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Good Reads, Hacking Edition

by Fabian on May 16, 2012

“Fun fact: PHP is actually much more dangerous than swimming with sharks,” I tweeted yesterday. The reason I know is because in the background – unobserved by the masses – I’m working on a whole new Friendly Anarchist: A more personal design, a new logo, PHP and CSS code – and a lot of great content. It actually goes so far that most people would call it a relaunch. (I won’t, as I suck at launches.)

It’ll be a while before everything is done, but I honestly haven’t been this excited about the site since launching Productive Anywhere.

But – more on this once it’s done! In the meantime, here are some great articles I enjoyed over the last few weeks. Just in time for Ascension Day, which you’ll hopefully be celebrating a good bit. No matter if you’re Christian or not, enjoying some real leisure will always be a positive thing for you!

[¶]

We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night – but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.

Nice one by the BBC on why we shouldn’t worry if we don’t sleep eight hours straight at night – and instead use our waking time to have a drink, talk to a neighbor, or sleep with a person we love. (Or, all three.)

[¶]

Nothing fools you better than the lie you tell yourself. David P. Abbott was an Omaha magician who invented the basis of my ball trick back in 1907. He used to make a golden ball float around his parlor. After the show, Abbott would absent-mindedly leave the ball on a bookshelf while he went to the kitchen for refreshments. Guests would sneak over, heft the ball and find it was much heavier than a thread could support. So they were mystified. But the ball the audience had seen floating weighed only five ounces. The one on the bookshelf was a heavy duplicate, left out to entice the curious. When a magician lets you notice something on your own, his lie becomes impenetrable.

Magician Teller reveals his secrets.

[¶]

Jesse Newman spent five years to create a truly epic “visual narrative” based on Greek Mythology on his computer. Learn more about it here. See the video how he did it here. Collect your jaw from the floor.

Now, here’s the money quote from his FAQ, answering the question: “How are you able to take off so much time? (5 years so far!)”

People don’t usually like this answer, but… unless you’re living below the poverty level, you could do it, too. Prioritize time for yourself over having cable TV, a new car, etc. Live below your means. Recognize every purchase as a value of time, not just money. Don’t look at a new car strictly as costing $30K; translate that to time and see it as costing you a few months home hanging with the kids.

My emphasis. This is not just an incredible digital imagemaker. He’s also a very smart man.

[¶]

Here’s a proposition — a thought experiment — to spark some consideration: The global economic system we have created is no less mythical than Zeus.

James Shelley has become one of my favorite bloggers in recent times. Smart, smart, smart.

[¶]

I believe that [the people of the Amazon tribe Pirahã are] happy because they don’t worry about the past, and they don’t worry about the future. They feel that they’re able to take care of their needs today. They don’t want things that they can’t provide for themselves. At least they never have in my experience. In other words, I take in things and they will ask for a few little things that I have that they don’t make, such as pots and pans or matches. And if I give it to them, fine, and if I don’t give it to them, fine. They’re not materialistic. They value being able to travel quickly and lightly. I’ve never met another group, not even another Amazonian group, that is so little concerned with material objects.

…

In the rainy season there are no beaches because the river comes up more than seventy feet. Since food becomes harder to get in the rainy season because you have the same amount of fish, but in much greater volume of water, the Pirahã tend to spread out, and you find very small villages of maybe one or two families. But in the dry season when the river goes down and the beaches come out and the fish are easy to catch, they get together on the beaches in large groups. And you’ll find beaches with over 100 Pirahã for a couple of months during the dry season. And in that case, they’re singing and dancing every night. They could go on dancing for forty-eight hours, sometimes even for seventy-two hours. But that doesn’t mean that everyone’s awake for that entire period of time. It just means that you dance and dance and dance, and then when you get tired, you might step out and take a nap, and then get back up and start dancing again. But the noise and the happiness and all this stuff going on with it continues on. And if you’re like me, and not able to do that all the time, and trying to sleep, it gets frustrating! They’re just happy the whole time!

…

I am currently working on a book idea called “Wisdom From Strangers” about how we can learn very important valuable lessons from people who are unlike ourselves. In fact, the more unlike us they are, the more we can learn. You cannot learn what you need to learn just by staying in the library. You have to have these experiences to take you beyond the boundaries of what you know, and make you live in ways that you never knew before.

A great Boing Boing interview with Daniel L. Everett on the “grammar of happiness”.

[¶]

Now, I’m no Luddite. Quite the contrary. I have a practical mindset, which obliges me wherever possible to consider costs and benefits. In the case of the internet, we’re all familiar with its benefits – the most obvious and general being its incredible speed in information recovery and transfer. But what about the costs of the internet?

Ben Irvine for the School of Life on the Internet Dead End.

[¶]

Last but not least: A post that was an instant “everybody’s favorite” when I sent it out on Twitter: 101 Useful Websites.

Speaking of which: I’m only about 19 people away from reaching my 1000th Twitter follower! Would like to help? If you aren’t following me already, you’re cordially invited to do so and say hello!

--{ Be the first to comment and gain all the fame and honor! }--

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The Loop

by Fabian on May 10, 2012

The reason why I hate productivity systems is because they easily become a dominant part of “the loop”.1 And once they become a dominant part of the loop, they become a problem. A problem that keeps creatives from focusing on what matters – and from doing what they want to do because their muse is calling. (Hint: It’s not creating GTD context lists.)

So what’s the loop?

Let’s get an understanding of the loop by looking at a little girl that’s different. She’s not different because she’s weird or stupid or crazy or something. She’s different because she doesn’t seem all that eager to get a great college degree in order to become a manager. (As most people nowadays do.)

Instead, she likes to spend her time painting.

Now you might say that you know a lot of little girls who like to paint. The thing with this particular girl is that she doesn’t stop with it. She continues to paint even though she isn’t 12 anymore. She’s 13 and she paints. She’s 15 and she paints. She’s 20 and – she paints.

Our girl has a plan: She’s going to be a painter. Not a manager. Not a car saleswoman. Not a secretary. A painter.

But at some point, she enters the loop.

The Loop and the Money

The loop is an amorphous thing. Even though it’s a loop. It’s vague. It’s messy. It’s hard to define. But it’s real.

The girl enters the loop. You could say: The loop becomes a part of her life. Her life as someone who wants to create not just as a hobby, but full-time. Here’s how she gets into the loop: Subconsciously, her mum takes her there. And her teacher. And her career counselor: “It’s nice that you paint, but show me the money.”

This is how it all begins.

Inside the Loop

Think of that girl.
And her plan.
And her art.
And her career counselor.

Suddenly, painting isn’t as easy anymore as it was. Suddenly, it’s a huge challenge. Because somewhere, there’s a doubt: Could this possibly work out?
There’s overwhelm: ((From all I know, “overwhelm” isn’t technically a noun. But that noun is either missing in the English language or, more probably, in my personal vocabulary. Feel free to send me some suggestions!)) So much to do, so little time! And how the hell will I pay my bills?

And there’s procrastination.

Procrastination is part of the loop.

It costs energy and motivation and time. It costs what we call our life.
It costs the life of that girl.

It costs a whole chunk of life – an hour, a day, a week, a month – until she finally gets back to her core.
Back to what she is.
Back to what she wanted to create.
Back to her art.

That’s the first round of the loop: Create art, passionately. Become doubtful. Procrastinate. Then, finally: Reconnect. But immediately, it begins again.

GTD and the Loop

In the next round, the girl is smarter.
Someone told her about Getting Things Done.
Gave her some hints, some tricks, some tools: A context list. An agenda. A link to 43folders.
And, to her amazement: It works! She actually creates art again. She does what she loves and she’s happy – until she receives a setback.

At some point, somehow, thrust is lost.
Momentum is lost.
Hope is lost.

Enter doubts.
Overwhelm.
Procrastination.

The second round of the loop.

The third time around, she’s even smarter.
She drinks the David Allen Kool-Aid.
She learns all about GTD.
She implements it like a pro.

But by now you know what’s going to happen, sooner or later:
A setback.
Doubts, overwhelm, procrastination.

The third round of the loop.

Our girl might still get smarter. She might learn even more about GTD. She might read a couple of books on habits and procrastination. She might start to blog on productivity.

Two years later, she’s a self-described “creative maverick teaching other people how to find time for their passion” and a million Twitter followers. She’s an a-list blogger with a well-developed business, a growing audience, and enough clients to pay the bills.

But when we look back at her core, all she ever wanted was to paint.

Your Life and the Loop

If you’re a creative, you live in the loop. There’s probably no point in hating it. From all I can tell, after years of being in the loop myself, setbacks and doubts and overwhelm and procrastination are all part of the game. There’s no point in denying it. I’m pretty sure even Pablo Picasso sometimes struggled.

Now, there might be many differences between Picasso and you and me and that girl from our story. But one difference that stands out is that Picasso couldn’t escape into GTD nerdery and convince himself he was doing his thing. He could spend some time with the ladies and have a few drinks or whatever, but he couldn’t attend David Allen seminars. He couldn’t trick himself into believing that learning about GTD techniques would make him a better painter.

Once we know we’re living in the loop, let’s try not to forget about why we entered it in the first place. And give more time to the actual creation of beauty instead of trying to become a perfect manager of our time.

tl;dr

There’s nothing wrong with being a productivity nerd. As long as it doesn’t keep us from creating the epic stuff we wanted to create in the first place.

  1. Disclaimer: I don’t really hate productivity systems. [↩]

--{ 8 great comments }--

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Puzzle Business (And How NOT to Build Your $100 Startup)

by Fabian on April 30, 2012

Here’s what most prospective (micro) business founders tend to think: Damnit, if I want to start a business in this world, in this environment, in this economy, I’ll need a damn fine plan in order to get somewhere!

And so they sit down and think. They brainstorm. They investigate. They take courses. They write down concepts. They read about other people’s approaches. And yet – they don’t know where to start.

Because they are looking for the perfect plan.

A perfect plan would mean getting clear on their values, their product, their offer, their clients, their business name, their budget, their new logo, their website design, … – all the way down to their accountant and the name of their accountant’s sister-in-law.

Unfortunately, making a perfect plan tends to get pretty overwhelming.

Why not build a business like you would solve a puzzle?

Puzzle Break

How do you solve a puzzle?

  • Do you look at the thousand pieces in front of you, trying to figure out a genius way to put them together in one single, giant move?
  • Do you grab any random piece and try all the other random pieces – until one of them coincidentally seems to fit?
  • Or do you take an approach that’s somewhere in beetween: You look at the box to get an idea of where you’re heading. You start with the corners and edges to make it easy for yourself, and then search your way along the larger shapes and colors. You pick a wrong piece every now and then, give it a try, and then try the next. When you’re exhausted, you take a break. You look at that box, again. Slowly, the image starts to take form. It gets easier, as you’re in the flow, and there are less pieces to choose from. But there are still some hurdles, as you saved some of the harder parts: “All these brown pieces look alike! I’ll handle them later!” You look a the box, once more. Where are you going? What’s the goal? You manage to get over the hurdles. Boom. Puzzle solved.

If you’re struggling with any of the entrepreneurial issues I described above, chances are that you’re trying to take the first approach: Develop the perfect plan down to the lowest detail before even taking the first real step.

But while you’re making the plan, the world keeps turning. You keep getting older. And nothing happens. At least, nothing that will bring you closer to building that business you had in mind.

At some point, the only thing you need to do is to get going.

On the other hand, just starting with any half-assed idea that comes to your mind will probably be entertaining to watch, but most likely fail. You don’t need an excessively precise plan, but you need an idea of where you’re going – just like the box of a puzzle.

How about this: Decide on a broad idea of where you’d like to go. Grab a resource that will guide you on the way. But then: Stick to it and do the work. Decide on the first step, like grabbing the first piece of a puzzle. Then find the one that fits next to it. After the first few steps, look back at the big picture, remember the vision of your business and reconnect with it, like you would when looking at the box.

Slowly, the picture will start to get real.

The $100 Startup

Depending on your job and income, $100 can either be ridiculously little or quite a bit of money. Some of you might be working 15 minutes to earn it, others a whole week. Either way, $100 can be a great investment to build your business. Or, it can be a horrible waste of money: $100 can buy you an hour or two of coaching or consulting. It can buy you five or six decent business books. Or, today (and until Thursday only!), it can buy you a whole entrepreneur’s library.

Adam Baker and Karol Gajda put together this excellent package of resources – and they are offering it for $100 during 72 hours only. It includes ebooks and guides by Chris Guillebeau, Jonathan Mead, Corbett Barr, Susannah Conway, Pam Slim and many others. It also includes a hard copy of Chris Guillebeau’s new book, The $100 Startup – free shipping to anywhere in the world.

Check out this amazing offer here!1

How NOT Build to Your $100 Startup

This sale, unlike most others, isn’t claiming any artificially inflated prices in order to make you believe it’s a good deal. It really is a good deal. But it comes with a caveat, like any other sale or offer: The resources included are only as good as you make them – by putting them to use!

Information alone won’t help you: Ebooks can be forgotten in the download folder of your computer. Print books can gather dust in a cabinet somewhere.

But even if you actually read all that stuff, you won’t gain anything. Inspiration alone doesn’t change the world.

You have to take all that information and inspiration, and convert them into action. This is the only way to do it.

So if you think about grabbing one of these $100 startup packages, please make a promise to yourself: The promise to use the information contained in order to build something amazing.

tl;dr

If you want to build a business, making a plan is great. Just don’t freak out about every single detail before starting, or you never will. If you need a hand to guide you through the technicalities, check out the $100 startup bundle, available for sale now (and until Thursday only!).

  1. If you buy it through this link, I will get a commission that will help me drink more fine rum and keep The Friendly Anarchist going. It would be much appreciated! [↩]

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A Billion Dollars isn’t Cool

by Fabian on April 27, 2012

“A billion dollars? That’s not cool. You know what’s cool? A million dollars.” –Derek Sivers

Quite some time ago, I read this post by Chris Brogan about attention management. Chris is an author and consultant and has written many great articles on marketing-related topics. But even though I enjoy many of his writings and thoughts, I found myself scratching my head after reading these lines:

“…attention is finite.

With that in mind, it becomes a matter of budgeting and management. How much one-on-one can I invest, because that’s where the real value of social media kicks in. How can I get more information to more people in a one-to-many format, because that’s my only hope at scaling. This is what we have to ask ourselves daily.”

Chris is right of course: Attention is finite. Still, his conclusions puzzle me: Why should we have to ask ourselves daily about how to optimize our time usage? Why should we see every “one-on-one” meeting as an “investment”, and try to get the word out to “more people in a one-to-many format”?

I for one have never been a friend of aggressive proselytizing. Because… who are we? Jesus? Or are we just trying to sell a product? If the latter’s the case, what’s all that hype about scaling? Why not just forget scaling and chill the fuck out for a while?

Business, the “Staying Small” Way

A different approach was taken by entrepreneur Derek Sivers, as outlined in this interview with Michael Ellsberg:

As CDBaby was growing, once you get beyond say 10 or 15 employees, all of the sudden you’re on the radar of business-to-business services that start pitching you all these things you “need.” I.e., “You need to use our business metrics…” etc.

We’d even get people coming by in person, in suits, with clipboards, to say, “Well of course, you need to have an employee review policy.”

And I’d say, “Need? OK, so if I do not do this, will I be thrown in jail?”

And they’d say, “Well, no, no, no, but you really should. . . ”

And I’d say, “OK, we’re done here.” Unless I’m actually going to be thrown in jail for not doing it, then I don’t need it. [Laughing.]

Sivers wasn’t crazy about scaling. He certainly wasn’t against growth, but from what I can tell after reading that interview, he didn’t freak out about it. His company grew faster than he had planned, anyway.

Here’s the (real) billion dollar question: Can’t Chris Brogan live quite nicely with the money he’s making right now? If he can, why does he have to scale?

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t want to single Chris out. Nor any of the other “growth” bloggers, like Gary Vaynerchuk or whoever. For me it’s fine for them to grow as much as they want to. It can certainly be thrilling to build a larger company.

I just don’t agree with everybody painting the picture as if growth was mandatory. And that’s really about a much bigger issue than just building a marketing company: Ultimately, do we all really need evermore money? Do we really need more growth? Do we really need to scale?

Here’s another quote from Derek:

…I realized, you can just opt out of all of this. As long as you’re able to keep your living costs low—if you can live on $1,000 a month, or better yet, $700 a month—you don’t need to do anything for anyone, you can just do the occasional little odd job, and say no to the rest.

This chimes with me: Personal frugality pays higher dividends than any scaled business could ever do. It’s not about living miserably, but about living smarter: If I ever reach the point where I have to “budget” my quality time, ceaselessly worrying about getting the word out to evermore people, I’d be tempted to simply shift gears and take a walk for a change.

If I was Chris Brogan or Gary Vaynerchuk, the only thing I’d wish to do was to scale down. Degrow. And chill out for a change.

tl;dr

Our society is looking for growth like a crackhead for his next fix. Thankfully, there are better ways to lead a business, even if it might make us just a couple of millions instead of billions.

--{ 5 great comments }--

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Un-Dumbing Education

by Fabian on April 17, 2012

During the last two months, I spent most of my working time marking almost 600 short essays written by students of Political Theory and the History of Ideas at Cologne university. (Hence, the silence.) It was quite a bit more work than expected, payment was meagre, yet it was an interesting opportunity to get an inside view of Germany’s brave new education.

The first honest observation to make is that if they continue to cut costs the way they did over the last few years, universities won’t find people anymore who are able and willing to correct their exams. Payment used to be for 19 hours a week over a course of two months. Now, it’s down to 15. The hourly wage is okay, but far from impressive. At the same time, the number of exams has exploded, so that per-exam payment is significantly lower than it used to be, making the marking a stressful endeavor.

To be sure, having more students at the universities is a good thing. And if more of them are taking exams, we’re probably not bad off, you might say: More well-educated people should be great for society.

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

When my professors were getting their university degrees in the 1970s, they had to present about 2 or 3 written exams during their whole duration of study. When I was studying in the early 2000s, we had to present about 3 or 4 exams per year. Now, it’s about 8 exams per semester! So while there are indeed more students, they are also obligated to take more exams than ever before. Which makes it hard to do them justice as a marking assistant.

Of course, the humanists and social scientists could do what everybody else does and just switch to multiple choice tests. They might take a tad longer to create, but marking would take dramatically less time and could be done my a chimp with a pencil. The downside is that multiple choice tests aren’t precisely the best strategy when you’re trying to teach people how to write.

Blinded by Numbers

Yes, writing still matters. In many subjects, it’s a desirable learning target. This target is already being jeopardized, thanks to curriculum designers abolishing most classes that required presenting term papers. Instead, there are more and more classes that require you to take written exams. The same exams that might now turn into multiple choice tests.

It’s understandable: If all we’re looking for is numbers, a 400% increase in exams taken may be just as impressive as having students finish with a university degree after 3.5 years instead of 7.

The thing that’s hard to get by merely looking at the numbers, though, is that “more exams” doesn’t necessarily mean “better education”. Just as the 3.5 years that are “saved” don’t come for free. Contradictiory to common wisdom, these “saved” years weren’t just wasted by previous students to dick around, make out with classmates and smoke pot. While most of us indeed enjoyed some of that, these “saved” years were also used to visit classes that you were genuinely interested in – opposed to simply attending what you had to attend in order to avoid getting minus points. They were used to read the classics, lead controversial discussions, and to find research subjects that you really cared about.

Most of that is gone by now, not due to the students but due to the new preference of dumbing things done in order to get impressive numbers on paper.

Dumbing Things Down

To me, the reasoning behind the abandonment of Germany’s signature university education (in favor of hollow box-checking madness) was always hard to understand. I got illuminated a bit after reading these paragraphs in an interview with mathematician Gunter Dueck:

Celebrating a five-star tomato soup from selected fruits is an art that only few people master. But you can also buy a packet soup for 44 cents on sale that tastes acceptably red and is foolproof to prepare because there are instructions on the back.

I see it this way: Computers today are able to manage anything on packet soup level. But instead of developing the computer further, the management and the business administrators try to bring all art down to packet soup level so that the computer itself can do it – or at least a semiskilled person on minimum wage. This so-called standardization or industrialization is the main reason for people drifting into the low-wage sector. It’s the renunciation of genius, of the innovative and the new, of five-star level and real sophistication in favor of the standardized programmed.1

What’s happening at German universities seems to be a typical case of dumbing real life down in order to standardize it and make it intelligible for machines. The same mistake made by business administrators in large companies is being repeated by educational policy makers and university boards.

The problem is that computers aren’t imaginative or creative. While they can solve rule-based problems pretty well, they fail when it comes to entering new territory. They fail when it comes to creating art and beauty. They fail when it comes to transcending limits of thought.

I’m certainly not willing to jump on the cultural pessimistic bandwagon, as many other commentators critizicing  the computer age do. We just shouldn’t confuse the abilities and the power of a machine with the abilities and the power we maintain right within us.

The latter will be central to improve the former for a long time to come. But this requires individuals to go beyond rules at some point of their education, and start to learn some lessons in tempo giusto. Only this will lead to an abundance of people capable of living their life in a state of sovereignty rather than submission. In an open society, this is a goal that shouldn’t be swapped for hollow mark certificates that aren’t worth the paper they are printed on.

tl;dr

Humans are creative, machines are not. Educators would be better off to leverage this human strength instead of dumbing life down to machine level.2

  1. The original interview is in German, this is my own translation and accentuation. [↩]
  2. Newness on TFA: My friend Daniel (the writer of the German music blog Ist das Alles?) suggested creating a short “Too long, didn’t read” summary at the end of my posts to make it easier to follow along if you don’t have time to read the whole thing. While I hope that most of you can indeed take that time, I’ll experiment with this as I think it’s also a useful exercise for me as a writer. [↩]

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