Author: Scott Berkun

Does Your Workplace Affect Creativity? Mostly No

Posted on in Creative Thinkingby Scott Berkun

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:

  • The Manhattan Project (cheap military housing in the desert)
  • The Apollo 11 moon landing (ordinary offices/cubicles)
  • Any company that started in a garage (Google, Apple, HP, Amazon, Disney)
  • Any band that started in a garage (Nirvana, The Kinks, Creedence Clearwater)
  • The Wright brothers (bike shop)
  • The Internet and the Web (ordinary academic research labs)

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]

What should you do when stranger sends high priority email?

Posted on in Uncategorizedby Scott Berkun

I asked this question on twitter – here are the best responses:

  • “Hey, thanks for the email; please enjoy this viral cat video.” (Daniel)
  • forward it to someone else (you don’t like), w/ explanation “too important for me to handle, you should really take this” … :-) (Dossy)
  • I’ve got an auto reply for messages sent high pri: “thanks for your high priority message. http://bukk.it/tldr.gif ” (Lincoln)
  • Delete / No Response / Ignore (5 votes)

Have another entertaining suggestion? Leave a comment.

Fermat and ideas are made of other ideas

Posted on in Creative Thinking, mailbagby Scott Berkun

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!

 

Is ‘being spiritual’ a cop-out?

Posted on in Philosophyby Scott Berkun

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.

Site news: new design coming soon (sneak preview)

Posted on in this siteby Scott Berkun

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:

  • Simplify, simplify, simplify: more whitespace, more attention to easy reading
  • Make it easier to find ways to follow (Twitter, Facebook, mailing list)
  • Better visibility to videos of my best talks and lectures

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.

Innovation is an illusion

Posted on in history, Innovationby Scott Berkun

Here is a good thought experiment:

  1. Consider the last time you walked into a convenience store .
  2. Perhaps you grabbed a snack, waited in line to pay, and left.
  3. Did anything in the experience seem interesting? Probably not.

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.

I answer MBA student questions about Innovation

Posted on in Innovationby Scott Berkun

Liz Barclay at Oakland University, is using the Myths of Innovation in a MBA course on creativity. I offer to teachers who use my books that if they send in a list of student questions, I’m happy to answer here. Here’s some Q&A with her class:

Kevin: A key component of innovation is failure, and it is the overcoming of repeated failures that often lead to breakthroughs. Today’s children are being taught at a young age that failure is a bad word and that participatory success is to be shared and valued by all. If you agree, will decades of this collectivist methodology lead to a technology and innovation gap in the US sometime in the future?

Human culture has good reasons for making failure a bad word. For (civilized) cultures to work, most people need to follow at least sone of the same rules, and that’s supported by instilling values for fitting in and doing the right things (as defined by everyone else). Even the most innovative culture in the universe some conformity is needed: stop signs, traffic lights driving on the same side of the road (not to mention speaking the same language). Institutions like schools, churches and armies will always emphasize rigidity and conformity in at least some ways.

But to your point, children need regular experience with subjects where there is no singular right answer: drawing, painting, writing, making music… these are all activities where creativity is almost unavoidable provided the assignments aren’t merely to copy what someone else is doing. English and history also have lots of room for creativity provided the teacher’s goal is to expose students to their own thoughts, rather than memorizing someone else’s. And regardless of what schools do, parents are free to emphasize creativity and free thinking in their children, if they choose.

I don’t think the U.S. is at particular risk here -we have far less institutional  conformity than many other nations, and we also have far more dropouts :) Not that I’m advocating dropping out, but it is potentially a creative act that leads to many other creative acts.

Anna: I am curious whether Mr. Berkun is familiar with TRIZ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ), and if yes, what he thinks about it. Has he had any chance to apply TRIZ in his own practice? In a nutshell, from what I remember from my father’s lectures back in Russia, TRIZ was invented as a “scientific method to help an average person to make inventions”. TRIZ offers series of tools which could be applied to a “technical problem” to generate variety of solutions to “eliminate the contradiction” and therefore solve the problem by changing something about the “technical system”.

I’m familiar with TRIZ. It’s vaguely similar to other idea generation toolkits, like IDEO’s method cards. Both systems offer short bits of advice on different ways to think about a problem. This can of course be helpful, as framing a problem differently is often what leads to a step forward. But there’s nothing exceptional about any of these systems. They can help find different ideas, but for very difficult problems the likelihood of finding a working idea simply by using one of these systems is small.

But ideas are easy. Having the idea is very different from being wiling to spend 5 years or $50,000 refining it to the point that anyone will believe the idea works.  TRIZ, nor any idea generation aid, can do that for you. TRIZ also emphasizes physical inventions, as in machinery and gadgets, rather than ideas for other things. You can play with one version of TRIZ here and you’ll quickly see some of its limitations. Try using it to invent a time machine, or a car that gets 500mpg –  You’ll see how limited the help it offers can be.

Linda: Does he see any place in our traditional education system for a more accurate depiction of the work of inventors or the real story of historical people/ events or does he see this as something strictly for those who intend to be seen in their jobs as ‘innovators’? I’m wondering because I can see some useful learnings even for someone like me in a traditional field (Finance).

Formalized education tends to be dull and gravitates towards making everything seem predictable and obvious. If you have to build a system to teach courses again and again and again, it’s inevitable to tend towards an illusion of dull certainty: “This happened, which led to this, which led to what I am teaching you now, therefore it is all obvious and credible.”  History, which is a huge part of every subject taught everywhere, is partially just a story we tell ourselves to make us feel good in the present. It steers clear of topics we are uncertain about, even though we know these subjects will be taught very differently 100 years from now, just as they were taught very differently 100 years ago.

The best recommendation I can give is to read a early history of whatever subject you care about. If you go back far enough you will always find a frontier where big bets and high drama took place to define the basic concepts we all take for granted now. Finance has a fascinating history of innovation. Who made the first bank? How did they convince anyone to let them hold their money? When did paper money start (and how did they convince anyone paper had value?) When you go back you will find many important ideas that modern experts do not know, or have misinterpreted, or take for granted. Innovation is everywhere – you just have to look a little deeper to find it. I hope my book helped you believe that’s true.

In all fields there are people who push at the boundaries and are asking big fundamental questions. Every field has its own encyclopedia of ignorance, you just might need to do some looking before you find professors and experts working to answer those big questions.

Have a question you’d like me to answer? Leave a comment.

News: I’m working on a UX book with Jackson Fish

Posted on in Books, designby Scott Berkun

When my friends Hillel Cooperman and Jenny Lam started their UX company JacksonFish, I thought, how awesome. Every designer dreams of working on their own terms, where they can make great things. JacksonFish has delivered on their vision, and you can see plenty of examples of their amazing work here.

When they told me they were working on a book, called Making Things Special (no intentional connection to my management book, though I’m sure they’ll be friends), I was excited for them. And then when they ask if I’d take on the role as the book’s editor, I was flattered and thrilled.

The book is a kickstarter project and they’re looking for support to get the project funded:

Making Things Special is a book about creating standout user experiences. The authors, Hillel Cooperman and Jenny Lam (us), have been designing user experiences collectively for over 25 years… We’ve worked with clients like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, as well as several small to mid-size startups and tech companies. Clients come to us when they want to create an experience that’s not just intuitive, not just usable, but something that their audience can fall in love with.

Here’s their fun Wes Andersonesque kickstarter video for the project about what it means to make special things, something the book will teach (Look for the donut robot cameo at 2:09):

Please head over here to learn more about the project and how you can help it along.

Haiku Deck: a simple way to make better presentations (review)

Posted on in Public Speakingby Scott Berkun

I recently wrote a harsh review of Prezi, focusing on how that tool makes it easy to make distracting, annoying presentations. On the other end of the spectrum is a new iPad app called Haiku Deck.

Haiku Deck takes a radically simple approach. The tool has very few features. It lets you pick background images and then write a sentence of two of text over them. That’s it. It’s incredibly simple, but this is very good for audiences everywhere. A major problem in most presentations is how complex and overwrought they are. Most people start by making elaborate, complex slides, believing it’s the slide that makes the talk, rather than their clarity of thinking.

Using Haiku Deck will help many speakers avoid many of the common traps. You can’t cram your slides full of bullets. You can’t make complex flowcharts with tiny 8pt font labels. Haiku pretty much ensures you’ll follow much of the advice in Garr Reynold’s classic Presentation Zen. Simply put, you are forced to keep your slides clean and simple, meaning you have to do the heavy lifting of thinking through who your audience is, and what they need to learn from you, which is the only way to make a better presentation anyway.

A major time sink in making good slide decks is finding images to use, but Haiku helps there too. It automatically queries rights free image databases, allowing you to confidently include images that you have permission to use. Of course you can use your own photos too.

An easy complaint die-hard Powerpoint/Keynote users will have is how many features, from flowcharts, to shapes, to graphs, they may think they depend on are not in Haiku Deck. In most cases they will be better off, as all of those things were less effective than they think anyway. Haiku does support exporting to Powerpoint (which I have not tried).

My major complaint is entirely selfish: the basic style Haiku deck uses, with full screen images covered by a single point in an easy to read font, is the core style I’ve used in my own talks for years (especially at Ignite talks). I fear if Haiku deck becomes popular I’ll look more like a follower than someone a little ahead of the curve.

The app is free. You can share your presentations on Twitter, Facebook, and by email.  I’d guess they’re planning to offer style packs and add-ons for cost in the future, but the core app is free.

Download Haiku Deck for iPad here.

Why we’re wrong about the phone of the future

Posted on in Innovationby Scott Berkun

I recently read a fine article in the Atlantic called iPhone 5? Yawn. What Will the ‘Phone’ of 2022 Look Like? It does a good job of summaring what some engineers and designers believe will be next. It’s a fun and inspiring read.

The problem is the odds are very good we’re all wrong.

The trap is when we think about the future, we assume the best idea wins. This is a myth of innovation: it’s chapter 8 in the book. The quality of the ideas involved is certainly a factor, but often not the most important one.

Consider how many human interfaces throughout history were chosen:

  • Silverware
  • The QWERTY keyboard
  • Car steering wheels and gas/brake pedals
  • Doorknobs / handles
  • Bathroom faucets
  • Electrical outlets

These paradigms became standard primarily because they were the idea in use at a key time in the development of the technology. Better ideas came along later, but it didn’t matter. It was either too expensive, too hard to teach, or there was no market incentive to drive a shift to something new. So no change came.

Odds are very good we will have many of the same UI paradigms a decade, or even a century, from now. (the motion detection bathroom faucets are an interesting counter example, but they’re not dominant and they may be more annoying than they’re worth).

And when change does come it will likely be not because of some master plan to make a better phone, or a better outlet. It will be because an entirely new concept comes along that disrupts the very idea of these devices, and that change will likely bring along with it entirely new flaws that were impossible to predict at the time, but that we’ll be stuck with for much longer than anyone expects.

Also see: The future of UI will be boring

 

 

Open letter to Americans about our politics

Posted on in open letter, politicsby Scott Berkun

Dear people who complain:

There was never a golden age in American politics. If you despair at how depressing our politics are, recall that in 1800 John Adams and Thomas Jefferson engaged in some of the nastiest PR campaigns against each other. Elections are about power, bringing the best and worst out of everyone who wants power, regardless of their motivation for wanting it.

While it is true that a singular nasty example doesn’t define the past, or the present, politics in a democracy is inherently frustrating. A government by and for the people includes your stupid neighbor, your weird cousin, the person with the religious beliefs you find absurd, everyone you stare at on the bus (or who stares at you), the people who own the company you work for and the ones begging for change on your way there. There is no way for a government by and for the people to function without forcing these diverse views, needs and desires into a dialog with each other. This is the system as it was intended to function. How much maturity and civility we bring to this inevitability is up to us to decide.

It’s really a miracle it works at all and for as long as it has. Part of why is a collective faith in the process and that everyone should get a chance to participate equally, even those we passionately disagree with. Power changes hands in this country with surprising frequency and civilized grace relative to the history of civilization and for all its horrors and disappointments it is still a wonder to behold.

A common refrain heard during election season is “voting is picking the lesser of two evils”, a jab at the disappointing quality of our candidates. This assumes we’ve historically had good ones, which, once you get past the 5 or 6 great presidents most American’s agree on, is increasingly disappointing the further you study it. And when people who make this complaint are asked personally if they would run for office, of any kind, they generally say “no way”. We know how undesirable life as a politician is, yet simultaneously we’re surprised by the low quality of the candidates we have. Yet these facts are directly related to each other.

We are not promised good candidates in the Constitution. Most of us invest little energy towards the process of picking candidates (which involves participating in a party months before an election), understanding how they’re chosen or even helping decide the winners in races:  58% of American’s voted in 2008. And that was just a vote, which takes only minutes: who knows how much time they invested in considering their choices. Complaints and apathy are dangerous bedfellows and we suffer both in great supply. If we are truly passionate, the system offers us countless local elections where our influence is far greater, and collectively, has far more impact on national elections that we tend to think.

I believe, more or less, we get the government we deserve. Paying close attention twice a decade isn’t paying much attention at all. We are an apathetic and divided nation and its those who are undecided the longest who curiously yield greater influence. And while voting is a right, there is far more to be gained in the long run by voting in the interest of the nation as a whole, which requires inquiring beyond the self serving echo chambers we love to pretend is the entirety of the world.

Sadly it’s only when things hit close enough to home that we start watching our representatives, senators, mayors and governors regularly, and participating at levels of government where our vote carries much more weight, where the kind of change we want is both deserved and possible.

Nothing is learned by throwing wrenches at the engine of an already struggling machine. Revolutions almost never succeed, a fact we deny since we are one of the few nations in history to be born from a successful one. It’s only by getting inside and dirtying our hands, or at least studying the system to see how it was designed to work, and was designed to be changed, that empty frustrations can be replaced by meaningful action. No matter how small those actions are, they have far more value to everyone than grandstanding, complaining or voting in protest.

Churchill wrote:

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others.

Related:

[Updated 10-31-16 – minor edits]

Man’s Search for Meaning: Book Review

Posted on in Book reviews, Books, Philosophyby Scott Berkun

This is one of those classic books I’ve had on my shelf for over a decade, but never touched. A friend was going to read it, and as I’ve been depressed with my recent injury, it seemed a good time for me to read it too. It’s a well known classic of philosophy / Holocaust literature, written by Viktor E. Frankl, an Austrian psychotherapist who was imprisoned at Auschwitz during World War II.

Man’s Search For Meaning is a short book and a worthy read. The author’s tale is exceptionally compelling as his observations about life in hellish conditions are enhanced by his training in psychology, going beyond the awful, but familiar, horrors many of us know from popular movies and documentaries about the Holocaust.

The central theme of the book is about how anyone can choose to make meaning out of any situation, no matter how bad thing are. He uses his personal experiences and observations from the Auschwitz to support this premise. More that the list of platitudes you often find in self help books, the lessons are grounded by the first 50 pages of the book, which centers on Frankl’s first person tale of  starvation, violence, cruelty and epic loss in the German death camps.

One measure of books I use is how many passages I copy down for later. This book scored very well. Three of my favorites were:

Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.

Another was this questioning of the American worldview, where we believe we can get anything simply by aiming directly:

To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to “be happy.” But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to “be happy.” Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.

This need for a reason is similar in another specifically human phenomenon-laughter. If you want anyone to laugh you have to provide him with a reason, e.g., you have to tell him a joke. In no way is it possible to evoke real laughter by urging him, or having him urge himself, to laugh. Doing so would be the same as urging people posed in front of a camera to say “cheese,” only to find that in the finished photographs their faces are frozen in artificial smiles.

And it was hard not to forget this one:

Nietzsche’s words, “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how”

The only disappointment is the extra sections of the book vary in quality, There’s one about the theory he invented called Logotherapy, which feels like it was written as it’s own thing (which I believe it was). While  interesting, it contains a series of repetitive self-aggrandizing anecdotal tales of how this method has helped people. Even so, the entire book can be read in an hour or two, these extra sections are short, and you might enjoy them more than I did.

It’s a great book to read when you feel like a failure, feel lost, beaten or downtrodden in any way. When you are finished reading you will, at worst, see your own challenges in a different light: everything in your life could be so much worse, and even if it were, you could still find a way to find meaning.  Get the book here on amazon ( I read the kindle edition).

It seems he was a fantastic speaker. Here’s Frankl talking about the need for idealism:

On Free Speech vs. Religious Respect: in five sentences

Posted on in Culture, Philosophyby Scott Berkun

Either people believe in free speech or they don’t. Some cultures do, but many do not. It’s inevitable that people who do not believe in free speech will feel outrage at the behavior of those who do believe in free speech. Leaders of the latter decide how that outrage is expressed.

All religions, including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hindu have had phases of violence, and also tolerance (or peaceful protest), in their response to what outrages them.

What I learned from losing a leg

Posted on in personal, Philosophyby Scott Berkun

Three weeks ago I tore my Achilles tendon playing basketball. Just like a well worn rope that snaps from being pulled too hard one too many times, it tore completely during my regular basketball game at the gym.

Everyone asks “what happened?” assuming there must be a grand story, like I reverse dunked over three people but misjudged the landing, or hit a game winning shot from half court, but someone fouled me hard, causing the injury. There wasn’t. It was entirely boring. No one touched me. For those who saw it happen, they saw me push down on my right foot to cut to the basket and I simply fell over as if a ghost had swept my leg from behind. It looked funny and harmless, as if I had forgotten where the floor was and tripped over it, surprised it was there. NBA star Chauncey Billip’s tore his Achilles the same way during a game last year, as you can see in this video.

I’ve played competitive basketball my entire life and know my body well. Sitting there on the court in mild shock, holding my ankle, I knew something very bad had happened.  Since that day I haven’t been able use my right leg for anything, which has been surprisingly traumatic.

Of the many serious injuries a body can suffer, the repair for this one is simple, if slow. The loss of use of my leg is temporary: 4-8 weeks. They surgically reconnected the tendon last week (see photo), and with rehab and care I can likely play basketball again in 5-7 months. Despite the impermanent nature of my injury, it has had some permanent effects on how I look at things.

Here’s what I’ve learned. These may be obvious to you but these were new, or humbling reminders, to me:

  • Disability is isolation. I can’t drive. If I can’t drive, I can’t go to the gym each day. If I don’t go to the gym each day, I can’t stop for coffee or at the bookstore, or meet a friend for lunch, or a dozen other little daily habits that keep me sane. I don’t live in a convenient place designed for this kind of thing. I’m self employed and write from home. I’ve had to find new support systems to make my life work.
  • Everything demands minute planning. I generally cook for myself and love to do it, but now my kitchen is a logistics nightmare. When on crutches, you lose use of your hands. Without hands you can’t carry anything. Normally, to make a meal requires dozens of thoughtless trips from the refrigerator to the pantry to the stove and back. Each one of those trips is an exercise in logistics now. Going to the bathroom, taking a shower are all long sequences of thoughtful acts that must be planned.
  • I see everything in small terms. We all forget all the little things our bodies do when we run down the street, or throw a frisbee. When something breaks, those seemingly simple tasks become complex. Every action has to be planned, considered, tested and carefully executed. Rehab is relearning. It takes me forever to get around the house, or to get from a parking lot to a store. I’m attentive, for better and for worse, to the small. My ankle will have to relearn all the basic things we expect our ankles to do for us.
  • 100 years ago I’d be crippled.While the surgery is simple by today’s standards, 100 years ago I’d be walking with a cane the rest of my life, if I could walk at all. Grateful to the universe for being born at this time.
  • I’m connected to wheelchairs, handicapped parking spots and people who need help. I notice all these things because at the pace I’m able to travel, my companions are other people with issues the world isn’t designed for.
  • My mind follows my body. I’m a productive writer because I have a healthy body. I go to the gym nearly every day to clear my mind and let my subconscious work on problems for me. I haven’t been to the gym in almost a month. I’m still struggling to find a new way to balance stress and find physical relaxation.

I’m sad about the prospects of losing basketball from my life. It will be a long road to recovery and there are no guarantees at what level I’ll be able to play. Basketball is the  place I’ve learned most of what has made me successful. But sorting out what’s possible and dealing with my feelings about it are so far in the future, and I’m dealing with so much in the present, that I have no choice but to postpone worrying about it until I’m there.

I’m always grateful for people and things that get me to think and this experience definitely qualifies. I’ll be looking at the world from a different perspective for awhile. If nothing else, I’ve always been a fan of mythology – I now have a permanent scar connecting me with the legend of Achilles!

9 ways to understand how ideas spread

Posted on in Business, Culture, Innovationby Scott Berkun

A reader named Niko, who is working on a PhD in social network analysis, asked me for my favorite sources about how ideas spread:

I am doing a PhD in the field of social network analysis in which I try to determine mutual influence among people who are connected with cell phones. Many times individuals have good ideas but can’t bring them to life due to limited resources or social capital. If we would be able to find the right spot to plant the seed I believe there would be much more flowers on our planet.  know you read a lot and have broad horizon, I wanted to ask about any good source to learn more about the spread of ideas, social contagion and social network analysis in general, may it be from philosophical or scientific perspective.

I’ve read much about the subject, but the strongest sources come from a wide range of fields, as there is no one universal theory for how and why ideas spread.  It’s also interesting that most of these predate social media, as I believe taking a long view is often the most powerful one. Here’s my list:

  • The canonical pop business books about the spread of ideas are Made to Stick and The Tipping Point. These books have a strong marketing focus, and emphasize ideas that are bound to products. They’re both well written and easy to read. Made to Stick is more practical, focusing on a list of attributes to aim for. The Tipping Point is most notable for its identification of the roles certain types of people play in connecting people to ideas (e.g. Mavens).
  • Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, by Cialdini. Influence takes a wider view of marketing and propaganda, exploring the wider history of how people in power use their power to tilt the playing field to their advantage. Most applicable to politics of the books in this list. Includes exploration of concepts like Reciprocity and Social Proof.
  • Connections, by James Burke. Most books on how ideas spread make it seem as if it’s something people control. Luck and factors outside of anyone’s control play a tremendous role. Connections entertainingly shows how random the spread of ideas can be, and the book joyously makes connections between inventions and breakthroughs that you’d never expect.
  • The Dr. Fox effect. This decades old study demonstrated that even experts are heavily swayed by the charisma of whoever is speaking to them. We are biased towards people we find charismatic, and towards ideas we want to hear (e.g. politicians, salespeople). In the study, an actor played an expert, speaking entirely in jargon and obfuscated language, but who managed to score higher marks in every category than a legitimate expert. You can see an excerpt of the video here.  I wrote about this effect at length in Confessions of a Public Speaker, Chapter 8.
  • The Diffusion of Innovations, Everett. This is the book that defined much of marketing theory for the last 50 years. S curves, early adopters, it’s all here. Ironically many modern books on marketing use these concepts, but don’t acknowledge or seem aware of the source. While the book’s research focused more of the spread of technologies, most of the theory applies well to any idea.
  • Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman. This critique of modern media demystifies how television thrives, and how it has changed our view of the world. It is a harsh critique (as you might guess from the title) and clearly takes the side that television has done more bad than good (or at best, it’s a draw). Postman’s goal was to disarm the negative influences television has for influencing which ideas spread and he succeeds: you won’t watch television the same way again.
  • Jerusalem: One city, Three faiths, Armstrong. What could be more instructive in the history of how ideas spread than a concise review of how religious ideas have developed and spread in the major religions of the West? This fascinating book, centered on the history of a city, walks through the early development of Jewish monotheism, to the birth of Christianity, to the development of Islam. You can see how each religion borrowed from the past (e.g. The Old Testament is really just the Jewish bible), factionalized in many directions, rejected  ideas inherited from the past (often violently), had times of peaceful acceptance of other ideas/religions, condemned things in their own faction that were once accepted, and on it goes. If nothing else it offers how malleable ideas, even ideas born of scripture, are by the forces of culture. (For a more academic and wider take on how religious ideas spread, see History of Religious Ideas, Vol 1, Eliade, or Masks of God: Vol 1, Campbell).
  • How to write headlines that work, Copyblogger. The major medium of today is the web, and the one sentence descriptions that appear on Facebook, twitter, and email, are the first decision points in what ideas we consume or avoid. Headlines an titles are a microcosm of the entire question of how and why ideas spread: how much will you lie or misrepresent an idea to get a click? What emotions do you play on? What tone or joke can you cleverly compress into just a few words? This article by Copyblogger is one of many, but it expresses how little of the quality of ideas themselves determine the fate of the idea.

More broadly, we love to assume the best idea win, especially ideas in our national, cultural or religious history. There’s questionable evidence for this assumption. In The Myths of Innovation an entire chapter explores this myth. In short, self-interest is a huge driver of choice, and what is best for people with influence may not be what’s best for everyone else.

Additionally, the skills for a) having the best ideas and b) being persuasive,  are not related to each other. A charismatic senator might have much worse ideas than his brilliant, but awkward, rival. Given how heavily influenced we are by superficials (see Dr. Fox, above) when it comes to evaluating ideas, the effects of this bias can not be overstated. Or in business terms, a product no one needs that is marketed well, can overcome a healthier, cheaper alternative that fails to excite or compel customers to buy. This should be troubling to everyone interested in progress.

Throughout history, ideas are often chosen for speed and convenience relative to an immediate issue, as their’s little expectation the choice will matter later. But when an idea takes off, they’re hard to change no matter how bad they turn about to be, in part because we love to protect the ideas from our past.

What books or articles should be on this list? Please leave a comment.

The Math and Aftermath of 9/11

Posted on in history, politicsby Scott Berkun

Eleven Fourteen years ago 2996 people died during the events of 9/11/2001. It was a tragic day for thousands of innocent people whose lives were taken. It’s impossible to understand the significance of the day for surviving family and friends.

From a colder, mathematical perspective, I’ve wondered what the total cost in lives has been since that morning. How connected these deaths are or are not to each other is up to you. With a few hours of research I compiled the math, with sources marked as follows:

WP = Wikipedia, CRS = Congressional Research Service, AP = Associated Press, DoD = U.S. Department of Defense

Deaths on 9/11/01: 2,996 (including 19 hijackers)
Injured on 9/11/01: 6000 (WP, but source needed)

The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:

  • U.S. armed forces deaths in Iraq: 4422 (FAS, U.S. DoD)
  • U.S. armed forces injured in Iraq: 32,229 (FAS, U.S. DoD)
  • Coalition force deaths: 4,799 (WP, with sources)
  • Coalition forces injured: unknown
  • Contractor deaths: 1487 (WP, with sources)
  • Iraqi civilian deaths: 100,000 (AP, lowest of several estimates)
  • Iraqi civilians wounded: unknown
  • Iraqi military (supporting allies) deaths: 16,623 (WP, with sources)
  • Iraqi military (insurgent) deaths: 26,320 (WP, with sources)
  • U.S. armed forces killed in Afghanistan: 1980 (WP / CRS)
  • U.S. armed forces wounded in Afghanistan: 17,519 (WP / CRS)
  • Afghanistan civilian deaths (since 2007): 6478 (U.N. report)
  • Afghanistan military deaths: unknown (BBC)

In summary:

  • Total deaths: 179,628
  • Total casualties: 55,748

I don’t have any commentary. These numbers are staggering, no matter how you connect them or not.

Please check my math and my sources and note corrections in the comments. I’d be thrilled to see these stats vetted and improved. It was bewildering to go through all the reports and studies to compile even this list, as many reports show similar data in slightly different ways with different sources. I’m sure I’ve made mistakes, I’m just not sure where.

[references updated 9-11-15]

Researching and writing the next book

Posted on in Writing Well, Year Without Pantsby Scott Berkun

As mentioned before, the next book is about my experience working at WordPress.com.

Something I do while working on the first draft of a book is read books that have elements I want to emulate. It could be structure, style, tone or simply a feeling the book gave me as a reader. I go back and reread and it helps me figure out exactly what I want to do in the book I’m writing.

Here’s the list of books I’ve gone back and looked at to help me with the book I’m writing about my experience at WordPress.com:

  • Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder. This is one of the first, and greatest, books written about a modern tech project. He followed a team of engineers working on one of the last mainframe computers (Data General Eclipse) in 1981, before the rise of personal computers. The book won the Pulitzer prize for non-fiction.
  • NewJack, Ted Conover – the author worked for a year as a prison guard at Sing Sing prison and wrote a book about his experience. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize and a fantastic read for many reasons.
  • Dreaming In Code by Scott Rosenberg – Rosenberg followed Mitch Kapor (founder of Lotus) and a team of programmers trying to reinvent calendaring applications. He also asks the question why is software hard to make? I enjoyed he book even though I disagreed with many of his answers. I wrote a review of DOC here.

I’ve also been reading many famous diaries / autobiographies. Diary of Anne Frank, My life in France by Julia Child, and Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London.

If you have any favorite company profile books, or exceptionally good books that followed a project, please leave a comment. Same for any books you can think of that use the diary or first person approach particularly well.  Thanks.

Lessons learned from my bad habits

Posted on in Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

Since leaving WordPress.com to return to writing full time, a surprise has been the decline in my writing habits. It has taken taken months to get them back.

As an exercise in sharing what I learn with you here on the blog, here’s my recap:

  • Writing of any kind is harder than other work. A secret benefit active writers have is they write all the time. That’s most of what they do. They forget that doing other kinds of work is so much easier (and pays so much better). In a regular job, you show up, there are piles of things that need to be done and people to do them with, and off you go. But returning to writing after having a conventional job allowed me to remake a discovery: writing is hard. It’s harder than doing most other kinds of work because you have to make everything up: the page is blank every time you start.
  • When writing feels hard it probably means you’re doing something right. I stayed at WordPress.com for 6 extra months, in part, because leading, designing, and managing, as challenging as those things can be, are easier than filling blank pages. I worked with great people, which made every day fun and gratifying. And I knew returning to writing had less immediate, and more isolated, rewards. As obvious as this all sounds, it has taken weeks to fully internalize these lessons. There is no way around it: writing is challenging. I’ve had to remind myself that when it feels hard it doesn’t mean I’m doing anything wrong, it probably means I’m doing something right.
  • The fundamental rule of making things happen in any kind of work is simple: 1) If progress is slow, reduce your scope. 2) Repeat as necessary. That’s it. If you persist, eventually you have a small enough unit of work that progress is clear and easy. This sounds obvious, but it took me months to relearn it in practice. For weeks I was working on the new book without daily goals or a clear outline or any reasonable structure at all. It was like wandering around in a half-finished maze, in the dark, with one eye open. When blogging you don’t need much structure: you can’t get lost in writing a single blog post. But for bigger writing projects you need some scaffolding to make progress.
  • The next book is always the hardest. I’ve never worked on a book based on a journal before, and I expected it’d be easier than my previous book projects. WRONG. The current book is always the hard one. Writers are good at lying to themselves about this. It’s the only way to trick ourselves into big new projects. But past projects will always seem easier than current ones. Why? Because they’re DONE.
  • Blogging is snack sized writing: I love blogging, but writing 300-1000 word pieces requires different skills and discipline than writing 2000, 5000 or 50,000 word pieces. Skill at any craft is only as good as your frequency of practice.  I hadn’t written a book in a couple of years, and all the blogging had let those writing for long reading muscles fade. Like sprinting daily for a year and then suddenly trying to run a marathon, you’re confronted with how inadequate your habits are to the task. It takes time to relearn all the little things you have to do, including changing your habits, when the goals are larger.
  • Blogging is not a diary. Some bloggers confuse publishing with keeping a diary. It’s not the same. No matter how open a blogger is about what they will share, they will write about those things differently if they are writing for other people (blog) vs. writing just for themselves (diary). I’ve kept a diary for over 20 years. It’s where I go to safely explore my own thoughts and feelings free from judgement by anyone else. If I wrote those entries knowing other eyes would see them I’d I’d write differently, and lose some of my intimacy with myself.  While working at WordPress.com I was writing so much in so many different places, including keeping a separate journal with notes for the next book, that I didn’t write in my diary often. I missed the power I got from just writing for myself.

Looking back I see how I could have been more disciplined. But working two jobs was tough, and I don’t know if I could have done it all to some imagined standard and still have been a happy guy when I wasn’t working. There’s only so much willpower and discipline any of us have.

Looking forward, the new book is coming along nicely now. And I’ll be sharing more about the book itself as well as involving you in the process as it comes together. Stay tuned. A good summary of what is in the works is here.

Have questions about my writing habits? Ask away in the comments.