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?
I’ll be speaking at OOP 2011 in Munich, Germany late this month. I’ve never been to Munich before, or Germany for that matter.
Any advice or recommendations, dear readers? I’d be grateful for suggestions.
If you’re a local, or a fan in town for the conference, let me know – maybe we can meet for a beer (or 6).
“If we only wanted to be happy, it would be easy; but we want to be happer than other people, and that’s almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are.”
– Charles de Secondat
Here’s my favorite talk from last month’s Seattle Ignite 12 – How to Solve a Song, by Karen Cheng.
The video doesn’t do it justice – which happens sometimes (any theories? leave in the comments).
Not sure if it’s that the audience energy isn’t picked up well in her microphone, or what, but this was awesome to see live. If you get bored, jump to the medley around the 3 minute mark:
Clive Thompson wrote in Wired about how he thinks twitter fuels in-depth analysis. I have doubts about his argument, but perhaps agree with his main point. Here’s an excerpt:
I think something much more complex and interesting is happening: The torrent of short-form thinking is actually a catalyst for more long-form meditation…
When something newsworthy happens today—Brett Favre losing to the Jets, news of a new iPhone, a Brazilian election runoff—you get a sudden blizzard of status updates. These are just short takes, and they’re often half-baked or gossipy and may not even be entirely true. But that’s OK; they’re not intended to be carefully constructed…
…It used to be that only traditional media, like magazines or documentaries or books, delivered the long take. But now, some of the most in-depth stuff I read comes from academics or businesspeople penning big blog essays…
Here’s my opinion:
I agree with Thompson’s last point. The Kindle and iPad have improved long form reading, in our attention deficit culture. It’s a dedicated, read-only designed experience. I now read longer articles found online via Kindle, and find I’m reading more of them, but often days or weeks after they were published (Instapaper is the magic bridge, compiling and emailing articles I mark to my kindle).
If you use twitter, has twitter changed your reading habits? And if you don’t use twitter, has it’s existence changed how the people you read do their writing?
I posted on twitter yesterday looking for a word. Here’s what I wrote:
I need a word for someone who is always very busy and doing work, but adds no value (It’s a distant cousin to slacker, but a more active kind of unproduction).
Can be a real word, or made up – received about 15 suggestions:
Any other ideas, or votes, dear blog readers?
Thanks to Ario for this provocative essay on the effect of the web, called The Internet Changes Nothing.
There is a cynical slant to this piece, which the title gives away, but much of his logic and question are sound, it’s just the conclusions where he sometimes runs astray. I agree Marshall McLuhan was a lousy writer and a jumbled thinker, and technology revolutions tend to warp the idea of what a true revolution should bring. The Internet certainly has changed some things for the better, but it has had little effect on others (Are Americans happier or better educated on average than in 1994?).
Here are two choice quotes:
The Internet is not new anymore. It’s twenty years old. Commercial television was roughly two decades old in 1970; it was an established medium. No one then heralded TV as a revolutionary new technology. The Internet is not maturing. It is mature. TV’s programming and business models were rock solid in 1970; the new line up was always the old line up slightly modified. No one speculated seriously about any radical new broadcast TV format. Finally, the Internet has not “changed everything.” TV too was supposed to “change everything.” It didn’t. Rather, it altered what we did with our time. Before TV, the week had an extra twenty hours. TV took them away.
The suggestion being that the Internet mostly has taken those hours back from TV. We used to write letters, now its emails. We used to talk on the phone, now we use Facebook. There is more shifting than radicalizing or revolutionizing. Is the shift a revolution? depends on which part you care about: the means or the ends.
Think for a moment about what you do on the Internet. Not what you could do, but what you actually do. You email people you know. In an effort to broaden your horizons, you could send email to strangers in, say, China, but you don’t. You read the news. You could read newspapers from distant lands so as to broaden your horizons, but you usually don’t. You watch videos. There are a lot of high-minded educational videos available, but you probably prefer the ones featuring, say, snoring cats.
Why we don’t use the internet to the fullest is not a technological problem – it’s a cultural / personal problem each of us face that technology can’t solve for us. We had the same problem with typewriters and libraries. And we’ll always have it. Convenience is not always the problem that needs to be solved.
As Neil Postman suggested long ago, there are many kinds of problems technologies not only can’t solve, but have no effect on. If our view of life is tech-centric, we are blind to both the limited impact of technologies on those problems, and the problems themselves.
Read the essay: The Internet Changes Nothing. Worth the time to sort out where you agree and disagree with him.
“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” -Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The Romans had new years resolutions, and I suspect they were just as bad at keeping them as we are (See The Meaning of New Years Day). The problem is we create them based on wishful thinking, the worst kind of thinking there is. While hope and optimism are great, they aren’t necessarily connected to reality. And for that reason it’s very easy to make grand resolutions, but much harder to keep them. We typically pick things for their emotional or ego potency, ignoring how unprepared we are to achieve them.
The desire is only one part of the challenge – even the definition of the word resolve expresses this:
re·solve:
The solution is Divide and Conquer, another idea from the Romans:
The American Psychological Association report on resolutions noted:
And while nearly 60 percent of people will drop their resolutions by the six-month mark, perhaps due to the persistence of old habits as well as reversion to earlier stages of behavior change, Norcross notes that those who make resolutions are still 10 times more likely to successfully change their behavior than those who do not.
Also see Woody Guthrie’s New Years Resolutions, which gleefully violate all of my recommendations.
Experience is not what happens to you: it’s what you do with what happens to you. – Aldous Huxley
Experience is only a chance to learn. It does not guarantee any lessons or skills. You can have many experiences where you learn nothing, or the wrong things. Only when someone studies their past honestly, and periodically throughout their lives, is there a better chance their experience will have value in the future.
In the working world, a resume for someone who worked at a company for ten years, even a fancy one, ensures only that they learned how not to get fired. Maybe they slept with the boss, or were the low performer others kept around so they’d look good. The quantity of their experience alone promises little. The experience of a proud parent with 5 adult children many mean little about their parenting skills if they’re all in prison and hate their Mom and Dad. A VP at a Fortune 500 corporation whose division succeeded in spite of their incompetence, has a deceptive track record that does not tell you the important parts of the story.
We make decisions about people based on our positive assumptions about the quantity of their experience, denying our knowledge of experienced people in our lives who are bad at what they do for work. We also look down on people who have moved between fields, assuming this gives them less experience. Yet it’s the ability to compare and contrast different experiences that makes each one more powerful. Often for this reason people who have worked in more than one field have more reliable wisdom than people who have only worked in one.
Many on this planet go through life being mediocre at most things they do – it’s not a shortage of experience that’s the problem. Sometimes someone who is smart, honest and motivated but has no experience at all, will perform better than someone with a superficially impressive career we can only judge from the most biased source possible: their own opinion.
“There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it” – Dostoyevski, Diary of A Writer
“People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.” – Samuel Johnson
“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” —André Gide
Now and then I’m told what I wrote was obvious. Readers will say “I’ve heard it before” or “your book was good, but nothing new.” As if novelty were more important than all othrer attributes. I’ve learned this is usually an empty critique. Here’s why:
1. Important messages need to be heard more than once
We still haven’t learned to consistently practice the golden rule, follow the Ten Commandments, the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, or most of civilization’s basic laws and precepts. Being reminded of important ideas is necessary because:
No one learns everything the first time. And even when learned, we sometimes lose our way and forget to follow perfectly good advice.
2. Rather than worry if something is obvious, ask better questions
There are many different ways to say the same basic message. But it’s those differences that make something funny, memorable or moving. Simply rejecting something because it’s obvious (or more likely, just familiar to you and your personal knowledge) denies you of the opportunity to experience those things. Instead, ask questions like:
Being obvious can be a mistake if none of the above apply, but otherwise there’s clear value. As a writer, when I’m told a reader couldn’t apply what I wrote, or the stories didn’t relate to their lives, that’s useful criticism. If they tell me of a better alternative, I can go read it and learn from it. But “that’s obvious” doesn’t suggest I should have changed anything.
3. Sometimes being radically different means you are wrong.
A book on basic math will, at some point, explain that 2 + 2 = 4. Any writing about universal themes (love, happiness, progress) will cover ground others have before. The better questions are:
For example, I don’t believe radical new theories on creativity or public speaking, two areas of my expertise, are necessary. No theory will do the hard work or take the risks for you. This is perhaps my meta-theory about writing itself. It explains why I’m unlikely to write a book called “The radical new amazing theory on X”. I don’t believe such things exist for the interesting challenges in this world, and books that claim there is one focus more on novelty than utility. Even when popular, these books have little influence relative to their sales.
Artist Nina Paley said “Don’t be original; be obvious. When you state the obvious, you actually seem original… Likewise, the more specific the feelings, experiences, stories – the more universal they appear.”
4. If it’s old to you, it might be new to someone else
One of my favorite stories from Confessions of a Public Speaker is the often quoted study on how people are more afraid of speaking to a crowd than dying (read the excerpt here). Everyone’s heard this, and many believe it, but few know the low-quality source. It was a thrill to do the research and show how empty it was. But I did have someone tell me, “I’d heard that debunking before Scott”, to which I wanted to reply “but what about the 99% of the population that hasn’t?”
In The Myths of Innovation, a similar thing happened with Newton and the apple. I was amazed to discover how unlikely the apple legend was. I’d been reading about invention and science my whole life and didn’t know. I figured even if more people than I realized knew about this, it was a stellar reference for making larger points about epiphany stories. Just because you might find a story obvious, doesn’t mean the larger point it’s being used to make isn’t important, meaningful or relevant.
Ideas can be both obvious and potent, and surprising and impotent.
Also see:
I spoke at Ignite 12 in Seattle and presented this for the first time. It’s time-lapsed video of me writing an essay, called How to Write 1000 words.
I was inspired by Picasso’s movie The Mystery of Picasso (discussed in the Myths of Innovation), and Matt Wiley’s video of page design, where they bravely work, and makes mistakes, in front of a camera, showing what creating things looks like.
Here’s the video with audio commentary: flip to the HD version, which makes it easier to see what I’m doing.
And here is the live version (different commentary), performed at Ignite Seattle:
Stats on the essay:
For more advice on writing:
Ok, this is pure fun. I took George Carlin’s 7 Dirty words (The only words you can’t say on U.S. television, or couldn’t), and put them into Google Labs Ngram viewer (which searches for usage of words in the entire google books archive). I made a guess before I ran the query – I expected all the words to rise in usage over the last 40 years. I was wrong:
Chart shown below / link to query:
As some of you know, big ranges in data hide trends. So I took out the big outliers (Shit and Fuck) and ran the same query, yielding the chart below (query here) – overall positive trend on all of them, but more interesting than the first chart:
Playing around with the new Google Labs Ngram viewer (which searches for usage of words in the entire google books archive), I compared the use of four words, usability, innovation, prototype, and experiment, over the last 100 years. Chart shown below:
I complain often about abuse of the word innovation. I also advocate the use of the word experiment. Interesting to see the decline of the later at the same time as the rise of the former. I’m clearly on the losing side.
You can run this query, or build your own. It’s fun. Not sure what conclusions can be drawn from such a wide pool of data, but interesting none the less.
Confessions of a Public Speaker is currently the top book on Public Speaking on Kindle. With 98 reviews and a near 5 star average, it’s a nice surprise to see it still doing well. Thanks to everyone who’s bought a copy.
buy / gift the print edition or buy the kindle edition for yourself here.
And you can read two free excerpts (Attack of the Butterflies, or $30,000 an hour) if you want a sample first.
If you’ve read the book and haven’t reviewed it on amazon, please do. It helps more than you know.
“Beyond doubt, the most salient characteristic of life in this latter portion of the nineteenth century is SPEED – what we may call hurry, the rate at which we move, the high-pressure at which we work;- and the question to be considered is, first, whether this rapid rate is in itself a good; and, next, whether it is worth the price we pay for it.”
– W.R. Greg, Life at High Pressure (1877)
Also see, The cult of busy.
There’s an old George Carlin joke about how between Idaho’s state motto “Famous Potatoes” and New Hampshire’s “Live free or die”, the truth can be found.
Noticed today, on the this blog, two polar opposite posts, One on Wikileaks Considered, the other on Smell-O-Vision, were the top two. Amazing. Thanks for reading my crazy, and oddly diverse, thoughts.
The Seattle Film Festival theater has a special showing this month of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, in Smell-O-Vision. Yes, Smell-O-vision. As an invention historian I knew about Smell-O-Vision, one of many failed attempts to revolutionize the movie theater experience and had to check it out. I wasn’t alone: the line went out the door and the theater was packed.
To my initial disappointment, unlike the original Smell-O-Vision, or its arch-rival AromaRama, SIFF didn’t bother to install expensive ventilation systems to pump artificial scents into the theater. Instead they went with a low frills approach – each person received a paper bag filled with candy and smelly things. This turned out to be exceedingly clever and worked far better than those fancier systems ever did.
The pre-show instructions, delivered by our very own Oompa Lumpa, explained that on-screen prompts would tell us when to smell, eat, chew or open the various objects in our bags. He also told us that “tasting is just smelling with your tongue”.
Here you can see what the on-screen prompts look like. They also showed subtitles for all the lyrics to all the songs in the movie, making it a sing-a-long as well as a smell-a-long.
And it worked well. When 200 people all start eating chocolate at the same time, the room does smell like chocolate. When everyone eats cherry bubblegum, it smells like cherry. This simple approach to the problem was definitely more effective than Smell-O-Vision ever was.
A particularly fun moment is when Charlie and GrandPa Joe are in the Fizzy Lifting Drink room – in the theater we were instructed to blow bubbles, and blow we did, filling the the theater with the same bubbles that were on the screen.
The theater was 60% children, which usually means a nightmare of film annoyances. But this event was so fun, creative and entertaining, and the grand silliness of the movie, combined with all the activities everyone is supposed to do, made it great fun. I’m a fan of the film (70s satire at its finest) and this might have been the best experience I’ve had watching it.
If you live in Seattle, check the SIFF calendar.
I was working on a piece about WikiLeaks, when I found this cogent comment, related to the recent U.S. State department leaks (Cablegate).
Vince Kuratis wrote on a TechCrunch piece about WL:
The first question should be: Do you believe governments have the right and/or responsibility to keep certain types of information secret or private. This might include military information, diplomatic information, medical records, etc.
If you answer this question “Yes”, as I expect most people would — the argument shifts from WHETHER the government has the right to preclude information from being leaked and made public to WHAT TYPES of information and WHAT CIRCUMSTANCES to which this should apply. Then you get to the question of whether wikileaks fits those circumstances, but you’ve acknolwedged [sic] government’s right and responsibility to keep SOME things secret.
It’s a good point and its opposite is also true: it’s the job a free press to push to reveal more about what’s going on than a government wants. Governments tend to protect information, and media tends to want to reveal it. This is an old line of tension with a messy history, with no simple answer. The balance between both forces is what matters, rather than one dominating the other. There is no utopia at either end of the spectrum, only a tenuous and ever-shifting balance somewhere in the middle.
There are many examples of progress being driven by leaks. The Pentagon papers changed our perception of the Vietnam war, for example, and its publishers were tried, and dismissed, under the 1917 Espionage act. But clearly we do not want everything public. Some things like the passwords to the Federal governments social security computers, terrorism on U.S. soil response plans, or the combinations to the locks on the vaults at the Federal Reserve, should be excluded from the public domain.
Everyone seems to think they know what the right balance is, which is insane – there is no way to be certain, which is why the tension between transparency and opacity is paramount.
There are three checkpoints that define the balance:
WikiLeaks does make journalistic claims, but they separate themselves from the rest of the media world, staking a claim that #2 isn’t porous enough. They have placed themselves on the far left, shifting the playing field towards transparency. Existing media suddenly looks more moderate to governments, and even if Wikileaks is ignored in the future, the landscape shifts – I’m assuming this is their hope.
My key take so far: It’s not progress or regression that’s happened, so much as a disturbance. How governments and other media respond over the next weeks and months will define whether this is a step forward or backward. It’s an opportunity for change, and a forcing function for reconsideration, but so far not much more.
In summary, it’s no surprise that:
What’s your opinion? Do you know for certain that this is for good or for bad? How do you know? Or more importantly, what am I missing?
Last night was the 12th Seattle Ignite and they celebrated their 4 year anniversary. How awesome. I had the honor of speaking at the first Ignite in 2006, and it’s amazing how far this thing has come (Photo credit: Eugene Hsu).
When it started it was a crazy format that few understood (20 slides per speaker, 15 seconds per slide, automated = 5 minutes per talk. 10-15 talks per night, inspired by Pecha Kucha). Half the fun was watching smart people struggle live on stage with their own slides. Since the bar for entry was low, it was safe for people to take a chance, and the audiences were super supportive as a result. But people have seen this enough they’re gaming the format – some people are exceptional at optimizing for this kind of speaking.
Which makes me think its time to change the format, or at least encourage more curveballs and cheats, like I recommend in the Ignite talk I gave about how to speak at Ignite. This isn’t the Olympics. There’s no score and no prizes. If you have a great idea that requires hacking the format, do it. What is a “slide” really anyway?
As long as something happens every 15 seconds, the goal of more interesting presentations has been served. You could pick 20 pretty backgrounds that have nothing to do with what you’re saying and show those (juxtaposition can be cool). Or have 20 blank slides. Or have a jigsaw puzzle made from one slide that fills in piece by piece every 15 seconds. There’s plenty of room for innovation here.
I hacked the format last night, showing a time-lapsed video of me writing this essay as my 5 minutes (I had permission from the organizers – thanks Brady and Randy). Some people said to me after “but you’re cheating” and I said “Absolutely. But was it interesting?” Rules are the means, not the ends.
Here’s my actual recap:
I didn’t catch all the speakers, but here were my notes.
