E R I K V I D A L

The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered:

Strange Horizons: The Ten Stupidest Utopias!

If utopia is supposed to be the ideal and perfect place, where everyone lives in harmony, then why do so many of them turn out to suck? To get an answer, let's go to the source: Thomas More, whose 1516 travelogue Utopia gave us the word, a pun meaning "no place" and "perfect place." More's Utopia describes an island where everyone is happy and smiling and living in divinely inspired synchronization. Told with verve and a sly wit, Utopia is one of the foundational texts of contemporary science fiction as well as utopian thought.

But More wasn't just a writer of fantastic tales. He was also a politician and one-time Undersheriff of London. As such, More was not only an enthusiastic upholder of a radically unequal and oppressive social order, but also an advocate for burning 16th century heretics. Live by the sword, die by the sword: in 1535 Henry VIII beheaded More and anyone else who didn't support his accession to Supreme Head of the Church of England. The violence of More's historical period is never far from the surface of More's island Utopia, where a single act of adultery is punishable by slavery and serial adulterers are punished with death. If More's narrator had looked past the happy smiling faces of Utopia, what fear and violence might he have seen?

Yet utopia—a word that has come to represent a hope that the future could surpass the present—persists. "As long as necessity is socially dreamed," Guy Debord says in his 1973 film The Society of the Spectacle, "dreaming will remain a social necessity." Debord meant that in conditions of inequality and injustice, people will always imagine a better place. What constitutes "better" is, however, a matter of much dispute. We dream our fears as well as hopes, reflecting all the agonies and contradictions of the waking world; in dreams, demons rise from our darkest places. This is the dangerous element in utopian aspiration, the monster behind the smiling face. Utopias can embody the highest hopes of humankind and frameworks for continuous evolution, but they can also reflect our worst fears and sickest appetites—not to mention a mania for power and control that is latent in every person. "What a strange scene you describe and what strange prisoners," says Glaucon, Socrates' disciple, in Plato's Republic, the template for the stupid utopia. "They are just like us," answers the master.

 

Plato's Republic

Told in the form of a dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon, one of the earliest and most primitive utopias is all about limits, discipline, and hierarchy. The number of inhabitants of the Republic, pronounced Socrates, should be limited to 5,040 in order to maximize conformity and control. In this most "just" of cities, women and children are property, for how could they be otherwise? "For men born and educated like our citizens," Socrates says, "the only way of arriving at the right conclusion about the possession and use of women and children is to follow the path on which we originally started, when we said that the men were to be the guardians and watchdogs of the herd." Quite naturally, the State would be ruled over by men most like Socrates himself, philosopher-kings, "the best of our citizens." This guardian class would live communally and apart from the herd: "having wives and children in common, they must live in common houses and meet at common meals."

Exactly how stupid is Plato's Republic, and who am I to call one of history's greatest philosophers "stupid"? Is Plato's time simply too different from our own for us to pass judgment? I don't think so, for The Republic lives on in the rhetoric of contemporary political movements of both right and left—every elitist and technocratic fantasy of our time has grown from the seed of The Republic. Plato would not have understood the term "dehumanization" as we understand it—he'd never, of course, seen a factory floor or a gas chamber—but when his ideas have been enacted in places like the Soviet Union, Mussolini's Italy, or modern state-capitalist China, they have proven brutally dehumanizing, his apparat of "guardians" thoroughly corrupted by power.

Though protected from criticism by the moldy gauze of antiquity, Plato and his teacher/mouthpiece Socrates are not so different from us; they had their fears and prejudices just as we have ours. We still live in the fabled cave Socrates describes in The Republic, watching the shadows on the walls and thinking them reality. He thought that only the philosopher could throw off his shackles in the sensible world and leave the cave for the heaven of Ideas; the philosopher alone could wield this pure knowledge in ruling the Republic. In didn't occur to Plato/Socrates that the World of Forms beyond the cave might only be another shadow or even hallucination. Plato could not escape the trap into which any utopian can fall: he didn't believe enough in his own fallibility.

 

The City on the Hill

More than just a source of gold, in the Christian imagination the New World represented the triumph of the natural ideal over a decadent European culture. Naked and innocent "Indians," living in communitarian grace, appeared immediately in the writings of Conquistadors and would serve to bolster a utopian image in Europe of the New World. (This chimera persists, mutated, in New Age idealizations of indigenous culture.) When the natives wouldn't conform to that image, in due course it became necessary destroy their villages so that their souls might be saved. "They are not fit to command or lead," said one exemplary Catholic of those he deemed his racial inferiors, "but to be commanded and lead."

Up North, their Calvinist counterparts arrived and set about creating a Protestant utopia of everlasting hierarchy. "We must consider that we shall be a city upon a hill," preached Massachusetts governor John Winthrop. "God Almighty in His most holy and wise providence, hath soe disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poore, some high and eminent in power and dignitie; others mean and in submission." The New World was to be More's Utopia, at last made real. In Salem sixty years later, witches would burn. A Native American apocalypse was not far behind, followed by Filipinos, El Salvadorans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, and anyone else who ran afoul of this utopian marriage of theocratic and imperial aspiration.

 

Nueva Germania

The flip side of the myth of the Noble, Adamic Savage is the racist scapegoat. It is historically, pathetically, frighteningly commonplace for a certain kind of individual to absolve him- or herself of all evil by assigning it exclusively to another racial group or social outcast: Jews, gypsies, Tutsis, Arabs, queers, etc. In such a view, achieving utopia becomes a simple matter of liquidating or expelling the offending group. In the late 19th century, Elisabeth Nietzsche-Förster—sister of Friedrich Nietzsche, who described her as a "vengeful anti-Semitic goose"—sailed with 14 German families to Paraguay to found a racially pure, socialist, vegan utopia along the remote Aguaraya River. The settlers sought "an authentic rebirth of racial feeling," but things didn't work out as well as they'd hoped. Crops didn't grow; sand fleas and snakes nipped at their pure alabaster ankles; many fell victim to malaria. Within two years Elisabeth's husband Bernhard Förster, leader of the colony and a vicious anti-Semite, drank and poisoned himself to death. Elisabeth slunk back to Germany, where after her famous brother's death she ruthlessly reedited his works so that the Nazis would adopt him as their pet philosopher.

Meanwhile, back in South America, Nueva Germania's school, church, and opera house sank into ruin. After World War II, it reportedly sheltered fugitive Nazi war criminals, including Dr. Josef Mengele, who conducted horrible experiments on inmates at Auschwitz. Today, Nueva Germania is still a town, one of Paraguay's poorest, of several thousand subsistence farmers. Some of the old people still speak German and sing their German songs. I have read that it is difficult to tell many of them apart from the natives; over the past century, the Aryan settlers have interbred with the darker-skinned natives. Perhaps the ghosts of Elisabeth and Bernhard Förster wander among this town of half-breeds; if there's any justice, it will be their own private version of hell.

 

Herland

"We have bred a race of psychic hybrids," said early 20th century feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "and the moral qualities of hybrids are well known." Whatever does she mean? "Marry an Anglo-Saxon to an African or Oriental," she writes elsewhere, "and their child has a dual nature." This, we are led to understand, would be a bad thing. While contemporaries like Looking Backward author Edward Bellamy foresaw a globalized future in which humanity would blend together, economically, politically, and sexually, Gilman deeply feared such a development. She wasn't alone; her era gave birth to hysterical racial fears manifest in discriminatory immigration laws and crackpot forms of eugenics. Her 1915 utopian novel Herland depicts a colony of women "of Aryan stock, once in contact with the best civilization," isolated from the rest of the world but surrounded by the indigenous people of South America. The women reproduce through parthenogenesis, giving birth only to girls.

The result is, of course, a pure and perfect society: "You see," says the castaway male narrator, "they had no wars. They had no kings, and no priests, and no aristocracies. They were sisters, and as they grew, they grew together; not by competition, but by united action." See what can be accomplished if you just get rid of the biological group that most offends your sensibilities? A racially and sexually homogeneous society will, according to Gilman, quite naturally, and with apparently very little effort, blossom into utopia. While Euro-American feminist fans of Gilman, whose story "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a staple of women's-studies classes, would prefer to separate out Gilman's racism from her brand of feminism, in fact the two are inseparable. Gilman is not so different a figure from Elisabeth Nietzsche-Förster; perhaps in death they both haunt Nueva Germania, united in their ideal of sisterhood.

 

The Radiant City

The Industrial Revolution gave the world a new idea of the ideal society. "Try sniffing the abominable stench behind the piles of books," wrote Japanese Futurist Hirato Renkichi in 1921. "How many times superior is the fresh scent of gasoline!" This is a line that Beatty, fire chief of Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, would have loved. In the first three decades of the 20th century, an architectural aesthetic emerged that demanded absolute mastery over nature and necessity. Movements like Futurism and Constructivism worshipped machines, fetishized war ("war—the world's only hygiene," wrote Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti), rejected the burdens of history, and embraced totalitarian governments like Fascist Italy or Soviet Russia. Their modernist allegiance to technology concealed a cavernous, angry irrationalism.

In the 1920s, Futurism mutated into more rigorous and less flamboyant architectural and design movements like the Bauhaus. The Taylorist urban designs of that period were each a nightmare of mathematical perfection, but few went as far as the Swiss theoretician Le Corbusier. His 1935 book The Radiant City was dedicated, simply and tellingly, "To Authority"—this during the years of Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler. To Le Corbusier, a world of standardized building materials and assembly-line production required military-style industrial and social centralization. The inhabitants of his ideal Radiant City—"a machine for living in"—would reside in self-contained high-rises containing fitness, cultural, educational, and social facilities that would unite all social classes, cultures, and spheres of life in a single geometric grid. It is in many ways the natural descendent of severe, mathematical Renaissance utopias like Campanella's 1623 City of the Sun, in which a priest class, reminiscent of Plato's philosopher-kings, would monitor the city's virtue from a tower at its center. In the 20th century this social and architectural vision would be harshly criticized even as it shaped buildings throughout the First and Second Worlds, such as self-contained high-rises on the outskirts of London (dissected by J.G. Ballard in his 1975 novel High-Rise), Czech communist panelaky, corporate office parks, and federal housing projects. Each imagined a kind of gleaming social egalitarianism; in time they crumbled and came to express savage social and economic disparities.

 

New Babylon

The situationist "New Babylon" negated Le Corbusier's grid even as it embraced his ambition to reduce and erase the individual through environmental manipulation. Led by philosopher and filmmaker Guy Debord, the Situationist International was founded in 1957 to discover new ways to live—called "situations"—in dystopian capitalist cities, aiming "to form a unitary human milieu in which separations such as work/leisure or public/private will finally be dissolved." Sculptor and architect Constant (one name only) was one of the few situationists to attempt a utopian projection of their ideas. Sounding more like a bong-hitting Jules Verne than a Marxist builder of boulevards, Constant rhapsodized about a city he called New Babylon, where labyrinthine, modifiable sections induce unified ambience through the control of sound, lighting, and weather. Increasing automation, he writes, "will create a need for leisure" that demands "a continuous construction on pillars . . . in which premises for living, pleasure, etc., are suspended . . . leaving the ground free for circulation and public meetings." Space travel, muses Constant, "may influence this development, since bases established on other planets will immediately raise the problem of sheltered cities." Liberated from work and cut off from nature, the noncitizens of Constant's city live in a continuous drift without a fixed place of residence.

It's fascinating, but there is something repellent in the universalizing totality of Constant's New Babylon. There are no neighbors in New Babylon, no dirt, no greenery, no culture outside the situation itself—nothing to sully the cigarette-smoking perfection of its Parisian ideal. New Babylon actually had a great deal in common with supposed enemies like Le Corbusier (criticized for "cadaverous rigidity"), particularly in its yearning for technology to liberate humanity from nature and our own sense of self, striving to mold the subject through environmental manipulation. In many ways, both the Radiant City and New Babylon are fairly typical mid-20th century science-fiction cities: gleaming, skin-deep Epcot Centers deeply estranged from nature, suspicious of true community, and fearful of individuality.

Like many other vanguardist groups of the left, the Situationist International sought to achieve doctrinal purity by constantly expelling members who didn't fit with the leader's vision. Constant was pressured to resign from the S.I. in 1960, his urban designs criticized by Debord as "public relations for the integration of the masses into capitalist technological civilization," but his work remains integral to the situationist legacy.

 

The Postwar American Suburb

Historian Robert Fishman calls American suburbia a "bourgeois utopia," whose hopes for community stability were founded "on the shifting sands of land speculation," backed up by racially discriminatory covenants and lending standards. The postwar American suburb, each a Nueva Germania of the soul, organized men's life around commutes and women's life around the home: the result was absent fathers, isolated mothers, and alienated children, who seldom knew anyone of a different race. In providing for the material needs of the growing middle class, the suburb created social and spiritual cavities that numerous social movements—from the 1960s New Left to today's Christian fundamentalism—have tried to fill.

According to census data, today the middle-income suburb is actually disappearing, drowning between the Scylla of racially exclusive gated communities and the Charybdis of ethnically diverse subdivisions. The poorest suffer from a lack of public services, lousy schools, and little in the way of parks or squares that might provide some sense of community. The most affluent suburbs are often populated by "relos," executive nomads who move every few years to keep their careers on track, never putting down roots, never investing in the community beyond the gated neighborhoods in which they own their homes. "There's no there there," said Gertrude Stein; the American suburb is still the definitive "no place," an empty parking lot sitting where our past and future should be.

 

The High Frontier

"Every day of continued exponential growth brings the world system closer to the ultimate limits of that growth," writes a team of MIT scientists in the classic 1972 study Limits of Growth. "A decision to do nothing is a decision to increase the risk of collapse." For Princeton physicist Gerard K. O'Neill—and for a generation of astrofuturists—the solution lay in space colonization. In his 1977 book The High Frontier, O'Neill, sounding like a real-estate salesman, paints an idyllic picture of high-orbital suburbs complete with shopping malls, golf courses, manicured lawns, and perpetual Southern California weather. In classic utopian fashion, O'Neill brings his future to life through a letter-home narration by new space colonists. "You asked about our government," write the narrators Edward and Jenny. "Legally, all communities are under the jurisdiction of the Energy Satellites Corporation (ENSAT) which was set up as a multinational profit making consortium. ENSAT keeps us on a fairly loose rein as long as productivity and profits remain high." Though there are company town-hall meetings, we are assured that everyone is "much too busy to make a hobby of electioneering." While this anemic, privatized version of democracy may sound ideal to O'Neill, his high frontier makes my blood run cold. As with the visitor to More's Utopia, Edward and Jenny might do well to ask themselves what violence lies behind the marketing.

In the 1981 sequel, The High Frontier, 2081: A Hopeful View of the Human Future, O'Neill takes his narrator Eric to a utopian Earth that has been radically changed by solar power and high-orbital manufacturing. O'Neill envisions a garden suburb called Waterford, Pennsylvania, which is enclosed, like the Radiant City and New Babylon, in a temperature-controlled dome. In Waterford, surveillance and security are total: all citizens wear "credit anklets" that monitor all their movements while facilitating purchase of consumer goods—a high-tech version of Campanella's City of the Sun. Culturally, Waterford is as white-bread as Grosse Pointe, Michigan. "The most successful nations [are] those with homogenous populations," opines one of Eric's guides, "because homogeneity eliminated one source of violent conflict."

O'Neill would like for us to buy the plot of land he's selling, but I would advise the reader to first spend some time on his islands in space. Of course, you don't have to get on a spaceship to do it. Just hop in your car. Drive until you see a Wal-Mart. Get off the highway. Keep driving. When the place you're in looks like any other place, then stop—there should be plenty of parking. Get out and take a look around. Is this really the future that you want?

 

Pallas

Since the publication of Robert Heinlein's 1966 novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress—in which a lunar colony secedes from earth to establish an anarchocapitalist society—libertarian novelists have turned to imagining what writer Ken MacLeod has called "libertarias," utopias that allow individuals to freely pursue their self-interest without the interference of a state. Unlike most classic utopias, libertarias seek Darwinian competition instead of peace and harmony. The result may not be a "good" society in the conventional sense, but it is one that allows "man to be true to his nature as a predator," as L. Neil Smith puts it. Smith's 1993 novel Pallas is set on an asteroid colony established by billionaire industrialist "Wild Bill" Curringer, based on the philosophy of Mirelle Stein (who is obviously a stand-in for philosopher-dominatrix Ayn Rand). On their sprawling homesteads and in their citified saloons, each well-armed Pallatian cultivates a folksy accent and tinkers with quaintly Victorian machinery, having no truck with laws or government. The only "worm in the apple" of Pallas is the Greeley Memorial Utopian Project, a Stalinist commune governed by the villainous Gibson Altman.

Filled with unintentionally amusing scenarios and chapter-long rants against vegetarianism, agriculture, and public transportation, Pallas tells the rough-and-tumble tale of Emerson Ngu, who escapes the Greeley Project to become the wealthy and sharp-shooting hero of the asteroid. The novel's explicit nostalgia for the Wild West would be kitschy fun if it weren't so rigidly ideological. Smith is like most American libertarian sci-fi writers in that he's essentially a small-town boy trapped in a big world populated by people and ideas he doesn't understand, but you don't need to agree with Smith's politics to understand his book's appeal. In a world of limits imposed by nature and history, libertarias like Pallas—or, for that matter, O'Neill's High Frontier—represent a powerful vision of escape.

 

The Internet

When William Gibson coined the word cyberspace in his 1984 novel Neuromancer, he conceived of "the Net" as more than a mere communications medium. For Gibson's lumpen, punk rock characters, cyberspace is utopia, literally "no place," but also a Platonic "consensual hallucination" and escape from the stricken, corporate-run sprawl outside. Within two decades of Gibson's prescient novel, the dot-com era turned the San Francisco Bay Area into a vast Potemkin village of 24-year-old millionaires and 24-hour raves, spawning a wave of utopian nonsense unseen in America since the late 1960s. The Internet became a virtual redux of Fishman's bourgeois utopia, the information superhighway as digital libertaria.

"Over the next decade, computer networks will expand their bandwidth by factors of thousands and reconstruct the entire US economy in their image," wrote George Gilder, the right-wing Timothy Leary of the Internet boom, in 1994. "TV will expire and transpire into a new cornucopia of choice and empowerment . . . Hollywood and Wall Street will totter and diffuse to all points of the nation and the globe. . . . The most deprived ghetto child in the most blighted project will gain educational opportunities exceeding those of today's suburban preppie." Instead, within ten years the hallucinatory hype ended in a wave of lay-offs, litigation, and consolidation of media ownership. Today the Internet looks less like utopia and more like a battlefield that reflects all the conflicts of the real world. Gibson's original dystopian vision has turned out to be truer than Gilder's imagined utopia, but this should not come as a surprise. Utopia is never more than what we are; the people in them will always be just like us.

via www.strangehorizons.com

The Most Merciful Thing in the World (According to Lovecraft)

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents... Some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age.

-- HP Lovecraft, Call of Cthulhu, 1926

Are You...?

Seth Godin: What's High School For?

Perhaps we could endeavor to teach our future the following:

• How to focus intently on a problem until it's solved.
• The benefit of postponing short-term satisfaction in exchange for long-term success.
• How to read critically.
• The power of being able to lead groups of peers without receiving clear delegated authority.
• An understanding of the extraordinary power of the scientific method, in just about any situation or endeavor.
• How to persuasively present ideas in multiple forms, especially in writing and before a group.
• Project management. Self-management and the management of ideas, projects and people.
• Personal finance. Understanding the truth about money and debt and leverage.
• An insatiable desire (and the ability) to learn more. Forever.
• Most of all, the self-reliance that comes from understanding that relentless hard work can be applied to solve problems worth solving.

via sethgodin.typepad.com

You Are Not So Smart: Procrastination (A Must Read For Writers)

The Misconception: You procrastinate because you are lazy and can’t manage your time well.

The Truth: Procrastination is fueled by weakness in the face of impulse and a failure to think about thinking.

Netflix reveals something about your own behavior you should have noticed by now, something which keeps getting between you and the things you want to accomplish.

If you have Netflix, especially if you stream it to your TV, you tend to gradually accumulate a cache of hundreds of films you think you’ll watch one day. This is a bigger deal than you think.

Take a look at your queue. Why are there so damn many documentaries and dramatic epics collecting virtual dust in there? By now you could draw the cover art to “Dead Man Walking” from memory. Why do you keep passing over it?

Psychologists actually know the answer to this question, to why you keep adding movies you will never watch to your growing collection of future rentals, and its the same reason you believe you will eventually do what’s best for yourself in all the other parts of your life, but rarely do.

A study conducted in 1999 by Read, Loewenstein and Kalyanaraman had people pick three movies out of a selection of 24. Some were lowbrow like “Sleepless in Seattle” or “Mrs. Doubtfire.” Some were highbrow like “Schindler’s List” or “The Piano.” In other words, it was a choice between movies which promised to be fun and forgettable or would be memorable but require more effort to absorb.

After picking, the subjects had to watch one movie right away. They then had to watch another in two days and a third two days after that.

Most people picked Schindler’s List as one of their three. They knew it was a great movie because all their friends said it was. All the reviews were glowing, and it earned dozens of the highest awards. Most didn’t, however, choose to watch it on the first day.

Instead, people tended to pick lowbrow movies on the first day. Only 44 percent went for the heavier stuff first. The majority tended to pick comedies like “The Mask” or action flicks like “Speed” when they knew they had to watch it forthwith.

Planning ahead, people picked highbrow movies 63 percent of the time for their second movie and 71 percent of the time for their third.

When they ran the experiment again but told subjects they had to watch all three selections back-to-back, “Schindler’s List” was 13 times less likely to be chosen at all.

The researchers had a hunch people would go for the junk food first, but plan healthy meals in the future.

Many studies over the years have shown you tend to have time-inconsistent preferences. When asked if you would rather have fruit or cake one week from now, you will usually say fruit. A week later when the slice of German chocolate and the apple are offered, you are statistically more likely to go for the cake.

This is why your Netflix queue is full of great films you keep passing over for “Family Guy.” With Netflix, the choice of what to watch right now and what to watch later is like candy bars versus carrot sticks. When you are planning ahead, your better angels point to the nourishing choices, but in the moment you go for what tastes good.

As behavioral economist Katherine Milkman has pointed out, this is why grocery stores put candy right next to the checkout.

This is sometimes called present bias – being unable to grasp what you want will change over time, and what you want now isn’t the same thing you will want later. Present bias explains why you buy lettuce and bananas only to throw them out later when you forget to eat them. This is why when you are a kid you wonder why adults don’t own more toys.

Present bias is why you’ve made the same resolution for the tenth year in a row, but this time you mean it. You are going to lose weight and forge a six-pack of abs so ripped you could deflect arrows.

You weigh yourself. You buy a workout DVD. You order a set of weights.

One day you have the choice between running around the block or watching a movie, and you choose the movie. Another day you are out with friends and can choose a cheeseburger or a salad. You choose the cheeseburger.

The slips become more frequent, but you keep saying you’ll get around to it. You’ll start again on Monday, which becomes a week from Monday. Your will succumbs to a death by a thousand cuts. By the time winter comes it looks like you already know what your resolution will be the next year.

Procrastination manifests itself within every aspect of your life.

You wait until the last minute to buy Christmas presents. You put off seeing the dentist, or getting that thing checked out by the doctor, or filing your taxes. You forget to register to vote. You need to get an oil change. There is a pile of dishes getting higher in the kitchen. Shouldn’t you wash clothes now so you don’t have to waste a Sunday cleaning every thing you own?

Perhaps the stakes are higher than choosing to play Angry Birds instead of doing sit-ups. You might have a deadline for a grant proposal, or a dissertation, or a book.

You’ll get around to it. You’ll start tomorrow. You’ll take the time to learn a foreign language, to learn how to play an instrument. There’s a growing list of books you will read one day.

Before you do though, maybe you should check your email. You should head over to Facebook too, just to get it out of the way. A cup of coffee would probably get you going, it won’t take long to go grab one. Maybe just a few episodes of that show you like.

You keep promising yourself this will be the year you do all these things. You know your life would improve if you would just buckle down and put forth the effort.

You can try to fight it back. You can buy a daily planner and a to-do list application for your phone. You can write yourself notes and fill out schedules. You can become a productivity junkie surrounded by instruments to make life more efficient, but these tools alone will not help, because the problem isn’t you are a bad manager of your time – you are a bad tactician in the war inside your brain.

Procrastination is such a pervasive element of the human experience there are over 600 books for sale promising to snap you out of your bad habits, and this year alone 120 new books on the topic were published. Obviously this is a problem everyone admits to, so why is it so hard to defeat?

To explain, consider the power of marshmallows.

Walter Mischel conducted experiments at Stanford University throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s in which he and his researchers offered a bargain to children.

The kids sat at a table in front of a bell and some treats. They could pick a pretzel, a cookie or a giant marshmallow. They told the little boys and girls they could either eat the treat right away or wait a few minutes. If they waited, they would double their payoff and get two treats. If they couldn’t wait, they had to ring the bell after which the researcher would end the experiment.

Some made no attempt at self-control and just ate right away. Others stared intensely at the object of their desire until they gave in to temptation. Many writhed in agony, twisting their hands and feet while looking away. Some made silly noises.

In the end, a third couldn’t resist.

What started as an experiment about delayed gratification has now, decades later, yielded a far more interesting set of revelations about metacognition – thinking about thinking.

Mischel has followed the lives of all his subjects through high-school, college and into adulthood where they accumulated children, mortgages and jobs.

The revelation from this research is kids who were able to overcome their desire for short-term reward in favor of a better outcome later weren’t smarter than the other kids, nor were they less gluttonous. They just had a better grasp of how to trick themselves into doing what was best for them.

They watched the wall instead of looking at the food. They tapped their feet instead of smelling the confection. The wait was torture for all, but some knew it was going to be impossible to just sit there and stare at the delicious, gigantic marshmallow without giving in.

The younger the child, the worse they were at metacognition. Any parent can tell you little kids aren’t the best at self-control. Among the older age groups some were better at devising schemes for avoiding their own weak wills, and years later seem to have been able to use that power to squeeze more out of life.

“Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.”

- Jonah Lehrer from his piece in the New Yorker, “Don’t”

Thinking about thinking, this is the key. In the struggle between should versus want, some people have figured out something crucial – want never goes away.

Procrastination is all about choosing want over should because you don’t have a plan for those times when you can expect to be tempted.

You are really bad at predicting your future mental states. In addition, you are terrible at choosing between now or later. Later is murky place where anything could go wrong.

If I were to offer you $50 now or $100 in a year, which would you take? Clearly, you’ll take the $50 now. After all, who knows what could happen in a year, right?

Ok, so what if I instead offered you $50 in five years or $100 in six years? Nothing has changed other than adding a delay, but now it feels just as natural to wait for the $100. After all, you already have to wait a long time.

A being of pure logic would think, “more is more,” and pick the higher amount every time, but you aren’t a being of pure logic. Faced with two possible rewards, you are more likely to take the one which you can enjoy now over one you will enjoy later – even if the later reward is far greater.

In the moment, rearranging the folders on your computer seems a lot more rewarding than some task due in a month which might cost you your job or your diploma, so you wait until the night before.

If you considered which would be more valuable in a month – continuing to get your paycheck or having an immaculate desktop – you would pick the greater reward.

The tendency to get more rational when you are forced to wait is called hyperbolic discounting because your dismissal of the better payoff later diminishes over time and makes a nice slope on a graph.

Evolutionarily it makes sense to always go for the sure bet now; your ancestors didn’t have to think about retirement or heart disease. Your brain evolved in a world where you probably wouldn’t live to meet your grandchildren. The stupid monkey part of your brain wants to gobble up candy bars and go deeply into debt. Old you, if there even is one, can deal with those things.

Hyperbolic discounting makes later an easy place to throw all the things don’t want to deal with, but you also over-commit to future plans for the same reason. You run out of time to get things done because you think in the future, that mysterious fantastical realm of possibilities, you’ll have more free time than you do now.

“The future is always ideal: The fridge is stocked, the weather clear, the train runs on schedule and meetings end on time. Today, well, stuff happens.”

- Hara Estroff Marano in Psychology Today

One of the best ways to see how bad you are at coping with procrastination is to notice how you deal with deadlines.

Let’s imagine you are in a class where you must complete three research papers in three weeks, and the instructor is willing to allow you to set your own due dates.

You can choose to turn in your papers once a week, or two on the first week and one on the second. You can turn them all in on the last day, or you can spread them out. You could even choose to turn in all three at the end of the first week and be done. It’s up to you, but once you pick you have to stick with your choice. If you miss your deadlines, you get a big fat zero.

How would you pick?

The most rational choice would be the last day for every paper. It gives you plenty of time to work hard on all three and turn in the best possible work. This seems like a wise choice, but you are not so smart.

The same choice was offered to a selection of students in a 2002 study conducted by Klaus Wertenbroch and Dan Ariely.

They set up three classes, and each had three weeks to finish three papers. Class A had to turn in all three papers on the last day of class, Class B had to pick three different deadlines and stick to them, and Class C had to turn in one paper a week.

Which class had the better grades?

Class C, the one with three specific deadlines, did the best. Class B, which had to pick deadlines ahead of time but had complete freedom, did the second best, and the group whose only deadline was the last day, Class A, did the worst.

Students who could pick any three deadlines tended to spread them out at about one week apart on their own. They knew they would procrastinate, so they set up zones in which they would be forced to perform. Still, overly optimistic outliers who either waited until the last minute or chose unrealistic goals pulled down the overall class grade.

Students with no guidelines at all tended to put off their work until the last week for all three papers.

The ones who had no choice and were forced to spread out their procrastination did the best because the outliers were eliminated. Those people who weren’t honest with themselves about their own tendencies to put off their work or who were too confident didn’t have a chance to fool themselves.

Interestingly, these results suggest that although almost everyone has problems with procrastination, those who recognize and admit their weakness are in a better position to utilize available tools for precommitment and by doing so, help themselves overcome it.

- Dan Ariely, from his book “Predictably Irrational”

If you fail to believe you will procrastinate or become idealistic about how awesome you are at working hard and managing your time you never develop a strategy for outmaneuvering your own weakness.

Procrastination is an impulse; it’s buying candy at the checkout. Procrastination is also hyperbolic discounting, taking the sure thing in the present over the caliginous prospect some day far away.

You must be adept at thinking about thinking to defeat yourself at procrastination. You must realize there is the you who sits there now reading this, and there is a you sometime in the future who will be influenced by a different set of ideas and desires, a you in a different setting where an alternate palette of brain functions will be available for painting reality.

The now you may see the costs and rewards at stake when it comes time to choose studying for the test instead of going to the club, eating the salad instead of the cupcake, writing the article instead of playing the video game.

The trick is to accept the now you will not be the person facing those choices, it will be the future you – a person who can’t be trusted. Future-you will give in, and then you’ll go back to being now-you and feel weak and ashamed. Now-you must trick future-you into doing what is right for both parties.

This is why food plans like Nutrisystem work for many people. Now-you commits to spending a lot of money on a giant box of food which future-you will have to deal with. People who get this concept use programs like Freedom, which disables Internet access on a computer for up to eight hours, a tool allowing now-you to make it impossible for future-you to sabotage your work.

Capable psychonauts who think about thinking, about states of mind, about set and setting, can get things done not because they have more will power, more drive, but because they know productivity is a game of cat and mouse versus a childish primal human predilection for pleasure and novelty which can never be excised from the soul. Your effort is better spent outsmarting yourself than making empty promises through plugging dates into a calendar or setting deadlines for push ups.

via youarenotsosmart.com

Cal Newport: From CEOs to Opera Singers – How to Harness the “Superstar Effect”

Sumo stable in Tokyo, Japan: you don’t need to be a superstar to use the Superstar Effect.

Earlier this year, just 2,300 of 32,000 applicants to Stanford University were accepted — a rate of 7.2%, the lowest in the school's history.

The students who survived this screening are phenomenally accomplished. A quarter had SAT math scores higher than 780, and over 90% had high school G.P.A.'s above 3.75, which works out, more or less, to straight A's over four years of schooling. And these weren't easy A's: the average applicant to a top-tier university takes an overwhelming volume of demanding AP or IB-level courses. (Not surprising, considering that the Stanford admissions departments ranks the "rigor of secondary school record" as "very important" in their decision.)

If you eliminate recruited athletes and the children of the rich and famous from this pool — categories that receive special consideration — these numbers become even starker. In short, for the average, middle-class American high school senior, applying to Stanford is like playing the lottery.

Which is why Michael Silverman proves baffling.

When Michael, a student from Paradise Valley, Arizona, applied to Stanford, his G.P.A. put him in the bottom 10% of accepted students. His SAT scores fell similarly short. "Standardized testing isn't my strong point," he told me. Perhaps more surprising, Michael avoided the crushing course load that diminishes the will of so many college hopefuls, instead taking only a single AP course during the dreaded junior year. He kept his extracurricular schedule equally clean — joining no clubs or sports and dedicating his attention to no more than one outside project at any given time.

Michael's rejection of the no pain, no gain ethos surrounding American college admissions is perhaps best summarized by his habit of ending each school day with a 1 – 2 hour hike to the summit of nearby Camelback Mountain. While his peers worked slavishly at their killer schedules, Michael took in the view, using his ritual as a time to "chill out and relax."

Despite this heretical behavior, Michael was still accepted at Stanford. To understand why, I will turn your attention to a little-known economics theory that changes the way we think about impressiveness. To get there, however, we'll start at an unlikely location: the competitive world of professional opera singers.

The Opera Singer and the Valedictorian

Juan Diego Florez cemented his reputation as a top operatic tenor during a 2008 performance of Gaetano Donizetti's La Fille du Regiment. Among professional singers, Donizetti's masterpiece is known as "the Mount Everest of opera"; a reputation due, almost entirely, to a devilishly tricky aria, "Ah! Mes amis, quel jour de fete," that arrives early in the first act. The aria demands the tenor to hit nine high C's in a row — a supremely difficult feat. To avoid embarrassment, most performers resort to the far easier natural C.

Not Florez.

In his 2008 performance of Donizetti, at the Metropolitan Opera House, Florez hit all nine notes. The acclaim was so overwhelming that he was summoned back to the stage for an encore, overturning the Met's long-standing ban on the practice.

As a top opera singer, we can assume that Florez does well for himself financially (likely on the order of 5-digit paydays per performance), but not lavishly well. Put another way: he's well-off but not wealthy.

Then there are the superstars.

In 1972, a young tenor by the name of Luciano Pavarotti also made a name for himself performing Donizetti at the Met. Like Florez, he too hit the high C's. But there was something extra in Pavarotti's voice. The audience at the Met in 1972 did more than demand an encore from Pavarotti, they weren't content until he had returned to the stage seventeen times! In writing about Florez's 2008 performance, the New York Times noted: "If truth be told, it's not as hard as it sounds for a tenor with a light lyric voice like Mr. Florez to toss off those high C's…[I]n the early 1970's, when Luciano Pavarotti…let those high Cs ring out, that was truly astonishing."

In other words, both Florez and Pavarotti are exceptional tenors, but Pavarotti was slightly better — the best among an elite class. The impact of this small difference, however, was huge. Whereas we estimated that Florez was well off but not wealthy, when Pavoratti died in 2007, sources estimated his estate to be worth $275 to 475 million.

In a 1981 paper published in the American Economics Review, the economist Sherwin Rosen worked through the mathematics that explains why superstars, like Pavarotti, reap so many more rewards than peers who are only slightly less talented. He called the phenomenon, “The Superstar Effect.”

Though the details of Rosen's formulas are complex, the intuition is simple: Imagine a million opera fans who each have $10 to spend on an opera album. They're trying to decide whether to buy an album by Florez or Pavarotti. Rosen's theory predicts that the bulk of the consumers will purchase the Pavarotti album, thinking, roughly: "although both singers are great, Pavarotti is the best, and if I can only get one album I might as well get the best one available." The result is that the vast majority of the $10 million goes to Pavarotti, even though his talent advantage over Florez is small.

Once identified, The Superstar Effect turned up in a variety of unexpected settings, from the sales of books to CEO salaries. It was found to apply even in settings that have nothing to do with financial transactions. In a particularly compelling example, a researcher named Paul Atwell, publishing in the journal Sociology of Education in 2001, studied the Superstar Effect for high school valedictorians.

Atwell imagined two students both with 700s on their various SAT tests. The first student was the valedictorian and the second student was ranked number five in the class. Rationally speaking, these two students are near identical — the difference in G.P.A. between the number one and number five rank is vanishingly small. But using statistics from Dartmouth College, Atwell showed that the valedictorian has a 75% of acceptance at this Ivy League institution while the near identical fifth-ranked student has only a 25% chance.

In other words, in many fields, it pays disproportionately well to be not just very good, but the best.

Hacking the Superstar Effect

Taking a step back, we likely agree that it's an interesting finding that being the best has a hidden advantage. If reaping this advantage, however, requires becoming class valedictorian or honing a brilliant singing voice — both staggeringly difficult feats — it's doesn't seem all that applicable.

This is where Michael Silverman reenters the picture.

The details of his story reveal a crucial addendum that makes the power of the Superstar Effect available to most people. I call this addendum The Superstar Corollary, and it's here I turn your attention next.

I discovered The Superstar Corollary in an unlikely setting: the extracurricular lives of high school students. I was researching a book on students, like Michael, who get accepted to outstanding colleges while still living low-stress and interesting lives. During this research, I kept noticing the same trait in these teen-aged lifehackers: they had accomplishments that triggered The Superstar Effect, but which revealed on closer examination to not require a rare natural talent or years and years of grinding work.

For example, consider the details Michael's story. Starting as a freshman, he focused all of his extracurricular energies on a serial string of environmental sustainability projects. He started by submitting a model of a green house to a competition. This led him to discover that a local energy company offered a grant program for local high school students. He won a modest grant, and used it, with the help of a retired engineer from his hometown, to retrofit a golf cart to run on biofuels. Leveraging this success, he earned another grant which he used to install solar panels on his school's maintenance shed. This earned him press coverage, and the resulting Superstar Effect helped wow the Stanford admissions department into overlooking his borderline scores.

Notice that nothing about Michael's rise to stardom required a rare natural talent or overwhelming work load. His projects required, on average, less daily time investment than participating in a varsity sport. Yet, he was the best at what he did among all applicants to Stanford, and the resulting Superstar Effect earned him a disproportionate reward.

Michael wasn't alone in his success at hacking The Superstar Effect. Consider, for example, Maneesh Sethi (featured recently inTim's lifestyle design case study competition), who got into Stanford on the strength of having written a popular computer programming book, or Steve Schwartz, who got into Columbia by taking on the role of press officer for a student-run environment advocacy group. Both found uncontested niches that required only a reasonable amount of effort investment to conquer, but still triggered the full impact of The Superstar Effect.

I formalize this idea with the following corollary:

The Superstar Corollary
Being the best in a field makes you disproportionately impressive to the outside world. This effect holds even if the field is not crowded, competitive, or well-known.

In other words, becoming valedictorian or a sustainability guru both generate the same Superstar Effect, but the former is much harder than the latter.

The Superstar Corollary and Lifestyle Design

Let's move beyond high school students and broaden the applicability of this powerful idea. The Superstar Corollary hacks the neural circuity responsible for producing feelings of respect and impressiveness, yielding a huge return on effort invested. As detailed below, this makes it a perfect tool for lifestyle design.

For the employee seeking liberation…

Triggering The Superstar Effect in your employer provides a valuable bargaining chip when trying to inject mobility and flexibility into your work schedule. Employers don't mind upsetting hard workers, but they fear losing stars. The Superstar Corollary gives you an efficient route to this workplace stardom.

Imagine, for example, a programmer in a web development shop. The Corollary might inspire her to become a top contributor to some new, up and coming, open source technology. Becoming known as a world expert yields more impressiveness than if she had invested the same hours into simply working overtime on her existing projects.

To give another example, imagine an entry-level employee at a non-profit. By taking on responsibility for tracking the organization's web site visitors, and then mastering enough Google Analytics to present beautiful analyses to the board, the employee will be seen as the technology guru of the organization — a star who is helping them understand their audience in new ways. This aura of stardom outstrips what's achievable if he had instead invested his efforts only into being a conscientious, efficient, hardworking, and replaceable employee.

For the owner of a muse looking to increase his rewards-to-effort ratio...

For the post-liberation, muse-owning lifestyle entrepreneur, The Superstar Corollary provides a powerful tool for ramping up returns without ramping up the work invested.

Writer Chris Guillebeau, from The Art of Non-Conformity blog, provides a perfect example of the Corollary at work in a lifestyle business. Instead of starting yet another site offering generic lifehacking hints, Chris found an uncontested corner of his field to conquer. Specifically, he set out on a mission to visit every country in the world. The scope of this quest transformed him into a star among travel/lifehacking bloggers, and his site quickly become a lucrative success.

Applying The Superstar Corollary

Applying The Superstar Corollary in your own life can be tricky. Here are some ideas to facilitate this effort.

Idea #1: Sloganize.

To sloganize is to transform your conquest into an easy-to-describe and immediately interesting quest. For example, Chris Guillebeau, mentioned above, sloganized his conquest of the adventure travel writing by focusing on the catchy goal of visiting every country in the world. Similarly, in my above example of a web programmer mastering a new open source technology, she might sloganize her efforts by writing a definitive eBook on the subject. To say that she literally "wrote the book" on the technology gives the expertise extra power.

The power of sloganizing is clear: it maximizes the superstar impact of your conquest.

Idea #2: Apply the $1000 Wager Test.

Two years ago, I had a series of conversations with my friend Ben Casnocha about the possibility of writing an eBook. Both Ben and I had written and published successful books on the side, and we were exploring the idea of a guide on how successful part-time authors manage to juggle their full time job with their writing. Ultimately, we abandoned the idea. The problem: there wasn't enough to say. The part-time authors who have the easiest time writing books tend to be those who know enough about the industry to be confident in the success of their project. This confidence is what allows them to keep finding time in their schedules to write; fancy scheduling rules and productivity systems prove irrelevant.

This same observation carries over to the quest to conquer an uncontested niche in your field. To follow through you need confidence in your success; otherwise, your efforts will diminish over time, regardless of the complexity of your productivity systems or the fervor of the inspirational quotes you read. Here's a simple rule: If you're not willing to bet $1000 on your success within 6 to 12 months, then either your goal is quixotic or you don't know enough about the field yet. In both cases, you're not ready for the project. A blind adherence to the flawed idea that getting started is the most important step is best left to cheesy motivational speakers — winners make plays with confidence.

Idea #3 Follow Steve Martin's Brand of Diligence

In his memoir, Born Standing Up, the comedy superstar Steve Martin provides insight into his rise to prominence. I've written in-depth about his method, but perhaps the most important concept is Martin's redefinition of "diligence." He notes that diligence was crucial in his rise to comedic fame, but he's quick to redefine the term away from it's standard definition of "hard work applied consistently over time." To Martin, the key to diligence isn't the work applied to your pursuit, but instead the work you don't apply to other pursuits. He succeeded in reinventing comedy because he kept his focus on comedy, even when other, more shiny and interesting side projects presented themselves.

The same concept applies to The Superstar Corollary. When conquering your uncontested niche, it can be tempting to divide your attention. Here is where Martin's diligence is key. The bonus reward you get for being the best far outweighs any small benefit that a shiny new side project can provide. On the large scale, therefore, maintaining a relentless focus on your conquest maximizes your total overall reward.

Concluding Summary

We're wired to be disproportionately impressed with someone who is the best at what they do. This effect, however, is blind to the competitiveness of the pursuit. The writer who is traveling to every country in the world, for example, can earn as much attention as the Rhodes Scholar with a PhD in international relations.

Is there's an uncontested corner in your own working life where you could apply the Superstar Corollary to gain a huge return on investment?

via www.fourhourworkweek.com

Roger Ebert: The quest for frisson

The French word frisson describes something English has no better word for: a brief intense reaction, usually a feeling of excitement, recognition, or terror. It's often accompanied by a physical shudder, but not so much when you're web surfing.

You know how it happens. You're clicking here or clicking there, and suddenly you have the OMG moment. In recent days, for example, I felt frissons when learning that Gary Coleman had died, that most of the spilled oil was underwater, that Joe McGinness had moved in next to the Palins, that a group of priests' mistresses had started their own Facebook group, and that Bill Nye the Science Guy says "to prevent Computer Vision Syndrome, every 20 minutes, spend 20 seconds looking 20 feet away."

Oh, there were many more. A frisson can be quite a delight. The problem is, I seem to be spending way too much time these days in search of them. In an ideal world, I would sit down at my computer, do my work, and that would be that. In this world, I get entangled in surfing and an hour disappears.

Twitter is an enabler for this behavior. It provides a quiet, subtle pressure to tweet frissons, and be tweeted in return. A good tweet can involve a funny comment, a snarky one, or one so poetic I read it and marvel. It can contain breaking news. It can be a small autobiographical revelation. I enjoy this. Deprived of speech, I chatter all day on Twitter, and have virtual relationships with the carefully chosen Tweeters I follow. Some are great writers. Some are deep thinkers. Some keep me updated on American Idol. Some persist in updating the scores of sporting events. I hate that, except in a situation like the Blackhawks' winning season. I care about the Blackhawks, but not enough to watch. All I require is the frisson.

This is not in praise of Twitter. It has to do with the possibility that my brain--and yours too, since you are here--has been rewired by the internet. There's an article by Nicholas Carr in the new issue of Wired magazine about a UCLA professor who used an MRI scan to observe the brain activity of six volunteers. Three were web veterans, three were not. He found that veteran Web users had developed "distinctive neural pathways."

He asked his newbies to surf the web for six days, and then he repeated the experiment: "The new scans revealed that their brain activity had changed dramatically; it now resembled that of the veteran surfers." The article suggests this possibility: "When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain."

In other words, instead of seeking substance, we're distractedly scurrying hither and yon, seeking frisson.

I recognize this happening in myself. I've been a lifelong heavy reader, and I've particularly loved the great 19th century novelists: Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Dostoyevsky, Collins, Mrs. Gaskell, Thackeray, Tolstoy. Their books take some time. Not long before my illness I re-read with great pleasure all the Barsetshire novels of Trollope, which stand at the center of Victorian literature like a great fictional Stonehenge.

Adjusting to the loss of speech, I turned with eagerness to the Internet, where we all speak in the same way. I began this blog, and started the practice of sometimes replying to comments not so much to be a nice guy, but because it was a way to have a conversation. I was told about Twitter. I vowed I would never be a Twit, and now I am one. At this moment I have nearly 156,000 Followers. That's not because I'm famous like Britney Spears or Ashton Kucher, but because I am a very good Tweeter. I took to it naturally; it entertains me.

Facebook has no charms for me. It looks inward. Twitter looks outward, and I've found remarkable people to follow. Check my Lists if you care. There's a kind of Degrees of Separation thing going on; I see people retweeting each other, and I know they met through me. I found one great Tweeter from India, and that led to two, and now I'm following a dozen Indians and actually met one of them at Cannes. And people in Toronto and Malaysia and Egypt are following them. Some very smart people are twits. I follow such interesting people as Margaret Atwood, William Gibson, Joan Walsh. Some of you blog regulars are among my favorites.

But how is my reading of long 19th century novels coming along? Not very well. Sometime late last year I began Dombey and Son, one of the few Dickens novels I'd never read. I was delighted. I think I tweeted a link to the first pages and urged people to share my joy. Then...I dunno...I got swept up. Sundance, the Oscars, Ebertfest, deadlines. Tweeting. Blogging. Surfing.

I took the novel on the flight to Cannes,. I was up to page 60-something. I started reading, and was drawn in and delighted. Didn't pick it up again until the flight home. Again, entranced. Page 372. Plus all the London newspapers, of course. Dickens is surely one of the greatest storytellers, and an astonishing stylist. We returned home, let's see, a week ago today. I put the book right on the table. It stayed there until today. Someone tweeted a link to the Wired article. I retweeted it, saying I was afraid that sort of brain alteration was happening to me. I glanced over at Dombey and Son.

For years I would read during breakfast, the coffee stirring my pleasure in the prose. You can't surf during breakfast. Well, maybe you can. Now I don't have coffee and I don't eat breakfast. I get up and check my e-mail, blog comments and Twitter.

This morning I got up, and before I did anything else I opened the novel, and started to read. It's a very good book. Thackeray read it and said that Dickens, confound him, was just better than anyone else. I read with pleasure. Then I got some work done. Wrote an obituary for Dennis Hopper. In the middle of the afternoon, I got up, left the room that held the computer, and sat in a window seat in our library. I read for another hour. Our Wi-Fi for some reason doesn't work in the library. Just saying'.

As I fell into the rhythm of the words, as I savored the way Dickens was planting his signposts for the development of the plot, as I watched him create unforgettable characters in a page or two, I felt a kind of peace. This wasn't hectic. I wasn't skittering around here and there. I wasn't scanning headlines and skimming pages and tweeting links. I was reading.

What I am going to do, is take some time every day to read. I believe I'll make it a practice to read in the room without the computer and the Wi-Fi. I'm eying my next book: de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. It's been on my To Read list since I bought it in, let's see, 1982. Maybe I can rewire my brain, budge it back a little in the old direction.

I wonder about something. With the invention of channel surfing, and then web surfing, have we all become rewired? Has the national attention span dropped? Is that why kids like shallow action pictures and why episodic television is losing to reality shows? And why sports, which offer a frisson every few seconds, are more popular than ever? Is that why slogans are replacing reasoning in our political arena? Is an addiction to video games the ultimate expression of this erosion of our attention span?

I've taken a lot of grief over saying video games could never be Art, and then admitting I'd hardly played one. I considered my statement self-evident, but man, was it not. I made a vow to myself that I would never return to the subject unless I had played a game. One of my fellow Chicago film critics, Capone of Ain't It Cool News, even volunteered to set me up with a game machine. But now, I dunno. The danger is, what if I like it? We all know I have an addictive personality. What if I became a gamer? I'm so busy right now that my work would be shot to hell.

Gamers have assured me in something like 4,000 comments that video games can/will be/are Art. Only a few have said they can't wait for that day. None have said they don't enjoy playing a game that isn't Art. Maybe my whole argument was beside the point. A video game that was Art would, I assume, require an ordered and measured emotional experience. A certain contemplation. What are video games (or so I have heard) but a series of frissons? Is it possible that only a few Gamers would want to play a game that was Art?

There's such a skitterish impatience in our society right now. The national debate is all over the place. Talking points take the place of arguments. Think up a snarky name for someone, and you don't have to explain any further. The oil spill is in Day 40 and enough, already. We've been there, done that. In some circles it has become Obama's fault, not for any good reason but perhaps because that breaks the monotony.

Something has happened. Do we even know it has happened? We look out from inside our brains. We notice differences in things. But how can we notice a difference in the brains that are noticing them? One reason meaningless celebrities dominate all of our national media is that they are meaningless. They require no study, no reading, no thought. OMG! Heidi is leaving Spencer! OMG! Russell Brand is a sex addict! OMG! Matt Lauer never dated or slept with Alexis Houston, and all that time he didn't know Alexis was a man! OMG! Top Kill has failed! WTF. ROFL.

via blogs.suntimes.com

Tim Ferriss: Practical Tactics for Dealing with Haters

Brute force seldom works with haters. Redirection does. (Photo: Deadstar 2.0)

I recently spent a week in Amsterdam enjoying bicycles, canals, Queensday, and… ahem… coffee shops. For real. Honest. The best coffee I’ve had in Europe has to be De Koffie Salon.

I also gave a short keynote at The NextWeb about how to deal with haters, protect yourself from (some) media, respond to FlipCams, and other personal branding self-defense 101.

Think you have crazy people contacting you or commenting on your blog? Me too. I share some of my favorite hater e-mails, Amazon reviews, and voicemails. It’ll make you feel better to hear the stories.

It is possible to learn to love haters. But it does take some know-how and tactical planning… 

I elaborated on a few points in an interview in the Netherlands with Amy-Mae Elliot, who originally posted them on Mashable in her piece Tim Ferriss: 7 Great Principles for Dealing with Haters:

1. It doesn’t matter how many people don’t get it. What matters is how many people do.

“It’s critical in social media, as in life, to have a clear objective and not to lose sight of that,” Ferriss says. He argues that if your objective is to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people or to change the world in some small way (be it through a product or service), you only need to pick your first 1,000 fans — and carefully. “As long as you’re accomplishing your objectives, that 1,000 will lead to a cascading effect,” Ferriss explains. “The 10 million that don’t get it don’t matter.”

2. 10% of people will find a way to take anything personally. Expect it.

“People are least productive in reactive mode,” Ferriss states, before explaining that if you are expecting resistance and attackers, you can choose your response in advance, as opposed to reacting inappropriately. This, Ferriss says, will only multiply the problem. “Online I see people committing ’social media suicide’ all the time by one of two ways. Firstly by responding to all criticism, meaning you’re never going to find time to complete important milestones of your own, and by responding to things that don’t warrant a response.” This, says Ferriss, lends more credibility by driving traffic.

3. “Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity.” (Colin Powell)

“If you treat everyone the same and respond to everyone by apologizing or agreeing, you’re not going to be recognizing the best performers, and you’re not going to be improving the worst performers,” Ferriss says. “That guarantees you’ll get more behavior you don’t want and less you do.” That doesn’t mean never respond, Ferriss goes on to say, but be “tactical and strategic” when you do.

4. “If you are really effective at what you do, 95% of the things said about you will be negative.” (Scott Boras)

“This principle goes hand-in-hand with number two,” Ferriss says. “I actually keep this quote in my wallet because it is a reminder that the best people in almost any field are almost always the people who get the most criticism.” The bigger your impact, explains Ferriss (whose book is a New York Times, WSJ and BusinessWeek bestseller), and the larger the ambition and scale of your project, the more negativity you’ll encounter. Ferriss jokes he has haters “in about 35 languages.”

5. “If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.” (Epictetus)

“Another way to phrase this is through a more recent quote from Elbert Hubbard,” Ferriss says. “‘To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.” Ferriss, who holds a Guinness World Record for the most consecutive tango spins, says he has learned to enjoy criticism over the years. Ferriss, using Roman philosophy to expand on his point, says: “Cato, who Seneca believed to be the perfect stoic, practiced this by wearing darker robes than was customary and by wearing no tunic. He expected to be ridiculed and he was, he did this to train himself to only be ashamed of those things that are truly worth being ashamed of. To do anything remotely interesting you need to train yourself to be effective at dealing with, responding to, even enjoying criticism… In fact, I would take the quote a step further and encourage people to actively pursue being thought foolish and stupid.”

6. “Living well is the best revenge.” (George Herbert)

“The best way to counter-attack a hater is to make it blatantly obvious that their attack has had no impact on you,” Ferriss advises. “That, and [show] how much fun you’re having!” Ferriss goes on to say that the best revenge is letting haters continue to live with their own resentment and anger, which most of the time has nothing to do with you in particular. “If a vessel contains acid and you pour some on an object, it’s still the vessel that sustains the most damage,” Ferriss says. “Don’t get angry, don’t get even — focus on living well and that will eat at them more than anything you can do.”

7. Keep calm and carry on.

The slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On” was originally produced by the British government during the Second World War as a propaganda message to comfort people in the face of Nazi invasion. Ferriss takes the message and applies it to today’s world. “Focus on impact, not approval. If you believe you can change the world, which I hope you do, do what you believe is right and expect resistance and expect attackers,” Ferriss concludes. “Keep calm and carry on!”

via www.fourhourworkweek.com

Steven Johnson: The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book

I want to start with a page out of history—the handwriting of Thomas Jefferson, taken from one of his notebooks on religion. The words on this page belongs to a long and fruitful tradition that peaked in Enlightenment-era Europe and America, particularly in England: the practice of maintaining a “commonplace” book.  Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters—just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. It was a kind of solitary version of the original web logs: an archive of interesting tidbits that one encountered during one’s textual browsing. The great minds of the period—Milton, Bacon, Locke—were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: in the words of one advocate, maintaining the books enabled one to “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.”

The philosopher John Locke first began maintaining a commonplace book in 1652, during his first year at Oxford. Over the next decade he developed and refined an elaborate system for indexing the book’s content. Locke thought his method important enough that he appended it to a printing of his canonical work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Here’s an excerpt from his “instructions for use”:

When I meet with any thing, that I think fit to put into my common-place-book, I first find a proper head. Suppose for example that the head be EPISTOLA, I look unto the index for the first letter and the following vowel which in this instance are E. i. if in the space marked E. i. there is any number that directs me to the page designed for words that begin with an E and whose first vowel after the initial letter is I, I must then write under the word Epistola in that page what I have to remark.

Locke’s approach seems almost comical in its intricacy, but it was a response to a specific set of design constraints: creating a functional index in only two pages that could be expanded as the commonplace book accumulated more quotes and observations. In a certain sense, this is a search algorithm, a defined series of steps that allows the user to index the text in a way that makes it easier to query. Locke’s method proved so popular that a century later, an enterprising publisher named John Bell printed a notebook entitled: “Bell’s Common-Place Book, Formed generally upon the Principles Recommended and Practised by Mr Locke.” Put another way, Bell created a commonplace book by commonplacing someone else’s technique for maintaining a commonplace book. The book included eight pages of instructions on Locke’s indexing method, a system which not only made it easier to find passages, but also served the higher purpose of “facilitat[ing] reflexive thought.”

The tradition of the commonplace book contains a central tension between order and chaos, between the desire for methodical arrangement, and the desire for surprising new links of association. The historian Robert Darnton describes this tangled mix of writing and reading:

Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.

Each rereading of the commonplace book becomes a new kind of revelation. You see the evolutionary paths of all your past hunches: the ones that turned out to be red herrings; the ones that turned out to be too obvious to write; even the ones that turned into entire books. But each encounter holds the promise that some long-forgotten hunch will connect in a new way with some emerging obsession. The beauty of Locke’s scheme was that it provided just enough order to find snippets when you were looking for them, but at the same time it allowed the main body of the commonplace book to have its own unruly, unplanned meanderings.

But all of this magic was predicated on one thing: that the words could be copied, re-arranged, put to surprising new uses in surprising new contexts. By stitching together passages written by multiple authors, without their explicit permission or consultation, some new awareness could take shape.

Since the heyday of the commonplace book, there have been a few isolated attempts to turn these textual remixes into a finished product, into a standalone work of collage. The most famous is probably Jefferson’s bible, his controversial “remix” of the New Testament. There’s also Walter Benjamin’s unfinished, and ultimately unpublishable Passagenwerk, or “Arcades Project,” his rumination on the early shopping malls of Paris built out of photos, quotes, and aphoristic musings. Just this year, David Shields published a book, Reality Hunger, built out of quotes from a wide variety of sources. And of course, there are parallel works in music, painting, and architecture that are constructed out of “quotes” lifted from original sources and remixed in imaginative ways.

***

NOW, BEFORE I TAKE the next step in the argument, I want to pause for a brief autobiographical confession. Exactly twenty years ago I arrived here at Columbia as a grad student, holding an undergraduate degree in Semiotics, much to the bafflement of my parents. I was here to study literary theory, to work with giants like Edward Said and Giyatri Spivak. I took a seminar on Jacques Derrida my second year here, and Derrida actually showed up in person for the first class, the silent, white-haired dude in the corner who didn’t introduce himself until the professor arrived. I could talk about the open text and deconstruction and the death of the author with the best of them. Technically I was enrolled in the English Department, but even that was misleading. All of my writing read like it had been translated from the French.

I tell you this story because I think 22-year-old Morningside Heights Steven would have listened to those opening remarks and nodded enthusiastically at where I was going. The idea of a purely linear text is a myth; readers stitch together meanings in much more complex ways than we have traditionally imagined; the true text is more of a network than a single, fixed document. These were all the defining beliefs of postmodern theory. I still think all of these things are true, though I choose to say them slightly differently.

But I think 22-year-old Steven would have had a more difficult time wrapping his head around this next image. This is what happens when you search Google for the ostensible topic of our discussion tonight: “journalism.”

What I want to suggest to you is that, in some improbable way, this page is as much of an heir to the structure of a commonplace book as the most avant-garde textual collage. Who is the “author” of this page? There are, in all likelihood, thousands of them. It has been constructed, algorithmically, by remixing small snippets of text from diverse sources, with diverse goals, and transformed into something categorically different and genuinely valuable. In the center column, we have short snippets of text written by ten individuals or groups, though of course, Google reports that it has 32 million more snippets to survey if we want to keep clicking. The selection of these initial ten links is itself dependant on millions of other snippets of text that link to these and other journalism-related pages on the Web. Along the right side of the page, we have short snippets of text written by five advertisers, mostly journalism schools as it happens, though they are in a silent competition with other snippets of text created by other advertisers bidding to be on this page. And then we have the text in the search field, created by me, which summons this entire network of text together in a fraction of a second.

What you see on this page is, in a very real sense, textual play: the recombining of words into new forms and associations that their original creators never dreamed of. But what separates it from the textual play that I was earnestly studying twenty years ago is the fact that it has engendered a two hundred billion dollar business.

***

WHEN TEXT IS free to combine in new, surprising ways, new forms of value are created. Value for consumers searching for information, value for advertisers trying to share their messages with consumers searching for related topics, value for content creators who want an audience. And of course, value to the entity that serves as the middleman between all those different groups. This is in part what Jeff Jarvis has called the “link economy,” but as Jarvis has himself observed, it is not just a matter of links. What is crucial to this system is that text can be easily moved and re-contextualized and analyzed, sometimes by humans and sometimes by machines.

Ecologists talk about the “productivity” of an ecosystem, which is a measure of how effectively the ecosystem converts the energy and nutrients coming into the system into biological growth. A productive ecosystem, like a rainforest, sustains more life per unit of energy than an unproductive ecosystem, like a desert. We need a comparable yardstick for information systems, a measure of a system’s ability to extract value from a given unit of information. Call it, in this example: textual productivity. By creating fluid networks of words, by creating those digital-age commonplaces, we increase the textual productivity of the system.

The overall increase in textual productivity may be the single most important fact about the Web’s growth over the past fifteen years. Think about it this way: let’s say it’s 1995, and you are cultivating a page of “hot links” to interesting discoveries on the Web. You find an article about a Columbia journalism lecture and you link to it on your page. The information value you have created is useful exclusively to two groups: people interested in journalism who happen to visit your page, and the people maintaining the Columbia page, who benefit from the increased traffic. Fast forward to 2010, and you check-in at Foursquare for this lecture tonight, and tweet a link to a description of the talk. What happens to that information? For starters, it goes out to friends of yours, and into your twitter feed, and into Google’s index. The geo-data embedded in the link alerts local businesses who can offer your promotions through foursquare; the link to the talk helps Google build its index of the web, which then attracts advertisers interested in your location or the topic of journalism itself. Because that tiny little snippet of information is free to make new connections, by checking in here you are helping your friends figure out what to do tonight; you’re helping the Journalism school in promoting this venue; you’re helping the bar across Broadway attract more customers, you’re helping Google organize the web; you’re helping people searching google for information about journalism; you’re helping journalism schools advertising on Google to attract new students. Not bad for 140 characters.

When text is free to flow and combine, new forms of value are created, and the overall productivity of the system increases. But of course, when text is free, value is sometimes subtracted for the publishers who used to charge for that text. So let me make one point clear: recognizing the value creation of open textual networks is not argument against paywalls. I happen to think it is perfectly reasonable for online publishers to ask people to pay for the privilege of reading their journalism. If people are willing to buy virtual tractors on Farmville, or cough up two bucks for the Flight Control app on the iPhone, a meaningful number of people are going to be willing to pay for a well reported and edited newspaper or magazine. I don’t think erecting paywalls is some kind of magic cure that will instantly restore the newspaper business to the forty-percent margins they commanded back in the day when they had a virtual monopoly on local ads and classifieds. But there is nothing in the idea of charging for content that is in conflict with the value of textual networks. Search engines can still index the paywalled content, and there are a number of clever schemes out there —including the metered usage model that the Times is apparently going to roll out — that allow publishers to charge for content while still allowing that content to be linked to, excerpted, and remixed in new ways.

But there are worse things than paywalls. Take a look at this screen. This, as you all probably know, is Apple’s new iBook application for the iPad.  What I’ve done here is shown you what happens when you try to copy a paragraph of text. You get the familiar iPhone-style clipping handles, and you get two options “Highlight” and “Bookmark.” But you can’t actually copy the text, to paste it into your own private commonplace book, or email it to a friend, or blog about it. And of course there’s no way to link to it. What’s worse: the book in question is Penguin's edition of Darwin’s Descent of Man, which is in the public domain. Those are our words on that screen. We have a right to them.

Interestingly, the Kindle – even the Kindle app for the iPad – does allow you to clip passages and automatically store them on a file that can be downloaded to your computer, where you can post, archive, forward, tweet to your heart’s content. You are apparently limited to a certain percentage of the overall text of the book, which is perfectly reasonable in my mind. The process of actually getting your hands on the text is a little complicated, probably deliberately so, but I can live with it.

But it gets worse. This is a page from the NY Times Editor’s Choice iPad app, showing what happens when you try simply to select text from an article. You can't do it. Just so you know that I am an equal opportunity critic, this is what happens when you try to copy text on the WSJ’s app.  You can’t do anything with the words. They’re frozen there, uncopyable, unlinkable, like some beautiful ice sculpture. Frozen is the right word, because we’re so used to selecting and copying digital text, encountering text on a screen that can’t be selected leaves you with a strange initial assumption: that the application has crashed, and the screen is frozen.

Now, it may well be true that Apple, and The Times, and The Journal intend to add extensive tools that encourage the textual productivity of their apps. If that happens, I will be delighted. The iPad is only about two weeks old, after all, and it famously took Apple two years to introduce copy-and-paste to the iPhone OS. But there are plenty of first generation iPad apps that facilitate new textual networks, like Twitterific or Evernote or Instapaper. Apple itself has made it incredibly easy for developers to build rich connections to the Web into their apps through their Webkit framework. And so I get worried when I look at iBook, and the Journal and Times apps. In part because these are both extremely thoughtfully designed apps. I happily purchased both of them, and use them both. They have a lot of elements that I like. It’s precisely the skill and care with which they have been built that scares me, because that makes the frozen nature of the text seem more like a feature than a bug, something they’ve deliberated chosen, rather than a flaw that they didn’t have time to correct.

The contrast here suggests to me that we have two potential futures ahead of us, where digital text is concerned, or that the future is going to involve a battle between two contradictory impulses. We can try to put a protective layer of glass of the words, or we can embrace the idea that we are all better off when words are allowed to network with each other. What’s the point of going to all this trouble to build machines capable of displaying digital text if we can’t exploit the basic interactivity of that text? People don’t want to read on a screen just for the thrill of it; even with the iPad’s beautiful display, reading on paper is still a higher-resolution experience, and much easier on the eyes. Yes, the iPad makes it easier to carry around a dozen books and magazines, but that’s not the only promise of the technology. The promise also lies in doing things with the words, forging new links of association, remixing them. We have all the tools at our disposal to create commonplace books that would astound Locke and Jefferson. And yet we are, deliberately, trying to crawl back into the glass box.

As with paywalls, I am not dogmatic about these things. I don’t think it’s incumbent upon the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal to allow all their content to flow freely through the infosphere with no restrictions. I do not pull out my crucifix when people use the phrase “Digital Rights Management.” If publishers want to put reasonable limits on what their audience can do with their words, I’m totally fine with that. As I said, I think the Kindle has a workable compromise, though I would like to see it improved in a few key areas. But I also don’t want to mince words. When your digital news feed doesn’t contain links, when it cannot be linked to, when it can’t be indexed, when you can’t copy a paragraph and paste it into another application: when this happens your news feed is not flawed or backwards looking or frustrating. It is broken.

***

I SAID THERE were two potential futures—the glass box and the commonplace book—and the good news is that I think the commonplace book model has a number of trends on its side. The web is bursting with organizations that recognize the importance of textual productivity, many of them explicitly trying to imagine what journalism is going to look like in this new world. Here’s one: ProPublica, the nonprofit news org which won a Pulitzer Prize last week for its collaboration with the NY Times. I draw your attention to the bar that runs along the top of every page on the site. “Steal Our Stories.”   This is playful but important: Propublica has licensed its content under creative commons, so that anyone who wants to publish their articles can do so, as long as they credit (and link to) ProPublica and include all links in the original story. Instead of putting their journalism under glass, they’re effectively saying to their text: go forth and multiply.

One of the reasons Propublica can do this, of course, is because they are a non-profit whose mission is to be influential and not to make money. It seems to me that this is one area that has been under-analyzed in the vast, sprawling conversation about the future of journalism over the past year or so. A number of commentators have discussed the role of non-profits in filling the hole created by the decline of print newspapers. But they have underestimated the textual productivity of organizations that are incentivized to connect, not protect, their words. A single piece of information designed to flow through the entire ecosystem of news will create more value than a piece of information sealed up in a glass box. And ProPublica, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg. There are thousands of organizations – some of the focused on journalism, some of the government-based, some of them new creatures indigenous to the web – that create information that can be freely recombined into private commonplace books or Pulitzer-prize winning investigative journalism. A journalist today can get the idea for an investigation from a document on Wikileaks, get background information from Wikipedia, download government statistics or transcripts from open.gov or the Sunlight Foundation. You cannot measure the health of journalism simply by looking at the number of editors and reporters on the payroll of newspapers. There are undoubtedly going to be fewer of them. The question is whether that loss is going to be offset by the tremendous increase in textual productivity we get from a connected web. Presuming, of course, that we don’t replace that web with glass boxes.

There is an additional civic value here, one that goes beyond simply preserving professional journalism. For about ten years now, a few of us have been waging a sometimes lonely battle against the premise that the internet leads to political echo chambers, where like-minded partisans reinforce their beliefs by filtering out dissenting views, an argument associated with the legal scholar and now Obama administration official Cass Sunstein. This is Sunstein’s description of the phenomenon:

If Republicans are talking only with Republicans, if Democrats are talking primarily with Democrats, if members of the religious right speak mostly to each other, and if radical feminists talk largely to radical feminists, there is a potential for the development of different forms of extremism, and for profound mutual misunderstandings with individuals outside the group.

My argument has been that the connective power of the web is stronger than its filtering, that even the most partisan blogs are usually only one click away from the political opposites, whereas in the old world of print magazines or face-to-face groups, the opportunity to stumble across an opposing point of view was much rarer. Some of you might have seen a David Brooks column this week that reported on a new study that actually looked an exposure to differing points of view in various forms of media, and in real-world encounters. It turns out that the web, at least according to this study, actually reduces
the echo-chamber effect, compared to real-world civic space. People who spend a lot of time on political sites are far more likely to encounter diverse perspectives than people who hang out with their friends and colleagues at the bar or the watercooler. As Brooks described it, “This study suggests that Internet users are a bunch of ideological Jack Kerouacs. They’re not burrowing down into comforting nests. They’re cruising far and wide looking for adventure, information, combat and arousal.”

This is just one study, of course, and these are complicated social realities. I think it is fair to say that our pundits and social critics can no longer make the easy assumption that the web and the blogosphere are echo-chamber amplifiers. But whether or not this study proves to be accurate, one thing is certain. The force that enables these unlikely encounters between people of different persuasions, the force that makes the web a space of serendipity and discovery, is precisely the open, combinatorial, connective nature of the medium. So when we choose to take our text out of that medium, when we keep our words from being copied, linked, indexed, that’s a choice with real civic consequences that are not to be taken lightly.

The reason the web works as wonderfully as it does is because the medium leads us, sometimes against our will, into common places, not glass boxes. It’s our job—as journalists, as educators, as publishers, as software developers, and maybe most importantly, as readers—to keep those connections alive.

via www.stevenberlinjohnson.com

Rands In Repose: Back Alley Bridge: The Work Experience Without The Work

My management team was bickering. Two managers in particular: Leo and Vincent. Both of their projects were fine. Both of their teams were producing, but in any meeting where they were both representing their teams, they just started pushing each other’s buttons. Every meeting on some trivial topic:

Leo: “Vincent, are you on track to ship the tool on Wednesday?”

Vincent: “We’re on schedule.”

Leo: “For Wednesday?”

Vincent: “We’ll hit our schedule.”

Leo: “Wednesday?”

Endless passive aggressive verbal warfare. Two type A personalities who absolutely hated to be told what to do. My 1:1s with each of them were productive meetings and when I brought up the last Leo’n’Vincent battle of the wills, they immediately started pointing at their counterpart: “I really don’t know what his problem is.”

I do. They didn’t trust each other.

On the Topic of Trust

There’s a question out there regarding how close you want to get with you co-workers in your job. There’s a camp out there that employs a policy of “professional distance”. This camp believes it is appropriate to keep those they work with at arm’s length.

The managerial reason here is more concrete than the individual reasoning. Managers are representatives or officers of the company and, as such, may be asked to do randomly enforce the will of the business. Who gets laid off? Why doesn’t this person get a raise? How much more does this person get? Profession distance or not, these responsibilities will always give managers an air of otherness.

Here’s my question: do you or do you not want be the person someone trusts when they need help? Manager or not, do you see the act of someone trusting you as fitting with who you are?

Yes, there’s a line that needs to be drawn between you and your co-workers, but artificially distancing yourself from the people you spend all day every day with seems like a good way to put artificial barriers between yourself the people you need to get your job done.

Is that who you are or who you want to work for?

The topic of trust is where I draw a line in both my personal and management philosophy. My belief is that a team built on trust and respect is vastly more productive and efficient than the one where managers are distant supervisors and co-workers are 9-to-5 people you occasionally see in meetings. You’re not striving to be everyone’s pal; that’s not the goal. The goal is a set of relationships where there is a mutual belief in each other’s the reliability, truth, ability, and strengths.

It’s awesome.

And it’s something you can build with a card game.

BAB

It’s pronounced how you think. Rhymes with crab. It’s an acronym for a game which, with practice, will knit your team together in unexpected ways. It’s Back Alley Bridge. Here are the rules, but before I explain why this game is a great team building exercise, you need to understand a few of the rules.

BAB isn’t bridge. The game does have a few important similarities. First, it’s a game for four players, involving two teams — the folks facing each other are on the same team and share their score. Second, it’s a trick-based game where the goal is for each team to get as many tricks as possible. A trick is won when each player turns up a card and the highest wins, unless someone plays a trump suit, which, in the case of BAB, is always spades.

Bidding. Also like bridge, BAB has bidding, meaning each team bids how many tricks they think they’re going to get after the cards have been dealt. Scoring is optimized to reward teams who get the number of tricks they bid and heavily punishes those who don’t get their bid. Bidding is a blind team effort — you have no idea what your teammate has in their hand other than what you can infer from their bid.

Decreasing hand count. Unlike bridge, the number of cards each player gets decreases with each hand. Each player gets 13 cards in the first hand, 12 in the second, and so on. Play continues down to a single card and then heads back up to 13. A work-friendly modification I’ve made is to only play every other hand (13-11-9, etc.) This number of hands fits nicely into a lunch hour.

Hail Mary. There are two special bids: Board and Boston. A bid of Board indicates the team is going to take every single bid. A board of Boston indicates the team intends to take the first six. Achieving a Board or Boston can be an impressive feat and is rewarded handsomely from a scoring perspective. Failure results in a scoring beat-down. Both of these special bids allow for wild variances in the score, which can be handy for teams who are falling behind.

Scoring, game play, and other information are in the complete rules. Now, let me explain why I picked this game as a recurring weekly lunch meeting.

In BAB, you talk shit. I’ve landed BAB in three different teams now and in each case, the amount of trash talking that showed up once players became comfortable with the game was impressive. This is a function of my personality, but it’s also a byproduct of any healthy competition amongst bright people. It’s also a sign of a healthy team. I’ll explain.

Trash talking is improvisational critical thinking — it’s the art of building comedy in the moment with only the immediate materials provided. As I’m looking for candidates for my next BAB game, I’m looking for two things: who will be able to talk trash and who needs to receive it?

The art in talking trash is the careful exploration of the edges of truth. When someone effectively lays it down, they say something honest and slightly uncomfortable. The ever-present risk with trash talking is when that line is crossed. It’s that one thing that is said that goes too far and offends, but it’s the presence of that line which makes talking trash so much fun.

It’s these honest and dangerous observations that form the basis of trust. When a co-worker makes a big observation about you and shares it with the other players, you take note - someone is watching. It sounds problematic, but remember, we’re just sitting here playing cards. It’s safe.

In a new BAB game, it takes players time to get used to the trash talking, especially in a situation like Leo and Vincent’s. Adversarial co-workers playing on the same team need to learn to ditch the business for the game. They need to understand there is a relationship outside of the daily work and there’s nothing like a comedic verbal beat-down to remind them to lighten up.

In BAB, you learn things unintentionally. Once you’ve got an established game with regular players who all know the rules, you’ll learn two things: people get better at trash talking with practice, and information travels in unpredictable ways in groups of people.

It goes like this:

• Player #1: “I bid 3.”
• Player #2: “I bid 1.”
• Player #3: “Pass.”
• Player #4: “Kevin’s quitting. I’m sure of it.”
• Player #1: “Yeah, I know.”
• Player #2: “Sucks to be you.”

Out of nowhere, in the middle of the game, you’re suddenly assessing the departure of a co-worker. I see this as a sign of a thriving, healthy BAB game because the team has begun to trust each other more. In the safety of the game, they’re letting the worries of the moment spill onto the table for all to see, which is impressive, since everyone knows that anything on the table at BAB is fair game for talking shit.

In BAB, you’re having work experiences without the work. Relationships need time to bake. Trust doesn’t magically appear; it’s cautiously built over time via shared experience. The majority of these experiences are created during the regular work day and I’m certain there are a great many healthy professional relationships that are defined and maintained in this manner, but I want my teams closer. I’m not suggesting group hugs and voices united singing Kumbaya. I’m looking for each team member to have the opportunity to understand each other slightly more than what they see when they’re at work.

The more you understand how your co-workers tick, the better you’re able to work with them. You’ll stop seeing them as the role, the title, or the keeper of a particular political agenda. They are just… Phillip. And you know what I know about Phillip? He’s the manager who used to wait too long to speak in a meeting. He had plenty to say that mattered, but he used to be too shy to say it.

Two months of trash talking over BAB showed me his reservations, so I learned to pull Phillip into the meeting conversations as quickly as possible. After a few pulls, he started to do it himself. After a few weeks, you couldn’t get him to shut up.

The Second Staff Meeting

The inspiration for the game came from a regularly scheduled bridge game at Netscape, and there’s nothing special about BAB that makes it the perfect lunchtime game. I chose BAB because a team-based game that fits nicely in a lunch hour.

You bet I maneuvered Leo and Vincent onto the same team for weeks on end. There was no magical moment during one game where they suddenly understood each other. Leo and Vincent continued to bicker in meetings, but over time the tone changed from the passive aggressive to the playful talking of trash. They turned competition into something healthy and fun.

In the safe competition that is BAB, you learn not only how to work better together by understanding that winning doesn’t always mean hitting your dates, getting paid, or receiving a promotion. Winning can be a simple, playful thing, “We were awesome as we kicked your ass.”

More importantly, BAB is a regular forum for experiencing that relationships are not defined just by the work we do together, but who we become with each other when we aren’t looking.

via www.randsinrepose.com

Re:Focus: Why Does Your Company Exist?

Dan Hesse, the CEO of Sprint, is back making commercials for his company.  In the latest version, he is doing more of what he did in previous ads - selling on price.  The top guy in the company, the big boss, numero uno, looks straight into the camera and tells you Sprint's latest calling plan is better than the competition's. That's what the most senior person in the company wants us to know about his company - they're cheap.

 

On the opposite side of the spectrum is Phil Knight, the charismatic founder and former CEO of Nike. Knight was the keynote speaker at a conference and, like the CEO of Sprint, he too made a case for why you should choose Nike over the competition.  But Knight took a different approach.  He didn’t say what Nike does or how they are better.  And he certainly didn't attempt to differentiate the company based on price.  Instead, he told a story that explains Why Nike exists.

Looking across the audience, Knight asked those who run to stand up.  And a good percentage of the room stood up.  Then he asked those who run three or more times a week to keep standing; everyone else was asked to sit down.

Looking out at the people left standing, Knight said, "we are for you."

"When you get up at 5 o’clock in the morning to go for a run," he went on, "even if it’s cold and wet out, you go. And when you get to mile 4, we’re the one standing under the lamp post, out there in the cold and wet with you, cheering you on.  We’re the inner athlete.  We’re the inner champion.”

Without a single mention of their latest technologies or which athletes wear their products, Knight makes a vastly more compelling case for Why we want Nike in our lives. Nike may or may not be better, but we are drawn to them because they have a cause.  They know and we know Why the do what they do.  The same can not be said for Sprint and so many other companies.

Phil Knight knows Why Nike exists and he tells us.  It is the same purpose, cause or belief that inspires his employees as well as his customers.  “Just Do It” is more than a tag line, it’s a motto.  It’s a cheer.  It’s a rallying cry. Are Sprint employees inspired to be cheap?

The mistake Mr. Hesse and so many other marketers make is that they tell us what the company does and how they think they are better, but is not a single mention of Why the company exists in the first place.  And it’s the Why that matters most in a purchase decision.  People are not attracted to what you do, they are drawn to Why you do it.  And Why is what truly differentiates one company from another.
 

Nike doesn’t want to make products for everyone, they want to make products for champions.  Champions are not the ones who always win races, champions are the ones who get out there and try. And try harder the next time. And even harder the next time. Champion is a state of mind. They are devoted.  They compete to best themselves as much if not more than they compete to best others.  Champions are not just athletes.  Champions are entrepreneurs, politicians, nurses, soldiers, students and Hall of Famers.  Nike wants to make products for all champions. 

What Phil Knight can do that so many other CEOs can't is put his company’s Why into words. And because he can, so can all those who work at the company.  And because everyone in his company can put the Why into words, so can we.  Sprint and Nike are both companies built on brand equity in industries in which there is little to no real difference between one company's products and another's. But we all know what Nike stands for. We only know what Sprint does and we may or may not believe they are better or cheaper, but we certainly have no clue Why they exist. 

Before consumers can know your Why, you must know it. If you don’t know Why you do what you do, how will anyone else?

Your Why starts as a feeling.  Call it drive or passion or inspiration or something in your gut, it doesn’t matter.  Only when that feeling is translated into words can it become actionable and scalable.  Only when others can repeat your Why as clearly as you can, can you lead. And when you lead, you never have to sell on price.

Someone should tell Dan Hesse to stop talking about price and start talking about Why.  Come on Mr. Hesse...just do it.

via sinekpartners.typepad.com

Reddit: "I read a lot of threads about being lonely, sad or unhappy in general..."

A wonderful, heartwarming post about life from Reddit contributor Alukima:

I am not witty or interesting; I wont pretend to have anything profound to say. I am 26, female, divorced and spent most of my life feeling empty and hopeless. This may not help anyone, but these realizations helped me find my happiness. The points are in bold.

They didn't lie to you in elementary school, being different is awesome.

In high school and my early twenties I was teased for wearing video game related t-shirts. Now the the same girls who teased me often complain to me over facebook about being suck in generic relationships and "wish they had found something to love the way I love gaming". Also, I recently made a bet that my $15 TMNT purse would get more compliments at a bar than a $900 coach purse. I won.

Some things really do take time.

At one point in my life I was naive enough to think fate decided who we were supposed to marry. I became infatuated with a boyfriend and when he left I thought my life was over. At that time if you had tried to tell me anything different I would have banned you from my life. He was my one true love (so I thought).... Overtime, I came to realize he was a selfish cheater that used me. It wasn't easy and up until a short period of time ago he was my "drunk dial". It took me meeting another of his exes and listening to her identical story for me to finally get over it.

You have to love yourself before anyone can love you (in a romantic way). I married a great guy right out of high school. He was smart, attractive and patient. We bought a house and planned our future. No matter how hard he tried to make me happy I found a way to make us miserable. Looking back I now know I didn't like me and just couldn't understand what a guy like him would see in me, so I questioned his every action. I am still happy we divorced, but I now realize it was 100% my fault.

Finding something you are passionate about in life should be one of your first priorities.

In an episode of Lost Desmond finds out that Penny is his constant, after watching this episode I wanted to find my "constant". I looked through old journals, photos and asked friends. The only consistency in my life was gaming. It made sense. Its the only thing that has stuck with me throughout life. I make game art, keep up on game culture and play games constantly. But I never thought of gaming as a passion. So I for a month I set gaming goals. I found myself happier than ever before. I have now given in and am constantly happy.

If someone that loves you asks you to get help for anything- do it.

I had cancer when I was sixteen, over the next ten years I had numerous people tell me something was wrong. I ignored them. I tried to kill myself and finally sought help. I went to a psychiatrist , she diagnosed me with PTSD. I got treatment and most of my symptoms went away. Close friends kept saying something was wrong. More ignoring. I went to the doctor because of a cold and found out they missed part of the original tumor, It was affecting me in a way that simulated mental illness. Because of my procrastination the tumor had grown into a place that could have killed me. I got lucky. I am cancer free and mentally healthy. Never chance stuff like this. You will never be objective to yourself, listen to people that love you.

Don't help others more than they are willing to help themselves.

My little sister is a meth addict. It breaks me to write this but she is a lost cause. I gave her money, she bought drugs. I let her borrow my car, she stole it. I got her out of bad situations, she got back into them. I let her live with me, she stole from me. The list goes on. If she ever makes a legitimate attempt to change her life I will be there. But until she whole-heartily wants a change I wont even give her my address.

Having a few close friends is better than a huge group of associates.

I somehow became the cool nerd girl when I moved to my current city. I went to a different party every night of the week. It's so pathetic to admit this, but in a month I went from having around 33 pics of me on facebook to over 300. I felt cool. Then I had an issue I needed to talk to someone about. All of my cool friends were as helpful as paper weights in a hurricane. I went back to my small group of "unpopular" friends. They helped me through my issue and loved me just the same.

People who set realistic goals and work towards them succeed.

Have you noticed just how disgustingly poor my understanding of grammar and punctuation is? I never advanced past 8th grade English. Here is something I wrote in g-chat just over a year ago: "I like sam beam better then te decemeris.... i wish thy would tour their going to be in st louis soon. go you wnna go?" That line was sent to a guy I wanted to date. I was trying. I was sober. I am still awful but at least people can understand me. Its very embarrassing but I have to work hard to sound this stupid.

You can always make friends.

I had to start from scratch after my divorce at 24. I was the cause for the breakup so our mutual friends hated me. I tried to stay in the rural town I grew up in but things did not work out, it was just too small. I moved to a larger city and found nerd friendly events. After a short period of time I had made a small but great group of friends. I want to point out that I did have to move to fit in, I grew up in a redneck area. Sometimes you do have to make drastic changes to better your own life.

Keep sight of your future but don't forget your past.

As a child my own household was abusive so I got away whenever I could. I am a very nerdie atheist now but as a child my regular escapes included services at black churches every Sunday. To make it clear- I DO NOT BELIEVE IN ANY KIND OF GOD. But at the certain kind of church I attended we heard more about common sense morality than theology anyway. Regardless of what anyone thinks of religion this period in my life shaped me for the better.

Follow your heart. The end.

Please do forgive me for the haphazard writing, I found early morning inspiration and had to get to work. I just wanted to be honest with my most embarrassing aspects. I am lame, ordinary, unattractive and slightly insane yet really happy. I am tired of hiding honest discourse behind throw away accounts.

Update: I just wanted to thank everyone for the all the positive responses. I can't believe the amount of emails, tweets and blog posts about something I felt like an idiot for submitting.

Thank you so much.

via www.reddit.com

Re:Focus: Planning Is Everything. The Plan Is Nothing.

Dwight Eisenhower said, "planning is everything, the plan is nothing." I didn't know what he meant until recently.

Whether you're starting a business or managing your career, when we set out on the journey the plan often look like this:

Our goals are clear and the path is clear.  All that's left to do is to follow the plan - to walk down the path.

But when we actually start the business or set out on our careers, the path actually looks more like this:

In reality, most plans are rendered useless almost as soon as they are put in motion. There is still some value in the original plan, however.  It defines the goal or the outcome we desire.  And that's the most important part of the original plan - that the destination is clear; the reason you're on the journey in the first place.

When you looked at the second picture, did you see only the crowd blocking the path or did you look into the distance to see the buildings - the destination?  Even in this little exercise, looking at the building and wondering how to get there is vastly more inspiring than looking at the crowd and wondering how you'll get through it. The same is true in our businesses and in our careers. We often lose sight of the destination and can see only the people coming at us in all directions.  We see only obstacles. But simply by looking up, looking ahead, the obstacles seem to become less daunting.   

With your eyes refocused, start planning as you go and start planning ahead. Learn to be flexible. Learn to anticipate; something with which the original plan offers no help.

Should you move to the left or the right of the man in the baseball cap? What about the guy in the sunglasses?  Soon you'll have to pass the guy in the orange jacket. Or perhaps there's a completely different route to take altogether.

As a fun little exercise, try this when you actually walk down the street. Focus ahead at what you'll have to pass and have in your mind a plan of action.  You'll be amazed how much quicker you get to your destination and you'll be astounded how much more fun you'll have getting there.  The crowd will no longer be a sea of obstacles, and the journey will feel like a game.

Then do the same for your business or your career. The plan, you see, is nothing. Planning is everything.

via sinekpartners.typepad.com

Re:Focus: Market Opportunities Don’t Exist

A very successful shoemaker in the United States was considering expanding his business into India. He decided to conduct some market research to help him properly assess the market opportunity before he could make his final decision. He sent one of his sons to travel the country from north to south.  He sent his other son to travel the country from south to north.

After one year away, his two sons returned with their reports.

“We must expand to India,” said the son who traveled north to south. “No one there has shoes, the market opportunity is amazing.”

“There’s no point expanding to India,” said the son who traveled south to north. “No one there has shoes, there’s no demand.”

 A market opportunity is not a thing that exists or doesn’t exist. No amount of research can conclude that there is or isn’t a market opportunity.  A market opportunity is nothing more than a perception.  Some perceive opportunities where others do not.  Some succeed where others fail.  And some fail where others succeed. This is the reason it is unwise to wake up everyday in pursuit of market opportunities.  Why not chase unicorns? There is not a single example of a person or organization that ever achieved greatness by chasing a market opportunity. 

Greatness starts with a problem that needs solving. The opportunity comes from marketing a solution that works. Sharing that solution becomes a cause.  The cause inspires people to help.  And when people are inspired to help, organizations become great.

If we were to look into the history of the successful American shoemaker, we might learn about a problem that he set out to solve that inspired him in the first place.  Something few people know is that he grew up very poor in a very rural part of the country, a mile and a half from the nearest town.  They were so poor they didn’t own a car or horse.  They were so poor, they didn’t even have shoes.  They had no way to cross the rocky, dirt roads to get to town.

One day, a passing traveler gave him a pair of shoes.  The young boy put on the shoes and, for the first time in his life, he could walk across the sharp rocks on the dirt road without cutting up his feet.  It was this one pair of shoes that made it possible for him to walk to town to get a job.  It was this job that helped lift him and his family out of poverty.  It was this one pair of shoes that inspired him.  He vowed that he would see to it that everyone in the world would have shoes so they could walk to and from work and provide for their families.

India, as it turns out, has many poor people and many sharp, rocky dirt roads.  Is the opportunity to sell shoes or is to help people to live in dignity and provide for their families simply because they can walk across rocky, dirt roads to get to work?

Solve a problem, pursue a cause and, who knows, you might just sell a billion pairs of shoes in the process.

via sinekpartners.typepad.com

The Word Demon: J. D. SALINGER gives great writing advice

Eleven years after the highly influential novel The Catcher in the Rye was released, its reclusive author J. D. Salinger wrote the following letter in response to a request for writing advice by an 'angst-ridden' first-year college student. Advice was certainly present in Salinger's reply.

Oct. 21, 1962

Dear Mr. Stevens,

I must tell you first, offputtingly or no, that I am at best a one-shot letter writer, these days. Along with that, I really never have anything to say when I`m done writing fiction at the end of a day. One thought, and one only, hits me about your letter. Entirely "materialistic," I'm afraid. You need a new typewriter ribbon. Get one or don't get one, but unless you make an effort to deal with things as unabstractly as that, you're stewing quite unnecessarily. You've decided that Things are what matter to people. Of course. Not only with "people" but with you, too. Everything in your letter is a thing, concrete or abstract. Avidya and vidya are things. For me, before anything else, you're a young man who needs a new typewriter ribbon. See that fact, and don't attach more significance to it than it deserves, and then get on with the rest of the day. Good wishes to you.

(Signed, 'JDS')

 

via worddemon.blogspot.com

We Are Here: The Pale Blue Dot

A truly inspiring video, and an absolute must see. Happy Valentine's Day.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

-- Carl Sagan

Seth's Blog: The hidden power of a gift

If I sell you something, we exchange items of value. You give me money, I give you stuff, or a service. The deal is done. We're even. Even steven, in fact.

That's fine, but it doesn't explain potlatch or the mystery of art or the power of a gift.

If I give you something, or way more than you paid for, an imbalance is created. That imbalance must be resolved.

Perhaps we resolve it, as the ancient Native Americans did, by acknowledging the power of the giver. In the Pacific Northwest a powerful chief would engage in potlatch, giving away everything he owned as a sign of his wealth and power. Since he had more to give away, and the power to get more, the gifts carried real power, and others had to accept his power in order to engage.

Or we resolve it by acknowledging the creativity and insight of the giver. Artists do this every time they put a painting in a museum or a song on the radio. We don't pay for the idea, but we acknowledge it. And then, if it's particularly powerful, it changes us enough that we become givers, contributing to someone else, passing it along.

Sometimes we resolve the imbalance by becoming closer to the brand or the provider. We like getting gifts, we like being close to people who have given us a gift and might do it again.

And sometimes, in the case of international aid, we resent the rich giver, the one with so much more power, and thus create a cycle of dependence that does neither side any good. This sort of gift isn't much of a gift at all.

When done properly, gifts work like nothing else. A gift gladly accepted changes everything. The imbalance creates motion, motion that pushes us to a new equilibrium, motion that creates connection.

The key is that the gift must be freely and gladly accepted. Sending someone a gift over the transom isn't a gift, it's marketing. Gifts have to be truly given, not given in anticipation of a repayment. True gifts are part of being in a community (willingly paying taxes for a school you will never again send your grown kids to) and part of being an artist (because the giving motivates you to do ever better work).

Plus, giving a gift feels good.

via sethgodin.typepad.com

The First and Best of the 33 Strategies of War

Like Cortes you must locate the root of your problem. It is not the people around you; it is yourself, and the spirit with which you face the world. In the back of your mind, you keep an escape route, a crutch, something to turn to if things go bad. Maybe it is some wealthy relative you can count on to buy your way out; maybe it is some grand opportunity on the horizon, the endless vistas of time that seem to be before you; maybe it is a familiar job or a comfortable relationship that is always there if you fail. Just as Cortes's men saw their ships as insurance, you may see this fallback as a blessing--but in fact it is a curse. It divides you. Because you think you have options, you never involve yourself deeply enough in one thing to do it thoroughly, and you never quite get what you want. Sometimes you need to run your ships aground, burn them, and leave yourself just one option: succeed or go down. Make the burning of your ships as real as possible--get rid of your safety net. Sometimes you have to become a little desperate to get anywhere.

-- Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War, 2007

Seth's Blog: Quieting the lizard brain

How can I explain the never-ending irrationality of human behavior?

We say we want one thing, then we do another. We say we want to be successful but we sabotage the job interview. We say we want a product to come to market, but we sandbag the shipping schedule. We say we want to be thin but we eat too much. We say we want to be smart but we skip class or don't read that book the boss lent us.

The contradictions never end. When someone shows up and acts without contradiction, we're amazed. When an athlete just does the sport, or when a writer just writes the words, we can't help but watch, astonished at the purity of their actions. Why is it so difficult to do what we say we're going to do?

The lizard brain.

Or as Stephen Pressfield describes it, the resistance. The resistance is the voice in the back of our head telling us to back off, be careful, go slow, compromise. The resistance is writer's block and putting jitters and every project that ever shipped late because people couldn't stay on the same page long enough to get something out the door.

The resistance grows in strength as we get closer to shipping, as we get closer to an insight, as we get closer to the truth of what we really want. That's because the lizard hates change and achievement and risk.

The lizard is a physical part of your brain, the pre-historic lump near the brain stem that is responsible for fear and rage and reproductive drive. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because her lizard brain told her to.

Want to know why so many companies can't keep up with Apple? It's because they compromise, have meetings, work to fit in, fear the critics and generally work to appease the lizard. Meetings are just one symptom of an organization run by the lizard brain. Late launches, middle of the road products and the rationalization that goes with them are others.

The amygdala isn't going away. Your lizard brain is here to stay, and your job is to figure out how to quiet it and ignore it. This is so important, I wanted to put it on the cover of my new book. We realized, though, that the lizard brain is freaked out by a picture of itself, and if you want to sell books to someone struggling with the resistance (that would be all of us) best to keep it a little more on the down low.

Now you've seen the icon and you know its name. What are you going to do about it?

via sethgodin.typepad.com

In the Landmark Forum they have a great label for people who consistently give in to this kind of phenomenon (which, it's fair to say, is most people--and I certainly I've been one myself from time to time): the "95 percenters". You get 95% of the way through a project and then, right before the finish line, you stall out, you get nervous, jittery, you start to wonder if you took the right path after all, thinking, "Well, maybe I should go all the way back to the start and retrace my steps, just to be sure I made the right choices, took the right path..." Writers are particularly guilty of said phenomenon (or perhaps it just seems that way to me, from the writerly POV): I imagine I've lost count of how many times I or another writer I know has gotten to within a few pages of finishing (more often than not, a script), and then, rather than push forward and just finish the thing, we go back, edit, re-edit, fuss with the formatting, spend an afternoon trying out new titles, a new character name, think about re-inserting that one amazing but long (oh, sooo long...) subplot we cut right at the outset, and on, and on, and on...

Getting over the lizard brain can be a daunting task, but it can be done. How to do it? Hear it, LISTEN to it, know what it is, realize where it's coming from, silently nod your head in acceptance, and then move forward regardless. Sometimes the tiniest bit of blind faith in the human part of you can work wonders, when it comes to overcoming the lizard...

How can I explain the never-ending irrationality of human behavior?

We say we want one thing, then we do another. We say we want to be successful but we sabotage the job interview. We say we want a product to come to market, but we sandbag the shipping schedule. We say we want to be thin but we eat too much. We say we want to be smart but we skip class or don't read that book the boss lent us.

The contradictions never end. When someone shows up and acts without contradiction, we're amazed. When an athlete just does the sport, or when a writer just writes the words, we can't help but watch, astonished at the purity of their actions. Why is it so difficult to do what we say we're going to do?

The lizard brain.

Or as Stephen Pressfield describes it, the resistance. The resistance is the voice in the back of our head telling us to back off, be careful, go slow, compromise. The resistance is writer's block and putting jitters and every project that ever shipped late because people couldn't stay on the same page long enough to get something out the door.

The resistance grows in strength as we get closer to shipping, as we get closer to an insight, as we get closer to the truth of what we really want. That's because the lizard hates change and achievement and risk.

The lizard is a physical part of your brain, the pre-historic lump near the brain stem that is responsible for fear and rage and reproductive drive. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because her lizard brain told her to.

Want to know why so many companies can't keep up with Apple? It's because they compromise, have meetings, work to fit in, fear the critics and generally work to appease the lizard. Meetings are just one symptom of an organization run by the lizard brain. Late launches, middle of the road products and the rationalization that goes with them are others.

The amygdala isn't going away. Your lizard brain is here to stay, and your job is to figure out how to quiet it and ignore it. This is so important, I wanted to put it on the cover of my new book. We realized, though, that the lizard brain is freaked out by a picture of itself, and if you want to sell books to someone struggling with the resistance (that would be all of us) best to keep it a little more on the down low.

Now you've seen the icon and you know its name. What are you going to do about it?