Author: Scott Berkun

The top mistakes UX designers make

Posted on in design, usabilityby Scott Berkun

Last week I spoke at the Puget Sound SIGCHI meeting. Since it’s a group of designers and user researchers, I let them participate in picking the topic, and top mistakes won by a wide-margin. I didn’t use any slides – instead I led an interactive talk, summarized below. Rather than talk about tactical mistakes, such as prototyping or running studies, I focused on the ones we overlook the most, about attitude and culture.

  • Not credible in the culture.  Most designers and researchers are specialists, making them minorities in the places they work. Most training UX people get assumes they are working alone, which is rarely true. This means their values and attitudes likely don’t match the work culture of most companies. The burden to fit in, or to recognize what the culture value’s and provide it, is on the specialist. If you are the best designer alive, but work in a place ignorant of design, your lack of credibility in the culture renders your design ability useless. Being a specialist means you will always be explaining what you do, your entire career, including translating your value  into a language your coworkers can understand.
  • Never make it easy. The first users you have are your co-workers. How easy is it to follow your advice? As a specialist, its easy to become the UX police, scolding and scowling your way through meetings. No one likes the police. Generally, people do what is easiest to do. If your work creates more work for them, they will naturally want to avoid you. Specialists often scowl from ivory towers, where they provide advice that is hard to follow, or sometimes, hard to understand as it’s not in the language of the culture.
  • Forget your coworkers are meta-users. Unless you write production code, you are not actually building the product customers use. You make things, specs, mockups, or reports, that are given to others who must convert your work into the actual product. This means you must design both for you actual customers, and for your coworkers, who are the first consumers of your ideas. Usability reports are often tragically hard to use. Mockups and design specs often forget details developers need such as sizes in pixels, and hex colors.
  • Never get dirty. In many tech cultures there is plenty of dirty work to do: mainly finding bugs and reporting bugs. Anyone can do it, but no one wants to do it, and everyone avoids it. Often there are bug bashes or engineering team events to find and deal with bugs. As a specialist, its easy to go home early while the development team stays late to do the dirty work. If you’re part of the culture, you’d stay and help when there is dirty work to be done. But if you’re a consultant, you’d go home. How do you want to be perceived? For people who don’t know what you do, helping out with the dirty work may be the first way to earn a positive reputation, or to make that first friend or two.
  • Pretending you have power.  Most specialists play advisory roles. They give advice. There is nothing wrong with being an advice giver. The challenge in being an advice giver means the critical skill for success is persuasion and sales. You need to be an expert at selling your ideas. To pretend that you don’t need to sell your ideas, is to pretend you have power. Advice givers should be evaluated heavily on how much of their advice is followed. Giving advice is easy. Getting people to follow it is where your value is.
  • Ignore possible allies. Among your co-workers, one of them loves you the most (or hates you the least). If you are not enlisting them to support your requests, or give you feedback you’re ignoring your possible allies.
  • Vulcan pretension. There are deeply embedded value systems among designers and researchers that are self destructive. For research, its Vulcan: “I research, analyze, and produce data. I do not offer my own opinion ever.” But everyone else does give opinions, and in many cases the opinion of a researcher is more valuable.  Researchers should say feel comfortable saying “This is not based on data, but I think…” which protects the integrity of data, but allows them to offer opinions just as everyone else does.
  • Dionysian pretension. For designers, its the dreamer mentality as an excuse for not having to do the thinking required to make an idea real. “I just come up with ideas for things, its not my job to figure out how to make it work.” This is related to never getting your hands dirty, as all ideas have dirty work required to make them real that must be done, and if the person coming up with an idea does not participate in the process, it demotivates everyone else from wanting to follow that idea.
  • Don’t know the business.  Everyone should know why they have a job. Who decided to hire a UX person instead of another developer? What argument did they make? Find out. Find out how the company makes money and which kinds of decisions are likely to make profits grow.  Having a better UX doesn’t guarantee anything: many market leading products are UX disasters. How can this be? If you don’t know how that’s possible, then you don’t understand how many other factors beyond  UX are involved in your business.

Advice Summary

  • Earn credibility in your culture on your culture’s terms.
  • Make it easy / fun to follow your advice.
  • Design for your developers/managers, as they are the first users of your work.
  • Have something at stake
  • Consider switching to a role with power
  • Seek powerful allies
  • Get out of your office and drop your ego
  • Follow the money

Notes from the Q&A after my talk

Thanks to Emily Cunningham  (@emahlee), here are some questions and answers from the audience.

How do you become credible? (Audience question)

  • Ask your best ally (who is not in your job role) that question.
  • Don’t always change the conversation in meetings to ask the same question you always ask. You’ve become a UX robot, always saying one of the same 3 things.
  • Saying the same things over again and again, but not affecting change isn’t helping anyone.
  • Know and be aware of “what conversation are we having?” for each meeting (tip from audience)

Good Project Managers empower the people in their team. But good project managers are rare.

How do we educate our co-workers of our value?

  • Start on their terms. How do you solve a problem they need solved? (Ideally using your special skills, but being useful at all is a better start than being non-useful but a “design expert”)
  • Most people have no idea what you do. Part of your job will always be to give the intro talk about your profession.
  • You can’t do it en masse so divide and conquer:
    • Ask your co-worker, “I’d like to talk to you about what I do so I can get your feedback on what I’m doing.” The next meeting you’ll have one more person (hopefully) on board and who understands what you do.

People want data (observation from audience member)

  • Data gives you credibility.
  • Video clips give you credibility.
  • Anyone can go capture video of the product being used.

Pay attention to how decisions get made:

  • What data works? Is it numbers? Stories? Who yells the loudest?
  • Are you sure decisions are made in meetings, and not in private discussions?
  • Does the VP always make the decisions? Who do you know who has the ear of the decision maker?
  • Seek informal channels – Conversation at people’s desks, or over coffee.

Another Mistake: Never Make It Easy

  • Designers have multiple users along the way, for instance, developers who get our wireframes, with color codes, pixel sizes, or CSS they can reuse, are happy developers.
  • Developers are always busy juggling 9 things they need to get done.
  • Set it up so the devs get some reward every time they work on your design. What positive reinforcement of the behaviors you want do you provide?

Film analogy and design decisions

  • Film has hundreds of people working on it. But there are only a few people who have enormous power.  Out of 500 people, maybe six or seven people have power over the creative direction of the film.
  • Amazon and Microsoft’s designs are an “averaging out” of many people’s input.  (This goes back to the earlier point that design expertise is weighted less than dev expertise).

When there are smart, confident people working on things they are passionate about, there’s going to be unavoidable messiness. There is no ideal team where everything goes smoothly and every decision is contention free.

Inspire people to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do.

  • There’s a thin line between being inspiring and being a jerk. One person’s inspiration is another person’s annoyance. The most inspiring thing a person can do is to work hard on problems they care about that align with what the team cares about, share that work with others, gracefully take feedback, and continually produce.

Related Posts:

What do you think we missed? Leave a comment.

Is speaking easier than writing? Some advice

Posted on in Public Speaking, Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

I get many emails asking about writing, in response to the popular posts I’ve written about writing. Recently Shawnee M. Deck wrote in asking about writing ones life story.

I was immediately appalled by my lack of ability to put down on paper the words that seem to make everyone laugh whenever I tell my stories.

This is common. Spoken language and written language work differently. The skills needed to tell a good story in one do not necessarily transfer to the other.  Our ears are more forgiving than our eyes. When listening, we can use people’s tone, pace and volume to get more information about what they are saying. When reading, we get none of that information. The words have to stand alone. It takes more skill to keep people’s attention in writing than in speaking.

Some writers do voice to text transcriptions, talking into a microphone and having software convert it to text. Give it a try. If that works for you as a way to get a draft down, go with it. But know that it will need heavy revising to appear like good writing to a reader.

Should I leave a lot of the grammar errors to my editor? What should I expect from my editor in general?

The more you know the better, but yes, any copyeditor should be your grammar expert. Editors come in two flavors: copyeditors and development editors. The former will correct your grammar and give you feedback on sentences, paragraphs and low level writing. The later, which is harder to find, is someone who can give you guidance on the overall direction, approach and voice of the book. Sometimes you can find one person who does both. Publishers sometimes have a third kind called acquisitions editors who find and negotiate with authors to sign book deals, but are often less involved in the process afterwards.

What format would you most suggest? Organized by subjects categorically? Organized chronologically?  For now, I’m just getting the chapters down based on my outline.

There’s no right answer. A good book can use any of these methods, provided the writer uses the one they choose well. For now, I’d agree – it doesn’t matter. Just get your stories down. When you have a complete first draft, you can come back and change your mind about how it’s organized. If you plan for a second and third draft, which you should, you can happily postpone sorting out questions of form or structure. An outline helps get the first draft down, but there’s no law requiring your second draft uses the same outline.

Should I buy a lot of books (other than yours) and spend a lot of time researching how to write “memoirs” or should I spend a lot more time just writing.

The answer is both. You need to write and get feedback, and read and take notes (What worked in a book? What didn’t? Why?). You can also read many more hours a day than you can write (even pro writers don’t spent more than a handful of hours a day creating new work). If  you read books related to what you are writing about, or in the same style,  it will inform you of what you want to aim for, as well as avoid. As far as memoirs, check out Joan Didion, Ted Conover, Annie Dillard, Loren Eisley or any book in the Best American Essays series (there’s one for each year for at least the last decade). Most of the essays are memoirs or non-fiction, giving you a sampler pack of writers you might want to study.

 

On Insecurity and Writing

Posted on in Creative Thinking, Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

A good friend mentioned he’d write more often if he dealt with his insecurities about writing.

I look at this differently.

All writers are insecure: they have doubts and fears that never go away. Kafka didn’t want any of his books published, and lived with perennial doubts about his talents. Fitzgerald and Hemingway both despaired about the quality of their current projects, whatever they were, afraid their new works wouldn’t measure up to their last (despite feeling this way about their previous works too).  Talk to any creator while they are creating and insecurity is everywhere. Will this work? Is this the right choice? Should I cut this or make it bigger? Insecurity is part of the deal, as the act of making something means you have to find your way as you go.

Anyone who creates anything has an endless game of ping pong between confidence and fear going on in their minds. And although one might score an ace or a slam, neither ever wins, it’s an endless game. Complete confidence creates shitty work, and complete insecurity ends work altogether. Both confidence and fear are needed and must be lived with, not eliminated. Experience with creativity means familiarity with this process, not an avoidance of it. Fear is an asset if you use it as fuel for your fire, rather than a way to smother it, or as an excuse for never starting it in the first place.

Writing is hard. Painting is hard. Competing at sports is hard. Everything interesting is hard. The risk of failure is what makes the challenge interesting. Take away any chance for failure, which you’d need in order to feel completely secure, and you take away motivation.

I say choose to do it anyway. So what if it’s bad? So what if no one likes it? So what if you read it and don’t like it yourself? So what so what so what so what.  SO WHAT. At least you will have done it and can decide not to do it again. But to spend hour after hour just thinking and talking and torturing yourself about something you don’t do, while pretending, based on little study of the craft, that there is a magic way to avoid all the hard parts no other productive maker has ever avoided, is beyond arrogant – it’s mad.

It’s okay to be insecure. Just be insecure about something you are actively making, instead of being insecure about some imagined reality that will never exist if you don’t sit down, shut up and get to work.

Related:

Quote of the day

Posted on in quote of the xby Scott Berkun

The quote of the day:

“All power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The more I’ve learned, the less I believe it. Power doesn’t always corrupt. What power always does is reveal. When a guy gets into a position where he doesn’t have to worry anymore, then you see what he wanted to do all along.”

-Robert Caro, Interviewed in Esquire, 12/16/09

What should I talk about? (Puget Sound SIG-CHI)

Posted on in On Tourby Scott Berkun

I’m speaking this month at the Puget Sound SIG-CHI meeting (1/26, 6:30pm, location TBD) , a cool group of designers, researchers and UX-minded folks.

Since it’d be daft to pick a topic without some form of user-research, I’m asking you, here and now, what you’d most like to have me talk about. Here are some suggestions:

  • The top 10 mistakes UX people make
  • Why designers fail
  • How to be persuasive
  • What I wish I’d learned in college (about UX)
  • Why the world is hard to use (and always will be)
  • What I learned designing WordPress.com

If anything in the list resonates, leave a comment. Or offer a suggestion please.  Thanks.

 

Self-publishing vs. working with O’Reilly Media

Posted on in Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

I met Joe Wikert, GM at O’Reilly Media, in 2008, while negotiating terms for Confessions of a Public Speaker. I’ve talked to many editors and executives at publishing companies, but he quickly charmed me with his genuine intelligence and honest good nature. Like my editor at O’Reilly, Mary Tressler, he’s one of my favorite people at O’Reilly Media.

When I decided to self-publish my newest book, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds, many people assumed there was some bad blood between O’Reilly Media and myself. It was one of the most common questions I heard, despite it not being the case.

When Joe asked to interview me about self-publishing, I imediately said Yes, as this is exactly the kind of good natured curiosity, and interest in providing a level playing field, that made me happy to work with Joe and O’Reilly Media in the first place.

We talked about the choices I’ve made, what I learned, advice I have for authors and publishers, and more (here’s Wikerts summary).

Quote of the day

Posted on in quote of the xby Scott Berkun

Some folks at Pixar, like their President Ed Catmul, offer great and true insight into the creative process. Here’s Lasseter with an excellent quote:

“I will never let a story reel go into production without it being great… I can show you early versions of the Pixar films when they are terrible. Every Pixar film was the worst motion picture made at one time or another. People don’t believe that but it’s true. We don’t give up on the films… we work, and re-work these story reels and [only] then we go into production. We then do the staging with the camera work. We go and record the dialogue with the actors. We’ll do the animation. Meanwhile, all the things that have been modeled that’s in the set and the characters has to be colored, with texture, and then it’s brought together, and lit, and we do the final rendering… it’s a lengthy process. It’s hand made… it takes 4 years.”

John Lasseter, Chief Creative Officer at Pixar, on Charlie Rose, 12/5/11

 

Quote of the day

Posted on in quote of the xby Scott Berkun

“I don’t write to get something through to somebody. I write for various reasons. Some songs I write for the pleasure of writing the song. It doesn’t have any great meaning, it’s just a song. Songs are nice. Kids sing songs all the time for the pleasure of the singing. The pleasure of the rhythm. London bridge is falling down… There’s a pleasure in singing the songs, there is a pleasure in writing the songs. Some songs you try and express yourself emotionally. Those are different songs for me. And they express what I feel and they relieve tensions that I feel when I express them. But I don’t think about getting through to somebody.”

– Paul Simon (From “Songs of America” documentary)

How WordPress.com is made

Posted on in design, Software/Web developmentby Scott Berkun

Some of you know, in addition to my writing and speaking work, I work as a team lead for WordPress.com, managing a team of developers and designers.  It’s an amazing place to work, and I’ve given a few talks about how we make design and engineering decisions.

You can read a popular post I wrote called How WordPress.com is made, which focuses on how our 100 person company works, even though we are distributed around the globe, all the time. You can also read Automattic CEO Toni Schnieder’s post In praise of Continuous Deployment, about how we deploy new features and code.

I gave a short lecture on how wp.com is made at WordCamp Seattle (an informal series of events  around the world for people interested in WordPress) which you can watch below. When I gave this talk again in Portugal, someone from Corefactor made a sketchnote, documenting the core points I made.

Here’s the talk from Wordcamp Seattle:

If you get bored, skip to 18:30, where i talk about how we almost never use email. I talk about Jetpack at 23:00, and Q&A begins at about 31:00. If you have trouble with the embedded version, go here.

Quote of the day

Posted on in quote of the xby Scott Berkun

Here’s the quote of the day. I wish more stars in all workplaces felt this way (Although Kobe has plenty of history of being less than coachable):

“[Brown] was not afraid to criticize the star guard [Kobe Bryant] after the exhibition opener Monday against the Clippers, pointing out to reporters that Bryant was one of many Lakers whose defense was subpar.

Brown called a timeout less than a minute into the third quarter that night after Bryant left Clippers guard Chauncey Billups open for a three-point attempt. “That’s his job,” Bryant said. “I’d be upset if he was letting me skate through things. If you make mistakes, it’s a coach’s responsibility to point those out. If he can’t point that out to me, he has no chance in pointing that out to anybody else.”

From The L.A. Times article on Lakers coach Mike Brown

The gift of Innovation (photo)

Posted on in Myths of Innovationby Scott Berkun

Timothy Meaney, CEO of Kindling, a collaboration tool used by Symantec, Motley Fool, Nordstrom and Credit Suisse, sent out copies of The Myths of Innovation to some of their favorite customers.

He kindly sent me a photo, which I promised to post here.

Should you be inspired to do something similar with one of my books for your clients, friends or armies of creatives under your employment,  and give me an interesting picture, I’d be thrilled to post about it here too.

 

Amazing list of what people want me to write

Posted on in Mindfire, Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

At the book launch party  for Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds last month, Much fun took place.

(Photos by Shawn Murphy)

I set up a big wall upstairs in the back where people could write topics they wanted me to see me write about.

Wow.

It took up three huge sheets of paper, and some folks drew pictures, diagrams and other creative ways to express their suggestions.

Here’s the list. Some silly, some serious, some both:

  • The history of the London Underground
  • The history of the Velvet Underground
  • The history of Velvet Curtains
  • How to beat the house in Vegas
  • Does philanthropy work for today’s generation?
  • Does philosophy work for today’s generation?
  • How to write a book about public speaking
  • How to speak publicly about writing a book
  • How to freelance as a subject matter expert
  • What is the most important topic today? Why?
  • Why does Steven Gerraud matter so much?
  • What does fear hinder within us?
  • How do you not keep up with Jones’ and not care?
  • How to keep focus in a world that does not stop
  • How to best disseminate and grow a disruptive business idea in an organization averse to change?
  • How to avoid cynicism in a system determined to create and maintain it
  • Write about me! I’m fascinating (But you’re not that bright – you didn’t say who you were).
  • Why bacon is the only thing a man (or woman) really needs to survive. (Why bacon goes so well with everything)
  • The nature of friendship in the era of Facebook
  • Romance in the middle ages
  • Extend “Complexifiers vs. Simplifiers”  – does this map to englebart/Kay or Jobs/Gates? @strayideas
  • Resourceful or smart?
  • Should we privilege content creators as a potent segment and work to prefer their favor vs. consumers of content & passive commenters? – Andy
  • How to fix the floating plastic garbage in the pacific
  • Technology as a way to reduce consumerism?
  • Balance of intuition vs. data/tangible in our human experience and how that translates to business/culture.
  • Non-profits.
  • Should we focus on removing waste or adding new net value? – Andy
  • How the future depends on our rejection of four ideas: competition, scarcity, individualism, and the endless pursuit of more.
  • The randomness and influence of the general media
  • I want to read the novel. Finish it!
  • Crowd-sourced, real-time digital social media in the streaming cloud!! OMGR0X0RZ!!!
  • Ten years from now, why will authors need publishes? What’s their value add?
  • Life after Facebook, Google+, Twitter, 4square.
  • Writing about writing a book about writing a book.
  • How to create and share with audio in ways similar to the way people share through photos and writing today.
  • How to win at everything
  • How to make a living traveling in other countries (South America)
  • Learn about a write about a random subject each of a month
  • Why the world NEEDS EUGENICS!
  • How to recover after a terminal failure.
  • A day in the life of MS – before and or after .com
  • What should we do about the media in this country. Where should we look for reliable insight into public topics. Who should we trust. *Is it more important to fix the media or our political system?*
  • I’m originally from L.A. and have experienced the Seattle freeze. What’s up with that?!?
  • Courage
  • As everything gets more digital, will our children miss that we left behind fewer keepsakes?
  • Monkeys!
  • Monkeycats
  • What does Occupy Wall street look like 100 years from now. Is it a new sub-culture / political party? Something else?
Have something to add? Leave a comment.

Quote of the day

Posted on in Philosophyby Scott Berkun

No introduction necessary:

We believe life is a constant series of small decisions that most of us leave up to someone else to decide. By taking charge of those decisions yourself – even the smallest ones – you can change your life from mundane to magnificent.

From the Married with Luggage blog (A 40 something couple sold everything and travels the world)

The secret life of blurbs

Posted on in Books, Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

Blurbs, the quotes from famous people that appear on books, are curious things. They’ve been around forever, and show no sign of going away. It takes work for an author to get them. When you see a high profile name on a book it means the author, or their editor or agent, is well connected. It’s not a democratic nor meritocratic process.

The work involved goes something like this:

  1. Publishers and authors want to sell books
  2. Endorsements from famous people, in theory, help sell books
  3. To get a blurb, authors ask everyone famous they know, or friends of friends of famous people
  4. Some of those people agree to consider it – many decline or don’t respond
  5. Some of the people who agree actually look at the book
  6. Of those people, some offer a blurb, many decline here too
  7. Of those that offer a blurb, some are good enough to use

It’s a long, nag-filled process. Reading a book takes time, as does writing a short quotable summation of it.

Some famous people never give blurbs (I know because I’ve asked them, and they told me). Other famous people love to blurb as many things as they can (It’d be interesting for someone with google-fu to see which famous people give the most blurbs).  It’s likely many famous people give blurbs without even skimming the book (quid-pro-quo blurbing is common), whereas others insist on reading the entire thing before considering anything.

My first 3 books have many great blurbs from famous people, and I’m grateful for them. But for such a small piece of copy, people have very strong opinions about what they do or do not imply.

The singular blurb for my new book, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds is unique. It’s unusual because unlike every other blurb I’ve seen, I, the author, wrote it myself. “You are smart enough to buy books for better reasons than a famous person you don’t know saying you should.” It’s my book, why not be honest?

I hope you find it amusing, or at least clever. Here’s why I did it:

  1. Most blurbs sound the same. I figured a more interesting and honest blurb may earn more attention than a famous person you don’t really know saying “I love this. It was better than Cats” or “Amazing read” or another thing much like what others have said about other books.
  2. As a self-published book, I’d rather invest time in making the book awesome. If I could skip the laborious and unavoidable steps listed above for hunting blurbs, I could focus more energy on making the book itself worthy of attention. Was it a mistake? I’m not sure.
  3. Given a chance, people can evaluate things themselves.  I decided to give 1/3rd of the book away, for free, as a Preview (PDF). I think most people know how to skim a book and decide if it’s interesting or not, all on their own.

Did I make a mistake? Do blurbs make a big difference in your book purchasing decisions? If not, what does?

If you want to know more about my self-publishing experience, read this.

Mindfire Day: the summary

Posted on in Mindfireby Scott Berkun

You folks are awesome.

I know it’s annoying to keep getting asked to tweet, and post, and dance, in the name of some thing made by someone else. I know you have many other things to do.  And I’m grateful to every single one of you who helped out today.

I promised a summary, and here it is.

The summary:

I promised prizes and I will gladly give them out – tomorrow :)

Of course its never too late – if you forgot, the book is still new and every bit of PR helps. All of the specific and easy to follow tasks listed here are always welcome and have value.

Thanks again. More soon.

Do crazy innovations affect serious subjects?

Posted on in Creative Thinking, Innovationby Scott Berkun

Kestutis Gardziulis, one of my kickstarter supporters for Mindfire, asked this question:

How do “crazy” innovations affect serious subjects?

Often crazy ideas in innovation history are described as accidental inventions. Things like how Nutrisweet was discovered when a chemist accidentally licked his fingers, or that Post-It notes were invented out of bad glue. These stories are told as if it were all an accident that could happen to anyone. Most people find  stories told this way charming, which is why they’re so popular.

The better way to consider these stories (for anyone serious about creativity) is the people involved were  a) paying attention b) working hard.

Any idea, no mater how crazy, silly, or ‘bad’, can be reused in surprising ways, provided a and b are true.

In the cases of both Nutrisweet and Post-It notes, the inventors were not slackers. The only reason they had a chance to make these ‘accidental’ discoveries is that they were in a place of work, and were working. They were not on a beach reading Stephen King novels, nor in their parent’s basement playing XBOX all day (although I do admit, it is also possible to discover ideas in these activities too).  The ‘accident’ happened while they were working.

But the most profound thing is that when something crazy happened, they paid attention. They didn’t throw the idea away as most of us would. Instead that asked: “this is weird… how does it work? and what might it be good for?” And set about working hard to find out what the weird or crazy accidental idea might be used for in the world, in some cases, abandoning the initial project that led to the discovery of the crazy thing in the first place.

In another way, crazy ideas that are invented as jokes or as playthings, can also become serious. Silly inventions like Hoola Hoops are now a form of exercise. A similar story is true about the poles used in adult strip clubs. Take a crazy idea from one domain, and bring it into another, and it may become something very serious indeed.

Creativity can simply be seeing a new way to use an old thing, or having the insight and courage to borrow an idea from one domain, or designed for one purpose, and apply it to another.

What stories do you know of, of an idea from one field being reused in another? Please share in the comments.

 

When is it time to quit a job to follow a dream?

Posted on in Mindfire, Philosophyby Scott Berkun

Andrew Rosen of Jobacle, one of my kickstarter supporters for Mindfire, had this request for a blog post:

How do you know it is time to quit your job and put yourself into a project you believe in on a full-time basis (head and heart)?

I try to live life backwards. It’s a cliché, but many cliché’s are cliché’s because they have some truth in them. I do periodically imagine myself on my deathbed looking back. What do I want to see?

When I do that, answers to questions like this are easy. The time is now.

Many people spend their entire lives with a dream they keep in their back pocket, expecting there to be a day with no distractions or conflicting priorities. In that fantasy, there is a day that will come, on its own, when following a dream will be the easiest choice in the world to make, and everyone, and everything in the universe will point towards the dream. That day never happens. That day has probably never happened for anyone. You have to make that day happen for yourself, often in spite of some reasonable advice to the contrary.

Most people reading this post live comfortable lives. No matter what choice you make, you will live a reasonably comfortable life, historically speaking. Review Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – no matter what you do, you’ll likely be ok. You have the power to take a big risk or two over the course of a lifetime and survive, or possibly thrive. But never taking a chance? Never making sacrifices to find out what’s behind that dream or what’s on the other side of that fantasy? Over the long view of a lifetime, that approach makes little sense.

If you want specific plans for how to quit, see: Should I quit my job now.

Can you thrive on a sinking ship?

Posted on in Management, Mindfireby Scott Berkun

Josh, one of my kickstarter supporters for my Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds, asked this question.

My place of employment is closing. The problem is the mood is very somber and depressing. How do you work within that environment and not let it bring you down?

If you stand back, way, way back, the entire solar system is a sinking ship. We know the sun has just a few billion years left, and if we’re still stuck on planet earth, we’ll go up in flames with the rest.

Meanwhile, can we thrive here? Of course we can.

Whenever I hear of a group in trouble, or a project not going well, I think of the earth and the sun. If you frame a problem right, you can thrive anywhere. Even Sisyphus himself, according to Camus, had moments of joy here and there. I admit you can’t always thrive in terms of productivity, but you can thrive in spirit.

First, its when times are tough that leaders earn their pay. It’s easy to lead when everything goes perfectly. In some cases, a leader might be doing nothing at all, and ride on the waves of producvtity driven by the people who work for them. But when things go wrong, or there’s bad news, or the sun starts exploding, that’s when a leader earns their pay.

What goals can be set that people find interesting? What skills can people learn before the project is over? What sources of pride can be cultivated and directed at the remaining work? There are always ways to make the boring interesting, and the dull fun. It just requires someone who has authority to choose to use that authority to motivate and inspire.

I’m not suggesting denial. Everyone will process the end of a project or a company in their own way, on their own time. But for those who can find ways to stay motivated and excited about what they’re doing, they should be supported and encouraged to find ways to involve others.

Lets say there are 100 people on a project that’s ending. Everyone will be somber when it’s announced. But the following week, what if there are 5 people, working together, having fun, and being productive. The other 95 will start to notice, and many of them will want to join the 5, in spirit, if not in work. Not everyone will be capable of coming along, but you’d be surprised. If a key leader or two take up with the minority group, it can soon become much larger than people think.

At the end of the day we all face situations we can’t win and can’t control. The question then becomes: how will choose to face those situations? Like Sisyphus, choosing how to respond to what we can’t control might just be the most important and defining decision we ever make.

Today is Mindfire day: Details for how to help

Posted on in Mindfireby Scott Berkun

To help spread word of the new book, I’m asking everyone I know to tweet, post or facebook about Mindfire.

The goal is to see how high we can get the amazon.com ranking to go. Its been hovering at around #11,000 since launch. Can we get it to 7000? 2000? Lets find out.

I’ll be tracking who helps (make sure to reference @berkun, www.scottberkun.com, or my name on Facebook), and giving away prizes like amazon.com gift certificates and signed copies of books.

To participate is easy. Do any of the following RIGHT NOW:

1. Tweet about Mindfire. Here’s a sample tweet you can use: “Great book – Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds –  fast, fun & provocative read on big ideas by @berkun http://amzn.to/mindfires #mindfire”

2. Post on Facebook.  “Great new book Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds, a fast, fun and provocative read on how you think, work and dream. A great gift for creatives, leaders and thinkers –  http://amzn.to/mindfires”.   (Tag me at Scott Berkun so I’ll see it).

3. Post on your blog.  You can reuse the samples above, and also mention the free preview of the book, which can be found here:  http://bit.ly/mindfirepreview.   Make sure to have a link to www.scottberkun.com so I can track it.

4.  Buy Mindfire as a gift, or for your team.  Any sales today would help enormously. If you can think of friends or co-workers who need a good read, it’s a win-win: http://amzn.to/mindfires. (Also, you can gift the kindle edition of the book – it’s on the same page).  You can simply tweet, FB or blog about the fact that you the bought the book.

5.  See who else you can get to do any of the above. 

Cheers for all the help!

In return, I have a stack of new posts I’ve been saving up, and you’ll see me posting and tweeting about them today.