Peter Merholz on the Adaptive Path blog mentions culture as one of the main qualities that help to relay an experience. I couldn’t agree more.
Culture
The big one. The framework of codes (manners, language, rituals), norms of behavior, and systems of belief within which the person operates.
Guy Kawasaki gives a presentation relaying the principles from his book The Art of the Start. While I read his book a while back, it’s still always enjoyable to watch him give a presentation because I can never get enough of his sarcastic humour. 🙂
Better Bad News shows the falling of Justin Timberlake beside Bill Gates onstage at CES. It’s pretty hard to watch. I only made it through half of it before I had to turn it off.
As I’ve noted before to others, dumping millions of dollars into an ad campaign isn’t going to help your product one bit if it can’t stand on it’s own two feet once it’s released to the public. People will see it for what it is, good or bad. Therefore, quite wasting your money on celebrity endorsements that only end up making you look like a complete fool and distance you from your customers even more.
Hell, if you want endorsements, just go to your customers and relay what praises they are singing about you.
Bence Kucsan has a lovely video he made for a friend’s birthday. While watching it, thoughts about what true friendship or love is really about drifted through my mind. One thing that I immediately thought of was accepting people for who they are, good traits or bad ones, because no one is perfect, as we all have our strengths and weaknesses. As soon as you realize this in a relationship and accept it, it’s like a weight being lifted from everyone’s shoulders. At that point, people can just be themselves, who they really are, instead of being something that is expected of them, who you want them to be.
PS. BTW as Bence notes, the letters in the video spell out “Happy Birthday” in Hungarian, just in case you’re wondering.
Hmm, does anyone know of a blogging service or application that allows you to insert your own URL link for the title of an entry post? The only one that I can find that has this ability built in from the very start is Radio Userland (which offered this years ago when blogging first took off). It can be done with WordPress as well but you need to modify your various templates to do it in combination with a new custom field. I’ve searched Drupal and Textpattern as well but didn’t see anything related to such a feature.
When I saw the Apple demonstration of the iPhone, it immediately seemed to me that the multi-touch technology could probably be evolved to a larger touch screen-enabled computer display to do some pretty amazing things. Well it looks like Jeff Han has already been working on larger touch screens to help achieve this very thing. It would be amazing to see Apple release a consumer display down the road utilizing this same display technology in collaboration with their multi-touch technology.
Back when I used to play Quake and even Counter-Strike, I had two interconnected philosophies that I incorporated into my gameplay that were roughly based on Taoism. One was to make chaos your friend, thereby taking advantage of it whenever possible, and the other was to keep moving, because stillness basically equated to death.
In terms of making chaos your friend, the idea is to actually create chaos around you and let yourself be absorbed within it so that you become one with it. Of course to do this, you really have to trust yourself and your abilities enough to basically ignore that voice in your head telling you you’re crazy to do this and then fling yourself into the maelstrom. What’s amazing though is that once you become accustomed to it and you learn to truly trust yourself, it’s almost like being a free style dancer (or martial artist), as you weave and dance around your opponents, flowing through them instead of combating them directly.
For example, when I used to play Quake Deathmatch against other players, there were certain key rooms that were heavily contested since they contained powerful armor or weaponry that respawned every so often. These rooms personified chaos. To the person who had never played the game before, they would just sit there stunned thinking how the hell could you survive in there. To the skilled combatant though, the room was a dance floor where the best moves where performed in certain key locations. Again going against logic, the more you were out in the open, in the middle of the room and chaos, the safer you were since you were less likely to take splash damage. In comparison, just imagine a hurricane wherein the eye at the center is calm, yet chaos surrounds you.
As for the emphasis on maintaining movement, again envision a dancer more so than a person who is exhausted and can barely run. The dancer gets their energy from their movement and knows how to maintain it. Flying an airplane is somewhat similar in nature, as a skilled pilot can maintain a plane’s energy through a variety of aerial maneuvers. Therefore, if you ever stopped, you’d lose your energy or flow (also know as Qi). Again just like a dancer, this has a lot to do with maintaining your rhythm as well.
For example, when I used to play Counter-Strike, often times at the start of the round there would be a huge rush to reach certain areas of the map before your opponents did. Well similar to how a martial arts instructor will tell you to strike through your opponent instead of striking at them, I never stopped when reaching these key locations. Instead when engaging the enemy, my focus was on flowing through them like water instead of stopping to fight directly. In doing so, this allowed my teammates to easily take out those opponents I was passing, since the opponents were focused on me and not them, and it also allowed me to get behind the secondary group of opponents and easily strike from behind. Therefore by maintaining my movement, I was able to create much more chaos, which in turn dramatically improved my survivability, and of course aided my team greatly.
Ok, so what. Why relay these stories? Because as Miyamoto Musashi once said, “From one thing, know ten thousand things.” In effect, when you learn one thing in life, see if you can apply it to other areas of your life. Therefore, just as I trusted myself and my abilities as I threw myself into the maelstrom of chaos, so too do we need to start trusting ourselves and our abilities more (and stop thinking so much) when we throw ourselves into other ventures. And just how I focused on maintaining my movement, so too must we realize that we need to keep moving forward with our objectives instead of slowing down so much and stopping to strive for perfection.
I think it’s crucial to point one thing out here though. There is a big difference between just “winging it” and believing you can achieve the unexpected. The fool jumps in without looking where he is going but the explorer surveys the unknown terrain in front of him and has the conviction to know his skills and knowledge will aid him whatever encountered.
I always seem to frustrate myself whenever I listen to someone who helps me to see things relating to the bigger picture that I’m working towards. Why do I get frustrated? Because when listening to them or reading what they have to say, I see all of the small pieces of concepts, ideas, and beliefs in my head weaving together to make the thing I’ve been searching for so long. Why that should be wonderful you think!? It is…until I finish listening or reading what they have to say and then everything I’ve just thought of unravels in my mind. Doh!
I think I seriously need to start taking notes as I’m absorbing information instead of afterwards. Nevertheless, I think I’m closer to what I’ve been pursuing my entire life than I have ever been. What’s that? I still have no idea. I can’t describe it (though culture is a strong component of it). I can feel it with every fibre of my being though, using my intuition as a compass, and I know I’m headed in the right direction.
“And the king dances on his throne, while the beggar gnaws on a bone.”
Dare. Dream.
Explore. Discover.
Open. Trust.
Connect. Share.
Care. Love. Feel.
I wrote this a long time ago when I was doing some research on feeling connected to the world. If you look at the way the words are grouped on each line though, you’ll also note that they form the stages of building a relationship.
The funny thing is that if I ever did become a “Cultural Consultant” (in relationship to building strong communities / organizations / businesses), I think I’d use this as my motto. If you truly want to feel alive, you need to take risks, open yourself up, connect with others, and share things about yourself. When you do, people will truly know that you care. When you achieve that point, you’ll start feeling more alive then you’ve ever been before and you’ll truly love what you’re doing.
There is one funny thing about this though (or strange depending upon how you look at it). If I had to describe what I was trying to do in as simple and as few of words as possible, I would have to say that “I’m teaching people how to be human again.” Doesn’t that sound like a strange thing to say? Yet isn’t that what I’d be doing with a business who wants to build a community or start blogging? I’m basically teaching them how to be human again, so that they can open themselves up and connect to other people.