Category Archives: Food for Thought

Nov 28 0 comments
Food for Thought

On language

Food for thought…

Philip Glass:

“A new language requires a new technique. If what you’re saying doesn’t require a new language, then what you’re saying probably isn’t new.”

Marcel Proust:

“Every writer is obliged to create his own language, as every violinist is obliged to create his own ‘tone’…. I don’t mean to say that I like original writers who write badly. I prefer — and perhaps it’s a weakness — those who write well. But they begin to write well only on condition that they’re original, that they create their own language. Correctness, perfection of style do exist, but on the other side of originality, after having gone through all the faults, not this side. Correctness this side — ‘discreet emotion,’ ’smiling good nature,’ ‘most abominable of all years’ — doesn’t exist. The only way to defend language is to attack it.”

Jul 31 0 comments
Food for Thought

Who Wants Animated CliffsNotes?

Today’s daydream…

You know those RSA Animate video summaries of popular business books?

Great stuff.

But why limit them to business books?

I’d love to see those for fiction. Imaging the possibilities…animated CliffsNotes!

I know that sounds blasphemous, but there are so many classic and contemporary novels that I’d love to read but just don’t have the time for. (I’m looking at you Moby Dick.)

I may be in the minority on this daydream, but it’s still a good idea just for the impact it could have on story education in this country.

Students would love these videos. Kids don’t want to read, and while they’re much shorter than a full-length novel, CliffsNotes and Wikipedia summaries are still reading. If teachers had snappy videos that could catch their attention, more students might actually pick up the book. Having a 10 minute overview of the book sprinkled with helpful commentary could also make some books more accessible. (I’m looking at you Sound and the Fury.)

The best place to start?

Shakespeare, the Bible and Greek mythology.

There’s so much wisdom and heritage in those works that’s fading away because the original texts and stories aren’t easy to read and understand. We shouldn’t get rid of these canonical stories, but we do need to prime the pump for students. (And let’s admit it, adults, too.)

What book would you like to see animated in this style?

Feb 20 0 comments
Food for Thought, Writing Life

Writing via time travel

Awhile ago, I read this interesting advice from personal development and entrepreneurial coach Jonathan Fields:

Often the best way to solve a problem is to have a conversation with your future self. How do you do this without bending the space-time continuum? It’s simple, really. Have a seat in your favorite chair and close your eyes. Now imagine walking into a bare room, with plain white walls with a small table and two folding chairs facing across from each other. Sit down in the chair closest to you. Now, in walks your future self 10 years from now. S/he sits across from you and explains that s/he’s there to answer whatever questions you have about the problems you’re facing. Go ahead and begin firing. Ask him/her whatever you want and take advantage of a more experienced version of you.

A clever, handy technique that probably stems from Neuro-Linguistic Programming. I originally classified this as a personal development tool. Which it is, but it may also be a great writing tool in disguise…

How Would _____ Write This?

How would a more experienced version of yourself write this? (This being whatever ad or announcement or scene or headline you’re trying to craft.)

This may sound like a silly exercise, but if you approach it earnestly and give it time you’ll find that our minds are a lot more powerful than we think. As with freewriting, novel approaches to brainstorming can produce novel results. A large part of creativity may simply be getting out of our own way and letting our subconscious run wild. In this case, simply asking a “better” version of yourself to solve the problem may be enough.

Of course, our future self may not be the only resource at our disposal. Given enough familiarity, we may be able to ask other writers.

I’ve read a biography of John Steinbeck and a handful of his novels, letters and journals. I’m confident I could conjure up a young Steinbeck if I wanted to.

Same for Seth Godin. I’ve read his blog faithfully for years, read many of his books and listened to at least a dozen presentations he’s given (now available on the web). That’s not to say I’m as smart as Seth Godin. But that’s not the point, either. What matters is using my knowledge of him to produce work that’s better than what I could do “on my own”.

Of course, even if you use this technique, the work you produce is still your own. And if the work is better, that’s quite the confidence boost. “Look what you wrote. You did this once; you can do it again.” Sometimes a little time travel is all it takes.

Who would you consult?

Dec 27 0 comments
Food for Thought

On failure

My banker has this Michael Jordan quote on his bulletin board.

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

I love that. Reminds me of Ernest Hemingway:

The first draft of anything is shit.

Success isn’t getting it right the first time. It’s trying again. And again. And again.

Dec 21 0 comments
Food for Thought, The Craft

Editing as Poetry

Another thing we learned was that…

Another thing we learned was…

We also learned that…

We also learned…

We learned…

From Jason Fried.

Dec 03 0 comments
Food for Thought

Death of a Specialist

It used to be that if you wanted to be known as The Food Photography Guy, you could make sure that all of the publicly available info about you dealt with your passion and success as a food photographer. And nobody would know about your love for rebuilding hotrods, your work as your church’s youth minister or the moonlighting you occasionally do as a wedding photographer to make ends meet.

Not so anymore.

Side effects include…

One intriguing side effect of cataloguing our interests and activities on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, et al. is that it’s getting harder to create a focused personal brand. This isn’t just an issue for people involved in unbecoming activities. This is an issue for anyone who claims to specialize in a given area…meaning nearly every business professional out there. Especially as business continues to fracture into smaller and smaller niches.

For The Food Photography Guy, rebuilding hotrods probably won’t affect sales unless you start to gain some notoriety from it. (Success can be a double-edged sword.) Your work as a minister is honest and worthwhile but may cause some to question where your focus really lies. And your wedding photography, oddly enough, may hurt your brand the most. After all, when you need great food photography, you don’t hire a wedding photographer. And if you’re such a great food photographer, why are you taking pictures of bridal veils and wedding cakes?

So what do you do?

Be yourself

You can’t stop being you. And you shouldn’t. As business professionals, we may be specialists, but as human beings, we’re always generalists. Or better, we’re always “multi-specialists”. I think the Internet is just allowing us to finally show this.

You can’t put the cat back in the bag. And hiding from the Internet isn’t the answer. No, I think we’re moving to a new era of personal branding. One that’s less about narrow specialization and more about big ideas.

Like any large corporation, we’ll have a master brand built on our core ideals and interests. Then we’ll have sub-brands and brand extensions built around different interests. And like any business, our brand extensions will come and go – everything has a lifecycle – but our master brand will prevail and grow throughout our lives. And like any large corporation, being well-rounded will be a good thing once again.

Nov 29 0 comments
Food for Thought, Projects

The Power of Half Steps

Matt Mullenweg wrote a great post on shipping. He writes:

Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world….

By shipping early and often you have the unique competitive advantage of hearing from real people what they think of your work, which in best case helps you anticipate market direction, and in worst case gives you a few people rooting for you that you can email when your team pivots to a new idea. Nothing can recreate the crucible of real usage.

I learned this last year on a creative writing project. Tired of pushing the same story ideas around my desk, I decided the best way to make some real progress was to go big and go public. I pledged to brainstorm one movie idea per weekday for an entire year. To help keep me motivated and judge the quality of my work, I built a blog to showcase my ideas and invited a group of friends and associates to follow along, vote on their favorites and spitball the ideas. It was a great success. By the end of the year, I brainstormed over 240 movie ideas, regularly got a 30% response rate on my mailing list and received over 600 comments on my website.

This year, I learned that before you ship, sometimes progress is simply a matter of starting even when you can’t see the finish line.

Coming off last year’s success, I wanted to keep the momentum going this year. I narrowed my list down to twelve ideas and invited the group back to follow along while I outlined one a month for the entire year. Unfortunately, between a heavier freelance workload and a new baby in the house, my creative writing time has been minimized. Determine to do justice to the ideas, four weeks per outline became five (costing me two outlines) and delays and a short break cost me another two.

Still, I’ve accomplished a lot with minimal resources. Eight outlines is a lot more than I had written in previous years. In hindsight, I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. Step-by-step, though, I often felt the opposite. Sometimes when I sat down to right it was all I could do to come up with the next question, forget the answer. But half steps add up. It’s important to ship, but along the way it’s better to take a half step than no step at all.

Matt Mullenweg’s 1.0 Is the Loneliest Number

Oct 16 3 comments
Food for Thought

The next (next) big thing

Right now, the big thing is convenience. We want everything now. And we want it everywhere. Complete portability and instant access. There’s a lot of money to be made by being the most convenient.

And when convenience becomes ubiquitous, the next big thing will be personalization. Everywhere you want to be, instantly and exactly how you want it. Forward-thinking companies are already pushing this. And if convenience was big, personalization will be huge.

And when personalization becomes the norm…then what? What’s the next (next) big thing?

Sep 30 0 comments
Food for Thought

Scott Adams on winners and losers

Scott Adams on winners and losers:

I’ve noticed that losers compare themselves to the average of other people, whereas winners compare themselves to their own natural potential. The loser can find comfort in knowing there are plenty of other slackers, and he is average (good enough) among them. The winner compares his progress to his personal potential and doesn’t stop until he achieves it.

From The Scott Adams Blog

Sep 11 0 comments
Food for Thought, Writing Life

Why I don’t want an iPhone

Do you ever feel like the whole world is conspiring to convince you to get an iPhone? I feel this way all the time, and it pisses me off. Mostly because part of me really wants one.

Let’s face it: smart phones are cool. And non-touchscreen phones are so 2008.

But they’re very expensive. Not only do the phones cost big money, but you have to pay extra each month for data service. That’s hundreds of dollars a year on top of the already high costs of cell phone service and a high-speed internet connection. And what do you get for this? Constant access to your email wherever you are. A portable to-do list and calender. A music player. The ability to surf the internet at stoplights. Thousands of little programs to keep you busy in those few unhurried moments you have in your day. Maybe it’s just me, but that doesn’t seem like much.

But cost is actually the least of my worries. Smart phones lower your quality of life. I’ll say it again: smart phones lower your quality of life.

Think of it this way: What are the most important things in your life? If you can only do a few things each day, what should you be sure to do?

Here are my answers:

  • Spend more uninterrupted, in-the-moment quality time with my daughter.
  • Spend more uninterrupted, in-the-moment quality time with my wife.
  • Spend more uninterrupted, in-the-moment quality time writing.
  • Spend more uninterrupted, in-the-moment quality time by myself.
  • Spend more uninterrupted, in-the-moment quality time outdoors, having adventures, experiencing new things.
  • Spend more time helping other people.

This is what a good life looks like to me. And a smart phone would detract from all of these.

What about the benefits I mentioned? Well, I don’t need more email in my life; I need less. And won’t a folded piece of paper in my pocket be just as convenient, if not more so, than a digital to-do app? We all know that headphones are bad for your eardrums. And do any of us really need more time to surf the web? To what end? Think of all the great achievements in history that occurred without the help of Google Reader.

Yes, I like blogs. I write for two at the moment and am starting a third soon. I’ve learned a lot from the Internet. But we need to be honest about the limits of real time and the differences between consuming information and getting things done. What’s keeping you from succeeding at the things that matter to you? Is it lack of information? Is it organization? Is it focus? The Internet should improve your life, not just fill up your down time.

The problems go deeper still. Studies have shown that filling your free moments with digital stimulation (like web surfing, texting and music) actually decreases your ability to learn, solve problems and create new memories. By whipping out the phone and checking in throughout the day, you’re actually decreasing your ability to find solutions to the big challenges in your work and personal life and making your days less memorable. Not just because surfing the web isn’t memorable. Constantly being plugged in doesn’t give your brain the downtime it needs to process and store memories. There’s just too much new paperwork coming in to do any filing, so to speak.

Talk about a vicious cycle: you get bored so you surf the web; surfing the web makes your life more boring. iPhones, cool as they are, just facilitate this downward spiral. All the while your days disappear in a haze.

Think about the implications of this. Your memory is your life! On the first page of his book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned while Editing My Life, Donald Miller writes,

The saddest thing about life is you don’t remember half of it. You don’t even remember half of half of it. Not even a tiny percentage, if you want to know the truth. I have this friend Bob who writes down everything he remembers. If he remembers dropping an ice cream cone on his lap when he was seven, he’ll write it down. The last time I talked to Bob, he had written more than five hundred pages of memories. He’s the only guy I know who remembers his life. He said he captures memories, because if he forgets them, it’s as though they didn’t happen; it’s as though he hadn’t lived the parts he doesn’t remember.

The opportunity cost of being plugged in is gigantic and terrifying!

So you have two options: buy a smart phone and marshall all your self-control to only use it rarely (because even if you only use it strategically, if you use it regularly you’ll still suffer the consequences). Or you can just not buy one. Whatever is so important that you have to check it now, it can wait. I’ve found it’s a lot easier to not buy junk food than resist the candy dish on the kitchen counter. Saying no to an iPhone is not cool, but it does give me more quality time for the people and activities I love and helps me remember these precious, fleeting moments.