This is the video of a talk I did last month at Webstock in Wellington, New Zealand.
It's pretty different from a lot of stuff I've done. It's about being scared.
As I mentioned on Back to Work, Webstock is—what? Well. Webstock is unique. Truly. If you get the chance, you should go. Really.
I could not and would not have done this talk in this way had I had not been so inspired (and, frankly, so terrified) by the awesomeness of the other speakers, by the quality of their talks, and by the astounding graciousness and empathy of the audience that this particular event attracts.
Tash and Mike and their crackerjack team have made something really special here. I'm honored that they even invited me, and I'm insanely grateful for the care and hospitality that they showed to the speakers and to the attendees at every step of the way.
Seriously. Thank you.
So, yeah. I did something really weird at Webstock. Weird for me and, honestly, just plain weird for "a talk."
I'm not sure if it succeeded. But, I did the best I could to make myself (along with some really heroic friends and fellow speakers) into a legitimate guinea pig for a concept that means the world to me:
You can be scared and still do it anyway. Regardless of whatever it is.
And, you can. No. Really. You. You can do this.
You can run toward the shitstorm, let it cover you with shit, but, still never let it stop you from running.
I have the life that I have because I've made a lot of weird decisions, and they've worked out well.
Not gonna lie to you. I'm a huge nerd. Surprised?
Yep. I can recite big chunks of The Big Lebowski from memory. I can argue for an hour on the merits of Dick York over Dick Sargent. And, I can—and frequently do—catch myself thinking Catwoman, Batgirl, Princess Leia, and Emma Peel should have a light-hearted pillow fight that ends with an hour of genial french-kissing.
Pretty much like you, probably. I dunno, maybe your version includes Kitty Pryde. Po-tay-to/Po-taht-o, right?
Perhaps most saliently, by virtue of having spent a solid 2,399 days as a Fake Productivity Guru, I have been provided with an unquestionably Janusian monkey's paw of a gift; I now know a lot about workflows. Nerdy, nerdy workflows.
I can tell you a few things that almost always work, I can tell you a handful of things that almost never work, and—best or worst of all—I can tell you thousands of things that might work. Sometimes. Maybe. Kinda. For some people. For now.
And, at the risk of gay-marrying my arrogance to my hypocrisy, I can tell you that I also know enough about the unholy diarrhea of potential options for Theoretical Productivity to share two big patterns:
Getting your workflow right matters.
Getting your workflow right to the exclusion of the actual work is a fool's game.
But. Managing to get the most useful and most elegant and least fiddly mix of 1 and 2 right is super-hard. Especially for nerds. Especially for me.
It is reeeeeeeeally nerdy. Almost intolerably nerdy. Just…overwhelmingly nerdy.
But, man, is it ever really good, and really fat with the most insanely granular details of How I Work.
Lo, even these 928.5 days after officially retiring from productivity pr0n, my desire to not "vend stroke material for your joyless addiction to puns about procrastination and systems for generating more taxonomically satisfying meta-work" is tempered by a (widely under-reported) practical streak.
Yes: I continue to despise empty advice about rearranging deck chairs on The Titanic. But, yes: I do also still very much enjoy talking about how all the tips and tricks can or can't work in the context of work you care about. That matters. It really does.
So. Here goes. A one hundred and forty six minute-long, Joyce-ian amble through the Big Stuff and the Little Stuff. David and Katie were very patient.
How I name text files. Why I break iOS apps. Why I love the letter "x." Why I won't row out to islands any more. How a 115,000 word book manuscript is "like a house full of confederate money." How "The Cloud" broke in New Zealand. How I use MultiMarkdown, Scrivener, TextExpander, OmniFocus, TextMate, Notational Velocity, Dropbox, and an explosive combination of Elements, Notesy, Nebulous, Simplenote, CF Outliner, iThoughts, Instacast, Good Reader, and wow wow wow.
How I try not to fiddle—how I sometimes succeed and often don't. But, how I try.
Long story (not very) short? One night in 2003--after killing it in front of audience of about 30 lucky people in Oakland--The Long Winters needed a place to crash, and my wife and I were happy to oblige.
So, they drove their Big Stinky Blue Van over the bridge, slept on our floor, and by breakfast the next morning, it'd become clear to me that I'd provided lodging to a man who was not only very likely a member of my karass--he was also one of the smartest bullshit artists I'd ever met.
Almost eight years later, although I don't see him nearly as much as I'd like, I still count the guy as one of my best pals ever.
That's John Roderick. And, I think you need to know about him.
John doesn't read this site--he's more of a Twitter person--so I don't risk feeding his astounding excess of dignity by saying he's one of the most gifted writers and bon vivants of our generation. He's just the best. In large part because he's congenitally incapable of suffering bullshit.
This was never more apparent than the Saturday morning in 2007 when we sat in my back yard and talked about a lot of stuff. Playing guitar, advertising on the web, the evil work of promoters, and why everyone is always trying to shortchange everyone on copper pipe.
That talking became a four-part interview I ran on the late and occasionally lamented The Merlin Show, and, to this day, it's one of my favorite things I've been lucky enough to post to the web.
So, y'know how I'm definitely "not for everyone?" Well, John is really "not for everyone."
He's opinionated and arrogant and undiplomatic and unironically loves Judas Priest--meaning everyone will find at least one thing not to like about him. Despite being hairy and enjoying laying on your bed, John is not exactly a teddy bear.
But, John's also right a lot. And, he never sands off the edges of his personality or opinions to make you theoretically "like" him. Which, it will come as no surprise to you, is a big reason I love the guy more than a free prime rib dinner.
So, why the jizzfest about that awful jerk, John Roderick?
Because, as I noted the other day on the Twitter, in our first episode of Back to Work I misattributed a line that should have been credited to John. Which in itself is unimportant, except inasmuch as finding that link to correct the error got me watching our 50-some minutes of chatting again. I also received some at-responses and emails that reminded me how much people enjoyed our chat.
But, really it made me realize how much that rambling morning in my back yard still resonates so much with stuff I care a lot about. Independence. Agency. Directness. And, never apologizing for wanting to get paid. Also, guitars and talkative hippies.
So, anyway. John.
I edited all four parts of the video into one big (streamable/downloadable) movie that should make it way easier to watch at a sitting. Should that interest you. Which it may not. Which, as ever, is totally fine, and kind of the point.
But. If you like Dan and my new show (and, seriously—God bless you magnificent bastards who helped briefly make B2W the most popular podcast in the world [gulp]), I think you'll really like this interview a lot too. I hope so, anyway.
Thus, submitted for your disapproval, permit me to present my four-year-old visit with the acerbic, opinionated, and reportedly unlikeable bullshit artist whom I respect and adore more than just about anybody.
Before Christ was a corporal, Dan Benjamin was already a bit of a hero to me.
Since the early aughts–long before his insanely great 5by5.tv podcast network–Dan’s Hivelogic Enkoder was saving us millions of spam messages. His thoughtful tutorials on OS X (including unmissable advice on doing sane installs of MySQL and Rails, among others) are among the best on the web. His CSS has been widely stolen and reused without acknowledgment by thieves as diverse as other people and me. And his polymath posts on everything from Buddhism to The Paleo Diet to how to record a “Double-ender” have shown a charming combination of curiosity and empathy that, amongst numerous other reasons, clearly makes Dan a better human than me.
A propos of nothing, Dan’s also the guy who conducted one of (mp3) the three best interviews with me in which it’s been my good fortune to participate.1
Today, I’m honored to say that Dan and I are starting a thing together.
If it suits you, drop by 5by5.tv/live in about 35 minutes–at Noon Eastern/9am Pacific–to find out what we’re up to. I think it might be good. I’ll just say I’m as excited about this as I’ve been about any new project I’ve started in the past year or so.
Anyway. You can judge for yourself. Whether you can tolerate me or otherwise, definitely do not miss the work Dan’s doing at 5by5. Because it really is outstanding and very polished stuff.
As for our thing? My own goal, to paraphrase a bit from that interview with Dan, is to help you get excited, get better–and then?–Back to Work.
No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don't want to die to get there.
And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it.
And that is as it should be. Because death is very likely the single best invention of life.
It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new.
[…]
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
None of us should ever have to face death to accept the inflexible and, too-often, novel sense of scarcity that it introduces.
In fact, it'd be great if we could each skip needing outside permission to be awesome by not waiting until the universe starts tapping its watch.
A simple start would involve each of us learning to care just a little more about a handful of things that simply aren't allowed to leave with us--whether today, tomorrow, or whenever. Because, I really believe a lot of nice things would start to happen if we also stopped waiting to care. A whole lot of nice things.
If that sounds like fancy incense for hippies and children, perhaps in a way that seems frankly un-doable for someone as practical and important and immortal as yourself, then go face death.
In a classic bit from an early Seinfeld, Jerry and Elaine are at the airport, trying to pick up the rental car that Jerry had reserved. As usual, things go poorly and get awkward fast:
Being a Parable for the Edification of Independents Seeking Independence
THE PARABLE
THE OSTENSIBLE CUSTOMER enters a deli and saunters up to the counter. The deli is tended by its rakishly handsome owner, THE SANDWICH GUY.
"Hi," says The Sandwich Guy. "What looks good to you today?"
"Slow down," says The Ostensible Customer, as THE LUNCH RUSH starts trickling in. "Lots of delis want my business, so, first I need to really understand what you can do for me."
"Well," says The Sandwich Guy, "I guess I can try to do what I do for everybody here and make you a customized version of any of the 15 awesome sandwiches you see on my menu. What're you hungry for?"
"Easy, easy, Ricky Roma! Before I make any decisions here I'm going to need to know a lot more about my options. Why are you so obsessed with 'what I want?'"
"Okay, sorry," says The Sandwich Guy, uneasily eyeing the growing queue of The Lunch Rush now piling up behind The Ostensible Customer. "What else can I do to help here?"
"That's better," says The Ostensible Customer. "Let's start by sitting down for a couple hours and going over all the ingredients you have back there."
The Sandwich Guy laughs congenially and hands The Ostensible Customer a menu. "Friend, I can make you whatever you want, but, if it helps, the 15 sandwiches listed here show all the ingredients--right there between the name and the price
A couple weeks ago, my pals at Twitter were kind enough to invite me in to visit with their (rapidly growing) team. The topic was meetings, so I used it as an opportunity to publicly premiere a talk I've been presenting to private clients over the past few months.
Supplementary links and commentary forthcoming, but I wanted to go ahead and post the talk as quickly as the video was available. Special thanks to Michelle, Jeremy, and the crackerjack Twitter crew for a swell afternoon.
I really like this talk and sincerely hope you will find it useful in helping to un-break your own meetings.
You mentioned you gave a talk at Rutgers about future proofing your passion. Is this available as a podcast? I'd love to listen!
This poor kid emailed me to ask a really simple question. And I went and saddled him with the world's most circuitously long-winded answer. Surprise, surprise.
Hey, Xx,
Thanks for the note, man. No I'm sorry its not up as audio AFAIK.
FWIW, it's a talk I'm asked to do more often lately so I wouldn't be surprised if it turns up sooner or later.
Since you were kind enough to ask, the talk—which comes out super different each time I do it— consists of a discursive mishmash of advice I wish I'd had the ears to hear in the year or five after graduating from college: primarily, that we never end up anywhere near where we'd expected, and that most of us would have been a lot happier a lot faster if we'd realized that we were often obsessing over the wrong things—starting with how much the world should care about our major. ("Liberal Arts," with a concentration in [ugh] "Cultural Studies," thanks.)
The talk started as a way to encourage students to learn enough about what they care about that any temporary derails and side roads wouldn't scare their horses too badly. But, today, I see it as something a lot bigger that's demonstrably useful to anyone who hopes to survive, evolve, and thrive in this insane world.
A handful of bits I'm (obviously) still synthesizing into something notionally cohesive:
My Kingdom for Some Context!
For myself, I wish I'd known the value of developing early expertise in interesting new skills around emerging technologies (rather than just iteratively pseudo-honing the 202-level skills I thought I "understood"). Alongside that, I wish I'd learned to embrace the non-douchier aspects of building awesome human relationships (as against "networking" in the service of landing some straight job that, as with most hungry young people, locked me into a carpeted prison of monkey work at the worst time possible).
Also how I wish I'd paid more attention to events, contexts, relationships, and change that were happening outside my immediate world —rather than becoming, say, the undisputed master of fretting about status, salary, and whether I was "a success" who had "arrived".
Hint: I was not a "success," and I had not, by any stretch, "arrived."
To my mind, "success" in the real world is much more the equivalent of achieving a new personal best; it's not about whether you won the "Springtime in Springfield SunnyD®/Q105™ 5k FunRun for Entitilitus," and got a little ribbon with a gold crest on it.
Truly, pretty much anyone who feels they've "arrived" anyplace is about to learn a) how much more they could be doing outside the narrowness of an often superficial ambition and b) the surprising number of things they had to give away through the opportunity costs and trade-offs that lead up to every theoretical milestone. It's a real goddamned thistle, and it's more than a little depressing.
Do You Still Really Want to be a Fireman?
[N.B.: I really hope you're taking bathroom breaks here, Xx]
Related, I think this is about how being an adult is not only unbelievably complicated in ways that you can't begin to imagine—that it's frequently defined by impossible decisions and non-stop layers of "hypocrisy"—but that there's an invisible but entirely real risk to doggedly chasing the theoretically laudable notion of "following your dream." Especially if it's a dream you first had while sleeping on Star Wars sheets in a racecar bed.
Not because it's a bad idea to want things or to have ambitions. Quite the opposite. More because, for a lot of us, the "dreams" of youth turn out to be half-finished blueprints for wax wings. And not particularly flattering ones at that.
By starting adult life with an autistically explicit "goal" that's never been tested against any kind of real-world experience or reality-in-context, we can paradoxically miss a thousand more useful, lucrative, or organic opportunities that just…what?…pop up. Often these are one-time chances to do amazing and even unique things—opportunities that many of us continue to reject out of hand because it's "not what we do."
It took me a full decade to learn to embrace the unfamiliar gifts that kismet loves to deliver on our busiest and most stressful days, and which gifts might (maybe/maybe not) even end up bringing the real-life, non-racecar-bed, now me a big step closer to something that's 1000 times more interesting than a hollow, ten-year-old caricature of "what I wanna be when I grow up."
Finding Your "Old Butcher"
Also related, it strikes me that the indisputable wealth of information and options that are provided by the web often comes with a harrowing hidden tradeoff. While we can certainly learn a lot on our own and become (what feels like) an instant expert on any topic in an afternoon, we usually do so in the absence of a mentor and outside the context of applying expertise to solve actual problems. In my opinion, a cadet should have to survive more than a few Kobayashi Maru scenarios before he gets to declare himself, "Captain."
Call it a guru, a wizard, an old butcher, or what have you, the mad echo chamber of a young mind often benefits from the dampening influence of an experienced grownup who can help you understand things that raw data, wikipedia entries, and lists of tips and tricks can't and wont ever do.
We benefit from a hand on the back and a gentle voice, reminding us:
"Try not to obsess over implementation until you really understand the problem," or
"Worry more about relationships than org charts or follower counts," or
"Don't quit looking after you've found that first data point," or—my favorite—
"Spend less time fantasizing about 'success' and way more time making really cool mistakes."
Conversely, though, I think this means that everything we think we know, as well as all the fancy advice that gets thrown around—absolutely including the material you're reading now—is the product of what one person knows and what another person has the ears to hear. For us. For now. For who really knows what. But it is a transaction that takes place in a very specific time and within the bounds of a set of "known" "facts." So, fair warning, doing your own due diligence never hurts.
What's Almost Not Impossible?
[N.B.: I swear to God this ends at some point, Xx]
One big pattern for "future-proofing" your passion? Keep your eyes open and your heart even "opener." And, be more than simply tolerant of the notion of change—sure, take it as read that nothing is ever fixed in place for more than a little while.
But, to the extent that your sanity can bear it, always keep an eye on the corners, the edges, and especially learn to watch for those infinitesimally tiny figures starting to shuffle around near the horizon. Because a lot of the things that seem ridiculously small and inconsequential right now will eventually cast a shadow that people will be chasing for decades. It's just that we're never sure which tiny figure that will turn out to be.
So, yeah. It really is true that no one but you cares about your major. But, trust me: everybody is interested in the person who repeatedly notices the things that are about to stop being impossible.
Be the curious one who soaks in all that "irrelevant" stuff. And, even as you stay heads-down on the "now" projects that keep the lights on, remember that the guy who invented those lights made hundreds of "failed" lightbulbs before fundamentally upending the way we think about time, family, industry, and the role of technology in how we live and work. But, yes, first he "failed" a lot a lot at something which more than a few of his contemporaries thought was pointless in the first place.
Ask: What's out there right now that's about to stop being impossible? Where will it happen first? Who will (most loudly and erroneously) declare it's total bullshit? Who will mostly get it right—but possibly too early? Who will figure out what it means to our grandkids? Who will figure out how to put it in everyone's front pocket for a quarter?
Y'know who? I'll tell you who: practically anybody BUT that guy in the racecar bed who wants to talk about his major.
Important: Merlin's Advice is Only Future-Proof to 10 Meters
A few years back, most watch manufacturers decided to come clean and stop categorically declaring that their timepieces were "waterproof." Instead, today, the more credible vendors admit their product is merely "water-resistant"—and, even then, they'll only guarantee the underwater functionality at so many meters, and for so long, and under thus and such conditions.
Truthfully, the same applies here. Nothing can actually "future-proof" anything. Anyone who claims to know the future is either a madman, a charlatan, or, often as not, both.
Thing is, regardless of the passions (or goals or values or priorities or whatever) that we hope to protect or defend, we'd all do well to remember that it is still ultimately OUR passion that's at stake.
That means we're the only one responsible for seeing that its functional components survive and adapt in a world in which each one of us has just north of zero control.
If we embrace the fact that no one can or should ever care about the health of our passions as much as we do, the practical decisions that help ensure Our Good Thing stays alive can become as "simple" as a handful of proven patterns—work hard, stay awake, fail well, hang with smart people, shed bullshit, say "maybe," focus on action, and always always commit yourself to a bracing daily mixture of all the courage, honesty, and information you need to do something awesome—discover whatever it'll take to keep your nose on the side of the ocean where the fresh air lives. This is huge.
Anything else? Yeah. Drink lots of water, play with your kid every chance you get, and quit Facebook today. No, really, do it.
Thanks again for the note, Xx, and sorry for the novella. I'll ping you if the audio ever turns up. Til then, forget your major, and break a leg!
This is a talk I did at Rutgers earlier this month. I kinda like it, but for a weird reason. Something something, perfect storm of technology Ragnarok, and yadda yadda, I had to start the talk 20 minutes late with no slides. Nothing.
So, I riffed.
And, I ended up talking about a lot of the new stuff you can expect to see in the Inbox Zero book—work culture, managing expectations, the 3 deadly qualities of email, and one surprising reason email's not as much fun as Project Runway.
Some people liked it. I think. I liked it. I hope you do, too.
Many thanks, again, to my great pal, Dr. Donald Schaffner, for bringing me in for this visit. I had a great time and met some fantastic, passionate people. Much appreciated.
Hey—know anybody who should hear this talk? Hmmm?
I’ll bet. Lucky you, you can hire me to deliver this or any of my other talks to the time- and attention-addled people you work with as well.
Current topics include email, meetings, social media, and future-proofing your passion.
Drop a note if you have an upcoming event where you think we two might be a good fit.
update 2010-04-27_13-50-00
Apologies—my friends at Rutgers (inexplicably) have placed this video under lock and key. Fortunately, I have a lock-picker called Firefox. Samizdat video available soon
After almost a year of hand-wringing, fretting, and occasionally even writing the odd string of English words, I’ve finally started turning into the home stretch with the first draft of my Inbox Zero book.
If it hasn’t been obvious, or you couldn’t just guess, this book project’s been a big rock for me. Given the effort it’s taken (read: most every hour I’m not sleeping, working, or pushing my daughter in a swing), it’s also the primary reason why updates to 43 Folders have been so scarce over the last few months. The spirit was willing, but the brain–insanely sick of thinking about these very topics–was weak.
Yes, as it turns out, writing a book does require an extraordinary expenditure of both attention and time. And, in my own case, I’ll confess that this often meant working even more than four hours a week. But, who knows? Maybe that’s just a consequence of my slow typing and abject lack of lifetrepreneurship.
Thing is, this has also been a fantastic and exhilarating time for me. Despite the pressure, the stress, and the alternating tickity-tock of both clock and keyboard, in the end, performing the architecture and masonry required to build such a large project demanded that I gather a lot of seemingly unrelated material, choose the most promising ingredients, and then heat it all up in a deadline-fueled crucible. Sure, it’s been mostly good pressure (who the hell complains about having a book deal?), but it’s still been real pressure.
Fortunately, with much relief and abundant gratitude, I can say that I’m really satisfied with the emerging artifact. And, of course, I really hope you guys feel the same way when the book comes out. Probably some time in the fall of 2049.
Coming Up for Air
I mention all this here because, if you follow any of the stuff I do and sayelsewhere, you’ll have noticed a recent uptick in the number of appearances I’ve been making around the web. That’s the happy confluence of my (finally) coming up for air, combined with my determination to (finally) make good on endless months of snoozed and punted and re-re-re-scheduled interview requests from some very cool people, publications, and podcasts. (Thanks to everyone who’s asked and, if I missed you, please ask again.)
So, today, I beg your indulgence to share three recent interviews with me that I like quite a lot.
While all three are profiles of me and what I’ve been doing and thinking about as I work on this infernal book business, they also each bear directly on the topics that I know mean a lot to you guys, too. Especially, if you’re one of the band of brothers who’ve stuck with me and courageously kept this XML-enabled null space in your feed reader since my much-discussed shift away from productivity pr0n.
Thus, by way of inarguably self-involved catch-up–and as an informal reintroduction to how I truly believe you can “find the time and attention to do your best creative work”–here’s three recent interviews:
My longtime hero, Hivelogic’s Dan Benjamin, recently invited me onto 5 by 5’s flagship podcast, “The Pipeline.” While it was intimidating to know I’d be standing alongside such august (and superior) talent as Zeldman, Haughey, Coudal, and Inman, I was honored to be asked, and I’m extremely happy with the results.
We cover a lot of territory in less than 40 minutes, but we basically hit on almost every major topic that means a lot to me right now, including, the power of voice, the challenges of knowledge work, the perils of the Lizard Brain, the primacy of action, the seeming unavoidability of Buddhism, and the hidden dangers of following herds, chasing dumb traffic, and aping the “success” of others.
Thanks much for this opportunity, Dan. You’re a real pro.
Mac Power Users, ep. 23; with David Sparks and Katie Floyd
Averse as I am to promoting productivity pr0n for its own sake, this tour de force podcast should be a lot of fun to anyone who’s interested in Mac and iPhone workflows.
But, like I said, please do take all this in doses. This is something I’ve evolved over years, so you certainly don’t need to stop what you’re doing to try to implement all of this.
Still, I have to say, this podcast lays out an empirically nerdtastic workflow which even the dorkiest Mac fanboy will find something new and awesome in. And, yes, there’s loads of non-tool-fetish advice on how to do the actual work. I promise.
Thanks so much to David and Katie for putting up with 90 minutes of me talking very quickly about the most embarrassing details of my encompassing Mac dorkery.
MaxFunCon Podcast, ep. 12; “Keep Moving”; with Jesse Thorn
In this admittedly rambling (but hopefully charming) interview, Jesse and I talk about what makes MaxFunCon so special, as well as how a person who’s as–to use Jesse’s parlance–“ADD-addled” as I am can actually put a 50,000-word book together. Along the way I profess my love for Maria Bamford, Jonathan Coulton, and Chris Hardwick, as well as extol the virtues of drinking vodka from a glass skull with John Hodgman.
Silliness aside, we talk frankly about the pants-be-crapping fear of performing (and the more profound terror of sucking at performing) that dogs anyone who’s ever decided to get up in front of a bunch of strangers and try to be entertaining. It’s hard. So hard. Which is kind of why I love it.
Alas, MaxFunCon 2010 is now way sold out, but you can claim your spot on the waiting list by writing to maxfuncon at gmail. It is, as I’ve repeatedly said, easily the best conference I’ve ever attended. Ever. Even more than DB/Expo ‘97.
Thanks for your patience with this one, and sorry in advance if this seems all me-me-me.
But, if anything, 43 Folders is a site that started and still exists for me to share what has and hasn’t worked for me along the road to trying to make great stuff.
I hope all three of these interviews will be of interest to anyone who walks that same road, stumbles onto those same shoulders, and shares my cardinal interest in always dusting yourself off, stepping back on the path, and plodding toward whatever comes next.
Thanks to my funny, literary pal, Jason B. Jones, today, I’m visiting lovely, warm Connecticut to do some talks and whatnot at CCSU. I mention it because I’d started typing this little post mid-way through the long eastbound flight that delivered me here from three fun (but very long) days doing a comedy thing with You Look Nice Today and Jordan, Jesse, Go! over on that other, top-left, edge of our nation.
So, I was tired. Really tired. The kind of tired where your wallet hurts your butt, and coffee tastes weird, and you try super-hard to sleep, but — well — you’re just too tired to sleep. And, I was fine with all that. Who can complain about being sleepy from hanging out with Adam and Scott? Exactly.
Except. The lady in the seat directly behind me was having grave problems with her “mud room.” Big mud room problems. I know this because she talked about it for several hours in excruciating detail.
I’ll spare you the nuts and bolts of the numerous and surprising ways that the room in which wealthy persons remove their shoes might contribute to causing a carefully-coiffed, 60-year-old woman to come unglued over “priorities.” Suffice to say, fixing this problem was a “high priority” for her. So, she said, repeatedly, as I shifted my wallet, let my coffee go cold, and balled the little blue pillow under my neck.
“Priority! Mud room!” I audibly mumbled, just loud enough to be heard exactly one row back.
Priority. Man, that’s a tough word. Because, depending on who you talk to, most people say “prioritizing” is either a giant problem, an underused skill, or a “Get out of Jail Free” card.
Me? I think priorities are simple to understand precisely because their influence is so staggeringly clear and unavoidable to behold, then act upon. Ready for this one?
A priority is observed, not manufactured or assigned. Otherwise, it’s necessarily not a priority.
Got that? You can’t “prioritize” a list of 20 tasks any more than you can “uniqueify” 20 objects by “uniqueness,” or “pregnantitze” 20 women by “pregnantness.” Each of those words means something.
An item is either unique or it is not. A woman is either pregnant or she is not. An item is either the priority or it is not. One-bit. Mutually exclusive. One ring to rule them all.
Why all the fussiness, Mr. Fussy?
When most people say, “prioritize,” I think they really mean to say, “force-rank” — to assign n items one and only one position between “1” and “n.” Right? So, yes, there’s one “#1” and one “#7,” et cetera. But that’s not “priority,” and that’s why you probably have at least one task on your version of a to-do list that has been “HIGH PRIORITY!!!” for more than a month.
Kind of unique. Sort of pregnant. “High” priority.
This is why I say priorities can only be observed. In my book, a priority is not simply a good idea; it’s a condition of reality that, when observed, causes you to reject every other thing in the universe — real, imagined, or prospective — in order to ensure that things related to the priority stay alive.
Even though their influence informs every decision we make on the most tactical level, thinking about priorities happens at a strategic, “why am I here?” level. Right? Maybe? Disagree? Pretty sure you can make priorities like biscuits or shuffle them around like Monopoly pieces?
Got news for you, Jack: if it moves, it’s not a priority. It’s just a thing you haven’t done yet.
Making something a BIG RED TOP TOP BIG HIGHEST #1 PRIORITY changes nothing but text styling. If it were really important, it’d already be done. Period. Think about it.
Example. When my daughter falls down and screams, I don’t ask her to wait while I grab a list to determine which of seven notional levels of “priority” I should assign to her need for instantaneous care and affection. Everything stops, and she gets taken care of. Conversely — and this is really the important part — everything else in the universe can wait.
Related example. You ever had a loved one — especially a very young relative — pass away unexpectedly? Brutal. What did you do when you found out? Did you “re-prioritize” your day and move a few things around? Or did you drop everything and join his or her loved ones in taking care of what needed to be taken care of? You just saw what needed to be done and likely had no compunction about telling everybody at work they’d either have to wait or move on without you.
And, let’s be clear: this is not all about “urgency.” Yes, an injured child and a grieving family need help now in a way that an M&A discussion or a CPR class may not. But, again. It’s not a question of order or shuffling. It’s a question of brutally honest decision-making and constantly saying, “No, I have another thing to take care of.”
Day One Buddhism.
Because, once you see what’s really there — once you know about an idea or a thing or a person or whatever that you’d reject 10,000 other things to protect and nurture — you’ve found your priority. And, consequently, you’ve discovered a bunch of other things that aren’t allowed to be priorities any more. Even in spirit.
Because, if you aren’t rejecting or dumping things every single day, you don’t know your priority. You’re making things up. If you think you have 35 priorities, then yes: you also think you have 35 arms. Is it any wonder you’re feeling awkward and unsure?
Maybe a mud room is a priority. I think more likely it was this lady’s emotional obsession. If I were the sort of person who coached people on these things, I’d ask her what piece of information she needed to get moving on the “mud room” project, then get it, do it, and move on. That said, dozens of thousands of feet in the air seems like a crummy place to realize a mud room is your “priority,” but I’m not here to judge. Much.
What I will tell you is that these ideas about scarcity and mutual exclusivity fly in the face of most “productivity” and “effectiveness” nonsense, and frankly, they make most people bristle. Big time. When I tell someone who’s making 10 times the salary I’ll ever make that it’s literally impossible to have seven priorities, they look at me like I’m the biggest, dumbest hippie in the world. Sheesh, right?
For the Cult of Priority folks, two things:
First, ask yourself why any “high priority” item has remained unresolved in your life for more than 60 seconds. Why isn’t it done completely? Have you ever “re-assigned” “priority” to some task? Really? Because that sounds more like procrastination than management, let alone “effective” action and decisive execution. Sounds more to me like getting paid $10,000,000 a year to re-arrange your spice rack — then wondering why your company, marriage, and back porch are all crumbling under your “prioritization.” Sounds like maybe you’re just feeling crummy about not understanding your job and your life. Once you know a tree is falling on you, you don’t take a meeting to drill down on strategies viz. arboreal exit strategies. You just run.
Also, number two — and this is a biggie — I’m staggered whenever a Director-level or higher executive claims they have 3, 5, 7, or 27 “priorities.” Because, at that level, your entire career is defined by the unbelievably great ideas that you reject. Painfully giant, wonderful, terrific opportunities that you simply don’t have the capacity to address without screwing up the real priority.
No, no, no, no, sorry, later, nope, forget it, later, no, no, no.
Because only babies and crazy people get to pretend that reality actually changes when you close your eyes and hum. And, reality is the thing that priorities hang on. If you think you can change it by taxonomies and meetings, you still have only two arms, only now you’re also screwed.
So, if a mud room, or a crying toddler, or a CPR class, or even a short note from an old friend turns up on your radar screen today, don’t ask yourself whether it’s a “priority.” Ask yourself what you must not do in order to make sure it gets taken care of.
Once you see and accept real priorities, the rest just turns on the mechanics of fearless completion.
This unbelievably long article is related to (but not necessarily about) a discussion that I and several other people have been participating in online over the past few days. It’s about (and not about) the increasingly popular practice of re-publishing someone’s online work on another site without the attribution, formatting, and linking that many bloggers regard as standard, ethical, and fair.
It’s admittedly a polemic (which is what people who think they’re clever call, “a rambling rant”), but what may seem to many to be a childish and ungrateful pout about trivial status and self-esteem beefs turns out to be a kitchen table issue for me. Because, how people decide to reuse and attribute my work directly affects my career, my livelihood, and my ability to thrive based mostly on giving things away for free. I know. Paradoxical, right? Believe me, I know.
I will wait here. Please read them all. This will take a while, and you should only continue if you’re okay with that. As ever, it’s kind of the whole point.
[Time passes, and then:]
Privileges, Fiat, and the Consequence of Guessing Wrong
Weird thing you eventually realize is the extent to which we all rely upon a certain amount of guessing about other people’s motivations. Call it a heuristic or a shortcut or whatever, but in order to make scalable sense of a very strange world, we each have to apply existential algorithms and SWAGs to help us turn a lot of unrelated crap into a sensible story that we can live with.
But. It is important to remember that it is just a story. And the truth behind our assumptions is often not only different than we thought or hoped, but can even be really difficult to understand, summarize, or fit back into our original story.
Eventually, you also learn that it’s sketchy to blame the truth instead of a broken story.
Which is why I said what I said about how All Things D’s Voices section obtains and presents the work of writers who do not actually write for them. It’s why I’m uncomfortable letting other people decide, by fiat, that their insight into my own motivations gives them permission to reuse my work however (and, importantly, wherever) they please while unilaterally setting the licensing and compensation to terms they’ve decided are appropriate.
In the case here, for Matt and Josh, that compensation was “a link” and — what? — I guess the opportunity to pretend that you write for a giant for-profit corporation. And because, as the story goes, every blogger writes primarily (or even exclusively) in order to generate page views that bolster his site’s advertising revenue, they/we/I should all be grateful for the largesse of our True Fourth Estate. Even if a giant for-profit corporation’s re-use of that work actually undermines the real motivations, it would be uncivil, ungrateful, and untoward for us to not thank them for helping us out with our little projects. Right?
Well. In my own case, anyone who guessed that motivation has guessed amazingly wrong. And, it’s not the kind of wrong without consequences. So, before I take up the rest of your morning, I’ll try to say this well and mostly once:
Nobody but me is allowed to decide why I make things. And — if and when I choose to give away the things that I make — nobody but me is allowed to define how or where I’ll do it. I am independent.
But, let’s start at the beginning. With a series of computer networks that were designed to help scientists keep talking after a nuclear holocaust. The network, of course, is the internet, and its oldest and best-known profession is advertising.1
Days We Were and Weren’t Working for Mad Men
As giant, popular websites have begun to struggle with a years-old decision to hang every nickel of their fortunes on CPM ads (and, consequently, on constantly increasing the volume of page views that make those ads theoretically profitable), readers, fans, and independent makers of content have been forced to watch, fidget, and, wince at their increasingly awkward tarantellas.
Because, as my friend, John Gruber, and I have grown fond of saying, page views and CPM ads can become a corrupting influence on whatever thing you really want to do — on the stories you hope to tell, and, cardinally, on the long-term success of reaching the niche audience who totally gets whatever unbelievably odd thing you’re uniquely capable of producing. Yes. Even if that thing involves not “just being a blogger”,2 maybe a few of us have the temerity to eventually crave something alongside or way beyond toiling in this noble, grinding, and often ghettoized occupation.
But. If your motivation is solely to be a blogger with a site that runs ads, it will necessarily mean thinking a lot about how you’re going to generate page views. Because without ads, most blogs would be lucky to generate bus fare.
When your sole metric is the number of times that pages on your site are loaded (and, that those delicious and life-sustaining ads are served along with them), it becomes unbelievably tempting to start doing things that you know are total bullshit. God knows I’ve done it. Probably dozens of times. Few of us haven’t followed that siren’s song in one way or another, but hopefully you evolve. Sometimes, you don’t.
The Lumpen Metrics of Page View Addiction
And, that is where things start turning to shit.
You “page” your articles to the point of hostile unreadability. You disguise or bury links to source articles in a way that makes your article seem a little more canonical than the real thing. You encourage unmoderated comment threads in which cheering an uncivil race to the bottom of the Port-O-Let means triple page views. You may even compel your indentured “writers” to hew to a stifling regimen of post volume, pointless stock art inclusion, and even compulsory word count — simply because the cargo cult of statistics whispers which coconuts make the best headphones. You conspire to trick, deceive, annoy, and badger your audience up to precisely that moment when they say, “Screw it,” and just never come back.
You ruin the fun for surprisingly little money and eventually discover, to your surprise, that whatever shred of credibility you originally brought to your enterprise has disintegrated into a light dusting on some backfill banners.
Also, “links.” Wow. Links used to really mean something different. When I first started enjoying blogs (maybe 11 years ago), links represented a semantic, curated map of the places where one writer’s attention tended to go.
Today, links have been converted into a wildly inflated currency — farthings that get hoarded and begged, then pushed around, re-counted, and stacked in ways that make you seem a lot less Charles Dickens than Ebenezer Scrooge.
Then, Presently, the Dark Night of the Soul
When page views run your life, you eventually start fibbing about what you really care about. You start pandering to an audience whose depressing lust for new pellets keeps them pecking at a feeder bar for every waking hour. And, yeah, these pigeons eventually become the sole leverage behind your going concern; lose the pigeons and there’s no point pushing pellets, right? Why else would you bother tending the coop?
And, finally, as this weird darkness metastasizes, you may unintentionally abandon those finicky but influential creators of culture and content upon whose work and authority your whole rag and bone racket ultimately depends. Because, let’s be honest: people who make things tend to recognize bullshit the second it plops into the domain where they have expertise. So, a smart blogger knows horeseshit page games like a veteran carpenter can tell you which chair’s made out of masking tape and balsa scraps. (“Dude! No! Don’t sit there!”)
Thing is: the silence or indifference of the readers and fans you lose will never register in SiteMeter, or Mint, or Google Analytics. There’s no overt trace to warn you when things have gone awry. So, you may never know when someone awesome has decided you’re a charlatan.
Because, friends, when page views run your life, you get dumb. Fast. And you start making terrible decisions.
The Ingratitude. The Temerity.
So, where does some small-potatoes nobody like me (or, in this instance, my pal, Matt Haughey and Delicious.com founder, Joshua Schachter) get off? Some giant for-profit publication (whose most evergreen topic, like my own, seems to be “How Everyone on the Internet Keeps Doing It Wrong”) shows the largesse to republish some digital peasant’s scribblings in their esteemed forum — and they complain? The very idea. Guys, this is a GIANT compliment, right? Because it “drives traffic!”
Hey, traffic. Right. I guess I’ll need that for all those page views, right? Well. Only kinda.
See, links and traffic are great. Seriously. Especially when you’re getting started and when they come from a site run by people you respect and admire as much as I admire Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher (this beef aside, those two are the real deal). Links and traffic are, as I said, the coin of the realm in some sense. They build awareness about what a person does, and they expose a person’s work to a large enough audience that one even hopes a few “ideal readers” might end up landing somewhere in the mix.
But, what if you’re trying to do something really different? What if the page views only really matter to you when they’re happening in front of a face you admire? What if your game is not primarily ads? What if — as I said in that email to Andy — what if you’re selling yourself? Or, even better put, what if you’re not really selling anything but the idea that you do interesting things? What if everyone’s best guesses about your motivation are wrong, cynical, and lead to decisions that actually harm rather than compliment? What if.
So, Who Died and Made You So Fancy, Mr. Fancy?
Anyone with the patience to read or hear anything I’ve had to say over the last year knows that saying what I have to say in the way I want to say it is orders of magnitude more important to me than driving a lot of pointless page views from people I never cared about reaching anyway. No offense, internet, but right now, I need links like Chasen’s needs chili.3
And, to clarify why I include myself in this particular discussion, even though ATD did not boost my own articles for their site, this kind of unilateral and dodgy “repurposing” of my work has happened to me many times. Even setting aside the truly black hat scraping that happens dozens of times a day, I’ve received this kind of left-handed compliment numerous times over the past 4 years.
The example that, for a variety of reasons, sticks out most prominently in my mind happened in May of 2007, when I awoke one morning to discover that the much-more-giant-and-financially-lucrative site, Lifehacker, had suddenly started republishing my entire feed on their ad-crazy home page without even bothering to inform me, let alone ask if I was cool with it. Hey. Wow. Just look at all that honor. Lucky me.
I immediately complained about the nonsense to now-emeritus Lifehacker editor (and long-standing Top 10 human) Gina Trapani, and she was kind enough to remove me from the mix with all haste (thanks, Gina).
But, should I have had to ask? As I said in an email to Gina at the time:
I wonder how [Lifehacker’s hilariously Dickensian publisher, Nick Denton] would feel if a site like Engadget started automatically reposting every article from Gizmodo w/o permission or compensation — but wrapped it in Engadget’s ads. Maybe he’d love it. Who knows?
Personally, I think it’s always nice to be asked about this kind of thing first.
Was it about “the money?” Was it because I think Nick consistently sets, funds, and promotes many of the most execrable examples in the history of publishing? “Not really,” and “kinda,” respectively.
This was about taking something I did and putting it someplace that wasn’t mine, and then acting like we’d both agreed it was a good deal. Like snatching the card off the gift-wrapped toaster I brought, scribbling your name above mine on the card, then handing the whole thing to the bride with a kiss. “Yay! Presents! Thanks, Nick!”
Money is only an issue inasmuch as the prospect of making it without effort or agency governs someone’s decision to stick their dick in my mashed potatoes and call it a birthday cake.
There’s Also No “I” in “We.” Not Until I Say So.
Here’s something like my point: there’s exactly one person on this marble who gets to choose what I give away, to whom I give it away, and under what conditions I give it away. It’s not folks who have decided via tarot or Ouija why I do anything that I do. And it’s damned sure not the esteemed employees of Rupert Murdoch or Nick Denton. It’s me, gang. Merlin is Merlin’s sole free-stuff decider. Full stop. Punto.
If it matters (and it certainly may not), my goal and motivation is to wake up early every day, drink coffee, play with my daughter, kiss my beautiful wife, and then spend double-digit hours trying to create things that will make people happy, productive, entertained, inspired, and even a little more awesome — and, on those rarest and most joyful of days, maybe I’ll even make something that combines all of those qualities.
But, all these ideas start and end with me. All the execution goes through me. If it sucks, it’s because of me. But it always has my name and my dorky icon on it, so you know where to either find more or simply try to steer clear.
And, whether people love, despise, or feel indifferent about things I’ve made, it all comes down to me and my weird independent occupation. This is not simply a job; it’s an anxious daily adventure in fucking reinventing myself. While, I’ll note, paying my own way to keep every dinghy in this little flotilla afloat and barnacle-free. And while it’s undeniably the richest of first-world problems, funding your own independence is the most insanely costly and addictive project you’ll ever love.
Okay, Shakespeare: WHY Do I Care?
What makes all this melodrama so interesting today, is that we are all in the midst of an unprecedented and unavoidable global re-thinking of what a lot of things really “mean.” Economy. Home. Family. Security. Entertainment. Identity. You name it. There are a shit-ton of grenades still rolling around on the floor right now, and I’m one of those crazy fringe types who publicly, ardently hopes that at least one of them blows out a few load-bearing walls inside industries that are in overdue need of a bottom-up redesign. No matter what.
And, even in the face of change that will be gut-wrenching for literally everyone, I pray that for each person whose occupation relied on a 100- to 900-year-old business model, maybe one or two might get to figure out something they can make and vend in a way that does not require the intermediation of the people who are currently steaming their unsinkable vessels into some surprisingly pointy and resolute chunks of ice.
Again: There are Many Like It, But This One is Mine
This is just my opinion and I speak for no one but myself. But, when somebody moves my work onto their shelf without asking me like an adult, one of the last things on my mind is stealing or piracy. Seriously. I know. Crazy.
Steal my stuff? Sure. Go nuts. Grab it. Read it. “Pirate it.” Put it on a Kindle. Put it in a torrent. Make it into LaTeX (whatever that is). But, man. Don’t sell it without asking me. Don’t be a dick about pretending I made it for your project. And, don’t try to shortchange me on copper pipe, then call it a special discount. None of that’s your call, chief.
I can make words and videos and pretty much anything to replace or augment the ones people consume; but I absolutely can’t do it if you rub my name and address off of the label. And, here’s the funny part: when people like me quit making stuff, guess what? Your shovelblog fodder and pigeon pellets start drying up. You’d have nothing left to churn. So, it actually benefits all of us to take this stuff seriously.
The Niche Shall Set You “Free”
And, finally, as far as motivations go? If you’re married to page views, never assume that I am. If you’re angling for 1,000,000 Twitter followers whom you pretend to read, never assume that I am. And, if your project is based on generating compulsory year-over-year growth vis-a-vis market domination and fiduciary responsibility, never assume that I am.
The niche is the thing, friends. It’s the future, and it’s here. Things like this little rhubarb are just the earliest Braxton Hicks contractions of a change that will be getting way, way weirder than most people think.
But, if we each have the arrogance to demand the credit that we’re due, an astonishing number of opportunities begin to unfold. We learn who really made what we love; not just who put it someplace where lots of people can see it. We discover whom we admire and we make decisions about who to collaborate with.
And, if we do the right thing, we can each merge into an insane new caravan of makers who look out for each other, focus on doing great work, and who try to promote things because it made a connection with us. Not because it benefits someone who pays us by the compliment.
But, the anecdote that’s on my mind today comes straight out of the warm and countless Wednesday night potlucks my family attended in the Fellowship Hall at White Oak Christian Church on Blue Rock Road in Cincinnati, Ohio. Where, even if you arrived empty-handed and unable to contribute on a given night, you were welcomed and encouraged to eat all you liked. But, when you finished, you wiped your mouth, straightened your tie, and personally acknowledged every single cook who’d just fed you. Yes. Even all those amateurs who filled your belly for “free.”
I have and will continue to run ads on some of my sites, including 43 Folders. It will be left to the reader whether this is wise, well-done, or simply hypocritical, so I’ll just simply stipulate that, in my opinion, ads alone are not the problem; they’re an easy revenue stream that can be removed with trivial ease. But. Making a career out of executing work exclusively to generate page views that support those ads? That is where this gets thorny. I don’t do that (at least now I don’t), but judge away. ↩
Not that there’s anything wrong with that; some of my best friends are “just a blogger.” ↩
My pal, John Gruber (from daringfireball.net), and I presented a talk at South by Southwest Interactive on Saturday, March 14th. We talked about building a blog you can be proud of, trying to improve the quality of your work, reaching the people you admire, and maybe even making a buck (in a way that doesn’t blow your deal). Here’s what we had to say:
So amazing, so illegal. What are we going to do with you, future?
That’s my pal, Jonathan Coulton, remarking on the disruptively talented Kutiman, who has made an astounding series of YouTube video remixes that’s lighting up the web and (one imagines) generating a lot of wood amongst our nation’s libidinous entertainment litigators.
Unsolicited tip for media company c-levels: if your reaction to this crate of magic is “Hm. I wonder how we’d go about suing someone who ‘did this’ with our IP?” instead of, “Holy crap, clearly, this is the freaking future of entertainment,” it’s probably time to put some ramen on your Visa and start making stuff up for your LinkedIn page.
Because, this is what your new Elvis looks like, gang. And, eventually somebody will figure out (and publicly admit) that Kutiman, and any number of his peers on the “To-Sue” list, should be passed from Legal down to A&R.
Everybody knows the business has moved from legal to binary files. The question now is how much more lead time old media companies and other IP-obsessives can afford to burn by pretending it’s otherwise.
In the mean time, though, you have to wonder how much artists like Kutiman (or, for that matter, Jonathan), really need the mixed basket of theoretical benefits that big companies with big distribution can provide. For a long-lived career, does a boot-strapping indie artist with giant niche appeal gain enough from a big-company relationship to offset the loss in agility, equity, and flexibility? I guess we’ll find out soon enough.
Because, even in the face of bullying, obfuscating, and throat-clearing from corporations with a homemade timetable for evolution, more and more folks like Kutiman will just keep making and releasing stuff. Cool stuff, “illegal” stuff, niche stuff, and stuff that doesn’t require the benediction of a middle-aged executive in order to reach its precise audience with almost zero friction or overhead.
And, that prospect should buoy and energize anybody with a scintilla of artistic entrepreneurship or the drive to just try making and offering their own stuff in their own way.
Man. What an exciting time this is. Seriously. We may not each have Kutiman-level talent and vision, but there’s absolutely never been a better time to at least give it a throw.
Remember: the only person who can sit on your ass is you.
I’ve recently returned to using the Open Source (MPL-based CePL license) Celtx app for all the script-ish stuff I write. But it does a lot more than just collect and format drafts (which, unlike a text file or MS Word, Celtx does in a way that lets you focus solely on writing, rather than fiddly formatting). It’s also an amazingly flexible and robust app for managing all the pre-production materials for screenplays, comics, audio plays, or what have you. And, again: it’s totally free.
Celtx reminds me favorably of Scrivener, in that it takes into account that there may be much more to a very large writing project than just typing; that your final draft only serves as the jumping-off point for another, more giant thing that you will need to make out of all your words.
To this end, you can choose to let Celtx handle as little or as much of the process as you need — anything from storyboarding and conceptualization through shooting schedules, prop management — even animal handling! (Memo to self: write more things that require animal handling.)
One neat feature I’ve just barely started playing with is the app’s ability to seamlessly share versioned drafts of your script via Celtx’s web-based Project Central. Looks like you can flip a bit to make it public v. private v. members-only. And, I still haven’t touched the coolest online feature of all, which allows you to solicit criticism and notes from other users and even collaborate with colleagues, co-writers, and production staff — kinda like “SVN for Screenplays,” I’ll dub it, in a way that will probably infuriate everyone who uses either of those.
Why a notebook link from the guy who’s supposedly over notebook pr0n? Easy. This is all about how Michael Bierut has used his 85 notebooks over the past 26 years.
The notebooks function like a security blanket for me. I can’t go into a meeting unless I have my current notebook in my hand, even if I never open it. Because I carry one everywhere, I tend to misplace them a lot. Losing one makes me frantic.
It’s a fascinating mini-memoir, told through almost three decades of lines in a go-to capture tool. To me, this is much more about habits, cognition, and memory than paper and cardboard.
Like most designers, I get asked a lot about my process. A lot of my ideas are so simple and dumb that a simple dumb drawing is all it takes to describe it. I probably did the drawing for the cover of Tibor Kalman’s monograph in a meeting. Picture on the front, stacked type on the spine: what if we did something like this? That’s how it came out. If a process is supposed to have steps, to reflect a method, that isn’t much of a process.
I disagree. Any process that stops feeling like a process has become an ideal process.
I love Christgau’s original (pre-1990) explanation of how he grades the records that he reviews.
An A+ record is an organically conceived masterpiece that repays prolonged listening with new excitement and insight. It is unlikely to be marred by more than one merely ordinary cut.
An A is a great record both of whose sides offer enduring pleasure and surprise. You should own it.
An A- is a very good record. If one of its sides doesn’t provide intense and consistent satisfaction, then both include several cuts that do.
[… further explanations, then …]
A D+ is an appalling piece of pimpwork or a thoroughly botched token of sincerity.
It is impossible to understand why anyone would buy a D record.
It is impossible to understand why anyone would release a D- record.
It is impossible to understand why anyone would cut an E+ record.
E records are frequently cited as proof that there is no God.
An E- record is an organically conceived masterpiece that repays repeated listening with a sense of horror in the face of the void. It is unlikely to be marred by one listenable cut.
If every critic — ala Ebert, in his way — would disclose the yardstick by which he generates the “stars,” “thumbs,” or “Little Man” of his reviews, it would go a long way toward educating readers; as well as, I’d argue, potentially helping revive the increasingly one-star interest in professional arts criticism.
It’s not that people aren’t interested in hearing what anointed “experts” have to say about a given movie, CD, book, or what have you. And, it’s not even that the lumpenconsumertariat requires that everything be reduced to a pre-chewed paste about buying decisions.
But, disclosing the fahrenheit, celsius, or kelvin of a given reviewer’s mercury would make it much easier for readers to understand how closely a critic’s cognition maps to their own.
Because, by itself, a thumb is really just a decisive finger. And, by itself, a finger almost always benefits from a little extra context.
[Note: This post originally appeared on our daughter site, “43 Folders Clips,” and we liked it enough to republish it here.]
Here’s a video of my presentation, “Toward Patterns for Creativity,” from earlier this month at Macworld, here in SF.
My slides were kind of a mess thanks to a bonehead technical problem on my part, but you can follow along fine below.
As I said, I’m very interested in seeing where a topic like this could go. Because I truly believe it’s an idea that could help push a lot of people to the next level.
Related: if you’re interested in where my head was as I prepped for this, be sure and catch the previous post, The Problem with “Feeling Creative”.
Also, if you haven’t done so already, do yourself a favor, and pick up the book I highlight in this talk: The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharpe.
Addendum: 2009-01-28 06:42:03
It should not go without mentioning five (5) John Gruber-related things:
Seriously. I really did like John’s talk, and I think he’s totally onto something with the Auteur thing. (cf.)
John very kindly let me borrow his laptop after my learning that my own was un-dongle-able.
The slide problem stemmed from my preparing the presentation on a newer version of Keynote than John had installed.
I’m pretty sure John did have Helvetica Neue installed. Because he’s a giant type nerd.
Which is just to say that John is a friend as well as my favorite person in the Apple universe. So, upon watching this a second time, I realize I’d hate to leave you with the impression that I feel anything other than embarrassingly abundant aloha for him.
A big part of what I do these days is delivering talks like this and others all around the US and beyond. If you’d enjoy having me visit with you to present at your company, event, or conference, drop a line and my ninja assistant, Erica, will be happy to take your details and check for availability.
After a recent “Most Days” episode, several people asked to see what all’s in my menu bar, so I made this little video using ScreenFlow. It’s a “proof of concept.” A “pilot program,” if you like. Again: an experiment. (Hint: this looks way better in full HD)
Watch this space next week for more info on these apps, plus discount codes and more.
Liked this? Want to see more of these? Got ideas? Stuff you’d like to see or have ever wondered about? Leave a nice comment on the Vimeo page. But, be gentle. It’s my first attempt at a screencast, and I’m no Don McAllister.
Seeing Your App Here?
NB: If you’re a developer of one of the mentioned apps and want to give my readers a sweet discount via a coupon code, hit me up at macstuff at 43 folders dawt com with the subject “I Love 43f Readers.”
I knew what the near-consensus would be before the page opened. Everybody knows.
The SE/30 (with a hard drive) was, pound for pound, the best Mac ever made. Not only was it when the Mac arrived as a serious tool for normal (albeit deep-pocketed) people, but it felt faster than homemade snot, and still had the awesome old-school form factor.
I liked using Ci’s and Cx’s and Fx’s and Quadras and whatnot, but no Mac ever brought the total package like the SE/30. In 1991, I laid the shit out of some PageMaker on my SE/30 and a big-ass Radius monitor. Good times.
If I could get away with it, I’d probably still be writing on one right now.
This post by Paul Harrill is a great take on what I’ve been saucily referring to as, “Twyla’s Box.” (Yes, again with the Twyla Tharp book.)
I’m sharing it here, because in addition to delivering a thought-provoking slap at the self-abuse of productivity pr0n (“Certainly if you find yourself reading productivity book after productivity book you’re missing the point” [ouch]), it includes a canny synthesis of the overlap between (the best, non-fiddly parts of) GTD and those patterns that seem to help folks like Twyla Tharp to keep making for decades. Nice work, Paul. Loved this (and sorry for arriving so late to the party; I am now subscribed).
So, first a quote from Paul’s post, followed by (forgive me) a long-ass re-quoting of Tharp’s chapter, “Start with a Box”, which I’ve lovingly copied straight from Paul’s swell post. Paul said:
For one thing, the book caters to artists, not paper-pushers. Sure, in some ways, work is work. But getting things done can be a lot harder when the “things” are ideas you’ve dreamt up entirely on your own. (I imagine this applies to programmers, too. Merlin, are you reading?) [Heh. I am now, Paul. — mm]
[…]
As Tharp states in the first few pages, her book’s basic premise is that “[i]n order to be creative you have to know how to prepare to be creative.” The rest of the book talks about how to make a ritual of your creativity, how to work through creative blocks, and how to get out of (and altogether avoid) ruts.
From Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit chapter, “Start with a Box:”
Everyone has his or her own organizational system. Mine is a box, the kind you can buy at Office Depot for transferring files.
I start every dance with a box. I write the project name on the box, and as the piece progresses I fill it up with every item that went into the making of the dance. This means notebooks, news clippings, CDs, videotapes of me working alone in my studio, videos of the dancers rehearsing, books and photographs and pieces of art that may have inspired me.
[…]
There are separate boxes for everything I’ve ever done. If you want a glimpse into how I think and work, you could do worse than to start with my boxes.
The box makes me feel organized, that I have my act together even when I don’t know where I’m going yet.
It also represents a commitment. The simple act of writing a project name on the box means I’ve started work.
The box makes me feel connected to a project. It is my soil. I feel this even when I’ve back-burnered a project: I may have put the box away on a shelf, but I know it’s there. The project name on the box in bold black lettering is a constant reminder that I had an idea once and may come back to it very soon.
Most important, though, the box means I never have to worry about forgetting. One of the biggest fears for a creative person is that some brilliant idea will get lost because you didn’t write it down and put it in a safe place. I don’t worry about that because I know where to find it. It’s all in the box….
Dynamite, right? And I love Paul’s post-script here:
No “tickler files.” No “weekly review.” It’s even more simple. Boxes. Just boxes.
As I said in my presentation the other day, I also love the related topic of “Scratching,” where Tharp talks about kind of wandering around with a high tolerance for ambiguity, just letting ideas and inputs flow over her. And, where do those ideas and inspirations go? You guessed it. The Box.
I won’t quote that one at length, but I do really feel like this stuff fits together in a sensible, secular way. It’s just practical ideas, all pegged to pushing product out the door. Such appealing material that I feel I’ve barely scratched the surface of.
So excited to keep diving into this stuff. Feels like there’s never been a better time to fire your muse.
PS: Can I also mention that Dan M., Paul K., and John G. were, to my knowledge, the only ones in the audience at my talk who audibly laughed out loud at the “Twyla’s Box” slide? Which is, you know, disappointing. Because I did say, “box.” I mean, come on, people, work with me, here.
PPS: All the sample slides above link to a Clips post with my full deck. Which, as ever, will make hardly any sense without my blathering alongside them. But, I think they’re kind of pretty, plus they remind me favorably of Mike Monteiro’s stuff (wonderful drawings you should totally buy).
The beginning of a blood-curdling recession hardly seems like the time to ruminate about fantasy resources, I’ll grant you that. But, I want you to think about something. Really think about it.
If, tomorrow morning, you had 60% of the time and resources you needed to start making anything you wanted, what would it be? And, what would you do first?
Thanks, Leo
To be honest, Zen Habits isn’t my favorite site in the universe (oy, always with the “Zen”). But, it turns out its founder, Leo Babauta is a very nice fellow, who also has a new site for his new book. So, he’s been interviewing a few people for the site, including yrs truly. Apart from my brief, low-sugar meltdown at the beginning of our talk, I really like how his interview with me turned out. (As I’ve said before, interviews are one place where I find out what I really think.)
For one, I’m always happy to share how my daughter is constantly (delightfully) blowing up my whole notion of priority. That’s huge.
But, I also like that this interview is the first place that people who don’t know me personally will hear me ask that question above — about what you’d want to make (I turn the tables and ask it to Leo toward the end of his interview, around 19:20).
Never See it Coming
It’s a wildly disarming question, especially when you don’t know it’s coming. Because it makes you realize how much you may view life as a slog toward a tomorrow that’s pretty much identical to today and yesterday and the week before. And, certainly, there’s nothing wrong with security, dependability, and providing continuity to yourself and your family. It’s what adults need.
But, as most of us discover — especially at the beginning of that blood-curdling recession — security is an illusion. It’s a heuristic we draw from observing the coincidence of things not going badly for a while at a stretch. And, that’s great. While it lasts. But, it’s definitely an illusion.
Thing is, if I think about all the events in my life that led to a really big, (eventually positive) change, they all started as something awful. A death, a layoff, a divorce. Anything that forced me to “re-pot myself” at a time that seemed sad, inconvenient, and horribly timed. At the time, each seemed like “the end” — something I couldn’t possibly recover from.
But, that’s life. It’s a huge dick about both your plans and your desire to avoid inconvenience.
Humor Me
So. What if, just for the sake of argument, we embraced the thinking of the fat man, and accepted that we have no real idea what’s going to happen tomorrow. Because, let’s be honest, we don’t. You or I might get seriously re-potted tomorrow morning, and wouldn’t it be splendid if we had something besides our incredulity and angst to comfort us?
So, I ask that question. What would you make?What would you start?
Change is a wave you can ride or drown under, but you can’t just sit on the beach, eating Dippin’ Dots and listening to Skynyrd. That’s not how it works. So, even if you’re mostly secure right now, and even if you’re mostly doing what you like, just think about what a big change would mean and how you’d ride it.
But, Why the Free Stuff?
The reason I throw in that “60% of what you need,” is that it’s just enough to make the question interesting and ambitious. Give someone no resources, and they have no imagination. Give them all the resources and they break ground on a Hooters in their garage. But, give someone most of the resources they need, and you have a delightful real-world challenge to the creative imagination.
And, finally, if you’re feeling really ambitious, imagine you have most of what you need today. Because, here’s the O. Henry ending: you probably already have at least part of what you need to get started. On a novel. On a one-person business. On your first gallery show. Maybe it’s only 40% or 25% or .001%. But, it’s something. And something is all any project needs to get started. Don’t believe me? Try it.
Imagine you have almost what you need. Then, just start something.
If your mall’s bookstores look anything like mine (and it’s probably safe to assume that they do), you’ll find numerous sections devoted to helping writers, painters, musicians, and other aspiring artists to become successful in one way or another. There are books chock full of tips on finding an agent, on painting like the masters, and on composing and selling a hit song.
There are also dozens of books on “creativity” itself. Guides that are meant to help you access and unlock the artist within and to see the world in more creative ways. How to “be” creative, how to generate ideas, and how to learn to think “laterally.”
Some of these books are justterrific, many are atrocious, and, at least in my anecdotal experience, only a handful challenge their readers with a fundamentally unmarketable premise:
Creative work only seems like a magic trick to people who don’t understand that it’s ultimately still work.
Bad for Business
But, let’s be honest. This is a tough idea to sell to folks with “real jobs” who are just looking for a diverting bit of creative tourism or who find themselves yearning for a nostalgic amble past a mostly-abandoned adolescent arts hobby. People who want to learn how to feel creative. To feel successful. To feel like an artist. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
My sense, though, is that for most people who repeatedly do (and sell) creative work, this all seems a bit like wanting to feel like a world-class athlete. Because “feeling creative” produces great work in approximately the same way that “feeling like a doctor” makes you a gifted thoracic surgeon.
Let’s Talk About My Feelings
The athlete got good not by reading reviews of headbands, but by waking up early, lacing shoes in the dark, and hitting the track to train hard. While the surgeon got good not by watching reruns of Trapper John, M.D., but by slogging through medical school, residencies, and hundreds of hours of face time with patients, colleagues, and mentors. “Feeling” had nothing to do with it.
But is it fair to compare creative work with physical and mental achievement? Having strong legs and support from a young age helped the athlete, and any aspiring doctor who couldn’t pass 10th grade Biology is likely headed for a career outside the surgical theater. But, what about artistic “gifts?” And “talent?”
The Labored Metaphor About Mineral Mining
Even (or especially) for people with a notional gift for their chosen field, talent — like luck, rich parents, and unmined gold — is just a raw material. It’s not the one-bit switch that determines artistic success. And, any “talent” one theoretically possesses is likely to stay stuck under a layer of river rock unless and until its claim-holder learns to repeatedly pan, sluice, or dredge it into something that can be refined, polished, and, in most cases, vended. Fancy ladies buy gold jewelry; not drawings of mining equipment.
Still, unlike metaphorical mining, it’s rare for any artist who “strikes it rich” once to simply stop working. That’s not how the temperament operates. You slake a thirst for creating by finishing projects, then finding new ones. Again and again.
It’s this ability to create a long-lived career in creative fields that’s gotten me wondering about design patterns. And, it’s also apparently the topic I’ll be standing in front of a bunch of people, trying to figure out, next Friday at my Macworld PULSE session. Oh, yeah. That’s right. I’m doing a presentation in seven days, aren’t I? Hm.
Right. Macworld Presentation. Check.
Anyhoo, I’m working on the talk right now (and for poor Paul Kent’s sake, let’s agree that it’s “mostly done”). I expect I’ll report back soon as the talk develops (or, for poor Paul Kent’s sake, as it “gets one final bit of polish”). I haven’t decided whether the whole thing is just a terrible idea to begin with, but I guess we’ll find out in a few days.
Here’s what the proposal looked like late last summer:
Toward Design Patterns for Creativity
“Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem in such a way that you could use this solution a million times over without doing it the same way twice.” — Christopher Alexander, 1977.
For over 30 years, “Design Patterns” have been been used by architects, designers, and software engineers to share useful ways in which the recurring problems of their fields can be identified and solved. By documenting and categorizing the things that “tend to work” within a given context (and within a given set of constraints), individual patterns can provide the basis for a pattern language that encourages flexible problem-solving that discourages the costly and time-consuming tendency to reinvent the wheel.
This presentation addresses the opportunities and challenges around developing design patterns for creativity. Is creativity simply an innate ability that one either has or lacks? Or, are there demonstrated habits, practices, and approaches to one’s work that tend to help produce more consistent output (along with a more healthy and long-lived career for the creator)? Are there environmental and cognitive changes that can improve the quality of our work? Ultimately, could patterns for creativity help us learn to stop relying on an unreliable muse to inspire (and complete) the work that matters to us?
We’ll look at the common myths of creativity and talk about ways in which the hard work of making anything might be improved by the application of patterns that have been shown to work for artists, writers, and makers of all sorts. We’ll also address some of the ways in which OS X applications might be used to apply and support patterns for creativity at the point of implementation.
Wow. That’s pretty ambitious for a 20-minute talk about a topic I don’t really understand, isn’t it?
All Downhill from Here
Well. If you’re going to Macworld, do stop by and say hi. I’ll be at PULSE and in a few other places that I’ll announce soon, but I should be pretty easy to spot. I look like this and am easy to recognize as the middle-aged man with the amazingly polished presentation about design patterns. And a giant tote bag full of unintentional irony. As usual.
Yep. Pretty much just dotting i’s and crossing t’s at this point, Paul.
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