It was huge and kept growing by leaps and bounds.
Until it didn’t.
(My license was KFV2338, a number I haven’t said out loud in 40 years).
CB radio took off because human beings desperately want to connect with people they know and be heard by people they don’t.
And then it went away because it was noisy, unfiltered and sort of pointless.
We can’t imagine why people were so entranced.
Until the next one comes along.
A flow state is priceless. It happens when we lose ourselves in the work, simply connecting with the task, without commentary or doubt. When we’re in flow, time slows down, satisfaction rises and we feel fully engaged.
An easy way to end a flow state is to see how well you’re doing. Are you ahead of the other runners? Are you progressing according to the milestones? Do you have more social metrics now?
The irony, of course, is that the best way to make progress is to find flow. But if you’re using progress as a yardstick, it won’t last long.
First, we have to see them.
Some people, no matter how fast or slow their friends are walking, always walk a step behind.
Or perhaps you need to live in the nicest house on the block, or drive the fanciest car.
There are people who can’t rest until they know that they’re at the top of their class, or use up their available credit limit, whatever the limit is.
Maybe you need to finish everything on your plate, plus your friend’s. Or maybe you always leave something over.
The thing is that status roles are always local. We compare ourselves to the others in our circle, not everyone on the planet.
If your status narrative isn’t making you happy, you can try to change it–but it’s truly difficult to do so. The get-along person rarely shifts gears and becomes the dominating competitor, or vice versa.
An alternative is to do the hard work (but in a brief window) of choosing your circle and setting your limits.
If you need to live in the biggest, fanciest house, choose a neighborhood where doing that won’t break everything else in your personal life. If you overtrain to be sure you’re going to win, enter races where the overtraining won’t wipe you out.
If you need to avoid the front of the parade, don’t pick an industry or a cultural setting where only the people at the front are treated well.
We choose our boundaries rarely, but we have to live with them every day.
The school zone has a speed limit of 15 miles per hour. It’s hard to be opposed to this sort of restriction, because the consequences are so dire and the cost is so low.
The driver is making a choice, the kids, not so much. The driver is surrounded by steel and safety devices, the kids, not so much.
Living in community is about limits. That’s a foundational feature that permits it to work. They’re all around us, and we only notice them when they change.
The phone is ringing. Your ice cream is melting. Next month’s rent is due. There’s a useful workshop coming up in a few months. Your hard drive will fail before the end of the year. College tuition will need to start being paid in five years. Your back tooth is going to need a crown in 2030. New York City is going to be underwater in 2050.
When is soon?
Every one of these things is something we can choose to pay attention to right now. Each one is either urgent or important, it’s up to us. Paying attention to something when the problem is still small makes it far less of an issue later.
The ringer on a phone was designed to establish urgency. And social media has optimized for that itch as well.
But it’s not up to them.
[For your calendars, two updates:
I’ll be doing a live event with Chip Conley, bestselling author, impresario and big thinker (and my first co-author, from 1986!) in a live chat (with QA) about jobs, learning, wisdom and making a ruckus. Today! Just hours from now.
All the details are at this LinkedIn post.
In addition, I’ll be joining the other Akimbo teachers for an online free-for-all and jamboree on Tuesday, January 11th. Hosted by Ramon Ray, I’m looking forward to joining my friends online. I hope you can come. It’s free and you can sign up for it here.
Hope to see you there.]
Technology is not neutral. It can’t be, because by definition, advances in tech create change, and change always creates positives and negatives.
We now live in a time of rapid technological change, perhaps the biggest in 150 years. In the face of the overwhelming impact of tech, we might not be enjoying the ride.
Sometimes the problem is the tech itself, and sometimes it’s about our fear of change and unknown.
It’s worth taking a moment to think about which technology we’d rather live without–in other words, when was the golden age that we’re nostalgic for, the one that technology has tarnished in the name of progress?
They’re not in a perfect order, but if you had to draw the line, where and when would you put it?
Housing
Toilets
Money
Debt
Culverts and water supplies
Books
Libraries
Handwashing and germ theory
Eyeglasses
The scientific method
Clocks
Trains
The cotton gin
The loom
The origin of species
Electricity
Voting machines
The telephone
Gas-powered cars
Credit cards
Vaccines
Television
Antibiotics
Sunscreen
Birth control
Portable telephones
GPS
Electric cars
Solar panels and windmills
Email
Online bookstores
Search engines
Cochlear implants
Mapping DNA
Podcasts
Machine learning
Image recognition for reading x-rays
Wikipedia
Facial recognition
Augmented memory implants
GPT and AI writing and creation
Cloning
Gene repair
Quantum computing
The internet of things
This is not the same as being creative.
In fact, they’re very different skills and emotional mindsets.
All humans are creative. Sometimes.
Creativity is a special sort of internal conversation, an opportunity to see a problem or a situation and then produce something that dances with it.
But shipping creative work is a cultural and professional risk.
One way to confirm this is to see how different something feels when it’s truly anonymous. If it doesn’t matter to you whether the work resonates with someone else, if there’s no way to tell and no feedback of any kind, then it’s far less fraught.
Realizing that there are two things at work here–the willingness to lean into problem solving AND the willingness to share it–it’s possible to focus on the part that’s holding you back.
Laser guns don’t make noise. At least in real life. In the movies, they always do. Phasers and ray guns and light sabers all manage to make distinctive sounds.
And we don’t mind. In fact, we expect them to.
The foley artist works overtime to create sounds that amplify our experience and fill in the gaps–because the experience is the point.
Does your project have a foley artist? Because it certainly has gaps.
The problem with becoming defensive is that our internal narrative gets in the way of expressing what’s actually going on. Because we’re imagining all the blame and shame and scorn that the other person may or may not be feeling toward us, we bring those feelings into our words and actions, and end up making a mess.
And the problem with being offensive is that the person we’re offending can no longer hear what we’re saying.
Communication lives between the two. We do best when we can describe the actual, the same way we might talk about the weather. Here is what is. Simply that.
Some people say “hobby” like it’s a bad thing. In a race for more, it seems as though doing something you don’t get paid for, something that requires patience and skill–well, some people don’t get it. They’d rather troll around on social media or watch a rerun.
A generation or two ago, hobbies were things like paint by number or candlemaking, or perhaps a woodshop. That’s changing. Not simply because computers allow us to be far more professional, but because the very nature of the output is different.
This might be the golden age for a new kind of hobby, one that’s about community, leadership and producing public goods, not private ones.
Because it’s so much easier to connect and because ideas multiply, the generative hobby gives us a chance to make a contribution, even (especially) when we’re not at work. Sharing ideas, leading, connecting…
Wikipedia is the result of 5,000 people working together to produce a resource that’s used by a billion people. The people who have contributed the most don’t work there, they work on it.
Jeff Atwood is transforming a long-lost and influential book into a modern tool for a new generation. Github is a professional tool, but it’s also become a clearinghouse for projects that simply exist to make things better.
It’s magical when it works. I’ve spent the last three months working with a cadre of people on a community project, and it’s been a highlight of my career.
Perhaps “generative contribution” is a better name for it. But I’m all for reclaiming “hobby,” because the way we spend our time is the way we spend our lives.
