Author: Scott Berkun

Postmortem: Seattle and Snowpocolypse

Posted on in Seattleby Scott Berkun

About once a year Seattle gets snow, and invariably we do not handle it well. The shock is how, year after year, an entire city seems stunned by how fragile our transportation system is.  And then, during the failure, some people complain that the city didn’t do enough to fix or prevent the problem.

Here’s a postmortem on what happened:

  • Our geography sucks. We have hills. It doesn’t take much ice to make hills dangerous. There isn’t much a plow or salt can do in a large city with lots of hills, with once a season snow. And many Seattle-ites have limited first hand experience with cars losing control on hills: they becomes unguided missiles (see videos below).
  • All our transportation is surface level. Due to our geography, we have no true subway. Buses run on surface roads and are not immune to surface level problems. I didn’t hear any reports of light-rail issues yesterday, likely because it’s an independent system.
  • We have inexperienced drivers. Since it snows once a year, whatever lessons people learn about how ineffective ABS brakes and fancy cars are in bad conditions, they’re forgotten 8 to 10 months later. And as driving home is a (understandably) selfish activity on normal days, people don’t realize the risks they’re taking in aggressively trying to beat the weather to get home.
  • Issues have compounding effects. Traffic is comprised of non-linear relationships, meaning it can accelerate faster through the traffic system than people expect. An accident here, can lead to a backed up exit there, and soon there is the equivalent of gridlock on arterials or even highways.
  • Plows, police and emergency crews can’t magically teleport through traffic. Once nothing is moving, there is no magic way for buses, tow trucks, or ambulances to get anywhere. We so rarely have bad weather it doesn’t make budgetary sense to maintain a large staff of plows and salt trucks that will sit dormant 95% of the season.
  • Thanksgiving/Holiday week’s amplify issues. More people are out and rushing to get things done.

The net lesson is it’s not the amount of snow that matters. It’s recognition of how:

  1. Easily traffic flow can fall apart
  2. The prime danger isn’t the roads but the other drivers on the road
  3. Using a vacation day to avoid the whole thing might be a brilliant move

Yes, many people had no choice yesterday and I empathize. But many of you reading this probably did.

It’s interesting to read through this list of stories shared to the Seattle times – there’s a persistent sense of shock and surprise. I’d love to know how long these people have lived here. And what, if anything, they’ll do differently next time they hear a report of snow in the winter in Seattle.

Here are two videos from last night:

Book review: The checklist manifesto

Posted on in Books, Creative Thinking, Culture, Philosophyby Scott Berkun

Gawande’s first effort, Complications is a great book. He’s honest about the limitations of surgeons in a way few doctors are: it’s fantastic, doubly so if you deal with doctors on a regular basis. His second book, Better, was ironically not as strong, but a worthy read on how a thoughtful surgeon (Gawande) thinks about proficiency and skill development.

This book, the Checklist Manifesto, is harder to recommend. First, it’s not a manifesto, it’s too thin, long and even-tempered to hit that mark. Second, it falls into the Dan Airley (Predictably Irrational) trap of insisting on telling the author’s personal stories of learning, even when they’re repetitive and predictable: it’s clear through all 100 pages of Atwande’s conversion to the wonders of checklists in the first half of the book that he will, in fact, be converted.

The prize in the crackerjack box that is this book, the part that made the book worthwhile, is Gawande’s interview with Dan Boorman, an expert at Boeing on the checklists pilots use in emergencies. He makes clear why most checklists in our lives earn a bad reputation:

“There are good checklists and bad… bad checklists are vague and imprecise. They are too long; they are hard to use, and they are impractical. They are made by desk jockeys with no awareness of the situations in which they are to be deployed. They treat the people using the tools as dumb and try to spell out every single step. They turn people’s brains off rather than turn them on.”

But Boorman continues and offers a design minded view of what a good checklist is:

“Good checklists, on the other hand, are precise. They are efficient, to the point and easy to use even in the most difficult situations. They do not try to spell out everything  – a checklist cannot fly a plane. Instead they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps – the ones that even the highly skilled professionals could miss. Good checklists are, above all, practical.”

It made me long for a book about Boorman and his experiences in the world trying to teach people who tend to make the former, to make the later. There’s a short interview with Boorman here (PDF).

Gawande is an excellent writer in every sense of the word. I enjoy his pieces in The New Yorker and elsewhere. But this book would have been better suited at actual manifesto length (50-100 pages) or structured less on Gawande and more on his subject. Unlike medicine where his insider observations fascinate, here on more ordinary subjects his personal narrative isn’t sufficient to power an entire book.

How much to charge for speaking?

Posted on in Public Speakingby Scott Berkun

Question from the mail-bag:

I’m an excellent speaker but there isn’t high demand for my talks yet. I’ve been speaking for free to attract clients, but now I’m being offered money. I don’t know how much to charge, especially when the truth is, I will speak for free if I have availability and room for new clients. I don’t want to undercut myself. I also don’t want to charge too much and be turned down. Last year I quoted 1500 for a half-day seminar and they said their entire budget for the day was 500. I told them I’d be wiling to negotiate, and never heard back from them.

As I explained in Why Speakers earn $30,000 an hour, speaking is a free market activity.  There is no single reference to use for how much to charge. This works against you if you only speak once in awhile, since you can’t triangulate to find out what people think you are worth, and have fewer chances to get drunk with other speakers and organizers to get them to dish on what they charge or pay (I list the ultra high end of known fees here).

Being an excellent speaker isn’t of primary importance when it comes to fees, unfortunately. Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber might be horrible speakers, but they’ll fill a stadium of paying customers just for showing up. Fame and expertise draw people first, not speaking ability.

In some circles a $500 fee is significant, as paying someone to speak at all seems exorbitant to most normal people on this planet. In other circles, $5k for a lecture is small change. Study your profession and seek out high profile events. You’ll find they charge people $1000 or more to attend for a day, which implies they have sizable budgets for paying speakers. However these budgets come with higher expectations of the profile or fame you need to get that gig.

I wouldn’t worry about undercutting yourself – if your primary income is something else, it’s wise to see speaking as a funnel for that business until there’s enough demand to think otherwise. If you are good, each gig you do will lead to more gigs, and soon you’ll have too many requests than you can handle, which gives you leverage in explaining higher rates. Same goes for most freelance type careers.

On your lost client: clients can be flaky. The fact they disappeared may have nothing to do with your rates (ask them). They likely contacted a few people, and possibly got lost in all the email, or the agenda changed and the workshop was cut. All freelance work has a high inquiry to engagement ratio and speaking is no different.

If you want more insider speaking advice, you want my bestseller, Confessions of a Public Speaker.

We are just like ants: the proof

Posted on in Cultureby Scott Berkun

As I kid I spent hours playing with ants. I’d move stuff around their nests, watching how they responded to whatever I did, amazed at how dedicated they were to whatever they were doing and would completely ignore whatever I did.

Turns out we’re not so much different. This little experiment in sidewalk design proves it (by PFSK, via @Rbanks).

People Watching Plus from Rune Madsen on Vimeo.

Can you Redesign a Chocolate Bar?

Posted on in designby Scott Berkun

Over on designmind, David Sherwin, author of the upcoming book Creative Workshop, is sharing some of the design challenges from his book on his blog. Some of these are really fun and provocative.

This week’s challenge:

Choose a product you use as part of your day-to-day life—food, drink, paper products, etc.—and  redesign or repackage it so that consumers will want to use less of it.

How can you use your design skills to make more out of less and encourage people to use that reduced quantity in a more mindful manner?

There are some photos of what a redesigned chocolate bar might look like.

According to David, this challenge was inspired by designer Tithi Kutchamuch, who said “I buy Twix Extra because it’s only ten pence more expensive… I finish it in one go, and feel guilty for the rest of the day… Bargain food persuades people by playing with the value of money, which has brought a lot of problems to society: over nutrition, eating disorders, obesity, illness, guilt, wasting food, wasting resources, over production, etc. Can design make people buy food that offers less?”

Help wanted: designer for next book (updated)

Posted on in Booksby Scott Berkun

Update: this job was filled and the book was published!

This is an updated and sanity enhanced job description (backstory here).

I’m looking to hire someone to play a unique role in my next book: The Designer.

The plan is to self-publish a collection of my best writings, from essays, to blog posts, to magazine articles. But to avoid the traps of “blog posts in a bundle” books. I’ve hired an awesome editor as the first key member of the team. Now it’s time for the next key member: the designer.

The role:  A book is a kind of user experience, starting with the cover, but extending to every font, every layout, every chunk of whitespace. Typically designers come in late, are forced to work quickly and without much input – it’s no wonder most books are so ugly, so sad, so unloved. Why can’t we make a book where fantastic writing is matched with a simple, bold, and clean visual design?

This role will different. You’ll be involved early. You’ll have power and influence over what’s in the book, not just how it looks. There will be no bureaucracy: it’s just me, you, Krista (editor) and a few other hand-picked people we choose.

Here are the responsibilities:

  • Drive the visual design and user experience of the book
  • Have authority over the cover design, typography, layout and interior choices
  • Manage challenges of print & e-book (kindle/pdf) design
  • Contribute to the vision for the book itself
  • Suggest and provoke me to write new material
  • Collaborate with me, Krista and other team members
  • Use readers of scottberkun.com to contribute ideas and feedback

Here are the rewards:

  • More influence over a book’s design than you will ever have
  • The potential to do great work with great people
  • Redefine the contribution of design to modern book publishing
  • If you’re a fan, you’ll get a unique opportunity to define one of my books
  • You’ll be paid a negotiable fee. But as a self-published book it may be less than you’re used to.
  • I’m considering a bonus structure for team members based on how well the book does (a bonus when the book breaks even, and another if it makes a significant profit).

Requirements (read them all – it’s a test):

  • You understand the power of clean, simple, bold design
  • You enjoy collaboration with smart, fun people – good feedback inspires you
  • You are organized, self-directed, and can lead a project with many parts
  • You’ve wanted to contribute to a beautiful, well-crafted, book that defies convention in favor of smart, clever ideas for book design
  • You are psyched about this for reasons other than money
  • Bonus points for being a fan, or being familiar with my work

To Apply:

  1. Email me: info at scottberkun dot com
  2. With the subject:  I want this book
  3. Must include: a link to your design portfolio and the name of your favorite cartoon character
  4. Deadline: apply asap (already reviewing applications – rolling hiring process)

More on free work / Designer job

Posted on in Philosophyby Scott Berkun

Update: the book this job was for  was published.

Weeks ago I posted a job ad for a designer position on my next book.  This led to a post on sometimes working for free and why I support the idea. Then after what seemed a long debate, I apparently changed my mind with a new job posting. A few asked me to explain, so here we go.

In retrospect it was a poorly written ad.

I asked for a “design god” while simultaneously suggesting there wouldn’t be much pay, if any.  The combination is offensive. I can understand that. Anyway, I don’t need a design god – or even a demi-god. A talented and motivated design student could fit the bill perfectly. Or a veteran looking for a fun and interesting side project. I got carried away, on both ends.

My goal wasn’t to cheapskate my way to a book. Instead it was to raise a flag in my network for people who find the project, or working with me, interesting enough to do it primarily for those reasons, not the money. If a great candidate stopped by and said they need a minimum of X or Y, I’d likely say yes. Perhaps that’s arrogant, stupid or both. Mea Culpa. As I said, it was a poorly written ad.

I’ve written a new ad and just posted it.

One reason for the first change was, practically speaking, the debate over free garnered more attention than the job itself (FAIL again for me as a copywriter).

The most convincing argument I read was this one from Baldur and Jace:

You are a writer with a record and it’s reasonable for an outsider to assume that a book you self-publish will earn you money. You’re not doing this as a non-profit project, you’re not donating the proceeds to charity. You expect to profit from the project financially.

(Jace) I basically agree with Baldur here. You’re asking someone to put in a lot of work on an an experimental project, yet accept a disproportionately low (as in zero) share of any possible rewards, which are — let’s face it — likely

It’s surprising how certain some of you are of my future success. As the guy who actually does the work, I know differently. I know nothing is guaranteed to me. I know no one will buy my next book purely because of my ‘record’. Exceedingly few books earn back their costs, much less make money, and self publishing adds even more risk. But you readers don’t know that – it’s hard to believe all this from your end of the web browser. These two comments made clear how my ad looked to you (“uber-author rips off small innocent creatives”) and I got it.

But as to the question of the philosophy of free, many of the arguments didn’t hold water:

Fuzzy The Bunny wrote:

I’ve heard all these arguments a million times. The experience! The experience! did I mention the experience? Experience is only as good as the future job it will help you land.

I agree.

And if you don’t think the experience of a free job is worth the investment, don’t take the job. If you work in a profession where literally no one ever gets paid, not even the best and brightest, it’s worth asking why you’d call that a profession and not a hobby. And if some do get paid, it’s likely because they are more experienced than their peers. Seeking experience is what writers, artists, actors and dozens of other kinds of professionals have always done. You will not find a painter or songwriter who didn’t work for free at some point or another in trade for experience and exposure.

Sam Greenfield wrote:

There is precedent for this kind of work. Union actors are not allowed to work for free without a waiver from their union.

True, but there are other precedents. For independent films many very successful actors waive their fees, because they want to help the project or the director. Many other professions have trial projects and true freelance work,  where given a sufficiently good opportunity people are willing to trade experience for pay. For anyone who doesn’t think my job is a sufficiently good opportunity, no problem. I didn’t expect them to apply. But it was those who do that I was trying to find.

Bruce Heilbern wrote:

Never ever ever work for free. Once companies learn they can get someone for free you will displace a paid employee. Never work for free; the conpany doesn’t.

Really? Most companies I know like to pay employees so they’re guaranteed to keep them employed there. Especially if they are talented and have other options (say, working for a competitor).

Larissa wrote:

As designers, we already have a hard time being respected for our work because some people think it’s just “pushing pixels” – so I strongly disagree with the idea of working for free. If you do it for one person, then everyone will expect you to work for free.

Nearly everyone has trouble being respected for their work. Everyone makes fun of lawyers, politicians, accountants, you name it. As I mentioned, I have written for free many times, and also do paid projects. The exposure of a free project may be the only way to find people who have budgets to pay you for similiar work. But it’s up to you to judge how much exposure a project might give you in return for your efforts. I never said say yes to all free work, only to work where the total benefits outweigh your total costs.

Jessie Mac wrote:

However, if you’re already getting paid work in that profession, working for free doesn’t make sense unless the project brings other benefits such as marketing exposure, networking possibilities or potential future paid work etc. In the end it’s up to you to decide if those benefits make the unpaid work worth it.

Exactly. I totally understand people saying no to a project as it’s not a good trade for them. But that’s different from suggesting no one should ever work for free, or on a project like mine.

Need a new writing tool: help?

Posted on in Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

I’m a no frills guy. I can write with just about anything and don’t think the tool matters much. The tool is not the hard part. I write in Word, WordPress and now and then Notepad.

But at the moment I have 3 different writing projects going on at the same time – and I find it blocks me to have to sort out which project I’m writing for in a given moment before I start writing. And I write less.  I want to be able to write first, and sort it out later without copying and pasting or doing other medieval type things.

I want to be able to write in one tool, and just tag each post afterwards. Then a month later I can just filter on the right tag and get all the “posts” that fit that project.

Any suggestions?

Design for now or for later?

Posted on in designby Scott Berkun

“If you need people to enjoy it right away, that might mean you’re not going to probe very deep”
– Edward Norton

Of course Mr. Norton was talking about art, not products, but his point raises questions for all makers. If you spend too much time trying to get immediate attention, you’re likely to ensure little long term effect. Think of movies or novels that are most memorable: was it the first five minutes that caused that effect? I doubt it. But if you spend too much energy thinking about the final payoff, few people will make it that far into your design.

In software one of the most neglected parts is the first experience people have. Sometimes called OOBE (out of box experience), installing and setting up most products in the world is an afterthought. IKEA furniture is a cascading failure of OOBE, as it gets worse and worse as you examine each and every one of the stupid little pieces, described in microscopic hieroglyphics the author himself didn’t understand.

Thinking like a writer, the burden is on each unit of experience to be worthy of interest. Each word should lead the reader’s mind to the next. Each sentence to the next sentence. And on it goes. The last page might be awesome, but what’s the point if no one gets that far?

In whatever you make, how do you balance designing for immediate rewards vs. long term rewards?

How I almost invented RSS

Posted on in Uncategorizedby Scott Berkun

Dave Winer, who’s known, in spite of his wishes, as the inventor of RSS, wrote about the myth of the sole inventor, a topic I spend an entire chapter exploring in The Myths of Innovation (Chapter 5: The Lone Inventor).

Winer explains he didn’t invent RSS alone – there were too many contributions to name anyone, including himself, as “the inventor”.

This is refreshingly honest. When an idea succeeds there are often dozens of people claiming to be its parent (See my review of The Social Network). And for the media it’s a stronger story to mention someone as “the inventor of”, however inaccurate it might be, than to say “one of the inventors of” or “someone who contributed to the invention of”. Everyone’s ego benefits from these consolidations of credit so they grow in popularity regardless of their substance.

As evidence of Winer’s point: I worked on a project similar to RSS years before the name RSS was coined. I’d never say I actually invented RSS, instead I’m one of many supporting stories of Winer’s point.

Working on IE4 in 1996 we created an XML based standards proposal called Web Collections, and submitted a draft to the W3C in March 1997.  We even shipped a feature that used it in IE 4.0 beta 1, called Sitemaps, which led to a U.S. patent. The motivation was we realized browsers were dumb and wanted websites to have a smart way to tell browsers about how pages were organized or updated.

Sounds impressive perhaps. But at the time few people cared. Even now, clearly, few people care :)

Moreso, Castedo Ellerman, a colleague working on another IE4 project called Channels, submitted a similar use of XML, called CDF, a few days later as part of our push technology offerings.

Netscape followed close behind with MCF in June of 1997 (It’s possible they submitted something to the W3C earlier, but I couldn’t find it. Hotsauce, the Apple based metadata system they more or less acquired existed earlier but not in a standard based form – if you have a more accurate history please share).

Yet Wikipedia’s history on this matter starts in 1999 – Here’s their history of RSS:

RDF Site Summary, the first version of RSS, was created by Guha at Netscape in March 1999 for use on the My.Netscape.Com portal. This version became known as RSS 0.9.[4] In July 1999, Dan Libby of Netscape produced a new version, RSS 0.91,[2] which simplified the format by removing RDF elements and incorporating elements from Dave Winer‘s ScriptingNews syndication format.[7] Libby also renamed RSS “Rich Site Summary” and outlined further development of the format in a “futures document”.[8]

At the time Netscape’s RDF was a competing proposed standard with Microsoft’s CDF. It was at the peak of the browser war, and there were many competiting ways to do things on the web offered by both companies.

Why are Web collections and CDF omitted? The reasons are simple:

  1. The line for when an idea begins is arbitrary. All ideas are made from other ideas. When precisely an idea becomes it’s own concept is not a matter of science but opinion. This is a matter of convenience. It would take pages of names and ideas to comprehensively identify everyone who pursued any idea, and to sort out which of them were influenced by what work others were doing.
  2. MSFT abandoned the ideas. The GM of IE 4.0 cut the sitemap feature, the only real use of web collections. And CDF was known mostly for the ill-fated Channels feature, part of the push technology (which Wired proclaimed would end web-browsing altogether). The uses of these proposed standards  faded – and standards only thrive if they are manifested in software people use. Netscape’s standard lived on in code.
  3. No one has spoken up to offer other pieces of history further upstream. Winer mentions CDF and Microsoft, but not Web Collections.

But this is not an unusual story – the complexity of origins, competitive approaches to a similar idea, and failures of acknowledgment or comprehensiveness is the norm. It’s just inconvenient to take a close look at the origins of things, so mostly we never know. Read up on the invention of airplanes, light bulbs or anything and you’ll make similar patterns of discovery.

Of course I didn’t invent RSS. But I did work on something that influenced what did happen. Such is the life of people with ideas.

[Post updated 2/4/13: In the tragic story of Aaron Swartz’s suicide, he’s often referred to as the inventor of RSS. Alternatively Wikipedia offers “he was involved in the development”.]

[Post updated 2/4/13: Typos fixed and edits of concision]

The impact ratio (why it’s hard to know what’s important)

Posted on in Culture, Philosophyby Scott Berkun

We like to think we know how important everything is when it happens. But looking backwards, it’s clear some events that seem minor in the moment have  large consequences. While other events that seem major in the moment have small consequences. I call this the impact ratio: the relationship between your initial perception of the importance of something, and how important it turns out to be a year or ten years later.

Consider the pretty girl, with the sad brown eyes, you see on the train one ordinary Tuesday morning, whose presence you somehow remember 10 years later. That experience had more impact than seemed possible that very afternoon. More impact than all the meetings that week, all the lunches that month, and maybe even the majority of waking hours the entire year.

We’re not built to be good at evaluating the significance of most events when they happen. Since we can’t know the future, it’s hard to know which things will turn out to be valuable, forgettable, pivotal or trivial. Depending on what happens tomorrow, the value of past experiences changes.

An old fable called “We shall see” illustrates this well:

A farmer’s horse ran away. That evening the neighbors gathered to commiserate with him since this was such bad luck.

He said, “We shall see.”

The next day the horse returned, and brought with it six wild horses, and the neighbors came exclaiming at his good fortune.

He said, “We shall see.”

And then, the following day, his son tried to ride one horse. He was thrown down and broke his leg. Again the neighbors came to offer sympathy.

He said, “We shall see.”

The next day, conscription officers came to seize young men for the army, but because of the broken leg the farmer’s son was rejected. Then the neighbors came to say how fortunately everything had turned out.

He said, “We shall see.”

You are Don Draper: Pick the ad

Posted on in Myths of Innovation, MythsDayby Scott Berkun

You can be Don Draper and help pick an advertisement. I can’t offer you bourbon or a smoke, but you can weigh in and give judgment, which might be a fun break on a boring day.

Some books on amazon.com are allowed to put a video ad on the book’s page to help promote the book. Myths of Innovation is one of them. The current video is broken and was mediocre anyway.

To help promote the paperback edition of Myths, I hired Bryan Zug to make a new video to appear on amazon.com and on youtube. We edited two different versions and wanted your feedback: which is stronger? Which will get more people to watch all the way through and seek out the book?

If you have 3 minutes to opine, please do the following:

  1. Watch both videos. They’re similiar but different.
  2. If you were born on an even day (10, 12, etc.) please watch B first, then A (to help counterbalance order bias).
  3. Vote below on which version is stronger

Version A: TJ

Version B: Spike

Vote

10,000th comment: thanks

Posted on in this siteby Scott Berkun

A few days ago we hit a milestone – Dorian Taylor’s comment on my review of The War of Art, was the 10,000th comment left on this blog. He leaves many excellent thoughts here, so it’s fitting it’s him.

Just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has ever left a comment here, even if it was to tell me how wrong I am or that my words smell funny – I read everything that gets posted, sometimes twice, and it helps me continue this adventure in writing.

I hope you’ll keep commenting – as it helps me to keep writing.

Thanks.

Resumes vs. Recommendations

Posted on in Managementby Scott Berkun

It’s curious that people who are hiring put so much faith in resumes: a resume is a document made by the most biased source possible. Whereas a recommendation, if from a trusted source, knows both parties and, even if biased, has conflicting biases. As much as they might want to get a friend a job, they want to protect their reputation. They’re unlikely to recommend someone who doesn’t live up to their billing.

Unless the job you’re hiring for is to be interviewed all day long, most interviews don’t tell you very much about how the person will perform when actually working. A recommendation on work done at another job in  a similiar role has to weigh more heavily than their ability to merely talk about that work.

Of course resumes and recommendations are not mutually exclusive, but one is given undue dominance over the entire process.

See The Winchester Rule of Interviewing

On working for free

Posted on in Philosophyby Scott Berkun

Recently, this comment was left on my job posting for a book designer:

You know what they say, Mr. Berkun – you pay peanuts; you get monkeys. If you want someone to spend the time required to design a book and then not get paid with anything other that good wishes, you’re on the wrong track. Would you do consulting for free if a company said they would give you freedom and publicity alone?

There is nothing disrespectful about asking people to work for free if you are doing something interesting. Here are my arguments:

  1. There are kinds of compensation other than cash.  Sometimes those other rewards are harder to obtain than cash. If you were a guitarist and could play a gig with U2, without pay, would you do it? I’m sure you would. I’m not Bono in 100 different ways, but you get the point. If you think I’m a bozo, I wouldn’t want you working for me simply because I’m paying the most.
  2. Yes, I work for free when the rewards are worth it.  Many artists do. If  you see someone on a television news show, I guarantee you, they are not being paid to be there. Why? The opportunities of that “work” have value above and beyond financial compensation. I do webcasts online, for free, quite often.
  3. If I could work with someone I admired, on a fun and challenging project, I’d certainly consider doing it for free. Especially if the project was unlikely to reap financial rewards for anyone involved (such as, say, an experimental self published book).
  4. Hell. This blog you are reading is “free”. No one pays me to do this. So why bother? Because it has rewards I can’t obtain any other way.  I’m a writer by trade, yet I’ve written 1000+ posts here. Arguably 70% or more of the words I will ever write I will not be paid for.
  5. Specific to this designer role, I don’t want to hire someone who is motivated for this project solely for financial reasons. I did mention I’d like to find a way to pay them, but can’t promise.  Primarily I want to hire someone who a) digs my work and wants to collaborate, or b) who is motivated by the opportunity to design something amazing and recognizes the unique opportunity here – since in the publishing world, designers rarely get that kind of seniority on a book with an established author.

The zero-tolerance argument against working for “free” is a bad argument, as zero-tolerance arguments always are. It discounts non-financial compensation, puts no value on how interesting or exciting a project can be, and ignores the huge number of successful people in hundreds of fields who willingly choose to work on projects without pay.

So fine, you can call me a monkey. I like monkeys. But at least in this case I’m a monkey who is practicing what I’m preaching.

[Update: the design job description was updated to include guaranteed pay]

Book review: The War of Art

Posted on in Book reviews, Booksby Scott Berkun

I didn’t like this book. It was just too unintentionally silly to like. Now I know silly books can be meaningful or moving, or just plain fun, but this one is hard to recommend. It’s particularly hard to suggest it to anyone in serious pursuit of writing or making of any kind. It’s too weird, dramatic, and fanciful, and the good advice and thinking it does contain is often buried in indulgence. You can find equivalently good inspiration without these flaws.  The book you should read instead is Art & Fear (more on that shortly). It’s cruel to say, but it’s the book Pressfield should have read first.

There is a fantasy among people who want to write that inspiration is the challenge. If only they had sufficient inspiration, all other problems would fade away. They imagine writers as people who are inspired all the time, which is nonsense.

But it’s a convenient fantasy, and those who buy into it tend to believe two things: a) obtaining passion is the hard part and b) it can be found in a book.  It’s these people who buy books like the War of Art. They prefer mystical, romantic and even supernatural explanations for what writing or art making is. A narrative of WAR is what they want, as it shapes the universe as a battle, with forces of good and evil, and you, the reader, get to imagine yourself as the hero in this epic conflict.

As an exercise, this is fine. As a metaphor, it’s useful. But as a literal way to think about the daily practice of making things it’s absurd. Worse, I think it’s destructive for learning how to write, especially for new writers. There are much better ways to explore why writing is hard, particularly the notion of blocks.

The first half of the War of Art is a reasonable attack on the psychology required to make things, and this much of the book I’d recommend. He writes just a paragraph on most pages. Short notes on the fight and how he fights it, plus anecdotes from famous figures, and his pet theories on psychology. Some of it is good and moving. Other bits are cliche, cheezy or overly dramatic. As a light read for getting psyched, I was often moved and entertained. But the annoyances and wanderings increase as you read. After two of my favorite sections ( How to be miserable, We’re all pros already), which came mid-way through the book, I had an increasingly hard time continuing. It was hard to finish the book’s 165 sparse pages.

The problem is Pressfield (Author of the Legend of Bagger Vance) likes his fantasies. It’s clear he depends on them to work. This may work for for him, but as a model for others? With no offering of alternatives? He gets lost in them in this book and will lose inexperienced writers in them too. As the book progresses his central arguments shift to mystic forces, with the task of creative work scrambling into literal notions of angels and gods and their pivotal role in writers and their work. If you like books like The Secret and find the Law of Attraction useful in your life, and you want to write, you’ll like this book, as it bets on similiar faith in the universe and forces beyond our control as its central, or at least concluding, theme.

Otherwise please go read Art and Fear instead. It achieves all of the aims of The War of Art with more grace, honesty, concision and power than any other book on making there is. Bradbury’s Zen and the Art of writing is also excellent, without any self-indulgence or dependence on mystical metaphors.

Meanwhile, read my post on How to write a book: the short honest truth.

How U2 gets ideas for songs

Posted on in Creative Thinkingby Scott Berkun

In my never ending study of how people work with ideas, I watched Classic Albums – U2’s Joshua Tree.  Unlike most behind the scenes documentaries, much of the 60 minute film is the band and the producers (including Brian Eno) discussing how certain songs were created, composed and mixed, often while they are in front of mixing boards playing with the raw tracks.

Here are some highlights:

Adam Clayton (bass) explains how half the songs on Joshua tree are expressions of a musical idea first, and often those ideas are arrived at collaboratively. Then Bono works to find a lyrical idea based on the emotional content of the music.  The other half of the songs are ideas Bono or the Edge bring to rehearsal, in wide range of (in)completeness that they develop together.

About the song ‘With or without you’:

“I can see that it [With or without you]  was so out of step with everything around – it was mad. It was kind of ecstatic music – kind of gauche and uncool but with a kind of highness to it. A highness that works so well live. Of course when you sell that many records and you hear me say it was out of step with the times you want to slap me around the face, but it was going into it. And something that is a staple on the radio now, like with or without you, got to understand is a very odd sounding song, it just sounds normal because you’ve head it so many times. But it kind of whispers its way into the world and this odd guitar part that’s played on the edge’s infinite guitar, it’s an unusual sounding record”

– Bono

On how not being cool can be a creative asset:

“Coolness is a certain kind of detachment from yourself.. it’s not exposing of something of yourself”  – Brian Eno

About the need for iteration:

“that’s the story of our records – they start with ideas either quite simple or quite abstract and then they get brought into focus slowly”
– Edge

Why Where the Streets have no name took longest to create:

“[The edge had a riff that was in 6/8 time and was trying to figure out how to get from] 6/8 to 4/4 time for where the band come in. At the time I didn’t appreciate the hours of thought that had gone into the idea – it just seemed like a way of fucking the hand up. So he had the beginning and the end but he didn’t really have the bit in the middle, so we would spend interminable hours figuring out chord changes to get the two bits to join up. Which is why it drove Brian (Eno) mad”
– Adam Clayton

On why starting from scratch can be the fastest way to a solution:

“That song [Where the streets have no name] was recorded, so there was a version of it on tape. That version had quite a lot of problems. What we kept doing was spending hours, days and weeks… probably half the time that the whole album took was spent on that song, trying to fix this version on tape. It was a nightmare of screwdriver work. My feeling is it was just better to start again. I’m sure we would get there quicker if we’d start again. It’s more frightening to start again, because there’s nothing. So my idea was to stage an accident. To erase the tape so we’d just have to start again.” – Brian Eno”

If you’re a fan of the album I’d recommend watching the whole thing – It was fascinating to see Bono listen to his raw, early vocal tracks for different songs and talk to the producers about it. And for fun, at 38:05 one of the producers mixes together a DepecheMode / Pet Shop Boys version of Where the streets have no name in real time on camera.

Also see: Springsteen on Creativity