What I’ve Learned So Far

Another gem turned up via Twitter:

“Genius is only a greater aptitude for patience.”
~George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon

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An irony: Twitter is the medium of impatience — a sentence or two is all that goes into a message, and you can dash that off in a few seconds. Yet in this case Twitter brought me something I (and you?) need to hear.

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Possibly related:

Why Are the Most Creative People in Business Skipping Out on Web 2.0?

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My question to you:

Can genius and social media go together?

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(Photo by Abby Ladybug, used under a CC-Noncommercial license.)

A few days ago I had an exchange on Twitter with Andrea Gillies, an author who has written a memoir of her experience caring for her Alzheimer’s-stricken mother-in-law. (Among her other fine qualities, Andrea is, like me, an alum of the University of St Andrews.) I was intrigued when she posted this:

That’s what we miss about being children. Living in the present, concerned only with the immediate and trivial past and future. How glorious.

I replied:

Amen. I’m trying to relearn living-in-the-present from my children.

Then she said:

Don’t think we can relearn it. Once we’re out of the garden, we’re out. Would love nothing more than to be proven wrong, though.

Now I ask you to consider these questions:

• Can we shed, even temporarily, our grownup worries about the future and regrets of the past so that we once again enjoy the un-self-consciousness of children?
• If so, how?

What do you think?

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(Photo via Marjon Kruik, used under a Creative Commons license.)

See that picture? That’s me, sometime soon, rocking a keynote address.

Yes, “rocking” — because that’s what most keynotes sorely need.

This is on my mind because I just got back from a great conference. Neat people, interesting ideas, many common interests, and plenty of good speakers . . . but I kept hoping for an over-the-top speech that never came. My own contribution was to sit on a panel with two entrepreneurs who run social-media companies. People in the audience told me later that we did a good job, and that they liked the mix of viewpoints from the members of our panel.

You’re always happy to hear that kind of feedback, and I’ve been grateful to hear more of it over the past six months as I’ve ramped up my public speaking. But there comes a point when you want something bigger.

Speaking at a professional breakfast or lunch is fun. Lecturing to a room of 40 people in a conference session can be lovely. Sharing a panel with smart folks in front of a much larger audience was certainly a treat. But none of them match taking the stage as a featured speaker at a conference and then blowing the roof off the joint.

As I keep representing my company at events, that’s what I’m working toward.

Part of it is vanity. I’m never actually going to be a rock star like Jack White (that’s him playing the guitar solo for the Raconteurs in the picture), so this is likely the closest I’ll get in terms of live performances. Having been a performer since I was in kindergarten, I can tell you it’s a rush to command the attention of an audience and then win its cheers.

Part of it is frustration. Smart keynoters abound, especially at a good conference like the one I just attended. Some of them are polished speakers. Many of them are far more experienced in business than I am. But seldom do they really galvanize an audience, touching hearts and minds in a way that no one in the crowd will soon forget. I figure that, if the topic is important, it deserves that kind of treatment.

Part of it is ambition. Keynoters get the headlines, for themselves and their companies. They get more attention and respect. If there are fees to be had, they get the biggest ones. In the long run, I want all of these things, and it won’t hurt my feelings when I can subsidize my children’s education and my writing habit with my proceeds from speaking.

Part of it is generosity. Listen, I don’t want to sound like a douche, so I won’t try to claim that this is my only motivation. But my background has given me an unusual mix of perspectives that people tell me is useful, and my experience as a writer, actor, debater, speaker, and occasional broadcaster has given me a better grounding than many speakers if the goal is to deliver a speech that works both as an intellectual lesson and an emotive performance. And I do want to share that.

All this wanting doesn’t mean I’m there yet. I’m not a celebrity, even within the small sphere of social media. I’m not a big-time business leader or self-made entrepreneur. It will take time — and a track record of making the most of my opportunities — before meeting organizers give me the prime slots on their schedules.

Meanwhile, I’ll do what I can do: work on my chops, preparing for the day when I can take the stage like a rock star.

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(Photo by Flavio Ferrari, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.)

Bear with some gadgetology here — this is what I’m thinking about for my dream work setup.

Item one: A portfolio to hold everything. I’m thinking a Briefolio from Levenger:

Underlying principle: A small portfolio doesn’t let you overpack. When I carry a bigger bag, I carry too much stuff. I’m thinking about this because this morning I repacked my bag after two days in Dallas for a conference. That means I repacked it with papers and magazines and books that I didn’t have time to touch — and that I should have known I wouldn’t have time to touch.

Item two: A tiny notebook computer with long battery life. Maybe this ASUS Eee PC 1000he:

Underlying principle: I love my old ThinkPad, but it’s getting long in the tooth, it’s pretty big, and the battery life isn’t what it could be. (The ASUS has nine hours of battery life.) Plus, it won’t fit in the portfolio like this will.

Item three: Composition notebook. Nothing fancy, though I do like high-end Moleskines, too.

Underlying principle: Paper is still often the best technology for capturing thoughts.

Further reading: “26 Years, 85 Notebooks” by Michael Bierut.

Supporting cast: Pens, Blackberry (or maybe, in the future, an iPhone), iPod, headphones, and a book or magazine — or, possibly, someday . . . a Kindle?

What do you think?

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(Composition notebook photo by Ryan Bush, used under a CC-ND license.)

One of the grand problems of political discourse in the United States is that we are often expected to put on an entire suit of clothes at once — to buy into an entire ideology, with all its interlocking parts. This leads to false dichotomies, shoddy thinking, and the erosion of our Republic. I hope you’ll reject that way of thinking.

I have a friend who frames this in terms of the death penalty. He’s a political freethinker, but he’s found that if he learns a person’s stance on capital punishment, he can often extrapolate many of their other political views. In many cases, the first “suit of clothes” looks like this:

• pro-capital punishment
• pro-gun rights
• pro-life
• pro-Iraq invasion
• pro-Bush
• anti-Obama
• anti-tax
• anti-regulation
• “conservative”
• etc.

The other suit of clothes is the negative image of the first:

• anti-capital punishment
• pro-gun control
• pro-choice
• anti-Iraq invasion
• anti-Bush
• pro-Obama
• pro-tax (or tolerant of higher taxes, especially on the rich)
• pro-regulation
• “liberal”
• etc.

Here’s the big problem: if you wear one of these suits of clothes without thinking it through, you end up holding ridiculous positions. For now, just one example:

• Most climatologists in the world, regardless of nationality or politics, are convinced on the basis of strong evidence that global warming is a real, current problem that requires strong human intervention. If they’re right — or even likely right — how will it benefit us to resist them on ideological grounds?

We have big problems ahead of us: climate, economy, foreign policy, et cetera. And too many of our approaches to these problems have been driven by ideology, not independent thought.

Please buck that trend.

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(Photo by John Keogh, used under a CC-NC license.)

Beloved readers: Now that I’m back in the swing of writing here regularly, I’m considering redesigning this blog. Could be a few tweaks here and there, could be something more radical. Now that I think of it, it could be tweaks first and then something radical.

One blog design I like is Noah Brier’s, especially because of the side-by-side presentation of major and minor posts:

I also get many ideas — most of them far beyond my ability to implement — from articles like this one at Smashing Magazine. See, for example, Neil Scott’s nifty, pared-down design:

Anyway, consider this your engraved invitation to tell me what you would like to see in this blog’s design.

On my professional blog, I’ve written more than once about the power of checklists, and especially about how they’ve been used to increase safety and effectiveness in hospitals. My conclusion was that many of us, as individuals or in businesses, could benefit from instituting this kind of simple but effective discipline.

Perhaps it will not surprise you that I’ve had trouble implementing this for myself.

Now, though, in line with my stated career objective in yesterday’s post, I’m putting together a big daily checklist aimed at ensuring that I cover each day’s bases that day (hey, that also sounds familiar . . .). Some of the things on the list seem silly to write down, since I do them automatically anyway. The point, though, is to get all of the things on the list to be automatic — and to have the list as a reference and a goad for those times when I’m prone to slip up.

Here’s the really hard part: you have to include things on the checklist that you know are going to be painful to do. And when you encounter those things in the course of your daily work, you have to . . . go ahead and do them. Possibly it’s just the bias of my own experience, but I think that shying away from what’s most painful — or even potentially painful — is the great stumbling block for many people, the thing that keeps them from achieving what they’d like to achieve.

No need to be a glutton for punishment, mind you. We don’t all have to be like Lance Armstrong, who said that a day’s training on the bike wouldn’t be complete without at least a little agony. But if we’re going to engage in deliberate practice and get better methodically, it implies that we need to address our shortcomings, even if that only means tidying up after them.

Try using a checklist for anything that’s giving you trouble. I’ll do the same, and report back with my results.
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(Photo by Kent Wien, used under a Creative Commons Noncommercial license.)

I am fortunate, especially in this economy, to have an excellent salaried job. I’d like to keep it for a good many years yet. Keep that firmly in mind as you read the next bit.

What I’m after in my career is writing lots of books. That’s it.

Now, I enjoy teaching and public speaking and research and working on marketing projects and helping customers and attending conferences and “other duties as assigned.” I also enjoy exercising and listening to music and spending time with my family and having long conversations with friends. Hey, I enjoy life.

But the thing that’s been waiting for me for as long as I can remember is writing books. Part of the reason I restarted this blog is to make sure my writing chops are where they should be — like Jerry Rice running sprints in the off-season. Some of the books I want to write dovetail beautifully with my day job, so I’m laying groundwork in that direction. And my academic work has already pointed me toward a couple of books that could do something more than show up in other academics’ footnotes.

What isn’t going to work is for me to do things the same way I’ve done them. Why? Because I’ve tried that . . . and no books were forthcoming.

So, what am I doing differently now?

• Setting aside the idea that books come after projects A and B and C and D et cetera. Items A through D likely will get done long before Walker’s First Work hits the shelves at your local bookstore, but they have to happen in parallel — interwoven — with the writing of the books.
• Rebuilding my to-do list from the ground up.
• In general, showing more chutzpah, which mostly means being audacious whenever I’m feeling aversive about writing.

Your life is like your house: you can put the furniture wherever you want it to go. So there’s no sense in complaining if it’s not situated as you’d like it to be.

Or, to put it another way, if something’s a priority for you, act like it.

Are you putting your real interests first? Even if (as with me) it will take years for them to come to fruition?

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Photo by Ginny, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

No matter how long you’ve worked on a blog post, if it just doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.

Retreat, regroup, rewrite. Who knows? Maybe it will come together better tomorrow.

And now I’ll be shutting down the laptop and watching some basketball, because that’s about what my mind can handle at the moment.

*whistling*

It’s not an EASY formula, but at least it’s a SIMPLE one: if you’re overwhelmed / cluttered / behind / in arrears, commit yourself to taking care of today-plus-a-little.

Examples abound:

• Have a messy house? Clean up every bit of mess (dishes, junk mail, laundry, . . .) that you generated today — then keep tidying for ten more minutes.
• Badly in debt? Figure out what you make in an average day and what you spend in an average day. (Take big chunks of money, like paychecks and mortgage payments, and average them across the month.) Rig your life to break even every day, then put yourself in the black — even by just a few dollars.
• Out of shape? Get enough activity to burn off all the calories you eat today — plus just a bit more.
• Behind on e-mail? Handle and eliminate all of today’s e-mail today, plus 10% (or 2%, or just 5 e-mails) out of what’s left.

You get the idea. The key is to do it every day.

Two big benefits arise from this method:

1. You make incremental progress every single day. It can be disheartening when you try to take care of things in waves: sure, you feel a rush when you do a burst of activity, but you can feel even worse if it’s not sustained and the clutter (or the debt, or the pounds of fat, or whatever) come rushing back on the next tide.
2. You’re training yourself in a permanently sustainable method. By the time you do get all the way uncluttered, you’re in the habit of taking care of today today, and then you can use your surplus time / energy / money / resources to get a little ahead — more savings, better fitness, plant a garden, or what-have you.

Simple enough? Effective enough? What do you think?

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(Photo by Denise Mattox, used under a CC-ND license.)