I mentioned yesterday work on my fourth book is moving along. One key decision I need your help with right away is the title. Everyone has opinions on titles after a book is out. And I’m trying to be smart by getting your input now while I can do something with it :)
Which one is the strongest? Don’t worry much about the subtitle, we’ll focus on that in round 2. Leave comments if you have specific suggestions. Thanks.
It’s been awhile since I’ve said anything about my next book. Time for an update.
The book’s primary theme is: Intelligent Provocation.
What does this mean? These days, discourse is heavily polarized. We rarely see or hear intelligent arguments. Many of our popular voices are not thoughtful about how they express their thoughts.
The goal of the book is to take on big questions, provocative ones, in a thoughtful but challenging way. Much of the book will be heavily revised essays and posts I’ve already published, with 1/3rd or more of new material written to make the entire project work well as single great read.
Since I plan to write many books in my life, I need this one to be self-published. I’m sure in the future I’ll want to write books publishers will be afraid of, and I can only do that if I do it myself. I need to start somewhere, and this book is a great place to start.
Weeks ago I hired an editor, Krista Stevens, and recently I hired Tim Kordik to join the project as the book designer (and yes, he’s being paid). We are officially on a roll. We have a complete outline, some draft sections finished – things are well on their way. The current plan is for the book to be out late spring of this year.
I’m working on ways to involve you readers in the process. So stay tuned!
To help celebrate the recent release of the paperback edition of Confessions of a Public Speaker, as well as it’s 100th review on amazon.com, here’s a checklist you can use to help make sure things go well at your next presentation.
You can download a nice printable PDF of the checklist:
If you’re a frequent speaker, what else would you add? What might you remove? (Keep in mind, good checklists are short and smart)
Read the national bestseller, with behind-the-scenes tales from the life of a successful public speaker, teaching you the inside view of how to be a great communicator. Recommended by the Wall Street Journal, Lifehacker, Wired and other media. Buy on Amazon / Read a free chapter
I’ve written before that we’d all be better off if people stopped saying Innovation. Calling something innovative doesn’t make it so – it’s just a word, a word that’s been abused to the point it has almost no meaning. History bears out many creative and successful organizations rarely use that word at all. They don’t need to. It’s often people who want to seem special, or creative, or productive, who use that word as a mask for their insecurities.
Recently I got unrequested email about a site called Innovation management. On their front page alone I counted more than 7o uses of the word. What a disappointment. It defeats their own purpose.
It’s not a surprise that the site seems designed to push PDF articles for sale, articles I presume, based on the site, suffer from an inability to use the age old innovation called a thesaurus.
Sometimes when people are trying to be helpful, all they can think to say is a platitude. Often this has the effect of making people feel worse, not better. Here’s a list of the most annoying platitudes people say.
It’s true that technically some of these are cliches, others are aphorisms, but they’re all used for similar reasons and can be equally irritating. It’s interesting to note how many of them conflict with each other.
What comes to mind? Leave a comment (240+ already have below). Thanks.
To celebrate the release of the paperback edition of Confessions of a Public Speaker, here’s a kick-off post for a week of posts on public speaking.
The good folks at Toastmasters published an excerpt of Confessions in the November edition of their newsletter. And to follow it up, they invited me on to their monthly Podcast (MP3), a show called, simply enough, The Toastmasters Podcast.
We talked about hecklers, grandstanders, the dreaded rambling question and other situations most speakers fear – it’s a good 20 minutes of advice.
Download (MP3) or listen from their site.
Confessions of a Public Speaker has reached the sweet milestone of being republished in Paperback. It’s now cheaper, smaller, and friendlier. It won’t hurt your foot so much if you drop the book on it, and you can bend the cover in all kinds of creative ways to fit into bags, big pockets or tight corners.
It’s really an amazing little book, garnering nearly 100 reviews on amazon, 96 of them 4 or 5 stars.
If you’ve been waiting for the paperback edition to buy a zillion copies for your co-workers who regularly put you sleep with PowerPoint, or to find a volume slim enough to secretly slip under the office doors of your executive team, the time is now.
And you can of course check out great free excerpts from the book: Attack of the Butterflies and How to make $30,000 an hour.
To celebrate the release of this new edition, I’ll be posting once a day this week on speaking.
O’Reilly Media has started a new blogger review program – If you’re willing to write a review, both on your blog and on amazon.com, you can get free copies of many of their books.
And of course you are free to write positive or negative reviews.
The paperback edition of my bestseller, The Myths of Innovation is, for a limited time, part of the program (They change which books are in or out frequently)
If you want to participate, head here now. Look forward to your review!
A person of good intelligence and of sensitivity cannot exist in this society very long without having some anger about the inequality – and it’s not just a bleeding-heart, knee-jerk, liberal kind of a thing – it is just a normal human reaction to a nonsensical set of values where we have cinnamon flavoured dental floss and there are people sleeping in the street.
– George Carlin (unreliable source)
I find this quote interesting because I’m intensely ambivalent about it.
On the one hand, compassion, or at least empathy, is good. I agree with Carlin there. Anyone of true Christian faith, or most faiths, is compelled to treat the poor well and it’s clear in most scriptures that helping those in need is one of the greatest, and holiest, things a person can do.
But the fact that we make cinnamon flavored dental floss (or not) has no relationship to whether there are poor people in the world, or how we go about handling poor people in our communities. There’s something naive in assuming one is causing or has any effect on the other.
Carlin himself was fond of explain how unfair and illogical the universe as a whole is, but here he’s equating a surplus in one area with being related to, or causing, a lack in another, which applies a kind of logic that isn’t necessarily inherent in the universe.
If anything, dental floss is cheap. Cinnamon flavoring is cheap. The $50 people spent to see Carlin perform is more of an extravagance than the fanciest dental floss. People worried about scratches in their $80,000 car, or getting stressed out about their summer vacation plans, as people around them can’t get their basic needs met is a better comparison of inequality that’s hard at times to comprehend.
O’Reilly is running a special deal, today only. You can get Confessions of a Public Speaker as an ebook for $6.99.
Go to http://oreil.ly/eI8w2x here, and enter this code: DDCPK
If you have the print version but want a copy on your kindle or device, grab it now.
Nice little thought from Warren Buffet, quoted in a good piece on Harvard Business about Why smart people do dumb things:
[Charlie] Rose asked the question that scholars, pundits, and plaintiffs attorneys will be debating for years: “Should wise people have known better?” Of course they should have, Buffet replied, but there’s a “natural progression” to how good new ideas go badly wrong. He called this progression the “three Is.”
First come the innovators, who see opportunities that others don’t and champion new ideas that create genuine value. Then come the imitators, who copy what the innovators have done. Sometimes they improve on the original idea, often they tarnish it. Last come the idiots, whose avarice undermines the very innovations they are trying to exploit.
When conversations go wrong, there’s a moment right before it gets bad that something must have changed. What is it? What causes the transition from civil to adversarial?
I can think of five six reasons, but I’m sure there are more:
What are other causes? Leave a comment.
Also see How to discuss politics with friends for practical advice.
[Note: #6 added 2/20/2014]
“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration of fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams random conversation, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul.
If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery- celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: ‘it’s not where you take from, it’s where you take them to.”
– Jim Jarmusch’s golden rule #5
(Hat tip Darren Geraghty)
In The First Decade of the Future is Behind Us by Kyle Munkitrick for Discover magazine, he ask the question, are we in the future yet? He makes some good arguments:
Can we finally admit we live in the future?…Thanks to a combination of 3G internet, a touch-screen interface, and Wikipedia, the smartphone in my front pocket is pretty much the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I can communicate with anyone anywhere at anytime…and then use the same touch-screen device to take a picture, deposit a check, and navigate the subway system. We live in the future, ladies and gentleman.
Having studied the idea of the future, I had two responses:
1. The future is a safe place we never want to believe is now. Something in our psychology likes to long for things. This includes the afterlife, the faith that the next raise will make us happy, or that when we lose 10lbs we’ll feel good about ourselves. The better future is a form of projection we need. In the present we need to believe something better awaits. You don’t need an iPhone to recognize how amazing the present is. Study the history of civil rights, personal wealth, or opportunity in America, and you’ll find much to be amazed about. We take most progress for granted.
2. Technological progress is not social progress. Are there fewer assholes in the world? Is there less greed? Do more people follow the Golden Rule? Technologies focus on a narrow aspect of progress, one we are good at. It’s the other kinds of progress that are harder to develop. If the only elements of a better future are improved technologies, prepare to be disappointed. Many things do not change with technology.
If you want to find new ideas, start by breaking existing ideas down into smaller ones. Only then can you see how to build your own.
It’s a little mantra you can say: Ideas are made of other ideas.
No genius in history invented their parents. No legendary artist created the idea of art. Mozart didn’t invent the piano and Picasso didn’t invent paint. We have always borrowed, reused, and remade, standing on the shoulders of ideas that came before us and we always will.
It’s impossible to find any idea that can’t be broken down into smaller ideas. Pick a song, an invention, a philosophy… they are all recombinations of other ideas. Sometimes the grandest ideas, once you ditch the romance, are the easiest to dissect. Until you can see the fact that all ideas are made of other ideas as an immutable law, you’re unlikely to create, since you see ideas in the world as fixed when in truth they are always in motion.
I wrote about this at length in the book The Myths of Innovation, and it’s also in my Creative Thinking Hacks essay:
[use] the following simple definition: an idea is a combination of other ideas. Say it five times out loud. Say it to your cat. Yell it out you car window at strangers waiting for the bus. Every amazing creative thing you’ve ever seen, or idea you’ve ever heard can be broken down into smaller ideas that existed before.
An automobile? An engine + wheels. A telephone? Electricity and sound. Reese’s peanut butter cups? Peanut butter and chocolate. All great creative ideas, inventions, and theories are comprised of other ideas.
Why should you care? Here’s why: if you want to be a creator instead of a mere consumer you must see ideas currently in the world as fuel for your mind. You must stop seeing them as objects or functional things: they are combinations of ingredients waiting for reuse.
Of course there is more to know to improve your creative skills. Check out the Dance of The Possible: An Irreverent, and mostly honest, guide to Creativity for solo advice, and The Myths of Innovation if you’re trying to create inside an organization.
I’ve been around for awhile, and have stacks of books claiming to spark design skills and creative thinking. Most end up in the back corner of the shelf, never living up to their promise. I’m impressed, and happy to say, Creative Workshop: 80 challenges to sharpen your design skills, book is a different breed. It’s authored by David Sherwin, who runs the Change Order design blog.
Highly recommended for people who want to learn by making, and who have some design experience but want to grow and stretch their creative abilities. It’d make for a great team building book, where the entire team picks a challenge and does them together, doing a show and tell of their work each week.
The first 24 pages are available for free on scribd.
And it’s listed on amazon.com here.
There’s something familiar about Kobe Bryant’s description about the style his coach, Phil Jackson uses. As this article explains, his teamates sometimes get upset when Jackson zings players in the media, but Bryant says:
“…when you’ve been around Phil for as many years as I have, we all understand that he likes coaching publicly,” Bryant said. “I think it’s important for the new guys to understand that. Ron, Pau, guys that kind of have issues with that, that’s how he coaches. It’s fine. Just let him do his job and go about your business.”
When someone you trust conveys private messages in public, you are being abused. They are enlisting the shame and shock of hearing feedback for the first time in public as a way to to intimidate you into behaving the way they want. It’s both insecure and immature. It happens every day in some workplaces and families, where people with less power are constantly surprised and belittled in front of their peers.
It’s a weak way for people in power to abuse their influence. They are confusing the fear it creates in other people with respect. Victimizing those around you only makes everyone weaker.
A stronger way for someone in power to communicate is to speak directly and privately. Giving the other person a chance to consider and respond, things denied when messages are expressed for the first time in front of strangers.
(Update 1/13: Problem fixed – thanks to everyone who forwarded, helped and empathized)
Greetings people of Amazon.com:
We’ve gotten along well. I write books and you help me sell them. Generally I’m fond of you and all you do.
Recently you’ve done something that makes it hard to sell one of my most popular books, Making Things Happen. You’ve put the cover for the out of print edition of the book, which had a different name, where the new edition should be.
This looks bad and is confusing for our customers.
It has happen before, and I’ve complained through my publisher, O’Reilly Media. It was fixed, but returned. Twice. And here we are again. Can we fix this please? I’m embarrassed by it. I assume you are too. It’s just an image file, and it can’t be hard fix.
And while you are there: I’ve asked previously for the 46 reviews from the old edition to be moved to the new, as it’s the same book, but was told no. If you can move the cover over by accident, can we move those reviews over on purpose, for my and everyone’s benefit?
Thanks,
Signed, One of your customers
I once wrote that Everything is Project, and its true. Recently Gregory Heller gave an ignite talk, at Seattle Ignite 12, that takes this idea to the extreme: Scrum Project Management for Weddings.
There’s good advice for weddings and all projects, including a telling of the Chickens and Pigs tale.
Recently I’ve been involved in quantity vs. quality arguments related to the web. I have a half-baked thought I wanted to share, in hopes someone else already has baked it. Or can now.
In this simple chart, we see someone’s information consumption. At some point, they are aware of so many websites, blogs, tv shows, etc. that they feel personally overwhelmed.
The amount of content in the world is always growing, as is our awareness of information made before we were born. Therefore the possible information a person could consume continues to increase over time and is well beyond a person’s individual capacity to ever read, see, think or even know about it all.
The question then is this: Does the space beyond a person’s point of information overload matter? Since it’s beyond their threshold (they are already overloaded), does it matter if there are 5, 10, 100 or 1000 other blogs or books to read? Or if 5, 10, or 10,000 new blogs or books are made?
If information overload is a constant, we’re indifferent to whatever is beyond that constant since we don’t experience it any differently than the overload we already have.
There is a notion the world is polluted with information. And that reckless publishing or creation is bad. This might be true, but that ship has sailed. We won’t be eliminating information from the world. Therefore:
Hypothesis: It doesn’t make the world any worse to add more information to it, since we can’t be/feel more overloaded than we already do.
What do you think? Opinions? Flaws? Improvements? Has someone else written about this before?
