[...]for the past few days I’ve really tried to write at least 15 minutes every day. Once I get started, I just crank it out. [...] In the past month I’ve thought about it and opened Marsedit over and over, looked over my drafts, and not wanted to write on any particular one, so I didn’t that day. But when I have to do 15 minutes, I find that I can pick any of my drafts, and when I force the words out, suddenly I do want to write on that topic. [Emphasis mine - rew]

The idea that simply committing beforehand to write for X minutes creates the desire to write more seems counterintuitive (to me, anyway). Yet there are certainly a lot of good writers who say that’s the secret (or the main part of it). Yet it seems so hard, if you’re not doing it right then to believe that it could be so simple. I guess it’s because, while simple, it’s not easy. It’s doubly pernicious because the whole reason I can’t seem to get started is that I don’t want to right now. The fact that if I’d get started, then I’d want to is sort of beside the point.

There are other things besides writing that work that way for me. For instance, some days I really, really don’t want to work out. Yet even on those days, the moment after I start, I no longer want to quit until I’ve done every single rep of every single exercise. It’s not some great expenditure of will power at that point; finishing every step is what I want to do. The critical moments all are in the lead-up to the one where I actually begin.

Right up to very first step on the stepper or first lift, my brain is all abuzz with excellent reasons this would be a good day to skip it.

Now there’s no reason at all why the first rep of the first exercise should change my state of mind. If it was a good day to skip before, it should be a good day to skip after the first step. I’m not jacked up on endorphins, I’m not tired or sweating yet, not pumped up or let down or anything. Yet the moment I’ve started, I no longer want to quit. To get finished, sure, but not to quit.

Now, it’s possible that’s deeply-ingrained training from way back in some day when I had coaches who beat that into my head. If so, I’m grateful (again) for having had people teach me that. But I think it may be something more fundamentally human and psychological. I don’t think I’m alone in it, and I don’t think it’s purely the outcome of someone yelling at me regularly not to quit many years ago. I dunno.

The thing that seems to change is whether it’s hard to do something. Keith said that once he gets started writing, the desire to keep writing follows on its own. I find the same thing with my workout. The fact that I don’t want to right now doesn’t mean that I won’t want to once I get started.

The trick seems to be training my rational mind enough to force my emotional mind to just have a little faith that once I start, I’ll be doing what I want to do if I’ll just dive in.

It feels like things move so fast that there’s simply not time to take a week, or a month, or a year, off. We worry that we’ll get left behind if we slack off for a bit, that technology will move on and we’ll never catch up.

Even if we’re trying to keep up it can feel like things are moving ahead faster than we can move ourselves. But it’s not true; there’s always room for good work and good observations.

Pick something and start talking about it. Say something stupid: it’s okay. You’ll find out more by getting involved in the conversation (even by being clueless) than by sitting on the sidelines wondering if you know enough to contribute anything.

Talk to people, learn stuff, get on board and move. You can always catch up, you can always contribute. You just can’t sit there on your butt, paralyzed by fear of irrelevance, and let the world move away from you and leave you behind. If you want to do the work, there’s always something new that you can become an expert in that no one else has done before and so no else has known before.

There’s always a new trend, there’s always a new revolution around the corner in technology or business. There’s never one last chance.

After the bubble burst in 2000, there were a lot of gloomy voices acting like that was the end. Technology was gonna be a commodity. The land grab was over, the dot com rush was finished, blah, blah, blah. There was a great malaise for a few years for a lot of people who didn’t know what to do.

Of course, some people just kept on working. Too young or too dumb or too focused on their work or plans or dreams to be put off, they were too busy creating interesting things to bother with joining the Malaise.

So they created the current revolution, and sure enough, a lot like before, the money and buzz have returned. This one will crash too, eventually, but there will be another one after that.

So don’t sweat it. It’s OK to miss out on things, especially if you’re doing other worthwhile things with your life. There will be another exciting train along shortly to hop aboard. In fact, one’s usually at the station just waiting for another clever passenger.

“Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil.” - Ephesians 5:16 (ESV)

“Are you reeling in the years? Stowing away the time?” - Steely Dan

Is the work you’re doing right now worth what you are getting for it? It’s not just a question of money; does your work reward you in all ways enough to compensate for what it costs you?

Is it worth the time that you spend on it? The parts of your life that you trade for it? What’s the impact on your family, or your friends? Is it worth it?

If it’s not, you need to sit down today and make a plan for finding other work that is. Life is far too short to spend doing work that’s not worth the time. It’s easier to contemplate the cost of changing your life when you see clearly the cost of keeping it the same.

It turns out that cutting inventory by 10% and facing books out (instead of just showing spines) increased their sales by 9%. This is counter to Long Tail thinking, which says that more choices and more inventory tend to increase sales.

I don’t think that’s what the Long Tail suggests. In fact, part of its premise means it can’t apply to a brick-and-mortar store, where display space is fixed (and expensive).

The key conditions are well-summarized in the Wikipedia entry:

The key supply-side factor that determines whether a sales distribution has a Long Tail is the cost of inventory storage and distribution. Where inventory storage and distribution costs are insignificant, it becomes economically viable to sell relatively unpopular products; however, when storage and distribution costs are high, only the most popular products can be sold.

Borders’ action here, instead of being “against Long Tail thinking” is actually perfectly aligned with it: they realize that their sales distribution does not have a long tail, because their customer base is too small and their cost of additional inventory is relatively high. So they have taken steps to increase the popularity slightly of a slightly smaller number of items.

Seth’s a very smart guy; it’s hard for me to tell if he’s misrepresenting the long-tail on purpose for something, or if he actually missed it on this one. I’m guessing the former, since the real point he seemed to be making in his post was a good one. Or am I the one missing the boat here?

Maybe it’s just me.

Historian Robert Conquest recently pondered why so many of his fellow scholars had been for so long incapable of grasping the true nature of the Soviet regime. He concluded by blaming “a clerisy that has hardly heard of opinions other than those appearing to be…the acceptable expression of concern for humanity” and that has demonstrated “a strong tendency to silence those who disagree with one or another of the accepted beliefs.”

Can you think of an issue about which people pretend that there exists no “other” side, or that anyone who says, “Wait, I don’t think that’s what’s happening here, this evidence here suggests otherwise,” is a lunatic, or out to destroy humanity, the world, decency, puppies?

It’s so easy to slide into this kind of closed-mindedness. I believe what I believe, and I think I have good reasons for it. I enjoy finding other people who seem intelligent and well-spoken who share that belief. But from there it’s only a lazy little slip over into “ALL people who are intelligent and well-spoken WILL share this belief; everyone else is an evil slug.”

I suspect many readers not only thought of a great example of such narrow-minded idea bigots, but also assume that most smart, “good”, and well-informed people would agree.

So, for instance, if you believe “Bush lied, kids died” is an accurate and pithy explanation of the current conflict in and over Iraq, you thought “stupid/evil neocon warmongers”. If, on the other hand, you think “Global warming is a Commie plot”, you thought “stupid/evil Gore-cult worshipers”.

But the point I’m trying to make here is that if I (or you) begin to think that nobody in their right mind could disagree with my example “clerisy of narrow minds”, then I’ve slipped into the same mindset, thus joining one myself.

p.s. - I know that I’m a card-carrying member of about 14 different “clerisies” myself. But I’m working on escaping. Are you?

I just wanted answer Miro’s question. So I googled ‘Miro Slodki’ and found his blog. “A-ha!” I thought. “I’ll just zip over and email him directly, and in less time than it would take to fill out FC’s ‘new user’ form. Take that, Fast Company!”

Only…I couldn’t find an email link. Now stubbornly in pursuit of my prey, I spent 5 minutes wandering around the site, even visiting his LinkedIn profile, only to by stymied. Nowhere on the site (that I could find) was there any way to just contact Miro directly (even via a web form), other than posting comments on actual posts.

I even found that Miro is looking for interesting work:

PS. At the moment I find myself seeking new challenges and contracting assignments. I would appreciate if you could extend a kind word on my behalf and send the referrals my way.

But how could I do that if I can’t find how to contact him?

I searched for a while, but Google and I couldn’t find him. I found other places that Miro had joined and commented, all of which jealously guarded any way to contact him directly. So eventually I gave up. We’ll see if, in an amusing irony, the linkback to his blog that Wordpress will auto-generate will draw him here to see the link he’d asked for a week or so ago.

Hey, I’m not picking on Miro, by any means. I don’t even know him (though I know him better than I did 20 minutes ago, that’s for sure). I’m just pointing out what I think are two serious problems companies and people share when trying to use the web to achieve their goals:

• Trying to enforce behavior on people that I have no relationship with, and to whom I offer no benefit. I wasn’t trying to get something from Fast Company; I was trying to help out one of their readers, on their site, by linking to one of their articles.
• Seeking visibility and opportunity without giving it a way to knock. I know spam is a problem, but being permanently incommunicado is worse. You don’t have to go as far as Scoble. But if you want contact, you have to throw me a bone.

“Good writing is partly a matter of character. Instead of doing what’s easy for you, do what’s easy for your reader.” - Michael Covington (slide 8, “The unselfish perspective”)

It seems the collective heart of the social media crowd has been stolen away by video blogging, which appears to them more or less The Ultimate Tool. I can see why some might think that. But I hate it, and you should, too.

With some great bloggers, like Jeff Atwood and Steve Yegge and Marc Andreesson and even Mark Cuban (who’s a great blogger w/o being a particularly good writer), I know what they do. Their ability to blog intensely interesting pieces is just part of the unfair measure of talent they’ve been given in a field other than their primary one.

But there are lots of people making lots of social media noise whose actual profession I cannot figure out. I enjoy reading Chris Brogan, Andrew Chen, Kevin Lim, etc. - I just can’t for the life of me figure out what they get paid to do, and by whom. (OK, I think Kevin’s a grad student, but the others - no idea).

And they’re the tip of the iceberg. There’s apparently a semi-closed system of maybe a hundred or more of nearly-A-level social media butterflies out there blogging and twitting and flickring and who-knows-what-else-ing each other, all while getting more and more excited about the “possibilities”. But possibilities for what?

My impression is that right now it’s sort of a blogorrheic derby, to see who can output the fastest, most nearly stream-of-consciousness flow of stuff, to “make people think” and “examine the issues in social media”. Right. Make noise, get attention. I have a 3-year-old. Some of this is not unfamiliar to me.

That brings us to video blogging. When someone sits down to write a blog, unless they’re just compulsive, they have to at least be aware of the idea of editing or re-reading before posting. They may not do it much, but at least the idea’s there. Most people, even in the blogosphere, still seem to at least recognize the notion that ‘better’ writing is something different than ‘first draft’ writing.

But this doesn’t seem to be the case with video blogging, where immediacy seems to be one of the Primary Virtues, and where editing, even cutting out sections altogether, is verboten.

Most video is like bad writing: lazy, self-indulgent, flabby, poorly arranged, flaccid and pointless. Bad writing used to be much easier to make than bad video. But suddenly it’s vastly easier to produce video than to write. After all, you only have to manage to get the button pushed to make video; you don’t even have to type words. But good video production is much harder than it looks. It’s tempting to confuse visual quality with content quality.

When I’m reading a great post, I don’t have to read through 47 lines of “um…um…um…um…” that were auto-generated while the author was gathering his thoughts. But when I’m watching (heaven help me) a video, all those stay in. Each little 3-second pause, or 2-second nervous laugh, or irrelevant aside that seemed funny at the time, but, well, you had to be there, is left in, and then you and I and every other poor sap trying to extract value from it has to sit through them.

Look, it’s no accident that Scoble, the human content cataract, has moved so eagerly from written blogging (which at least allowed him the *opportunity* to gather and edit his thoughts before publishing) to twitter/pownce (which actively discourages either gathering OR editing of thoughts) to audio (which lets you just conveniently babble) to video (which is just audio with more let’s-face-it-do-we-really-need-to-see-that video of the mugs of the babblers).

Just click, chatter for a while, and upload! Woot! I’m adding content, I’m creating value, I’m re-conceptualizing our paradigms! Except I’m not. What I’m doing is blowing out 20 minute chunks of crap with an occasional nugget of goodness buried inside. Then I’m asking thousands or millions of people who want the nuggets to go spend 20 minutes each to find it, rather than doing the work once, digging out the nuggets, cutting out the extraneous and self-indulgent stuff, properly framing the remaining pieces so that the nuggets are presented in a reasonably fair way, and saving (18 minutes) X (however many viewers) = a lot of time.

It gets worse with every shiny new VC-backed way for people to put up endless video streams of the minutiae of their lives. Think about this: how many live-action 24×7 streams of video can you watch? The answer is 1. Only one. And you can only do that by expending an exactly equivalent stretch of your own life.

And here we come to the fatal flaw of web video (and audio; let’s not forget audio, though it seems to be passing away as passe so quickly that it’s barely worth mentioning): you can’t scan or compress it very much.

Now, you have to understand, I read fast. Not as in “fast for a trained speed reader”, but much faster than an average reader. That includes many of you who think that you’re fast readers, but are really only high-functioning average ones. But while I read pretty fast, I scan like a demon. If it’s in text that I don’t need to absorb in detail, I can move through it at a scorching pace, and generally catch and either slow down and “zoom in” on, or revisit later, most of the important stuff. And it makes yummy things like Google Reader a veritable buffet of information and knowledge and (mostly) reading pleasure.

But what happens when I see a blog entry in Google Reader that consists of “Hey, this is great, watch this” and an embedded video (or worse, a link to a video)? What are my choices? For many of the various sucky video services on the web, it’s not even readily apparent how long this piece of crap is going to be before I start.

Apparently, it’s the purpose in life of a lot of the chuckleheads who write these players to keep you from skipping even one second of the Blessed Incarnation of Video that is this particular video. These brain-dead Flash-based players that can’t even do basic things like FF and REW usably. Pausing, while iffy, at least works more than not. But fast-forwarding or skipping to specific points in the video? Right. So it’s either press play and stare for however long it drags on and hope that somewhere in there is a payoff, or skip it.

So most of the time, I skip video posts to written blogs, and ignore “vblogs” entirely. And the more people post video instead of taking the time to write the #*&$#*&% essay so I can read it (quickly) or scan it (ridiculously quickly) and get what I need, the more I ignore them.

What’s needed is for people to compress and edit and excise and eliminate and then post it. Just like with your blog. Don’t make me watch what wasn’t useful. Only show me what was good. Cut it down to size. Then re-arrange it so it’s better organized. Then cut it down some more.

Do the hard work once, at your end, on behalf of every consumer of it. Don’t make your many viewers each duplicate the work or spend the time that you should have invested once for everybody. Don’t think that because you’re slamming out hours of video and audio that you’re adding any value to the world or the lives of those trying to pan through your stream of nonsense for the elusive golden nugget.

I may be in the minority. I suspect that I am, at least amongst a populace with a demonstrated affinity for “less reading, more video”. But I’m guessing that my view is more common among influencers or any people whose time is more valuable than pretty much any other commodity (note: I’m not claiming here to be an influencer, only that I suspect that we share this view of reading vs. video).

And that’s the thing video abuses: my time, and yours.