Nollind Whachell

For me, figuring out my weaknesses is just as important as figuring out my strengths because I believe that our strengths come from our weaknesses and our weaknesses come from our strengths. In effect, you can’t have one without the other because they work off of each other. So instead of trying to hide from or ignore your weaknesses, so as to avoid believing you’re weak or imperfect, you should strive to be aware of them and understand how they relate to your strengths. In doing so, it gives you the awareness and understanding of how to keep yourself balanced, no matter what life might throw at you.

Without a doubt though, it is a constant and difficult challenge to maintain this balance. Some days you’ll feel so strong that your weaknesses won’t be anywhere in sight. Other days, you’ll feel completely overwhelmed by your weaknesses with your strengths nowhere in sight. This is the natural cyclic nature of life though, this ebb and flow or ups and downs. Again don’t try to be surprised or upset by it, expect that it will happen from time to time (which in itself is hard to do) and strive to do your best work on your strong days, letting your weak days be a time for rest and reflection (i.e. a time to get away from it all).

Now for myself, I want to cover my weaknesses in two ways: intensity and lacking. Think of a weakness of intensity as something like Superman slapping a friend on the back because he told a great joke and sending that friend flying 100 yards across a field in the process because he forgot his own strength. Now a weakness of lacking is kind of the opposite of this in the sense that a man may have barely any strength at all, so he’s weak in being able to do things like carrying heavy objects or even defending himself.

Weaknesses of Intensity

• Desire for creative self expression which can become scattered and lack direction because I often have so many creative ideas I’d like to work upon, I’m not sure where to start.
• Desire for the simple luxuries of life because my family wasn’t well off growing up as a kid.
• Desire for recognition and authority of achievements because I often find it so difficult to communicate my strengths which is crucial if you want to get hired or employed.
• Desire for personal freedom and change in my work because it lets me fully utilize all of my talents in my work and lets me take risks experimenting with new ideas.

Now to balance out these intensities, I need to do the following. I need to have a creative outlet that let’s me express myself authentically. Right now, this website and journal are letting me do this to a degree but I’d like to elevate this further in the future. With regards to luxuries, I need to be spartan and frugal, realizing that some of my best ideas and most memorably experiences have often come from limited interactions (i.e. limit yourself to expand your possibilities). As for recognition, I need to be self-confident in my talents, even if others can’t fully see them yet, but still work on constructive ways of communicating them better. Finally, with regards to freedom, I need to be more flexible in accepting “conventional” work at times because it may propagate an unconventional idea or interaction that could lead to a new experience or opportunity in life.

Weaknesses of Lacking

• Lack the ability to be balanced, cooperative, and diplomatic because I see issues that are so common sense to me that I often blurt them out without much consideration for others.
• Lack the ability to be silent because I feel I can help, so I’m very vocal in trying to problem solve issues.

Now to balance out these lackings, I need to do the following. I need to be more cooperative and diplomatic in my interactions, using empathy to put myself in the shoes of others which will help me soften my blunt words, so they become more tactful. I also need to learn to keep my mouth shut and instead just to listen, observe, and understand. This is critical in understanding the whole of a system. In effect, while I can learn a lot by interacting with others, I learn a lot more by just sitting in the background listening and observing.

My Past Self

What I find really intriguing about this weakness analysis on myself is that I actually used to be much better at overcoming my weaknesses in my past because I was much more of an introvert then. In effect, my shyness forced me to keep silent and it also forced me to go along with the rest of the crowd, thus being much more cooperative and diplomatic.

Ever since around 2001 though, when I started realizing my true talents and potential, everything started getting out of balance. In effect, the more successful I became, the worse I got out of balance. What’s hilarious about this though is that the company I was within experienced this exact same thing as well. The more successful they became, the more they got out of balance and spiralled downhill as a company, until they eventually imploded in 2002.

Creating My Future Self Presently

What I also find really intriguing about this though is that my ideal future self is something very similar to what I’d like do within a company right now. In effect, my optimal role seems to be one in which I’m an advisor, consultant, coach, or mentor within a company whereby I’m not controlling people or telling them what to do, so much as I’m helping to teach them how to achieve things on their own. I do this by helping them to see things around them and in themselves that they may not have seen before (i.e. making the intangible tangible), thus making them more aware and responsible for themselves and others around them.

There’s a few quotes within John Thackara’s In The Bubble book that gave me another important realization with regards to my purpose and how I seem to help people the most (yet have such a hard time describing it on a resume or bio).

We’re so flooded by noise that it’s hard to understand what’s going on. True, we have learned to filter out noise and distraction, but in so doing we have also constrained our capacity to reflect on and make sense of the bigger picture.

In order to do things differently, to reassert some kind of control over the evolution of events, we need to design ways to see things differently. Tomorrow’s literacies therefore need to be process and systems literacies.

Our world is filled with representations of invisible or complex phenomena. But most of them have been made and used by specialists as objects of research. So the design challenge described in this chapter has a second aspect: how to deploy new representations in such a way that they influence wider groups of people.

Although information overload is frequently discussed in the media — which helped cause it — our delimma is not that we receive too much information. We don’t receive anywhere near the quantity of data it takes to overload our neurons; our minds are capable of processing and analyzing many gigabits of data per second — a lot more data than any of today’s supercomputers can process and act on in real time. We feel flooded because we’re getting information unfiltered, unsorted, and unframed. We lack ways to select what’s important. The design task is to make information digestible, not to keep it out.

Simply put, I seem to have this knack for seeing the intangible and helping to make it tangible. For example, I have this ability to see the ebb and flow of a business, both internally and externally, as a whole system (or ecosystem). It’s why I seem to be so effective at defining processes and standards within a business, as well as defining the identity and culture of it as well. It’s also why I’m so fascinated with figuring out new ways of socially collaborating and interacting together, both offline and online (i.e. business organization, MMOs, CMSs, etc).

This is also why I’m so frustrated at trying to find work that can make use of this talent. For example, in a recent interview, someone told me that I might be better suited working in Human Resources. That to me would be like chopping off one of my arms because it only lets me utilize half of my talent. Why? Because when your talent is working in systems or more appropriately ecosystems, it involves working with both living and nonliving elements. Thus only working in Human Resources would “cage” me within human (living) interactions. Yet for me to work effectively from a whole systems approach, I need to work and immerse myself in all elements of it, no matter if it’s people, hardware, or software, because they are all connected.

Hilariously enough, this same interviewer proved this point to me. He indicated that the job position required work that related to “marketing”. When he described the details though, it sounded like user interface design and development.  When I indicated this, he agreed somewhat but elaborated that the purpose of the “interface” was to communicate and be a method of “interaction” between their customers and the company which is what marketing does. A radical thought to me at the moment but now it makes perfect sense.

All said and done now, my current challenge is how to effectively communicate this talent of mine easily, preferably within a visual way. I’ve got some ideas, based upon some previous research I’ve done in the past but I’ll have to play around with them before I can add them to my portfolio.

I’ve been extremely busy the past couple of weeks but I can’t let it go to my head. Even though I’ve been productive, coming up with amazing solutions that I thought weren’t even possible a few weeks back, I still feel as though that this is only a distraction from something greater that I’m supposed to creating and working on.

I mentioned before that I keep seeing all of these amazingly talented individuals and yet, like myself, their full potential does not seem to be realized yet, even though their talents may be readily visible. The only way I can explain this would be like seeing Superman using his powers to deliver pizzas (i.e. “Delivered anywhere, worldwide, and always served piping hot!”). It just seems like such a waste of our true potential.

Then again, I guess it’s better to be doing something, rather than nothing. The trick is, obviously, to make sure that you don’t lose your awareness and focus along the way. That you don’t get so caught up in what you’re doing that it becomes more important than yourself or the creative exploratory journey that you’re undertaking to reveal your true purpose. So yes, it’s better to be creating something rather than nothing. Yet still it’s important to always push yourself towards a purpose of creating something that truly expresses your authentic whole self and utilizes all of your powers within the process of its creation.

I’ve been playing and working with the Web since the first web browser, Mosaic, came out in 1993. I even remember nostalgically finding a copy of the 0.9 beta version of it years later on floppy disk.

What I find frustrating though is that even after years of accumulating knowledge, expertise, and experience, people within the web industry for the most part today are still treated like a joke. For example, I remember dealing with huge global clients around 1999 and their product websites were often a complete afterthought to them (i.e. “Oh geez. We need a website too. Can you get that up by next week?”).

Today with the world living, playing, learning, and working on the Web and online social interaction being such an important aspect of our lives, you’d think that people in the Web industry would finally get some respect and recognition for what they’ve been doing all these years but it’s still completely the opposite. Even though web design and development has gotten more complex, clients often expect developers to do more with much, much less.

This is why, more than anything, I’ve gotten out of doing freelance client work because very few people understand and value my expertise and knowledge. In effect, web design is not about the individual pieces (i.e. linking simple web pages or documents) but the interaction of those pieces as a whole on a variety of levels which is why I think my systems thinking comes in so handy in this regard. Web design is branding & identity, marketing, graphical design, interactive design, usability, information architecture, community building, front-end programming, back-end programming, and more. This is why it’s usually almost impossible to find one individual who can cover all of these areas well.

For example, the typical web designer today that helps most small businesses can achieve so much because of the power of content management systems which lets them focus more on the front-end versus the back-end. Even just focusing on the front-end though is hardly simple. For example, when I was doing freelance work, I expected most of my clients to already have a solid brand and identity, as well as their content copy figured out with at least some logical structure to it. This would at least give me something to work with (i.e. Jerry McGuire’s “Help me, help you!”), allowing me to build a great flowing story-like interactive experience on their website. But even those basic expectations of branding and copy were almost never met and more often than not, clients expected me to come up with their branding & identity, as well as to help them with their copy.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I couldn’t do this. It was more the frustration at the context and scope of the project in relation to the quality of work that I could get out of it. For example, if the client’s needs were simple and they had a basic but usable logo, as well as at least some usable content, I often produced work that they were often extremely happy with, yet from my perspective I wouldn’t show it on my portfolio because it just didn’t “cut it” as quality work to me. Eventually after years of doing this and clients expecting more in less time and with less pay, I said enough. I don’t want to be a machine that produces a quantity of mediocre work. I want to be a human being who can express his authentic self through the quality of his creative work.

Amazingly enough, after I stopped doing freelance work and started doing work for myself, the quality of my work shot up dramatically and my knowledge, particularly with regards to front-end script-based interactivity, seemed to skyrocket. It’s because I finally had the time to experiment and play with crafting  something that I myself would truly want to use. And if you only know one thing about me, realize that I am harder on and expect more of myself than anyone else. Thus if I’m using something, I expect it to be of quality work, being both highly functional and highly usable.

All said and done though, web design to me at its core still has very little to do with technology. It’s simply about people, relationships, and communications. For example, I’ve seen websites that while they may not have been visually beautiful, they were still amazing because their functionality and usability truly allowed people to connect easily and interact with one another. At the same time, I’ve seen simply gorgeous websites that were completely frustrating to use because they lacked the functionality and usability to let people connect easily. Thus more often than not people would just leave in frustration, not even bothering to contact the company because they couldn’t even find a way to contact them on their website. Sad but true.

This is exactly why I’m looking for full time work right now, while I continue to do my own personal work on the side. I want to find a company that truly cares about people both internally and externally. Thus they need to truly care about their employees and give them the time and space to create quality work which they can be proud of. At the same time, they should truly care about their customers and, more importantly, the local community around them. In effect, the more powerful they become, the more they should humbly give back in thanks for where they’ve gotten. And if you think this is a pipe dream, no there are local companies out there like this. Alas my goal is more difficult because I’d like to find a company that can not only utilize my web expertise but also my video game and community expertise as well, particularly done in such a way that the company is creating a positive social impact and change within the world, even if just on a local level.

All said and done though, I could have given up on web design years ago and I often thought about it. But still in the back of my head, I always knew that my knowledge and expertise were valuable to me in some way, even if on a personal level, because I still feel like I have something I still need to authentically create and express online with regards to social change. And in some strange way, I feel that when I discover what this is, it will make use all of my knowledge and expertise over the years in a unifying harmonistic way (i.e. story writing, web design, drawing, composing music). In effect, I feel it will a website that will express an important story of some kind through words, visual imagery, and even music on something of social importance. Again what this will be, I still don’t know at this time but deep within me is this strong undeniable emotional feeling that it still needs to be expressed in some way.

Thus as the saying goes, it’s not what life gives you, it’s what you do with it that matters. And if anything, I’m actually glad at the frustrations I’ve had with some clients over the years because they’ve helped me to understand and get closer to what I truly want to be doing. Without them, without that conflict, I wouldn’t be who I am today and I wouldn’t know so passionately about where I want to be going.

One of the most beautiful aspects of systems thinking is that it applies to so many aspects of life. At times though, this ability to learn so much from one thing can be frustrating, particularly when it comes to choosing a particular avenue to explore and experiment with systems thinking.

Two such avenues though have always been dominant within my life. One being systems thinking as it applies to organizational design, particularly startup businesses, and the other being systems thinking as it applies to game design, particularly massively multiplayer games. While people who know me know my interest in both of these areas, what they don’t know is that I’ve been looking at way to merge both of these avenues into one for at least a few years. For me the reasons are obvious, why spend years of research in one area (i.e. games design for entertainment), when I can spend years of research on something that merges both into something much more meaningful (i.e. playful social systems designed for social change).

To understand what I mean, imagine a fusional mix of Jane McGonigal’s Gaming Can Make A Better World, Flickr’s evolutionary origins, Kickstarter, and The Social Network, all rolled into one. Again for those who know me, I’ve hinted at this somewhat in the past when talking about my idea of “connected communities” which arose out of my frustrations of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. We, as a society, need to collectively evolve our intelligence and awareness if we’re going to be able to handle the challenges coming our way. And no I don’t mean a new way of organizing government or businesses, I mean a new way of self-organizing “we the people” to collectively tackle problems head on without the need for centralized command and control type systems that are simply so unreliable within the rapidly changing and volatile times we live in.

Simply put, we need news ways of socially interacting that are more than just individually focused (i.e. Facebook), as this just mirrors the same frustration within massively multiplayer games that follow this same individualistic pattern (typically theme park MMOs). We need systems that give us new ways of interacting as collective groups, rather than just as individuals. So instead of creating social systems that relay our individual awareness (i.e. Facebook), we need systems that relay our collective or group awareness. Yet at the same time, this needs to be done in such a way that the system is sustainable (i.e. decentralized) and simple to use (i.e. emergence-based with simple interactions).

If you’re wondering if I’ve magically come up with such a system, sorry to disappoint you but no I haven’t, even though I do get the occasional insight and realization that evolves my scope of understanding on tackling the subject. For example, this morning I played around with some conceptual ideas of a game-like social system that utilizes “energy” to achieve things within it. This energy is either time-based or money-based and it allows you to use abilities like “attacking” or “defending” a task / quest / cause, while also being able to “heal” or “empower” other individuals working on that task. So again, replicating elements that we see within games but using them in such a way that we can self-organize and overcome heroic challenges in real life (rather than just overcoming virtual heroic challenges and quests within games).

So for me, my dream job is no longer working for an open, sharing, and caring business company or game development company. It’s working within an eclectic company that is a hybrid of both, that’s looking at new ways of developing decentralized social systems that help people to interact within new, sustainable, and enjoyable ways.