Good Stuff From the Internet

It's not complicated, it's just hard. 

"Lots of things are like that. They're not complicated. They don't require brilliant, innovative strategies, they're just hard. They require more work and more effort and than anyone might reasonably expect. The best managers create organisational room for that to happen."

Saying No to Crap. A Resolution.

"All that effort, all that ingenuity, all that inspiration, all those years perfecting one’s craft, all those long hours, all that Powerpoint, all those conference calls, all that feedback, all those brilliant rationales, all those missed school plays and cancelled dates, all those postponed vacations, all those lovers never loved, all those bedtime stories never told, all those plans postponed, all those dreams on hold, all those promises broken, all those interests never pursued… To produce crap?"

Be Wrong as Fast as You Can

“The Big Fear,” Jacobson writes, “is that times will get so hard that you’ll have to drive five or six nights a week instead of three. The Big Fear is that your play, the one that’s only one draft away from a possible showcase, will stay in your drawer. The Big Fear is thinking about all the poor stiff civil servants who have been sorting letters at the post office ever since the last Depression and all the great plays they could have produced. The Big Fear is that, after 20 years of schooling, they’ll put you on the day shift. The Big Fear is you’re becoming a cabdriver.”

Behind the Scenery

"Baum believed that a window should "arouse in the observer cupidity and the longing to possess the goods". Before him, and the set-pieces he photographed for his magazine, most shopkeepers regarded their windows as simply places to cram with as much merchandise as possible. Baum, though—having lived, and performed on stage, by candle, oil lamp and gas jet—gloried in the potential of electric light, installed in many store windows after the high-voltage World’s Fair of 1893. And he understood that, in this new world of material plenty, goods alone had lost their primary appeal. A better idea would be to sell a powerfully lit, yet edited fantasy, every article of merchandise auditioned and few chosen—except at Christmas, when too much was never enough."

Jerry Seinfeld Intends to Die Standing Up

For Seinfeld, whose worth Forbes estimated in 2010 to be $800 million, his touring regimen is a function not of financial necessity but rather of borderline monomania — a creative itch he can’t scratch. “I like money,” he says, “but it’s never been about the money.” Seinfeld will nurse a single joke for years, amending, abridging and reworking it incrementally, to get the thing just so. “It’s similar to calligraphy or samurai,” he says. “I want to make cricket cages. You know those Japanese cricket cages? Tiny, with the doors? That’s it for me: solitude and precision, refining a tiny thing for the sake of it.”

Doppelganger Series by Francois Brunelle

Liberalisms

Walter Russell Mead:

"'Liberal' and 'progressive' are two of the noblest and most important words in the English dictionary. They describe essential qualities of the American mind and essential values in American politics in a country born in reaction against oligarchy and concentrated autocracy. They sum up in a nutshell what this country is all about. A liberal is someone who seeks ordered liberty through politics—namely, the reconciliation of humanity’s need for governance with its drive for freedom in such a way as to give us all the order we need (but no more) with as much liberty as possible. In this sense, liberty isn’t divided or divisible into freedoms of speech, religion, economic activity or personal conduct: Genuine liberals care about all of the above and seek a society in which individuals enjoy increasing liberty in each of these dimensions while continuing to cultivate the virtues and the institutions that give us the order without which there can be no freedom."

Now this is a conversation worth having. What exactly is the future of liberalism?

I don't agree with the whole article. Mead tries to break down the barriers of right versus left, but things get muddled when you call the size of government a "blue" issue given the growth under both Democratic and Republican control. And characterizing Tea Partiers as a reaction to taxation without a guarantee of a safety net sounds more like wishful thinking than reality. Beyond that, it paints a pretty stark picture of where things are and why the notion of liberalism is in dire need of an update.

There is a liberalism emerging today that tends to focus a bit more on outcomes than ideologies and cherry picks from both the traditional right and left. It has a laissez-faire attitude towards social differences and a favoritism towards market-based ideas.  This class believes a social safety net and open education are needed to create equality of opportunity and a conservative approach to the environment is probably more pragmatic. Militarily, 'speak softly, but carry a big stick' seems a more effective use of power than just frantically waving around the stick.

Markets are best at keeping costs low while spurring progress, regulations work when they secure fairer competition rather than enshrining entrenched interests and the safety net is a mechanism to create the structural stability people need to change jobs, start businesses and climb the economic ladder. Reduced spending doesn't necessarily mean reduced services, investments aren't the same thing as costs and defense is still viewed as discretionary. The question isn't big versus small, tax or no tax - but bringing the right toolset given the nature of the problem.

"Americans want to believe that all four goals work together: that defending their security, promoting their prosperity, preserving their freedom and equality and fulfilling their global mission are all part of an integrated package and worldview—and that the commonsense reasoning of the average American can understand the way the pieces fit together. They are, in other words, looking for more than a set of unrelated policies that accomplish certain discrete goals: They want those policies to proceed from an integrated and accessible vision that meshes with their understanding of traditional American values and concerns."

The future of "freedom through order" won't be fought between big government Democrats and economically small government, socially conservative Republicans. Who knows where the parties shake out. The challenge ahead is to bring durability in a belief system that unites the mix of these ideals, then chart a path that doesn't rely on traditional party structures to disseminate them.

Anyway - read the article.

photo via Michael Ignatieff

Interesting stuff on the internet

The Art of Science

"Both artist and scientist are revolutionaries, trying to change our perceptions and understanding of the world. Sometimes the fuel is no more than an outrage that “this must change”. Their paths often begin with a gnawing realization that something is askew in nature, which sets the traveler on a journey into the unknown to find what is missing, such as bringing about a more just and humane society."

Moderate Success is the Enemy of Breakout Success

"Sometimes what you need to solve a problem is '0 years experience' -- not 10. I saw magazine people bring a lot of baggage to the blogging revolution: they wanted to be edited and wanted to write 1,000+ word pieces! TV directors with 10 years' experience trying to shift into YouTube thought adding $10,000 in cameras and lights was the right thing to do, when they really should have focused on brainstorming creative ideas that could go viral and doing audience development."

The Insourcing Boom

"For years, too many American companies have treated the actual manufacturing of their products as incidental—a generic, interchangeable, relatively low-value part of their business. If you spec’d the item closely enough—if you created a good design, and your drawings had precision; if you hired a cheap factory and inspected for quality—who cared what language the factory workers spoke? This sounded good in theory. In practice, it was like writing a cookbook without ever cooking."

Lewis Lapham's Antidote to the Age of Buzzfeed

"The cavalry charge that Lewis Lapham is now leading could be said to be one against headlessness—against the historically illiterate, heedless hordesmen of the digital revolution ignorant of our intellectual heritage; against the “Internet intellectuals” and hucksters of the purportedly utopian digital future who are decapitating our culture, trading in the ideas of some 3,000 years of civilization for...BuzzFeed."

And now for a couple reasons I'm happy I didn't go into the music business (and respect musicians that much more)...

How Much Does Crowdfunding Cost Musicians?

"They've already spent more than $3,000 to shoot videos and record the first singles from the album. All told, the musicians are in for more than $5,000 just running the campaign, and another $11,000 to make good on their promises to deliver the album and rewards. That means they're a few thousand dollars in the hole."

Making Cents

"But the ways in which musicians are screwed have changed qualitatively, from individualized swindles to systemic ones. And with those changes, a potential end-run around the industry's problems seems less and less possible, even for bands who have managed to hold on to 100% of their rights and royalties, as we have."

All kinds of stuff

Department of good quotes
Every discovery by definition is unpredictable. If it were predictable it wouldn't be a discovery. Creativity exposes unpredictable things to be discovered.
-Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin of design.
-Dieter Rams

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
-Franklin D. Roosevelt

Surround yourself with talented people and then let them step up. In our real lives we often have the luxury of time and titles to question and prod and redo. Often that makes for really great art, but it's good to be reminded that you can work from a place of fundamental trust as well.
-Association of Independent Radio

Where Music and Foodie Culture Meet
"'Obviously, you've got the total punk aesthetic of the working kitchen, with the cursing, staying up until 4 a.m., the drugs and everything,' said Dawson Ludwig, marketing director for Noise Pop. 'But it's more than that. Good music and good food are total indulgence, both providing fulfilling sensual experiences.'"

Turntable Kitchen: Pairings Box
"Introducing the Turntable Kitchen Pairings Box: a curated food and music discovery experience, delivered to your door, every month."

Teller explains the psychology of illusions

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5x14AwElOk]

Film Psychology: The Shining, Spatial Awareness

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sUIxXCCFWw]

One of the original influencer outreach programs
The Tennessee Squire Association created by Jack Daniels. From wikipedia: "A Tennessee Squire is a member of the Tennessee Squire Association, which was formed in 1956 to honor special friends of the Jack Daniel's distillery. Many prominent business and entertainment professionals are included among the membership, which is obtained only through recommendation of a current member. Squires receive a wallet card and deed certificate proclaiming them as "owner" of an unrecorded plot of land at the distillery and an honorary citizen of Moore County, Tennessee."

Music Bloggers Hack the Record Industry
"It’s not a common way to release a record, but putting out an album through a popular indie music blog is a pretty smart way to hack the traditional record industry business model. Yours Truly is just the latest indie music blog to launch a label, serving up lovingly crafted offerings and using the kind of promotional savvy that traditional record companies can’t seem to muster."

Barbie in Real Life

Big Smarts

From Influential to Small Connected Groups

"I feel that we’re at the beginning of a cycle in business where we move away from this idea of “influentials”, and instead focus marketing activity on small connected groups of close friends. I think this is what marketers are starting to think about, and will be the prominent theme for this decade."

Why Are Spy Researchers Building a Metaphor Program?

"The Metaphor Program may represent a nine-figure investment by the government in understanding how people use language. But that's because metaphor studies aren't light or frilly and IARPA isn't afraid of taking on unusual sounding projects if they think they might help intelligence analysts sort through and decode the tremendous amounts of data pouring into their minds."

Tesco's Home Plus Subway Virtual Store

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJVoYsBym88]

Where Food is God

"American health food is usually said to have started with a Presbyterian minister: Sylvester Graham, who first lectured on the virtues of vegetarianism during the 1820s. (He is remembered as the namesake of the graham cracker.) It really got going in 1863 when Ellen White, a leader of several hundred Christians who called themselves the Seventh-day Adventists, said that God had revealed to her that "Grains, fruits, nuts, and vegetables constitute the diet chosen for us by our Creator." The Adventists became vegetarians, and by the turn of the century, two members, cereal moguls John Harvey Kellogg and C.W. Post (who once marketed cornflakes as "Elijah's Manna"), had laid the groundwork for the U.S. health-food industry."

How Can You Make Healthy Food More Satisfying?

"Participants' satiety was consistent with what they believed they were consuming rather than the actual nutritional value of what they consumed."

The Package-free Grocery Store

"Focusing on the concept of “pre-cycling,” the store will encourage shoppers to bring their own containers from home, filling them up with and purchasing only the amounts of food that they need."

A Look at How Many Calories $1 Will Buy

"One dollar’s worth of Coke has 447 calories, while $1 of iceberg lettuce has just 16.5. To look at it another way, you would have to spend about $5 to buy 2,000 calories at McDonald’s, $19 to buy 2,000 calories worth of canned tuna and $60 to buy 2,000 calories worth of lettuce."

How Earned Media Boosts the Branding Effect of Paid Ads

Secondary Attention and Little Boxes of Sound

"And this brilliant post from Phil made me realise how much the device oriented bits of sound design and behaviour is also focused on Primary Attention. The Walkman gave us personal soundtracks, I wouldn't be without mine, but they're a powerful drug and there's a difference between listening to sound in your head and listening to sound in the world. Maybe, in fact, there's a more important difference - between listening and hearing."

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/7505689 w=525&h=393]

The Argumentative Theory

We now know that our rationality is inextricably linked to our gut. But now it seems we may have misunderstood why we reason at all. Decades of research has been developed to better understand decision making in regards to the individual when it seems we keep coming back to what makes us fundamentally different, our social evolution. Enter the Argumentative Theory of Reasoning:

"We do all these irrational things, and despite mounting results, people are not really changing their basic assumption. They are not challenging the basic idea that reasoning is for individual purposes. The premise is that reasoning should help us make better decisions, get at better beliefs. And if you start from this premise, then it follows that reasoning should help us deal with logical problems and it should help us understand statistics. But reasoning doesn't do all these things, or it does all these things very, very poorly."

"Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments... Reasoning can lead to poor outcomes, not because humans are bad at it, but because they systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions. This explains the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice, among other things."

No grand conclusion here, but it does speak to a couple things - first, the people we're trying to influence aren't necessarily looking for the best list of features. Gaining competitive advantage is about understanding belief systems, culture, lifestyles, environments, and the like - not winning on the battlefield of objective rationality. We just have to credibly justify the gut.

But more importantly, it speaks to how important our approach is in creating better ideas. We need to work with, for and among people that perceive the world differently than we do, we need to create environments in which contrarianism is lauded, where openness to new thinking and conversation is expected and where rigidity in the process exists mostly to force experimentation and sharing.

photo via jason rowe 

Some Cool Stuff

No Place Like Marfa Texas

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/22910715 w=500&h=281]

The Photography of Ray Gordon

Levi's Film Workshops

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/22285979 w=500&h=281]

Why did LOL infiltrate?

The word serves a real purpose - it conveys tone in text, something that even the most cynical critics accept.

"I don't 'LOL'. I'm basically someone who kind of hates it," says Rob Manuel of the internet humour site b3ta.

"But the truth is, we do need emotional signifiers in tweets and emails, just as conversation has laughter. 'LOL' might make me look like a twit, but at least you know when I'm being arch."

A few good promises

I promise to stay curious.

I promise to look for the other way.

I promise to experiment.

I promise to remember the lesson and forget the rest.

I promise to carry on the cause.

I promise to inspire when I feel inspired.

I promise to use empathic ears.

I promise to learn something from everyone.

I promise to be different.

I promise to persist, but adapt.

I promise to be focused, but flexible.

I promise to accept responsibility.

I promise to win together.

It's the Links

Behind the Scenes at TED

70 Online Databases that Define Our Planet

"While good data from social sciences experiments has been hard to come by in the past, researchers are currently swamped by it thanks to a new generation of lab experiments, web experiments and the study of massive multi-player on-line games."

Language and Tone of Voice: A look at "Oh Great"

In Pursuit of the Perfect Brainstorm

"In the last decade, a quirky legion of idea peddlers has quietly invented what might be a new discipline and is certainly an expanding niche. How and why this happened is, naturally, a subject that everyone in the field theorizes about. What’s clear is that in recent years, much of corporate America has gone meta — it has started thinking about thinking. And all that thinking has led many executives to the same conclusion: We need help thinking."

Dialects in Tweets

"More interestingly, however, there is a major difference in regional slang. ‘uu’, for instance, is pretty much exclusively on the Eastern seaboard, while ‘you’ is stretched across the nation (with ‘yu’ being only slightly smaller.) ‘suttin’ for something is used only in NY, as is ’deadass’ (meaning very) and, on and even smaller scale, ‘odee’, while ‘af’ is used for very in the Southwest, and ‘hella’ is used in most of the Western states."

Pick the meal for the person behind you

"It’s a creative, if strange little set-up since you still face the problem of choice overload – you have to pick something off the full menu – and the requirement to make a choice for yourself, without the benefit of getting what you ordered."

Mini Planners

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/17398038 w=400&h=225]

MINI PLANNERS from Moleskine ® on Vimeo.

Everything will be reinvented

"I don’t mean to come off as some starry eyed huckster but, from my vantage point, we’re living in a very exciting time. If ever there were an opportunity to think big and attack large markets with incumbent players, its now. I’m a believer that in the next 5 years we’re going to see every major industry reinvented in ways we didn’t see coming."

Things Left Unsaid

When asked his view of the value of University education, Jason Fried of 37 Signals finished with a description of the class he'd like to teach:

"It would be a writing course. Every assignment would be delivered in five versions: A three page version, a one page version, a three paragraph version, a one paragraph version, and a one sentence version.

I don’t care about the topic. I care about the editing. I care about the constant refinement and compression. I care about taking three pages and turning it one page. Then from one page into three paragraphs. Then from three paragraphs into one paragraph. And finally, from one paragraph into one perfectly distilled sentence.

Along the way you’d trade detail for brevity. Hopefully adding clarity at each point. This is important because I believe editing is an essential skill that is often overlooked and under appreciated. The future belongs to the best editors."

Editing is one of the last skills to hone. Hoarding and discovering are just more fun and much less painful. 

But the winnowing process as defined by Jason makes editing seem far less sacrificial. I've heard some of the best radio writers don't actually start with the ad, but write full stories, developing characters and scenes in order to understand motive and intent. So each next step in the process of editing isn't a step away from meaning, but towards clarity. Each unable to stand without the understanding generated by the one before.

Seems obvious maybe, but we probably don't give enough credit to all the things we've left unsaid.

(photo via this isn't happiness)