I’m working on some improvements at the site and had a post go out a few minutes ago that shouldn’t have.
If you receive my posts by email and you just got one telling you to sign up for email, which makes no sense of course, sorry about that.
I’m improving how subscribe by email works, and the quality of what goes out by email, so this is all for your benefit. But again, apologies for the annoyance.
[This is an excerpt from The Myths of Innovation]
Who invented the electric light? No, it wasn’t Thomas Edison. Two lesser-known inventors, Humphrey Davy and Joseph Swan (who won a patent lawsuit against Edison), both developed working electric lights well before Edison. Think Ford invented the automobile? Wrong again. Unfortunately, popular credit for major innovations isn’t brokered by historians: it’s driven by markets, circumstance, and popularity, forces not bound by accuracy. Often, even historians have trouble sorting it out. Here’s what the U.S. Library of Congress has to say on the subject, specific to the automobile:
This question [who invented it] does not have a straightforward answer. The history of the automobile is very rich and dates back to the 15th century when Leonardo da Vinci was creating designs and models for transport vehicles. There are many different types of automobiles—steam, electric, and gasoline—as well as countless styles. Exactly who invented the automobile is a matter of opinion. If we had to give credit to one inventor, it would probably be Karl Benz from Germany. Many suggest that he created the first true automobile in 1885/1886.
If the librarians at the largest library in the world don’t know, how could we? There are similar complexities surrounding most innovations, from the first steam engines to personal computers or even airplanes (no, it’s not the Wright brothers). As simple as it should be, innovation history is complicated. Most innovations are not the solid, tangible, independent things we imagine them to be. Each one is made up of threads and relationships that don’t separate easily or yield simple answers.
For example, take the electric light. When Edison sat down to design the lightbulb, he was far from the first person to try. If several people were trying to make it work, who deserves the credit? Would it be enough to come up with the idea itself? Have a prototype? Would it matter how long the prototype stayed alight? How bright it burned? How many people witnessed it? How many bulbs were sold? Would it matter whether they cost $5,000,000 per bulb or weighed 500,000 pounds? Depending on which question is seen as most important, different names surface as the rightful owner of the title “inventor.” However, as folks at the U.S. Library of Congress suggest, there is no guidebook: the rules change from innovation to innovation. While there is some guidance for resolving these issues, before we get to explore them, things get worse.
Beyond the innovation itself, there is the problem of precedence: various invented light sources date back as far as 70,000 BCE. The idea of a lightbulb, a small portable object that gives light, is beyond ancient—it’s older than the screw (500 BCE), the wheel (3000 BCE), and the sword (5000 BCE). The inventors of torches, candles, and lamps through history are mostly unnamed, but they certainly contributed to Swan’s, Davy’s, and Edison’s thinking (not to mention proving to the world the value of being able to easily see the way to the bathroom after sunset). In similar fashion, web sites derive layouts and graphic design techniques from newspapers, which are based on the early typographies of the printing press, and on it goes. All innovations today are bound to innovations of the past.
And if that’s not enough, there are the people who developed the glassmaking techniques required for the bulbs, the copper mining and metal refinement processes for the filaments, and countless other forgotten creators of the tools, machines, and mathematics Edison and other innovators used. Certainly their anonymous contributions were essential to the innovation known as the lightbulb: remove them from the past, and in that same puff of history changing smoke, the electric light we know disappears.
The answer to the list of questions above is simple: Edison, Ford, and countless innovators are recognized as sole inventors for convenience. The histories we know depart from the truth for the simple reason that it makes them easier to remember.
Read the rest of Chapter 5, The Myth of The Lone Inventor, in the Myths of Innovation
Each Tuesday I take the top voted question from readers and answer it. With 146 votes, this week’s winner was from James:
When a system is broken at work, should you work to fix the system, game the system, or avoid the system?
It depends! Do you like your job? Do you like your community? If yes, you should naturally work to fix. If you don’t, you should quit your job or move before you start quitting your ethics (I’ve written previously on Why We Accept Bad Systems and you might want to peak at that post before reading on). Here are three answers to your three options:
I do not like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. My reason is that while it seems sensible, it’s largely made up. It’s mostly an invention. It’s an interesting invention but we’ve taken it to be definitive, which it isn’t. Maslow made observations, mostly about American culture and formed them into a framework we take as predictive for all people. Yet there are plenty of other frameworks, including ones that recognize needs are not hierarchical, an observation about your own life that’s easy to make when you stop to consider: do you organize your meals hierarchically? your day? your week? The worthy long and short term ambitions you have likely cut across the “hierarchy” in dozens of reasonable ways.
Recently Carr wrote about the arc of innovation, suggesting that there’s a hierarchy of innovation much like Maslow’s. Carr does point out some of the hierarchy’s flaws, but he still, maddeningly, uses a triangular hierarchy for his model for innovation. (It’s like the insanity of people making everything into periodic tables. What is wrong with you people?) It was always dumb that Maslow, if it was his choice, made it a pyramid. Why is the top level so small? is it really smaller in space? Does the smaller size suggest it’s easier to fulfill? What does it mean? It’s just bad design.
Anyway, the thrust of Carr’s post is about the diminishing returns of modern inventions, and here I agree with him. The common gripe is the rate of change today is faster than ever, but that’s perception. It feels that way certainly, but the amount of change is smaller than in the past.
The leap from steam power to electricity was larger than anything we experienced in modern times, bringing cheap power into workplaces and homes, granting nighttime lighting (which redefined sleep itself!) and thousands of things into the lives of ordinary people. The move from a telephone to a cellphone, as impressive as it is, is far less of a shift and it’s impact smaller on the important parts of our daily lives. This is an opinion of course as all comparisons of the value of two innovations always are. I love the internet, but when you break down how important it is compared to running water, electricity, a nearby market with food, stable democracy, reliable health care and hundreds of other older innovations it’s not even close.
Carr writes:
There has been no decline in innovation; there has just been a shift in its focus. We’re as creative as ever, but we’ve funneled our creativity into areas that produce smaller-scale, less far-reaching, less visible breakthroughs
Part of the problem is smaller breakthroughs, like a bigger screen for your phone, are made incredibly visible through billions in marketing dollars, whereas more substantial improvements that are less profitable are barely noticed (or would have to have the same financial support to become noticed).
There are plenty of holes to poke in Carr’s hierarchy. Healthcare, which would be at the bottom of the pile, constantly sees technological breakthroughs. It’s just that unless you are sick or know someone who is, these breakthroughs do not make the news and are never part of the consumer marketing machine. And of course many inventions slice through the hierarchy, as an app that lets you work with friends by playing games to watch your diet hits nearly every level in one fell swoop.
There are six important themes I see at work in the larger discussion we should have:
Ann Bauer recently wrote at Salon on Why it’s a problem that writers never talk about where their money comes from. She’s wrong – they do talk about it. Not everyone does of course, but enough that a few web searches will find them. I guess she didn’t do much research before writing this? Independent authors talk about it more, but with a handful of web searches I found plenty of examples.
Some of these links I’d seen before and some I researched in ten minutes this morning.
Bauer’s essay is well written and an admission of her being “sponsored by her spouse” and depending on family is a common way for artists to start, or maintain their careers (e.g. Van Gogh depended primarily on his brother Theo). When I started planning to quit my job we saved money beforehand, and my wife took a more stable job to help give me time to sort out my new life.
In the news we hear almost exclusively about famous bestselling authors who make more than 95% of all authors living or dead ever did. They are extremely rare, which is confusing since they are the most well known. It’s a surprise to many that most books don’t sell well and 100k are published every year in the U.S. alone. Writing has never been and never will be an easy way to make a living. Almost no one is forced to be an author – it’s a choice.
Many authors have and continue to write about their finances and how they made it or try to make it work. Give them a read (above) and if you appreciate their forthcomingness, thank them.
Each week I take the top voted question from readers and answer it (submit one here). I jumped this one to the top, submitted by F.B., as it’s urgent in nature.
I am overwhelmed by fear after a bad biking accident and realizing how fragile everything is in our human consciousness. How do I gain confidence from here?
Many platitudes come to mind but I’m leery of platitudes in hard situations like yours. They’re so easy to offer, yet I know from my own experience with horrible times that when I heard them they didn’t help. But people don’t know what to say when someone is hurting, so we resort to the safe things we’ve heard before. I strongly recommend talking to close friends, fellow bikers, and a therapist or counselor. You need to find support, now, for your feelings and get on a path to sorting yourself out and it’s people who know you best who know how to help you when you’re scared and can get beyond platitudes. Your situation is not unique, although if you have an ego like mine, you probably have so much guilt and self-blame that you think that it is.
My darker answer is humanity is a wonder and a mystery. How we’re able to do any of the things we do in this world is, from a certain perspective, beyond comprehension. Every time I’m in a high rise office building and look out the window down to a highway, I have the same thought: how is it that there aren’t *more* accidents? Thousands of people fly down highways at 70mph, all a just a few feet apart, operating at the limits of perception and reaction time. They’re all strangers who have no specific reason to care about each other at all, and yet for the most part they do.
Everyone complains about how people drive in their city, yet watching highways from afar you can’t help but notice how smoothly it works. How everything in civilization and nature functions is a wonder to me. Even as someone with a designer’s mind and who knows how things are constructed, I’m constantly amazed by electricity, running water, airplanes, DNA, ecosystems and that all of it works so well so much of the time. Every now and then things go wrong, sometimes it’s someones fault and sometimes not. At the scale of the civilized world it’s unavoidable things go wrong now and then, but it’s a psychological shock when it’s us and not someone we see on the side of the road as we drive on. I was in a mild car accident the other day and even though no one was hurt, it put me off for weeks. It’s my turn, I told myself. My turn to be on the other side of life experience, falling out of the system instead of flowing inside it. I hated how it felt, but I told myself it would be awhile until driving felt like it did before.
My positive answer is you must find your way back to the beginning. Before you were an expert on a bicycle you were a novice. As a novice it took courage to go out on the road at all. You took the safest paths on the quietest roads. You paid attention and worried about every little thing. When you’re ready, which you might not be for awhile, you’ll have to put yourself back into that mindset. Beginners mind.
You have probably thought through ever microsecond of the accident and what you could have done differently. This is good, for awhile. There may be something you can learn, and change, to be a safer rider, but maybe there is no lesson. This is a harder conclusion to accept as our brains demand reasons for everything, but it could be there is no grand lesson. Every situation in life is a compounding of thousands of variables – you can do all the right things and on one day it’s not enough, or do the wrong things another day and by sheer chance it saves your life. We play the probabilities every time we get out bed and walk out the door. Being alive and doing anything interesting comes with some amount of risk no matter how well you do it. Most days we’re too confident to think much about the probabilities, but when something goes very wrong it’s all we think about.
The head game you’ll have to play with yourself is getting past knowing too much. A beginner doesn’t know what a bad accident feels like, and you do. It might be awhile before you even want to ride again. I hate the phrase “you know too much”, even though I just used it, as I don’t think that’s possible. Knowing a lot means you have to learn how to compartmentalize your knowledge, to choose which perspective, or feelings, or memories, you will use when to help you in what you’re trying to do. A good therapist or counselor can help you do this and I recommend you see one. Take it slow. Be patient. It might be weeks or months until you’re ready to start again, if at all (it’s OK if you decide not to ride again. It really is). If you look for stories for situations like yours, you’ll find examples of people who have had harder times and found their way through them. I wish you well.
The hotel where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4th 1968, is now the primary site of the National Civil Rights Museum, and it is a powerful place. The sign to the hotel and its exterior is preserved for history, the interior thoughtfully converted into a modern museum space. I visited for the first time recently during a road trip through the South of the U.S.
Before the trip I knew the basics of the civil rights movement in America, but was surprised at how much I didn’t know. I’ve had this experience about history before, but it never prevents me from having it again. We always think the major events are enough to help us understand something, but then you dig in and discover how much went on before those major events.
A stop at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute two days before broadened my knowledge. There were many more people who made sacrifices and took personal risks than I realized (Fred Shuttleworth’s story was particularly powerful), and the struggle lasted far longer. The effort not only to raise awareness, but to find support was slow, painful, and plagued by brutal setbacks.
I expected, given its location, that the National Civil Rights museum would center on the story of Martin Luther King, Jr. But it was clear in the first few minutes that there were several decades of important developments that led up to the rise of MLK visibility.
The many dimensions of racism and how proud some town leaders were of their outward defiance of any semblance of civility was disturbing. “Why burn a cross when you can foreclose a loan?” expresses such clear intelligence about what they were doing (economic intimidation). Even if you didn’t agree with these attitudes they were flaunted publicly and pervasively. Who could be brave enough to stand up against this kind of open harassment?
Segregated schools, given their own section in the museum, made clear how racism wasn’t just about the current generation, but also was applied to children, and therefore, the future. How do you divide children? I stood in that room and wondered how lost a people could be to so clearly take opportunities away from future generations. My 21st century eyes struggled to see this in a way that didn’t make me sad for humanity, as much as I didn’t want to see it that way. How do we do this to each other? How have we done this to each other for centuries? It’s impossible not to walk through the museum without feeling mystified about the human species. I’ve felt similar thoughts in Holocaust museums and at WWII sites (See What I Learned in Hiroshima). There is a brutality in our history and in us that we haven’t evolved past, if we ever will.
As I walked through the museum the big question I asked was: what would I do? In every story of awful behavior, vicious cruelty, and repression of ideas, I tried to imagine how I’d respond if I were a victim. What action would I take? Would I have done a sit-in at Woolworth’s? Would I have protested peacefully? Would I have gone on a Freedom ride? How civil would I be? Would I have been violent? Where? How? How brave would I be, and what would that word even mean? Or would I hide and ignore the whole thing?
And with each step I took from room to room I felt waves of respect for how many people were willing to make sacrifices to make arguments for rights that should have already been theirs (“”I’m tired of marching for something that should have been mine at birth” -MLK). I really don’t know what I would do. I can’t know. But I can try, today, to do something for the causes I believe in and injustices I see.
Out in the streets of Memphis are a series of murals, and had I not gone to the museum I wouldn’t have completely understood what they were about, and how they fit into the larger story.
The famous stories like Rosa Parks, a story I’d learned as a child, always seemed like a singular event in my memory. As did MLK’s I have a dream speech. But it was only during the second half of the experience at the museum before either one was mentioned.
It took years of work and sacrifice before Parks’ protest for there to be enough of a story for hers to get broad attention and have the wider effect it had. The story of Fred Shuttlesworth, a name I first learned in Birmingham, came up many times in the museum, and I was inspired again by his intelligence and courage.
Its only towards the end of the story that MLK comes into central focus. In the movement he was a major wave, not the ocean itself, and as obvious as this sounds now, until I’d walked through the museum I’d never had that perspective before, or had it so clear in my mind. The role of the FBI and other government organizations in harassing black leaders was sad too, another reminder of what the status quo was like in the 1960s and how if we believe in progress, there is always something worth improving in any status quo.
From outside on the street there’s a plaque just beneath room 306. I watched many people stop to take a photo of this most famous and tragic place, and then walk on. Like me, before I went inside, I knew this was a horrible and important moment in history, but I didn’t fully understand. I felt sad for the people who moved on without going into the museum. They were in a historic place, but didn’t understand the history that led to that day.
Standing in the room itself you can’t help but look across the street to where the rifle was fired that killed MLK. It seems so close and so quaint, and it was. There was an ordinary, neighborly grace of civility violated here. It’s an ordinary street, with ordinary buildings, made extraordinary for horrible reasons.
The museum continues across the street, and you can look the opposite way towards the hotel, out the apartment window where the shots that killed MLK were fired. It was not a hard shot to make. The cruelty of it is made worse but how peaceful this place is now and must have been then.
There is a marker in the street that quietly expresses where the shot traveled. It’s a silent, dark memorial, that some visitors might not notice.
Standing in the window was a morbid and disturbing place to stand. I felt obligated to look and to stop for a moment. I thought about what the world would be like if there was never a reason for a museum like this to exist at all, much less in this specific place. I’m still mystified by how anyone can want to hurt someone who is a leader of a non-violent movement. It’s only cowards, filled with hate they don’t understand, that can act this way.
The museum ends with questions and the idea of community. I like that word. I like the idea of people creating a shared place together where everyone has an approximation of equal opportunity, and everyone contributes to doing what they can to help their neighbors, in the broadest sense of the word.
I strongly recommend visiting the museum. It will put everything going on today in America in a wider, deeper context, which can only help you sort out your feelings and what you want to do or not do about them. There’s so much history we, collectively, have yet to learn from.
Each week I take the top voted question from readers and answer it (submit one here). There were three questions about my writing process (by Jasmine Carver, Aron Grinshtein and Seattle Coffee Scene, earning a total of 1660 votes) and I’m answering them together.
What are the creative processes you go through when writing?
I start with the first word of the first sentence and then write the second word. I continue with words until the sentence is done and then I move on to the next sentence. Ok, that’s not useful. Sorry! It’s just hard to take questions like this too seriously as I don’t think there is anything magical in any writer’s process. You have to do the work and as you do the work you figure out which process works best for you. The two words creative and process are oxymoronic in this sense, as anything strictly procedural would by definition not be very creative. Seeing famous writer’s habits is interesting and can give you tactics to try, but you won’t know what works for you without doing the work.
I’ve written often about how I work and my advice for other writers. Here’s a list:
What is your writing setup like?
Below is a photo of the desk in my office. I have a Mac Air and a 27″ Cinema display. I like working on a big monitor, but I can work nearly anywhere (I got much better at writing on the road while working on The Year Without Pants). I usually carry a moleskin notebook wherever I go so I can write or sketch, and I also take notes on my iPhone 4s. I read primarily on an iPad mini 2 using the Kindle app. When at my desk I often have music playing or listen to the news while working. I have different playlists and change which one I’m listening to depending on my mood and what kind of concentration I need.
When you wrote your first book what motivated you to start?
The first book I wrote, about the design of the London underground, was never published. You can read all of my blog posts about the project from 2005. My motivation was to deliver on an idea I had. Many people have ideas for movies or books and I was one of them, the only difference was I committed the time to try and bring the idea into the world. My larger motivation was to see if I could make a living doing something other than managing software projects. While this book was never finished the experience of writing it did give me the confidence to write Making Things Happen, which started my career as an author.
Once you started what different things did you have to think about and how did you confront them?
The biggest challenge is sustaining interest, for myself and for the imagined reader.When you start writing you have the excitement of the new on your side, but that fades and you slowly realize just how much work you will need to do to deliver on the idea. It’s important for me to have an outline as that helps divide and conquer the work. It’s easier to stay motivated if you can focus on small units of effort. A book is too large for most people to keep in their mind at one time, but a chapter, or a section is easier. When I’m stuck it often means I need to break down the size of the units of work or revise the outline. I have different things I try when I feel stuck, and perhaps that’s a future blog post.
I always read at least a dozen books in the form and style of the book I’m trying to write. For The Ghost of My Father I read many memoirs. For The Year Without Pants I read many first person journalistic books. There is no better way to understand what you want to do than studying what other good writers have already done.
I always focus on getting to a first draft. It doesn’t matter if I limp my way there or not. When I have a first draft I can read the entire thing and get a sense for how it all fits together (or more precisely, doesn’t fit together. If a first draft fits together perfectly it means I didn’t take enough risks in the draft). I like to think of books as fractals. The same loop of writing a draft for the entire book applies to each chapter, and for each section within each chapter. If progress is slow, I focus on a small unit of measure.
Reading well is central to writing well. When reading a draft I ask questions like:
Mostly I pay attention to things that break the flow and stand out in a negative way. Coleridge described the suspension of disbelief for fiction, and I believe in something similar for non-fiction: the continuation of curiosity. The title of the book itself generates a certain curiosity for the reader and my job as the writer is to carry that through an entire 8 to 12 hour experience. The job of each sentence is to make the reader want to read the next one. If I can repeat this for every sentence in the book I’ve done well.
Did you go through the same thought processes for each book? If not, how did they change?
The Myths of Innovation was the most journalistic of my early books. I spent far more time studying history and interviewing people than any of my other book projects (see the bibliography). I wanted to write a book that was a contribution to knowledge in a formal, collegiate sense, and that demanded more thorough research and study. But the process is the same: collect notes, interview people, develop an outline, write a draft. The unpublished novel I wrote followed the same basic process.
You can find all my posts about writing well here. Have a question about writing or something else you want me to answer? Ask here.
One of the most provocative chapters of The Myths of Innovation is The Myth of Epiphany.
Do you love stories about flashes of insight? Or wish you had more of them so you can be more creative? Most people do. But the reasons these stories are loved has little to do with how breakthroughs usually happen.
The surprise is if you scratch the surface of any epiphany story, you’ll find they are mostly fabrications and exaggerations. As fun and inspiring as they seem, their value fades in practice. I don’t say this to depress you: it is true that the thrill of an epiphany feels great. But if you’re serious about ideas you need to look deeper into what these stories are really about.
One of the best accountings of the mythology is from Tim Berners-Lee, describing how he invented the World Wide Web, one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century:
“Journalists have always asked me what the crucial idea was or what the singular event was that allowed the web to exist one day when it hadn’t before. They are frustrated when I tell them there was no Eureka moment. It was not like the legendary apple falling on Newton’s head to demonstrate the concept of gravity… it was a process of accretion [growth by gradual addition]”
Even Berners-Lee was a victim of the epiphany myth, as the apple falling on Newton’s head didn’t happen, and the entire story is problematic as it’s usually told
We love these stories because they support our secret wish that creativity only requires a magic moment. That it’s like a lottery where we just need to be inspired enough, or have the Muses favor us. It feels safer to believe this, but it is dangerous because of how far removed it is from reality. Do you find the excitement of a flash of insight fades quickly? All of our creative heroes experience this too.
“Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work.” – Chuck Close
We love stories of flashes of insight because we love dramatic stories. The notion of an epiphany ties back to religious and spiritual concepts like the Muses, where forces in the universe instantly grant things to people. Even if we don’t literally believe in these forces we love the notion that creativity works through some system, and that all we need is one brilliant moment that can change everything for us.
The smarter way to think of ideas is that a flash of insight is one part of the process. You can take any epiphany story and shift it into giving you useful advice for how to follow in a successful creators footsteps.
Ask three questions:
Even the Newton apple story isn’t true in the way it’s commonly told. Newton certainly wasn’t hit on the head, and it’s unlikely that the singular moment of watching an apple fall from a tree, even if it happened, carried particular significance to a man who made daily observations and ran frequent experiments testing his ideas about the things he saw.
The lesson about creativity from Newton we should learn is his daily habits: he frequently asked questions and ran experiments, constantly trying new approaches and making prototypes to explore his ideas. But that’s not nearly as exciting a story to tell as the apple tale, so it’s rarely told..
Gordon Gould, a primary inventor of the laser beam, had this to say:
“In the middle of one Saturday night… the whole thing suddenly popped into my head and I saw how to build the laser… but that flash of insight required the 20 years of work I had done in physics and optics to put all of the bricks of that invention in there”
Most legendary stories of flashes of insight are like Gould’s: the inventor rarely obsesses about the epiphany, but everyone else does. Flashes of insight are best understood as our subconscious minds working on our behalf. In professor of psychology Csikszentmihalyi’s book Creativity he defines epiphany as having three parts: early, insight, and after. The insight feels like a flash because until the moment our subconscious mind surfaces an idea, we’re not fully aware that our minds are still working on the problem for us. We get ideas in the shower because it’s a place where it’s easier for our subconscious minds to speak up.
One way to think about the experience of epiphany is that it’s the moment when all of the pieces fall into place. But this does not require that the last piece has any particular significance (the last piece might be the hardest, but it doesn’t have to be). Whichever piece of the puzzle is sorted out last becomes the epiphany piece and brings the satisfying epiphany experience. However, the last piece isn’t necessarily more magical than the others and has no magic without its connection to the other pieces. It feels magical for psychological reasons, fueling the legend and myths about where the insight happened and why it was at that particular moment and not another.
Related:
[Originally published at Harvard Business as Does Size Matter For Ideas?]
Americans are preoccupied by the size of things: big houses, big sandwiches, and big salaries. At leadership retreats, and in the bestselling books we buy, we seek grand thoughts. The basic logic we use is the bigger the idea, the bigger the value, but often that’s not true. There’s a myth at work here: the assumption that big results only come from radical changes. There’s good evidence for a counter-argument.
The problems that plague organizations, or hold them back from greatness, are often small things that happen to be consistently overlooked. The lack of progress or greatness isn’t because there’s a grand idea missing. Instead the cause is a simple idea prevented by bureaucracy, killed out of ignorance, or buried under incompetence. If those simpler, smaller, ideas were set free, the effect would be as potent as any grand theory. Somehow we discount simple ideas for being playthings, for being too small to be worthy, not recognizing the surprising power hidden in what seem to be our smallest decisions.
The McDonalds brothers had a very simple idea. They made hamburgers at a few stands in San Bernardino, California. And as any reasonable owners would do, they wanted to run those stands efficiently. How did they do that? They tried to make the process for making food repeatable, an assembly line for food construction. Any homemaker or line cook of the 1950s made the same discovery, as making school lunches, or eggs over easy, again and again motivates this kind of thinking.
Had you shown the McDonalds’ business plan to any of the great business minds of the day, they’d have thought you were insane: they’d have said the idea wasn’t big enough to warrant interest of any kind. Fifty years later, McDonalds has 30,000 locations and $22 billion in revenue. Certainly not all of that value can be attributed to the simple notion of creative efficiency, but dedication to the notion did enable their early domination of competitors. The point is simple: a small idea, applied consistently well, can have disproportionately large effects. Ray Kroc’s insight was not finding a big idea, but in seeing how a little idea, done right, could become big.
Put another way, what I’m describing is leverage. Rather than worrying about the size of an idea, which most people do, it’s more productive to think about the possible leverage an idea has. To do this requires thinking not only about the idea itself, but how it will be used. An idea can have a different amount of leverage depending on where, when and how carefully it is applied. One old idea from one team in your company, reused in the right way on another team unfamiliar with it, might just have transformative effects.
In Atul Gawande’s book The Checklist Manifesto, he explains how the simple idea of a task list, something used by aircraft pilots for decades, has improved patient safety in surgery by 30% or more. Hospitals didn’t need a breakthrough technology. There wasn’t a new theory or grand vision. A simple act, with a simple, old tool, had incredible, and surprising, leverage.
There are many dubious stories in the history of innovation, and some, despite their improbability, make valid points about the nature of ideas. Charles Steinmetz (or Edison, or Tesla, depending on the version of the legend you hear), holder of over 200 patents, retired from General Electric. A complex system had broken, and no one could fix it so they hired him back to consult. Steinmetz found the malfunctioning part and marked it with a piece of chalk. He submitted a bill for $10,000. The GE managers were stunned and asked for an itemized invoice. He sent back the following: Making the chalk mark $1, Knowing where to place the chalk mark $9,999. Ideas are like chalk marks: as simple as they seem, knowing where, when, and why to use even the smallest ones can make all the difference in the world.
[Mentioned by lifehacker and 99u]
Many books are made into movies, but most movies aren’t very good. Movies are hard to make, period. Even with a great book (Wild is based on the memoir of the same name) it’s hard to transfer what makes the book great into a different medium.
For any writer, or reader interested in memoir and storytelling, I recommend going to watch Wild, staring Reese Witherspoon. Here’s why:
I read many memoirs and wrote one recently – if you’re interested in personal non-fiction, even as a reader, you should see the film. I haven’t read the book itself, so can’t comment on how they compare.
I wrote the popular book The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com & The Future of Work about my 18 months working at WordPress.com as a manager of a remote team. I’m often asked “Why isn’t remote work more popular?” My first response is to ask: do you know how popular it is right now?
As a general rule the slowest thing to change about civilization is human nature. It’s easier to upgrade technology, but when it comes to people’s habits and beliefs change takes time.
We have poor conceptions of wider trends: our basis for opinions is anecdotal and prone to many kinds of hidden bias.
The broad trends are clear: remote work, defined as working somewhere other than the office one day a week or more, has been on the rise for years and continues to rise. The rate of change is moderate, but the rate of change in workplace dynamics is rarely fast. The WSJ posted the chart below based on a 2013 report from the U.S. Census bureau. Surveys and studies all have their weaknesses (e.g. the 126% increase for construction is hard to believe), but this summary reflects the baseline trends seen in other reports, like IPSOS/Reuters 2012 report. Many major corporations have had liberal remote work policies for years, including Aetna, American Express and others (another list here) and there are even job boards dedicated to remote positions.
And the data across all working people in American (about 142 million) shows an increase in 4.2 million people who work from home part of the time:
How much of your daily work is done through a computer screen? 30%? 50%? At any moment you are working through a screen, you could be anywhere in the world while you’re doing it. Whatever benefits there are of being in the same office, when working strictly through a screen those benefits are neutralized.
Every mobile device and laptop is by definition a remote working tool. Pay attention to how much time you actually spend each day in the same room talking in real time to other people – it’s far less today than ever in history (I don’t have data for this, but I’ve rarely heard counterarguments). Even in companies that do not allow “remote work”, remote work is encouraged implicitly by the equipment used and the daily working habits we’ve adopted across our culture. The resistance to the concept of remote work is strange, given the reality of most office work.
Most companies on the list I’ve compiled of 100% distributed/remote organizations are small, young, and technology centric. Some, about half, started as distributed companies with one or more of the founders living in a different city than the others. 50 years ago it’d would very hard to start a company that depended on remote work, but the technology of the last 10 years has made it easier, and in some cases preferable, to base a company on remote work. These are new times and the assumptions we have about work need to change.
Managing remote workers requires different skills from managers and employees. The skills are not hard to learn, but they are real. I wrote The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com & The Future of Work to document my own experience as a traditional manager forced to learn this new way of thinking and to show what it was really like.
Even in large companies, it’s often younger managers, on younger projects, that are willing to experiment and try new ideas. Remote work is one of many new ideas about work and productivity. See How To Convince Your Boss To Try New Things and How To Change A Company for specific advice for your organization if you’re looking to push your company forward, on remote work or anything. The book Remote by 37Signals is a great companion to the Year Without Pants for advocacy of remote work policies.
We have a paradox about progress: many people complain about how stuck in the past their organizations are, yet point to the lack of adoption of remote work as an indicator of it’s uselessnesses, rather than a reflection of their organization’s fearful grip on the status quo. The people with the most power in any organization can be the most afraid of change. Remote work forces managers to reevaluate what good work is, and how to measure it, a reevaluation many managers don’t want to do (See: Work vs. Progress).
Remote work, like many progressive ideas, depends on company culture. A company that is truly progressive, trusting, collaborative and communicates well will fare better with remote work than one that is hierarchical, political and territorial. I wrote Why Culture Always Wins to capture why WordPress.com (and WordPress itself) are able to use remote work to its fullest advantage: remote work fits their philosophy of empowering talented people and keeping management out of the way of progress as much as possible. Organizations that see middle-management as the most important talent in the organization often struggle to see how remote work can function well at all.
We have widely diverse preferences for how we work. Some people commute one hour each way, every day. That’s ten hours a week in a car or bus. Some people would find this unacceptable, others like the tradeoff. Generally we have many work traditions that don’t make much sense anymore in the abstract (e.g. 9 to 5 working hours, strict dress codes, etc.) but changing traditions takes time. More importantly, each person decides for themselves what the preferred combination of variables are and tries to get them for themselves. Remote work is another variable in the conversation between employers and employees and how they define what work is.
Paul Graham recently posted about the U.S. talent shortage of programmers, and Matt Mullenweg’s reply pointed to remote work as the solution. They’re both right. There will always be people who work best in the same physical space with their coworkers, and others who prefer the freedom of working from anywhere they want. More choices is the right answer for America or any nation.
If digital media is the only way workers communicate, it means everyone’s collective habits about email, Skype and other communication tools are critical. How well people write and how thoughtful they are about giving their coworkers what they need to be successful becomes more important. Remote work often means working with people in different time zones, which requires an extra level of awareness on everyone’s part for scheduling and planning. Most of these are soft skills, which are sometimes easier to hire for than to train. Soft skills can be far harder to teach, or find people with, than hard skills.
Often when a company experiments with remote work and it fails it’s because they didn’t notice or anticipate the shifts required in their assumptions. They chalk up the failure to “remote work doesn’t work” rather than “we’d have to adjust our assumptions and habits to benefit from remote work and we’re not willing to do that now.”
My hope is more managers realize it’s in their self interest to give good employees the choice to work remotely. It’s in any manager’s benefit to encourage workers to find ways to be more productive. If you hire a talented professional they will know best how to be most productive and do their best work. And of course some companies will default to remote work, like Automattic and others have, and this is great too. Having more kinds of companies is a good thing.
Many workplaces offer benefits to employees that go unused (discounted gym memberships, etc.) – it reflects choice, not a failure of the benefit. Some workers will always prefer to be in a physical office, and that’s fine. But if they’ve never worked remotely when will they get a chance to see if it benefits them? The option to work from home when needed, or to try a different lifestyle without having to change jobs, is a win for everyone.
I’d like to measure how many companies offer remote work to their employees, rather than only how many use it. On its own it’s a good indicator of the health of an organization in demonstrating their interest in attracting and retaining talented people.
You can see all of my posts about remote work and The Year Without Pants, including the FAQ about the Year Without Pants and remote work.
Each week I take the top voted question from readers and answer it (submit one here). I jumped this one, submitted by Mike Nelson, it to the front on the line since it’s timely in nature.
What us the most important, single thing that Obama and Congress could do in 2015 to foster innovation in the US?
You’d have to start by defining the word innovation. As you might be sick of hearing, I often complain the word has been abused into meaninglessness. In this case I take it to mean significant positive change, as that’s the best definition of the word I know.
What would be on your list? Leave a comment.
Maybe the challenge of modern life isn’t external distractions, but our lack of practice with concentration?
I learned to concentrate when I was 15, as part of my dream of playing in the NBA. I read a book by Larry Bird to help me. I didn’t make the NBA (no surprise) and don’t remember much about the book (the cover was green, like the Celtic’s uniforms!), except for this advice on concentration:
You can sit or lay down. Once you are in position, close your eyes and relax. Just sit there for a minute and think about anything you want. After about a minute, start thinking about the neighborhood or subdivision in which your home is located. In your mind see your neighbors houses, the roads, the streets, the trees. After you can see your neighborhood clearly, move down the road your house is on and see the houses along the way…
When you begin, you will only be able to concentrate for a few seconds or minutes. If you work at it every day, though, you can build your concentration just as you can build the strength in your arms.
From Bird on Basketball: How-To Strategies from the Great Celtics Champion
When I hear someone say “I get easily distracted” I always think of Larry Bird’s advice. Maybe they haven’t practiced concentrating enough to earn the ability to control where their attention goes?
I heard recently about Hemmingwrite, a distraction free writing device, as if it’s the devices we currently have that hold people back from writing the novels of their dreams. I don’t think so.
You can also buy software that claims to free you from distractions, but if Bird is right the distractions are in your mind, not in the world. No matter how advanced the software, a mind that’s bored will always find a way to do something else. Writing often and well requires dedication, just like doing anything often and well does. Every device with an off switch is “distraction free” if you choose to flip that switch. Every app has a close button. Take some responsibility. Sure, gadgets and software may help you, but at some point the problem is you, your commitment and your habits. Larry Bird bet on his own mind, the one thing you have upgrade yourself.
Artists don’t get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working. — Stephen DeStaebler
I don’t always want to write. Writing is hard work. But I know the rewards are worth the effort and I work up the motivation to stick to my commitments to myself and put time to write ahead of other things. It’s only by practicing with your mind, the most important software you will ever have, that you can control what distracts you and what doesn’t. Some of the most important things we want in life can not be bought or sold as a product: control over our own attention is one of them.
References:
We share a mass confusion about creativity – why are ideas are so fun in our minds but so frustrating when we work on them? Through my own stories, and tales from Picasso, Michelangelo and Yoko Ono, I explain how to close that gap. Recorded live in front of a great crowd of 2500 attendees of the World Domination Summit 2014.
This version of the talk contains the largest live game about cognitive bias that has ever been played (as far as I know). Jump to 18:31 if you want to start there.
I gave a shorter version of this talk, without slides at TEDxDePaul.
A reader took their favorite ideas from The Myths of Innovation and made them into fascinating, but rather hard to remember, acronyms.
You can read the rest of the points they thought best (the blog seems dedicated to summarizing books this way).
It’s always fascinating to see how readers digest what I had to offer. I’m just the writer, but if you want my take on the most important ideas, see my own easy to read summary of the book.
Each week I take the top voted question from readers and answer it (submit one here). With 35 votes, this week’s winner was submitted by Rebekah.
Who influences you as an influencer?
I must start by admitting I am a bad fan. I’m on few email lists or newsletters. I just don’t follow people well. As much as love music, I’m often surprised to hear a band I love has a new album out or are on tour in my town. I don’t entirely know why it’s true about me, but I accept, gladly, that I don’t seem to need much to be happy. My consumption habits follow my curiosity more than anything and I’m more curious about what I don’t know than what I do know.
My biggest influences by far are dead people. That sounds morbid and I doubt it’s the answer you were hoping for. I used to be embarrassed to admit it, but it seems obvious now. When I read the news I often think about people from the past, and how they responded to similar events. The perennial appeal of Shakespeare or Socrates speaks to deep questions and ideas about the human condition that we are never going to fully resolve but need to wrestle with to be our best selves. Those writers, and many others, captured this well, often better than modern writers do. I think of Voltaire, Emerson… very little of the great literature and thinking of the past is put into practice today, or even remembered. I’m just now catching up on Doris Lessing and Ursula Le Guin. It goes on and on. The adage that we repeat the past is entirely true, it’s just a question of who repeats it, when and why. This doesn’t prevent progress but it does mean anyone interested in progress, which I am, must understand the patterns of humanity that we’re prone to repeating. We assume what’s new is best but I don’t believe this always applies anymore.
Readers are powerful. I’m in debt in a way to anyone who gives their time to consuming my work. When I meet folks who know who I am I’m often floored by how much they know about things I’m ignorant about, or how many questions they have that I haven’t thought of before. Half the reason I get up there on stage and write books is to invite a certain kind of discourse with people I don’t know. I’m a seeker and its often people who have read some of my work who are best at offering a suggestion, a book, a movie, a place, that challenges me or influences me the most. I consider my position a place of privilege and I honor that by reading every review, every email (or every ask berkun submission like this one). I want to stay in this position and I’m convinced my odds are best if I continue to be a seeker.
I look less to whatever is popular now. Being the most popular doesn’t mean you are the best. Many of our most popular influencers become popular by commenting on a very narrow subject repeatedly – they’re likely not the makers of movies or cathedrals or symphonies or anything other than commentary. And they may not be offering the best commentary either. They’re popular because they work hard (curation is a talent and requires work), they reliably cover the same topics, and they’re good at drawing attention to themselves. But the most influential people in the world are in some ways very conservative: their popularity hinges on them being palatable to a wide audience and as their popularity grows they fear losing it more than their interest in learning new things. The true progressives with the most interesting ideas are far more likely to be found on the fringes, not crazy enough to be completely ignored, but not attracted by popularity enough to let it dominate their choices. I follow what’s trending so I have a clue and I stay in touch, but I don’t chase trends (pssst: every trend we chase today we’ve chased before and will chase again). When you write to chase a trend it creates work with a short shelf life.
I’m deeply inspired by people who put take risks for the ideas they believe in. So many people claim to be passionate about something, but put absolutely nothing at stake for those ideas. Anita Sarkeesian has been on my mind often this year. For all the pundits I know, I cant think of many who have bravely endured what she has, simply for having a strong opinion and standing behind it. Voltaire wrote while in exile from his own country: how many bloggers or social media gurus care enough about an idea to put up with that? I’m inspired by benevolent conviction. I don’t agree with everything Sarkeesian has to say, but her work has made me think of the things I’m afraid to say and why I haven’t said them.
Books and movies influence me more than blogs and media. I’ve listed the books that have influenced me the most (see My favorite books and why I love them). I think of books first as they have a depth of thinking and experience that lasts with me far longer than magazine articles and blog posts. I usually read books over several days, or longer, and that time gives me space to think for myself in between the writer’s thoughts. I read ~20 books a year, possibly more if I’m working on a book, less if I’m not as dedicated to my craft (reading well is a big part of writing well). Movies strike deeper chords with me too. There’s something about a 2 hour immersion in a filmmakers world that has powers no other media has.
Twitter and Facebook are for serendipity. Social media helps me find and connect with people and I love it for that. For better and worse many people find my work through social media. It’s like a busy street corner, where sometimes you see old friends, sometimes you get into fights, and mostly you’re never sure what you’re going to get. But it’s a shallow media. You can’t get deep and it’s easy to read people wrong when you do. You can see who I follow on twitter and it gives a good idea of my social network and interests, but debates and discussions there only go so far. I much prefer boozy dinners and nights in pubs, with some people I know well and some people I don’t, who all enjoy serious conversation with people who don’t agree with them. I try to use Twitter and Facebook to get me face to face (or at least on email) with interesting people – thinking of social media as a means to other ends changes its value dramatically.
What should I read or see or do that you don’t think I have? My mind is open.
What? Who is this Berkun guy and why should I care he wrote a book? Good questions indeed. Here are the answers.
Now that my sixth book, The Ghost of My Father is out, it’s time to share the process that led to the final design (I posted previously about how The Year Without Pants cover was created). This time I decided to work with Tim Kordik again, who worked with me on the excellent cover for Mindfire: Big Ideas For Curious Minds (see how Mindfire’s cover was designed here).
I always start with a one page design brief, explaining the goals for the cover. Since Ghost is a memoir, I spent much of the last year reading memoirs in preparing to write one. I picked some of the best memoir covers I found and shared them with Tim, and we talked about them over beers. We both liked the simple typography and the bold design choices (singular colors, simple imagery, etc).
I like working with Tim because he understands the fun of the first round. Round one is the time to try widely different ideas and break rules. He put together more than a half-dozen initial concepts. Some were all out pop-art (upper left) and others felt more like thriller novels (bottom left) but I was pleasantly surprised by how different the concepts were: shadows and cut-outs were excellent metaphors for a book about a distant parent.
I asked readers to vote on the design, and 359 people kindly volunteered their choice. The 2nd option above, with the family in shadows, won with 33% of the vote. I never let votes make choices for me, but it generates discussion and helps me think about the design, even if I don’t necessarily agree with the winner.
We talked about how strong the metaphor of the chain from the first round was, but not the style (too much like a literary novel from the 1970s) which led to one of my favorite concepts of round 2, with a vertical chain over a patchy blue background. It was my favorite design for round two and a front runner for the final design.
By chance a friend, Teresa Brazen, posted a photo of a hike she took on Facebook. It seemed a perfect theme: a place for contemplation, and perhaps sharing time with someone close, but that was obscured and uncertain (in much the way a difficult, but important relationship can be). It seemed worthy as a concept and I sent the photo to Tim with some brief thoughts. He liked it and ran with the idea.
We kept my favorite design from round 2, as it was the strongest concept so far, but spent the round focusing on the new bench concept. Tim found stock photos that captured the spirit of Teresa’s photo (the rough, dense visuals of the landscape in Teresa’s photo made it hard to use for something like a book cover).
We finalized on the bench concept, and went with more abstract photo. Not being able to see where the ocean meets the sky suggested so many things about how, when you look closely, there is a surprising fuzziness to our memories and connections with some people we think are important in our lives, and the book is a head on exploration of this challenge. With most of the big decisions finalized, we got down to the graphic design details of spacing, font weight and composition. I still wasn’t sure if we’d have a subtitle or not, and after some advice from my kickstarter backers, I went dropped it. Simplicity wins.
Here is the final design of The Ghost of My Father. Below you can see the full front, back and spine design.
I wrote a new chapter for the book, after my father died, and we rereleased the book with an updated cover. We added a blurb to the bottom, and a visual highlight to make it easy to tell the difference between editions.
We settled on orange as the best contrasting color, and added a thin highlight strip to the spine as well, so anyone can spot the updated version even if it’s on a shelf.
You can buy the book on Kindle or Paperback, or read an excerpt (PDF). Kirkus reviews called it “A sobering, lucid memoir about the uncanny, precarious nature of family, masculinity and childhood.” It’s the best and most personal book I’ve written and if you like my other writing, you should really give this one a try. It changed my life to write it and may change yours to read it.
[Note 12-5-17: this question came up this week for a 2nd time, with 368 votes, by Richard Ferrers, and thoughtful reuse is also one my favorite rules]
Each week I take the top voted question from readers and answer it (submit yours here). With 225 votes, this week’s winner was “What Are The Rules You Live By?” submitted by Max. He wrote:
Over the course of life you make experiences, learn from them and have certain key “nuggets” of wisdom that you hold on to. These are rules that you found that make you more successful and happy, make you avoid stupid things and make better choices. What are those?
I have rules about rules:
Instead there are pairs of contradicting rules I think about often. Each side of each pair are true, but never to the exclusion of the other. The uncertainty generated by these “rules” keeps them alive and pushes me to revise and review the rules themselves.
What are your rules to live by? How did you decide on them? Leave a comment.
