I spoke at TEDXDepaul last month, on the invitation of Daniel Gurevich. He gave me free reign to decide what to talk about, a liberty I enjoy, so if you like this talk you can thank him too.
At the event I met Alexis Finch, who was sketchnoting the event at the same time I liveblogged my notes. We made an impromptu press row right up front. Here is her sketchnote of my talk.
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I spoke at TEDXDepaul last month and it was a fantastic event. The organizers Daniel Gurevich and Matt Helbig did a fine job from a speaker’s perspective. They chose a great venue, sold every ticket, paid for good A/V, the stage was well lit, and they had a great roster of other speakers (you can read my notes on all of the talks from the day here).
But there’s only so much organizers can do: speakers have to do the heavy lifting of good material and delivery.
Tactical mistakes are annoyances. If the material and delivery are good, people will overlook these problems. But a good speaker wants as few distractions from their ideas as possible. There were two tactical mistakes speaker’s made at TedXDepaul worth reporting.
Marcy Capron of Polymathic chose to use an iPad for her notes. There’s nothing wrong with notes themselves, or iPads, but in this case the stage lights reflected off her iPad onto the screen and walls behind her. And every time she adjusted the iPad, those glare spots moved around. It’s hard not to be distracted by bright things that move on a large screen.
If you plan to have a device on stage, ask for a run through with the stage lights on to check for anything unusual. If there are glare issues, most venues can provide a lectern to place your device on, eliminating this problem.
Doug Zell of Intelligensia Coffee arrived late, and joked about it, which bothered me all on its own. The primary commitment every attendee and speaker have made is their time, and it’s a sign of great disrespect to be late, much less to joke about it (Apparently he was in a bike race earlier in the day, and would have entirely missed his speaking slot if the event wasn’t running late). He had a cavalier attitude about the whole thing which rubbed me the wrong way. His talk on branding was good (notes here), but he crossed the line for me on professionalism. You must show your hosts, fellow speakers and audience respect. He was the closing speaker and hadn’t seen a single talk for the entire event.
The specific tactical mistake he made was keeping his biking hat on. As you can see here, wearing a hat on stage puts a speaker’s eyes into shadow. Eyes are the most important part of the face to connect with, and a hat hides them. Good lighting amplifies the problem, as it casts the rest of a person’s body into good primary light.
If you’re looking for a pre-speaking rundown of things to do and avoid, here’s my handy checklist for speakers.
I don’t root for sports teams for the same reason I’m not religious. The divisions between one group and another are too arbitrary to hold my attention.
If you ask a sports fan why they root for their particular team, it takes them some time to answer. Being a fan is not a logical choice, it’s emotional and tribal. It’s often an inherited decision, a choice not made but absorbed.
Most people are fans of the nearest team, the team of their home. It’s likely their parents, grandparents and childhood friends all rooted for the same team, and the bond they feel for that team is combined with the bonds they feel for their community. It’s the same cultural premise of rallying together as a tribe, and rooting for the warriors to go fight and defend the community, keeping everyone safe. This is a good premise if lives are at stake, as rallying together is what has helped us survive this long. This drive is deep in our biology, explaining why it feels good to stand in a stadium with thousands of people all cheering for the same thing. We are driven to feel connected, explaining the popularity of music concerts, rallies and events of all kinds.
But when you realize how many teams there are it’s harder to find a good answer for the question: why this team and not that team?
I used to be a fan. I grew up in NYC and had Yankees, Giants and Knicks posters on my wall, and wore the jerseys of my favorite players to school. I was a passionate sports kid, good at basketball and football, and I felt connected to local teams for that reason: I imagined myself playing professional sports one day. But as a teenager I stopped wearing player jerseys. It struck me as strange to want to be someone else, even someone I admired. I wanted to be me, and since I played basketball for my high school, I had my own jersey with my own number. I still loved my teams and loved cheering them on, but something had already changed.
Then I moved to Pittsburgh for college and was shocked to discover a new tribe rooting for a new set of teams. What was wrong with these people? I wondered. It seemed absurd to root for the Pirates and the Steelers, since they just happened to be nearby. It didn’t dawn on me until I returned to NYC, and saw the my own hometown fans, that I realized I’d done the same thing my entire life. Had I been born in Chicago, I’d have been a Bulls and Bears fan (teams my Knicks and Giants despised). Being a fan wasn’t a choice I’d made, so much as inherited. And I’d inherited hate too. I hated Chicago simply because they rivaled my Knicks and Giants. To root for a team means to root against the other ones.
Moving to Pittsburgh also reminded me of a childhood friend who moved to NYC from Toronto but still rooted for his hometown Blue-Jays. I remember the daily abuse he got from his “friends” about his choice. His Blue-Jays cap was seen as a betrayal of our tribe, but I realize now he was a much tougher fan than we were. He paid a price for that choice every day. It’s not brave in any way to show up to home games and root for the home team, even if you’re wearing face-paint and a wedge of cheese your head. Everyone loves you because, like the team mascot, you embody the tribe they are already rooting for.
The lyrics to “Take Me Out To The Ball Game”, a song sung at nearly every major league baseball game, are telling: Root, root root for the home team, if they don’t win it’s a shame. But why? What if the home team is a bunch of jerks? Or if they’re a lousy team? It’s only a shame if they lost unfairly. The fact that they were home or away should be irrelevant, shouldn’t it? At basketball games it’s now standard for the people sitting behind the hoop to wave objects and scream, hoping to distract players on the opposing team. At football games fans scream as loud as they can when they other team has the ball, hoping to prevent them from talking to each other about what play to run. Somewhere along the way rooting for ones own team has warped into to impacting the play of the game itself. The Seattle Seahawks even calls their fans the 12th man, an extra player helping the team. It’s great to see a team honor their supporters, but it’s also weird for fans to become part of the game.
Today I root mostly for close games. I don’t care much for any team. Mostly I want to see everyone play well. I want to watch the height of the sport. I want to see a game that will live on in all of the player’s memories for being the greatest game they played, something a blowout win never provides. I like certain players, and occasionally, find connections to certain teams, but it rarely runs deep or lasts long. To fans of teams this makes me a traitor, but I prefer to see my love of competition transcending my interest in any particular team.
Like fans of sports teams, most people adopt the religion of their village and their parents. It’s not a choice, in the same way it wasn’t a choice for me to root for the Knicks. Religions, like sports fans, are blind to how many equivalently well justified alternative views there are in the world. They often rally as much around crushing their rivals as they do honoring their own beliefs, despite there being no championship trophy to compete for. Being a fan of anything makes it easy to lose perspective on what you care about and why, which explains why I will never be a fan in the same way again.
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Ian Rose wrote an excellent rebuttal: Why I am a Sports Fan
There are two different uses of the word myth:
I spend time on this blog debunking factual myths like Newton’s Apple, even for things as boring as mythical numbers in schedule estimates, because I have expertise and believe people who read my blog want to know the truth. While complete ignorance is neutral, faith in a lie is dangerous. I don’t want the suspension bridge I drive across to be built on a pet theory. People with knowledge should be compelled to use what they know to question, poke and prod the darkness, especially the darkness snakes sell as light to fools.
But I do love the metaphorical truths found in mythological stories. The winged story of Icarus and Daedalus isn’t true in aerodynamic fact but contains powerful truths about ambition and trust. Few great works of literature are true in a factual sense, but their freedom from facts allows the expression of emotional or philosophical truths in ways factually based stories can’t. Picasso said “Art is the lie that tells the truth” and that’s what he meant. It’s not a justification for lying on your business plan.
Factual myths are very hard to kill. Simple lies are more popular than complex truths.And the most common factual myths have nuggets of truth in them, just enough to get past most people’s BS detection systems. Newton was never hit on the head by an apple. It’s one of the most popular stories in this history of science, yet it’s a fabrication. And science is a community of practice obsessed with factual certainty. How could this survive for so long?
The answer is the people most inspired by a story are the least interested in challenging it, and the most interested in spreading it. Apple Inc. chose its name after Newton’s apple, but never bothered to check the veracity of the tale. Why? Probably because they liked it and the popularity of the tale was part of the attraction. Popular lies grow into legends, and everyone wins in the spreading of a legend, everyone except the people who care about facts. I do like legends for their metaphorical truths, but it’s dangerous to confuse those with factual truths. Marketing and advertising live in the grey between what’s true and what’s a willful lie.
Does the true story of Newton, or anyone, matter? It depends. If you’re a fan and it you simply want to feel good about your fandom, then perhaps truth doesn’t matter. But if you are serious about achieving yourself, truth is essential. To achieve greatness the precise factual truth about what a hero did or didn’t do matters. I’m convinced these truths, if told well, always have more inspirational power than false legends. But not everyone agrees with me. I wrote The Myths of Innovation to sort out the history of ideas for people who want to stand on the true shoulders of giants, not the made up fantasy stories we’ve popularized. But as popular as the book has been, it will never be as popular as books that promise to teach you the magic secrets of geniuses in five minutes.
Falsehoods never go away completely. The ones that last are too fun, and too convenient, to kill. While Snopes.com will always be popular, it will never popular enough to eliminate the need for its existence. It’s too easy to bend legends to the needs of the teller and the listener. Few people are motivated to seek sources to verify what they see, hear or read. This is why legends grow in size with age: there are fewer and fewer people who witnessed the events around to question the tale. But I believe it’s progress to examine these stories anyway. It’s the duty of people with knowledge to use it to shine light on darkness. I know I will never eliminate the lies, but I must use what I know to help as many others find their way as I can.
History reveals itself to be a sloppy garden of truths, myths and lies, and it requires endless tending. Serious writers are the gardeners of ideas and must garden not just for the present, but for the future.
I used to feel guilty about books I own but haven’t read. They’d sit in piles making me feel unworthy as a writer, and reader. And no matter how many books I’d read in a year, I’d always find myself buying more. I couldn’t win. It was a destructive cycle and it drove me mad. It was yet another kind of information I seemed to be drowning in.
One day I realized there was another way to frame my behavior. The goal should not be efficiency because efficiency makes you conservative. As a writer I need an ambitious curiosity, not a safe one. It’s good to take bets on books at the limits of my comfort zone. That willingness to buy books signals to myself there are new worlds other creators make, and for the price of a meal I can purchase the opportunity to discover them. I can’t penalize myself for trying. If I never read any of the books that might be a problem, but merely not reading some of them is entirely sensible. The clothes we buy mostly sit unworn. Our couches are mostly not sat in. It’s rare for a thing to be used as much as it could be.
Buying books also has these larger effects:
I feel no guilt now in abandoning books either. They’re not children, they’re invented things. If I don’t like it after 50 pages I owe the author nothing. In fact since I bought the book, I paid for the right to read as much or little as I please. Never finishing books is a different problem, and the solution for that is buying better books.
Not sold yet? How about this: on the day I was born there were already more books published that I could ever read. There was never the potential to read everything. I have to abandon the expectation of perfection in my book purchases, for the same reasons I need to abandon the expectation of perfection in everything. Books are cheap, my literary inefficiencies doesn’t cost much in the long run, especially if those bets and gambles help me find a book or two a year that changes my life.
Related:
A decade ago, on a dare, I took a class in improvisation. I was surprised how much the class helped me experience daily life. It made me a better speaker and teacher too. Recently I decided to take improv class a second time, and again I was surprised. I’d forgotten how much I’d forgotten. My classmates had so much fun together that most of of us have continued on to the 200 & 300 level courses.
Here’s what I’ve learned and why I recommend people should take it.
If you know of an improv comedy group near you, most teach introductory classes. Go take one. Grab a friend if you need to, but go sign up. In Seattle my class is with Unexpected Productions, but a decade ago I took it with Jet City Improv.
I’m 41 years old today and I never expected to live this long. Although I’ve spent more time in hospitals than I’d have liked, my lifespan expectations were not born from a specific reason. I simply recall as a teenager imagining the totality of my life and somehow those imaginations never got far past 30. There just didn’t seem anything beyond that point as far as I could tell. My horizon ended there and now to reach beyond it is a pleasant surprise.
I don’t know why but as I’ve entered middle age I’m filled with giddiness. This all seems like a bonus round. I have my health and some of my sanity left. I say some, as I find most of adult life comically absurd. Voltaire wrote that “God is a comedian playing to an audience afraid to laugh” and I don’t seem to have much fear in that regard. Here in the first world we are so lost in distraction and pretense that taking most of what goes on at face value is something I’ve long shed from my experience of life.
7 months ago I tore my achilles tendon, but yesterday, after months of physical therapy, I was able to play basketball again for the first time. It’s a miracle of modern medicine I can walk without a cane, but to play is magical. And it’s magic purely for me. No one on the court knew my story. Kids half my age just saw me smiling and had no idea why. And I find myself seeking others who have similar smiles, a smile they don’t need to explain, a smile unhinged from the weather, or a job, or other trivia, a smile from somewhere deep inside that reflects their appreciation for the amazingness of ordinary things. Being alive, compared to the alternative, makes everything extraordinary.
And having lived beneath my means, provided I don’t do anything impressively stupid, I should be able to spend the better part of my remaining years doing what I’ve been doing for the last ten: living the life of a writer. I’ve made many sacrifices to get here, but it has held the deepest meaning for me to try and fill that shelf. I’m doing everything I can to make this dream last as long as I do. And I hope you’ll continue to help that dream simply by reading and following along.
Many people my age or older half-joke about wishing to be younger. Wishing to be young is a coward’s wish. People who wish to be younger would squander that miracle. They’re wasting the time they have now pretending they’d make better use of a different now. My soul fades in these conversations, as the souls of these people are already dead. They’ve buried their dreams under so many copouts they can’t tell the difference. I used to make the arguments, but I’ve learned they don’t want to hear them. They prefer the certainty of a fantasy, to the uncertainty of living fully in the present. The same cowardice that failed them the first time around would only fail them again if they had a second chance. And as I age I wonder: how am I still a coward? What would I do if I had the courage? Getting older makes me more courageous as I have far less to lose. Courage is far scarcer and more important than youth, and the upside is you can always grow more courageous, at any time, at any age.
America has a youth obsessed culture, but I’m slowly taking arms against it. The longer I’m alive the further I’ll be on creakier end of the bell curve of age, and I better get used to it. I’ve learned to be comfortable as the oldest person at the table now. I can learn as much from younger people as they can from someone older. I’m fascinated by young adults, old enough to be on their own but young enough to passionately chase their sky high ambitions.
I don’t envy their age, as they have so much to learn about what they want from life, but I’m drawn to their openness to the present. They make big bets on life, bets people my age are terrified of making, and maybe always were. But I have many big bets I still want to make. We are social creatures and behave like those we choose to be around, and I’m thinking I don’t want to act my age. I don’t want to hang out with my ‘peer’ group. The peers of my soul are not the peers of my generation. I find my mentality, despite my age, is far younger than my body and I hope it stays that way forever.
I wrote recently about whether a college degree is worth the expense, and when I heard about Kio Stark’s new book called Don’t Go Back To School: A Handbook For Learning Anything, I was intrigued. I asked her for a copy in exchange for consideration for writing a review, and here we are. It’s a good book, I read it quickly, and if you don’t know where to start in seeking your own education start here.
From the title I expected either a manifesto or pragmatic guide to self learning, but that’s not the case. The book centers on interviews with successful individuals who achieved success without following traditional paths. Although I easily read the entire book and recommend it, it’s an oddly shaped reading experience, where the introduction read more to me like a closing summational chapter. Although the book closes with a chapter of tactics and resources, and some interviews provide tips, the book itself is more inspirational than pragmatic.
There are some excellent interviews (Norton, Doctorow, Taylor) but some wander too deeply into personal histories and career specific advice, away from the book’s ambition (Cory Doctorow‘s interview felt as if it were repurposed as he talks more about writing than anything else). Unlike Founders at Work, where the interviews stand alone, or even What Should I Do With My Life?, where the author weaved the stories together, Don’t Go Back to School sits in the middle in structure. It took until I reached the 4th or 5th interview that I settled in to the frame and tone of the book. I’d almost recommend reading the interviews first, and the introduction and closing references last.
And yet one of my favorite lines in the book comes from Stark’s introduction:
A gracefully executed quit is a beautiful thing, opening up more doors than it closes
She also clarifies common strategies her interviewees shared:
And Stark takes to task the often sited data about the value of a college degree:
…as a historical trend, people with college or graduate degrees have higher lifetime earnings… the problem is that this statistic is based on long-term data, gathere from a period of mderate loan debt. easy employability and annual increases in the value of a college degree.
Quinn Norton (Journalist):
To this day, lectures are one of the best ways I can learn things, now on my iPod. To really get it, I listen to the same lecture back to back, twice…
I was a very odd teacher… I hated grading. I remember standing up in front of them and telling them grades don’t matter… One of them raised their hand and asked, “Well then Ms. Norton, what matters?” I told them what you learn matters. The skills that you get are useful. Not the grade you get. They were aghast.
Dorian Taylor (Programmer):
At my present age of 33, I suspect I could get into any institution that would take my money. But I couldn’t tell you why I’d go.
Molly Crabapple (Artist):
If you go to a rich people school, in any major, you will get a network of rich people. If you go to a poor people school, you won’t get a network of anyone. I totally understand why people go to Ivy League schools, so that they’ll meet the future power brokers of the world. I just never had the grades or the money for that, so it wasn’t an option for me. I made my own way. I network with people who are outside my field – journalists, writers, performers – and I look for every opportunity in the entire world where there is a blank wall and I can put my work on it.
Christopher Bathgate (Sculptor):
Getting stuck for me has been one of my best teachers. It has taught me the huge difference between just knowing the answer, and knowing how to find the answer
Pablos Holman (Hacker):
A lot of the people I think of as being most capable and accomplished are those that dropped out of college and learned what they do on the job. Learning that way gives you a sense of responsibility and a sense of ownership of your skills and knowledge in a way that a degree doesn’t. You get a degree and it’s an external authority saying you know what you’re doing. The degree abstracts responsibility for learning and the knowledge you have.
Zach Booth Simpson (Researcher):
Don’t bother getting an education: just hang with smart people and ask good questions.
The book is excellent for people who want to break free, and need to connect with stories of those who have done it. Most of the interviews are with independent, freelancer, entrepreneurial professionals and their stories will have the most appeal for those dreaming about similar paths (as opposed to those who dream about middle management and want to get there without going to college).
You can get the book here Don’t Go Back to School.
A recent post called The Surest way to build a billion dollar company by James Slavet tries to look at data from the past to explain a plan for how to be a billion dollar company (And thankfully he never uses the i-word once). If you like his premise it’s a well written article with insights into how companies have achieved this in history:
The first observation in looking at billion-dollar consumer Internet companies is that there aren’t a lot of them. We’re approaching the twenty-year mark of the commercial Internet. Amazon and Yahoo were both founded in 1994. Yet from a recent scan of the public markets, there are currently only twenty-four publicly held U.S. based Internet companies that are worth $1 billion or more. That’s about one company per year for the past twenty years…
A full two-thirds of the 24 publicly traded U.S. Internet companies worth more than $1 billion are digital transaction firms. The billion-dollar club includes a heavy dose of travel, local and real estate businesses. The list includes Priceline, Expedia, TripAdvisor, HomeAway, Groupon, OpenTable, Yelp and Zillow. Other transaction-focused businesses that clear the threshold include Amazon, Ebay, Netflix, Vistaprint, Shutterfly, Ancestry, Bankrate and IAC/Match.com.
But there are fallacies lurking in the premise.
You can read Slavet’s article here: The Surest Way To Build A Billion-Dollar Internet Company | LinkedIn.
Stacey Hanke asked on twitter:
Why is it that when I ask for feedback, it’s never constructive. It’s always vague “good job, nice work.” What does it take to get thorough feedback?
Giving feedback is risky. Most people don’t want to hurt other people’s feelings. They’ve learned many people are just fishing for praise when they ask for feedback, so that’s what they provide.
Some people are more honest with feedback than others. Seek them out. And it’s up to you to cultivate trust with someone to get to the point where they feel safe enough to give you honest criticism. Consider the cliche “do I look good in this bathing suit?” who answers this with complete honesty? It’s typically people who know you well enough to know that you want to hear the truth and will appreciate it. It takes time for that kind of relationship to develop.
There are five ways to improve the quality of feedback you get:
Also see:
I’ll be updating this post with notes from each speaker – Rules: I will revise and update all day long, cleaning up links and sloppy grammar.
This is now the edited version of my notes from TedXDePaul 2013, held Saturday April 6th at the Museum of Contemporary Art, hosted by Daniel Gurevich and Matt Helbig.
The day opened with brief comments from Daniel about how there are two kinds of people: creators and curators, which would be the two themes for the day. He spoke for just a minute, and then an unnamed warm up team from Second City Improv, Scott Goerhing and Kaitlyn Skully, came out. They were unexpected and excellent. Dan’s opening was by comparison short and cold, as commentary from hosts often is, but Goerhing and Skully charmed their way through introducing speakers, making safe jokes at the speakers expense (asking if I was behind the fashionable Birkin bag), warming up the crowd. An unexpectedly good choice of curation. They never outwore their welcome, and added warmth and humor to the entire day.
He briefly described his work and blog. He expressed that photography is a quiet act and its a surprise to go out and talk to large groups like this. He grew up by reading fashion magazines, which he thinks trained his eyes for how to see. At first I was concerned he was simply going to talk through his personal history, but listening to him explain why certain photographs were meaningful for him was fascinating. It’s hard to capture in notes here how much value there is in a generous expert honestly talking through work they admire.
When he moved to Brooklyn as a young man from Indiana, he didn’t know anyone. Walking on Atlantic avenue, he saw a postcard of a couple on a boat and it moved him. It had an emotional effect. The first real photographic images he bought. He talked through a series of images and what they meant to him. He likes to think his images start a story. Good photographs don’t tell you everything.
Photographs lose their initial meaning over time. They are taken in one context for one reason, but live on, and take on meanings, often superficial ones, by those who come later who do not know the context.
It was hard to catch the names of all the photographers he mentioned. They included Bresson, Bruce Davidson, Helen Levitt, Lartigue, Slim Aarons, Edward Weston (whose diary he referenced) and several others.
“The truth of a photograph is less interesting than the romance… allowing the romance is sometimes the most interesting part [as a photographer]”
He told a story of following a young woman on a bicycle, while on a bicycle, trying to time it right to take a good picture. And he worked hard to find the right angle and exposure, while moving. And later he realized a detail he’d missed: she had a metal right leg. A powerful detail that was entirely circumstance.
He wonders what photograph wil mean with digital photography and tumblrs, and the digital natives who don’t know what photography used to mean as an expensive, physical object, rather than cheap, easy, fast digital photography. Images on the internet are so easy to share that it makes the images themselves mean something else. He thinks it’s fascinating, unlike photographers of the past, that modern photographers can capture in the present, and 5 and 100 years from now, what people in any moment though of a particular photograph.
Aye gave the history of his work as designer working with the CTA (Chicago Transportation Authority) and other projects.
Transportation is the interaction of people’s choice and government. Includng tensions. The CTA has anxiety and a history of animosity between transportation users and employers “we’d have a great service if [it] weren’t for all those people”. In this sense The CTA’s main focus is to logistical expertise. They’re similar to FedEx – except these packages contain people. But as a designer, Aye was interested in the experience of being inside those packages.
After 11 months leadership changed at CTA, support for a designer (or for Aye) diminished, and he was fired. Now he’s a professor and wants to use what he learned to teach designers are everyone from the challenges he encountered. He created GGS to answer the question how can we help? And they realized what they needed was a ‘new model for public engagement.’ A new way for people to access the information and services CTA(?) already have.
Initially he resisted crowd sourcing, but realized there was a role for all kinds of research, including the messy, unfiltered elements of involving many people. He used his frameworks from being a teacher to consider the entire problem different: the city is a classroom. Which led to a new term: public design team. “Everyone of you in this room has a slightly different perspective on transit” and the spirt was to be open about finding ways to incorporate many of those views into the process.
Which led to…. a mobile app. To help people navigate the city. They launched a public kick starter campaign, which was terrifying. They set a goal of $125k, but only got $23k. Which was devastating.”After crying myself to sleep… he realized they were free from all of the expectations.. it didn’t matter if they screwed up again since they’d failed so largely before”
“Succcess hides learning” he realized. And what he’d learned was the project was much to complicated. They needed to simplify.
They developed three principles:
I had to prepare for my own talk and sadly didn’t take notes for Capron’s talk. If someone else took notes please leave a comment with a link.
I talked about the wide gap between consuming information about creativity and actually making things yourself. To make good things demands connecting with yourself, your soul, and the voice inside you that you have to work to hear. I referred to the film The Mystery of Picasso.
A Sketchnote of my talk is here (made by Alexis Finch).
Elaine is an art director, involved with a group of female creatives called Quite Strong.
She opened by talking about advertising, and showed a short film by Gene Kilborn [killing us softly] about gender bias in ads:
She studied women’s studies in school, and marketing and advertising and thought “what a bunch of assholes…[advertisers] ruining everything”. Apparently beer ads are known as being the most evil. But there is still room for good work: Budweiser did an add with the bottle cap as a crown. Compelling, simple and without any cultural issues.
She decided “I am going to change this industry from the inside”. On an early photo shoot she managed to hire a size 14 model, something unheard of – but they resized her in post production. She also worked on beer ads for Coors (w/Ice Cube).
She helped create Lustlist – a curated list of female talent they admire. Artists, directors, etc. to highlight their work and a place for advice for female creatives. In the beginning all they had was each other for confidence, but soon we were asked to speak at events. At the first of 2o speakers, 2.5 were women. Design conferences are better. But she noticed men speak differently and more egotistically, but that in some ways she admired that style: “hey what’s up, here’s my work, it’s cool, I get paid a lot of money for it… {mic drop}”. Women tend to focus too much on other people and the community rather than themselves.
6 out of 20 of top 20 are women on top ted talks. For the “Most Persuasive” top 20 list it was all men except one, where ironically the woman was speaking about women representing women in media. She joked it’s called TEDx, non TINAx or TabithaX.
With some colleagues she created the Moxie conference, with the tagline “Make that cheddar (money). Look good doing it.”
She was honest in saying “What merit did we have to throw a conference? We had no merit. But we wanted to practice what we preach” It was a success, and 40% of attendees were male, which they were proud of: their agenda wasn’t too big to include everyone willing to participate.
Question to ask when making work:
“it’s either you [in the TED audience] or the people posting youtube comments, and they’re not stopping any time soon”
Kadavy is a designer and talked primarily about design literacy. He offered that when people across the web get angry about something it’s the sign of something big. He told the story of the origins of ComicSans font. It goes back to 1994 during planning for Microsoft’s Windows 95 launch. Microsoft Bob, a product in development at the time, had a talking dog as part of the UI. Vincent Connare, a type designer at Microsoft recognized the font the dog talked in, Times Roman, was out of context and a mistake. A cartoon dog should talk in a cartoon font. He went and created Comic Sans font. But it turned out to be too late to change Bob. Comic sans shipped in Windows 95 anyway and has been (ab)used ever since.
Connare never intended the font to be used as it has. For every 1000 people who say CS should never be used, there’s one guy who uses it anyway and says “I don’t care what you think” and anyway it’s just a font. Computers have granted everyone the power to be designers for better and worse. Connare was a craftsman. He’s emabarassed that his career is associated with this font, used in ways he never anticipated. Each of us is a craftsperson and can make things for others to see.
More people search for “comic sans hate” every year. [I wondered if more people do more searches every year]
Guttenberg, who made Europe’s first movable type printing press, made it possible to take an idea from one brain and give it to something else. In other words printing and publishing networked people’s brains.
Two big obstacles:
He created an unnamed site that failed and then started redditgifts without co-ordinating with reddit. He was a reddit user and knew their inside jokes. He’d also been involved in one of the early kickstarter campaigns, based on the Jetblue travel challenge, in 2009 (Fly for 30 days, up to 15 cities, for $600). Two people did it and blogged about it. This led to an idea for something related to reddit – gifting to strangers (aka secret santa).
Their first rule for people who signed up was: Don’t be a dick. Since this involved strangers, the internet and sending things, they feared people who send gag or mean things. They built a very simple website that didn’t do much. That first Christmas in 2009 4380 participants in 52 countries participated. It was awesome for him, but super scary for many reasons. Now that it worked, they’d need to build out the site to cover:
They wanted to make it easier to “friend stalk” participants so a stranger could learn enough about them to send a really good gift.
Beyond the tech challenge, wondered if people would abuse it and send garbage? it was scary and Exciting. The First gift sent was copy of the game Half Life 2. The next gift Dan mentioned was called Package required surgery (photo here)– they packed a set of gifts, based on research of that stranger, and stuffed them in a stuffed shark. “We put your present in the shark you are going to have to do surgery to get your gifts out”. The person who received it brought it full circle: and took photos as if it were real surgery. Other gifrst includes $1500 in cash. Hand paintings. Amazing – was famous on the web.
[He showed many great photos of gifts and the responses from the recipients. I’ll try to dig some up later online if I can]
They wondered Was it just Christmas? Or could we do this around a day of our own invention? They tried another day. Named: Arbitrary day.
2010 – signups quadrupled. Showed picture of crazy portraits (found their picture and painted them a portrait).
2011 – Jimmy Fallon participated as did Stephen Colbert. $1million in gifts to strangers were sent. Someone sent a case of live crabs to eat and the receiver posted as a joke “I got crabs from an internet stranger.” They did another version for U.S. troops and another that worked one-way (not reciprocated).
2012 – even bigger – $2 million, 127 countries
WHY? Is it working? Why does it grow? He saw a recent TED talk about using money to buy happiness, it can help but you have to spend it on strangers. That’s basically what redditgift is to him, this idea improved and amplified by the web.
He’s an artist in what is sometimes called Glitch art, where something that is commonly called ‘broken’, like a blinking street light, or a tv that only plays static, is recontextualized into another creation and used for another purpose. He believes glitches are powerful because they break us out of the context of being a consumer: What’s wrong? Is it my tv? my web connection? The software? We pay attention and the illusion the maker tried to create is broken. All systems are unstable and messy if you pay attention, just like we [as human beings] are.
Glitch safari: looking for glitches in different mediums and places. Referring to updating software: “My art sometimes breaks when things get fixed.” When stuff stops working the way I want [due to upgrades and such], it forces me to make new work.
His work is often called Brikolage, working with curating found objects. He looks at something like Word, the Microsoft application, is a collection of sounds, scripts, icons and code, and to him all of this is fair game. [And showed video of one of his works based on Word – I couldn’t find it but here’s a similar one called Windows Rainbows and Dinosaurs].
He referred to the book The Language of new media: “modularity is one of the modes of new media.”
Satromizer – iPhone app for glitching he made with a collaborator.
Glitches are more than a stunt: but a philosophy of creation and awareness. Glitches offer us a chance to see things we depend on and forget about differently. He invites us to take a moment when we encounter them and consider what it means.
She asked the audience to think about a social problem that requires a community to solve.
She studied at Xavier and was interested in community building. Went door to door in Cincinnati to ask about what they liked and disliked about their neighborhood. She heard 6 people tell her they wanted a speed bump, to protect their children. They were surprised many people had the same issue. She brought it through the right government channels, and made it happen. And this inspired her to do even more.
She worked on the campaign, and after they won South Carolina Primary the campaign was broader, and she was interested in using online tools. Rather than go door to doo she found MYBO which was pivotal in the campaign.
She continued doing online community and found the switch from offline to on was very similar She never imagined the internet would be central to her work, but it’s not surprising now. These were people who cared and the task was to help them relate to each other: organizing.
Discovered subject lines with the most casual subjects did best. They were treating the recipients as people (She joked “Sorry for all the emails (not really) but thanks for all the action”).
In 5 weeks someone who joined rose form being an unknown local volunteer rose to play a key role in the Ohio campaign. [I think her point was the online tool created local engagement that would have been unlikely without it].
Always have to meet people where they are. Not on obama.com, but on reddit. Many people don’t self select to join a community. But Reddit was a risky place to be (as a president). 30k people registered in one day, their highest spike in the campaign until near the end.
Modern Americans are hard to reach by phone. They move, they don’t answer cell calls to numbers they don’t know. But 85% of unreachable people can be reached online, through facebook, through their friends. Friends as messengers is the most powerful way.
If you are an organizer, you are not the best representative to get the people you don’t have already. Your friends or subordinates might be, but you definitely are not.
The internet is not a holy grail: it’s just a tool. Use it to build relationships.
[He arrived late and apologized for being dressed casually: he was in a bike race. He was slated for 5:30 and luckily didn’t need to go on until 6:00, which he joked about a bit. He carried all this well and got laughs but it was disrespectful on principle]
His company started as a small coffee roaster, now has coffee bars across the U.S. and 1000 wholesaler accounts, and buy from 20 counties, paying above fair trade values.
What’s required to build a great brand?
He talked about how bike races don’t need to talk or make excuses. Great brands also stand on their own, with little artifice [which didn’t jive to me with him being cavalier about being late].
For years I’ve studied use and abuse of the word innovation. In the business world, it’s often used as a empty filler word, without meaningful intent. You can test this by simply asking someone using the word: what does innovation mean? Rarely will they have an answer, which is a good sign it has become a nonsense word. I’ve complained about this, which leads to people ask me to do more than complain, and to offer a definition.
I generally recommend people don’t use the word at all when working. Use more thoughtful words instead. Most importantly, simply dedicate yourself to solving problems. It’s solving problems that matters. Instead of saying “our goal is innovation”, which is vague, say “our goal is to solve THIS problem for THESE people”, or admit that your first aim is to decide which problems you’re going to solve and for whom.
If you must use the word, here is the best definition: Innovation is significant positive change. It’s a result. It’s an outcome. It’s something you work towards achieving on a project. If you are successful at solving important problems, peers you respect will call your work innovative and you an innovator. Let them choose the word.
This is a high bar, and it should be. To call every change you make in your work an innovation belittles the possible scale of progress. The act of creating something, even if it solves a problem, should perhaps still not be considered an innovation until it is adopted by other people (see Innovation vs. Invention). Until then, it’s just an invention with the potential to be an innovation. If you are an engineer, a designer or a start-up founder, inventing things is simply your job.
What does significant mean? I’d start with the invention of the light bulb, constitutional governments, wireless radio and the Internet. Perhaps you could say significant is a 30% or more improvement in something, like the speed of an engine or the power of a battery. If you know the history of your profession you know the big positive changes people made over the last 50 years, giving you perspective on the scale of brilliance you need to have to be worthy of that word.
But if you use word lightly, or frequently, you show hubris in the present and ignorance of the past. Sayings like “we innovate every day”, “chief innovator” or “innovation pipeline” are inflations. They’re popular, but misguided. Calling a thing an innovation doesn’t make it so. It’s just a word and words are free to be abused. If you think about it, it’s easy to separate mere improvements from something worthy of grander praise.
The best thing to ask anyone who uses the word innovation is: what do you mean when you say that?
Most of the time people have no idea what they mean (or realize they really just mean one of these). And once they admit this, that’s when you offer the definition above.
[Note: I can’t claim that I came up with this definition. I’ve read dozens of books on the history of invention and progress that influenced me before ever realizing an improved definition was necessary. Suggested sources are welcome.]
Clay Hebert recently posted on the The Best Conference Hack, which is simply sitting in the front.
As a frequent speaker I like Clay’s advice. For speakers the empty front row is mysterious and frustrating. Speakers make a huge commitment, yet audiences who have little at stake show their lack of faith by staying back. Unlike a rock concert, somehow the 5th row is more desirable than the 1st.
I think better advice than Clay’s is to participate and speak about something. Many conferences offer Ignite or lightning talks, allowing many attendees to share their voice. This is by far the best conference hack: participate. It puts you in the middle of things. Volunteering has similar benefits without the stress.
But the surprise is, when I’m an attendee I don’t listen to all the speakers.
Sometimes I barely go in the session rooms.
Everyone has different learning preferences, and I know mine: I find it hard to listen to lectures, but I’m a tremendous reader. Unless the speaker is very good, which is rare, I’m better off reading their book or their blog which I can do at my own pace. As I wrote about in Confessions of a Public Speaker, lectures were never a good way to learn skills. They’re passive, non-interactive and rarely performed by people good at lecturing. I know it’s ironic that I have a low tolerance for lectures as I make a living giving them.
Conferences are a compromise: you get access to popular experts, but it’s broadcast access. This is a good deal if it’s your only option or your learning style matches what you get at the conference. But for me it’s conversations, which are two way, that I learn the most from. Conferences use speakers as MacGuffins, drawing attendees to come, but often the “side stuff” has the highest payoff.
Typically at events I do the following:
But this is merely what I do. Unless your learning preferences match mine, don’t do these things.
If you don’t know how you learn best, experiment. Go to different kinds of events that offer different experiences. Better events invest in different kinds of learning, with things in the hall for people like me, and well prepared speakers worthy of all the attention the front row can give them.
In making the mega list of 177 innovation myths, I hoped the hours it took to research would pay off in others building on it. Designer Stefan Klocek was first by inverting all the myths as an experiment, creating a list of 177 innovation truths.
Of course semantic inversions don’t always work, but some are interesting especially when compared together:
See the entire list here.
I’ve read the Great Gatsby more than a dozen times. It’s a reference book for me, in that I find I experience the book differently each time I read it. Many people are surprised to learn the book was headed for obscurity until it was chosen as a free book for soldiers during WWII. It was twenty years after its publication in 1925 that it first became a classic. Fitzgerald died in 1940 thinking himself a failure and that his work wouldn’t be remembered. How wrong he was.
As a story outline, The Great Gatsby is simple. There’s nothing that fancy or elaborate going on. It’s a writer’s book in a way, since it’s so simple and in many way obvious, yet works so wonderfully well. It’s constructed as a series of slow burning time bombs that make you simultaneously want them to both go off to relieve the pressure, but not go off, so you can enjoy the way things are slowly unraveling for as long as possible. It’s irresistible as a writer to want to take it apart and see how it works.
What makes the book sing is the first person narration, and how easy Fitzgerald makes it seem to blend internal thoughts with plotting, dialog and observation. He jumps though time and perspective but always makes you, as the reader, feel well cared for by the soft cushion of his narrative powers.
But there are moments that don’t age well: scenes of racism, which, on afterthought, were probably appropriate for 1920s America (and perhaps part of the commentary he was making about society. It’s hard to tell at times what he is criticizing and what he’s simply observing). Some manners of speech feel staged, but not having been born until 50 years after it was written it’s hard to argue whether he got it right or wrong. But none of those complaints stand in the way of what has always been a deeply worthwhile, and easy read.
Some choice non-spoiler quotes from the book:
It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced — or seemed to face — the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished
Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.
No — Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and shortwinded elations of men.
Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.
The little dog was sitting on the table looking with blind eyes through the smoke, and from time to time groaning faintly. People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away. Some time toward midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood face to face, discussing in impassioned voices…
When I saw the latest film version of The Great Gatsby (directed by Baz Luhrmann, of Moulin Rouge fame), I was disappointed and delighted. Baz’s style fits his name, and the movie is grand, dramatic, over the top and nearly absurd, but also beautiful, shocking and intense. It seemed Baz didn’t see the film as a tragic commentary on the misguided capitalistic dream, or at least not enough to prevent the dance numbers and special effects to often take center stage. The revival of Gatsby parties seemed to have missed the point of who Gatsby was.
I’d always thought of the story as more smoldering than explosive, and more lyrical than confrontational. I still prefer the 1974 Redford version of the film, which was more stayed and placed a bigger bet on the strength of the story than on visual storytelling itself. Gatsby is meant to be a sad enigma, and it’s Carraway (played best by Sam Waterston) who has the burden of framing him for us. In the end, the most successful, best looking person in the story is the opposite of what he seems, yet it’s so easy to get lost along the way that this is what the story is truly about. Perhaps Fitzgerald was too soft in his telling of the story, as far too many people take other things away from it.
[updated 4-10-2016]
The term Myths of Innovation has become popular on the web, but few articles on the subject link to each other. I wrote the bestselling book, The Myths of Innovation some time ago, but still new articles appear without a single reference to any sources at all. Somehow in all this “innovation” we’ve forgotten basic useful inventions like web searches, links and footnotes to credit what others have done.
On this page I’ve compiled the definitive list of Innovation Myths, referencing every use of the term I’ve been able to find. Many of these articles are broadly written: not based on research into specific legends and inventions. However my hope is providing one place to review and compare popular misconceptions about the subject will help all of us move forward in our thinking.
I came up with the term independently in April of 2002 for a lecture at Microsoft that eventually became the book. I hadn’t heard the term before but in compiling this post the earliest use I found was the 2001 post by Veitch, below.
Also see the companion list: the 177 truths of innovation.
1/31/2001 Innovation Myths, Open Future, John Veitch
6/30/2002, Innovation Survey, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Frank Milton (pub date unverified)
9/24/2004, The Seven Myths of Innovation, Financial Times, Sawhney/Wolcott
12/1/2004, 6 Myths of Creativity, Fast Company, Bill Breen
12/2005, Innovation myths, Innovate on Purpose, Jeffrey Phillips
2/2006, Excerpt From Innovation Handbook: A Roadmap to Disruptive Growth, Clayton Christensen/Scott Anthony
2/3/2006, Top Ten Innovation Myths, Geoffrey Moore
6/13/2006, The Myths About Innovation, The Straits Times, Atul Mathur
6/06/2006, Five Innovation Myths, McKinney / Jim McNerney
5/2007, The Myths of Innovation (the book) – revised 2010, O’Reilly Media, Scott Berkun
12/10/2008, Myths of Innovation, Industry Week, Jill Jusko
7/16/08, Seven Myths of Innovation, CyberJournalist
4/09, Four Dangerous Myths, American Management Association, Paddy Miller, Spring 2009
6/29/09, Six Myths of Innovation, CIO Insight, Samuel Greengard
2/22/2010, Five Damaging Myths about Innovation, Biznik, Jeanne Yocum
12/16/10, The 5 Myths of Innovation, Sloan Review MIT (Julian Birkinshaw, Cyril Bouquet and J.-L. Barsoux)
7/20/2010, 4 Myths that get in the way of Innovation, CBS, Margaret Heffernan
9/14/2010, Beware of these Ten Myths about Innovation Business Insider, Martin Zwilling
3/2011, The 7 Common Myths of Innovation, CEO Refresher, George Chen Ian Pallister
4/8/2011, Dispelling the Myths about Innovation, Formico, Peter Boggis
10/2011, The Innovation Myths, Harvard Business, Scott Anthony
10/28/2011, Myths and realities about Innovation, CNBC, Benjamin Hallen
5/12/2011, 10 Myths of Innovation, Jon Gatrell
8/4/2011, Bust Your Innovation Myths, Art Markman
9/8/2011, Debunking the Myths of Innovation, Jim Stikeleather, Dell
10/24/2011, Innovation is About Execution, Despite the Myths, Forbes, Martin Zwilling
11/3/2011, Three Myths about Innovation, Jim Stikeleather
12/19/2011, Relentless Innovation – Debunking the Myths, U. of Texas, Jeffrey Phillips
2/24/2011, 5 Myths of Innovation, Haydn Shaugnessy, Forbes
1/4/2012, The Myths of Innovation, James Gardner, Computer Weekly
2/7/2012, Debunking 4 myths of innovation, FastCoDesign, Jeffrey Phillips
2/12/2012, Five Myths of Innovation, Gartner.com
2/20/2013, 7 Myths of Innovation, Fast Bridge
4/2/2013 (From the future!), 5 Innovation Myths Busted, Flanders, Vladimir Blagojevic
12/5/2015, 6 Myths About Innovation, Stephanie Vozza @ Fast Company
I used a series of Google, Yahoo and Bing searches, focusing on different date ranges and permutations on “Myths of Innovation”. Search engines are better in some ways than when I wrote the book, as more data is now available on the web. I prioritized articles, posts or presentations that used the words Myth and Innovation somewhere in the title, including some that used the terms Myths and Creativity.
Many posts I found are cross-references of the same links, with interviews with authors of books/posts about myths they’d written about elsewhere and I only listed each list once. If you find other items I should add, please leave a comment.
Thanks to everyone who spread the word about the free download of my book Mindfire.
As of this moment the free download is up, but I’ll be shutting it down shortly.
In case you are curious here are the resulting numbers:
It was a great success, especially for a book that has been out for a year.
I’m grateful for your support and I’ll get back to work on the next book.
A few weeks ago you voted on the title for my next book. Thanks to your help that decision has been made:
The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work.
The book follows the behind the scenes story of my year working for Automattic, Inc, the makers of WordPress.com and what I learned from working in a 100% remote based, email-free, open-source fueled working culture. It was a fascinating experience in many ways and the book teaches everything I learned about management, leadership, creativity and organizations.
I’ve been working with the folks at Jossey-Bass on the cover design. Here are 4 concepts – Which direction is best? Place you vote.
If you want to be notified when the book is on-sale and get access to exclusive content, sign up here.
The timeless patterns that explain how innovation happens, or more often doesn’t, are explained in the bestselling book I wrote called The Myths of Innovation. The way innovation is generally explained is flawed. We rely on legends and myths that sound inspiring but have little relation to the truth about how good ideas become real.
If you’re frustrated by how your organization kills good ideas, or relies on caution more than creativity despite the proclamations from leaders to innovate, this book will help you understand what’s really going on and why.
The stories and facts in the book are its greatest asset. You’ll gain the longest lasting tools for thinking clearly about innovation from the book itself.
To help as many people as possible get beyond the myths, they are summarized here. The book was heavily researched with 100s of footnotes and references, but here’s the tightest summation:
If you liked this summary, please get the book. Over 100,000 people already have and the book has earned hundreds of excellent reviews. You’ll get detailed lessons and dozens of entertaining and inspiring stories based on well researched facts. It includes 4 chapters about how to apply everything you learn with a simple plan for the common challenges innovators face.
[Updated 7/7/13 – added link to Myth #3]
[Updated 10/11/19 – restated myths as declarative statements]
Last week I reviewed the book Why We Love Sociopaths: a guide to late capitalist television and I enjoyed it so much I asked the author, Adam Kotsko for an interview. To my delight he agreed.
SB: Your book elegantly frames why we’re attracted to TV shows involving sociopathic behavior. Do you have a theory about when television shifted from more balanced dramas to a world where many of the popular shows involve sociopathy? The Sopranos is often referenced as the show that changed television and (re)introduced moral ambiguity to popular television drama: do you agree?
AK: The Sopranos was definitely a turning point, but I think the ground was actually prepared by reality television. By their very nature, those shows are about scheming and backstabbing — and as interesting and daring as Sopranos is in a lot of ways, it’s fundamentally about just that type of “office politics”-style conflict (although “voting someone off the island” obviously takes a very different form). In terms of a cultural turning point, though, it’s harder to pinpoint. American culture has always been very individualistic, utilitarian, or — to put it bluntly — greedy, but popular culture has most often tended to try to provide some kind of moral veneer or cushion. In many cases that was hypocritical sentimentality, but I’m not sure that the more recent trend toward openly embracing selfishness is to be preferred simply because it’s “more honest” or something.
If I were held at gunpoint and forced to choose a cultural moment that opened up this possibility, though, I’d say it was the end of the Cold War. Suddenly America no longer had a transcendent mission, and it no longer had to pretend that capitalism was some kind of moral force for good against the unmitigated evil of communism. And I think it’s really telling that once another transcendent mission presented itself — in the form of our farcical overreaction to terrorism — the moral sense was totally and radically absent. We perceived ourselves as entitled to openly violate all norms of law and human rights for the sake of facing this “existential threat.” It was as though the nation as a whole was echoing the archetypal reality show contestant who declares, “I’m not here to make friends!”
SB. What motivated you to write this book? There are many popular criticisms of television as both a medium and for its content, but your approach was both novel, approachable and specific. Did you have a personal stake in trying to call attention to this trend?
AK: I did Awkwardness as a kind of experiment with a more popular form of writing. I did Sociopaths because I wanted to go further in that direction — my explicit academic trappings are much more subdued in the second book — and simply because I felt as though I had hit on an interesting cultural trend that no one else was really talking about as such. On a more personal level, I basically didn’t want to let my idea go to waste — and more broadly, I was attracted to the idea that I could “redeem” my time spent watching all these shows by putting that to work in my writing.
SB: Clearly you watched many of these shows. Were, or are you, a fan of any of them? Do you see dangers in enjoying shows centered on individuals with major psychological issues? (or, more broadly, do you believe television has a desensitizing impact on American culture (e.g. Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death)?)
It’s probably clear from the book that I’m a big fan of the Wire, which I perhaps spent more time on than is warranted by its popularity. I still watch Mad Men avidly, and I’ve picked up on other shows in the sociopath style — Boardwalk Empire, Justified, etc. I’ve winnowed my TV watching over the years, compared to my more omnivorous habits during graduate school, and so I probably would not have devoted as much time to something like Dexter or stuck with House as long as I did if I were starting them now.
On the issue of how these shows are affecting people, I’m less concerned about that than I am about the culture and institutions that shape them into the kind of person that identifies with the sociopathic social climber. There’s always going to be a certain fascination in the outlaw figure, but the systematic glorification of the sociopath betrays a deeply sick society in my opinion.
Whatever effect TV shows are having on people, I think that the way their workplaces and schools function has a much bigger impact — and both of those institutions are structured increasingly as an ongoing competition where loyalty or morality seems like a liability. If people who live every day in that kind of environment need to let off some steam by identifying with Tony Soprano for a couple hours, I don’t begrudge them.
——————–
If you watch television you should go read Why We Love Sociopaths: a guide to late capitalist television
