Author: Scott Berkun

Being Geek: An interview with Michael Lopp

Posted on in Books, interviewsby Scott Berkun

I had the chance to interview Michael Lopp, of RandsinRepose fame, about his new book, Being Geek. The book, like much of his writing, takes an honest approach to thinking about careers and life in the tech world, and he knows what’s talking about, having done stints at Apple, Netscape, and Symantec. Unlike many bloggers, he’s dedicated to the craft of writing and it shows in his work.

SB: Your latest book, Being Geek, is described as a career handbook, yet it’s way smarter and funnier than most books like this I’ve seen. What made you decide to write about career development, instead of a book about design or technology?

I think engineers have a weak spot when it comes to career development. I know I do. I’d much rather tinker with Python all morning that reverse engineer that cryptic off-the-cuff statement my boss made this morning about our project and how that statement might affect my work for the next three months.

There are endless strange situations we end up in on a daily basis that might affect our career and I wanted to sit down and document as many of those scenarios as I could in a way that is approachable to the engineer, to the geek.

You’ve mentioned you want people to feel they ‘own their own career’. Why do you think the majority of people don’t believe, or behave, in line with this sense of personal ownership?

You’ve spent a lot of life looking up to people who you believe are looking out for you. It was your parents and then it was your teachers and professors and finally it’s your boss. I think the idea of relying on your boss to move your career forward is a risky one. Sure, maybe he’s great and experienced, but his incentives are based on optimizing for this job and this job isn’t your career.

Does your boss know you want to be an architect? Do they know that all you ever wanted to do was found a start-up? That you want to write a bookshelf full of books? You probably talked about this at your annual performance review, but is he keeping that in mind as the myriad of decisions regarding you cross his desk? Maybe. Or perhaps he’s optimizing for the now… for his incentives rather than yours.

One of my favorite things about your work is the notion things are messier than we presume them to be. Do you think technologists are better or worse at dealing with the chaos of the real world than the rest of us?

We’re worse. A lot of the book is based on the idea that geeks are system thinkers which is a result of spending a lot of our careers surrounded by the blissful comfort of predictable machines. These tools have given us a profession and they define our success. Unfortunately, we project this sense of order outward. We believe the world is a rational place that is defined by inviolable rules… which it isn’t.

If you assume that much of this real world chaos is caused by people, technologists are in even worse shape because the solitary internal work of the mind does not traditionally expose us to random people in the wild. When one of these strange people show up at our desk with their odd corporate dialect and hidden agenda, we’re… a little slow.

I know you take writing seriously, as well as design. Do you find the process of writing well similar to the process of designing well? Is it rewarding for similar reasons?

There are two big intersections between designing well and writing well. First, before you start, you want to have just enough of a plan regarding what you’re going to build to give you a basic structure and a general direction, but not so much of a plan that you constrain yourself. You leave just enough room in your plan to improvise and to explore the unexpected because that is where I believe innovation comes from. One of my all time favorite pieces of writing was when I gave myself random permission to lose my shit researching gel pens and that leads me to the other intersection.

It’s cliché, but whether your designing or writing, you obsess over the details until your eyes bleed. I’m still staring at the my answer to your previous question and wondering if “solitary internal work of mind” says what I’m trying to say. It’s close, but it’s not perfect. I know I can keep staring at it until it’s perfect, but I also know that I can bring other people in to sweat the details with me. Design or writing, the rule is: all ideas improve with additional eyeballs.

What is rewarding about both approaches is I believe whoever is looking at your design or reading your writing can see and feel all of your consideration.

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You can read a free sample of the book here (PDF) or go straight to amazon.

The founding fathers and their faith

Posted on in Book reviews, Books, history, politics, Recommendedby Scott Berkun

Last week I finished reading Founding Faith, by Steven Waldman. The book explores the history of religion in America, focusing on what the founding fathers believed personally and expressed in their role in government. It was an excellent read and balanced in coverage – the author frequently explains how both modern liberals and conservatives get the history wrong.

Here’s some of what I learned:

  • When someone says “the founding fathers believed X” they’re probably wrong. Each founder had different views – they were rarely unanimous.  They had bitter rivalries (Adams/Jefferson), different opinions on the constitution, the war, states rights, you name it.  And more confounding, their opinions, like yours and mine, changed over time (Adams became less religious as he aged, Franklin possibly more).
  • Americans wanted freedom from the British church.  The Puritans, and others that followed, wanted freedom to practice their own version of Christianity, but were not allowed to under British law. One (but not all of the) motivation for the first amendment was to prevent the U.S. government from establishing a state religion, having seen what it did in Britain. Religious freedom, specifically from the British Church, was a contributing cause for the Revolutionary war. It was one major reason people came to America, and one reason they resisted British rule.
  • Many of the issues the founders cared about were immediate. We often say “what the founders intended” but they had little conception of some of the issue we face today. They struggled just to make the constitution, the revolutionary war and the bill of rights succeed at all, in their present time, given the complex politics of a new nation. They hoped to put a system in place that would interpret the law and explore its many corners and applications, which is what the Senate and the Supreme Court have done, and hopefully will continue to do. The first or any amendment wasn’t fully understood or defined until it was tested and explored in the years after its ratification.
  • George Washington was motivated for religious tolerance to fight the war. He may have had philosophical motivations, but practically speaking he needed soldiers. If he discriminated based on religious factions, he’d had fewer soldiers and he needed every last one. He defended Catholics and other groups for these reasons – the only hope for winning the war hinged on cross-denominational support, which demanded cross-denominational tolerance.
  • Jefferson was the least religious of the founders. He questioned the divinity of Chirst, yet  found Christ’s message and teachings essential and brilliant (he worked on a version of the gospels stripped of its miracles). Adams was probably the most religious, often quoting scripture or including references to divine support in his acts.
  • The founding fathers beliefs were tempered by politics of the day. The book documents the debates among the continental congress (and, I believe, the senate) that surrounded the founders. Trades were made, positions were taken and then pulled back, in the same messy, ugly way it happens to day. We forget how many other people besides the founders were involved in every piece of legislation.

I read the book in just a few days (motivated by the religious issues in NYC). Oddly enough, the book had little impact on my opinions. But it did ground them better in the history of religion and politics in America.

I strongly recommend the book – not just for religious history, but for general understanding of the workings of the U.S. Government during such a pivotal time. I suspect there are other interpretations of the facts other than his, but simply for better framing the process and key decisions, it’s a worthy read.

Here’s the link to amazon: Founding Faith, by Steven Waldman

Quote of the week

Posted on in quote of the xby Scott Berkun

Quote of the week:

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

– John F. Kennedy (#)

Ten points on Freedom and the Mosque (w/Video)

Posted on in politics, videoby Scott Berkun

I’ve never done a “low quality webcam video speaking to camera” thing before, but felt compelled to do so on this issue. I’m surprised more people haven’t spoken up.

If you get bored or hate videos, here’s a loose summary of the what I had to say:

  1. Feelings of anger, loss, sadness and fear about 9/11 and the resulting wars are real – and are worthy of acknowledgment, empathy and respect.
  2. One definition of wisdom is care in choosing how convert feelings into actions. A valid feeling can be used as motivation for actions which we regret or betray our better natures.
  3. Freedom is not convenient. The idea is not just the pursuit of our freedom, but recognizing, despite how inconvenient or unpleasant it is for us, that it’s critical others can pursue their freedom too.
  4. Private property law is clear. The building is being sold by an owner of private property.
  5. The Bill of Rights – The first amendment says, in part, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;”.
  6. If you don’t agree with 4 or 5, your argument is not with this mosque. It’s the same law that allows the other churches, temples and other places of worship to exist in NYC and elsewhere. And explains why the Mayor of NYC, who actually lives there, is in support of the Mosque (video / transcript). What is legal is not necessity right – I agree. But for American citizens we should be erring on the side of granting rights.
  7. Al Qaeda is not a nation. It’s not a religion. This is not 51 Al Qaeda place. If it were, the argument “don’t let known terrorists build buildings”, near WTC or anywhere else, would be universally supported. If it turns out this building will house criminals or terrorists, or illegal behavior of any kind, we could stop it purely on those grounds. And being under the watchful eye of the same NYPD whose heroes died on 9/11, and who watches over the other mosques in the neighborhood seems like good choices. And more positively, if the occupants are peaceful and good for the community, wouldn’t that be best for everyone involved? Wouldn’t that be the last thing our enemies would want to see?
  8. It’s bad logic to confuse the act of one person with acts of an entire group, nation or religion. Even if the majority of a group behaved in ways not to our liking, a law-abiding  American citizen should still be judged based on their own actions. We wouldn’t object to a Christian shrine near Oklahoma city, despite the affiliations of the people who caused that tragedy (see comments).
  9. Approximately 3000 people were killed at WTC on 9/11/2001. There were 16000 murders in the U.S. last year.  Since 50% of American’s are Protestant and 23 % Catholic, we can assume most of these homicides were done by Protestants and Catholics. Should we ban those kinds of temples near the burial grounds for those people? Ask that they not be within a certain distance of where certain murders occurred? Even if somehow the poor logic of #8 is defended, it’s not consistent with our behavior for other tragedies and for good reason.
  10. The WTC was more than 2 buildings – it’s a 16 acre site. This is enormous for any city, much less the extreme density of NYC. The proposed mosque site is 2 city blocks away – about 600 feet (see this potent map here). In your neighborhood two blocks might not seem far, but In NYC this is a large distance. There are many things you might find equally disrespectful to you, or a memorial, in the same radius: from strip clubs, to off track betting sites, to empty and abandoned buildings. The culture and standards for this area are incredibly diverse.
  11. A better focus for outrage is the WTC site itself, which after 9 years still has no proper memorial, and is still locked in planning debates. I suspect much of the outrage at the proposed mosque is misplaced outrage for the owners and organizers of the WTC site.
  12. We are all prone to error. And given the choice of erring to a) slide into choosing which Americans have which freedoms within how much distance from what kinds of special places, vs. b) having to deal with the existence of something some people don’t like a few blocks away, where they can easily avoid it (or might never even stumble upon it altogether), seems like an easy trade. We will make mistakes in either direction, but mistakes towards b are far less dangerous.
  13. Rather than expending energy protesting and being angry about things you do not like, a better application of that same energy might be putting it towards something good – I’ve spent hours thinking about this issue which helps no one – So I decided to do something good and donated  $250 to fund a group that supports the families of injured or killed NYC Police and Firefighters, the actual heroes of the event at the center of this entire debate .

Why does transparency matter?

Posted on in Management, reader's choiceby Scott Berkun

In a series of posts, called readers choice, I write on whatever topics people submit and vote for. If you dig this idea, let me know in the comments, and submit your ideas and votes.

This week it’s: Why does transparency matter? submitted by Nick Finck.

Whenever I hear talk of transparency I think of overhead projectors. This dates me significantly, but it used to be professors wrote their lessons on sheets of cellophane called transparencies. These were thought to be clever since the clear sheets let the light through, making what you wrote on them visible.

Transparency is good for this reason. It lets you see. In management literature these days transparency is seen as good. If Rupert and Marla can see what the CEO is thinking, or what the actual revenue numbers look like, they’ll better understand why they’re being asked to do whatever they’re doing.

So Level 1 of transparency is achieving clarity. You give access to more information so people can see what is going on and why. The challenge is the more others see of how things really work, the more complex it can seem. Reality is a mess. Most people, most of the time, don’t really want to know how the sausage is made, despite what they say (e.g. Many talk about food, but are afraid to watch Food Inc.). When you open things up in the spirit of transparency it can be disruptive and confusing if not done carefully. Or if you haven’t hired people who can handle so much of the truth.

And even if the top secret plans are well thought out and explained well, you have a new problem. What happens if Rupert sees flaws in the CEO’s thinking, now that its been revealed? Is it acceptable for Rupert to ask questions? Will the CEO accept them respectfully? Will he incorporate good feedback? If not, then transparency is one way, and has limited value. If my plan as CEO is to do something very stupid, say to start a chain of hamster-burger franchises, and the world hates hamsterburgers, yet I insist on betting the company on them, transparency doesn’t help much.

The real goal is Level 2: achieving better thinking.  But this doesn’t happen merely because people can see what’s going on. Better thinking happens only when leaders listen to feedback and incorporate better ideas into their plans.  Being transparent and open might increase the odds better thinking happens, but it doesn’t guarantee it. Leaders still have to behave graciously when criticized, and reward people who come forward with good ideas, and not with token praise, but with the true reward of improving the plan based on their ideas.

When it comes to marketing, transparency is more contrived. If someone is selling a product or service there are some things they will never say, even if they know them to be true. They will never say “This product is not as good as our competitors”, “Our customer service sucks” or “I know this sounds cool but we know almost no one uses it after they buy it”.  Wise consumers know this. We keep in mind there are a set of things marketers and sales people will never ever say. If the dynamic is sales or PR there are unsaid but fundamental limits to how transparent the message can be.

Social media rhetoric often uses the word authenticity, but it’s the wrong word to use. The web and social media have humanized sales and marketing, as the personality of human beings comes through in greater force.  But that’s not the same as being authentic. Marketing is the wrong school of thought to use to determine what is authentic and what isn’t, don’t you think? The words “old-fashioned” and “home-made” appear on goods made in large, new factories, thanks to marketers and their talents.

Trust is always more important than authenticity and transparency. On the human level, to say “Fred is so transparent” means something negative. We literally mean we see through him to his untrustworthy core. The more I trust you the less I need to know the details of your plans or operations.  Honesty, diligence, fairness, and clarity are the hallmarks of good relationships of all kinds and lead to the magic of trust.  And it’s trust that’s hardest to earn and easiest to destroy, making it the most precious attribute of all. Becoming more transparent is something you can do by yourself, but trust is something only someone else can give to you. If transparency leads to trust, that’s great, but if it doesn’t you have bigger problems to solve.

Rules to live by

Posted on in Creative Thinkingby Scott Berkun

Buster Benson, the super creative guy who made 750words (helps you write), Locavore (helps you eat), 8:36pm project (helps you remember), co-founded the arts collective McLeod Residence, and blogs here gave me this morning’s inspiration.

From his site I found these great rules to live by:

  1. You must not dilly-dally.
  2. You must be your word.
  3. You must have good intentions.
  4. You must admit to being the maker of meaning.
  5. You must not feel sorry for yourself.
  6. You must have a vision that you are striving for.
  7. You must tie creativity and experimentation with survival.
  8. You must be the change you want to see.
  9. You must rally others with your vision.
  10. You must stake your reputation on your better self.
  11. You must be comfortable with the consequences of being who you are.
  12. You must share.
  13. You must make your own advice and take it.
  14. You must manage your stress, health, and clarity.
  15. You must study your mistakes.
  16. You must retry things you don’t like every once in a while.
  17. You must make time to enjoy things.

You should follow him and his work on his blog – inspiring.

Moments: a video you will enjoy

Posted on in Culture, Philosophyby Scott Berkun

There is a cliche among short videos of trying to make you feel something amazing or wonderous, and I admit when I started watching this one that’s exactly what I though. “Oh, here’s another one of those videos with short, clever, little moments designed to make me feel something positive and wonderful.”  But it was done well enough that I kept watching. And watching. And even though I still thought about the cliche, I liked it more and more until eventually I stopped thinking about the cliche and thought (felt) about my own moments and their meaning, or lack their of.

Anyway. I think it’s good. Hope you enjoy

Moments from Everynone on Vimeo.

Applying Jazz to workplace creativity

Posted on in Creative Thinking, Managementby Scott Berkun

Months ago I got a sneak preview of a book on two of my favorite things: the making of music and how teams in the work world function. I’d thought someone should explore crossovers between these worlds and thanks to Adrian Cho, that book now exists. It’s called The Jazz Process.

Adrian is clearly a special man with diverse talents – he directs the IJO jazz ensemble, yet also  manages teams of software developers. He’s the right guy to take this topic on. The book is finally out now and I interviewed him about the book.

SB. The corporate world seems superficially about as far from jazz, or any kind of music, as an environment could be. What made you think concepts from jazz might have value in the workplace?

AC: Jazz is an exciting and engaging style of music and method of performance. It exploits collaboration, innovation and agility through individualism, exploration, freedom and democratic decision-making. In the best jazz ensembles the musicians move easily and frequently between leading and following. According to stereotypes, corporations exhibit none of these traits. Instead they are conservative, rigid and steeped in conformity and compliance that discourages people from taking risks, moving too quickly, or treading beyond job boundaries.

There may be some truth to these stereotypes, but in many small corporations and in enclaves of excellence within large corporations, there are teams that perform very much like small jazz ensembles. There are also large corporations that recognize the need to apply principles of agility and innovation on a larger scale.

It’s important to separate domain-specific skills from general skills of collaboration. Along with jazz musicians, software developers, basketball players, and soldiers must possess specific skills to excel within their domain. The difference between these skills is obvious, yet each of these individuals must also leverage general skills of working together and overcoming challenges, allowing them to excel within their respective teams. Although it’s natural to look toward fellow disciples when seeking solutions to problems we encounter in our work, some of the best inspiration can come from people working in completely different disciplines.

Based on your book, musical improvisation seems heavily based on teamwork and trust, rather than on brilliance and going your own way. Do you find this counterintuitive notion difficult to explain to non-musicians?

I don’t find it difficult to explain once I’ve described some fundamental concepts. Most people have been in situations where they found it difficult or impossible to execute because they could not trust their colleagues to play their parts.  In jazz, as in other fields, the more one wants to explore and stray from the comfort of well-worn trails, the more important it is that such forays are supported by solid execution from others. It’s hard to take risks and explore unknown territory when you constantly have to worry that the foundation underneath you might fall apart.

Success in a team of brilliant individuals requires a balance between individual expression and team cohesiveness. It also requires an appreciation for the notion of team and project health and the ways in which instability can degrade health. Instability is an important element in high-performance teams, as I outline in the book, but when things become too unstable chaos can ensue and ultimately lead to crashing and burning.

As I understand, musical process is taught to young musicians almost entirely by playing with more experienced musicians. It’s an apprenticeship model. Do you think this exists in the corporate world, or the tech sector?

Should be it used more, especially where creativity is concerned?

Mentoring does exist in the corporate world and it should be used more but it needs to take a different form. In business, mentoring tends to exist in one-to-one or one-to-many forms. Individual mentoring exists in jazz too, but what’s most interesting is how jazz musicians learn from situations of immersive many-to-one mentoring. When presented with the opportunity to put together a band, young jazz musicians are often advised to hire musicians who are all better than themselves.

In this way the budding musician can directly observe and participate in collective improvisation of a higher order. It’s not learning creativity alone that is interesting but rather creativity in a group where everyone is putting out ideas simultaneously and everyone must respond to the ideas of others. This is why play-along records have limited value for learning how to perform jazz in a group.  One can certainly learn all the fundamentals of improvisation in this way, but there’s no interaction; there is no opportunity to learn how and when to lead or to follow. The soloist  does not learn how to respond when the pianist unexpectedly alters a chord or plays a substitution, or when the drummer riffs on a particular rhythm or when the rhythm section changes into double-time. In the corporate world, people are often unwilling to put together teams in which they are the least experienced person for fear of losing control.

Do you think jazz musicians can learn anything from how corporations work?

I’ve certainly learned some things from managing in business that I have applied to leading bands. However these are also things I could have learned in music alone. This affirms my belief that many fundamental and important principles are widely applicable. For example, it’s wise to have balance in a team with some people having a healthy appetite for risk and others who are risk-averse. In music it can be good to have people that play ahead of the beat, and others who play a little behind it, and others who play right on top of it. If too many people play ahead of the beat, then the music will rush; if too many play behind it, the music will drag. Jazz musicians and businesspeople alike can learn a great deal from one another.

In the Coda of my book I wrote that the book could also have been called “The Basketball Process” or “The Warfare Process.” There are also many opportunities to learn from nature. I can discover a lot from the behavior of a pack of wolves, a pride of lions, or a colony of beavers. Animals have been working together for a lot longer than humans have. There are many opportunities for learning and we can benefit from these if we’re willing to open our minds to the possibility that not all knowledge about productive teamwork is confined to just one field.

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You can download a sample chapter from the book, check out the book’s website, or buy it straight from amazon.

The Four Minute Presentation

Posted on in Public Speakingby Scott Berkun

We’re very proud, in this day and age, of our capacity for consuming information. We often brag (or lament) about  the speed of the world and the acceleration of change. Surely our TED talks, lightning talks, and 99 second presentations must be recent inventions, right? I wrote for Forbes about this fascinating trend in public speaking. But it turns out, as is often the case, the roots of change go back  further than we think. In this case, all the way back to 1917.

Enter the Four Minute Men. A group that worked for the U.S. government in 1917 to convey important information to the masses quickly and eloquently.

Many of the techniques and ethos are echoed by the speaking advice experts give today:

You aren’t there to give them an ear full but a mind full.

Talk to the back row of your audience; you’ll hit everything closer in.

Be natural and direct. Sincerity wears no frills.

Don’t fear to be colloquial. Slang that your hearers understand is better than Latin that they don’t.

Don’t figure the importance of your job on a time basis. Four hours of thinking may go into four minutes of speaking.

You  can find a great write-up on the four minute men here at the joyful public speaking blog.

The Idea Approval Index

Posted on in Creative Thinking, Innovation, Managementby Scott Berkun

Many leaders talk about progress, but overlook simple indicators. One easy measure is the Idea Approval Index (IAI). To get this number simply ask one question:

How many approvals are needed for an employee to deliver on an idea for a customer?

In most organizations it’s a high number.

From committees, to review meetings, to long email threads, most companies inhibit change. There are many people who have to approve an idea before it even gets off the ground. There are always people to convince, cajole, or sneak past, and they should factor in the index. As a rough measure, the higher the number, the harder it is for even a great idea to go anywhere. The lower the number, the better the odds. For example:

A) Marla starts her own company. She does everything herself. Idea Approval Index = 1.

B) Rupert is a middle manager at Bigtech. He has an idea. He runs it past his boss (1 person). They bring it to their monthly senior idea review committee (10 people). The committee suggests they run it by the Innovation task force (8 people), who have  concerns they want addressed. Finally they show it to their VP who loves it, requiring them to present it at the next executive strategy meeting (6 people).  The idea is praised but must wait for funding due to other priorities. Idea Approval Index (IAI) = 24 .

That means there are 24 chances for someone to kill the idea no matter how good it is. 24 chances for someone to feel threatened or scared or to insist on stupid changes which is often the first response established people have to new ideas.

In large organizations there could be different indexes. One could be to measure how many approvals are needed for an employee to spend an hour/day/week prototyping a new idea to share inside the company.

If you want faster exploration of new ideas lower the Idea Approval Index. If you want more status quo, raise the Index. If you want both at the same time, lower the index for getting projects started, and raise it for getting projects out the door.

(If you dig this kind of thinking: you’ll love the new paperback edition of my bestseller, The Myths of Innovation)

[Originally posted 11/07 . Revised 8/10.]

Why you fail at writing

Posted on in rant, Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

People say they get stuck when they try to write, but being stuck really means you’re forced to think. What is writing but thinking put down on paper? If you’re not willing to sit and think you probably won’t write well. Writing, therefore, can be thought of as a long series of thinking sessions. You string enough of those sessions together and you have an essay, a chapter or a book. If you don’t, you don’t.

More than anything, writing is a kind of work. Even if you love it, even if you are brilliant, even if you have amazing ideas, it will require many hours of effort to finish writing an essay or a book. You will be giving up other activities to create that time. This trade may simply not be worth it to you. This is fine, as you might be happier and more useful to the world as a person who does not write. If you know yourself well, you might realize the problem is simply you like the idea of writing far more than the reality of how much time and effort is required.

But many people are not self-aware. A common question I get asked is this (from an actual email I received):

I really really want to write a book. I know I have it in me. But when I start I get stuck and want to do something else. How do you get around this?

Some things can not be done. Writing without writing is one of them.

If you don’t like writing a sentence, odds are good you won’t like paragraphs, and if you don’t like paragraphs you’ll be really pissed off when you learn about these things called pages (chapters will blow your mind). Writing is hard. It’s work. That’s part of why people are impressed by others who have written books, or essays, or anything at all.

There is a big difference between wanting to say you wrote a book, and actually writing one. Many people think they want to write, even though they find crafting sentences and paragraphs unpleasant. They hope there is a way to write without writing. I can tell you with certainty there isn’t one.

“A writer who isn’t writing is asking for trouble.” – Walter Kirn

Many books are written by ghostwriters. Why? Many people want to say they have written a book, without writing a book. They pay someone to do the writing part, and then get to put their name on it. That is not writing. It’s delegating. Same goes for books that say “By <very famous person>, with <very not-famous person who writes>”. They are offloading the writing part. They might be thinking, or sharing, to make the book possible, which are good things, but that’s not writing.

Thousands of people start books and then stop. This is the second law of thermodynamics applied to creative works. The natural state of a book idea is for it not to be written. We have to expend extra energy to manifest an idea in the world, and that’s why making things can be so magical. But someone can think about writing, and have ideas for grand movies and thrilling novels, ideas they love and tell their friends about, and never write a single word. Thinking about writing is not the same as writing. No amount of thinking about a paragraph puts your ass in a chair in proximity to a keyboard, and gets those fingers moving.

Another  reason people fail at writing is simply they don’t know how to read well. To read as a writer means your paying attention to why writer’s made the choices they did on every page. Asking questions about craft as you read is important because when you write pages of your own, you will have to reread them many times. If you can’t read other writer’s work well, you probably can’t critique your own. It seems counterintuitive, but a way to be a better writer is to become a better reader first.

There are definitely techniques for learning to get past fear, how to love blank pages, what to do when your motivation fades – these techniques are easy to find. Writing is old. Writing about writing is almost as old. I’m happy to share the ones I know.

But many people who fail at writing really didn’t want to write in the first place. They only thought they did. Perhaps they want to be famous, or to think of themselves as the kind of person who writes books, both of which have little to do with writing.

But if you really want to write – here’s more practical advice:

[edited 4-7-16]

Ground Zero and the Mosque

Posted on in Culture, politicsby Scott Berkun

I grew up in Queens, NYC, and I know Manhattan pretty well. I’ve also been to the WTC area several times over the last decade.  The recent headline news about building a mosque “at” Ground Zero caught my attention and I’ve followed along.

I’m not here to argue for it or against it – my question is different.

Only recently did I find a map of the potential site (Shown below).

It turns out the mosque would be two blocks away from the northern edge of ground zero. And if if you know NYC at all, one city block can represent an entire planet of different stores, cultures, languages, religions, sports teams, and cuisines.  To be two blocks away, in terms of density and diversity, can be enormous.

Physically, two blocks is likely a distance of 400 feet, more than the length of a football field.  And that’s from the northern edge of the entire WTC site:  the main towers were another 100 feet or more to the south.

There are two mosques already nearby WTC. Masjid al-Farah is about 12 blocks away. And just 4 blocks away from WTC (2 blocks past the proposed new mosque), is Masjid Manhattan.

I’m fascinated by any argument over invisible, ill-defined boundaries – and I’m curious, especially for a city as dense as NYC, where that boundary ends for all sides.

My question is this: Exactly how far away would a mosque, or any building for that matter,  have to be “not” to be considered near ground zero? 5 blocks? 10?

Lessons from Google Wave and MSFT Kin

Posted on in Innovation, Microsoftby Scott Berkun

I’m a fan of things going wrong. It’s only when things go wrong that anyone pays attention enough to really learn something, or get the courage to try something new.

Recently there were two high profile failures, at two Fortune 500 tech companies. Microsoft’s failed cell-phone Kin, and Google’s hard to define Wave. I thought it’d be fun to compare and distill some lessons.

Change requires a champion: Kin is one in a long line of failures for the mobile space for Microsoft. Although it was formed by a different group, and led with a different vision, it was canceled a shocking handful of weeks after its release. This generally signifies senior management failure: a rule of thumb is either can it before it launches, or give it the runway it needs to succeed. To kill a product after 40 days signifies several layers of mistakes or a (poorly timed/surprise) changing of the guard. The exit of VPs J. Allard and Robbie Bach, seems like a link in the story. Allard is the story behind XBOX, one of Microsoft’s best stories around innovation.

Google Wave was weird, but cheap. Compared to Kin, which likely involved dozens of people and man-months, Wave was likely done by a small team of people. That was their biggest cost! If you’re going to have failures, even visible ones, better cheap and small, that expensive and large.

As a rule, any software in this century that reinvents the scroll bar deserves to fail.  Sure, there might be a better design, but what do you gain in putting your neck out for it? There’s just no reason to place a bet, even a side bet, on a scroll bar and perhaps that’s it – wave was just weird. It was interesting, but often in the wrong ways. Whatever goodness might have lurked inside, it was hidden inside an onion of seemingly odd choices that required a lot of explaining. And it was slow too. Weird and slow negates most other kinds of goodness because few people will stick around long enough to experience them.

However the fact that Wave stayed out in the wild longer than Kin means the team that made it got a chance to learn tons. This is awesome. This is smart. They got to be involved in a live, mass market, real time experiment in trying to do whatever it was they were trying to do. For them, Wave is far from a failure. It was one of the best learning experiences they might ever have.

The Kin team however, having had the runway pulled out from under them, likely learned nothing. They’re probably bitter about all of the concept sacrifices they had to make to get it out the door, and likely blame those sacrifices for why it was as poorly received as it was.

But worse, I suspect there won’t even be a postmortem written for the team, or the company. The lessons of Kin will likely die with Kin, instead of being shared openly so everyone learns from the multitude of experiences the smart people on the project had.

An easy metric of innovation culture is learning – are people at all levels learning, sharing and growing from whatever happens, good or bad. Not lip-service. But actual learning, where people admit their own mistakes or oversights and what they themselves might have done differently (rather than the witch-hunt many big companies confuse with learning).

This starts with the leaders, and the leaders on Kin or Wave have much fodder to work with. Are they going to share what they learned? Progress awaits if they do. But resentment, confusion and high odds for the same mistakes being made again will fester if they don’t.

Anywhere that people learn from success and failure will outpace places that lack the courage to look at failures with their eyes open and learn from it, as well as places that don’t learn anything at all.

Coming soon: Myths paperback edition!

Posted on in Uncategorizedby Scott Berkun

The original edition was published in 2007. It was a charming little book, that disarmingly changed how people thought about ideas, so they could be more successful working with ideas on their own, at work or in life.

The original was a popular book. It was a bestseller for O’Reilly Media, and got praise from all kinds of places, like lifehacker, slashdot, MSNBC, the NY Times, and even got me on as a co-host of The Business of Innovation series on CNBC. It was an amazon best book of 2007, and a finalist for the 2007 Jolt awards. And most important of all, it’s actually fun to read.

This new edition gave me a chance to make the book even better.

  • More Useful: Four new chapters. One major chapter called “Beyond Hype”, focuses on putting the lessons from the book to work in your life, and three heavily revised essays on creativity, pitching ideas and staying motivated.
  • Tighter: We fixed typos, broken references, and errata.
  • Prettier: Shiny, dramatic cover (we lost the rotary phone, but C’est la vie).
  • Handier: travel-friendly size, w/ clever flap-o-matic design (keeps your place)
  • Better: Every chapter was cleaned, washed, and buffed, with improved references, and some additional stories.

If you’ve never read it before, now is the time. It’s the best edition ever made (ok – there are only two editions, but still).

The book hits stores early September, but is available for pre-order now.

Yoda and different kinds of trying

Posted on in Philosophyby Scott Berkun

Yoda said “Do or do not, there is no try.” I have always had problems with this nugget of Jedi wisdom.

The semantic difference between do, do not and try is thin, but it annoys me enough to indulge my atomic hairsplitter.

The advice is superficial for doing anything interesting. Even if you are fully committed and focused, you are still likely to fail at a first marathon or novel. We all have limits, no matter how great our commitment is. To grow means putting ourselves in situations where we’re not sure we can succeed. To have complete certainty of success at a big challenge is insane, which is why rallying against the concept of a ‘try’ is ridiculous.

What Yoda’s advice implies, but doesn’t state, is that holding back prevents learning. I agree. When you hold back, you have an excuse. You can say “I didn’t really try that hard” or “I only did because you told me”. Those are the excuses that indicate a bad kind of trying. It’s trying where you just want to be able to say you tried, mostly so you don’t have to try anymore.  Commitment is investment. You get as much learning out of any attempt as you put into it. No more and no less.

My point is there is a way to try and be fully committed. You give everything, in spite of knowing it may not work. And it’s only then that you might learn what you need to learn for your next try to have higher odds of success.

So I disagree with Yoda: there is trying, just different kinds. Some are more rewarding than others. The rewarding kind is where you know going in even if you give your best you may fail, yet you do it anyway. Your eyes are open. You have faith a better version of you is on the other side of that attempt, but only if you are fully committed. There’s nothing wrong with trying if you are fully committed and not hedging. Sometimes there’s nothing wrong with a half-assed try either, if it gives you the motivation to make a bigger commitment next time.

(note: this post revised on 7/11/2012)

News: I have a new job (Automattic)

Posted on in personal, Plans and goalsby Scott Berkun

Many of my friends make fun of me when I complain. They tell me I’m living the dream. And in ways I am. I do what I love, writing and speaking, and make a living from it all on my own (thanks to the help of readers like you).

But as an expert for hire type guy, one natural concern is how few experts actually do the things they write and talk about. Many famous gurus in many fields haven’t done the thing they write or speak about in years, if they ever did it at all (see how to call bs on a guru). I’ve always thought it’d be smart at some point to get back in the middle of something for awhile – do a sanity check on how much of the advice I give to other people I practice myself.  Plus learn new things, face new challenges, to boldly go where… and most important perhaps, work as part of a team of people where I have something deeper at stake in the outcome. Wisdom accrues when you have the guts to dive into the thing you keep wondering about and see what happens.

As of this week, I’m an employee at Automattic – the company that hosts and maintains a popular instance of WordPress, among other things. I’ll be working as a team lead on wordpress.com (one of the top 20 websites in the U.S.). I’ve had sweet offers for jobs here and there over the years, but nothing came close to these folks, which is why I said yes. If I’m going to jump back in for awhile, these are the best people in the world, and one of the most important projects, I can imagine doing it with. It’s a distributed company so my dogs won’t even notice the change.

This news won’t change your experience here or, hopefully, what you think of me. I’m still a writer, and I’ll still be writing and speaking, and new books are in progress (I still have a shelf to fill). Of course everything I write here is entirely my independent opinion. But transparency is good practice and I wanted to make sure I shared all this with you.

Hope you’ll wish me well.

The Acceleration of Addictiveness

Posted on in Innovationby Scott Berkun

Paul Graham wrote about the acceleration of addictiveness and it troubled me.

He wrote:

What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they’re all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating.

We wouldn’t want to stop it. It’s the same process that cures diseases: technological progress.

I disagree as technology has no wisdom. I can use a hammer to build a house, or kill my neighbors. The hammer doesn’t care. Technology is a kind of power, nothing more, and a technology on its own is not a kind of progress. It’s how the technology is used that makes it progress or not. People who make hammers, or software, don’t control how the world will use what they make simply because they made it. They think they do, but they don’t (e.g. Edison believed the phonograph would be used exclusively by businessmen, the Wright brothers thought airplanes would end the need for warfare).

Using technology to cure a disease is not the same thing as making a new, cheap, super-addictive drug. The same lab tools might be involved, but the goals are entirely different. Yes, with my kitchen oven I can make a cake, or cook my neighbor’s children, but would anyone call them the same? No. We’d say we’re using the same means to achieve two very different ends.

A simple rallying cry for technologists could be: make things that are useful but not addictive. But this runs against the capitalistic drive of most start-ups, who want to be viral, they want to be addictive so they can profit. The problem is ethics, not technology. Graham runs the venture firm called Y-Combinator – and I bet the viral / addictive element is a plus in what products they choose to fund. They want products that people will spend lots of time, perhaps too much time, using. The real problem is addictive things are very profitable. And once you admit this, the the challenge is again not technological, but ethical. What kinds of things are you okay profiting from?

It also raises the question about what addiction means. Is air addictive? Food? Water? I think something you need becomes an addiction when it negatively effects other parts of your life. But if people suffer from internet addiction, wouldn’t any tool used over the internet exacerbate that addiction? The easy answer is to say it’s not the maker’s problem, it’s the consumers. But at some point a technology could be powerful enough that this is not true: but where is that point?

The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.

I’m not sure what it means for the world to be addictive – alcohol, heroin, etc. have been around for a long time, and we’ve always had people who abuse them. But I agree with Graham’s general point: some corporations have mastered manipulating consumer need. The technologies of advertising and marketing are amazing. And that mastery has led to great profits, but also epidemics: 1 in 3 American’s are obese, and will have reduced life expectancy (diabeties is following along). Food Inc. details how the majority of the food Americans are sold is engineered to be as cheap and addictive as possible.  We are using our hammers to engineer this ‘food’, but to what end?

Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don’t think you’re weird, you’re living badly.

I agree here and there is a long history. The Greek ascetics, and monks throughout the ages, rejected many of societies behavior for similiar reasons. Progressives in any era are always seen as weird: the status quo can’t sort out yet whether the new behavior these people are engaging in is good or bad, and they tend to assume it’s bad, or fail to see the good aspects (e.g. what we say of neo-luddites and the Amish).  But some things do change fast: Whole Foods has made it easier than ever to be, say, a vegetarian in the U.S. – a huge change in the last 10 years.

It took a while though—on the order of 100 years. And unless the rate at which social antibodies evolve can increase to match the accelerating rate at which technological progress throws off new addictions, we’ll be increasingly unable to rely on customs to protect us. [3] Unless we want to be canaries in the coal mine of each new addiction—the people whose sad example becomes a lesson to future generations—we’ll have to figure out for ourselves what to avoid and how.

There are some social movements/antibodies afoot – it’s just they’re laughed at by the status quo American or business/tech culture, that is still in awe of all the shiny new hammers we have.  Start with the slow food movement (started 1986), Slow news movement, books like James Gleick’s Faster, or Neil Postman’s Technopoly (this should be air-dropped by the 1000s over silicon valley).  There is a long thread of thinking and behavior here, it’s just not the things people addicted to the internet are likely to think to find.

In the end, my mind is spinning about the idea of personal responsibility. When do we teach our children they are responsible for what they put in their mouths and their minds? For the life of me, I still can’t see where in all of this that is supposed to happen. Just like the crusade for seat belts, and food labels, there is an important role for government, but many solutions begin by finding the off-switch and learning to take comfort in doing less, not more.