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?)
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.
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)
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.
#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.
Lessons
Sketchnotes from other talks I didn’t attend:
I presented at Failcon 2012 on The history of failing to learn from failure. You can grab the slides here. Thanks to failcon attendees for listening.
Summary: We stink at learning from history, our own or from others.
Here are my notes from Failcon 2012, a conference about learning from failure. You regular readers know I love to write and study failure (see what to do when things go wrong).
It’s hard to make an event about failure work as most people most of the time feel shame about failure, even though it’s an unavoidable part of success and learning. It’s a fantastic idea for an event and I’m glad it exists. I’m sure it’s much harder to get speakers to speak here than other events, despite the payoff for everyone being much higher. The event went well, although the quality and the nature of the talks varied widely.
I had the opportunity to speak in the morning about how to learn from failure, and took notes on every other talk I attended. Part 2 of my notes are here.
#1. Chip Conley, former CEO of Joie De Vivre Hotels, spoke about the role of emotions in failure and success. He didn’t linger much on the many failures of his life, as dramatic as they were, and moved on to suggestions for what he has learned.
Late in his career he felt like a prisoner in his own company. “I didn’t want to be CEO anymore”. He offered that personal crisis follows business crisis. Some of his friends that are entrepreneurs committed suicide, his son was put in prison, and he fainted on stage during a talk. He wrote his new book as a CEO who didn’t understand emotions and failure forced him to reevaluate.
He refered to Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning as a book that helped him.
#2: Suneel Gupta (GroupOn): The Case Against Someday.
I really wish he didn’t use Prezi. It didn’t help him at all. Some of his slides were unreadable too (low contrast text over background image = readability fail). He’s a fine speaker technically, but his material was a collection of tips and stories that needed more structure for me to follow. I had a hard time capturing his talk for that reason.
Thanks to all 524 people who voted. All the data is in. Here are the results.
Of the 341 people not currently working from home:
Of the total 524 respondents:
And some of you have magical powers:
Observations from the comments:
Thanks everyone.
The Brooklyn Bridge is one of my favorite buildings. I’ve studied its history and the story of how it was built is also a favorite.
Here’s a great quote from one of the bridge’s engineers:
Man is after all a finite being in capacities and powers of doing actual work. but when it comes to planning, one mind can in a few hours think out enough work to keep a thousand men employed for years. -Washington Roebling
Here’s an essay I wrote about design, engineering and the Brooklyn Bridge.
As part of research for my next book, I’m curious about general perceptions of working from home.
Assuming you could keep your same job and pay, would you work from home instead of working in an office?
Leave a comment about why you chose your answer.
Thanks for bearing with us. The new design is live and the basics are working.
It should look like this:
We’re working on fixing the twitter/fb/feed buttons, and the mailing list signup form.
If you find other issues, from broken links or things on fire (that shouldn’t be) please report them here. Thanks.
Known issues:
There is a self-awareness paradox. To become more self-aware you have to be self-aware enough to realize how self-aware you are not. It’s a bootstrapping problem. Unless something happens that forces you to realize how inaccurate your view of yourself is, you can go through life never even knowing who you are. A twitter conversation with Alyssa Fox reminded me of this challenge.
It’s funny how sci-fi movies like the Terminator center on the fear of computers becoming self-aware. It’d be bigger news if most people became self-aware. Most of us aren’t aware of ourselves at all. Just ask our neighbors, coworkers and spouses. We laugh at other people who seem unaware of their own nature yet magically believe we are immune.
We all tend to reject negative things we hear in favor of positive ones, even if the negative ones are more accurate. Learning about our blind spots, weaknesses or insecurities is emotionally difficult. For some people even reading about cognitive bias, which effects all of us, is shocking and demoralizing. Discovering limitations is in most people’s psychology a kind of failure rather than the beginning of greater awareness.
As children we develop ways to avoid uncomfortable situations and information, and it’s part of how we’re able to survive. But those patterns often grow too strong. It’s easy to blame other people, at least in our own minds, for many disappointments we experience in life that are our own fault. Anyone who offers the complete and difficult truth is easy to avoid in favor of those who tell us what we want to hear, even if it’s limited or untrue.
Of course some elements of self-awareness are positive. We all have the potential to do things we don’t think we can. Discovery requires risk and life provides chances for everyone to make their own positive discoveries. There are natural rewards for seeking those kinds of self awareness. It’s easier for people in our lives to reach out and tell us the good things about us we don’t notice, rather than the weak spots they bet we’re sensitive to and are therefore afraid to try and help us see.
There are many methods that can help an interested person in learning more about themselves:
Many of these are scary and for good reason as more self-awareness, for better and worse, awaits on the other side.
But for any of these to work requires you to want to be more self-aware. A teacher can only provide the opportunity, not the commitment. It’s easy to do any of these things without conviction. “Yes, I tried meditation. Didn’t work.” But why didn’t it work? That’s the question someone serious would ask. Or what does the teacher suggest might work? What if the thing you need to become aware of is that you give up too easily? How can you ever learn that if you don’t know it?
Even with persistence, it’s convenient to wait until the hard parts of an experience arises, right where a discovery is available to us, and reject it before we risk getting hurt. We’re great at inventing logical reasons to cover for the things we’re scared of. Fear is twice as powerful when we call it by other names.
Having spent many years in teaching roles I’ve experienced enough students who simply did not want to learn that I can’t put the burden on the teacher. Or perhaps I simply wasn’t a good enough teacher for them to want to learn? I have no doubt that’s true. But no teacher can reach every student.
Self-awareness, the trickiest thing to develop, is a paradox: to become more self-aware, you have to be aware enough about yourself to know you need to know yourself better. How can anyone possibly teach this to anyone else?
Do you think you are self-aware? Do you think self-awareness can be taught? How?
There are only 4 steps:
People tell me this is obvious. But it’s ok to be obvious. Knowing and doing are different. Many people know many obvious things they fail to try or do, despite their knowledge.
I’m often asked for advice about writing. My first question is always “how much do you write now?” If they say, “I don’t really,” I say “Go write something. Anything. Then get feedback on it from someone who knows more than you.” There’s often a look of surprise or fear as if to say “I have to actually do the thing?” They’re afraid to even try. Their ego has made doing even a small task very expensive, when it should be very cheap. Their expectations for their own work should naturally be low and useful feedback is easy to find. It’s their ego that’s in the way more than anything else.
If they tell me they’ve written, I ask them how they think they need to improve. If they don’t know, I tell them to get feedback from someone who sucks less than they do. None of this is complicated. It’s not even expensive. The problem is everyone wants to skip steps 1 through 4. No one in history has ever become good at something by skipping these steps, yet everyone wants to try.
Another good question is: how many hours are you willing to spend to become good? It won’t necessarily take 10,000 hours, as that number is mostly just satisfying to say. But it will take many hours. How many? Depends on how good you want to be, and how lucky you are.
For most skills you can do #2 and #3 on your own. Read your own writing. Watch a video of yourself speaking or playing basketball or whatever it is you want to get good at. If you have read good writing, and watched good speakers, you can easily identify your bad habits. A coach or a teacher can help you move through these steps faster, but you can do them on your own, for free, with enough courage and persistence, two things everyone knows about, but few people have.
(This post partially inspired by a chat with Eric Barker and an email from Maria Brophy)
Here’s the quote of the week:
We’re all going to die, all of us. What a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.
– Charles Bukowski
I have a fascination with religious history. It’s a fantastic lens on the history of civilization. I’ve never had much faith, but the history of it, and the details of various scriptures have held me fascinated for years. The way the roots of all religions wind together mythology, history, culture, selfishness, compassion, wisdom and ignorance is an amazing way to understand our species.
A few weeks ago I visited Israel. I spent three amazing days in Jerusalem. On returning, my passion for history was rekindled and many books I’ve read since I returned were about religion and religious history.
The prize gem of this research has been one book: Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths by Karen Armstrong. It focuses on religions that trace back to Abraham, so there is no coverage of Hinduism, Buddhism, or other beliefs, but many of the lessons I learned from Armstrong have clear applications to any system of belief. The book is short, powerful and well written.
The book uses the city of Jerusalem, a central place in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as the focal point for history of all three faiths. From the shift from paganism to early Judiasm of the Old testament, to the birth of Christ and the diaspora of the Jews, to the rise of Islam, and the centuries of fights over a very small piece of land, many of the questions you’ve had are answered here.
Armstrong focuses on history, not faith. She clearly has knowledge of all three religions, as those are discussed, but her intent is to provide a balanced view not dependent on a particular belief. The book has been criticized by some for it’s lack of balance, but I found her view, as someone with little at stake, impressively fair . Her main bias seems to be towards compassion and against violence, as she critiques everyone when they fall short of their own scripture in this regard.
Some of the facts I enjoyed most were:
I’ve always wished every citizen of the world had to take a short course in comparative religion. It would stop a lot of violence. This book would make a fantastic start. If you have any curiosity about the links between faiths, I highly recommend this book.
Recently my friend Jared Spool posted on twitter about why it’s wrong to give interview candidates design exercises:
Asking a candidate to perform a design exercise so you can “see how they handle the pressure” is unethical.
#DanceMonkeyDance @jmspool (#)
This split me right down the line.
First, I think most interviews are bullshit. There’s little evidence interviewing identifies better candidates than other methods do, it’s just one we are all familiar with, and it’s easy, so we do it. Any questioning of job interview practices makes me happy, since we put great faith in something we’ve never examined that is filled with bias. Some interviewers are sadists who never have to justify their cruelty since it’s never questioned.
The ideal way to hire is to use referrals and references of people you trust in your line of work to arrive at candidates. And then, to hire a candidate to do a small project for you where they can demonstrate their ability. That is the best interview in the universe since it is based on what they can actually do for you on real work, rather than an absurdly artificial interview loop of mostly cliche conversations. To do this requires more work and is less efficient, but I’m convinced the results are dramatically better.
However, assuming I’m required to interview candidates, there’s value in asking people to show their ability to do tasks I’m going to hire them to do. If they were a painter, I’d ask them to give their opinion of the paintings in my office. If they were a carpenter, I’d ask them to evaluate the furniture in the room. I’d pick something real, in the present, where their abilities and knowledge should apply, and get out of their way. “How would you make this better?” and hand them a whiteboard pen and step back. I’d want to see what questions they ask and what they know about what they need to know before they can design something. I can do this in a friendly way, and at natural points politely disagree with them, just as I would if we worked together.
The idea of “see how they handle the pressure” is a tricky one. Most work environments are not designed around designers. To be successful a designer needs to be willing and able to persuade, convince and persist in selling or defending ideas. While I’m not certain there is a reliable way to test if a person is capable of doing this during an interview, it’s my job as an interviewer to try. I have to find places to challenge and ask tough, but fair, questions, to let them demonstrate their conviction in their ideas. As well as their ability to change their minds and learn from new information.
Or put another way, if I were hiring an Air Traffic Controller, I’d need to know they can handle the stress of being an Air Traffic Controller. It wouldn’t be unethical for me to expect them to demonstrate something of what I need to see to know they are credible. While the means I use to get this information could be unethical, my interest in getting that data isn’t – it can’t be. It’d be unethical to all the passengers of all those airplanes if I hired someone without even attempting to learn about their abilities for a key part of the job.
All of this is obviously more abstract and collaborative than having them build a chair, or paint or a portrait, while I yelled at them through a megaphone while timing them with a stopwatch. That’s a game show, not a job interview. But if done right a design exercise is a chance for them to lead the conversation through a problem. And if leading the way through a problem is something expected of them in the job, it’s reasonable to provide an opportunity for them to do it during the interview process.
Related: my essay on how to use an hour to interview creatives for a job
There’s a misguided trend in looking to architecture to explain why some groups of people are creative and others are not. A well designed workplace may be beneficial, but it’s not an essential factor. The long history of innovation, in the centuries before electricity and elevators, shows how much creative work can be done without regard to workspace design.
Put simply: a good team will help each other be productive in a cave. A bad team will make each other miserable in the fanciest building in the world.
Yet articles in the New Yorker, New York Times, Washington Post and Fast Company point to office design, suggesting the environment has primacy over determining which groups of people will be creative and which ones won’t. MIT’s famous building 20, is frequently referenced and studied, with some architects assuming if they emulate its elements they’ll see similar results. Where this line of thinking fails is its lack of accounting for most breakthroughs in the history of the world.
A huge percentage of them took place in environments that fail most of the standards for “creative workplaces” or “dynamic work environments”. Take as significant examples:
Look at the timeline of the greatest inventions throughout history. Or the greatest paintings. Most of them were made before electricity, before air conditioning, before a hundred comforts and conveniences we take for granted in all of our offices. Cherry picking recent breakthroughs and wrapping a theory around them is confirmation bias. Innovation and invention have been going on for millennia and any theory must include the past as well as the present.
Some articles point to the stimulating effects of some buildings, as the design forces people to mingle and interact in positive ways. I agree this can be an asset. But there is no rule that says this kind of stimulation can only happen at work. Many creative people throughout history found this kind of stimulation primarily at cafes, pubs, neighborhoods, libraries or parks.
Of course had these people been in better architected work environments they might have had even better results. And any leader of any organization should want to provide the best possible environment for their workers. But the primary reason great work happened had little to do with the special characteristics of workplaces. They achieved great work in very ordinary and unremarkable environments.
Architecture is important and can definitely influence culture and behavior, it’s just not a primary factor. The talents of the people you’re working with are how well you relate to each other trumps everything.
[minor edits: 3-16-15]
I asked this question on twitter – here are the best responses:
Have another entertaining suggestion? Leave a comment.
A nice email from Ro about how the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem is an example of ‘ideas are made of other ideas‘:
Hi Scott, My name is Ro, I’m from Italy and currently a graduate student in computer science from the University of California Irvine. On a monthly base I catch up with your essays, that I found really sharp-serious-funny (plus, I try to learn something more about being a good writer). Recently – like last night, I had dinner with a friend, a quite well known name in math (cryptography), who, not surprisingly, likes to tell jokes and stories about math and other mathematicians.
During the dinner he explained the Proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem (a.k.a. the FLT) in a few steps involving theorems from other fields of math. Each of these theorems were developed in adjacent fields of number theory and never meant to proof the FLT. Nevertheless, a composition of these theorems inspired Andre Wiles and a few other contemporary mathematicians to first draft a proof of the FLT (the idea from other ideas) and subsequently proof that their draft proof was correct.
All of this happened from ~1997 to ~2005, after 350 years passed from the original claim by Fermat. When my friend was done talking, your claim “ideas are made of other ideas” came to my mind and I thought to tell the story and provide a reference to you. A summary of such a short but inspiring description about proof of FLT can be found here.
The author of the theorem died 350 years before the proof was provided and there has been a long wave of mathematicians obsessing on this problem, whose solution has been composed from other solutions from other fields. Hope the above can be helpful as an additional example about “ideas are made of other ideas” for your future inspiring essays and talks. Keep up with your dream – filling up your shelf with your books :) Cheers, – Ro
Thanks Ro!
A recent op-ed piece on CNN by Alan Miller critiques the trend of people identifying themselves as spiritual, rather than of a specific denomination. It’s an interesting position:
The increasingly common refrain that “I’m spiritual, but not religious,” represents some of the most retrogressive aspects of contemporary society. The spiritual but not religious “movement” – an inappropriate term as that would suggest some collective, organizational aspect – highlights the implosion of belief that has struck at the heart of Western society.
Spiritual but not religious people are especially prevalent in the younger population in the United States, although a recent study has argued that it is not so much that people have stopped believing in God, but rather have drifted from formal institutions.
It seems that just being a part of a religious institution is nowadays associated negatively, with everything from the Religious Right to child abuse, back to the Crusades and of course with terrorism today.
Those in the spiritual-but-not-religious camp are peddling the notion that by being independent – by choosing an “individual relationship” to some concept of “higher power”, energy, oneness or something-or-other – they are in a deeper, more profound relationship than one that is coerced via a large institution like a church.
That attitude fits with the message we are receiving more and more that “feeling” something somehow is more pure and perhaps, more “true” than having to fit in with the doctrine, practices, rules and observations of a formal institution that are handed down to us. The trouble is that “spiritual but not religious” offers no positive exposition or understanding or explanation of a body of belief or set of principles of any kind.
Miller doesn’t pull punches. To call anyone’s beliefs retrogressive in a first sentence is not a invitation from an open mind. I don’t know what an implosion of belief would be like, but I assume he’s trying to say fewer people believe in what he believes, and that’s bad.
Yet the spiritual-but-not-religious outlook sees the human as one that simply wants to experience “nice things” and “feel better.” There is little of transformation here and nothing that points to any kind of project that can inspire or transform us.
At the heart of the spiritual but not religious attitude is an unwillingness to take a real position…
Theirs is a world of fence-sitting, not-knowingess, but not-trying-ness either. Take a stand, I say. Which one is it? A belief in God and Scripture or a commitment to the Enlightenment ideal of human-based knowledge, reason and action? Being spiritual but not religious avoids having to think too hard about having to decide.
I agree with Miller than having conviction is good. Until you are fully committed to an idea or belief you can’t fully understand it. However beliefs shouldn’t be formed merely because someone in authority told you to believe something. I don’t think it is a real position for someone to be told their beliefs from the day they are born, with intense social and familial pressure not to question that belief. To take a real position means you have made a real, free choice. But we don’t chose our parents and few of us chose our religions. I’m happy to critique the “I am spiritual crowd” for their lack of conviction if the same critique applies to everyone who didn’t choose their religion or belief system.
My fantasy is everyone should learn about every major belief. At least a handful of different ones. Each belief can even be taught by a leader from that denomination. The ‘student’ learns about them all and is free to make comparisons and ask questions on their own terms. No matter what they decided, they’d actually be making a choice, even if it was to believe what their parents do. Few religions would agree to this as it raises too many questions they are afraid to answer.
Socrates said “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I agree at least that examination can help figure out what worth means. If we critique the unexamined spiritualists, we must critique the unexamined faithful, and faithless, too.
As a design minded person I’ve had a long list of fixes, improvements and updates I’ve wanted for scottberkun.com. I had some false starts and stops in hiring folks to do the work, and somehow its been years since the site has seen much love. I’m so sad about that. You readers deserve better.
I’m proud to report a new design is almost finished and should be live soon.
The main goals for the redesign were:
Here’s a preview of what the new home page will look like. I’ll have more details on the rest of the design soon.
Here is a good thought experiment:
Now magically transport that same little convenience store to a poor shanty town in Ethiopia or India, where there’s extreme poverty.
Suddenly that same convenience store is an oasis of innovation.
It has many world changing breakthroughs: fresh water, electricity, working toilets, air conditioning, cold drinks and stockpiles of food. There are magazines to learn from and basic medicines to use. Their lives would be instantly transformed by access to such things.
The big question: How can the same technology be a breakthrough in one place, and meaningless in another?
The only answer is that the true deciding factor for whether something is innovative or not is not in the technology itself, but in the point of view of the person using it. Innovation is not a static quality, but a relative one. Innovation is a matter of perception relative to where you are and what you have.
William Gibson said “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed” but there’s more to it than that. The value of any idea or invention is variable, not static. And it varies not only through time but from person to person. It can also move backwards and forwards, as organic food is now seen as an innovation, but yet before 1950 that’s all there was in the world.
