A couple of days ago I was having trouble sleeping so I got up, lit a candle in the living room, and start jotting down some of the thoughts and frustrations flying through my head. Two words kept flowing through my mind, “natural” and “flow”. Therefore after jotting down a pageful of notes, here are two of the most important things I realized.
I design when I see and feel a natural connection or flow to things. If I don’t see this and I’m “forced” then things seem “unnnatural”.
The act of relaying my thoughts and feelings feels natural. How they are structured is what feels unnatural.
With this in mind, I’ve decide to unplug a bit. Yes to recharge (since I usually come back revitalized with a bucketful of ideas) but more importantly to figure out this “structure” thing. Those who’ve been following my blog know that this has been something that has been bothering me for a long time, as I’ve always hated the default blog structure and format. Hopefully with the time away to live life (thus following my own advice at the end of my last post), I’ll receive inspiration when I least likely expect it (which is usually how it works for me).
Till I return, feel free to dig through my archives if you haven’t had the chance to peruse some of my older entries. I’d recommend starting from the bottom, through the earliest entries, and checking out the titles that peak your interest.
Oh and I’ve unplugged my journal comments as well for the time being. You can still give me a shout via my contact page if you like though.
Catch ya laters!
William Gibson talks about going on media fasts, which is no information for five days, just going away — no phone, no TV, no radio, just your own stuff. People. It’s really weird. Try it. Try to stop watching television, listening to the radio, reading the newspaper, and go on an information fast. Do you know what happens to you? It’s like when you go away on a holiday and you’re out of touch: you relax. And you find out there are other things that are inside of you that are quite important.
While reading the “Twitter Debates” last week, something struck a chord in me that seemed to be of a greater issue but I wasn’t quite sure what it was at the time. Two quotes that jumped out at me though, one from Tara Hunt and the other from Kathy Sierra, both seemed to be focal points for what I was trying to uncover.
By not having enough time to post my blog, I was “losing” much of my thinking along the way. As my blog became more and more ‘professionally focused’, I was losing the personal things that matter to me.
I don’t want to be that connected. And I also have a huge appreciation for the art of keeping the mystery alive. I don’t want to know that much about so many people, and I sure don’t want people to know that much about me… mundane or otherwise.
Now it wasn’t until today that I remembered an Oct 2005 post from Keith Robinson entitled When I Make Something and when I did, all of the connections I was looking for started falling into place. Keith’s post was about what he goes through internally when he creates something.
I care what you think.
I enjoy myself.
I stress myself.
I wonder if my mom will find typos.
I feel self-conscious.
I lose my head.
I try too hard.
I want it to be cool (!!!!)
I cringe.
I start out honest but end up a liar.
I listen to music. Mostly cheesy music.
I ignore e-mails.
I try to think positive.
I have a love/hate feeling about criticism.
I wanna be adored.
I second-guess myself. Three times.
I ask myself where the period should go.
I estimate errors.
I want to help.
I’m begging for attention.
I want to impress my wife.
I obsess over pixel placement.
I demand a second opinion.
I compete.
I press “save” or “submit” with much more than a second thought.
I avoid regret.
I …
As you can see from the list above, Keith probably isn’t alone in feeling this way, as I’m sure all of us can check off more than a few of the items on that list when we do something. Now what I remember more particularly about this post though is what I asked Keith in the comments afterwards.
Now how many of these things do you think about when you are just having a conversations with someone that you bump into on the street (i.e. friend, aquaintence, family, etc)? Don’t you wish you could just be yourself on your blog without having to think about all of this stuff?
Of course Keith replied “Yes.” And in rereading that answer, everything I had been tossing around in my head for the past week finally came together and connected like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle revealing the greater issue I had been looking for. That being, why is it that when we do something work related (i.e. “professional”), we seem to want to “detach” our real selves from it? And yet at the same time, all I seem to hear from customers these days is that they’d like to learn more about the people behind the company, so that they can see there are real people there who are just like them.
For example, why did Tara stop posting more personal things on her blog (especially considering she has a business blog at Citizen Agency) and why does Kathy dislike revealing these personal things online? I mean everything I’ve read about Kathy seems like she’s loves human contact and interaction, particularly face to face. And yet when you’re face to face, that’s when people can see all of your peculiarities and nuances, things that we may see as being negative about ourselves, but what others see as making you a real person. Therefore, that which Kathy dislikes revealing online, I’m guessing she probably enjoys revealing face to face with others and it’s probably one of the main reasons people do want to meet her in person (such as myself but I can never afford to go to any of these cool events).
So why is it that we’re fine with revealing who we truly are when we’re face to face with someone (even a stranger), yet we’re uncomfortable doing this online (particularly when it relates to our work)? I mean isn’t that one of the things that everyone raves about regarding blogs, especially when looking to hire someone, is that we can get a good grasp of the person before hiring them so as to ensure they’re a good fit with our existing team from a personality perspective?
Also why are we so focused on trying to appear perfect all the time? I mean aren’t blogs a place where we can be more of ourselves and not have to worry about protocol so much. If so, why are we always worried about perfecting our posts before publishing them (i.e. taking days to structure and format them) instead of posting small pieces first that we join afterwards. I mean no wonder Tara finds Twitter so liberating, since there’s nothing stopping her thought flow when posting these small pieces of her life. Yet does Twitter have a patent on being liberating? What’s stopping people from being this liberating and real on their blogs?
That to me is what the real mystery of life is all about. It’s not so much not wanting to know about things but more that not everything can be explained or figured out, so don’t continually worry about it. In other words, stop spending so muc h time trying to figure out life by putting it into neat little boxes and spend more time living it and sharing it with others. And yes, I’m not perfect either. I need to follow my own advice. 🙂
Update: Ok, I guess I understand now Kathy not wanting to reveal even general day to day info about her life when you have wackos out there posting stuff like this about her. Hmm, almost makes you want to start a community like The WELL of yesterday, where new members are recommended by those already within it instead of it being open to everyone (and “anything” which is how I’ll describe those who wrote the sick and twisted stuff about her).
I was just reminded of a Half-Life teaser site I did for Sierra back in 1999. I remember when I made it, I wanted to create a centerpiece that look somewhat like an Oscar award, so I made the base using Caligari Truespace and fooled around with Photoshop to get an image of Gordon Freeman to look like he’d been touched by Goldfinger. Getting a bit nostalgic thinking about this, I decided to see if I could find it in the Internet Archive. Sure enough, I discovered the archive for the site shown below.
David Greiner of Freshview, the company behind the great email newsletter service Campaign Monitor, has posted up his thoughts regarding building a business around paid software/services after a lot of people at the Sydney Barcamp felt it was impossible to charge anymore.
People were giving examples of Flickr and YouTube, saying that everything had either been done already, was free or wasn’t worth paying for. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
The primary problem he noted was that so many of these people and startup companies were focused more on money or technology than on solving real problems for real people.
The web and software development community has a nasty habit of looking in on itself and forgetting about the other 99% of the online population. While everyone else out there is building for the early adopter crowd and going to bed dreaming of getting TechCrunched, why not look outside this circle and try to solve a real problem that real people are having.
Too many people I speak to are focused on technology instead of a solution. “It’s gonna be really cool, we’ve got RSS feeds, a neat tagging system and the whole thing runs on 3 lines of Rails code”. Now take a deep breath, and realise that none of that means a thing to your customers. They want to leave work 5 minutes early, they want it to take 2 steps instead of 5. They don’t want a tag cloud.
Of course all this focus on money and technology creates this drive to create something BIG, when in fact the opposite approach is the better path to take.
Instead of trying to build the next video sharing or social networking site, why not narrow your focus a little more. There are loads of simple problems out there that are waiting to be solved online.
BTW a beneficial side effect of focusing on real problems is that it helps to build a great culture for your company, as it shows you honestly care about the people you’re trying to help instead of focused on the almighty dollar. Yes, businesses need money to survive but they need a soul (or mojo) to thrive.
There’s an interesting article on NewScientist.com relating to Xiao-Gang Wen’s and Michael Levin’s theory that the universe is composed of a string-net liquid. What jumped out at me was the following quote.
“Wen and Levin’s theory is really beautiful stuff,” says Michael Freedman, 1986 winner of the Fields medal, the highest prize in mathematics, and a quantum computing specialist at Microsoft Station Q at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “I admire their approach, which is to be suspicious of anything – electrons, photons, Maxwell’s equations – that everyone else accepts as fundamental.“
While their theory still has to be fully proven, this is a great example of pioneering innovation. Basically the quality to ignore the fundamental known, question everything, and look at things from as many different viewpoints as possible. In other words, see beyond the paradigm shift.
I mean a few weeks back I was in a couple of conversations where people said what’s the point of someone coming out with another search engine or creating new content management software when Google “can’t be beat” and there are a lot of great CMS solutions to choose from. I chuckled to myself when I heard this. These are people who accept the fundamentals, that aren’t interested in seeing the “next step” in the evolution of these things. There’s nothing wrong with that, especially if these things meet your needs. It’s just that I don’t think you can say “it can’t possibly be evolved anymore”.
After all, life is in a constant state of change and evolution. What we know today, may be replaced by something else tomorrow or may only be a fraction of something larger. Actually if you read a lot of history on innovation and breakthroughs, you’ll find that many times the discoveries that change the way we think are often made by those with little or no experience in the particular field of study. It’s often an amateur with a passionate interest in something that has little knowledge of the complete fundamentals of the field of study. Thus they have no preconceived notions of these “fundamental” boundaries and instead experiment to discover the boundaries on their own which in turn leads to these new discoveries.
Therefore if something doesn’t feel quite right in your life, even though others may tell you it’s “normal”, question it and determine for yourself if it is right or wrong, useless or usable. You might be surprised at what you discover.
At lunch yesterday, I flicked on the TV to Turner Classic Movies (one of my favorite channels because it has no commercials) and watched Bound For Glory, a biography of Woody Guthrie. I think the following quote from Woody best encapsulates the overall feeling of the movie.
I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think you’ve not any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I’d starve to death before I’d sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow.
All in all, I found the message that Woody was trying to relay quite poignant for the times and even relates to this very day. We are not incompetent and useless people who need to sell our souls for some product, service, or company to make our lives better. Each of us is gifted in ways we can’t imagine and we all have the dignity, courage, and determination to achieve anything we set our minds to, if we only realize our true potential.