Archive for January, 2008
- By Scott Berkun on January 24th, 2008
- 10 Comments »
- Innovation
What to do if the world hates your idea
One of my most popular blog posts ever, how to write a book, generates tons of comments and e-mail every week. Here’s an interesting one I couldn’t help but respond to:
Great article, gave me lots of inspiration and hope. I just submitted a proposal to O’Reilly, and it was rejected within 30 minutes. Very efficient, and very nicely worded, but devastating nonetheless. What do you do if you think you have a great idea, but the world disagrees?
The first rule of creative work: expect to be rejected. Ask anyone who reviews creative work of any kind, whether it’s screenplays, music demos, or book proposals, and they’ll tell you they reject a ratio of at least 20 or 30 to 1. Sometimes it’s 1000 to 1 in the case of movie actors or works of fiction. There is nothing wrong with you or your work simply because you have been rejected. Rejection means you are doing something many others want to do and it’s hard work.
Ask any writer, including the famous, how many rejection slips they’ve seen. They’ll laugh and tell you about how they papered their wall with them. Seriously, rejection is part of the game. I note many of these stories in The Myths of Innovation. The Star Wars screenplay was rejected by almost every major studio. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance was turned down over 100 times. Stephen King, J.K. Rawlings, John Grisham, you name it, they’ve been rejected. Do not give up hope: instead, use rejection as fuel. Prove them wrong. Get better at your craft. Work harder, and when you’re finished, send them a signed copy with your warmest regards.
In some ways how you handle rejection is self selection for creative work – if you cant handle a few rejections from publishers, how will you handle a few bad reviews of your finished book? No matter what you do, if you’re making something, many people won’t like it. In fact the more popular the thing is, the more people who will pick on it and for increasingly trivial reasons.
As I mentioned in the post, one major advantage of living in 2008 is how cheap it is to make things yourself. The only approval you need to create something is your own. You can self publish a book, make a video or a bunch of mp3s for just a few hundred bucks. If the world isn’t behind you, to hell with the world – do it anyway. The only thing stopping you is you.
(Update): Of course you do need to consider now and then that the world might just be right, in some small way, about something you are missing. Perhaps you’re idea isn’t all that good, or you’re not explaining it very well, or it needs to be focused and directed in a different way. One of the best skills creatives need to learn is how to convert criticism into useful feedback.
- By Scott Berkun on January 24th, 2008
- 3 Comments »
- On writing
Who I write for
The ever creative ze-frank is currently asking a great question about creative process.
From his current post:
When you make things with an audience in mind, do you have internal representations of that audience to help guide you in the process? Are you in dialogue with a cast of proto-audience members that somehow represent different facets of your perceived audience? Are there little homunculi that provide editorial voices different from your own?
My answer, which I posted, is that I don’t have formalized characters when I’m writing a book or preparing a talk. But there is an ongoing dialog in my head when revising that approximates three or four imaginary people:
- The curious neophyte. If someone at random walked in off the street would any of this make sense? Would they keep reading/listening?
- The expert asshole. What if the person who knew everything about this subject and loved to criticize read this paragraph or heard this lecture. What vitriol would I hear? What bullshit would they call me on?
- The daily grinder. How about the guy who actually does whatever I’m talking about for a living and when I’m done will go straight back to work. Will anything I write or say impact what he does the rest of the day? week? month?
- The fan. Will someone familiar with my work find this boring? repetitive? derivative? Can I make this more fun for them instead of less?
- By Scott Berkun on January 24th, 2008
- No Comments »
- books
How to handle tough cricitism: an example
Awhile ago a wrote an essay on how to give and receive criticism. Writing about it is one thing, but doing is another. Recently I saw someone handle a tough situation in public quite well – here’s the story:.
Sun engineer Bryan Cantrill gave an offhand review, at a videotaped talk at google, of Rosenberg’s recent book, Dreaming in code (A book I reviewed last year). Rosenberg, instead of doing what many bloggers do, and either a) ignore the issue or b) escalate things into a juvenile flamewar, he looked carefully for the intent, instead of the sizzle, of Cantrill’s statements and offered a well reasoned response.
The result was an intelligent, respectful, and illuminating discussion than spanned across both blogs. Kudos!
Anyone know of other recent examples of maturity handling of criticism? This should awards for this kind of thing.
- By Scott Berkun on January 24th, 2008
- No Comments »
- web browsers
The end of Netscape & the history of browsers
AOL announced recently that the Navigator web browser will be no more. Navigator 1.0 started the web for most of the tech sector, and their success, and Microsoft’s response in 1994 gave me a ticket for a wild ride, working on IE 1.0-5.0 in the mid 1990s.
For a trip down history lane, check out the archive of most web browsers known to man.
- By Scott Berkun on January 22nd, 2008
- No Comments »
- Seattle
(Seattle) Full day courses – interested?
Hi folks – you may know I make most of my living performing lectures and teaching workshops. I love to teach and it provides a solid income to support all the writing I do here and in books.
After 4 years of doing this exclusively for hire by fancy companies, universities and big conferences, I’m exploring offering my best courses to the public, so anyone interested can throw tomatoes at me in person.
What I’m looking to find out is:
1) Are there enough people interested in Seattle?
2) Which course I should offer first?
3) How much would you (or your company) pay for a day of training?
If you live in the Seattle area, please give the short survey a spin. Will take you exactly 45 seconds. Cheers!
If I can get this running here in my hometown, I’ll happily take the show on the road to other cities if, and where, there’s enough interest.
- By Scott Berkun on January 21st, 2008
- 7 Comments »
- Innovation
Favorite MLK quote on tech innovation
On days like this when someone famous is honored, I try to dig up something they wrote to compare what I think I know about that person and why they’re famous, with what they actually did and said. It’s always enlightening, but sometimes I find unexpected gems like this:
(yes it’s 3 long paragraphs, but I bet you $50 it’s the best writing you’ll read today).
Modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future. He has reached new and astonishing peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that think and instruments that peer into the unfathomable ranges of interstellar space. He has built gigantic bridges to span the seas and gargantuan buildings to kiss the skies. His airplanes and spaceships have dwarfed distance, placed time in chains, and carved highways through the stratosphere. This is a dazzling picture of modern man’s scientific and technological progress.
Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.
Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live. So much of modern life can be summarized in that arresting dictum of the poet Thoreau: “Improved means to an unimproved end.” This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern man. If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual “lag” must be eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul. When the “without” of man’s nature subjugates the “within,” dark storm clouds begin to form in the world.
If we believe this, then why is so little of what we talk about when we use the word innovation directed at helping people make, in MLKs terms, internal progress?
Read the full transcript of MLK’s amazing acceptance speech for the Nobel prize, from Dec, 1964.
(hat tip to truehoop)
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