Author: Scott Berkun

Edison vs. Tesla: two approaches to problem solving

Posted on in Creative Thinkingby Scott Berkun

Two heroes in the pantheon of inventors are Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. Of their many contrasts (ethics being among them) an often overlooked one is their divergent approaches for how to solve problems. The book Empire of Light is a fantastic telling of the entire story of American electricity, and Edison and Tesla’s initial partnership and later rivalry, but it also touches on the attitudes about invention.

Edison is famous for his affirmations of hard work as a key ingredient in invention:

  • “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration”
  • “I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work”

It’s good advice. Finding the idea for something is rarely the hardest part in bringing it into the world. Instead, it’s the willingness to work on the long list of little issues that must be solved to bring an idea to fruition (or the marketplace). In problem solving lingo, this kind of approach is called brute-force. You apply great energy to try out many alternatives, cheaply and quickly if you can.

Tesla had a different approach. His intuitive understanding of the principles of science allowed him to think about problems in ways Edison either could not, or did not want to. Tesla wrote:

  • “If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once… to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.”

With the rise in popularity of Tesla as a mythic hero, and Steve Jobs as a latter day Edison, it’s easy to want to take sides. But when it comes to problem solving, both of them were right. There is rarely one mother of invention – there are always many possible ones.

The best approach to problem solving is synthetic: to use the synthesis of both ways of thinking to serve you. You should be willing to apply brute-force, but also be willing to do thinking in advance to make solving a problem easier.

Decades ago, in my computer science classes, there was a clear divide among my programmer peers. When given a new assignment,  some would jump right in to writing code. I’d call them little Edisons. Others would put the keyboard away, and think for a while on paper. They’d sketch things out, and perhaps ask a question or two online. These were the little Teslas.

Which one do you tend to be more like in how you approach problems?

edison-tesla

Livestream 9am PST: Creative thinking hacks

Posted on in On Tourby Scott Berkun

I’m speaking today at Creative Mornings Seattle on Creative Thinking Hacks.

I just learned there will be a livestream. You can tune in at 9am PST to watch/listen.

Description: Scott will simultaneously demystify creative thinking, provide tips and tricks for finding ideas, provoke wild opinions and comical rants, and explore how to become more powerful at the creative aspects of your work and life. 20 minutes + 20 minutes Q&A.

Livestream here (at 9am): http://www.ustream.tv/channel/seattle-creative-mornings 

(At the moment this video is still live: skip to 54:00 to get to the start of the talk. A proper edited video will be available soon)

 

The 5 best books on Innovation EVER

Posted on in Books, Creative Thinking, Innovation, Myths of Innovationby Scott Berkun

Before I share the list of the 5 best books on innovation, here’s a list of 5 things you need to know before reading that list. It’s worth it. I promise.

  1. There are 100s of books on innovation and most are terrifyingly (and ironically) boring. They’re bought to be placed, unread, on office shelves so people can pretend they’re smart. These books are cliché in the worst way, cherry picking trendy examples and building worlds of junk theories around them, theories the heroes in the cherry picked examples didn’t even use. Innovation is a junk word, and there are many junk books.
  2. It’s not clear why anyone should read a book about innovation. There’s little evidence people we’d call creative got that way by reading a particular book. Most skills in life are only acquired by work, and to be more creative means to create and learn, rather than merely read.
  3. I carefully studied over 60 books, related to creativity, invention and managing creativity in others during research for my bestseller, The Myths of Innovation (research that included teaching a course on creativity at the University of Washington – syllabus). And I’ve read more books before and after that project. I even organized the books I studied in an innovative way for readers. I’ve been studying creativity in many forms for a long time and my list reflects wide and deep reading.
  4. People looking for a book on innovation often make the mistake of compressing the many sloppy uses of the word into a single thing, and expect one book to excel at teaching people how to: 1) Generate ideas and invent things 2) Design and ship good products 3) Run a successful entrepreneurial business 4) navigate an organizational bureaucracy. These are very different skills, possibly even different subjects.
  5. These four skills are rare. It’s insanely rare for one person to have two, much less three of them. It’s improbable any book could single-handedly give you one of these skills, much less all three.  Any book claiming to do any of this is lying to you.

There. All done.

I can confidently say if you only read 5 books these are the ones to read and re-read:

  1. Innovation and Entrepreneurship, by Peter Drucker.  Drucker is profound, clear, concise and memorable. He puts modern business writers to shame with his clarity. This short books encapsulates all of the theory you need to think about starting a business, and what it will take to find, develop, launch and grow product ideas. (Also see,  The Art of the Start, Guy Kawasaki, and if you work in the tech-sector, Founders at Work is a must-read)
  2. Thinkertoys,  Michael Michalko. There are many books with exhaustive lists of methods for generating ideas. This is one of them. The misconception is that idea generation is the hard part, which it rarely is. But for those looking for games, tactics and methods to generate ideas this is a great place to start. (Also see, Are your Lights on?, by Gause and Weinberg).
  3. Dear Theo, By Vincent Van Gogh (& Irving Stone).  Before you dismiss this one, consider this: what we call passion in the business world, is passion for profit. What if there was no profit motive? How much passion would our heroes, like Edison and Jobs, have had for the ideas alone? To learn about the deepest commitment to ideas you have to study artists. There are no better stories of passion than great artists pursuing their creative visions against all odds and Van Gogh’s letters are a fantastic encapsulation of commitment, vision, dedication, brilliance, work ethic and madness, all traits any creator or entrepreneur should understand. (Also see, The Agony and the Ecstasy, for a similar book about Michelangelo).
  4.  They all laughed, Ira Flatow. History is biased in that we retroactively inject purpose and narrative structure into stories of invention, so that they make more sense to us in the present. But the real history of invention and discovery is messy, weird, frustrating and surprising. This book documents how frustrating it usually is to have a great idea in a mediocre world. (Also see, Connections, by James Burke – all episodes of the documentary based on the book are free online).
  5. Brain Rules, John Medina. I’ve read many books about intelligence and neuroscience – they’re mostly pseudo-fluff, filled with the latest theories and shocking claims, but lead to no tangible improvement in how you use what’s between your ears. Brain Rules is the book to read about how to use your brain to better use your brain. While it’s not strictly about creativity, show me a creative person who didn’t use their brain well (See my full review of Brain Rules here).

There. Have fun.

Most of these books are old. Well guess what? Innovation and creativity are old too. The best advice is not necessarily the newest, despite our compulsive neophilia. Just be glad I didn’t recommend Vitruvius’ ten books on architecture (which happens to be one of the only sources for the story of Archimedes and ‘Eureka‘).

But I implore you to do more than read. Like learning to play guitar, you can only learn so much from books. You must get to work yourself. It doesn’t matter what you make, but go make something. And when you finish, think about how to make it better and try again. This is the only thing that will make you more creative: the practice of making things. And only then can what you learn from books matter.

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.