Author: Scott Berkun

How to make a good book from a blog

Posted on in Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

RR from the Reluctant Runner blog read my post on how to turn a blog into a book and asked:

Over the past two years I have written a light-hearted fitness blog specific to running. I am going to start turning it into a book. I am beginning the process of going back through my posts and searching in a “Table of Contents” type of manner, seeing what would fit…what won’t. My question is: How do you do to fill holes? I assume a book can’t just be post after post…but rather expand upon these posts as ideas and write and fill in around them?

Writing a book is one thing, writing a good book is something else. There’s no easy answer to your question as it’s very subjective.

It turns out you can just have the book be post after post. There are no laws against it. The Diary of Anne Frank, is effectively just post and after post and it’s one of the most popular books in the world. Montaigne, the dude who invented the essay, wrote  a book on intentionally unrelated topics, yet he’s quite popular.Then again, many books from blogs are heavily criticized for having the exact same format as Frank or Montaigne. The difference then is:

  • The quality of the writing in the posts
  • The order you put them in
  • How interested a reader is in subject you’ve written about

The best advice then is to go look at other books made from blogs and see how they deal with the problem. Some examples:

Another wise approach is to make a draft version of your book and ask friends or readers of your blog to read the draft. Ask specifically for feedback on discontinuity between sections, and suggestions for other topics they expected to see to help close the gaps.

When you find a gap, you have four choices:

  • Add a new post/chapter to fill the gap
  • Change the order of posts in the book
  • Remove a post from the book
  • Rewrite one or more of the posts to better fit together

Good books apply these four choices better than the bad ones. But with books there are no rules to follow. You as the author have to decide for yourself what you want your book to be. Good luck.

How much vacation would you take if you could?

Posted on in Management, Year Without Pantsby Scott Berkun

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a poll asking “If you had unlimited vacation, how much would you take? The results are shown below.

It’s a question of interest, since my next book is about WordPress.com where employees enjoy an open vacation policy.

Surprisingly almost half the respondents (46.4%) said 4-6 weeks. 17% said more than six weeks.

 

Read my related post exploring the question: Should Americans get more vacation?

Bob Ross, Picasso and Creativity

Posted on in art, Creative Thinkingby Scott Berkun

Growing up in NYC in the 1970s, with a mere 4 TV stations, any show in regular rotation on PBS was seen by millions. One show on PBS was called The Joy of Painting, staring Bob Ross, who was born 70 years ago today (and died in 1995 at 53).

I had no interest in painting or the arts, yet I’d seen his show many times. There was something about his goofy looks and quiet voice that made him easy to make fun of as a kid, and we did. But watching him now there was always an intensity about him. As silly as he seemed to me then, beneath the soft exterior he was deeply serious about the power of painting. He believed what he was doing had meaning and could be learned by others.

I see him now as an unexpected inspiration (Rick Steves is another one). Ross was the first person I’d ever seen paint. Few working artists let cameras watch them over their shoulder as they work. And although Ross’s work was often rote and predictable, he was open about his methods.  He believed in what he did enough to share what he knew and to teach as many people as he could. I don’t know many people who do or have done that.

Today as someone who writes about creativity I spend time studying how creatives do their work – until now I didn’t realize I’d seen countless examples of it as a child, thanks to Bob Ross, well before I’d even started looking.

One of his most popular sayings was ‘Beat the devil’ and here you can see him gleefully, and with just a hint of joyful madness, prep to do some work:

Later on I’d discover and be inspired by Picasso’s film, The Mystery of Picasso, where he lets the camera watch him work. Few artists have ever done anything like this:

Which would help inspire me to capture time-lapsed video of myself writing an essay:

 

Quote of the day

Posted on in quote of the xby Scott Berkun

This quote appears in chapter 2 of The Myths of Innovation:

“It used to be said that the facts speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue. The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context… a fact is like a sack – it won’t stand up until you put something in it.”

—E.H. Carr (From the excellent What is History?)

 

Why You Shouldn’t Trust Your Instincts

Posted on in Philosophyby Scott Berkun

Among the most annoying platitudes we have is the saying “Always trust your gut”, a reference to your deepest instincts. This is mostly bad advice and I will explain why.

  1. Our instincts (‘guts’) can say contradictory things. We often feel fear just before we do something we deeply desire, such as getting married, or interviewing for a job we really want. We can also feel great attraction to things that are bad for us (e.g. cheeseburgers and milkshakes). There is often no singular ‘instinct’ but a multitude of feelings that must be actively sorted out. Biologically there is little difference between fear and excitement, meaning it’s our psychology and attitude that has to sort out what our instincts trying to tell us. To be able to say “I’ve sorted through my instincts and here’s what I’ve decided” is a far better path towards good decisions.
  2. We don’t know ourselves that well. Why do you like your favorite food but not the same ones your friends do? Why are you attracted to certain people but not others? Why do you make the same mistakes again and again? Most people are not aware of their instincts, or even why they make most of the decisions they do. You can’t trust your instincts if you don’t know what your instincts are trying to tell you. Some people know themselves better than others and have better reasons for trusting their instincts.
  3. Instincts are situation dependent. Depending on what happened to you yesterday, the way your instincts respond to what happens today will change. Instincts are not static. We are heavily biased by recent events. The way we perceive threats and rewards changes. We are also prone to influence from people around us, and their behavior changes what our instincts tell us. We all have better and worse instincts for different types of situations, which means different instincts can help or hurt you depending on many factors.
  4. Some of our instincts are better trained than others. If you are a trained artist your eye has been coached through hours of practice to see things most people do not. Your instincts for composition, form, balance and style may be finely tuned, better than many of your other instincts. To trust your well trained instincts is one thing, to trust your untrained ones is another. The advice ‘trust your gut’ assumes all of your instincts are well trained, when the opposite is true.
  5. Good judgement comes from mistakes which comes from bad judgement (paraphrasing Will Rogers). To develop your instincts requires practice, which means making mistakes so you can learn from them. You need to experiment with trusting your judgement, but also not trusting your judgement, to get the experience needed for good judgement to grow. You need metainstincts – instincts about how to interpret your own instincts.
  6. Data trumps memory. We have poor retroactive memories. When we pick X, and we’re wrong, we’ll say “Damn! I knew I should have picked Y”. Really? Are you sure? If you didn’t write it down and capture your thinking before you made the decision, you are going to be biased in how you think about your thinking afterwards. For tough decisions we often change our minds many times, which makes retroactive doubt useless. Sure, at some point you were leaning towards Y, but that doesn’t teach you anything since tough decisions require exploring multiple options. Simply because the outcome wasn’t what you wanted doesn’t mean you made ‘a mistake’.
  7. You can succeed for the wrong reasons, and fail for the right ones. You can be correct in trusting your instincts, but due to forces out of your control, still fail. It’s also possible to ignore your instincts, and have everything work out great. A single trial is a shallow basis for evaluating anything. We have big egos and assume the outcomes for important things are entirely on our shoulders but that’s rarely true. Even worse, success hides more data than failure does. There are many very successful people who have no idea why they were successful, but don’t know that either and possibly never will.
  8. [Updated] – Our instincts are easy to manipulate. Advertisers, marketers and salesman play on specific instincts and try to convince us to use them to override our own good judgement.

Sometimes you should trust your instincts, but even when you do, that trust should be earned, and trusted differently based on your experience with the situation you are in.

What do your instincts say about this post? Leave a comment.

(This post inspired by a conversation with Paolo Malabuyo)

Notes from Failcon 2012 – part 2

Posted on in Generalby Scott Berkun

You can find Part 1 of my notes from Failcon 2012. Here’s part 2:

#5. Braden Kowitz, Google Ventures, Pianos, Battleships, and Sneakers: Stories about Design and Failure.

He gave an excellent talk, with many real examples of failures he’s had in design. Best talk I’ve seen so far today.

  • He told a story from early at Google where he spent 3 months trying to make a perfect design, not showing his sketches to anyone. He finally showed it, and it was so overdesigned no one could figure it out. Waiting to unveil design is a mistake – it’s not art, it’s something that’s supposed to do something.
  • Reading books has limited value at skills. He learned tech skills by reading books, and gaining confidence, but this doesn’t work for skill development. You have to practice piano, not read books about it.
  • Design is learning through doing. Many young designers believe they are their work, and if their design fails, they fail.
  • Best suggestion is to dive into project and find a ‘piano’ tutor. Someone who knows more about design than they do and show them the way.
  • Google chat: they had a design for chat they’d developed, but in the first user test it completely failed. They tried again, failed again. The Designers often feel horrible at this point – in fact Braden is on a current project where this is happening.
  • Design is subtle – no one could have predicted which final design would work.
  • Why is there so much failure? He compares design to the game of Battleship. You are forced to continually guess at what a good design is, and people are moving targets. Example: the pull-down metaphor on iPhones. Apple didn’t invent it, but in just a few years people’s expectations have changed. People are a moving target.
  • Design then is really about dealing with failure.
  • One day sprint: Schedule user study for end of the day, forced to test something fast. Was working so fast he was afraid it would fail.
  • “Even if you are good at design, even at something specific like button placement, you can be wrong many times.”
  • When you run away from failure as a designer, you get less and less feedback. Instead you should lean in to failure, because it makes the intervals of ignorance smaller.
  • Have a running buddy – someone who helps set you pace for feedback, and helps get you out there in the real world.

#6.  Mike Arsenault, Grasshopper, How Not to manage your product

Finally a solid case study structured talk about one specific startup, with specifics on key decisions, results and lessons. Bravo. Honest, smart and real. Well done. A model for future failcon talks.

  • His slides can be found here – they’re very good
  • Linear fallacy – most stories about sucess tell a linear story about how they became so successful. He showed a graph of his product trajectory, which was chaotic and far from a ‘hockey-stick’ [hockey sticks are incredibly abnormal and rare despite how much they are talked about]
  • Service was to help entrepreneurs find  other entrepreneurs.  Referral rates – earned $100k of referral revenue based on a referral form.
  • ‘How can we productized this?’ That was the goal for the spin off product: Spreadables.
  • Explainer video explained the purpose and vision.
  • Staffed team of 12 experienced people, 40k customers from original business, and $100k of income… which was all done smartly. WE STILL FAILED.
  • They launched in summer 2010 and shut down in spring 2011.
  • They benchmarked: customer lifeitme value, cost per acquisition, avg revenue per user, Churn. And more.
  • Why did it fail?
    • Churn was 3X (Not enough matching between customers they got, and the ones they wanted).
    • CPA was 3x higher than Grasshopper.
    • Organic search was very low (compared to Grasshopper). This meant customer acquisition
    • Customers needed high touch

Lessons

  • Wasted beta list. Let it sit dormant and cold. Should have kept it ‘warm’ so it was active and ready to be useful when launched.
  • Team was too big (Mythical Man Month). Bigger team made more politics and lower velocity. Big team encouraged wrong behavior (build more!) instead of (build the right thing!). He would have kept team smaller.
  • Didn’t charge for 6 months. This was a product for businesses, not consumers and who would pay would have been a useful forcing function, and better data on responses to change (If you do something dumb with a free service, they stay anyway).
  • When people are paying you, their feedback is more pointed and engaged.
  • Product > Marketing. We focused on marketing too much too early.
  • “If you are doing more than writing code and talking to users, you are probably wasting your time”
  • Sketchnotes of this talk

Sketchnotes from other talks I didn’t attend: