Nollind Whachell

Just discovered a link to Citizen Agency when I poked my head in over at Dave Seah’s place (Hi Dave!). Citizen Agency focuses on “changing the world through empowering individuals”. What I also found interesting though, and what Dave found interesting as well, is one of their recent posts entitled Looking over the CA horizon into 2007 in which they discuss their new focus on happiness.

Looking over the horizon of 2007, we got really introspective. During xmas and right before NYE, Chris and I spent some time on the east coast at his parents place in New Hampshire. We were offline and had lots of time to talk and hear ourselves think. And, I’ll tell you what:

It was amazing.

At one point, we were sitting back, taking in the quiet and I thought to myself, “I want more of this.”

Of course when you return to the everyday grind, things get back to being stressed again (as they experienced) but they figured out some ways to get that happiness back and in addition wrote out a promise to themselves to help sustain this happiness. What stood out for me in the quote above though are the few words of “hear ourselves think”. This reminded me of an interesting show I watched the other day on spiritual mediums in which one of the mediums, an elderly lady from Vancouver, said something to the effect of “People don’t sit and listen as much as they used to which is a shame.”

Now she didn’t mean sit and listen to other people. She meant sit and listen to yourself, your inner voice. Of course that’s part of the problem today is that we are being mentally bombarded by so many things, that it’s difficult to even hear our own wants and desires versus the desires being pushed at us by the various mediums of advertising. Therefore, if you get the chance to get away from it at all, as they did at Citizen Agency, you suddenly start hearing your inner voice again and things become suddenly clearer. Put another way, seek your happiness, not happiness defined by someone else.

And yes Dave’s right. This is “a missing piece of the puzzle”. But I think all you need to do is look at the core values of what Citizen Agency believes in and I think you’ll start seeing the bigger picture. Again we have a group of individuals collectively pushing their own cultural values as to what they believe is important, even though those values may go against the normalcy of business today. Why go against the flow? Because the flow is changing.

Peter Merholz, the president of Adaptive Path, recently wrote an article entitled Experience design is not about brands. I must say it’s definitely a breath of fresh air to hear a person in Peter’s position talk this way because it validates some of my similar viewpoints on the subject that I’ve had in the past.

Experience, though, needs to be about the people. What do they want to accomplish, achieve, do? For experience to succeed, it must start with the person, and from there, impress upon the company. “Experience” is outside-in.

Simply put, if you want to truly connect with a person then focus on solving their problem instead of trying to sell your product. By helping them with their problem, you will in turn sell your product. Yes, it seems like only a minor deviation in how you interact with the person but it really makes a big difference.

The title of this post is a byline I was going to use for a new site I was developing but have now scrapped (as I’m just going to merge the content in with my existing site here). The basic premise of this concept is somewhat similar to The Tipping Point in that there are a myriad of individuals in the world today who are possibly unknowingly changing the culture of the world through their unbeknownst collective actions. In other words, all of these individuals are each doing their own thing, that is doing the things they believe in, in a way that fits in with their own values. Yet all of their personal cultural values are collectively somewhat similar and it is this collective cultural change that is driving a massive paradigm shift in our society’s culture today.

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

Mahatma Gandhi

The reason that this is possible is because just as a culture influences us (as it is somewhat like an environment we are within), so too can we influence this culture in turn. Therefore, every single action you do literally helps collectively to change the world around you and can then in turn influence other people to change as well. Of course, you can’t force people to change their minds. I learnt that lesson the hard way a long time ago. Yet still, by showing them a better way through your own actions, you can still be a strong influence on them by at least planting the seed in their mind.

This approach is now one of the primary directions I’d like to take with this site. In a sense, I’ll be relaying the situational awareness of this cultural change, so that others can see the change and change themselves if they so wish. I’ll be doing this by simply making people aware of other individuals out there who are helping to make this change possible. One recent example of this is my post on Joi Ito. If you watch the video mentioned in that post, you’ll see what positive values and beliefs Joi is pushing out into the world (i.e. openness, sharing, caring, diversity, etc). These are the same similar values that I see being relayed by other people in the world and even more so by the inherit nature of Web itself.

Small teams need people who can wear different hats. You need designers who can write. You need programmers who understand design. Everyone should have an idea about how to architect information (whatever that may mean). Everyone needs to have an organized mind. Everyone needs to be able to communicate with customers.

37 Signals
Getting Real

This quote perfectly describes why I’d love to find work in a startup company in town or at least a small establish company which has the culture of a startup. More importantly in these type of environments, everyone has the chance to contribute because everyone is usually involved in a project in one form or another (due to the many different hats worn).

I was fortunate enough to experience such an environment when I worked for a small web firm in town at it’s initial stages. Due to the environment, I was able to help with whatever I was capable of helping with instead of just only being able to help with what I was paid to do (i.e. my “official” job title). Therefore, even though I was initially hired as just a web developer, I was still able to help with client proposals, computer support, business advice, and more.

Yet in a larger corporate environment, usually the opposite is expected. Stay in your cubicle and don’t bother the other departments. In other words, just do your job (that being the speciality that you were hired to do) and nothing else. The end result is that instead of having a close knit team of people who fully understand the needs of each others work, you instead end up with a fractured team of people who are often in conflict with one another because they often don’t understand each others needs.

I guess that’s why I would describe myself as an explorer instead of a specialist though. Explorers explore new terrains and usually need a diverse set of skills (with the additional ability to quick adapt and learn new ones) to be able to survive within them. Specialists on the other hand, come onto the scene after the explorers have fully mapped the territory and it’s been settled. Their focus is not so much on sustainability but on growth instead.

The thing is, as many people are aware of, we are moving into rapidly changing times where the horizon has yet to be fully explored (as the Web is still in it’s infancy). Therefore I believe the future will bring a larger demand for these “quick learning generalist” explorers, since we’re undergoing a massive paradigm shift right now which is rethinking the way we do business and the way we interact with one another. Only time will tell, if I’m right or not though.

“Even better, hire people with multiple talents who can wear different hats during development. The end result will be a more harmonious product.” – Getting Real, 37 Signals

It’s funny. This quote above got me thinking about harmony and made me remember a discussion with a friend of ours who is an avid mountain biker about the word “balance” (i.e. “We need to achieve a balance in our lives”). When I mentioned this, he said he didn’t believe in that. He felt that life should be lived to the fullest and his passions (i.e. mountain biking) allowed him to do that. I think I understand now what he meant by that.

You see we shouldn’t be “balancing” our lives in the sense that we shouldn’t do anything extreme. In that sense, what he said made perfect sense. If you lived a “balanced” life, you’d probably live a very boring one because it equates to not pushing yourself out on a limb to fully experience life. Instead what we should be doing is achieving a harmony with our lives so that we can experience the full range and dynamics of it.

In this sense, think of an orchestra. Within it are various instruments that give the lows, midranges, and highs to the music being created. Therefore if one instrument continually played louder than the rest, drowning the rest out, the music probably wouldn’t be that enjoyable. Instead the unity and diversity of the instruments all playing in varying degrees at different moments in the music ensemble makes the experience of listening to it that much more wonderful than just listening to a single instrument.

So to should our lives be like the harmony of music made from these varying instruments. We should have a diverse range of interests, some extreme and some simple. Together as a whole, they will allow us to achieve this harmony within our lives. For example, a person may be extremely passionate about his work to the point of being an evangelist for the company that he works for, yet at the same time he may value his family immensely and therefore when he’s away from work, he fully disconnects from it so that he can fully connect and be with his family. Therefore just like the variations in tone within an orchestra, this person changes their tone at different moments in their life to achieve this harmony within it.

And finally, as I’ve mentioned before, I am not my just my work. I am not just a web guy. I’m not just a geek. I’m not just a gamer. I’m not just a lover of nature. I am all of these things and much much more. It is all of these things combined together in harmony that truly create me and make me the unique person that I am today, just as the various aspects of your life help to create the unique person that you are today as well.

Joi Ito has an excellent video presentation on Google Video discussing how games like the World of Warcraft can teach us more about community building and teamwork which we can then take and utilize within the real world (such as in our work environments).

One of the things I’ve realized though is I haven’t found a single MBA who is good at leadership in this situation. Most of the people who are good at leading here are people who are good at listening. It’s actually very similar to leadership in open source.

I honestly believe that games have the potential to be so much more than just about fun. A young fox cub chasing a butterfly through a field is more than just having fun. It is learning how to hunt. So too do games have the opportunity to teach us more about ourselves, which we can then take back into the real world. It seems like some companies already understand this transferability of experience and knowledge though, as there have been articles on the subject already.

Gamasutra has an article entitled Researchers: Deeper Emotions Keep Gamers Playing which talks about how emotions play a strong part in continued gameplay.

“We think there’s a deeper theory than the fun of playing,” says Richard M. Ryan, a motivational psychologist at the University and lead investigator in the four new studies about gaming. Players reported feeling best when the games produced positive experiences and challenges that connected to what they know in the real world.

“It’s our contention that the psychological ‘pull’ of games is largely due to their capacity to engender feelings of autonomy, competence, and relatedness,” adds Ryan.

“Feeling best”, “positive experiences”, and “connected” are all words that resonated with me. The funny thing is that while yes, it does relate to “what they know in the real world”, I think more than anything people are playing these games because they are looking for something more. In other words, they are looking for something that is lacking in the real world (or more likely something that used to be there a long time ago but is no longer).

What is it? I’m not sure specifically but I think it relates to the feeling of being a part of something and being truly valued and appreciated for your contributions, no matter how small or diverse they may be. Unfortunately, due to the culture of big business today, this rarely happens because most people are not seen so much as people but more as machines that fill a specialized replaceable role. And if you’ve ever worked in a large corporate environment then you’ll probably know what I mean.

Of course not all businesses are this way. Changes are occurring and for the better. It’s just that it will probably be sometime before these changes fully spread to most businesses so that they finally catch the cluetrain and fully understand what’s going on.

For those who are familiar with Hugh MacLeod, you’ll probably know of about his post from a while back entitled The Sex & Cash Theory.

The creative person basically has two kinds of jobs: One is the sexy, creative kind. Second is the kind that pays the bills. Sometimes the task in hand covers both bases, but not often. This tense duality will always play center stage. It will never be transcended.

I’ve slightly renamed this for myself to be The Love & Money Theory. In other words, on the one hand you get work which you love doing because it’s in synch with your passions. The other work you do, you just do for the money because you need to pay the bills. It doesn’t mean you hate the work. You may actually find it very interesting. It’s just that it isn’t fully in synch with your passions.

I have no problem accepting this reality. However, at the same time, I just realized that I need my space here on this site to be about my passions and only my passions. To achieve this, I think the best thing to do is to keep any “business” related content off my site here. In other words, I need to follow my site’s byline that says it’s a “Personal Site”.

With that in mind, I’ve removed all posts relating to my freelance work from my site here. And yes, this also means I’ll no longer be doing freelance work (well except for a few established clients already). I’ve decided instead to look for employment in Vancouver, preferably with a startup company or a small company with a startup culture. I just really miss working face to face with a close knit group of people.

Oh one last thing. You might be wondering why I changed the name of the theory from “sex” to “love”. The reason for this is that sex, while enjoyable, is very rarely fulfilling, as you usually just want more. Love on the other hand, even if just for a brief moment, can truly sustain you for a lifetime. And from the looks of Hugh’s latest post on his site, it looks like he’s thinks love is a pretty big deal as well.  🙂

Sometimes the more courageous thing to do isn’t to take a stand and persevere through something no matter what is thrown at you but instead to know when to let go and just let things happen. I think it’s because it’s so hard to let go of that “control” and to just go with the “flow” trusting that things will transpire as they should.

You always hear the words “fashion victim” in regards to people wearing the latest trends but I think those words are better suited for the animals who are gruesomely killed in the name of fashion. Yes we obviously need to kill animals for food and clothing (although vanity is another question) but why with such methods. Seems kind of sad that we have lost the reverence and respect for that which sustains us that we once had thousands of years ago when we lived much closer to the land. I guess maybe being “highly civilized” comes with a sort of detachment or disconnection of the things around us.