I have a few days of fun travel to new places coming up.

If anyone has been to Brussels, Belgium or Oslo, Norway, or is a local, and has some advice for good eats or places you think I’d dig, please leave a comment or drop me a line. Thanks!

Posted in On Tour, philosophy | 14 Comments »

One of the grand confusions of modern life is the confusion between what is good and what is popular. Most of the time people confuse being popular with being good, which isn’t necessarily true.

I knew a guy in high school. He was very popular. But I don’t think anyone would say he was good at anything. Not really.

I also knew another guy in high school. He was pretty good at lots of things. But for some reason, he wasn’t very popular.

I suspect if these two guys ever met the universe would have exploded. Good thing that didn’t happen.

The temptation many creative people I know have is to strive for popularity. To make, do, and say things that other people like in the hopes of pleasing them. This motivation is nice. And sometimes the end result is good. But often what happens in trying so hard to please other people, especially many other people, the result is mediocre. Their internal goodness detector is disappointed with what they make.

And then there are the artistes. People who develop their own sense of what they think is good and insist on striving for it, no matter what anyone else says. Provided they don’t expect anyone else to care, these people are quite interesting. Although there is nothing worse than an artiste who insists on telling you how stupid you are for not seeing how brilliant their work is.

Digging through history I’ve found it interesting how characters like Van Gogh, Michelangelo, and Bukowski balanced the popular vs. good challenge. Most famous artists took commissions, and in some cases those commissions resulted in their most famous work (For example, Da Vinci and Michelangelo had clients and lived mostly on commission income. If you wonder why much of what’s in museums are portraits of old wealthy people, it’s because they’re the only ones who could afford to pay for paintings). In other cases, like Bukowski, Henry Miller, Van Gogh, they never really compromised. Sometimes to their own detriment.

But what most creative people want, all the ones i know, is to be both good and popular. They want to achieve their own sense of goodness, while at the same time pleasing other people. It’s a tightrope. Especially once you’ve been popular here or there, people tend to want more of the same. And that rarely fits in with a creative person’s sense of goodness. So a few big popular victories early on can put handcuffs on how good, from the creators standpoint, they can ever be while still being popular. My first book was on project management, and I suspect for some people, no matter how many books I write on other things, I’ll always be the project management guy. And that’s ok.

How do you balance your own sense of good vs. your sense of popular? Do you find clear places where they are in conflict (say your client’s sense of good vs. your own?) How to you balance this out and stay sane? Do you divide your creative energy into “work creative” and “personal creative”, giving yourself a safe place to be an artiste? Or is this more than you’ve ever thought about what is, perhaps, a silly and pretentious line of thinking?

Whatever your opinion, I’d like to hear it.

Posted in creative thinking, philosophy | 14 Comments »

There’s a fantastic little essay over on Noop.Nl about some clever philosophical questions about what projects are. The essay is called Your project has no goal, and he explores why human beings tend to place reasons and explanations into things that are way more about us than about what’s really going on. Includes fun references to Taylorism, and The Selfish Gene.

I doubt I agree with all his points, but who cares - this was the most interesting project management related read I’ve come across in awhile. Good stuff:
Your project has no goal - Noop.Nl

Noop also has several lists you might want to check out, including the top 100 blogs for developers, and the top 100 best software engineering books ever.

Posted in Management, philosophy | 3 Comments »

Here’s a good one from the mailbag:

I am seriously considering quitting the (day) job and dedicate myself to my consulting activities but, it’s scary decision. On one hand I feel it’s the right time. I have no family nor other important obligations and in a few years it’ll be too late. But on the other hand the cost of living where i live and the financial crisis make me hesitate.

Do you think that today’s crisis should affect this type of decision? Any insights you can provide me on your decision would be very appreciated.

Big decisions are always scary no matter what’s going on in the world. You’d be nearly as scared in boom times to quit your nice job to jump into the unknown as you probably are now. Keep this in mind. Much of the fear is yours. I know mine was. It’s easy to say “oh, it’s not the right time” as if there could ever be a perfect time. No one is ever going to drop down from the sky and say “Quit now! It’s time!”. It will always feel scary, weird and uncomfortable. I’m not saying everyone should quit today - far from it - but I am saying there is this fantasy about what it should feel like that never happens.

In short, going out on your own you only need one thing: enough clients to earn a living. Depending on what you intend to do this could be one single client. Or three. Getting one or three clients might be very easy for you. Or very hard. But either way you can start figuring out how hard or easy it will be before you quit your regular job. The quality of your business idea and talents are things you can measure no matter what the state of the world is. If you see a way to make money, can verify it, can get good businesses to sign contracts to pay you, then why wouldn’t you do it?

The major advantage of being an independent is your low overhead. You only need to pay one salary and that’s yours. Even in down times if you see an opportunity to provide a service people need, and can pay for, you can do very well. Strong businesses are relatively stronger now given all the troubles weaker companies are in. Even during global downwards trends there are always pockets of opportunity and sometimes the people who strike out on their own during tough times, and survive, are best positioned to do well in boom times too.

Here’s a basic and time tested approach to all this:

1. What are you lowest possible expenses for the next 12 months. Do the math on how much you need to survive. Note all the frills you can cut, like cable TV, nights out on the town, skiing trips, moving to a cheaper apartment, etc. Put together your lean expenses for a year. If you have new business expenses you expect to spend before you can make income, consider those too.
2. Examine your savings. Based on #1, you know how much you need, assuming ZERO income, to last for a year. Look at your savings and do the math. If you find zero clients, how long can you last? A good guess is you need 6 to 12 months to build a base of clients. If you don’t have 6 months of savings, start saving now.
3. Find your support team. Ask your friends, your spouse, your colleagues, and find a small group of people who will support you and help you out as you start this new thing. You will need to know who can help when need it, who will encourage you and who will give you tough feedback you need to hear. Line up your support team before you make the leap.
4. Start looking for clients. Ask around. Of your network, who are the five people most likely to need your services. Talk to them. Ask them if you were a freelancer if they’d be interested. Talk to other freelancers in your field - buy them lunch and ask for advice. Do they like being on their own? Why? Why not? Before making the leap become a student of freelancers in your field and sort out if your fantasies about it approximate the reality. Start working your network and building it now. Start a blog about your expertise: it creates a home for your knowledge and if you go on your own, your business.
5. Get your first client fast: work for free . A good referral is worth much more than payment for a new independent. Be willing to work for free, on the basis it’s a limited time only arrangement, in exchange for a good referral or use of a client’s network. If you can’t find someone willing to let you work for free, be worried. You can do this on weekends or when off from your current job. Get projects under your belt now, while you have almost no risk. If after two weekend projects you hate it, you’ve learned, before quitting, freelancing isn’t for you.
6. Leave your job on good terms. Give plenty of notice, more than the minimum (Wouldn’t you be pissed if someone gave you only two weeks notice?). Finish all your work. Make sure you do everything you can to leave on excellent terms so worst case the door is open for your return, or to possibly use your former employer as a client.
7. Value life experience. When I quit it helped me to accept that even if I fail I’d have learned a great deal about myself, my industry and life in general. I was convinced there were lessons I’d learn I couldn’t buy any other way, and I got strength from this (It turned out I was right, but I didn’t know this when I quit). I was convinced on a personal level I could not lose, and if I planned #1 and #2 the financial risks were small. Worst case I’d take those experiences and return to the kind of career I’d had before.

I’d also check out books like Million Dollar Consulting, which outline many of the considerations needed to run a successful consulting or freelance business.

Posted in entrepreneurship, mailbag, philosophy | 7 Comments »

Does this even need an explanation? Forget his philosophies, I’m just intimidated by his facial hair.

Posted in humor, philosophy | 4 Comments »

Nice little video on failure and its role in success. It’s vaguely an advertisement for Honda, but its very low key, and mostly interviews with engineers, product planners, and drivers about their stories of failure. It’s well produced, and definitely worth the 8 minutes.

Failure: The secret to success (YouTube)

(Thx to Livia for the link)

Also check out my essay, How to learn from your mistakes.

Posted in creative thinking, philosophy | 3 Comments »

Are you free? I know I’m not. That’s why I write essays about being free, to freely show how un-free I am. Does this not make any sense? That’s ok. All is explained in the essay.

Essay #60 - How to be a free thinker

Posted in Essays, creative thinking, philosophy | No Comments »

A curiosity of the recent coverage of the $50 billion Madoff scandal is the sense of shock and surprise that professional investors make big, possibly illegal, mistakes in 2008. The same year half our banks fell apart, major investment firms went bankrupt, automobile companies beg for money, and governors offer to sell senate seats for cash.

In times like these a book gets mentioned by some experts called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the madness of crowds. It’s a big fat book chronicling the silly, absurd things large groups of people have bet their money on and lost. Some read the book to feel smart smart that we ourselves didn’t do any of the stupid things our ancestors did. But these days an update to the book is well overdue: an entire chapter can be written about the delusional wonders of 2008.

I’m left with this opinion: there will always be pyramid schemes, frauds and market collapses. It’s inherent in complex systems, things like democracies, free-markets and blogospheres, that these things will happen. Unavoidable actually. I’m not saying we should accept them or not try to reduce their number and impact (hello, SEC, where have you been?), but they will always take place. The reason? Trust.

A pyramid scheme, often referred to as a ponzi scheme, is well defined by wikipedia as an unsustainable business model, where the people who invest are not aware of how unsustainable it is. (In a ponzi scheme, victims are mostly just out of luck, in a pyramid scheme, victims are often part of the crime since they promoted the pyramid).

As the story goes the legendary Charles Ponzi told his potential investors in 1919 he could return 40% on their money in 45 days. FORTY PERCENT. At a time when the interest rates hovered around 5%. Why was he able to get their money on such a ridiculous promise? For one reason: they trusted him. That’s it. He found a way to earn their trust. The details don’t matter for the moment. Lets ask what is trust?

Trust is using what you know about someone to compensate for what you do not know. I trust my brother. I’d trust him to, I don’t know, say, watch my dogs. Now once he has my dogs I can’t be 100% certain what he might do when he watches them. He might decide to cover them with chocolate syrup, or set them loose in the meat section of my local supermarket, I can’t prevent him from doing these things. But I trust he won’t.

Similarly you trust the staff at McDonald’s not to spit in your food, the woman behind you at line in the bank not to make silly faces at the back of your head, or the gas you pump into your car to be actual gasoline and not turpentine. Our daily lives hinge on trusting all sorts of things we are too ignorant or busy to verify. And from time to time some people will take advantage of this trust because they are mean and because they can. It might only happen 1 or 2% of the time. Small enough not to make us stop trusting these things. But fraud, abuse, and pyramid schemes will always exist as long as we are free to choose who to give our trust to. Laws penalize people after they betray our trust, not before.

Look at the list of people whose trust was betrayed by Madoff: Steven Spielberg; Jeffrey Katzenberg, Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.); New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon, fashion mogul, Carl Shapiro; real-estate developer Mortimer Zuckerman; the European bank HSBC; and on it goes. These high powered people, despite their teams of lawyers and advisers had their trust betrayed. It’s sad and shameful what happened, especially since many of their funds were tied to charities, but there’s nothing we can do to permanently prevent this from happening again. To hire someone to manage your money will always be based primarily on the wonderfully imperfect, intuition dependent, amazingly tricky thing called trust.

How do you decide who to trust? All I know is after writing this post, I’m looking at everyone I see with a suspicious eye :)

Posted in philosophy, politics, pop culture | 11 Comments »

I have this pet interest in books that people, myself included, refer to when making a point, even though they haven’t read them. Thoreau’s Walden is on that list. I read it last month and here’s my review.

It’s a curious book. It’s well known in our environmentally aware age, to be about a person who spent years living off the land, in harmony with nature. But that’s not quite right. Early in the book Thoreau makes clear his spot in the Walden woods, donated by a friend (Emerson), is just a few miles from town. He was not a hard core hermit or back to nature zealot, as one might assume. His ambitions were more philosophical than tied to a specific set of rules for what nature is, or how often he could talk to people or have them over for dinner. It was an inquiry, a thought experiment, and arguably an American pioneer in self-discovery and taking responsibility for learning how to live. This idea is popular today, perhaps in slicker form, in books where people spend a year following the bible or traveling by bicycle to see what happens.

I was surprised by the three distinct themes I found in the book.

One is an attempt to provide a do it yourself guide. There are several lists of things purchased with prices and sources. Thoreau is thrifty and proud. He refers to how inexpensive his life is often, and there are long stretches where he describes, on a line item basis, how much it cost to build, supply and maintain his house. It seems he had some interest in providing a how to manual of sorts, but he gets lost in his ideas. Kind of like a lonely shop clerk who keeps telling personal stories instead of getting you the ham sandwich, sitting in front of him on the counter, you came into the store for. And the details don’t age well as a practical guide as the prices for nails have gone up, and home depot puts a new spin on what it means to do it yourself. There are frequent journal style mentions of hunts, food procured from his garden, and other daily facts of his existence.

The second theme is transcendent prose. This was what I hoped for. He was a student of Emerson and it shows, with page long riffs on the strange nature of man, the potential for greatness, the limits of our cities and times, and on they go. Some of these totally rock:

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root”

“As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them as much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile and then given his body to the dogs.”

“The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I look him in the face?”

These are moving, potent, memorable words. If Thoreau achieved his goal of transcending normal existence through a return to nature, and sharing that experience with the reader, it comes through in these passages.

But the third theme of the book is thick, meandering, writing. He runs with the same rambling narrative for pages at a time, beating his own point into the ground or losing it altogether. Anne Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek captures the experience of being alone in the woods with a completeness well beyond Thoreau’s, simply because she provides a consistent, reliable and intensely fascinating narrative. Thoreau seems like the kind of fellow who spent too much time on his own, and his wandering mind, unaware of the confusion he creates in the minds of others, rambles around on its own selfish whims. He was a true recluse and I think it shows. Emerson, though long-winded, keeps his points in straight lines. Thoreau writes like strings of thread, thrilling when they lead somewhere interesting, but often they just get tangled up so tightly you wish he’d take more frequent care to tie them up into neat, memorable bows.

For a short book it is not tightly written and although it has great themes, I find it hard to call it a great read. And Emerson, for all his own verbosity, should have suggested more edits in Thoreau’s work than it seems he did (I understand Emerson played a key role in getting the book published at all, but I can’t find the reference). Perhaps I came to Walden too late, having read many books clearly influenced by Thoreau’s work. And although I respect the fact the book was written more than a hundred years before I was born, I can read Emerson’s collected essays with fewer complaints.

Check it out for yourself: Walden, by Thoreau. This is an online, and annotated edition.

I tend to avoid annotated editions on first reads, so here’s the edition I used: Walden, by Thoreau (amazon)

Posted in Book reviews, books, philosophy | 2 Comments »

I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard travelling.

I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you.

I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think that you’ve not got any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I’d starve to death before I’d sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow.

- Woody Guthrie

- Woody Guthrie

Check out Dust Bowl Ballads - despite the tough topics he lives up to the quote.

Posted in philosophy, quote of the x | 2 Comments »

Sometimes I think we all have a worrying quota. An amount of worry we feel compelling to apply to the world. And if our lives get safe, and there isn’t much really worth worrying about, we fill up our quota by worrying about things that don’t really matter much at all. Case in point: I just had an extended conversation with my brother about the criteria for accepting Facebook invites from people who were jerks 25 years ago when we went to grade school with them. Boy - do we need other things to fill our quotas of worry.

Like the Facebook example, I catch myself worrying about ridiculous, trival things now and then, and the trick that helps, that shrinks my worrying quota is Maslows hierarchy of needs.

It’s an old trick: put whatever is on your mind in some kind of perspective (What’s worse? What’s better?) and it loses both its venom.

Most of the time, whatever I’m worrying about scores on the top half of the pyramid, and while it might belong in my quota of worry, it certainly doesn’t deserve the amount of energy from my life it’s absorbing.

Sometimes decisions are so insignificant that simply flipping a coin to decide and getting the decision out of the way is the best and healthiest thing all around: neither end of the decision matters. The only bad choice is taking too much time to make one. I find I can shrink my quota of worry by deciding a) some decisions matter less than I think b) worrying won’t help me make a better decision c) get someone else to sanity check if I’m worrying too much about something.

How do you find ways to worry less about things that aren’t worth worrying about?

(While I’m a fan of Maslow’s, anyone know of interesting alternative hierarchies of needs?)

Posted in lifehack, philosophy | 6 Comments »

I love wandering used bookstores, as there is always a magic tome back there, lying in waiting under layers of dust, that when found will blow my mind. There is a lack of pretension in old books that amps up their power in ways no NYTimes bestseller can ever match.

Nearly a decade ago I found a copy of Loren Eisley’s The Night Country: Reflections of a bone-hunting man, in a $1 stack. I had no idea who he was or what he was writing about, but the strange title and stranger cover drew me in. He’s an amazing writer. And he was one of the first to put my faith in writers who can transcend topics and genres and simply blow my mind with thoughts and words. You could have put Eisley in a cardboard box for an hour, and he’d have an essay that would change your mind about something important you’ve never even thought about before.

Another great find in the dark back used book racks was the Encyclopedia of Ignorance (EOI). Finally a tome about the infinity of things we do not know, that are never represented in books! A piece of my sanity was restored in this book, as I realized I wasn’t alone in feeling that we know much less about the universe and everything than we pretend we do.

Over on Kottke today, is mention of Wikipedia’s version of the EOI: The list of unsolved problems. This is great, except…it’s tiny! Ridiculously small! I’m hoping wikipedians will pick up the slack, but right now the EOI is my go to resource for things I don’t know.

Posted in books, philosophy | No Comments »