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:
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.
“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:
to come to a earnest decision about; determined to do something
to separate into constituent or elementary parts
The solution is Divide and Conquer, another idea from the Romans:
Pick one single resolution. Your odds of staying focused improve.
Look at last years list and evaluate where you failed. Too ambitious? When did you give up? Use this self-knowledge to inform this year’s resolutions.
Find a friend who can sign up to the same goal. There are tools that even let you place bets on your goals. We are social creatures, and our goals should be social.
Write down the resolution and sign it. Seeing your commitment in writing has psychological power.
Put your written resolution somewhere useful (e.g. in front of the fridge)
Have a daily positive task – mark off a day on a calendar every day you’ve met your resolution. You get a positive visual reminder you’re on your way.
Divide further: simply make a resolution for January, and re-evaluate on Feb 1st.
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.
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:
We forget
It can take several times before we understand
We need reminders to put ideas into practice
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:
Is the writer making good points?
Are the stories compelling?
Is there an angle offered that’s helpful?
Can I use what I’m learning?
Do I know a person that would benefit from this?
If there is a better single reference for this obvious thing, name it
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:
Does the writing provoke something useful?
Does it motivate?
Does it inspire?
Is it convincing you to do something better for yourself or the world?
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?”
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:
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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:
What government leaders decide to disclose, both to the public, and within the government itself.
The person inside an organization considering leaking something, who compares the pain their “disloyalty” to their organization will cause themselves and others in making the leak, against the possible long term greater good (See Whistleblower)
The journalist receiving the leak who, using their professional judgment, discerns on their own, or through discourse with representatives from the organization the leak is from, what the true greater good is and what should be withheld from the public and for how long (e.g. See NYT’s explanation of its coverage of Cablegate)
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:
WikiLeaks released these documents – there’s a long tradition and in each case it was messy, confusing and painful. Someone can be committing a crime and making progress at the same time. It’s impossible to sort out in the moment, especially when a single leak has 250,000+ documents.
The U.S. and other governments are pissed and calling it a crime and Assange a terrorist. That’s part of their job. If they publicly applauded the unauthorized release of confidential documents, they should be fired.
Internal communications of any organization will always contain harsh criticisms of other organizations, including allies. It’d be more disturbing if every cable said “We love everyone, especially you”, they’d either be phony cables, or proof the entire U.S. government had been lobotomized.
We hear about distractions like Julian Assange’s prosecution for unrelated charges. His personal behavior is mostly irrelevant to Wikileaks, free press vs. government control, and the idea of transparency.
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.
Karen Cheng gave one of the best Ignite talks I’ve ever seen (How to solve a song). It was interesting, clever, informative, funny, involved live performance, and exposed the basic mathematics of pop music. Her closing medley of about 12 pop song choruses based on the same 3 chords was brilliant. When this is online as a video, it will be hugely popular. Very impressive.
Mandy Sorensen talked about parasites. Watching this made me think how cowardly I am for picking topics easy to find interesting. Not sure I can make parasites fun, but she did. She managed to make this entertaining and oddly, if grossly, captivating. She did cheat by showing a picture of puppies though, but as I said, cheats are ok.
Gregory Heller. SCRUM Project Management For Wedding Planning is a great title, and he delivered. The concept of Invested/Committed applied to weddings was apt. He also wins a prize for showing a diagram and immediately saying “Don’t try to understand this diagram”. Awesome.
Justin Martenstein – He runs the 400 person game at the beginning of the evening, and every time I’m thinking “there’s no way people will participate” and yet every time he gets 80% of the crowd up on stage, in groups of mostly strangers, to work happily together on some crazy team project. Proof our species does not (always) suck. Amazing. He warms up the crowd for all the speakers.
As a testament to how cool the Seattle Ignite crowd is, Emily Chen’s talk on owning fewer things (Have less, live more) had technical issues. But when she let the crowd know, they gave her a rally of cheers and encouragement. And she made the right call: abandoning her slides, and just speaking directly to the crowd.
Sadly I didn’t catch James Callan talk about grammar Nazis or Joel Grus talk about how to be funny. Hoping to catch these and the other talks I missed online.
All writing comprises three things: words, sentences and paragraphs. If you know a few words, you can make a sentence. If you write a few sentences you can make a paragraph. Keep it simple. In the end, emails, blogs, books and novels are all made from the same substances. As long as you plan time to revise later, putting words down is easy.
There’s no right answer for what to do first. It doesn’t matter as long as you do something. Make an outline if you like. I often do. An outline gives structure, or the illusion of structure, which helps. Other times I have to turn off my mind and jump in. Only after I’ve driven myself mad wandering the page like an idiot can I map where to avoid, and where I’d like to go.
Writing begins with ideas, but we forget ideas are whispers in our minds. They’re always there. The trouble is we overpower the whispers with the loud voice of what we think we want our ideas to be. It takes quiet patience to listen carefully and that’s what creativity often means: simple quiet courage.
I keep a notebook with me at all times and that’s one habit that helps. In conversations with friends, when watching movies, or waiting for the bus, I silently write down little ideas. Sometimes as I write I discover more ideas beneath the first, so I write them down too. This may last a moment or five minutes. I have no rules other than writing little things down. I try to capture what’s in my head well enough to make sense a day or a week later when I return. Study a genius and you’ll find they had notebooks, sketchpads or prison walls to capture their thoughts. Our minds are not enough. Give me an assignment, and the first thing I’ll do is make sure my notebook is around with me all day.
Notebooks repel the fear of blank screens. They make it easy to copy a list from the notebook and put it on the top of any new thing. And the tool that holds the page is mostly irrelevant. I write in WordPress, Microsoft Word, Notepad, I don’t much care, and chasing tools is a waste of time. Shakespeare, Hemingway and Carver didn’t need much from their pre-electric and pre-web tools to write masterpieces and neither should you.
I don’t want a detailed outline, but I don’t want vagaries either. I aim for the sweet spot, a list of short sentences that demand explanation. I want sentence grenades, phrases loaded with opinion generating shrapnel for my mind. When I read them on the page I expect them to explode into opinions, thoughts, riffs and rants. How they explode depends on where my mind is at the moment. On another day they may send me to a different place, but I don’t worry about that day. Sometimes I abandon half the outline, or change the order of the sentences, or discover I have the opposite point of view I began with. I withhold judgment until there are enough words on the page to work with.
There will be dead ends and false starts but I don’t care as long as there is motion. Writing, but not revising, is all about motion. I’ll move to the next point and the next, hoping each grenade explodes, or reignites others, giving me a page of fodder to kick around. Like a fire when you’ve run out of wood, I can sense when the momentum has slowed and as I get my last runs in, I let it die. Then it is time for the work to begin.
In the first moment people get stuck they get scared. Inexperienced writers fear being stuck means they’ve done something wrong. I know the opposite is true. This is where the real work begins. It’s not writing until you’re stuck. When you’re stuck, you’re forced to think and thinking is good. Thinking is the entire point to the enterprise of writing. To think and feel and, through writing, express those thoughts and feelings to others. When you’re stuck it feels wrong, but it’s righteous. You’re being forced to reconsider what you’re doing and good writing demands consideration. Better for the writer to reconsider when writing than to have the reader consider it later and find it wanting.
When stuck I do one thing: Go to the top and reread. What seemed like a dead end will go away once you approach it again from the sequence of ideas in the preceding paragraphs. This is the one habit that makes me a better writer than the other guy. I read what I’m writing and improve it every time I read it through.
People say “that book was a great read” as if it’s a surprise. Isn’t that sad? All books should be good reads. No writer writes trying to be a bad read, a boring read. And the books that read better are ones the writer read often while writing it. Better writers might simply be better readers. They more diligently read their own work as they’re writing and fix mistakes of flow, pacing and thinking. These are more important than mistakes of vocabulary, flair or style, the three pretentious distractions we often think signify good writing. They often signify big egos and not much more.
There’s not much else to know. As I reread I refine like a river into a canyon, chipping away each time at little pieces, polishing the bits that hold up, and pushing away the ones that don’t. And when I can read through the whole piece without much changing I know I’m almost done. The last thing to do is to walk away. I need one final read with fresh eyes, eyes like my reader’s will have. And when I return there’s one more polish and pass: then it’s time to set it free and on its own into the world.
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Watch a timelapsed video of this essay being written, live:
Notes:
This essay itself is exactly 1000 words long.
It took 154 minutes to write this post. It was written over the course of 2 days.
Great post about redefining the idea of quality, using some recent music videos and TV ads as examples.
The common thread that runs through all of their videos is that they seem to be willing to forgo fast in favor of making something that is both cheap and good. OK Go videos tend to look low-budget, but in a good way. They have a homemade appeal. But while they didn’t invest a lot of money (relative to the quality of the output), they did invest a lot of time in planning, preparing, practicing, and shooting the videos.
My big secret project this year was extensive research into what will happen in 2011 and it hasn’t been easy.
My daily routine included reading a big bag of tea leaves every morning (the bag is called ‘the web’ by some), extensive alcohol abuse followed by extreme power napping, intense daily consultations with Nostradamus (I renamed my dog for this project), and of course a third mortgage on my soul for the necessary project funds.
It’s been a rough ride, but well worth it. I finished it this morning – here we go:
2011 will be mostly like 2010! The sun will not explode. Aliens will not land. You will look mostly like you did last year, and your time will be mostly spent doing the same things you did the previous 12 months. Your fears, dreams and complaints at the end of 2011 will be similiar to those at the end of this year.
Some smart people will make insightful guesses about 2011, but be wrong and ignored! We are disasters at predicting the future, but some predictions are based on better thinking that other predictions. The problem is we we judge predictions in binary form, which is foolish.
Some morons will make lucky guesses and be ‘right’ and be famous! You can always find someone who predicted something correctly, but this doesn’t mean they are wise, it likely means they were lucky. Some predicted the sub-prime crisis, but they may have been predicting a sub-prime crisis every year since the day they were born. It’s a big enough planet to always find someone who predicted whatever happens. This doesn’t mean much on its own. We should ask “what can we learn from this prediction” whether it’s right or wrong. Truly good predictions teach us something, even if wrong, but someone can have guessed right and teach us nothing.
I will repost this for 2012 and not have to change a thing (other than the numbers).
As work is underway for a collected works book of sorts, we’re trying hard to avoid the obvious traps. Most books that are collections of blog posts or articles don’t work very well. They’re under-loved, under-designed, and don’t make for very good reads.
If you’ve ever purchased a collected works type book, what are some of your frustrations? Or what things did you wish the author/editor/designer did that they didn’t do?
All artists are psychologically and emotionally driven to tell their stories. I’m not so sure we choose the stories – they choose you. We don’t ever completely understand the things that drive us, but I do believe that a good deal of the thrust of the direction of the choices I made, when I had a choice I made, when I had a choice about where my life was going to go, was back in deep pursuit of the mysteries of the past in order to find out ‘who am I, who am I going to be, where’s my future?”
Last night was the 12th Seattle Ignite and they celebrated their 4 year anniversary. How awesome. I had the honor of speaking at the