We are capable of abandoning, bullying, raping, murdering,
belittling, undermining, objectifying, cheating, stealing, ignoring,
maligning, spamming, excoriating and arguing.
And the very same people can support, trust, connect, lead, inspire, invent, illuminate and wait patiently.
The extraordinary thing is that we've built a society where the
second category pays off more than it ever has before. The media would
prefer the former, of course. It's more fun to cover a fight than it is
to report on progress. And the fast-twitch world prefers the caveman
stuff as well. Tweet your first impression, better hurry. That's what
our lizard brain evolved to do, it's our first instinct.
In the connection economy, though, the thoughtful, patient, mature and modern approach wins out.
Because connection is built on trust and generosity, not on snark and short-term wins.
Day trading isn't nearly as valuable as building something that lasts.
When your inner caveman shows up, the question you might ask him is,
"will this juicy, satisfying, visceral action in the moment build my
connection and weave a platform for my future, or is the price I'm
paying for pleasing the crowd the fact that I'm tearing my platform
down?"
September 16, 2013
[Updated on September 15, 2013, 6:30 am]
Here’s the first course, Go: How to Overcome Fear, Pick Yourself, & Start a Project that Matters.
There are two versions, you can download one or both and share them with those enrolled in the course you’re leading. They are in PDF format, and the files you download have web links throughout, making it easy to click to read the highlighted materials.
Download the Student version
Download the Organizer version
The organizer version is a slightly longer version, it includes notes throughout that cue the leader on exercises and questions that can be used during discussions.
This post will be updated if the course is updated, so feel free to check back here for the latest.
If this is the first thing you’ve read here, please subscribe to this blog! There’s a button up top that says “subscribe”. Or you can click here to do so. You might also want to read past posts to catch up with what this is all about.
September 15, 2013
Same waves, different day.
The risk of skin cancer. The falling. Sand in your socks. The people hassling you for your spot on the wave. The pressure to do more sets. The other guys at the beach who don't appreciate your style. The drudgery of doing it again tomorrow, when the weather sucks. And then every day, from now on, never ceasing.
Where would you go on vacation?
Your drudgery is another person's delight. It's only a job if you treat it that way. The privilege to do our work, to be in control of the promises we make and the things we build, is something worth cherishing.
[update: Shane put up a Meetup Everywhere page]
On Monday, I'll be posting the first curriculum, a course based on some of Seth Godin's (that's me) published writing and the challenge of shipping work that matters. It includes discussion questions and links to text, audio and even a bonus workbook.
This update is about choosing, contacting and organizing your course. No doubt, you (and some of the attendees) will want to review the curriculum in advance, but in fact, that's not the key question, any more than people need to know every book that will be covered before they join a book group.
Instead, the challenge is helping people understand that this is painless, worthwhile and most of all, the sort of thing that people like us like to do.
I've put together a simple online forum where you can go to exchange notes and check in with other organizers. It's run by volunteers and it's not a tech support system, but it might be a good place to find fellow travelers and to connect to find answers to shared questions.
To kick off your discussions, here's a sample invitation you might consider sending to colleagues and friends. Of course, you should change whatever elements of this aren't quite right, including dates, times and any or all turns of a phrase. I have no doubt that you can write a more effective and detailed invitation, but wanted to get you started…
email subject: Are you busy Tuesday afternoon?
I'm hoping you will join some of my friends to join a free course based on the work of Seth Godin.
Krypton is a new online/offline project based on a simple idea: we learn better when we do it together.
It's a free course that makes it easy to organize an in-person 'book group' to discuss ideas–books, websites, TED talks and other varieties of useful learning.
We meet four times, once a week for four weeks. Everyone in the course gets a PDF document with links to articles, etc., and we come together to discuss and figure out how to push each other to dive deeper into the work. Unlike traditional school, there are no tests, no memorization, no proving you did the reading. Instead, I'm trying to put together 8 people who will share their experiences and figure out how to grow from what's on offer. That's when the real learning happens–not from the spectator, click-clicking for access to information, but from on-the-hook teaching and defending and building.
Learning together.
The first session will be in the conference room near my cube, at 4 pm on Tuesday, October 1. Drop me a reply and let me know you'll be able to come. I've also invited Jenny, Andy, Jo-ann, Sasha and Ted. If you can think of someone else who should be there, let me know!
You can find out more about the thinking behind this at the Krypton site.
I'm excited about hosting this course, and I hope you'll give it a try and join us.
Tracey
September 14, 2013
“If I build this, will it delight you?”
Time spent building a spec that gets a ‘yes’ to this question is always time well spent. The spec describes what victory feels like, not necessarily every element of what's to be built.
A spec is an agreement before the agreement, it moves the difficult job of getting in sync with your client from the end of the process to the beginning.
Creatives of every stripe are so happy to get the assignment, so eager to get to work that we often forget to agree on what we’re setting out to do in the first place. It's fun to nod your head and say, "I understand," but even something as simple as cooking dinner deserves a few more moments of interaction before the knives are sharpened and the oven is turned on.
“I’ll know it when I see it,” is reserved for crown princes, government agencies and well-funded startups. People who can afford to do it twice. Everyone else should use a spec.
I’m not suggesting that there’s no room for exploratory work. Of course there is. But even exploratory work deserves a spec. Don’t tell me the answers in advance, but I certainly want to know the questions.
Writing a spec is a kind of mind reading, which is why it’s so difficult. One half of the partnership has to take the time to not only specifically and precisely write down what’s expected and what the measurements and boundaries are, but then must do the challenging and risky work of engaging with the other half of the team to agree on that spec. Disagreements here are cheap, disagreements later cost a fortune.
The fear, of course, is that the spec will end the project, that without a lot of sunk costs on the table, a spec alone is too easy to renege on. In my experience, the most successful freelancers are also the most successful spec writers. Yes, there's some risk in clearly and vividly making your promises while the client/partner/boss still has time to back out. But professionals take that risk every day.
I have no doubt that one could have boiled down the spec for the Taj Mahal to, “a big white marble house” but somehow, I don’t think it would have ended as well.
The only reason that typesetting works is that a small collection of letters can be re-used again and again to print millions of different words. This seems obvious, but it was actually the conceptual breakthrough that led to the long path that brought us to Gutenberg etc.
Your work is based on a similar insight.
Our skills, resources and assets are like letters in the alphabet and we can re-use and recombine them in many different ways. It might be the real estate you own, the skills you've learned, the permission base you've built over time, but all of those assets can be leveraged in different ways.
To grow, then, we only need to address two questions:
- Do I need more letters?
- How do I recombine the letters I've already got to create new value?
Chasing new letters is expensive. For most of us, a better first resort is to cherish the letters we've already got and be brave enough to recombine them into new forms, new approaches, new ways to add value. But yes, by all means, now that you've extracted maximum value, go get some new letters.
September 13, 2013
Which comes first?
Do successful people learn hard skills (differential calculus, advanced Spanish, Ruby on Rails) and then go on to learn the soft stuff (connection, innovation, humility, initiative, the ability to ship work that matters) or does it happen the other way around?
I think the answer has shifted, and just recently.
The industrial model of schooling involves more than a dozen years of hard skills, pushed, prodded and poked onto students who learn them in order to move forward. And the assumption is that as you engage in the test-and-measure forced march of hard skill learning, you will pick up the other stuff along the way.
But in the all-you-can-eat abundant world of access to education, the question is, “who will push themselves to learn this stuff if they are given access?”
Most people with access to a MOOC never even sign up. Most people who sign up, don’t finish. Why not? Because without the soft skills to push ourselves and own the process, we never acquire the hard skills.
Krypton can’t add much value in the process to learn hard skills. It’s not clear to me that a four-week in-person process is going to help you push through the hard parts of advanced programming or civil engineering… certainly not at the mass scale I’d like to achieve.
On the other hand, the work of folks like Gretchen Rubin, Fred Wilson, Chris Guillebeau, Jacqueline Novogratz (all part of our upcoming courses) is precisely aimed at waking us up and taking us somewhere we might not go. My course starts us off next month (I'll post early next week), and we'll keep layering on folks with work this soft/important/personal, month after month.
The class doesn't exist to test you on your knowledge. Instead, it's a safe space to share your experience, to expose your fear and most of all, to push yourself to explore how to do work that matters.
Call the content of TED videos and blogs ‘soft’ if you want to, but my experience tells me that in the world of ‘pick yourself’, the doors are only open to those that actually show a willingness to expose themselves to the risk of walking through them.
Doing that with a few colleagues and friends at your side makes that journey a lot more likely.
September 12, 2013
One of the challenges of brainstorming a new idea is that there's too much freedom. With too many possibilities, we can seize up, unable to think of much of anything.
In established organizations, this is particularly difficult, because the first thing the lizard brain says to you is, “don't say that, because if they like it, you're going to be the one who has to build it.”
Instead, consider the notion of edgecraft:
1. Find an edge… a free prize that has been shown to make a product or service remarkable.
2. Go all the way to that edge—as far from the center as the consumers you are trying to reach dare you to go.
You must go all the way to the edge… accepting compromise doesn’t make sense. Running a restaurant where the free prize is your slightly attractive waitstaff won’t work–they’ve got to be supermodels or weightlifters or identical twins. You only create a free prize when you go all the way to the edge and create something remarkable.
The cheapest, easiest, best designed, funniest, most expensive, most productive, most respected, cleanest, loudest…
Before you begin to do edgecraft, you must accept the fact that the edges of the problem aren’t always obvious. Because the edge you’re seeking is not the primary reason for being, you’ve got to see it out of the corner of your eye. It’s not always clear exactly what would make your product or service significantly more remarkable, until you embrace the fact that the problem you’re trying to solve isn’t the problem you think you have. It's also quite possible that your edge will merely be stupid, not effective.
Sometimes you don’t discover the problem you’re solving until after you’ve solved it–it’s not always a top-down process. Someone creates something weird or neat or quirky or fun and the marketplace embraces it. You don’t often create a more popular restaurant by serving better food. You can do it by serving remarkable food, or having a remarkable location or a remarkably famous chef. You don’t often build a better car by building a faster car. You do it by building the most beautiful car, or the least polluting car, or the biggest car. At least for a while.
Instead of slogging your way through incremental improvements in the core element of your offering, then, the edgecrafter seeks out another element and pushes it so far it becomes remarkable.
We've relentlessly outfitted just about everyone with a pocket-sized video camera.
And as we've done that, the UFOs have stopped visiting us.
Experience is real. It is our memory and perception of what happened to us, and it's influenced by our self-told story of the world around us. Experience, though, doesn't spread nearly as well as the digital record does.
That doesn't diminish our need to experience wonder or fear or tribal connection. Digital proof doesn't decrease a human being's need to be an outlier (or an insider) or to flee to safety in the face of things that scare us. It doesn't diminish our need to invent conspiracy theories or recognize heroism.
So the emotional experience moves. It moves from making up sea dragons and UFOs and the other "un-true" things others could never prove were merely made up. Instead, those emotions drive how we interpret what you sell, or what you say when you run for office, or how we interpret what happened on TV screens around the world. It changes the way we think about the things we can look up or get in our email box. Even when we can see something for ourselves, we'd often rather get a talking head or tribal leader to understand it for us. To tell us what people like us think about something like that.
Emotion isn't going to go away when the 'false' legends and fables do. It's too resilient for that. Instead, it's going to influence the story we tell ourselves, as it always has.
We don't need your proof. We need your story, and what it means to us.
September 11, 2013
