TW's Outboard Brain

This blog's new new home.

2006-10-07T15:01:00.000-05:00

Pretty good digs, I think:

Common Sense

Movin' out.

2006-03-11T12:44:00.000-06:00

Dear readers: To give you a better reading experience, I have moved my blog:

TW's NEW Outboard Brain

Please update bookmarks and RSS feeds accordingly.

The K.I.S.S. Principle of personal organization.

2006-03-10T15:50:00.000-06:00

While I'm on a roll from the previous post, let me talk about the simplifed approach to personal organization. This is one that doesn't work for the distracted consumer who's looking for the easy way out; this one works for gung-ho change-o-philiacs like me. Ready?

Step 1: Decide what's most important.
Step 2: Do that first.

This, I hear you saying, hardly seems groundbreaking. But consider: How often do you find yourself "meaning to" do something, but allowing everything else in the world intervene? At times this is the conscious process of procrastination, complete with nagging feelings of guilt. But at other times, it is simply the well-known phenomenon of putting out fires. We all do it, whether in business or housekeeping or family relations.

Let me ask you another question: How often do you find yourself "meaning to" save or invest money, but finding that your nickel-and-dime expenses somehow prevent you? Many financial advisors will tell you that the prime solution for this is to set aside your savings first, and to put them in some repository where they can't be quite so easily tapped as your checking account.

Well, the past is the ultimate repository: once time has slipped by us and into the past, it's locked away forever. By definition. The question is, do you want the past to contain all the "savings" you've accumulated toward your big, life-changing--or even civilizational--BHAGs? Or the nickel-and-diming of errands, tidbits, this-'n'-that?

Pause there for a second: I'm not talking about what you do do, but what you want to do. I'd rather do something major. Yes?

You know the old joke "Life is uncertain--eat dessert first." But how often do we treat ourselves to the accomplishments we really want--and do it first, before we let anything else crowd in on us? Life is uncertain. You might not make it to thirty. You might not make it to forty. Or fifty. You might get just one shot at immortality. So why not take it first?

What applies on the grand scale applies in the daily schedule. Yes, sometimes you must clear the decks, but often our deck-clearing serves as no more than psychological throat-clearing. We're warming up for an aria that may never begin.

So yes, prepare. Take care of your day-to-day obligations. But figure out the big stuff and do it before you get bogged down in the little stuff, or else the little stuff, kudzu-like, will always grow to overwhelm your mental landscape.

Next time I'll talk more about how to decide what's "most important" on your list. For now, I'll leave you with a serendipitous thought: While I was writing this post, my buddy Jim called me up to talk. He said nice things about a couple of the posts here, but repeated a caution he's given me before--namely, not to give attention to this blog that might go into a book manuscript instead. He has a point, not because I don't derive satisfaction from writing the blog, but because I do derive satisfaction from it. It's all too tempting to write more and more here, especially as my audience continues to grow,* and neglect to work on the books that I've always assumed will make my reputation.

So, I'm going to compromise by spending more time here talking about the books I intend to write. One major topic, upon which I'll be posting much more: Decisions--how we make them and what we can do to take charge of them. You can expect me to start posting on that topic first.

~~

* This might be an opportune moment to ask yourself whether you're really giving it that extra effort to make this blog the one most widely read by savvy people like yourself. I'd certainly appreciate it, and don't you think it would make you feel better, too? ;)

The K.I.S.S. Principle and environmental change.

2006-03-10T15:33:00.000-06:00

I'm sure Seth Godin isn't writing the great posts on his blog strictly to give me fodder to talk about environmental issues and how they're discussed. But his latest entry, "Bite sized", serves the purpose just as well as his earlier posts about "climate cancer".

Godin:

Actually, our behavior as people is pretty easy to predict. We like things that are simple, not complex. Issues where we can take action without changing very much. [...] The best problems, as far as a consumer is concerned, are those that can be solved quickly and easily, with few side effects.

Me: It would be great if everyone had the same wish that I do to embrace complexity, seek out change, and grow by leaps and bounds from day to day. But does that describe the world you see around you? It doesn't even describe my actual experience, only my wishes, and I'm the most gung-ho wisher for huge, positive change you can imagine.

I'd love it if the most powerful environmentalists got their heads together and agreed that, while maintaining their many varied good programs, they were going to collaborate on the one message, a simple message, that would best best serve the earth's environment. I don't know if it would target hydrocarbons, or habits of consumption, or what, but I do know it would help if every person in the industrialized world internalized some message like "Let's keep it safe for our grandkids: Stop polluting now." Put up billboards with a picture of a cute infant/toddler holding the earth in his or her hands and smiling. Run simple, warm television ads featuring respected, politics-neutral notables saying what they're personally doing to reduce their output of pollution. Hit every branch of the media in every country. Say it over and over.

Above all, give people something simple they can do right now with minimal pain to address the high-leverage problem. I'm busy and I'm weak-willed--make it easy for me, much less the folks who drive Excursions.

Commonplace: Napoleon

2006-03-10T05:56:00.000-06:00

"Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide."
—Napoleon Bonaparte

Environmentalism and the poor.

2006-03-10T05:33:00.000-06:00

This article is part of a series from Grist on poverty and the environment. Well worth reading, both for its historical perspective and its view of what should be done today.

Caste from the Past

The environmental movement has achieved great things. Without John Muir or David Brower, there would be fewer national parks and wilderness areas. [...] These and other activists deserve the hero label -- but we also need to expand our notion of what constitutes nature and who speaks on its behalf. Unless environmentalists take a full reckoning of their past to find other voices to remember and celebrate, the movement may grow ever more narrow and irrelevant. Maybe, just maybe, it's time to find some new heroes.

In my view, it is essential that environmentalists demonstrate to everyone that environmentalism isn't a fringe avocation, but a way of thinking about the world that benefits everyone. It's going to require better work than we've done so far.

Disposing of Styrofoam.

2006-03-10T05:18:00.000-06:00

Thanks to our friends from the bacterial world, there is hope for recycling the squillions of tons of used polystyrene foam (a.k.a. Styrofoam, which is a trademark) that we use.

Solving the Styrofoam Situation

This article is from Seed, which I've been reading more of lately and quite enjoying.

Clutter = procrastination = lies.

2006-03-10T04:25:00.000-06:00

The formula above might not be true for everybody. That's fine. I've come to believe it's true for me.

I'm hardly the first to make the connection between clutter and procrastination. "The Feng Shui of Procrastination" makes the point nicely: "Clutter is delayed decisions. It's procrastination. It's stress." All so very true, even though I'm not a big believer in Feng Shui. For me the most important sentence in the article is this: "Procrastination puts you out of integrity with yourself."

"Integral" means that all the parts agree with one another. Clutter keeps you from being that. It means you're lying to yourself about who you are and what you want to be. It means that you have one idea about where you're going or what your life ideally means . . . but they you do something very different. You surround yourself in cruft to give yourself an excuse for not living the bold life you dreamed for yourself.

That's all projection, of course; for "you," read "I" and you'll understand where I'm coming from. I have made so many agreements with myself about how I wanted things to be, but then allowed myself to get caught in the tidal flow of stuff, cruft, junk, and flotsam that life inevitably brings our way. The flow may be inevitable, but (a) we don't have to encourage it by following procrastination-friendly habits, and (b) we don't have to accept that clutter and procrastination themselves are inevitable. They're not.

Mind you, procrastination has complex psychological bases. For more on that, check out this useful article from Psychology Today: "Procrastination: Ten Things To Know". Read the whole thing, but for the moment focus on this:

Procrastinators tell lies to themselves. Such as, "I'll feel more like doing this tomorrow." Or "I work best under pressure." But in fact they do not get the urge the next day or work best under pressure. In addition, they protect their sense of self by saying "this isn't important." Another big lie procrastinators indulge is that time pressure makes them more creative. Unfortunately they do not turn out to be more creative; they only feel that way. They squander their resources.

This is where my simplified formula comes from. Clutter is the physical manifestation of procrastination. Clutter is outright proof of our indulgence in the fantasy that there will be time to work on Thing X later, and that there isn't even time now to put Thing X in the rightful place for things waiting to be worked on. Clutter is an abdication of responsibility.

If you want to have a meaningful life, you have come to an agreement with yourself about what's important and what isn't. If you're treating your own hopes and dreams with integrity, you do the things that are important and leave off the things that aren't--not just for the moment, but forever. You don't form clutter because you don't tell yourself the string of lies that would allow you to.

Let's all agree to stop lying to ourselves, shall we? Address the clutter/procrastination/lies nexus in your own life, honestly dealing with both the old junk you've accumulated and the new nonsense that washes in with each day's tide.

As I was writing this, I stumbled across a quotation from the late psychiatrist M. Scott Peck. I don't know what book or article it's from, or when I wrote it down, but I think it's useful in this context:

There are many people I know who possess a vision of (personal) evolution yet seem to lack the will for it. They want, and believe it possible, to skip over the discipline, to find an easy shortcut to sainthood. Often they attempt to attain it by simply imitating the superficialities of saints, retiring to the desert or taking up carpentry. Some even believe by such imitation they have really become saints and prophets, and are unable to acknowledge that they are still children and face the painful fact that they must start at the beginning and go through the middle.

Not for a moment do I propose that being honest with yourself is easy. But it's the only way to live.

[Thanks to Lifehacker for pointing out the Feng Shui article. Their accompanying photo is priceless.]

To-do lists.

2006-03-09T05:21:00.000-06:00

I admire Tom Peters for his drive, his enthusiasm, and his resolute devotion to excellence. I think I identify with him as strongly as I do because I have a strong desire to give advice and help anywhere I think it might be helpful. Partly this feeds my own ego, but I do get enough repeat business to make me think that at least some of my words hit home. In any event, I read Peters's blog daily and can recommend it.

A while back I bookmarked this entry in the blog, and I keep coming back to it at intervals:

The Single Most Important Thing

It's about that old stand-by, the To-Do lists. Peters argues that a short and sweet daily To-Do list is of paramount importance for achieving one's goals. He thinks it's so important that he shouts his description of it: "THE ONE TOOL WHICH WILL MAKE OR BREAK YOUR CAREER."

On days when I give myself a very simple set of marching orders without much room for negotiation, I get a lot done. I also have too many days when I don't give myself that simple set of marching orders . . . with predictable results.

"Secrets of Greatness: How I Work"

2006-03-09T04:57:00.000-06:00

No, not me, but a dozen of the most accomplished people you'd hope to find, from Wynton Marsalis to Hank Paulson. This FORTUNE magazine spread presents the first-person thoughts of notables from various fields, who describe how they do their daily work. Some spend all day on the phone (Paulson often leaves 200 voicemails in a day, but has never used e-mail), others on the computer (Judge Richard Posner spends little time on the phone, but uses e-mail constantly, plus he blogs). The details differ from one person to another, but all have found ways to achieve great success in their work.

Secrets of Greatness: How I Work

Some highlights follow . . .

Bill Gross, the king of the bond industry: "You have to cut the information flow to a minimum level."

Wynton Marsalis: "To find a groove means practice, practice, and more practice."

Carlos Ghosn, who runs both Nissan and Renault: "I do not bring my work home. I play with my four children and spend time with my family on weekends."

A. G. Lafley of Procter & Gamble: "A key to staying calm is minimizing the information onslaught."

All of it is well worth reading.

"Atmosphere cancer," redux.

2006-03-09T04:17:00.000-06:00

Last week I cited Seth Godin on the poor job that's been done to inform the world of the dangers of global warming. Among other smart observations, Godin made the point that the general public would look at the issue differently if we called the phenomenon "atmosphere cancer" rather than "global warming."

This interesting item from the "Framing Science" blog uses graphs of Gallup polling data to show just how low global warming rates in the public mind. The blog itself addresses exactly what Godin was talking about, namely the way that scientific issues are portrayed in the media. It's author, Dr. Matthew Nisbet, teaches communications at Ohio State.

The failure to adequately alarm or motivate the public about global warming raises a timeless organizational issue: who's responsible? We've all had the experience, when working in groups, of deadlines that slipped or tasks that fell by the wayside simply because it wasn't clear exactly who was responsible for which part of the project. The old saying has as much currency now as ever: "If everyone is responsible, then no one is responsible."

For macro issues like "atmosphere cancer," effective responsibility tends to fall to two types of entities: (1) private citizens or groups who take the issue on as a "holy" cause, or (2) governments. In the case of global warming, the former class includes major and minor environmental organizations, professional scientific groups, experts like Prof. Nisbet, and the few concerned citizens who will make this their #1 issue for activism. To start at the head of the list for governments, the Bush administration has been, shall we say, less than zealous in helping the American people to understand the real and pressing threats posed by global warming.

T-Ball

2006-03-05T21:28:00.000-06:00

Yesterday my son played his first T-ball game. He wore his spikes all day yesterday, and all day again today.

The game was mostly a hoot. You've got the kids who need reminding to run after they hit the ball. You've got the kids who take three swings to connect at all with the ball on the tee. You've got the three infielders and two outfielders all racing toward the same ball, then forming a scrum to decide which one of them gets to pick it up and throw it. The whole game was like that. I got to see it up close because I was one of several dads helping the coaches run the game.

The non-hoot parts were the crying kids--crying because they have to bat last, crying because their teammate won't give them a drink from their water bottle, crying because they have to play left field and they know the ball will never be hit to them. And so on. In this league, five-year-olds are never put out on the basepaths. Partly this is to build their confidence, but I suspect it's also because the coaches and league officials are parents, and they know that there will be way too much crying otherwise.

Even though the players are only five years old, you can already spot the players. Some of the clueless kids will clue in eventually, some will have their coordination come to them all in a rush. (It took me forever: I was finishing high school before I could hit a properly timed jump shot.) But some of them have it already--speed, alertness, hustle. These weren't the kids who were crying because they got stuck playing catcher in a T-ball game.

Thinking about some things I've read recently, I wonder how much of those boys' future success in the game will be attributable to that drive? I want to help every kid on the team enjoy baseball, because I love it and I want them to love it, too. But can anybody teach the sort of drive that the little dynamo kids are already showing? I certainly don't know how. If you push too hard, you extinguish desire rather than fanning it; if you don't push at all, the boys don't get better, and, worse, they may not make the connection between trying and getting better. No good comes out of either extreme.

That's all in the future. Somewhere, on my son's ball field or some other, a future Hall of Famer is starting his career in baseball. That kid may be in San Juan or Nashville or Oakland or Pusan or Yokohama. Of course I hope it's my son, if he can somehow avoid my bad eyesight and slow reflexes. So far, he loves being on his team, especially since it's named for his daddy's favorite team--the Red Sox. Partway through the game, he hiked up his pants legs to his knees so everyone could see his long, bright-red socks. He looked great running the bases. How could he not, with that big, fat smile on his face?

Commonplace: Eno

2006-03-05T06:28:00.000-06:00

"Honour thy error as a hidden intention."
--Brian Eno

(What hidden intentions do we shun because they present themselves to us as deviations from the set program?)

Kathy Sierra kicks ass.

2006-03-04T15:08:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I caught up on some blog reading, so I was going to link to Kathy's excellent posts on the theme "Dignity is Deadly."

But I didn't get to it yesterday, and by the time I got there today I see this compelling new post on "How to be an expert."

Given that I've linked to her stuff before--repeatedly--and that a couple of my friends and I have had long talks about what she's written, I figured it was time to add her to the sidebar here and give her a particular plug.

Do yourself a favor and make a habit of reading Creating Passionate Users.

Go hug somebody.

2006-03-04T10:37:00.000-06:00

A little while ago my son came to talk to me while I was working on my laptop at the kitchen table. I had the good sense to give him my full attention while he showed me how he can count all the way to 100. He's never done that trick before, at least for me. After he was finished, he jumped up on my lap for a big hug.

Maybe you don't have kids, and I'm not trying to be saccharine about my own. But you have somebody, somewhere, who is important to you. Go hug them, or call them, or e-mail them. Tell them you love them. Tell them you're glad you know them.

Do it before it's too late. You don't know how much time you have left; assume that time is short.

The (Substantially Amended) Traffic-Light Theory of Achievement

2006-03-04T10:36:00.000-06:00

Morning traffic seems to generate lots of ideas for me. I guess I’ll have to look elsewhere for inspiration in my future dream life--the one in which I get to avoid my fellow citizens on the roadways.

If you do any city driving at all, you’ll know this phenomenon: You’re going right at the speed limit, one stop light turns green right as you come to it, and then you hit a long string of lights all timed to the flow of traffic. When it’s really going well, it goes beyond even what the traffic engineers intended: you hit a string of lights, there’s no traffic to prevent your left turn, and then you hit another string of lights on a second street. A 25-minute drive downtown takes 11 minutes, and you wonder why life can’t always be this way.

You also know the converse case: You’re running just a little late. When you’re about to get in your car to leave for the day, you have to pop back inside because you forgot your briefcase/cellphone/lunch/iguana, and from then on things go haywire. You need to merge onto a busy street . . . but you miss a huge gap in traffic by two seconds, and then you’re waiting four minutes while an improbably huge convoy of morning commuters rushes by. Finally you merge, you drive down to the corner . . . just as the turn signal changes from yellow to red. You wait. You miss the next light after you turn. A little old lady pulls out in front of you at the last second--you have to brake hard--and then you’re stuck behind her, traveling way below the speed limit, for 46 blocks. Finally she sails her Skylark through a stale amber light at 22 m.p.h., and you’re left to wait at still another light. Your 25-minute trip downtown seems to take all afternoon.

Okay, maybe I’ve spent a little too long setting up my metaphor here, but my head is stocked with images like these because I encounter them every day. Bear with me, thought, because there’s something to be learned from these experiences.

What’s the difference between the happy first scenario and the teeth-grinding second scenario? We can observe that the difference started small at the outset, then turned large as time went on--but why? The answer, I think, is chokepoints, represented in the form of stop lights and other intersections. Most of the time when we drive, there’s no reason to speed, because these chokepoints will keep us from getting too far ahead anyway. But when we work within the system, and when we leave a little earlier in the morning . . . things seem to just flow.

Don Aslett talks about this effect in his estimable book How to Have a 48-Hour Day. He offers many examples of the benefits of being early versus the penalties for being late. Latecomers have to park in the boonies and hike in, but when you’re early, you can take your pick of prime spots and back your car in if you want to. Aslett's so convinced of the wisdom of this that he fills a whole page of his book with the words “BE EARLY” in three-inch-tall letters. Being early helps us to circumvent chokepoints. It gives us time to route around them, or sail through them, or wait without stress when they do snare us.

This even helps for tasks that mostly answer to steady, sustained work. Getting in shape, for example, requires not huge, periodic efforts, but steady effort applied regularly over time. Even then, though, there are chokepoints. You should go to the doctor for a checkup before you start a serious workout program, but for as long as you fail to make the appointment and go, that checkup serves as a chokepoint. If you’ve been meaning to shop for a gym but haven’t gotten around to it, that’s a chokepoint. Finding a workout buddy could be a chokepoint. Until you get through these, you might as well be stuck at a red light.

The steadiest producers stay steady because they don’t let little things like this turn into interminable red lights. Prolific book writers bang out the prose at their safe “speed limit” even on the days when they don’t feel like it. As soon as they’re done, they go on to the next proposal, the next outline, the next rough draft. It’s the same for the best salesmen I know: they don’t put in heroic efforts at the end of the month, but call on potential customers at a good tempo day in and day out.

Low achievers--and I speak from experience here, having been one in many areas--do the reverse. They putter along. They slow down in fear that the upcoming green light will turn amber, rather than better estimating the distance, maintaining their speed, and sailing through without even flirting with the red light. They wait for the ideal opening to merge with traffic, instead of taking the first safe opening. They leave late and arrive later.

Life has certain built-in delays and a few unavoidable chokepoints. There is only so fast you can grow a crop, earn a degree, or mature a vintage of wine. That’s fine: prepare for these constraints in advance and you can still come out ahead. But don’t lengthen the waiting by imposing delays of your own. You don’t have to speed, but when you see a makeable opportunity ahead of you, keep up a steady pace; otherwise the opportunity may be gone by the time you get there. Take advantage of this opportunity so you'll be in time to take advantage of the next one.

You know, when I first posted this, the final paragraph read like this:

Think about the next “stop light” in your own life. What is that chokepoint between you and your ambitions? Commit yourself to reaching that light early so that you can also make the next one, and the next. Finish this leg of your trip through life earlier--and with less stress--so you can better enjoy both the trip and the destination.

You know what? This is all projection, my faux-wise way of telling you how to be. Maybe what I've said here will be helpful to you, but regardless, you can live your own life in your own way. Meanwhile I need to take this advice, thinking of my own "stop lights" and how I might work around them.

Here's the story I ducked away from in the first version:

I just wrote a check for $133 to Austin's municipal court to pay a traffic fine. The ticket was for an expired inspection sticker, which I had let lapse because . . . well, there was no special reason. I just didn't pay attention to it--like a driver who doesn't pay attention on the roadway and misses a light he could have made.

I got the ticket at a traffic stop in the neighborhood just west of the UT campus. I was circling the neighborhood looking for a place to park. Ordinarily I wouldn't try to park there, since it's usually quite crowded on a Tuesday afternoon, but on this day my schedule was awry and I hoped I could find something. I trawled through the neighborhood fruitlessly for a few minutes, got stopped and ticketed, and then finally gave in and paid $10 to park in a garage next to campus.

My schedule was so awry because I had interrupted my work to go downtown in the middle of the afternoon to buy a nice bottle of scotch for one of my professors; I took it to him during his office hours that day. I had to interrupt my work to do this because I had neglected, despite repeated reminders to myself, to buy the scotch at a more convenient time in the wine shop in my own neighborhood.

The bottle of scotch was a peace offering to my professor because I had taken many extra months to finish a seminar paper that had been due--technically speaking, you understand--last May. The professor knew I was working on it, I had talked to him about the paper, but mostly I just dragged my ass and didn't get it done. Finally, after hundreds of pages of notes and dozens of pages of typewritten draftwork, I just hauled the thing into some sort or order, lopped off the parts that made the least sense or were the least developed, and stopped work on it. Let me just skip over any long description of the months of background stress this paper brought to my life.

I took a long time on the paper mostly because I wanted to impress the professor. I admire him hugely and want him to think highly of me. He wasn't angry to receive the paper so late, he knew I was trying, but this was hardly the way for me to impress him with my ability to deliver a finished project. Hundreds of hours of research and writing amounted to . . . not that much, when I read over the final draft.

After I got the ticket I went to get the car inspected. Well, a week intervened because . . . because I didn't get my butt in gear. I needed the car to pass inspection so I could make my appearance in municipal court and get off with no more than a $10 appearance fee. But the car didn't pass inspection because of a "Check Engine" light that I had studiously ignored for, oh, a few months. Why? Probably the fear that it would ultimately cost $800 or something to fix the car . . . which it did, after the car failed the inspection and after I was able to spend a day at home while the local shop fixed it and after the get-off-cheap court appearance date had passed.

$40 for scotch.
$10 for garage parking.
$133 for the ticket.
$800 for car repairs.
$28 for the failed inspection.
Months of stress wondering when I would get my seminar paper finished.
Weeks of stress over the ticket, the failed inspection, and the car repair.
Wasted time that can never be regained.

Sure, maybe the car would have needed the $800 repair anyway. But maybe the bill wouldn't have been so bad, or maybe it could have come in two parts to make it easier to swallow.

The solution to this would have been to finish the seminar paper last May when it was due--to keep up the pace and make that first green light. I could have gotten the car checked out when the "Check Engine" light first came on, which was before the inspection expired. Then I could have gotten the car inspected before it was overdue. All of these were green lights waiting for me to make them, but I didn't get my act together. I'm wondering how much I might have accomplished in the interim if I had.

That's the real story. That's why I retract any effort to tell you how to live your life in this vein. All I can say now is: I'm trying not to repeat this experience in my own life; please take this story as an example of how not to lead your own.

The best thing I've ever read on the creative life.

2006-03-04T08:25:00.000-06:00

Seriously, friends--I've found an epicenter of insight here.

How to Be Creative (Long Version) by Hugh Macleod

If you have creative urges, fulfilled or unfulfilled, please don't wait to follow this link. Please don't be deterred by the piece's length, and please don't wait until later to read it. Get yourself a cup of coffee, sit down and read, and don't run off when Macleod starts making the observations that sear your conscience. Face up to it.

"Do you want to make this damn thing exist or not?"

Wish List: Bespoke suits.

2006-03-03T21:06:00.000-06:00

Since I live in Austin and don't practice law, I would look strange wearing a suit on most of my weekly rounds. But I do dream of a day when I can afford--and occasionally need--bespoke English suits.

Cary Grant favored suits from Kilgour, French & Stanbury. That's a big vote in my book.

Or perhaps someday I will engage the skills of Thomas Mahon; he seems eminently qualified.

Buck O'Neil should be in the Hall of Fame.

2006-03-02T21:54:00.000-06:00

I don't know how else to put it. I don't even see it as something about which reasonable people can disagree. The Hall selectors did make the right call by inducting Effa Manley. But this . . . honestly, I'm at a loss for words.

Outrage over O'Neil's Hall snub heard in Congress

Here is a column on O'Neil response, from the site of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum--which wouldn't exist without his efforts. The columnist, Jason Whitlock of the Kansas City Star, puts it well: "The Baseball Hall of Fame needed Buck O'Neil far more than Buck O'Neil needed the Baseball Hall of Fame."

Maybe this is just my signal that I should stop caring about the Hall of Fame. Illusions die hard.

Great read: Simmons and Gladwell.

2006-03-02T19:53:00.000-06:00

Bill Simmons is one of the smartest sportswriters working today--and surely the funniest. He's a master of writing long, entertaining columns that bring together sports, books, and popular culture. He's also prolific enough to keep several types of series going at once. One of them, "Curious Guy," features edited e-mail conversations between Simmons and other interesting people. His current "Curious Guy" column is the first installment of his conversation with New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, one of the best writers anywhere.

"Curious Guy: Malcolm Gladwell"

Particularly if you're a sports fan, it's great to sit in on the conversation of two guys who are
so smart, so verbal, and so obviously enjoying riffing off of each other's ideas. (Don't wait too long; older stories on ESPN are for subscribers only.) You get snippets like this one from Gladwell:

". . . it's really risky to work hard, because then if you fail you can no longer say that you failed because you didn't work hard. It's a form of self-protection."

While I'm at it: Gladwell now has a blog. Man, he's good.

"Global warming" needs better p.r.

2006-03-01T21:13:00.000-06:00

Another typically sensible post from Seth Godin: "The problem with 'global warming'." The short version is that the problem hasn't been presented (or marketed) to the general public in a way that is (1) understandable, and (2) moving. In my view, Godin is absolutely right.

I've heard far too many earnest pleas for urgent action from well-meaning people who do not grasp the nature of human communication. They believe that if they just explain it again, slowly enough and passionately enough, their audiences will come to understand the severity of the problem, change their own ways, and then take up the cause themselves.

But guess what? We in the audience are human. We like what we like. We typically don't like change, especially if it affects things that we enjoy. I don't want to give up my car. I don't want to give up my wanton use of electricity. You're really going to have to convince me -- to sell me -- to do otherwise.

I say all of this not because I'm dubious about global warming -- I used to write an environmental column, for crying out loud -- but because I know that I haven't done a tenth of what I could have to change my own habits for the better in terms of global warming. I'm not trying to be selfish, but my schedule is criminally overbooked and it takes some convincing to get me to eat my spinach in any context. Make it real to me. Convince me. I'm good-hearted but highly conflicted.

This complaint shares the same root with my earlier rant about blocks of prose on PowerPoint slides. Presenters who fill their PowerPoint slides with chunk-o-text bullet points are thinking more about their own needs (making just one slide, easy-importing from their word processor) than about mine (bad eyesight, distraction, a stark lust for pictures).

Don't do that. Please. I'm weak and needy. If you want to convince me, you'll have to do better.

Any ideas on how to market the urgency, the right-now-this-instant urgency, of global warming--ahem, "atmosphere cancer"--to the general public?

Unseen. Unforgotten.

2006-03-01T19:47:00.000-06:00

Ann Bartow of Sivacracy points to a trove of pictures from the civil rights movement on the site of The Birmingham News. These photos, which had not been published in the 1960s because they were seen as too inflammatory for the newspaper's readers, were recently rediscovered by the News.

"Unseen. Unforgotten."

I spent seven happy years of my childhood -- in the 1970s -- in Alabama. In my imperfect memory, it seems that the races mixed little even then: I can't remember any black classmates at my private school, or black playmates in my neighborhood. It's worth reflecting on how far we've come, and how far we have yet to go, toward the promise of the day when everyone "will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

These photos are well worth your attention.

Presentations: Prose on slides = death.

2006-03-01T05:19:00.000-06:00

My mixed business and academic schedule exposes me to lots and lots of presentations, in all formats. Last week I was in the audience for an excellent, passionate, low-tech presentation from Bill Germano. Every week I hear graduate students delivering papers or leading discussions in seminars. Most weeks I sit through at least a couple of larger or smaller meetings at my office.

Let me emphasize "sit through" in that last sentence. Many of these work presentations are not nearly as good as they could be, which is another way of saying that they're much worse than they should be.

Folks, let me convey something very, very clearly for anyone who uses PowerPoint slides to convey anything:

Do not use prose on your PowerPoint slides.

The longest stretch of prose you could safely use on a PowerPoint slide is one sentence--and not a long sentence. You can put in pictures. You can put in easy-to-read diagrams. You can leave in blank slides for effect. You can put one or two words on a slide, or just a symbol, to reinforce your points. But you must not ladle in sentences of prose onto a single slide. Seriously.

Yesterday I sat through a group presentation that was predictably uneven, simply because it was given by a group of presenters. All of them were basically comfortable working with the technology. Some of them had better slides. Some of them had better physical and vocal carriage. That's to be expected.

But some of the slides we saw were simply pointless. The presenters missed easy opportunities to give us poor saps in the audience pictures that would have reinforced their words. Instead, they threw up blocks of text that fought with the words coming out of their mouths. It occurred to me, at some point, that these folks either don't know that blocks of prose on slides is presentation death, or else they think it doesn't apply to them, or else they don't care. If they don't care, shame on them, but I probably can't convince them. If they think the rules don't apply, I can reassure them that they do. But if they don't know--if you, dear reader, don't know--then I can use the media at my disposal to spread the Gospel of PowerPoint, viz., Slides with a lot of text on them undermine the purpose of a presentation, which is communication.

A decent rule of thumb for PowerPoint is "7-by-7": No more than seven lines of text on a slide, with no more than seven words per line.

A much better rule is "5-by-5", since five lines of no more than five words each forces you--in a good way--to boil down your thoughts and to keep any one slide from becoming too busy.

A much better rule is "5": Five words or less on a slide.

So that we don't leave this as an abstraction, how about a hypothetical example? Let's say you're giving a lecture to undergraduates on the final phase of World War 2 in the Pacific. You could put up a slide with this on it:

The Allies--led by the Americans, but with forces from Australia, New Zealand, and Britain--"island-hopped" from Australia and Hawaii all the way to Okinawa. From mid-1942 to mid-1945, they fought a series of bloody battles with the Japanese at Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Kwajalein, Saipan, Leyte Gulf, Iwo Jima, etc.
The Philippines was not necessarily en route to Japanese home islands, but Douglas MacArthur had vowed "I shall return" when his troops had to retreat from the islands early in the war. So the Allies retook the Philippines first, even though some strategists thought an eastern approach to Japan made more sense.
Once the Allies put themselves in bombing range of Japan, they started heavy bombing of Tokyo and other locations. Tokyo was firebombed around the clock; perhaps 200,000 died, mostly civilians.
Harry Truman decided to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. Bombs were dropped on Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945). This was done for several reasons:

--Kept U.S./Allies from making amphibious assault over hundreds of miles of open ocean.
--Brought a swift end to the war as a whole.
--Showed U.S. power to Soviets, who might have gotten ideas about expanding opportunistically in the region with Japan out of the way.

I say you could do this--if you want to put the class to sleep. Alternately, you could say the things above, with more detail and fuller explanations, while letting the slides hammer your point home visually.

Slide 1A: A map of the Pacific with big blue stars showing the locations of battles. Heading: "Island-hopping".
Slide 1B: An aerial photograph of any island battle in the Pacific. Heading: "Naval and land battles".
Slide 1C: The famous photo of GIs planting the flag on Iwo Jima. Heading: "Iwo Jima".

Slide 2A: Same map of the Pacific, but with arrows showing the eastern and western routes of island-hopping. Heading: "Philippines campaign".
Slide 2B: Famous photo of Douglas MacArthur wading ashore. Heading " 'I shall return.' "

Slide 3: Aerial photo of Tokyo under attack. Heading: "Tokyo firestorm".

Slide 4A: Harry Truman sitting at his desk, looking serious. Heading: "Truman and the Bomb".
Slide 4B: Any photo of scientists at Los Alamos. Heading: "Manhattan Project".
Slide 4C: Photo of a mushroom cloud. Heading: "Hiroshima & Nagasaki".

Click-click-click, you go through the slides as you're making your points. How much easier is it going to be for the sleep-deprived 19-year-olds in your audience to follow you?

This thirtysomething is also sleep-deprived and prone to distraction, so throw me a bone: Speak your prose and use your slides to hammer home your points visually.

Here endeth the lesson.

Notes on job-hunting: Fight cynicism.

2006-03-01T05:05:00.000-06:00

Covered in the first installment:
Rule #1. It’s not over until you win.
Rule #2. Get help.

Rule #3. Fight cynicism at every turn. The one thing above all others that will undermine your adherence to Rule #1 is the cynicism that often arises during a job search. If you’ve been in the working world for a while, you know the value you bring through your work. It doesn’t matter if you wait tables or edit books or build bookcases: you have skills that you have employed successfully in the past, you have a will to work, . . . and yet no one returns your calls. After enough repetition of this, you can become convinced that the deck is stacked against you.

This may be tougher the longer you’ve been working. You have more years of evidence that you’re worth something. You have more skills that have been useful in the past. If it’s been a long time since you were on the work market, you may have rusty job-hunting skills. And you may also face the bias--sometimes real, sometimes only perceived--that some employers hold against older workers.

Then again, it’s no picnic if you’re looking for your first job out of school, either. Maybe you haven’t looked for a “real” job before. You might not have built up good connections or an impressive resume yet. It’s easy to wonder at that point what the use was for all that fancy education.

But here’s the fact that you need to keep in mind, with as much clarity as any Stoic philosopher or Zen master: The market isn’t about you. It doesn’t care about you, and it doesn’t need to care about you. It is disembodied and incapable of caring. I’m not saying that this is a good or a bad thing in itself. Maybe in an ideal world, we would get to conduct our careers in a community that already knows us. We wouldn’t face the alienation of applications to previously unknown employers and of interviews with strangers. (This is an excellent reason to build your personal network before you need it, a topic I’ll explore in a later installment.) But that’s not the world we live in.

The good news is that the market can’t go out of its way to frustrate you, either. Maybe that sounds obvious, but exasperated job hunters often end up talking about the job-hunting experience as though the world is out to get them. It’s not out to get you; the process of landing a job can be hard, but the difficulty is not aimed at you personally. That might seem like a trivial observation , but it’s worth keeping in the back of your mind.

Keep this at the front of your mind: for as long as you’re looking for a job, your full-time job is to work like a farmer. Get up early, work all day. Sow and cultivate steadily until the harvest comes in. Your job isn’t over until the harvest comes in--that is, until you land the job you’re looking for.

Farmers often bring in extra hands to help them, especially at key times in the growing cycle. In the prior installment of this series, I said you should seek out those who can help you with the skills necessary to hunt for a job effectively. But you should also reach out to your friends and loved ones for help with the emotional tasks of keeping your spirits up, fighting cynicism, and returning day after day to the work of finding new work. You must be implacable in your efforts, and this will be much easier if you have a squad of cheerleaders rooting you on.

Rule #4. Improve something. This is the greatest antidote to cynicism. Recruiting cheerleaders will help you, as will acknowledging market reality. But you have to live with the doubts and fears inside you. My own experience tells me that when I work hard toward a clear purpose, I feel good inside. When I don’t work hard or toward a clear purpose, I don’t feel good. Success or failure in terms of outcome is not as important to my sense of well-being as the feeling of achievement that comes when I do my level best. Trying hard feels good.

Trying hard feels twice as good when the effort is aimed at bringing beneficial change into your life. When you can, this ought to mean making big changes to big things. I think that during a job hunt is the perfect time to re-tool your habits. Now would be a great time to lose weight, to take up running, or to give up TV and start learning a foreign language. You could learn a new academic subject. It would be the perfect time to shift the way you organize your time and your stuff. But even if you’re not ready, or somehow not able, to make big changes to big things, you can always make small changes to small things. Go over your resume and improve the format. Read a good blog or two about career-building strategies. Go through your e-mail archives and get in touch with two old friends you haven’t talked to in a while. Even better, send two e-mails before lunch and two after lunch. But no matter what, bring some form of beneficial change to some thing in your life.

Whatever you do, don’t sit on your butt waiting for the world to come to you. You’ve got to pick up the phone, fire up the e-mail, or walk out the door to engage the world on its own turf. You’ll feel better about yourself--and not just incidentally, you’ll make yourself much more likely to land a good job sooner.

Next time: Keeping up your energy level.

Addendum to "Prolificity: Stock your head"

2006-02-27T04:28:00.000-06:00

When I jotted down my thoughts on keeping problems in mind that you could think about in the odd moments of the day, I had forgotten this anecdote from the late mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota:

Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, "How did he do it? He must be a genius!"

I say "forgotten," because I stumbled across it yesterday while on a laptop cleaning frenzy. I had jotted down Rota's words a couple of years ago . . . and then neglected to keep them in my own mind during the interim.

The quotation is taken from Rota's talk, "Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught." (You can find a nice PDF version here.) In finding the links to it, I've discovered much more about Rota himself. He was a fascinating man and a great scholar, as this obituary from MIT makes clear. His work bridged mathematics, philosophy, writing, editing, and teaching. From what I can tell--especially given this page of remembrances and honors--Rota's life presents a fine model of what a scholar should aspire to be. Besides the speech already quoted, I can recommend Rota's lecture on "10 Lessons of an MIT Education." Even if your field is not mathematics (mine certainly isn't!), there is much of value there.

Book review: Jared Diamond's Collapse

2006-02-26T15:23:00.000-06:00

This review of mine originally appeared in the 2 January 2005 edition of the Austin American-Statesman.

Guns, Germs, Steel and Litter: From Easter Island to Greenland, Jared Diamond Looks at Civilization's Ecological Rise and Fall

Jared Diamond's "Collapse" is an impressive work of history. It is broad in its learning and vast in its scope. It is written in a fluent narrative voice that would be the envy of many novelists. And it might actually make a difference in how people think about the world. It is, in short, a book that no self-respecting historian would write.

For a while now, the trend among academic historians has been to produce microstudies marked by narrow focus and exhausting theoretical rigor. When historians do work on a larger canvas, they tend to portray big, obvious topics -- lives of presidents, major wars or famous incidents such as the Lewis and Clark expedition. The kind of innovative megastudies that Diamond pursues are disdained as too broad, too ambitious -- beyond the reach of any properly strait-laced specialist.

Thank goodness Diamond is not a historian by profession. He is a scientist and, even by the lights of science, a polymath -- an ornithologist, physiologist, evolutionary biologist and biogeographer. As such, he is not subject to the narrow dictates of the historical profession, which means he is free to write the sort of history that a lay audience -- an intelligent lay audience, mind you -- is interested in reading. This was demonstrated by the huge sales and Pulitzer honors won by his last book, "Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies." That subtitle almost seems like a slap at the historical establishment's allergy to master narratives, but it aptly reflects Diamond's devotion to what he calls "history's broadest pattern."

"Collapse," the latest result of Diamond's interest in the big picture, is a cautionary, but far from gloomy, tale that elevates the tone of environmental debate above fearmongering and ideological squabbles. Where "Guns, Germs and Steel" explored why certain societies managed to conquer large parts of the world, this one studies the reasons -- particularly the ecological reasons -- why certain societies have failed.

To elaborate his ideas, Diamond considers several collapsed civilizations, including those of Easter Island, the Anasazi, the Maya and the Greenland Norse. In each case study, Diamond draws on the work of specialists, from anthropologists to pollen scientists, to build a picture of why and how each civilization came to ruin. In the case of Easter Island, for example, he shows how islanders' religious beliefs, tribal allegiances, and use of the land -- all of which played a role in the creation of the island's famous stone statues -- reinforced one another in a vicious circle that led to deforestation, extinction of food species and, finally, civil war and population collapse. (Again tipping his hand as a nonhistorian historian, Diamond enlivens his case studies by frequently sharing his emotions. He opens one chapter with the admission that "No other site I have visited made such a ghostly impression on me as Rano Raraku, the quarry on Easter Island where its famous gigantic stone statues were carved.")

Diamond gives brief attention to societies that managed to solve problems of isolation, climate change, population pressure and social turmoil, such as Iceland, New Guinea and Japan, and then turns to several current societies that suffer from these same threats. For example, Diamond offers the case of Hispaniola, where the Dominican Republic shows signs of sustainable growth while Haiti suffers from an environment as poor as its economy. Haiti's past leaders enacted laws that drastically limited foreign ownership of property but never limited the population's use of trees for fuel. By contrast, longtime Dominican dictator Joaquin Balaguer actively sought foreign investment, outlawed logging, strengthened the country's robust system of national parks and subsidized gas stoves to reduce pressure on Dominican forests.

The last section of "Collapse" departs markedly from most current works of history. While many environmental historians write postscripts about how their studies relate to larger themes, these chapters are often long on generalities and short on policy specifics. Diamond, by contrast, devotes three long chapters to the lessons learned from his far-flung studies. He traces past societies' downward spirals to a small set of reasons: "failure to anticipate a problem, failure to perceive it once it has arisen, failure to attempt to solve it after it has been perceived, and failure to succeed in attempts to solve it."

To his credit, Diamond doesn't demonize the world of commerce. He's a passionate environmentalist, but also a passionate realist. "If environmentalists aren't willing to engage with big businesses, which are among the most powerful forces in the modern world, it won't be possible to solve the world's environmental problems," he writes. Given the sorry track record of many environmentalists on this score, the point bears repeating.

Diamond's final chapter lays out a dozen of the world's worst environmental threats -- destruction of natural habitat, chemical pollution, water shortages and so on. In the book's most practical turn, he lists and rebuts a slew of typical one-liner objections such as "Environmentalists are always crying wolf." One of his best rebuttals counters the claim that "Technology will solve our problems." After noting that "All of our current problems are unintended negative consequences of our existing technology," Diamond delivers this withering rhetorical question: "What makes you think that, as of January 1, 2006, for the first time in human history, technology will miraculously stop causing new unanticipated problems while it just solves the problems that it previously produced?"

Diamond's central thesis is one of hope: Despite major threats to the global environment, societies can act wisely. Many of our ancestors certainly got it right: Intensive but sustainable agriculture was practiced for centuries in the highland valleys of New Guinea; deforestation in Japan was reversed by a succession of Tokugawa shoguns hundreds of years ago. We moderns have it even easier; the advance of scientific knowledge should heighten our ability to anticipate, perceive and solve such problems.

Of course, the customs of certain professions make it less likely that the necessary information will get out to the public at large. Perhaps Diamond's next book will boast the subtitle "How Certain Academic Disciplines Fail or Succeed."

Considering grad school? Read these.

2006-02-26T11:31:00.000-06:00

Some books I have found useful:

American Historical Association, Becoming a Historian: A Survival Manual for Women and Men, 1991 ed. by Melanie Gustafson.
John A. Goldsmith, et al., The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career: A Portable Mentor for Scholars from Graduate School through Tenure, Chicago, 2001.
Mary Morris Heiberger and Julia Miller Vick, The Academic Job Search Handbook, Philadelphia, 1992.
Robert L. Peters, Getting What You Came for: The Smart Student's Guide to Earning a Master's or a Ph.D., 1997 rev. ed.
Cynthia Verba, Scholarly Pursuits: A Guide to Professional Development during the Graduate Years, available directly from Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

If you're only going to read one of these, make it the Peters book, which is pragmatic in the extreme. If you can read two, read Peters and Verba. But the most useful thing I've found is this free e-book from Prof. Phil Agre of UCLA:

Networking on the Network: A Guide to Professional Skills for Ph.D. Students

It's sad but true that graduate students--a slice of the population loaded with really smart people--are often very dumb when it comes to the nuts and bolts of putting together a successful career. Yes, it's scholarship, so in one sense it ought to be about ideas and hard work and new discoveries. But it's also an industry, so common-sense careerism will always have a place--a legitimate place. Grad students, no matter how brilliant, ignore this advice at their peril.

Heist Pictures: From my lips to the Guardian's ear.

2006-02-26T06:45:00.000-06:00

What was I just saying about heist pictures? This morning I find this tidbit on the Guardian Unlimited blog:

Everyone loves a good heist

[...] There has always been an ambivalent attitude towards particularly daring robberies, whether carried out by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or our own Great Train Robbers, or created on film in Oceans Eleven. While people hate muggers who pull knives on their victims and thieves who break into the homes of the elderly, carrying out a spectacular multi-million pound robbery will win the grudging admiration of the nation. The muscle or menace involved in pulling off the job will be cheerfully overlooked.

Why is this?

However hard banks and businesses try to persuade us that such robberies are not victimless crimes, there is a feeling that if the money is taken from the big boys - banks, security companies, Mayfair jewellers - then no one has been too badly damaged by it. [...]

Well said. In talking about the forthcoming "Inside Man," Spike Lee stressed that it was a thinking person's thriller, with no shooting. However, the trailer makes it look far more menacing than "Oceans Eleven" or "The Great Train Robbery."

Commonplace: Emerson

2006-02-26T06:43:00.000-06:00

"Look sharply after your thoughts. They come unlooked for like a bird seen on your trees, and if you turn to your usual task, disappear, and you shall never find that perception again. Never, I say, but for years perhaps, and I know not what events and worlds may lie between you and its return."
--Emerson

Good management is everywhere.

2006-02-26T06:14:00.000-06:00

You can find good and bad examples of management in any context. Clearing out some files, I came across this long ESPN profile of Leo Mazzone--by acclamation the greatest baseball pitching coach of this era. You don't have to like (or even understand) baseball to appreciate the power of his techniques.

Future Hall-of-Fame pitcher Greg Maddux:

[In training,] There are no parachutes on your back, no cones to run around, no 10 different meetings talking about something that doesn't concern you. All the other stuff, you don't partake in. So you spend less time doing nothing, and you spend all your time doing what it is you have to do to get better on the mound.

Mazzone in reply:

You don't think pitchers appreciate that? Running all these drills and doing all this stuff before you get on the mound is not very bright. Your first priority is to get on the mound and practice your craft, without being fatigued from drills that are not going to mean near as much as you trying to make pitches.

This is another way of saying "First things first, second things not at all"--an apothegm that's been taped to my computer monitor for years. Mazzone has always kept his players in shape, but primarily by having them throw a lot. Radical concept, no?

One more thing in the first-things-firt vein, this one more baseball-specific. Here's a quote from big-league pitcher Kent Mercker, who worked under Mazzone for six years:

I think there is an understanding, whatever team you are on, whoever your pitching coach is, whoever is hitting, if you can go knee-high down and away on the corner, you are going to be successful. I don't think that's a mystery, but I think it's the fact that he stresses, he harps on it, he doesn't let you forget that. There is not a 10-minute period that goes by in a day where he doesn't say that to somebody.

The heading for that part of the article is "Down and away, got it? Down and away, got it?" Mazzone is willing to be repetitive to implant this fundamental principle into the minds of his charges. His mantra is the converse of a famous observation made by all-time-great hitter Ted Williams in his book The Science of Hitting. Williams said that "baseball history is made on the inner half of the plate"--that is, the part of the strike zone nearer the hitter. Williams waited for the ball inside so he could drive it harder, and thereby make baseball history with big hits. Mazzone consistently--incessantly--coaches his pitchers not to give those pitches to hitters.

If you like baseball, read the article. It's the perfect thing for a Sunday morning during Spring Training, especially if you like your management lessons with a spoonful of honey.

Live every day as though it were your last.

2006-02-25T21:16:00.000-06:00

This post from Seth Godin set me thinking . . . what if we lived every moment as though it might be our last? What if we engaged every challenge as though our lives depended on it?

My great-grandmother died early this morning in Georgia. She was old and full of years--she would have been 98 in two more weeks. She was a farm wife with a third-grade education, a devout Christian, mother of four, and one of the world's great cooks. Best I can tell, she watched the news every day for all the decades that she owned a television, and she had opinions about how the nation and the world was being run. She loved everybody, and everybody loved her back. We'll miss you, Ma Baines.

Not all of us will be so lucky.

Let me repeat something I quoted earlier: "Whatever you do, just make sure you throw every pitch with conviction." It's a good test: If you can do it with conviction, it's worth doing. If you can do it knowing that you're a terminal case, do it. We're going to be dead a long time; if you can't do whatever it is with a straight face while holding that thought in mind, then don't do it.

Notes on job-hunting: It’s not over until you win.

2006-02-25T07:19:00.001-06:00

[This is part one in a series. Part two is here.]

Several friends of mine are looking for work these days. Some are without a job, some are leaving jobs, some are in jobs they hate. All have the same objective: something better than this. If this sounds familiar to you, keep reading.

The common thread among most of these job-seekers is that they don’t have a bone in their body oriented toward sales. They’re writers, artists, thinkers--damn smart ones, too--but they are not self-promoters, or at least not natural self-promoters. One of the toughest things about the process of finding a new job is that it asks people like this to turn into super-sellers for as long as it takes to land something new. In and of itself, this stinks. It’s one of those tough realities of life that you just have to face and surmount as serenely as you can. The good news, though, is that you’re selling something great: you!

Starting with this post, I’m going to offer some guidelines about how to find better work. These tips are not hypothetical. I have used them, and they work. In fact, they are working for me now--even though I have no plans to leave my company--because they are helping me redefine my working role. I hope they are helpful to you. Please share your own best career-improvement tips in the comments section.

Rule #1. It’s not over until you win. This is the cardinal rule, the unbreakable rule for successful career change. Finding a new job or reaching a level of enduring satisfaction in your career is not something you snap your fingers to achieve. The biggest mistake that I’ve made in my own job searches, and by far the biggest mistake that I’ve seen others make, is to form in advance some sort of mental picture about a “reasonable” amount of time and effort to put into the search. Abandon that illusion! There is no “reasonable” amount of time. If you have to temp for six months while you find or create the right position, so be it. If it’s year, it’s a year. It all depends on who you are, where you are in your career, and what you’re trying to do now.

Note that seemingly long delays in finding the right job may have nothing to do with you. The job market is notorious for the friction it contains. Information doesn’t flow freely. Employers seeking new workers and workers seeking new employers often aren’t able to find each other. There might be a great job waiting for you in a great department at a great company . . . except that the company’s H.R. department can’t get its act together. The list could go on, but my point is this: Don’t beat yourself up over the market or the opportunities that fail to materialize for you. Don’t indulge your fantasies of how the market should work. Just deal with it as it is, frictions and all.

So how do you push ahead to winning? Above all, define your outcomes in advance: Are you just looking to pay the rent for now? Do you want a great job that pays at least $N per year? Do you seek to exercise benevolent global hegemony? Or maybe you just want an honorable, low-stress, decent day job so you can write poetry evenings and weekends? Any one of these goals is fine. In fact, you ought to have more than one: the immediate need to fill now (sanity, rent money), a bigger goal for a year from now ($N per year, maybe a promotion), and a long-term ideal for where you’re headed in the future (making a living writing poetry, becoming a partner in your firm, retiring at age 50). But whatever you do, write down your goals in advance of your job search. If you don’t know what winning looks like, you can’t figure out what to do to get there.

Now comes the hard part: Acknowledge the reality that your efforts must be open-ended until you reach your goal. It’s not a matter of sending out a hundred resumes (not a great strategy anyway, according to many experts) and waiting. It’s not a matter of looking really hard for a week and then waiting. It’s not a matter of contacting ten friends and then waiting. There is no waiting. You work full-time until you achieve your goal--at which point, you’ll switch over to working full-time at your new job. The point is that the amount of your work doesn’t change just because you don’t have an employer right now: you keep putting in full days. In fact, you may have to work overtime if you’re hunting for a new job at the same time that you’re working at an old one. Don’t complain to me about it: I’m just describing the weather of the working world.

This is going to mean more work than you want to do. It's going to mean more grief than you think is reasonable to sustain. It could mean dozens or scores or hundreds of e-mails, resumes, and so on that don't go anywhere. Get Zen with it: it's just so. But you don't have to do it alone! Because you're going to . . .

Rule #2. Get help. You need skillz, baby. Many people stumble through job-hunting because they think they know what’s involved with it: you send out resumes, you fill out applications, you wait for a call. But this conventional wisdom for job hunting is actually no wisdom at all. In fact, the traditional way of job-hunting is a pretty lousy way to land a job you want.

Fortunately, what with this new “Internet” thing to go along with the old “public library” thing, help is close at hand. A great place to start is David Lorenzo’s Career Intensity blog, which is connected to his forthcoming book of the same title. Even though I’m not looking for a job, I check it out every day for great tips on how to create better situations for myself in the working world. Even if you don’t share the level of emotional “intensity” Lorenzo is talking about, you can benefit from his posts, which blend his own rich experience with a lot of sound common sense. Best of all, he’s full of energy and often posts several times per day.

Lorenzo and I are both regular readers of Keith Ferrazzi, the go-to guy for business networking. Ferrazzi (whom I’ve written about before) hates the kind of backslapping that gives “networking” a bad name; he’s all about building real human relationships in a business context. His blog and book are well worth your time.

Finally, there’s a good reason What Color is Your Parachute? has sold so many copies: it works. Dick Bolles offers gentle advice--sometimes abstract, sometimes quite specific--for those seeking change in their careers. You won’t get the intensity or drive embodied in Lorenzo’s or Ferrazzi’s work, but you will find much of value on his site.

In the next installment of this series, I’ll address cynicism--the biggest enemy of any effective job search.

Heist Pictures: Inside Man.

2006-02-24T15:41:00.000-06:00

Folks, I need some help. Prompted by the imminent arrival of the Spike Lee / Denzel Washington / Clive Owen / Jodie Foster project "Inside Man," I'm working on an essay about heist pictures generally.

How you can help? Please answer these questions for me:
--Just because I use the term doesn't mean it's ubiquitous, so . . . When I say "heist picture," do you know what I mean right away, or do you need some definition?
--What's your favorite heist picture? Why?
--Why do you like heist pictures? Or, if you don't, why not?

As for "Inside Man": I saw the trailer when I went to see Jackson's "King Kong." It caught my attention instantly with the closeup headshot of Owen talking. It looks well-plotted and tense. It debuts in the middle of March.

The official "Inside Man" site, with links to the trailer and to podcasts from Spike Lee.
"Inside Man" IMDB entry.

Thank you for your help.

Very much worth your time: William Germano

2006-02-24T07:11:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I had the good fortune to attend a seminar given by William Germano, the author of Getting It Published and From Dissertation to Book. Germano has been editing scholarly books for more than 25 years, and has much to say about the business, the philosophy, and the psychology of academic publishing. His presentation was low-tech but highly personal and humane.

Germano was speaking to an audience of Ph.D. students drawn from across the disciplines. He took great pains to spell out for us the differences between doctoral dissertations and publishable book manuscripts--two beasts very often confused for one another by writers of the former. Many dissertations, Germano said, are actually “big book reports,” written for an audience of five (the dissertation committee) and afflicted with the “aphonia”--the “willed voicelessness”--of the academy. Books, meanwhile, must be narratives with a voice that tell a story around a particular “through-line”--a central thread that ties together all the parts into a whole.

In the past I’ve read Getting It Published and enjoyed Germano’s essays for the Chronicle of Higher Education. It was a pleasure to find out that he is so thoughtful, funny, and engaging in person. If you’re in the business of writing for scholars, do yourself a favor by reading Germano’s books, and by all means take the opportunity to hear him speak if you can.

Things I love: Pepys's diary

2006-02-24T06:47:00.000-06:00

One of my favorite things to read is the diary of Samuel Pepys. (His name, by the way, is pronounced “peeps”.) For most of the 1660s, Pepys recorded his life in minute and bracingly honest detail. Anyone who could write as directly as he did would make for an entertaining read, but Pepys also had the advantage of living a very interesting life: during the time he kept the diary, he was swiftly climbing the career ladder as an administrator for the Royal Navy. As such, he had access to many high officials--especially his patron, Lord Sandwich--and was privy to the goings-on of the royal court and the diplomatic corps. The 1660s, you’ll recall, was a time of great drama in London: the diary begins during the confusion of the Restoration, and later covers the Plague and the Great Fire. We are fortunate that an observer so acute as Pepys recorded his thoughts during this period.

Reading day by day through Pepys’s diary creates the illusion of living in another time. In its pages we confront the essential continuity of human experience across the centuries: joy, sorrow, confusion, rivalry, glee, love, death. Yet we also come to understand some of the strangeness that makes the past into “another country.”

One example of this juxtaposition comes in the entry for 6 February 1663, when Pepys hired a coachman to carry him home:

So home, and being called by a coachman who had a fare in him, he carried me beyond the Old Exchange, and there set down his fare, who would not pay him what was his due, because he carried a stranger with him, and so after wrangling he was fain to be content with 6d., and being vexed the coachman would not carry me home a great while, but set me down there for the other 6d., but with fair words he was willing to it, and so I came home and to my office, setting business in order, and so to supper and to bed, my mind being in disorder as to the greatness of this day’s business that I have done, but yet glad that my trouble therein is like to be over.

In reading this, we touch on the life of an anonymous coachman of seventeenth-century London--someone who would have been lost to posterity had not Pepys jotted down his notation. At the same time, we come to know Pepys a little better. We grasp immediately the ambivalence he feels: his mind was in disorder over the day's business (for which you'll have to read the whole entry), yet he was also glad to have it behind him.

Thinking of Pepys and the coachman reminds me of a comment I once read--from Harold Bloom, I think-- about the reader’s desire to experience as much of life as possible. Bloom said that he reads so much because he is hungry to experience many human lives within the span of his own. The diary of Pepys allows us to do this in fine style.

Pepys has been popular reading since his diaries were discovered in the nineteenth century. We today are doubly fortunate to have two wonderful ways to read it. The University of California Press hardcover edition is a beautiful example of the bookmaker’s craft. If you love books that are well-wrought physical objects, you will love these books: the typeface, the proportions of each volume and the words on the page, the system of annotations--all are delightful. Buying the whole diary would run to several hundred dollars, but any good university library will have a set.

Thanks to the tireless labors of Phil Gyford, we can also enjoy the diary (albeit in an earlier, less-perfect edition than the California one) online. Since it is set up in blog style, you can sip from the diary instead of trying to gulp it, and you can leave comments or annotations of your own.

Why not inject a tidbit of history into your daily reading diet? It's the only blog you'll find that was written in the seventeenth century!

Op-ed: Supplies for GIs.

2006-02-24T06:41:00.000-06:00

This piece originally appeared on the Commentary page of the Austin American-Statesman on 8 June 2005.

Our Troops Should Not Be Lacking Clean Socks

Last weekend, my wife and I spent $70 for supplies, mostly medicine-cabinet basics, to send to U.S. troops in Iraq.

Like many opponents of President Bush's Iraq policy, I have attacked the policy while crowing about my support for the troops. Our shopping expedition was a small way for me to put my money where my mouth is.

The supplies are headed to Iraq through the efforts of a charity organization called Any Soldier, which was started by an Army sergeant who has served in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. Through its Web site (www.anysoldier.com), donors select a contact name from among thousands of male and female service members. Donors send packages directly to these contacts, who then distribute the supplies among the members of their units.

My office started a collection drive for Any Soldier because it is a simple, well-organized effort to put a care package, or even just a personal letter, into the hands of someone in uniform who might not get one otherwise.

The Any Soldier site expresses the same well-earned pride I have encountered again and again from the members of our military. Two of my brothers-in-law have been on active duty since 9/11, one in the Coast Guard and one in the Marines.

Their willingness to serve reminds me of what a boon this country has in its fighting forces. But the confusion my relatives faced over stop-loss orders and exit dates reminds me of the human costs of the administration's confused policies. Sending a care package may be a simplistic way to address those costs, but at least it's something.

As for what to send, I focused on a few of the basic hygiene items on the list supplied by Any Soldier: deodorant, toothpaste, soap, acetaminophen, razors and antiseptic ointment. I also threw in a couple of packages of crew socks, which I was surprised to see listed. The one "luxury" item I included was reading material -- a few paperback novels from a used bookstore and some recent back issues of National Geographic and Sports Illustrated.

When my wife first read the Any Soldier shopping list, she teared up. My own reaction was anger. The Web site downplays the suggestion that the military is shorting its troops in any way, pointing out that most office workers do not expect employers to buy them a briefcase, a day planner and so on.

Baloney, I say. I can quit my job if I want, and anyway I don't work there 24 hours per day for a year at a time. Mind you, by no means do I expect Uncle Sam to supply our troops with a lending library or a cache of gummy bears, but since we're spending a billion dollars a month in Iraq, you would think that we could keep the troops in Tylenol and fresh socks.

But maybe not.

Now I am confronted with the spectacle of an office charity drive like we hold for poor families at Christmas, except that we're extending our charity to the front-line troops of the richest military in the world. Those service members deserve the support of citizens everywhere, but they also deserve better support from an administration that seems unwilling to count human costs in its grand strategic formula.

Too much of our talk about Iraq -- pro and con -- is cheap. For two years, I have sworn up and down that I support our troops but oppose their deployment in Iraq, but this shopping trip was the first time I put my sentiments into action. And plenty of Bush supporters succumb to the easy jingoism of a yellow-ribbon bumper sticker, thinking that "God Bless America" somehow answers the administration's gross failures in executing its Iraq policy.

We need action. Our troops will appreciate the cases and cases of supplies the folks in my office are sending over, but they deserve better support from the top. Sending enough troops to do the job in Iraq would be a start. I won't even insist that Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld fess up that they have been wrong for two years in their claims that we have adequate forces there.

Given this White House's track record, that simple, wise change of policy looks to be a long time coming. So I suggest you head to the store and pick up a few items that any soldier can use right away.

Jon Stewart's got skillz.

2006-02-23T07:01:00.000-06:00

Jon Stewart is hosting this year's Academy Awards. This interesting article from the L.A. Times looks back over some of the highs and lows of former emcees.

Stewart should be up to it. If he can give pause in debate to Christopher Hitchens (second entry on page), he can handle the Oscars.

Commonplace: Balzac

2006-02-23T06:12:00.000-06:00

"To pass from conception to execution, to produce, to bring the idea to birth, to raise the child laboriously from infancy, to put it nightly to sleep surfeited, to kiss it in the mornings with the hungry heart of a mother, to clean it, to clothe it fifty times over in new garments which it tears and casts away, and yet not revolt against the trials of this agitated life--this unwearying maternal love, this habit of creation--this is execution and its toils."
--Balzac

Prolificity: Turn it off.

2006-02-23T06:04:00.000-06:00

Want to get more written? Here’s a simple step to take: Disconnect yourself from the Internet.

Radical stuff, I know. I work in front of a computer all day, so I have plenty of time to poke around in the Realm of Mystery and Wonder that is the online world. But it gets to be such a habit--interrupting what I'm doing to look something up, to check e-mail, etc.--that I do it all the time. Maybe you’re the same? Yes?

My best writing time is early in the morning, when my kids are still asleep. Me, my thoughts, and my cup of coffee, we all commune at my kitchen table, and when things are going right, the words flow quite well. But for things to go right, I have to unplug from the Realm of Mystery and Wonder. Sure, I always have some fact to check or detail to find online, but I can jot down my question on a piece of scratch paper (handy stuff, that) and then look it up after my sacred writing time is over. Hitting Wikipedia for a name or a date is a great thing to do while my kids are chomping down breakfast across from me. That setting is not the likeliest one for deep thinking.

For a while I was very good about unhooking myself from the Realm during my writing time. My wireless router is next to my wife’s desk in our bedroom; it’s the simplest thing in the world to unplug it at night before I go to bed or first thing in the morning. After that, I could go back in to hook it up before my wife wakes up, but one doesn’t want to run the risk of awaking the peacefully sleeping spouse--or at least, this particular spouse--before the appointed time.

Lately, though, I have profaned the sacred temple of my writing time. Why? Laziness of mind, probably. Fear of what I might write, maybe? I’m not sure I have a good answer for that.

Anyway, I’m thinking about this right now because it’s 6 a.m. and I’ve spent a frustrating time this morning trying to download a piece of software, trying to check my blog-traffic stats (thanks for the business, folks!), and wondering why Gmail has been loading so slowly the past couple of mornings. In other words, I’ve been farting around with things online that in theory should take “just a minute” but in fact have eaten through much of my holy two-hour block of time. Meanwhile, I have no less than five partially-done essays burning a hole in my pocket; I was sure I was going to get through one of them and post it here this morning. But instead I entered the Realm, I didn’t even get to enjoy the Mystery and Wonder part of it, and I didn't finish that essay. So to recover some value from my misdirected time, I wrote this instead, as a reminder to you and to me: The Realm is a wonderful place to visit, but not when it keeps you from your real work.

Tomorrow morning, the router stays off.

Things I love: Good Morning Silicon Valley

2006-02-22T14:18:00.000-06:00

So often we take a wonderful thing in life for granted, enjoying it without a care until it comes to our attention that not everyone knows about the wonderful thing.

It occurs to me that some of you, my gentle readers, won't be familiar with Good Morning Silicon Valley, the greatest newsletter I've ever experienced. Because of my job covering developments in high-tech business, I've been reading it for years; at this point, though, I read it even without regard to my day job. GMSV is consistently among my most enjoyable routines.

Read it, get into it, come to love its humor as I do. Then drop John Paczkowski a line and tell him that Tim from Hoover's in Austin sent you. Send him my compliments.

My grand unifying theory of business.

2006-02-22T14:11:00.000-06:00

There is a place in every subject for complexity. As a graduate student, I'm reminded of this all the time. It might seem a bit silly that someone really smart would spend years and years writing a monograph on, say, a California beef empire, until someone does it brilliantly or until you, as a scholar, need to know more on that particular subject for your own work.

This is as true of business writing as of anything else. There are blockbuster works that redefine the way a whole generation thinks about some aspect of commerce. There are the fountains that gush forth a constant stream of provocative new thinking on different aspects of commerce. And then there's . . . the rest, much of which doesn't deserve the paper it's printed on.

But here, in summary form, is what I've learned about business so far, at least in terms of how any enterprise, from a shoe-repair shop to General Electric, interacts with customers:

There are Bad Things in the world. Dragons. Beasties. Hangnails. Missed flights. Whatever in the world it is that your (potential) customers fear. The savvy business will figure out how to keep these Bad Things far away from the customer. Just one example for now: Maybe your customer's Bad Thing is even a millisecond of server downtime, in which case your customer needs a bunch of weird obsessives who will monitor and ensure server uptime as though the fate of civilization hinged upon it . . . in which case, you are Rackspace. Rackspace offers its customers, more or less, a legion of ninjas sworn by horrible oaths to oppose server downtime at all costs, everywhere, forever.

If you want to succeed in business, figure out who your customers are, what their Bad Things are, and how you're going to keep those Bad Things beyond their far border. Figure out how you can demonstrate the prowess of your employee/application/product, the gigantic, magical, immortal Paladin with the flaming sword who will guard that border forever, keeping those Bad Things at bay.

And then there are Good Things. Wealth. Health. Peace of mind. Cool stuff that makes people's lives easier. Smart companies will figure out how to deliver these things, on a plate, at the very moment when a customer wants them, and in exactly the way that the customer wants them. The plate itself may be beautiful, or historically significant, or sentient, or just really, really cool. The Good Thing and its delivery mechanism will, in fact, be so sweet that it becomes easier to use them than not to use them. Your customer might just be able to imagine living without them . . . but why would they want to?

Thus are thunderlizard customers cultivated. The rest is details.

That's the fruit of my experience, so far.

Wanna get smarter?

2006-02-22T08:09:00.000-06:00

Another gem from Kathy Sierra: Working in an interesting environment stimulates neurogenesis.

After reading Kathy's post, I rearranged all the tchotchkes in my work cubicle. It was time for my monthly purge of useless paper files anyway, so I allowed myself a little housekeeping tizzy, pulled old toys out of drawers, rearranged the pictures of my kids, and so on. Now that I think of it, I did basically the same thing last week when I completely renovated the file structure on my laptop--clean up, dejunk, renovate your head. As I've mentioned before, I use little things like my screensaver to keep my brain stocked with images and ideas.

This is the same idea as an experienced runner changing routes every so often, to put more emphasis on speed, or distance, or hills. Jack LaLanne has said that he changes up his whole workout every two weeks. Given the discussion in Sierra's post, this might help to account not only for LaLanne's physical vigor, but also his mental sharpness so far into his advanced age.

What do you do to keep your mind sharp?

How to blow a chunk of your day.

2006-02-21T22:12:00.000-06:00

After posting all kinds of things on how to make the most of your time and be all super-productive, I thought I'd give you something you could use to really, really just waste time:

Blueprint

Perhaps even more addictive is this one, with which my mother has developed a love/hate relationship

Planarity

And, just for fun, here's one more -- a game with a meditative quality:

Gridgame

My gifts to you: use them wisely . . .

Yushchenko's poisoning.

2006-02-21T21:55:00.000-06:00

A year later, the dioxin poisoning of then-candidate, now-president of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko remains bizarre. This article from Seed sheds only a bit more light on the subject, since the source of the poison remains unknown.

The Poisoning of Ukraine's President

Commonplace: Francis Bacon

2006-02-20T12:15:00.000-06:00

"A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds."
--Francis Bacon

Clueless, but in a good way.

2006-02-20T05:38:00.000-06:00

A great post from Kathy Sierra on ignoring the artificial constraints around us.

The Clueless Manifesto.

Often, by the time you learn you can't do it, your response might be "Oops! You mean this thing I just did?"

All of the most frustrated people I know are really, really certain about how the deck is stacked against them, or how their efforts will come to naught. Me, I'd rather be "clueless," happy, and creative.

If you've got a fever . . .

2006-02-19T13:21:00.000-06:00

. . . and the only prescription is more prose from yours truly, may I suggest my contributor's index page at the Austin Chronicle? Although it's been a couple of years since I've done anything for them, the Chronicle was a great place for me to break into newsprint. Good times.

Op-ed: TV in public places.

2006-02-19T13:08:00.000-06:00

This little piece appeared in the Commentary section of the Austin American-Statesman on July 5, 2004:

TV in Public Places: Can We at Least Lower the Volume?

May I make a modest proposal? Here it is: If you're in charge of a television that broadcasts in a public space, turn it off -- or at least turn it down.

I suggest this because last week I spent a couple of hours subjected to a noisy television in a doctor's waiting room. There was a newspaper on the coffee table, and a few magazines were scattered around, but the dominant force in the room was the television. Judging from the reactions of the patrons in my corner of the room, the programs being shown were not of wide interest.

The practice where I waited performs outpatient procedures that require an hour or two, and all patients must have "a responsible adult driver" standing by to ferry them home. The woman sitting next to me, there in our corner farthest from the TV, made good headway into the novel she brought. Lucky her. My wife would have brought her knitting and passed the time enjoyably.

I myself brought a magazine and a book, but I'm one of those people who can't read with a television on, especially a loud one. I would have asked to lower the volume, but a couple of folks sitting near it seemed to be watching. I've noticed, also, that once a TV is up and blaring, asking to turn it down or change the channel becomes awkward. It is as though the TV projects an aura of reversed etiquette: Even though it is the thing making the disturbance, the burden is placed on you to find a polite way to minimize it. Arguing that the volume disturbs your reading? It seems unlikely.

This reminds me to think of a way to raise this issue with my children's dentist. His waiting room is littered with interesting toys and books, but the TV is always on at full volume, so of course that's what draws the kids' attention. Kids have better things to do with their rapidly forming brains. Let them do those things -- play, read, look at picture books, imagine -- rather than plant them in front of the box that does the imagining for them.

Or that keeps them from eating their lunch. Recently we took a car trip to Dallas to visit my parents. On the way we stopped to eat at a Dairy Queen. Inside, someone had parked a television on the first booth by the door -- aimed so that the staff could see it, I guess. "The Simpsons" were on at high volume. I have spent many hours enjoying "The Simpsons," but it's not an appropriate show for my little ones. Instead of a welcome break from the hours on the highway, lunchtime was a struggle. We were happy to get back to the quiet of the car.

The intrusion of television is something like the intrusion of smoking. TV doesn't tear down your health like smoking does, but the noise pollution from the one reminds me of the air pollution from the other. Thoughtful smokers don't light up in nonsmokers' houses or cars; they are courteous enough to step into the yard or to wait until the trip is over.

Why don't we treat televisions the same way? If you go to a sports bar, of course you expect some smoke, and of course the TV will be turned up loud. It's a sports bar. But in a doctor's waiting room? The last thing I want is some new ordinance forbidding it, but I would like common courtesy to take over, so that we defer to non-TV watchers as we defer to nonsmokers.

After sitting for a while, I realized that the waiting-room TV was tuned to the E! network. A little homework reveals that the local cable package including E! costs about $46 per month, roughly $550 a year. I came up with a list of popular magazines the medical practice could subscribe to for the same amount. Ready? AARP The Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Better Homes & Gardens, Cosmopolitan, Entertainment Weekly, ESPN The Magazine, Field & Stream, Forbes, Fortune, Golf Digest, Good Housekeeping, Money, National Geographic, Newsweek, Parents, People, Prevention, Reader's Digest, Runner's World, Scientific American, Shape, Smithsonian, Southern Living, Sports Illustrated and Time. Those should offer plenty of diversion for the practice's patrons.

One popular weekly is notably missing from my list. If it puts away the television, the doctors' practice won't need the No. 3 magazine in the country -- TV Guide.

Housekeeping: Please help me take over the world.

2006-02-19T10:47:00.000-06:00

You may notice, gentle readers, that I have finally installed a hits counter in the sidebar to the right. I neglected to do this in my first few weeks of blogging, figuring it would be technically involved. In the event, it took one visit to StatCounter and a mere ten minutes of my time--and I work slowly with HTML.

So, as I write this, I can see seven--count 'em, seven--unique visitors have graced TWOB with their presence in the past 26 hours or so. Talkin' 'bout some site traffic, is all I'm sayin'.

When I installed the counter, I had a choice of how many digits to include. The default is eight, so I stuck with that. This means I'm all set until I hit my hundred-millionth site visitor.

Well, I don't expect you to go round up a hundred million, or even one million, unique visitors for me. But I can see from my StatCounter chart thingy that I've had 38 page views (including one since I started this post!) since yesterday. A quick visit to Instapundit reveals that it has received, oh 153-million-odd page views. (It got an extra 450 in the time it took me to type this paragraph.) Anything you can do to help me along in that direction would be appreciated.

What's useful or interesting to you about this blog? Would you be willing to tell two friends about it? If so, please do! If not, please tell me why!

Thank you, friends known and unknown. Enjoy your reading.

1/168

2006-02-19T10:43:00.000-06:00

"I'm ridiculously overbooked." This is what I tell people when they ask me if I'm "busy". I stopped using the word "busy" a while back after talking it over with a friend. You ask someone how they're doing. "Oh, I'm soooo busy," they tell you--often with a tone of voice that implies that the world has visited this condition upon them without their say-so. It's a lie I've told myself many times: "If I weren't so busy, THEN I could . . ." Fill in the blank your own way: ". . . follow my dreams," ". . . write that play," ". . . get a social life," ". . . go to church," or whatever it is.

As I said, it's a lie. In the context of a free country and a free job market, we make most of our own conditions. What we have may not be great. We do face limiting conditions. If you have six kids and no high school diploma, then yes, you'll probably stay pretty busy just trying to make ends meet. But for most of us? No way. You are where you've put yourself. I preach this to you not because I've mastered it, but because it's a message I need to hear every day.

This effort to confront reality as it is explains the title of this post: We have 168 hours in the week, and we're always living in one of them.

Where were you a week ago? What did you have in mind then for the week to come? What has happened in your world since then? How much control did you try to exercise over it?

In an earlier post I talked about coming up with a "civilizational BHAG" (big, hairy audacious goal). Despite my brave talk, I still haven't found one--and in fact I've shirked looking. But some of the pieces of my week are working better. I'm trying to keep it in mind that this hour--the one in which I'm typing this message and looking ahead to the book review I have to write and the stack of papers I have to grade today--this is as weighty a fraction of my week as anything else, noble or petty.

There are no minor hours. They all count.

What are you doing to nudge civilization in a better direction? Or if not civilization, your own life?

Prolificity: Stock your head.

2006-02-18T11:26:00.000-06:00

[Note the later addendum to this piece.]

Like most people, I am confronted with enforced periods of physical idleness--in the car, in meetings, or what have you. Lately I have made a concerted effort to use this time to improve my writing. How? Besides reinforcing my long-time habit of always having something to take notes in, I have stocked my head in advance with particular subjects for reflection, namely, the subjects I about which I am currently composing essays, articles, and stories.

I think it was Anthony Trollope who talked about how much he interacted with the characters of his novels during the odd moments of his day. When he had the chance to daydream, he did not do it randomly: he thought about the novel he was writing. Sustained attention to the characters in his current book led to a deep understanding of them, so that when he sat down to write in his famous early-morning sessions, he knew intimately the people he was writing about.

In a fictional world, you make up the settings, the scenarios, and the actors. But this process need not all be programmatic. In fact, if you plan it out too strenuously, you run the risk of making it all too tidy, or too pat for the purposes of your story. At least some of your cogitating time ought to be given over to open-ended reflection, during which you can, as Stephen King describes, unearth the pre-existing parts of your story that are waiting for you to find them.

The same holds true, though, for nonfiction. You don't make up the details, but you figure out how to tell the story, what the important parts of it are, what comes first and what comes next, how to characterize particular individuals and events, and on and on. There are hundreds of little decisions to make even for a short magazine feature; you can make some of them while you're sitting through the most boring part of your weekly staff meeting--but only if you've stocked your head with your key facts and problems ahead of time.

As a psychological or spiritual discipline, I am trying to inculcate the notion that there is no wasted time. I am so overbooked these days, I have the tendency to think that if I'm not getting something done right-now-this-instant, I am wasting time. But it need not be so. I am living my life. I am breathing in and out, experiencing the world, and I can spare the foresight and effort to do it a little better each day.

Practically speaking, this also means that you can spend more than just one hour per day or whatever on your writing--even if you're as overbooked professionally as I am. This helps to explain how Trollope got so much done: He had the remarkable discipline to get up and write every single morning. He had the wiring to write well on his first draft, and to press ahead with his story no matter what. But he also multiplied his time by using odd moments throughout his days to converse with the characters and the scenes of his mythical Barsetshire.

My marching orders for myself: Lay out your course of work. Then stock your head with the provisions to accomplish that work at all hours of the day and night, regardless of circumstances.

Presentations: Control your environment.

2006-02-18T07:59:00.000-06:00

My subject line here could be boiled down to one word: Prepare.

When you give a presentation, take responsibility for everything in your audience's environment. Are the lights right? Can people see the screen clearly? Are your handouts legible? Is the room freezing, or broiling? Can you hear too much racket from the meeting room/corridor/kitchen next door? Can you be heard by your listeners?

I'm thinking about all of this because of a two-hour seminar I sat through a couple of days ago. I hadn't had enough sleep the night before (all too common for me) and I had been fighting off a headache all day (very uncommon for me). The seminar was scheduled from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. (mistake #1) and when I got into the room the environment was anything but friendly to a person fighting off a headache. The meeting room in question is the largest one in my company--the one where we hold our all-hands meetings. It has many banks of lights that can operate independently to provide you with whatever pattern of lighting you need. But in this case, only the area lights were on, and they had been dimmed partway. This created three problems:
1. The entire room was lit at the same level, which didn't work given the type of stand-and-deliver seminar it was.
2. The light was too dim for audience members to read the handouts clearly.
3. This particular bank of lights emits an awful buzzing hum when it is dimmed partway.
On top of this, no one had shut the big door at the back of the room that leads to the break room outside, so conversations and other racket from outside rattled into our room. (We finally did shut the door, but belatedly.)

So, in short, it was too dark and too noisy, and there was a headache-promoting background buzz throughout TWO HOURS of a presentation. It's not just that this was bad--it was completely avoidable. A minute or two of experimentation with the lights combined with the simple foresight to shut all the doors all the way would have made life easier for everybody. I know this because I've been in a hundred other meetings in the same room where the lights and noise were no trouble.

The good news, in this case, is that the room has a deluxe built-in projection system, so there were no technical troubles on that end. The two presenters were quite polished, and clearly used to working off of each other in a back-and-forth presentation mode. But some of their slides featured dark-colored graphics that looked dramatic on the screen . . . but washed out to black on the handouts. Again, a simple lack of foresight undermined their presentation. This was more annoying because the date printed at the bottom of each handout page made it clear that they were working from a template they had prepared three years ago. They've had tons of time to get these handouts right, or simply to prepare a version of the handouts with the fancy graphics removed . . . but they never thought of it, I guess.

These shortcomings hit home for me all the more because earlier in the week I had listened to Guy Kawasaki's podcast on "The Art of Pitching," which is full of savvy advice on how to give killer presentations when it counts--that is, when you're asking for a lot of money. In one section, Kawasaki puts the burden on presenters to take responsibility for everything that goes into the presentation. I don't have his text in front of me (the podcast is a chapter of G.K.'s book The Art of the Start), but in paraphrase:
--If the projector doesn't work, it's your fault.
--If the projector won't cooperate with your laptop, it's your fault.
--If the projector bulb goes out, it's your fault.
Kawasaki encourages you to bring your own projector, not one but two laptops loaded with your presentation, a USB key loaded with another copy of the presentation, and then printouts of your whole presentation in case all Hell breaks loose with the technology.

I love this because it means taking full responsibility for all parts of the communication process, which I think is what distinguishes great communicators from lesser ones.

Two modest examples in this vein from my own little speaking career: I can remember a slide show I gave to the Rotary Club in Perth (Scotland) when I was on a Rotary scholarship. The old-fashioned slide projector got jammed partway through my presentation, but fortunately I had drilled on the material so thoroughly that I could ad lib and keep the audience's attention for the minute it took to untangle the machine. Then recently I gave a presentation on short notice in an office that didn't have a room with a projector: it gave me the chance to revise my whole presentation in a way that made sense as a handout. The talk was fresher than it would be, because the process of revising it made me rethink it for the new audience and the new format.

The two ladies who gave the seminar at my office this week were very nice and generally well prepared. Clearly they knew their material, and when the seminar turned interactive (only after 80 minutes of sit-and-listen) it was really valuable. But it would have been ten times better more effective if they had showed more commitment to taking charge of their environment on behalf of their audience.

For presenters, there is no such thing as being overprepared.

Commonplace: Poor Richard

2006-02-18T07:45:00.000-06:00

Benjamin Franklin alone could provide me with enough commonplaces to populate this blog for another ten years. These pages offer the text of various editions of Poor Richard's Almanack.

Prefaces and maxims from Poor Richard's Almanack 1733-1758.
Page images of the 1753 edition of the Almanack.

The 1758 preface includes Franklin's famous tract "The Way to Wealth," the advice in which seems as good today as ever. When our contemporary debates on taxation get heated, I always remember this part, voiced by "Father Abraham":

Friends, says he, and Neighbours, the Taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those laid on by the Government were the only Ones we had to pay, we might more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our Idleness, three times as much by our Pride, and four times as much by our Folly, and from these Taxes the Commissioners cannot ease or deliver us by allowing an Abatement. However let us hearken to good Advice, and something may be done for us; God helps them that help themselves, as Poor Richard says, in his Almanack of 1733.

The next paragraph has even harder advice for all of us who waste too much time:

It would be thought a hard Government that should tax its People one tenth Part of their Time, to be employed in its Service. But Idleness taxes many of us much more, if we reckon all that is spent in absolute Sloth, or doing of nothing, with that which is spent in idle Employments or Amusements, that amount to nothing. Sloth, by bringing on Diseases, absolutely shortens Life. Sloth, like Rust, consumes faster than Labour wears, while the used Key is always bright, as Poor Richard says. But dost thou love Life, then do not squander Time, for that's the Stuff Life is made of, as Poor Richard says.--How much more than is necessary do we spend in Sleep! forgetting that The sleeping Fox catches no Poultry, and that there will be sleeping enough in the Grave, as Poor Richard says. If Time be of all Things the most precious, wasting Time must be, as Poor Richard says, the greatest Prodigality, since, as he else where tells us, Lost Time is never found again; and what we call Time-enough, always proves little enough: Let us then up and be doing, and doing to the Purpose; so by Diligence shall we do more with less Perplexity. Sloth makes all Things difficult, but Industry all easy, as Poor Richard says; and He that riseth late, must trot all Day, and shall scarce overtake his Business at Night. While Laziness travels so slowly, that Poverty soon over- takes him, as we read in Poor Richard, who adds, Drive thy Business, let not that drive thee; and Early to Bed, and early to rise, makes a Man healthy, wealthy and wise.

I've taken this snippet and taped it onto my laptop where I can't miss seeing it:

"Lost Time is never found again."

Multiply yourself: Ask for help.

2006-02-16T05:44:00.000-06:00

David Lorenzo's blog is a fount of encouragement and good sense, not just for those seeking "career intensity" in a business setting, but for anyone who wants to do more and do better what they love to do most. Lorenzo's own energy is obvious -- he often posts several times a day, and he talks sense.

"Asking for Help is Smart" is a great reminder that not only is there no reason to go it alone in this life, but also that going it alone is silly. Two great quotes jump out at me from Lorenzo's post: 1. "I would rather be thought of as a needy success than as a brilliant failure." 2. "If you don’t swallow your pride and you try to 'tough it out' in an area where you lack skill, knowledge or experience, you exponentially increase the likelihood you will fail."

This matches my personal experience and the events I've seen around me. How many times in my life have I wasted my time, energy, and serenity by trying to do something that I simply wasn't up to doing? It could be a lack of training, or experience, or aptitude, or motivation, but whatever the case, even the most omnicompetent people have something that they ought to farm out to others. This is why I no longer change the oil in my cars myself: the guys at the garage do it all day, every day; they do it much faster and better than I can; they dispose of the used oil with no effort; they might spot important problems with the car that I never would; and so on. Yes, I know how to change the oil if I absolutely must, but at this point there's no reason for me to do it myself. I'd rather spend that time doing something that only I can do, or that at least will build toward my bigger goals in life.

What do you insist on doing for yourself that, really, you should be letting someone else do for you? Why don't you ask for help?

Why do we do what we do?

2006-02-16T05:39:00.000-06:00

As he often does, Seth Godin provides great food for thought here: "The Reason".

We all do things--and we all accept things--for rationales that don't hold up to scrutiny. There's a practice in business called "zero base budgeting" (ZBB). The idea of it . . . (any MBAs in the room should cover their ears while I butcher this) . . . is that you write next year's budget starting with a zero for every line item. In other words, you must justify every single thing you put into the budget--salaries, photocopiers, styrofoam cups, big projects, little projects, you name it.

How often do we do any such thing for our own lives? What if applied ZBB to our bank statements? Or to our calendars? (Tom Peters: "You are your calendar.") As I think about the prospect of this, it's all I can do not to run screaming from the room. This suggests to me that it's probably a tack worth pursuing.

What do you think?

Creator: Patricia Madson Ryan

2006-02-16T05:33:00.000-06:00

I liked this interview with drama coach and author Patricia Madson Ryan. She has interesting things to say about the creative process, and especially about how to give full attention in the current, creative moment. It's worth a read.

Two things I especially liked:
1. Ryan's opposition to multitasking. Multitasking is a vice of mine, but I find that I'm happier--and I get more done--when I stick with one thing until it's finished.
2. The advice to "Be average." What you are is good enough. You have a lifetime of preparation behind you: now step up and let 'er rip.

Dubai, "Mushroom City"

2006-02-16T05:24:00.000-06:00

This is a fascinating article about the explosive, all-but-unimaginable growth of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Along with all the prosperity come many problems, not least of them the routine exploitation of laborers. In my day job I see more news all the time on world-class commercial doings coming out of the UAE.

If anyone here can comment on first-hand experiences in Dubai, I'm all ears.

Commonplace: Chris Smith

2006-02-16T05:12:00.000-06:00

It's not every day that a member of Congress says something in a committee hearing that's worth being etched in stone, but Chris Smith, Republican of New Jersey, pulled off that trick yesterday when he said this:

"Cooperation with tyranny should not be embraced for the sake of profits."

He said this in the context of hearings on the business dealings of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Cisco in China. It's important to remember that, while China has made great strides in many areas -- its economic strength above all -- it is still far from free.

More:
Summary at Good Morning Silicon Valley.
Rep. Smith's opening statement at his committee's hearing.

Intake and output.

2006-02-16T04:35:00.000-06:00

During my first few weeks of regular blogging, I hewed pretty closely to my personal standard of three posts per day. I figure that not all of my posts have to be the mini-essays I love so well; they can be a mix of long and short, of musings, links, and commonplaces. But over the past week, my output has been haphazard at best. Meanwhile, though, I've been reading--from blogs, books, magazines, you name it--at a pace even more frenetic than usual. I use "frenetic" advisedly, because there's a certain pointlessness to my reading when I get this way: instead of working my way through a particular idea, I flash through a hundred ideas without arriving at any sort of conclusion or application for my own life.

So now I'm back on the bandwagon of regular posting. My point in doing this isn't only to give you something new to ponder each day, gentle reader, but also to reinforce my own sense of chutzpah: It's the idea that what I have to say is more important--to me--than what someone else has to say. This is a tricky balancing act to pull off, since I believe that my own life is about interacting with others. This does imply listening--more and deeper listening than I usually pull off. But my real mission is to contribute to others. And while listening and absorbing is a key part of that, I can't use my own talents to contribute to the lives of others unless I produce.

As evidence of my own struggles to pull off this balancing act, I can look at both the million half-consumed, one-fifth-digested ideas I've encountered from others over the years, and even more so to the million unborn or stillborn ideas of my own that I've never put into the world. Plenty of my ideas aren't very consequential to anyone but me--which is fine. That's the nature of ideas. But all of those that have gone undeveloped or unexpressed, they're open loops that weigh on my mind.

My goal: improve the ratio between the many ideas I have and the ones I turn into something useful to share with others.

In other words: brace yourself for an onslaught of bloggery! :)

Terminal patients.

2006-02-15T08:34:00.000-06:00

Let's consider something heavy for a minute: Every last one of us is a terminal patient. Each of us will check out of this life someday. Fine. But what if we put a sharper edge on this? What if you knew you had only 18 months before your appointment with the Reaper? What would you try to accomplish between now and then?

Would you do schlub-work? Busy-work? Cubicle-work?

Or something major?

There is nothing wrong per se with working in a cubicle. I do, and it helps my family to live comfortably. But how many of us are--when we're honest with ourselves--defined by the fact that we work in a cubicle? I certainly have been in the past, and it's an easy rut to return to.

As much as I can, I now guide myself toward doing big things. My own challenge now is to maintain that 18-months focus: what can I accomplish in the next year and a half that will change the world in some way that's meaningful to me? What can I do today that will help me get there?

Consider the example of David Lorenzo's friend, who used a cancer diagnosis to change his life for the better.

Friend, don't wait until it's too late.

Commonplace: Drucker

2006-02-15T05:47:00.000-06:00

There are probably a thousand quotations I could list from the late, great Peter Drucker. This one, though, may be my all-time favorite, above all because it speaks to one of my own biggest weaknesses: great planning, weak follow-through.

"Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work."

"Monstrous"

2006-02-15T05:25:00.000-06:00

I've been catching up on my Esquire reading, which reminds me (1) how very, very good Esquire is right now, and (2) how very removed I am from the world of high fashion in which the Prada and Dolce & Gabbana ads make any sense.

This article on speed-skater Apolo Ohno from the February issue set off a train of thought. Here's the key quote:

He does it because he's one of the lucky ones in this life, having found something he's monstrous at. Unlike most of the rest of us, he wakes up each morning with the chance to be perfect. "There's not one day I don't want to be on the ice," he says, and that's because for two minutes at a time, he is as good as it gets.

That word--"monstrous"--stuck in my head because of a conversation I once had with my good buddy Paul. We were talking about the famous 1978 playoff game in Fenway Park between the visiting Yankees and Paul's beloved Red Sox. That game is best known for Bucky Dent's three-run homer, which put the Yankees on top in the seventh inning.

What's less remembered is the home run that Reggie Jackson hit in the eighth inning--a solo shot that provided the Yankees their ultimate one-run margin of victory. Paul was watching the game as it unfolded, and he remembers the Jackson hit as a "monstrous" shot to centerfield. (Paul and I had this conversation a couple of years ago, and I can still see the way he rolled his eyes to the heavens as he said this.) It was incongruity that made Dent's homer famous, because Dent was such a light hitter. Jackson's blast was to be expected because he was, in a word, monstrous as a hitter.

Most of us never find our "chance to be perfect." This is another way of saying that we never put ourselves in a Category of One. Apolo Ohno has found his, and once the Torino Olympics are over, he'll have to figure out what else to do with his life. Reggie Jackson became wealthy and famous because he lived out his chance to be perfect for so many years on such a big stage.

Most of us certainly won't ever find fame and fortune in athletics, but somewhere, lurking in the shadows or staring us in the face, is our chance to be monstrous. Let's find all commit to find it.

Ethan Casey: The World at Large

2006-02-12T15:54:00.000-06:00

I've long taken it as an axiom that one thing the world needs more of is Ethan Casey's journalism. Ethan's an old friend and colleague; I was for several years a proud participant in his brainchild, Blue Ear, which helped me develop my writing chops as much as anything in my life. The good news is that Ethan's now online with a blog that's more than just a blog. It bears the hallmarks of his international experience and, above all, his thought. The man actually thinks. Even if he weren't such a mensch, even it he hadn't been such a good friend and mentor to me personally, that quality alone would make him worth reading. So, gentle reader, do yourself a favor and add Ethan to your regular reading list.

Ethan Casey: The World at Large

"Making meaning" and Mercedes-Benz.

2006-02-11T18:35:00.000-06:00

Guy Kawasaki has talked about "making meaning" as one of the major foundations of good branding. (See his typically insightful post here.) I think he's right.

The folks at Mercedes think so, too, apparently. They're running advertisements that feature the tagline, "You're Not Buying A Car. You're Buying a Belief." You can find details on the campaign here, or a bigger image of the specific ad here. The related press release is here.

(Let me just digress to say that enthusiast sites like eMercedesBenz are one of the greatest arguments for the existence of the Internet. Before right now, I didn't know where to look, should I ever become engrossed in the doings of Mercedes. Now I know.)

The text of the ad makes the connection to Guy K.'s point for me: "The notion of building a Mercedes-Benz has always been an exceptionally meaningful endeavor. More than making a machine, we are upholding an ideal. . . ." Immediately I think of my father's colleague who crashed in a Mercedes back in the 1960s. The car flipped a time or two, landed on its roof, and was damaged beyond repair. My father's friend unbuckled his seatbelt, let himself out through the window, and walked away. This set of positive associations erodes any idea I might have that the Mercedes stands for acquisitive lust, and builds up the idea that "Mercedes" is a synonym for "excellence".

That's what making meaning is about.

Creator: Michael Chabon

2006-02-11T12:10:00.000-06:00

Lately I've been on a jag of Michael Chabon reading. To me, he's as good as any novelist working today, plus his essays are consistently engaging. I just finished reading McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, which Chabon edited and to which he contributed both the introduction and the final story.

He posted a copy of his introduction on his Web site. This piece alone is well worth reading by anyone who cares about the current state of American fiction. (His site is filled with other tasty morsels as well.)

I also heartily recommend The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and The Final Solution.

Uma Thurman on Failure.

2006-02-11T11:21:00.000-06:00

There is an interesting interview with Uma Thurman in the February issue of Esquire. (Can't find a link to the article itself.) Here's the last paragraph of it:

So I guess I recommend being a student. It's not like it's some sort of written policy that I carry around in my back pocket. It just comes back to being present and having a tremendous work ethic and accepting failure as a necessity for learning. None of it's final anyway. When it works, it's not final, and when it fails, it's not final. There's always another move.

Emphasis added.

"All of the biggest hurdles are internal."

2006-02-10T16:33:00.000-06:00

I enjoyed this BusinessWeek interview, "Failure Is Part of Success," with serial entrepreneur Nicholas Hall. My favorite part was this:

Q: What's the biggest lesson you learned from failing?
A: How costly it is if you take yourself out of the game. It's like what they say about the stock market -- that you don't know when the gains will come, but you get luckier often if you stay in the game vs. trying to figure out when to get in the game. If you fail, you have to bounce back.

Are you like me? How much time in your life have you wasted wondering when you should step onto the dance floor? Just get up and dance!

Commonplace: Becalmed seas.

2006-02-10T16:11:00.000-06:00

Today my friend Z. told me this old Latin proverb.

"If there is no wind, row."

The beautiful thing is that Z. first heard it from the mouth of Mel Brooks. Looking over Brooks's filmography, I'd say the man's followed that advice to a T.

More on John Boyd and O.O.D.A.

2006-02-10T06:20:00.000-06:00

Tom Peters is running an interview + PowerPoint featuring Robert Coram, who wrote a book about Col. John Boyd's career and thought. Worth a look.

The Pareto Principle and Good Procrastination

2006-02-08T21:22:00.000-06:00

A hundred years ago, the social scientist Vilfredo Pareto observed the basic asymmetry between inputs and outputs in many areas of life. He began by noticing that one-fifth of all Italians owned four-fifths of Italian property, but the principle named after him has been generalized in many directions. It’s often called the “80/20 Rule,” since the generic form of it posits that 80% of outputs derive from 20% of inputs. This could mean 80% of sales coming from 20% of salespeople, 80% of profits coming from 20% of products, 80% of books written by 20% of authors, or what have you. It also works for Bad Things: 80% of complaints come from the whiniest 20% of customers, 80% of errors arise in 20% of processes, and so on.

(Note: It is coincidence that the two numbers add up to 100. The relationship could just as easily be 75/15 or 90/25.)

In personal and business productivity, the Pareto principle is used to prioritize work. All else being equal, it’s much better to focus on the 20% of activities that generate 80% of revenue, for example, than on the 80% of activities that generate just 20% of revenues. Smart workers and smart business take the principle further, of course, by repeating the high-output 20% over and over. In other words, if 20 hours of high-quality work yield $8,000 in sales, then 60 hours of the same work will yield $24,000 in sales. Even better, there’s sometimes a solid-gold 20% within the high-yield 20%--the 4% of super-premium inputs that yield the most disproportionate outputs. This is where Warren Buffett lives.

The other term in my title comes from Paul Graham’s recent essay, “Good and Bad Procrastination.” The relevant quote is this:

There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I'd argue, is good procrastination.

The good procrastination he’s talking about is essentially an application of the Pareto principle. Fiddling with Gridgame is fun, but those who diligently seek wealth don’t play Gridgame during working hours because, absorbing though it is to watch the little circles whirl around, Gridgame isn’t among the 20% most effective revenue-generating activities that lead to 80% of revenue. The most lucrative 20% of inputs include “making customers’ problems go away” and “giving customers good reasons to be happy to part with their money in return for what you sell.”

The top-4% principle applies here, too. Those who really seek wealth do things like start technology companies, practice tax law or nuclear medicine, or work in private equity. These people put off watching the big game; they put off vacations; they put off sleep; they may put off having a family or, if they already have one, may put off interacting with it. The point, in this case, isn’t to find out whether they are happy, but just to note that they are value-maximizing.

Graham has the right idea. Figure out what you’re after--what’s important to you. Figure out what’s more or less relevant to making that thing happen. Do the things that are more relevant, and put off the things that are less relevant. If you do the most relevant, most important things with the bulk of your time, you’re likely to get the important outputs you’re looking for in far more abundance than would typically be the norm. Instead of the 20 strong inputs yielding 80 outputs, and 80 weak inputs yielding 20 outputs, you could have 90 strong inputs yielding 360 outputs and 10 weak inputs yielding . . . well, who cares, once you have 360 outputs of what’s important to you?

**

The Bureau of Reclamation site has a very stripped-down introduction to the Pareto principle.

This page provides a more detailed basic approach to carrying out Pareto analysis.

Creator: Christopher Lloyd ("Hurrah for vulgarity!")

2006-02-08T11:45:00.000-06:00

If I could read only one thing out of The Economist each week, it would be the obituary. The best news magazine in English has long held up the model of what an obituary can be. Like the writing of English cricket commentators, Economist obituaries remind us why the the British have been so indispensable in the history of journalism.

A-a-anyway, this week's obituary (which you should read soon, if you want to avoid looking at an advertisement in order to see it) discusses the life of the recently departed Christopher Lloyd, the dean of English gardeners. Lloyd found his One Thing--gardening--early in life, and he wrote about it eloquently. He was so popular in no small part because he was so shocking. But he was shocking in the service of deriving pleasure from the garden, which is as it should be.

Some of the rules for your own One Thing are there for good reasons; others aren't. Find out which are which, and flout the meaningless ones with abandon. Share your joy in your One Thing with the rest of the world. Amen.

Networking: It doesn't have to be a dirty word.

2006-02-08T09:43:00.000-06:00

"Networking" gets a bad name because of the shallow back-slappers who engage in it. But if we take "networking" to mean "the process of building human relationships with lots of people who share interests with us," then it becomes something wonderful. As I've indicated before, my favorite writer on this subject is Keith Ferrazzi. His book, Never Eat Alone sits on my nightstand so I can dig new ideas out of it before I nod off at night; similarly, his blog is on my daily RSS rounds. Here are links to some of his best columns from Inc. magazine's site:

"Lessons from the Green"
"Do Your Homework (Really)"
"Finding Your Currency"

Another favorite writer of mine, Guy Kawasaki covered some of the same ground in short format with his recent blog post/essay, "The Art of Schmoozing".

This piece from David Lorenzo addresses the ways you can mobilize your friends, family, and other contacts to help you as you look for a new job or new customers in your career. Lorenzo encapsulates something great: "Friendships are valuable. The people you know should be your greatest asset as you develop your career. Give them every opportunity to help you. As long as you are providing great value, don't be afraid to leverage your social network for the benefits it can provide." Too many people, in my experience, hesitate to tell others what they're doing, what is most meaningful to them, and what they'd like to get out of life. (My blog represents part of my personal antidote to this.)

Even though a lot of ought to be common wisdom--much of this ground was covered decades ago in Dale Carnegie's best-known book--it still needs saying. Much of the value we derive from life comes from either (a) objectives we pursue and attain, or (b) relationships we build. Doing both at once--which is the good kind of networking--is a double blessing.

Decision: Taking versus making.

2006-02-07T22:36:00.000-06:00

Usually we talk about making decisions; lately I've been talking about taking them. We all do make decisions all the time, but we still make them even when the process is passive and unthinking. I use "taking" to indicate the level of active engagement that I think marks a truly effective process of decision.

Taking a decision implies taking action and taking responsibility for what you do and the outcomes of what you do. Exercising your faculty of decision in this way means taking on life actively as it comes to you, not operating by default.

Take decisions and take charge. It's the only way to really live.

Memory Lane: Middlebury

2006-02-07T22:23:00.000-06:00

I spent a summer in the 1990s at the Middlebury German School. To my mind, Middlebury has the quintessential appearance of a New England town, and Middlebury College has the quintessential appearance of a New England liberals arts school. I learned loads of German there and had a wonderful time: it planted the dream in my mind of someday living -- or at least summering -- in rural New England.

The college has an outstanding art museum.

I can't find good photos of the campus on the school's site, but this campus map (PDF!) suggests the flavor of it in watercolors.

More information about the town and surroundings.

Prolificity: Something every day.

2006-02-07T22:00:00.000-06:00

I've quoted Pliny's line: "Nulla dies sine linea" -- "No days without lines" or "Never a day without lines." If I had lived by that dictum since the first time I read it . . . nevermind.

Anthony Trollope got up in the morning and wrote for two hours. Nothing fancy -- just wrote. Niall Ferguson has said that his whole "trick" of producing so much boils down to "I get up and I work."

For years now I have risen early in the morning, but it hasn't always meant finished work to show. I read, I jot, I ponder. In an ideal world, those early-morning hours would be for my most abstract thoughts, and I could spend time later in the day hammering the thoughts out into pages and chapters and so on. But that's not the world I live in -- not yet, anyway.

I'm thinking of this because today I finally handed in an essay that was due months ago. My professor cared much less than I did that it was so late; he knows I worked hard in his class, and he knew that I was working hard on the essay. For me, though, the piece was one more -- remains one more -- among my many projects that have never reached their potential. In the high-tech world they have a saying that applies to microchips and software alike: Late products don't get better, they just get later. That was this paper. All of these repeated failures, including the many unfinished pieces that clutter my files, weigh on me. Extra baggage is the antithesis of prolificity.

Never a day without lines is fine, but waits to be misconstrued by non-completing scribblers like me. Better to say, Never a day without lines ready to show to the world. Early deadlines. Travel light.

Pepys had the right idea.

2006-02-06T17:31:00.000-06:00

5 February 1662: "I do offer quite to the losing of the profit of the whole estate for 8 or 10 years together, yet if we can gain peace, and set my mind at a little liberty, I shall be glad of it."

My gloss: Simplify your life and set your life at liberty to do what you want to do.

Research: Write it first.

2006-02-06T05:57:00.000-06:00

I spent another Saturday at the archive researching for the scholarly article I'm writing. As was the case last week, I was again appalled by how slowly I work. Last time I suggested that you have to write as you go, working the material into something usable, even it the conclusions are only tentative.

More thought on this point leads me to change this slightly: It's not enough to write as you go through your research material; you must write before you research.

Okay, two points of clarification are in order: 1. I don't really mean "you"--I'm talking about what I have to do to succeed. My mind works in funny ways, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. This is just one way that I am trying to accommodate its needs. 2. Of course you have to have some idea of what you're talking about before you start writing an essay. You need enough material to put down a provisional argument and a provisional outline. By the way, I like "provisional" better than "tentative," which is the word I used last week. There can't be anything tentative about it: sin boldly! Get the words on the page as though they would stand for all time, then subject them to the harsh reality of the documents. The process will tear down many of the words that you have and allow you to replace them with much better words.

I have wondered whether Anthony Trollope would have been able to keep to his clockwork writing schedule if he had been composing works of scholarship rather than literature. Surely his output would have been lower, but I believe the answer to the question is Yes. He set himself to the task of writing daily, and so he wrote daily. I believe that scholars can do the same thing if they will set themselves to it.

Write it now. Write it before you're ready. Write it now.

Interesting: Less power for the Queen?

2006-02-06T04:15:00.000-06:00

I am hardly an expert in British politics, but I find this development intriguing:

Queen's powers should be removed, says Cameron

With this move the new Conservative leader, David Cameron, "takes his campaign to reshape the Conservative party to a startling new level." Cameron's tactic is designed not to undermine the Queen, but to give to Parliament powers that are technically reserved to the Queen, but which in practice are exercised by (Labour Party) ministers.

That covers a vast range of government activity, from the appointment of bishops and the honours system to the right to go to war, sign treaties and fill many official jobs. However, Mr Cameron has asked it to focus on four specific areas: the right to
· declare war and send troops abroad;
· to make international and European treaties;
· to make appointments and award honours;
· to make major changes to the structure of government.

He has specifically ruled out changes to what he calls "the personal prerogative powers of the monarch, such as the power to dissolve parliament and appoint a prime minister". Mr Cameron is anxious to make it clear that he does not have Her Majesty in his sights, but the powers ministers now exercise on her behalf. He is not, aides insist, a closet republican. [...]

"I'm a staunch supporter of our constitutional monarchy and would not want to undermine it in any way," Mr Cameron will say in a speech today. But by venturing into a debate more often heard among Liberal Democrats and the left of the Labour party, the Tory leader has opened up the possibility of significant constitutional reform. [...]

Mr Cameron paints the move as something that could limit what he calls "the personal, presidential style that has taken hold under New Labour. [...]"

Here's a thought experiment: If, in some future century, Britain dissolved its monarchy, historians would subsequently write a history that traced back to the English Civil War, the Long Parliament, and so on. But when they started writing about the modern erosion of the institution--the first chinks in the wall of unthinkability surrounding the idea of removing the monarchy . . . would a move like Cameron's figure in that chapter?

A few thoughts on personal bootstrapping.

2006-02-05T07:35:00.000-06:00

Guy Kawasaki writes a blog called "Let the Good Times Roll." This is an appropriate name, because he's on such a personal roll with it: a lot of what he's blogged in his first several weeks of doing it has shot to instant-classic status. Since Kawasaki has lots of experience with entrepreneurship (he's a venture capitalist now; he was on the Macintosh team back in the 1980s), the blogosphere hung on the words of his post on "The Art of Bootstrapping." This joins the good words of other entrepreneurs like Evan Williams ("Ten Rules for Web Startups"), and was joined in turn by many other commentaries like this one. One of the best commentators on the subject, to my mind, is Paul Graham, who's "How to Start a Startup" is a classic. (This list includes links to a couple more of Graham's best essays on startups.)

What does this have to do with my personal bootstrapping? Well, I am not a technologist, and I don't have the bandwidth at this moment in my life to start a company--or at least, a company that creates a product like those of the startups that Kawasaki, Williams, and Graham are talking about. (This may be another way of saying that I'm afraid of making lots of money all at once--I'm not sure.) If I'm going to take the advice of these worthies, it will have to apply to my solo career or to my work for my employer.

So, thinking in this solo context, what do I take away from all of this bootstrapping advice? My solo business is to have ideas and put them into compelling language. That's my area of competitive differentiation, if you want to put it into business-speak. Most of the advice from these bootstrapping sages applies very well to this personal "business" of mine.

--Get the cash flowing and sock away every dime you can.
--Work from the ground up.
--Quick-and-dirty is fine, so long as you're meeting customer need.
--Let the scales fall from your eyes; see reality for what it is.
--"Don't wait until you're totally ready."
--"Be Picky" and "Be Self-Centered." Do it for you--or rather, I must do my thing for me. If a line of work doesn't meet my own needs, why engage in it?

So, let me ask you, gentle readers: You can read my ideas and words here, in shorter or longer form. Would you hire me to help shape your ideas into the best words?

More good-looking bootstrapping advice here.

Commonplace: Wolff

2006-02-05T07:05:00.000-06:00

"We are made to persist. That's how we find out who we are."
—Tobias Wolff

Social Contracts of Morning Traffic.

2006-02-05T06:53:00.000-06:00

Adverse events give rise to various emotions: anger, sorrow, frustration, and so on. Morning traffic, I find, does not usually make me angry or sad, but frustrated. Generally, frustration arises when the events we encounter go awry from our expectations. In other words, it is not the event itself that frustrates us, but the dissonance between the event and what we thought should or would happen. If you spend much time in morning rush-hour traffic, you may already see where I’m headed with this.

When I drive, I’m trying to get where I’m going as quickly as I can given the rules of the road and the constraints of good sense. That’s it. I’m not trying to break any records. I don’t want to speed. I don’t want anyone else to speed. But I do want to clip along, and I find that the whole process works better when I also try to look out for the other person. If it’s clear I can safely make it through a stale green light, and there’s someone following me closely, I may boost my speed just that much so that we can both make it. I sail on through, the other driver sails on through, there’s no risk to anyone, and we all get where we’re going.

Plenty of my fellow Austin drivers clearly don’t think this way. They drive 25 in a 40 . . . during the morning rush hour when everyone else on the road is traveling right at 40. Or, right in front of you, they slow down as they approach an eminently makeable green light so that they ooze through as it turns amber . . . leaving you to fume at the red light. Or they cut across two lanes of traffic to make a last-second turn that they should have seen coming. Et cetera. Just the usual crap.

These driving habits frustrate me not because they leave me at a red light. I’m a big boy and I can take it, and anyway if it were that important to be at work two minutes earlier, it was my responsibility to leave the house two minutes earlier. No, they frustrate me because they are so pointless. I’ve been left at the red light for no reason, no reason besides the other driver’s lack of alertness or concern for the people around him. My own driving habits—let’s all get through this together—set up an expectation in my mind that that’s how things are supposed to be. Maybe I get it from my father, who is an excellent driver and was also a church minister for many years: look out for the other person, be good to everybody, don’t wrong-foot the other guy.

Please bear with a leap of ratiocination here, because it’s a bit of a doozy: This frustration in traffic comes from the same root as my frustration with narrow-interest political rhetoric. Political shouting in favor of a narrow interest (or “special interest,” if you prefer) bothers me precisely because those who do it are more concerned with getting what they want than they are with having a government or a society that runs better. Of course I expect people to stump for their own interest in politics—it’s only natural. But worthy politicians actually do figure out ways to get what’s good for them while they move policy in a good direction overall. The unworthy ones will knife anyone to get what’s good for themselves, and hang the consequences for anyone else or the society at large.

Note that I’m not—at least for today—talking about a particular party or a particular set of special interests here. This applies across the centuries, across the political landscape. But fresh examples crop up every day, not always in the headlines, but down in paragraph 14 of the Washington story, the part that describes the nasty bit of horse-trading that got the budget passed . . . and hosed some large but uninfluential sector of the populace.

Maybe the problem is with my own ideals. I should expect the guy in front of me to stick me at the red light. I should expect our political leaders to sell out the best interests of the Republic when their own political vigorish is at stake.

Pardon my sighs. But I just don’t want to let go of the optimism that says we can have an adversarial system of republican democracy that declines to make an adversary of the common weal.

The Civilizational BHAG.

2006-02-04T21:01:00.000-06:00

A BHAG, in the world of business especially, is a "big, hairy, audacious goal" (or, in some vernaculars, a "big, hairy-assed goal"). It means the sort of breathtaking goal that arises from some compound of chutzpah, vision, and simple craziness. It is the sort of goal that might become quixotic in the wrong hands--or that might change the fate of an entire industry.

Tom Peters is fond of quoting a Hewlett-Packard advertisement that had the tagline “Have you changed civilization today?”

The idea is right. We should change civilization. Or rather, we are already making inputs into the direction and tenor of civilization, so we might as well do it intentionally and in a direction of our choosing.

There are bad folks in the world--whether we're talking about super-baddies like terrorist masterminds or garden-variety types like thoughtless corporate rapers of the earth. These people have plans for where they want civilization to go. They are enacting these plans, even as we speak, to send civilization in these bad, wrong directions.

The beneficial Civilizational BHAG would seem to be the good antidote for this. I haven't come up with mine yet: any suggestions?

Op-ed: My parking-ticket protest.

2006-02-04T20:55:00.000-06:00

[This piece first appeared on the Commentary page of the Austin American-Statesman on November 26, 2005.]

Have you ever gotten a ticket for parking within 30 feet of a stop sign? I got one last week. Until the moment I read the citation on the ticket, I had no idea any such parking rule existed. No such rule should exist, as I hope I'll convince you.

Part of my reaction is emotional. My driving record is excellent, and (touch wood) I have never had even a fender bender. (Well, I once crashed my friend's go-kart into his garage door, but I was 11 at the time.) My children are used to hearing me caution my fellow motorists: "That's not good. . . . Don't do that. . . . Oh! That's dangerous!"

This matches my personality. Growing up, my friends always thought that I was too respectful of rules. I never drank a beer until I was old enough to buy one myself. I never smoked pot. I never snuck out of my parents' house. And I never park in a no-parking zone. When it comes to rules, I'm as square as they come.

This can be a trial for me these days, since I am a graduate student at the University of Texas. Most weekdays, I end up cruising a particular circuit of residential streets north of the campus, looking for a free space. There are countless hazards: hidden driveways, yellow curbs, Dumpsters, and a forest of warning signs. No parking. Two-hour parking only. (I have three-hour seminars.) Parking for residents only. Loading and unloading only, five-minute limit.

So I circle. On the day of my ticket, I found a spot just off of 31st Street. No yellow curb, no warning sign, a long-accumulated oil stain from all the cars that had parked there before. For that matter, I had parked there before with no problem. When I came back from my class, I found the little bright-yellow envelope with the ticket inside. I had to read the citation twice before it even dawned on me that, yes, I was within 30 feet of a stop sign — within four feet, in fact.

This is law enforcement by trick, not legitimate enforcement. When you speed, you know you are speeding. You see the speed limit, you cruise along with traffic a little above it, and you take the calculated risk that going 51 in a 45 won't get you a ticket this time. Even I, the lover of rules, do this.

But in this case? No. The rule is ludicrous, should not exist, and must be nearly unknown among drivers. The oil stain on the ground indicates that years' worth of Austin car-parkers have looked at this little piece of real estate and said, "Hey, good parking place!" But now some industrious ticket-writer, who no doubt would claim merely to be doing his or her job, has discovered a gravy train for tickets to issue. I've now seen three other cars get tickets in that spot.

I am a liberal in most of my politics. I believe that in many cases a little bit of government intervention, wisely applied, can do some good. This is how we got the Interstate highway system. This is how we built UT and created Austin's beautiful parks. We can get even more grandiose: this is how the federal government backed up the efforts of heroes like the late Rosa Parks to break down the Jim Crow system in the South.

But what was Jim Crow? It was a system of arbitrary laws designed not to help the population to live better or prosper, but to dispense a brand of "justice" that had nothing to do with health, safety, education or welfare — much less the genuine item of justice.

Of course, my dinky little parking ticket doesn't rise to the level of Jim Crow — not by a million miles. No, it's only a small thing. But it is a thing that erodes my confidence that the government is supposed to be looking out for society's best interests. Instead it makes me think that the government is happy to trick me into breaking an unknown rule so it can collect an extra buck.

I don't want a parking ticket on my record — I love rules, remember? — so I mailed in my $20. Consider this column my moment of protest.

Aggressive mistakes.

2006-02-04T20:40:00.000-06:00

Football coaches will tell their players that when they make a mistake on the field, it’s better if it’s an aggressive mistake. Baseball managers will tell their players not to get “cheated” on a pitch. If you’re going to swing, go ahead and make it a big swing. The point is this: if you make a timid attempt at a block or a tackle in football, but guess right and hit your man on target, you still might not take him down, simply because you were too timid. If you fly at him and miss, you miss, but if you hit him, he’s down for sure. The same with baseball: if you take a timid swing and make contact, you’re probably out anyway, but if you rip at it and connect, you might clear the bases.

I’m as guilty as anybody of wanting to prevent failure in advance. And, like a lot of smart people, I flatter myself to think I can predict the future so well that I’ll know what’s sure to lead to success or sure to lead to failure, even in areas where some detached observation would convince me that the outcome in unknowable.

The antidote is to fail in the real world: go ahead and let it fly, then see what happens. If you’re wrong, be wrong, find out, and then fix it on the next go-round. Don’t sit back and preserve yourself from being wrong . . . or from being really right.

Steve Pavlina addressed this syndrome in his essay, “Show Me Your Battle Scars”: “Show me the wounds you’ve endured as a result of pursuing goals you couldn’t achieve. Let’s see that bankruptcy, that broken heart, the rejection letter, the lawsuit, the divorce, the public humiliation. Show me the total failures, the brutal disappointments, the smack-downs.” Probably the most famous formulation of this idea comes from Theodore Roosevelt:

“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

Note to self: get more aggressive about pursuing the necessary failures en route to success.

Creator: Voltaire

2006-02-03T19:45:00.000-06:00

Voltaire fascinates me: like his contemporary Benjamin Franklin, he was one of those people who seems too big for a single human life. Although he is not much read anymore -- outside of Candide -- he still commands enough interest to warrant first-class biographies. He wrote many plays, novels, and works of history, as well as 20,000 letters, through which he carried on conversations with many of the great minds of his day.

As for those letters: In the future, I wonder how historians and biographers will regard the e-mails (and blog posts, etc.) of bygone writers. Many of these records will be missing -- do you have all the meaningful e-mails you ever wrote? -- and with them will go great examples of the wit or dullness, turns of thought or expressions of opinion, that marked the great correspondents of the past. Whatever the case, writers' jobs won't be aided by the great troves of paper correspondence we have for writers from Erasmus to Theodore Roosevelt.

"If you could write lucidly, simply, euphoniously and yet with liveliness, you would write perfectly: you would write like Voltaire."
—W. Somerset Maugham

Wish List: E-type

2006-02-03T19:13:00.000-06:00

I'd love to drive a Jaguar E-type. I'm not picky about the model, though I wouldn't try to dissuade you from getting me a 1965 4.2 litre Open Two Seater.

My wife says she would prefer a 4-door . . . in which case I wouldn't say no to a 1959 Jaguar MkII 3.8 MOD Saloon. Or the 1963 3.4 litre, whichever. Red is a good color for these.

Commonplace: Paul Graham

2006-02-03T19:05:00.000-06:00

"If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school."

--Paul Graham

Thinker: Fernando Flores.

2006-02-02T19:37:00.000-06:00

For many years the Chilean thinker Fernando Flores has aimed his enormous intelligence and iron character at the problems facing human organizations--especially companies that don't work. This Fast Company profile on Flores gives a view into his relentless methods of drilling past initial layers of doubt and distrust to uncover the real problems that plague businesses. Years of political imprisonment in Chile did not break Flores's resolve; it's not likely that a fratricidal executive suite will.

Fernando Flores is pissed off. He has had enough of the bullshit. The 55-year-old philosopher, former Chilean minister of finance, former political prisoner under Augusto Pinochet's rule, has flown halfway around the world, from California to Holland, to transform two executive teams -- 32 leaders in all -- of a global construction giant. These are people accustomed to building on a grand scale. But right now, building is their problem, not their business: Their world-class reputation for being brilliantly managed, it turns out, consists only of hollow words -- words that have little power and less value.

Flores knows about words and how they translate directly into deeds. He knows that talk is never cheap -- he often charges more than $1 million for his services, a fee that is linked directly to specific promises of increased revenues and savings. He also knows that talk is the source of these executives' failure. Their words work against them -- which is why they can't get anything to work for them.

Talk all you want to, Flores says, but if you want to act powerfully, you need to master "speech acts": language rituals that build trust between colleagues and customers, word practices that open your eyes to new possibilities. Speech acts are powerful because most of the actions that people engage in -- in business, in marriage, in parenting -- are carried out through conversation. But most people speak without intention; they simply say whatever comes to mind. Speak with intention, and your actions take on new purpose. Speak with power, and you act with power.

Many of us in the business world know the frustration of working in environments where the talk goes one direction and the "walk" goes another. Flores offers an antidote to this sort of dishonesty.

“Great work is done by people who are not afraid to be great.” -- Fernando Flores

Op-ed: Fidgeting.

2006-02-02T19:32:00.000-06:00

[I first published this slight piece on the Commentary page of the Austin American-Statesman on February 1, 2005.]

Come to find out, I am a fidgeter.

A Mayo Clinic study released last week shows that some people seem predisposed to move around much more than others — all the time. They shift in their chairs. They tap their toes as they work or watch television. They get up and pace around their desks when they are thinking. In short, they fidget.

They also do not put on extra weight, even without any regular exercise regimen. This might explain why I am three pounds lighter than when I finished college 10 years ago. Back then, I jogged regularly and walked all the time, including half a mile back and forth from my house to campus. Now, I live at my desk, I seldom get out to run or bike, and I take the car everywhere.

But if the Mayo study is right, all my nonstop foot-shuffling and posture-readjusting and standing-up-for-no-good-reason burns 300 to 400 calories per day. Put another way, that is up to 35 pounds per year that I don't gain.

Should I gloat? I don't think so. From what the researchers could tell, the tendency to fidget or not is inborn. They found that the obese people in their study were remarkably efficient in their movements, with not a calorie wasted on extraneous effort. This matches my own experience.

Several years ago, I worked for a delightful woman, quite thickset, who did her work at the computer with the daintiest possible motions. In my mind's eye I see her moving her fingers from keyboard to mouse and back again with the elegance of a concert pianist. When she talked with you, she looked right at you and kept her hands folded on her lap.

When I talk, I have a hard time looking at anything for more than about five seconds at a time. My hands fly all over the place, drawing pictures and carving punctuation ("" and ! and ?) in the air.

My friends sometimes joke about how much I talk with my hands, but to my knowledge no one has ever called me hyperactive. While I am sure I do not suffer from a clinical condition such as ADHD, I do have a fairly short attention span, which I credit for my penchant to wriggle at my desk and walk away from it as often as I can. Come to think of it, I know at least one other person whose byline sometimes appears in this newspaper who has described himself as having a short attention span, and who remains rail-thin in middle age. Maybe this is a blessing that comes from being easily bored.

It is likely that my genes rather than my mindset are the origin of my fidgety behavior, but the knowledge that fidgeting fights obesity fits with a pet idea I have about pursuing goals through small increments. Maybe because of my short attention span, I often shy away from a project when it looks like a mountain of work. But baby steps are my forte: if I can break up an objective into tiny parts that will succumb to constant, low-intensity effort, I will get the job done. This reminds me of Rocky Marciano, who defended his heavyweight title against several larger opponents with an assault of countless small jabs, round upon round, to set up the knockout blow.

Natural non-fidgeters like my former boss probably cannot start wriggling in their chairs by force of will. But the findings of the Mayo Clinic report do support the idea that we can all do small things, hour by hour, to break our sedentary habits. Park your car at the back of the lot and walk an extra 50 yards. Take standup stretch breaks at your desk every 30 minutes. If, like me, you keep a water bottle at your desk, get a smaller one so that you have to make more frequent trips to refill it. (And drink more water, period: it's good for you, and it will force you to make more short trips of another kind.)

"Forget" to take the remote control to your easy chair so that you have to get up to change the channel. When you come to a break in the action, whether a brief stopping point in your work or a commercial on television, get up and walk around the room.

But whatever you do, don't just sit there — fidget!

###

Stunning: Asia Grace

2006-02-02T19:26:00.000-06:00

Kevin Kelly is one of my favorite creators-of-all-trades. During the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, he spent a lot of time traveling in Asia, taking photos all the while.

My method of shooting was simple: smile, shoot first, ask questions later. It seemed to work. I spent enormous amounts of time hanging around places waiting for something to happen. Sometimes it did, often it didn't. Further years were spent in the back of local buses waiting to leave.

The result was a book and this Web site. Simple, beautiful.

Asia Grace.

Credit where it's due: GWB on oil dependency.

2006-02-02T08:00:00.000-06:00

For now, I plan to post very little on politics. I spend lots of time thinking about it, but at the moment I find it more valuable to talk about other things.

That having been said, I want to give kudos to President Bush--with whom I disagree about many, many things--for at least talking a good game about reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

The relevant quote from Tuesday's State of the Union address:

Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy. And here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world. The best way to break this addiction is through technology. Since 2001, we have spent nearly $10 billion to develop cleaner, cheaper, and more reliable alternative energy sources -- and we are on the threshold of incredible advances.
So tonight, I announce the Advanced Energy Initiative -- a 22-percent increase in clean-energy research -- at the Department of Energy, to push for breakthroughs in two vital areas. To change how we power our homes and offices, we will invest more in zero-emission coal-fired plants, revolutionary solar and wind technologies, and clean, safe nuclear energy. (Applause.)
We must also change how we power our automobiles. We will increase our research in better batteries for hybrid and electric cars, and in pollution-free cars that run on hydrogen. We'll also fund additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn, but from wood chips and stalks, or switch grass. Our goal is to make this new kind of ethanol practical and competitive within six years. (Applause.)
Breakthroughs on this and other new technologies will help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025. (Applause.) By applying the talent and technology of America, this country can dramatically improve our environment, move beyond a petroleum-based economy, and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past. (Applause.)

This is admirable, I'm glad Bush said it, and he should be commended for saying it. Here's hoping that he actually puts all of this into action in a meaningful way. But the skepticism of environmentalists is easy to understand.

For more, here is the Guardian's take on the subject.

Memory Lane: Crabtree Meadows

2006-02-01T22:19:00.000-06:00

The Internet might have been made to revisit places from your childhood. When I was a boy, my family would travel from our home in Alabama to the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Many of the years we went up, we stayed at the Crabtree Meadows campground. All of this came rushing back to me last weekend when my parents visited; we talked about those old family vacations--20 years ago, now--that were so much fun for us.

--An overview of hiking in the area.
--GORP's guide for hiking to Crabtree Falls.
--A photo of the falls.

The nostalgia overwhelms me! Maybe one of these days I'll take my own kids to the same campground . . .

Prolificity: Long levers.

2006-02-01T21:45:00.000-06:00

The estimable life-hacking site 43Folders has been running a series on "modest changes." The goal is to identify small, doable things that will help you run your life more enjoyably and productively.

Thinking from the perspective of prolific creative output, I want to adapt this slightly to talk about "long levers," the things you can do that have a disproportionate impact on your ability to produce. In my experience, prolific creators set up their world, consciously or unconsciously, to feed their creative processes. If they need silence to create, they will find a place in the woods; if they need hubbub, they will find a desk in the middle of a huge office or a huge city. But they find those conditions, and if they don't find them, they make them.

The best place to start looking for "long levers" is in the most basic parts of the creative equation. You write or paint or compose or code or choreograph or sculpt under some set of conditions: early or late, indoors or out, alone or with others, in silence or not. Think of your physical setting: Do you write better lounged on the bed, or sprawled on the couch? Or sitting upright with notebook in your lap? Or with your laptop at the kitchen table? Or at a desk with a lavish two-monitor setup? (This isn't a rhetorical question: go ahead and answer it for yourself.) You can repeat the process for tools, times of day, and so on.

Two notes: 1. If you want to be prolific, you ought to be able to produce anywhere, or at least under a variety of conditions. My own goal is to be a real "all-weather writer" who can produce regardless of external circumstances. 2. There is no one right answer, so spare yourself the grief of trying to conform to someone else's version of it. True, Trollope did his writing in long doses early in the morning--but John O'Hara started late and worked through midnight. John Updike uses legal pads; William Buckley used a typewriter until he became an early adopter of word processing. The way you produce is the way you produce: observe yourself, and figure out what works best.

For me, early rising is key--that's when I'm freshest. I get more done sitting in a straight chair at the kitchen table than I do sitting on the couch; I think it helps me to sit up straight and to have my papers in front of me where I can see them, rather than scattered along the cushions. I use a laptop relentlessly, but I'm at my best when I also use scraps of paper (the backs of envelopes, more or less) for jotting miniature outlines and to-do lists. I don't know why that is, but I know that it is--and so I use it to my advantage. In my case, the killer app for early-morning productivity is to unplug the DSL router ahead of time. The router is in the bedroom, so if I want to go back in to plug it in, I risk waking my wife, who is very much not a morning person. So I leave it unplugged, I stick to my knitting-of-sentences, and much more gets finished. I work in silence most of the time, though I have discovered the trick of wearing headphones some of the time at the office to discourage interruptions.

Prolific writers don't get that way because their typing speed is high, but because they spend a lot of highly productive time writing. If you're like me and have many competing obligations (work, family, school . . .) that constrain the hours in the day you can give to creation, it's the "highly productive" part that is crucial. Observe your performance under different conditions, and then choose the conditions that most conduce to "highly productive." These conditions are the long levers for a creator's daily productivity.

Creator: Paul Pope

2006-02-01T05:18:00.000-06:00

Wired profiles graphic novelist Paul Pope, who is the creative force behind the new Batman: Year 100 series. It's been a long time since I collected comics, but I've certainly spent many hundreds of hours of my life in the company of the Dark Knight, in all his narrative reinterpretations.

Because I've been away from comics for a long time, I don't know Pope's work. From the pictures included in the Wired piece, it may not be entirely my cup of tea. But already I like the guy, because he has style, he works hard, he's been uncompromising in putting forward his own vision, and especially because he's got tons and tons of ideas that he's busy turning into reality.

Since moving to New York in 1998, Pope has created four acclaimed graphic novels. There's Heavy Liquid and 100%, published under DC's hardcore Vertigo imprint. Their continued popularity keep Pope's name in the spotlight. And there's Escapo and THB (for "tri-hydro-bioxygenate," the chemical name for Pope's fictional purple biomechanical security guard), more personal works that he says he's especially proud of; they were released on a smaller scale through Horse Press, a publishing venture he started back in Ohio at age 21. The THB series, which New York publisher Henry Holt has expressed an interest in buying, could wind up being one of the world's longest comic books. At a projected 2,000-plus pages, the tome is his magnum opus - what he calls "my Dune." Pope expects to work on the serialized book, a romantic epic set on a terraformed Mars, for the rest of his career. He releases THB in driblets and is nearly halfway done.
He's also venturing beyond the gray pulp of the comic book. This summer, AdHouse Books will debut a coffee-table collection of his erotica. That'll be followed a year or so later by Henry Holt's release of his first kids' series, Battling Boy. The two-book, 400-page fairy tale revolves around a young hero who faces off against various demons in the city of Monstropolis.

The mix of projects . . . the huge magnum opus pulsing in the background . . . the mix of mainstream and underground art . . . the different genres--even if his work isn't to my personal taste, his mode of creation is an inspiration.

Presentations: Guy Kawasaki.

2006-01-31T18:34:00.000-06:00

Kawasaki is an author, speaker, Macintosh evangelist from back in the day, and now an outstanding blogger. He's known for giving great presentations, and now he's been addressing different aspects of presentations in a series of recent posts.

"The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint"
"Lessons from Steve [Jobs]'s Keynote"
"How to Get a Standing Ovation"
"How to Be a Demo God"

If you give presentations, all of these are worth reading and re-reading -- and, for that matter, so is the rest of his blog, which is why I've put it in my permanent links on the right-hand side of this page.

Garr Reynolds has also ably summarized the 'Kawasaki Method' of presentation.

Commonplace: Kieschnick

2006-01-31T12:56:00.000-06:00

"Whatever you do, just make sure you throw every pitch with conviction."
—Brooks Kieschnick

(Kieschnick was the star pitcher and slugger at the University of Texas when I was an undergraduate there. He wasn't quite good enough as either a pitcher or a hitter to stick in a full-time role in the major leagues, but he has enjoyed some success in recent years as a combination reliever/pinch-hitter. Given this quotation above, which I took from a sports feature on him some time ago, I'd say he has his head on straight, too. How many of us fail to follow this advice in our day-to-day lives?)

Innovation: Screensavers.

2006-01-31T08:35:00.000-06:00

In my experience, interesting new ideas often spring from the juxtaposition of familiar ideas. One way that I present myself with these juxtapositions during my working day is by taking advantage of the screensaver on my dual-monitor computer setup at work. (If you've never tried two monitors -- wow, it's amazing how much more efficient it can make you.)

The free screensaver I use is called gPhotoShow. Once you install it, the program points to a folder of your choosing and rotates randomly through all the image files the folder contains. If you use two monitors, it rotates through the photos in different order on the two screens. You can change the settings to rotate through pictures faster or slower, have them appear with fancy wipes or dissolves, etc.

Whenver I come across interesting images in my Internet travels, I save them into my pictures folder. Then gPhotoShow takes care of the rest. If you end up with a nautical painting by Turner next to a nautical painting by Rembrandt, that might not fire up your innovation engine. But maybe a Lichtenstein next to a Velazquez will. I include not just paintings but photographs, commercial graphics, sports images, and anything else that I like.

Housekeeping: Comments turned on.

2006-01-31T07:50:00.000-06:00

After a bit of wrangling, gentle readers, I have convinced Blogger to turn on the comments function throughout this blog. Please do use it -- I welcome your feedback.

Also, if anyone knows a simple way to install a page-hits counter here, your technology-challenged correspondent would appreciate the help.

Prolificity: Keep your chops up.

2006-01-30T14:47:00.000-06:00

"Keeping my chops up" has stuck in my head ever since I read this article in The New Yorker in 2004. Here's the relevant quote:

“I try to keep my chops up,” Glover told Jane Goldberg, for Dance Magazine, “so I can just be.”

That's Glover as in Savion Glover, the great tap virtuoso of our age. His point is that he works hard to keep his technique in line--then doesn't have to think about it when it comes time to perform.

This matches my experience of writing. When I'm writing every day--writing to some endpoint, not just jotting down disconnected thoughts--the words flow more easily, and the prose itself ends up at a higher quality. I'm reminded of an interview with Janet Evans that I heard when she made her debut at the Seoul Olympics. Evans said that she tended to break her coach's prohibition on swimming seven days a week, because she found that missing a day in the pool threw her off her (typhonic) rhythm when she got back in the water.

If you want to produce a lot, work to produce something all the time, not by spurts or by seasons.

"Nulla dies sine linea." -- Pliny

Decision: Jeff Bewkes.

2006-01-30T14:37:00.000-06:00

I'm fascinated by Jeff Bewkes, the #2 guy at Time Warner who headed up the HBO hit factory in the 1990s/early 2000s. Fortune has a short feature on him near the bottom of this page.

Key excerpt relevant to the faculty of decision:

"I don't want to make somebody uncomfortable by being frank," he says. "But you're trying to find as much transparency as you can. It's an interesting combination to be as open as you can and as loose as you can, but you must make decisions as fast as possible. You keep the decisions transparent, and that allows you to correct them, because nobody figures this stuff out in one shot. My theory is iteration: You go, you talk, you act, and you check back on how did it work. You adjust course as you go, and it turns out that's the fastest way to move. So you're always moving and you're always deciding and you're always getting new information. You can actually provoke information by doing things that you can't figure out if you just sit there thinking."

Bewkes's idea of constant decisions and constant feedback meshes well with the concept of O.O.D.A.