Everyone makes mistakes. Except for businesses.

Businesses have a terrible time admitting they messed up, saying they’re sorry and making amends. I’m not sure how they came to believe that doing so was a sign of weakness. Maybe most businesses worry it opens them up to liability. Which is silly. Either they messed up or they didn’t, and the first step to rebuilding brand trust is admitting their mistake and saying they’re sorry.

A Good Example

I’m not quite sure how I came to be subscribed to Anne Holland’s WhichTestWon newsletter (the result of some “free” information, no doubt), but a few weeks ago, Anne started emailing me. I didn’t pay much attention until I received an email with the subject line “Webinar from H-II … So sorry guys”. Everybody looks at a train wreck…

Anne wrote:

Everyone who's ever done webinars has their war stories.  
 The one where the slides got stuck.  The one where the
 presenter failed to show.  The one with the broken poll.

 This afternoon we plummeted to new depths, and wound up
 presenting our Awards Webinar of the Year ... entirely
 without sound.

 Natalie and I were going crazy behind the scenes trying to
 fix things.  Between us, we've done something like 2,000
 webinars in our time.  But this time we failed.

 Finally I moved the slides along in what our co-presenter
 the gallant Len Shneyder of Unica called a "Charlie Chaplin
 Silent Film" mainly so the nominees could see what they'd
 won.

 So, here's the deal. If you were signed up for the webinar,
 you should have just now gotten an all-new invite with link
 for a repeat performance -- ONLY WITH SOUND THIS TIME --
 next Tuesday at 2pm ET/11am PT.  You do not have to sign
 up again, you're all set.

 PLUS - we are going to post a Case Study with creative
 samples and results data for each winning test (all 36 of them)
 on WhichTestWon.com in a "hall of fame" by this Wednesday.

 So, next week, instead of our regular "Test of the Week"
 you will be getting 36 Case Studies of award-winning tests!

 Mea culpa. I fall on my sword.  This no-sound thing has
 never happened before to us.  Thanks for sticking with us
 while we sort it out and try to make amends.

 Anne

 Anne Holland
 Publisher & Culprit - WhichTestWon.com

An excellent email

Frank, sincere, personal. She admitted her mistake, righted the wrong (rescheduled the webinar) and helped make it up to her subscribers by sending them extra material. A class act.

I wasn’t paying attention to Anne before, but now I am.

Businesses take note: a real apology can be the best sales letter you ever write.

How do you know when you’re done? You never do.

Claude Monet

Like many artists, Monet was temperamental. His mood was usually an extension of how his painting was going that day. Now, he’s a master, so you’d think his painting would usually go well. This wasn’t the case, at least in his eyes. Regardless of public opinion (he was hated at the beginning and loved at the end), Monet was consistently critical of himself. He also constantly pushed himself with new techniques and subjects, trying to capture increasingly fleeting plays of light and color.

Still, many of his early paintings are considered masterpieces. Not just as forerunners of coming work, but as fantastic accomplishments in their own right. Yet during all this time, Monet fretted and bickered and scratched out hundreds of paintings in progress. Something inside him drove him to push harder with each painting, to reach new levels of accomplishment that others may not even have been able to notice.

Alexa Johnson

My wife. A talented poet and copywriter, she proofs much of my writing. I had pushed a recent copywriting project as far as I could see to take it. And while I was happy about some of my work, other parts I wasn’t so sure about. Confused, stressed, I gave my work to my wife.

Her feedback was insightful and gave me confidence that I was on the right track. But as she said, I needed to take it even further. With that confidence, I took up my pencil again and tightened the writing even more, pushing it forward again until I wasn’t sure if it was any good at all.

John Cleese

I recently watched a speech Cleese gave on writing and creativity. In it, he made an unusual observation:

To know how good you are at something requires the same skills as it does to be good at that thing. Which means, if you’re absolutely hopeless at something, you lack exactly those skills you need to know you’re absolutely hopeless at it. This is a profound discovery. That most people who have no idea what they’re doing have no idea they have no idea what they’re doing. It explains a great deal of life….It explains why so many people who are in charge of so many organizations have no idea what they’re doing. They have a terrible blind spot.

How do you know when you’re done?

John Cleese is right. We can’t fully judge our own success — at least in subjective, fuzzy pursuits like art and management and creativity — unless we’ve previously been successful in that specific way. Now turn that on its head. If you can attest to the high-quality of your work, you’re not pushing yourself forward. If you’re happy and confident about your work, you’re just going through the motions.

Part of Monet’s greatness was consistently working beyond his comfort level. My worry that my work may have been drivel was actually a good sign. It meant I was growing as a writer. Of course, my work may well have been bad writing (and some of it was), but that’s alright; failure is a part of growth.

How do you know when you’re done? You never do. But if you still feel good about your work, you’re not there yet.

I’m in trouble.

We’re all in trouble, actually, but the growing research on how technology affects out attention and creativity is particularly frightening for writers. Both in terms of producing meaningful work (if any) and being read (and appreciated) by others.

The Science

Scientists used to believe that after childhood the brain had finished growing. We now know this isn’t true. Practicing an activity can strengthen and grow the neural pathways involved with that activity. That’s why playing video games can boost your visual acuity and hand-eye coordination. Surfing the web has been shown to boost your ability to judge the potential merit of information — in other words, your ability to scan.

As such, your brain is like a muscle. Use it or lose it, except training one part of it doesn’t necessarily help another. Just as doing curls won’t bulk up your quads, surfing the web won’t strengthen your deep thinking skills. This becomes a problem because the way we’re using our brains is changing. Over time, our information load has steadily increased; over the past few decades, that load has skyrocketed. TV, music, print, advertising — we’re surrounded with more and more stimuli, much of which we can’t help but consume.

And, of course, computers and the Internet, the 800 lbs. gorilla in the corner. Most people today spend hours on their computers and online, inundated with links, email, updates, feeds and multimedia distractions. Information workers, like writers, may spend even more time plugged-in. All of this “training” is rewiring our brains as sophisticated scanning machines, built to zip through large amounts of information for new or novel or helpful bits, which is one reason why we’re so drawn to surfing the web and checking our email. That’s what our brain wants to do. Just don’t ask it to slow down and focus, to be creative or to think deeply about anything. It’s now longer built for those tasks.

Scientists liken this need to check in with an addiction to food or sex; some is necessary but too much can be debilitating. But addiction is the key word. Each info fix releases a bit of dopamine, a little rush, and if you cut off the supply you crash.

Stop. Consider that. Email and the Internet are addicting. Are you hooked? How often do you check your email, Facebook, feed reader or Twitter account when you know very well there’s nothing there, certainly nothing of import. Nothing you would have scheduled time for in your day. Nothing you will look back on in a year or two and say “I’m glad I did that!”. Do you hop onto the “information superhighway” for a reason, for a set amount of time, or do you get on out of habit, to kill time or even mindlessly?

Surfing the web when you’re bored seems harmless. Nothing else is going on, right? But what if you’re bored because you surf the web and have for years? What are you missing out on?

The Consequences

Some people define an addiction as an uncontrollable habit that’s interfering with your life. This need to be plugged in is certainly affecting our lives, wasting time and distracting us from more important pursuits like our families and friends, our careers and goals, even our spirituality. But worse, this runaway behavior is rewiring our brains. Hours and hours on computers and the web is teaching us to be scanners; to think broadly, not deeply; to make connections, not create new content. The exact opposite skills we need to be successful in most fields.

Studies have already sown that humans are terrible multitaskers. Given multiple stimuli, we’re more likely to make mistakes, miss solutions, be less creative and give up sooner. All of these are ingredients for failure. Put another way, our technology is increasing the odds that we will fail at any complex, extended undertaking, such as writing a book, starting a business, raising a child, creating a beneficial habit, quitting a bad habit or learning a new skill.

Current research shows that success in any professional endeavor requires, on average, about 10,000 hours of “deliberate practice”. That’s 10 years at 20 hours a week, but the real kicker is “deliberate”. That’s focused, uninterrupted, engaged practice in which you’re really pushing yourself to learn and achieve. Hard to do if you have to keep stopping to check your iPhone.

Fighting the Urge

You can not check your email. You can use software to block key websites or avoid logging on altogether. You can turn off your phone and the radio and give all your attention to the task at hand. But it’s not easy. When the urge arises — when you need that dopamine fix — it takes a fair amount of willpower to stay on task. Let’s say you succeed and keep writing for 10 minutes…until the urge hits again. You have to summon your willpower again, and again, and again…

The catch, of course, is that humans have a limited supply of willpower. We can only use so much before we’re drained and susceptible to our lesser whims and urges. It’s no wonder we run on auto-pilot so much, from always putting on our clothes the same way to driving the same route home from work. Turning these routine tasks into conscious decisions uses willpower and reduces your overall amount of self-control and ability to focus.

This is one reason why the web is so destructive to productivity: it’s filled with pages and pages of little willpower hurdles. Each hyperlink is a question: Do you keep reading or choose this new path? Studies have shown that people read and comprehend less when reading online vs. from a book. Sidebars and headers also distract. Studies have show that extraneous material and graphics reduce throughput, comprehension and concentration. Reading online — as most of what we do online is reading — is like running a gauntlet. Even if you make it to the end, there’s a good chance that you’ll be tired and have missed the scenery.

To add insult to injury, many former book lovers find that their new online lives have eroded their ability to immerse themselves in a book. and now that everyone has the means to share their own story, many aspiring writers are finding that they’re no longer capable of doing the work the technology was supposed to facilitate.

What’s a Writer to Do?

For writers, the trouble is two-fold:

1. How to improve the quality and quantity of your writing
2. How to accommodate this new reader behavior and get read

Helping the writer

For all the bleakness over our dwindling attention spans and decimated willpower, there is hope. Studies show that you can build your willpower. Like your brain, like your muscles, it will improve with use. So while you may only be able to resist the siren song of email for 15 minutes today, if you keep trying, you can increase it to 30, 60, 120 minutes and more.

Also, willpower has been linked to blood sugar levels. Glucose, our brain’s fuel, gives us the power for self-control. Perhaps this is one reason why offices are such unproductive places in the late afternoon. Everyone is sugar-crashing and can’t resist the urge to chat and surf the web. Better managing for sugar levels — eating regularly and avoiding junk foods (which come with a sugar spike and crash) — can help.

Another approach is to get as far away from the distracting, productivity-crippling technology as possible. Not to be a Luddite, but what if your writing space and your computer workstation weren’t the same? What if your first draft of any project was handwritten? Get out of the office if you have to. This adds some transcription time, but the net result may still be increased productivity, not to mention more creative and insightful writing. And if your handwritten work is better, maybe you’ll need fewer drafts overall? (By the way, this post was hand-written in 2-3 hours.)

Also, write at the beginning of the day when you’re most rested and have just eaten a good breakfast. Before you’re tired and before your sugar naturally depletes, you should be able to do markedly better work than you can in the afternoon or evening.

Finally, and this is just plain hard work, start to wean yourself off your addiction to technology and the web. More information isn’t necessarily the solution. Define what you need to know, find that information (which shouldn’t take long since you’re quite experienced at that) and be done with it. This change won’t happen overnight. You will falter along the way. But the end result is worth it: more time, attention and enjoyment for your writing. Plus, as more and more people struggle with the technology-driven ADD, being a writer who can consistently produce a significant amount of quality content will become more of a competitive advantage.

But what about your readers?

You may be able to protect your attention and creativity from the onslaught of technology, but most of your readers will likely be the distracted, tired scanners of the 21st century. How to you reach them?

A few obvious tactics: write in smaller chunks, use simple sentences, pay attention to your headlines and subheadlines. But is this writing down to your audience? It’s clear, but does it leave deeper thought and subtlety at the door? Maybe. One alternative might be segmentation. Here, you’d have a mini-version of your message for the especially-distracted or partially-interested, then you’d have a full version for those people with the ability and interest to read more.

Your site and post design can help, too. If the goal is to read the copy, emphasize the writing and minimize the images, graphics and links surrounding it. This should improve throughput. Moving all your hyperlinks to the end of your post can reduce the reader’s cognitive load, too. Some sites, even purported writing sites, are so crammed full of links and ads as to be unreadable…until you realize the point isn’t reading and learning; it’s drawing people deeper into the web of the site and increasing the odds ofmaking a sale. What’s your goal?

I also wonder if there’s reason to shift as much content off the web as you can. Whether it’s ebooks or back to print, the point would be to move the reader off the web, with all its distractions, into a medium over which you have more control and can better shape the reading experience. This flies against the growing commoditization of content, but it may be necessary. When everyone sells corn, the market sets the price; but when you differentiate yourself by going organic or fair trade or local, you can get people’s attention and charge more. Likewise, when content is ubiquitous and worthless, the solution may be to be different and set up some walls.

Finally, maybe a new style of writing is called for, one that’s more front-loaded and clear about the benefits of reading, be it fiction or nonfiction. Writing that’s less academic and indulgent and more practical and human. It’s not that people don’t read, it’s just that with so many inputs, people need writing to be really engaging and meaningful to hold their attention. In this sense, our content-overload may not just be distracting, it may also have raised the bar for writers. We must do more with less. Just as athletes set new records every year, artists must continually improve to make their mark, too. If we don’t, we risk never being heard at all.

Sources:

Nick Carr has much to say on the subject of how the Internet is affecting our brains:

The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
The Shallows
Delinkification

Other related stories:

Brain Willpower Depleted By Use
Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind
Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price
The Risks of Parenting While Plugged In

On 10,000 hours of practice:

Talent Is Overrated
Outliers