also more than 20 full lectures you can watch, but good luck there too. The home page helps little, offering no framework for working by category or offering an easy first set of choices. I write about so many subjects it’s hard to find a way in if you’re not already familiar with my work. There is a best of berkun page, but it’s also hard to find.
Prioritize interactivity through Ask Berkun and comments: I’d love for this to be an anchor of the site, as it’s interactive and lets you readers drive the show. But it’s invisible in any of the navigation. Comments and requests fuel my work. The more engagement I get, the easier I find it to be productive.
Thoughtful conversions: as a writer there are 3 actions that I benefit from the most: selling books, getting hired to speak, and getting people to follow me on twitter, the mailing list or Facebook. The site is intentionally not designed to hit visitors over the head with these three things, but without any conversions there is no website. I’d like these three actions to be more prominent, but in a way that feels natural, not forced. I have tons of free chapters, checklists and resources, but they’re not tied to conversions in any direct way and they could be.

But these are my goals and I’m not the customer here – you are. Any comments, critiques or requests welcome.

What do you want more of? What do you want less of?

Cheers and thanks for reading.

Min / Max Note Taking for Conferences

Posted on April 28, 2014September 18, 2017 in Generalby Scott Berkun

As part of my recent talk about getting the most from events and championing ideas, I mentioned a brief theory on how to take notes. I presenting an updated version as the closing session of An Event Apart Boston and wanted to share the advice here.

I call the theory minimum effort for maximum value, or Min / Max Note Taking. The theory is simple:

You won’t remember much in a week – Human memory is poor and is not as reliable as we believe. Events compress many sessions back to back which puts even more pressure on our cognition. With each session that goes by you remember less and less about everything.
You won’t return to the slides – slide decks are often poor references for talks anyway, since if the speaker does a good job they used the slides to support their talk, rather than the other way around. Slides help most if you know what you’re looking for.
You need to capture brief reflections TODAY – while you are at the event, while your brain can still provide value to the future you about what there was to learn from the event.

For each session, commit to doing the following:

When a session ends, immediately make a list of 5 bullets per talk. It doesn’t matter what they are. They can be negative statements, positive statements, quotes you want to remember or even questions you asked or want to ask. If you write a good short list it will guide you later for how the slides or other materials might be useful. Write for the future version of you, the you that will be alive a week from now, who will forget much of the context you have in the current moment. Be kind to the future you.
Use breaks and lunch to catch up and summarize. Use the first or last 5 minutes of schedule breaks to jot down your list. Lunch at conferences is often 90 minutes long, easily granting you 10 quiet minutes towards the end to review the sessions so far and write summaries.At the end of the day, before you go out to social events, take time to summarize each session if you didn’t during the day.
Consider how to make good advice you heard actionable. In the abstract some ideas and tactics sound great, but may not apply to your situation (or to any real world project).
Consider taking notes on paper. For creative topics there’s value to being able to hand draw diagrams or relationships between concepts. When you write with your hand your brain processes the information differently, and there’s even evidence you will remember written things better than if you typed them.
Annotate links and references from the talk: URLs alone don’t help much as you won’t remember why you want to go to them. Make a thoughtful note you’ll understand a week or a month in the future for what problem that link or book will solve.
Post your summary on your blog (& twitter with the conference hashtag) – Invite other people to compare their notes to yours. They’ll contribute things you missed and you’ll learn from how their summaries differ from yours. It’s ok if your notes are short: they will still be very useful to people who didn’t bother to take notes at all. Being social accelerates learning: we are conversational creatures and it’s in the discussion about a session that you’ll learn the deepest lessons. If no one is inviting you to start a conversation about what you heard, start it yourself. If you do this during the event it will even help you meet new people at the event (including speakers, who may respond to the questions in your notes about their session).
Share a one page summary at work: a one page summary is more than enough to let coworkers know if they want to learn more about a session (in which case you can point them at the slides or the speaker’s website). One page is also enough to validate for your boss why it was worthwhile to pay for you to go (or perhaps to pay for you to go next time).

This is the best, simplest approach I’ve seen. Of course note taking is highly personal, but I hope this short guide will help you figure out what works best for you.

Why Culture Always Wins (An Excerpt from The Year Without Pants)

Posted on April 22, 2014December 15, 2015 in Management, Year Without Pantsby Scott Berkun

[This is an excerpt from The Year Without Pants, An Amazon.com best book of the year]

Chapter 4: Why Culture Always Wins

A great fallacy born from the failure to study culture is the assumption that you can take a practice from one culture and simply jam it into another and expect similar results. Much of what bad managers do is assume their job is simply to find new things to jam and new places to jam them into, without ever believing they need to understand how the system—the system of people known as culture—works. Much like the frustrated moron who slaps the side of a TV when it stops working, taking action without understanding the system rarely helps.

A favorite example of this tragic management habit is how in 1999 the famous design firm IDEO was featured on ABC’s popular Nightline TV show. They demonstrated an idea development technique they used called a “deep dive” to redesign a shopping cart in just five days. Soon hundreds of companies were doing their own half-baked versions of deep dives, and, surprise, the results were disappointing. Somehow, despite how dedicated some were to following all the steps and all the rules, an element was missing, and they couldn’t match the results they’d seen on the show. The missing ingredient was, of course, the primary one: the people involved. Watchers of Nightline worked at places with employees who were not as talented in design as IDEO’s. But beyond their talent, IDEO employees shared values and attitudes that were not explicitly captured in the deep dive method despite how essential those things were for the method to work. In anthropology terms this superficial mimicry is called a cargo cult, a reference to the misguided worship of abandoned airplane landing strips among tribes hoping for the goods airplanes had delivered to return.

Every year new trends in work become popular in spite of their futility for most organizations that try them. These trends are often touted as revolutions and frequently are identified with a high-profile company of the day. Concepts like casual Fridays, brainstorming sessions, Lean, Six Sigma, Agile, matrixed organizations, or even 20 percent time (Google’s policy of supporting pet projects) are management ideas that became popular in huge waves, heralded as silver bullets for workplaces. The promise of a trend is grand, but the result never is. Rarely do the consultants championing, and profiting from, these ideas disclose how superficial the results will be unless they’re placed in a culture healthy enough to support them. No technique, no matter how good, can turn stupid coworkers into smart ones. And no method can magically make employees trust each other or their boss if they have good reason not to.

The best approach, perhaps the only approach, is an honest examination of culture. But culture is harder to understand than a meeting technique or a creativity method. And culture is scary because unlike techniques, which are all about logic, culture is based on emotion. Few people have the skills to evaluate, much less change, a culture, even if they have the courage to try. It’s far safer to simply wait for the next trend to come along and rally behind it, hoping the excitement for the new method distracts everyone from noticing how little impact the previous method had.

In my story so far at WordPress.com, every employee I met was smart, funny, and helpful. They’d invested heavily in tools and systems but put the onus on employees, even new ones like me, to decide how, when, and where to do their work. These attributes of culture didn’t arrive by some technique sprinkled around the company years after it started. How did it happen, then?

Read the rest of the chapter 4 in the free PDF or read the entire first chapter.

Praise for The Year Without Pants, an Amazon.com best book of 2013, includes:

“The Year Without Pants is one the most original and important books about what work is really like, and what it takes to do it well, that has ever been written.”
—Robert Sutton, professor, Stanford University, and author, New York Times bestsellers The No Asshole Rule and Good Boss, Bad Boss

“The underlying concept—an ‘expert’ putting himself on the line as an employee— is just fantastic. And then the book gets better from there! I wish I had the balls to do this.”
—Guy Kawaski, author, APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur, and former chief evangelist, Apple

“If you want to think differently about entrepreneurship, management, or life in general, read this book.”
—Tim Ferriss, author, New York Times bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek

A Critique of “Don’t Fuck Up The Culture”

Posted on April 21, 2014March 31, 2016 in Culture, Managementby Scott Berkun

I enjoyed Brian Chesky’s recent post Don’t Fuck Up The Culture, where he proclaims to the employees of Airbnb the importance of culture in everything they do. I like Airbnb and it’s nice to see a founder emphasize culture.

But there’s sloppy thinking at work here (see: mistakes of writing about culture). The first problem is there is a field of study of culture: it’s called anthropology. When business and technologists sling the word culture around as if they invented it they get themselves into trouble. Modern start-ups are worthy of cultural study, but to use that small sample in ignorance of a broader view of culture is myopic.

Chesky wrote:

Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with passion.

No. That’s certainly a nice sentiment but it’s not a definition of culture. A proper definition is something like: culture is the willing behaviors and beliefs of a group of people. Many cultures are not passionate, or certainly not passionate primarily about work. It’s implied that these behaviors and beliefs are things people practice by choice, but that’s a mild denial of the role of hierarchy in culture. Most human cultures depend on leaders to define, modify and reinforce the behaviors and beliefs of the group.

This means a CEO or founder has tremendous power regarding culture. They are the only person who can:

Fire anyone
Hire anyone
Decide how/why people are rewarded
Decide how/why people are punished

And with those 4 powers, every CEO is in fact a Chief Cultural Officer. The terrifying thing is it’s the CEO’s actual behavior, not their speeches or the list of values they have put up on posters, that defines what the culture is. Without these four powers any employee at the company is along for the ride in a culture driven by someone more powerful than they are. By the time the first handful of employees are hired, the culture already exists whether anyone realizes it or not. The people with the most power to fuck up the culture are simply the ones with the most power.

And of course the most vocal challengers to most cultures are the first to be shown the door. It’s in human nature to want to eliminate the most disruptive people. And it’s also human nature to want to bring in more people that fit in well. Repeat these two behaviors over time and culture becomes homogeny, even if everyone still believes the culture values diversity. Is the culture still the same at that point? Everyone still there might believe so, but the people who left because of the culture don’t get asked their opinion.

Of course a democratically inclined leader will delegate the above powers in thoughtful ways, and invite more people to play leadership roles, including people who are disruptive in positive ways. But unless the CEO can be elected out of CEOship, the entire culture is at best a benevolent dictatorship, not a democracy where the culture of power can be changed. How power is distributed has a primary role in defining culture, and that distribution must inevitably change as a company grows.

The thing that will endure for 100 years, the way it has for most 100 year companies, is the culture.

There is no company that has the same culture today that it did 10, 20 or 100 years ago. Cultures often change dramatically as they shift from birth, to immature success, to full maturity (and of course the vast majority of companies die before they even hit adolescence). Study the history of HP, Ford, IBM, Microsoft, or even Google and Facebook, and this observation is revealed. You have to do careful study to filter out which cultural values remained immutable over time, if any at all. Ask the first ten employees to leave a successful company why they left, and many will answer “the company changed.” Which is fine: it probably needed to change to continue its success.

The culture is what creates the foundation for all future innovation.

This is partially true, and partially a denial that it’s also culture that eventually becomes the single biggest resistance to innovation (and any kind of change). Any tradition, no matter how noble in its inception, eventually becomes the primary force of resistance against new ideas. Again, study the failure of any once great company: often its the powerful defenders or the status quo, under the guise of culture, that accelerated their demise (“that’s not how we do things here”). That is why culture is tricky, as you want pride in the past, but want it tempered so it doesn’t hold you back from progress. The champions of the last war may not be the best leaders in the next one, but who decides who the leaders are? Only the leaders from the past have that power.

Our next team meeting is dedicated to Core Values, which are essential to building our culture… After we closed our Series C with Peter Thiel in 2012, we invited him to our office. This was late last year, and we were in the Berlin room showing him various metrics. Midway through the conversation, I asked him what was the single most important piece of advice he had for us. He replied, “Don’t fuck up the culture.”

Thiel is right, but his observation isn’t particularly helpful. Nearly every organization ruins its culture in some ways, even if it does amazingly well. It depends on what culture you prefer: risk taking or stability? scrappy or luxurious? When an entire company fits in a van it has one vibe, when it barely fits in a stadium, it has another. And more importantly we’re talking about corporations, not orphanages. Once a major profit source is found the goal is to exploit that profit for as long as possible. Thiel’s quote doesn’t acknowledge the presumption that shifting from discovering how to profit, to maximizing (or at least increasing) profit is what a corporation is built for. That shift demands dramatic changes to the culture. Even a simple thing like significantly improving the wealth of employees changes the culture.

The very notion of Core Values, a declaration of cultural philosophy for an organization, is a standard move from the corporate playbook. The existence of a list of values has limited bearing on how often they’re practiced (e.g. the ten commandments). As mentioned above, the behavior of leaders defines culture more than anything else. I’m sure Enron and WorldCom had the same basic values handbook most corporations do, describing how angelic, smart, collaborative and honorable everyone is supposed to be. Platitudes are cheap to produce and put on posters in hallways. What’s missing from these handbooks is a test. How do you know your Core Values are actually being practiced?

How To Test The Value of Core Values:

Can an employee say NO to a decision from a superior on the grounds it violates a core value?

Try to imagine it. Would a cultural value from your corporate handbook ever be used in making an actual decision about actual work? If the answer is no, then the values are platitudes, or were written so generically that they’re easily overlooked or easily manipulated to justify just about anything (depending on your opinion, Google’s don’t be evil is either a good example or a bad one).

Culture is critically important and I’m glad Chesky is bringing it up. If he’s a good leader and manager he’ll invite his staff to challenge him on the values he defines, and how the proclaimed values are tested.

But there is a presumption among many executives that culture is an asset created and managed like technological resources, which is a mistake. Culture is emotional. It is based on trust and even (platonic) love between people. It is hard to describe culture rationally or in the same easily measurable terms the business world operates on, which explains why so many attempts by business leaders to control and scale culture ultimately fail.

Life Under Surveillance: Snowden, NSA and America

Posted on April 18, 2014June 5, 2014 in ask berkunby Scott Berkun

I frequently take the the top voted question from readers and answer it on the blog. With 64 votes, today’s winner was submitted by Imran:

Life under Surveillance: Issues and Options?

Edward Snowden will go down in history as a hero. A quick look at the history of The Pentagon Papers and the story of Daniel Ellsberg reveals easy comparisons. Just like the legacy of presidents, we are bad at evaluating the long term impacts of leaks, revelations, scandals and whistleblowers. With every year that goes by we’ll see a continued shift to his positive recognition. I know many people call Snowden a traitor and in many ways he is. But there is no rule that says you can’t be a hero and a traitor simultaneously. Remember that all of the American founding fathers were traitors. The very idea of whistleblowing is defined by betraying the system in power, yet it is a primary way major corruption is revealed. As painful and risky as it is, if it succeeds in generating enough attention it is a rare forcing function for change. If Snowden came back to America I’d likely support the filing of charges against him but also hold him up as hero: they’re not mutually exclusive.

Regarding life under surveillance, personal technology made it unavoidable as surveillance is the business model of the web. The only surprise is we’re living in A Brave New World and not 1984. We are willing and mostly happy participants. That’s the funny thing about most dystopian movies: they underestimate what we’re willing to accept in the name of convenience. Every week we hear a new story of people being fired over Facebook posts or tweets, or stories of credit card numbers and passwords being hacked, and mostly we just shrug. On a personal level we don’t see the stakes as being very high, and we don’t have an understanding of how surveillance undermines any notion of democracy or republic based government. We don’t think through how it impacts journalists, and how central journalists are to protecting our freedoms. And it’s hard to grasp the reality that when certain things are taken away they won’t ever return.

On the positive side, republics like the United States are sleeping giants of consciousness. Americans are a sluggish bunch when it comes to caring about what’s going on in the world or even the daily business of how our governments run. But every now and then an issue that has been slowly weighing on the collective consciousness slides to the forefront, and we have unexpected and dramatic change. 17 states now support gay-marriage, a staggering number given how long this issue has lingered and been debated in America. When American values truly shift, the politicians feel it under their feet and change their stance accordingly. The question is what exactly has to happen for that ground to shift for Americans regarding surveillance, whether it’s privacy from corporations or true freedom of information from the government?

The rub with surveillance is, unlike most social issues, there are huge corporate forces benefiting from surveillance in one form or another. Political issues like legalizing marijuana, or reducing discrimination, are complex enough without the direct line to profits lurking in the center of protecting information about citizens. That’s what I find terrifying: when the interests of government and corporations align against citizens.

Are American people okey-dokey with NSA’s data dragnet?

The short answer is yes. Awareness of NSA’s behavior has not led to the formation of a political movement. A major contribution to the acceptance of the NSA’s actions is the feeling of fatalism many Americans have about government. They’re so detached from how it works they’ve long given up on it representing them or responding to their concerns. Snowden’s disclosures were a wake up call, but it was too abstract. It revealed generalities of abuse, not specific and emotional stories of how a family or a neighbor had data about them used against them. Most of us have a hard time connecting the dots to what our lives will be like if we don’t fight for these policies to change. There will need to be other, louder, more personally resonant, wake up calls before enough Americans rally around demanding stronger safeguards for the government’s access to data about its citizens.

[Update: Ellsberg commentary on Snowden]

Web designer wanted for work on scottberkun.com

Posted on April 17, 2014April 17, 2014 in this siteby Scott Berkun

Hi folks. I’m working on a minor to moderate redesign of scottberkun.com and I’m looking to hire a freelance designer to work with: I have ideas, rough sketches and beer (and of course money to pay you).

You don’t need to be a unicorn, as I’d likely hire the good folks at 10up to do the development work. But if you are unicorn enabled that’s nice too as maybe I can hire you for both.

Here’s how to apply:

Ideally you’re a fan and know some of my work (don’t fake it if you’re not – maybe I can make you one after we work together)
Point me at a single URL to your portfolio
Tell me your favorite mythological creature (make one up if you prefer)
Tell me what your rates are
Tell me something that sucks about the current design
Email the above to info at scottberkun.com

Thanks.

When My Parents Separated

Posted on April 17, 2014April 23, 2014 in Ghostby Scott Berkun

This is a brief excerpt from a draft of my next book, a memoir about my family.

When I was 8 years old my parents separated. While cleaning out my father’s car, My Mom discovered movie stubs for a film she hadn’t seen. He left a few days later. When he left, much of the energy in our house went with him. Not precisely because he was missed, but more that everyone’s energy went inward, away from each other. We all found our corners in that house and those corners became familiar places. my Mom would smoke in the basement, trying to escape the pressures of raising three kids on her own. My brother, sister and I still played together and did the things kids do, but we never talked about was going on. Or what it meant. Even when my parents reconciled three years later, and my father moved back in, we’d often stay in those well worn corners we made.

I was far too young to understand what was happening or what it meant. Kids have no context and can accept almost anything. It strikes me as curious how adults worry about what children will think of certain ideas, images or world news. It’s often the parents fears that are being protected, not the children’s. Children don’t have the taboos adults do. They don’t know being naked is wrong or that certain words can’t be said in front of certain people, and for good reason: what we find offensive or fearful is cultural, not biological. In many ways it’s all just invention. Children are far more accepting and open minded than they get credit for and often they can see things more clearly than their parents do. The question is how brave parents are in giving their children the chance to choose for themselves. Before my father left, my parents had a family meeting where they told us what was happening. This was the right thing to do and I’m glad they did it, but it was beyond my comprehension. My brother remembers it well, but I don’t recall it all: what I couldn’t understand never registered as a memory.

As an 8 year old I didn’t know any other families well. I certainly didn’t know any other fathers.I didn’t know my aunts or uncles or how they related to their kids. For me at age 8 whatever happened in the Berkun household was simply how it was. I had the sense it was uncommon for parents to separate or divorce, but those concepts were far too abstract to understand. In 1st grade I remember my friend Craig crying outside the P.S. 169 schoolyard, feeling sad and alone because his parents were getting a divorce. We all comforted him, but none of us, including him, had any comprehension of what it meant. We vaguely knew it was sad from what we’d gleaned about mentions of divorce on TV or in the movies. But we didn’t have the imaginations to comprehend the scale of the feelings involved, or that it could take years or a lifetime to sort them out, if he or his parents would sort themselves out at all.

During those separated years I did know that my mother, who I loved and knew loved me, was often very sad. And my older brother, who I loved and knew loved me, was sad in his own way too. But I don’t remember feeling sad myself at the time. I was a happy kid. I loved the freedom of the streets and the parks of our neighborhood in Queens. The separation distracted everyone away from me and in that gentle neglect I was free to roam and learn to love independence. Except for my family, those years were good years for me, with friends, and laughter and the discovery, for the first time in my life, that I was good at many things. Most of the pain in our family floated above and around me, like clouds of dust, annoyances to be avoided, but things you knew would pass by. I know now my arrogance was born during this time. I felt a kind of pity for everyone. I felt sad for them. I thought I was immune from it all, that somehow I was made of superior materials. I wanted to help my Mom, and I did all my chores. I wanted to chip in and help make it work, not knowing what ‘it’ was or how ‘it’ was supposed to be. Perhaps all boys feel themselves immune to fears and sadness, I certainly did. It wouldn’t be until many years later that I’d begin to understand the real wounds you suffer are the ones you’re the last to notice. The ones you’ve practiced so well at covering that you don’t feel them anymore.

Among those wounds was the curious absence of my father. It was strange, though I didn’t comprehend it at the time, that I spent more time with him alone during the separation than I did before or after. After my father moved out he scheduled monthly outings with me. He’d pick me up at the house and we’d spend the afternoon seeing a movie or playing miniature golf. Sometimes my brother and sister came, but in my memory often it was just my father and I. Did my brother and sister come less often, or were those outings simply less memorable? I know that when it was the two of us, we didn’t talk much. We hadn’t shared many interests, and he was, as most men during a separation would be, an unhappy man, but out we’d go. Then when I was 11 and he moved back into the house, those outings stopped. I don’t know why. We never talked about it. We all fell into a new routine and the years flew by. My father and I wouldn’t spend another day alone together for almost twenty years. It was almost as if on his return he became just another passenger in the family, sharing the same physical space as the rest of us children, following along on a journey of home life led quietly, and without acclaim, by my mother.

[You can read more about my next book here: Why Fathers And Children Don’t Get Along]

Mindfire book is FREE today: download it here

Posted on April 15, 2014 in Mindfireby Scott Berkun

Hi folks. It’s my birthday, and to celebrate I’m giving away one of my most popular books Mindfire: Big Ideas For Curious Minds.

Just go to the download page and you’ll be on your way.

Enjoy – Happy April!

Please Don’t Be Generic (When sending LinkedIn requests)

Posted on April 10, 2014April 10, 2014 in conferences, rantby Scott Berkun

I believe in first impressions, especially if you’re asking someone else for something. When you make a connection to another person, even on the interwebs, please take 60 seconds to say something personal about why you’re making the connection.

If you’re not willing to take 60 seconds to write something personal, and explain why you want to connect, why would you expect them to say yes? If they’re important enough to you to ask for something, match that with putting in a moment of effort. Otherwise you’re the equivalent of a stranger running up to someone on the street and asking to shake their hands, screaming “You’re someone I trust!” as you do it.

Here is what my LinkedIn inbox always looks like (see below). It’s often filled with generic requests from people whose names I don’t recognize, where the request tells me nothing about who they are, how they know of me or why we should connect. It’s a wasteland.

That last guy didn’t even get the language right as I only speak English.

The generic messages LinkedIn offers should be avoided. How could I be a person you trust if we’ve never met? And even if you trust me, that’s not the important part on my end: why should I trust you or find you worthy to connect with? It’d be far better to explain how you met the other person, why you’re a fan of their work, or how on earth you even know who the hell they are.

When I see these generic requests (above), I translate it to mean the following (below):

Advice:

Take 60 seconds to say something personal and meaningful
If you can’t, don’t bother sending the request
Unless you’re sure the person knows your name name well enough that it’s meaningful to them

[This post is excerpted from How Events And Conferences Should End]

Noah: movie review (Spoiler Free)

Posted on April 9, 2014April 10, 2014 in General, moviesby Scott Berkun

I’m fascinated by religious history and love movies, so it’s no surprise I’ve seen many films with religious themes. Even when I’m familiar with the texts they refer to, I often go back to reread and compare how the filmmakers handled the many challenges of trying to make a narrative movie about texts written for very different purposes. Most bible movies fall under the pressure to convert these stories into modern forms. The Ten Commandments, as over the top as it can be, is one of the best of these attempts. While The Bible, starting George C. Scott, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor is perhaps the worst (though its coverage of the tower of Babel is the only one I’ve ever seen on film).

Noah (2014) is one of the stranger movies about a biblical story you’re ever going to see. It is an interesting, but also frustrating film. I’d recommend it primarily if you are interested in how a talented artist used such an old and familiar story as the framework for many bold and unexpected turns. Purely as a telling of the tale from the bible it doesn’t work as well, and it’s also choppy as a hero driven disaster film, which is perhaps the simplest way to frame the narrative of the story. There are anachronisms everywhere, so many that I lost count (everyone is white, they speak with a British accent, they have finely tailored clothes, and on it goes). But this was ok. From the beginning of the film it’s made clear this is an artist at work. The rules he is following are his own and I found this liberating and challenging.

The passages in the bible about Noah are barely a few pages, and much of them are about the ridiculous plans God gives Noah to build the ark. I always find engineering instructions in religious texts to be comical, as I’m not sure who they’re trying to convince that anyone would build anything the way they describe even in ancient times (engineers were clearly not included in the meetings about how to tell these stories). It often reminds me of the techno-babble in Star Trek, designed as theatrics mostly to impress the uninitiated.

Director Aronofsky takes full advantage of how much is missing from the Noah story, in some cases for better and others for worse. It’s a beautiful film. There are gorgeous montages, wondrous landscapes, and finely crafted recreations of bits of the Genesis story (although interpreted in ways surprising to many Christians, who forget that the Old Testament was written by Jews, as a Jewish text, with their own interpretations which were favored by these filmmakers). The pacing of the story is odd, almost clumsy, with a heavy reliance on Hollywood cliches. This was surprising given Aronofsky‘s body of work, where he has always placed his vision, however flawed, above falling into these kinds of empty patterns. My favorite speech of the film is uttered by the bad guy (a character absent from the Genesis story itself), and it never gets the resonance it should simply because of whose mouth it comes from.

Making films about the Bible always upsets someone, as most religious factions are continually shocked to learn all of the other factions interpret these texts differently than they do (cue The People’s Front of Judea). I fail to see why films are expected to follow their source material precisely, religious or otherwise. Film is a different medium and trying to replicate a book in film is a mistake (part of why so many movies about the bible are so bad: they’re overly reverent for the trivia). It’s the spirit of the material, the themes and messages, that are most important to capture. This version of Noah has been criticized for breaking with details from the story in the bible. I didn’t mind most of these departures, I just couldn’t decide why some of these choices were made (e.g. In Genesis all of Noah’s boys bring their wives with them, but in the movie this is not the case). Theses departures often muddied the messages and questions, rather than clarifying or strengthening them.

The film is well acted. The performances are good. There are stunning, truly powerful visual moments. And even the hypocrisy of God’s instructions and behavior, a fundamental theme of the Old Testament, is made clear at times. But the muddy screenplay fails these contributions. This makes it tough to recommend the movie generally. If you like Aronofsky, the Bible, challenging films, or films with religious or philosophical themes, then go see it.