Scott Berkun's Blog, page 18

Why Isn’t Remote Work More Popular?

In 2013 I published the popular book The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com & The Future of Work about my 18 months working at WordPress.com as a manager of a remote team. I’m often asked “Why isn’t remote work more popular?” My first response is to ask people exactly how popular they think it is right now?

The slowest thing to change in the world is human nature. It’s easy to upgrade technology, but when it comes to people’s habits and beliefs change takes time.

1. Remote work is more popular than you think

We have poor conceptions of wider trends: our basis for opinions is anecdotal and prone to many kinds of hidden bias.

The wide trends are clear: remote work, defined as working somewhere other than the office one day a week or more, has been on the rise for years and continues to rise. The rate of change is moderate, but the rate of change in workplace dynamics is rarely fast. The WSJ posted the chart below based on a 2013 report from the U.S. Census bureau. Surveys and studies all have their weaknesses (e.g. the 126% increase for construction is hard to believe), but this summary reflects the baseline trends seen in other reports, like IPSOS/Reuters 2012 report. Many major corporations have had liberal remote work policies for years, including Aetna, American Express and others.

And the data across all working people in American (about 142 million) shows an increase in 4.2 million people who work from home part of the time:

2. You do remote work every day without realizing it

How much of your daily work is done through a computer screen? 30%? 50%? At any moment you are working through a screen, you could be anywhere in the world while you’re doing it. Whatever benefits there are of being in the same office, when working strictly through a screen those benefits are neutralized.

Every mobile device and laptop is by definition a remote working tool. Pay attention to how much time you actually spend each day in the same room talking in real time to other people – it’s far less today than ever in history (I don’t have data for this, but I’ve rarely heard counterarguments). Even in companies that do not allow “remote work”, remote work is encouraged implicitly by the equipment used and the daily working habits we’ve adopted across our culture. The resistance to the concept of remote work is strange, given the reality of most office work.

3. It’s often smaller companies that are willing to try new ideas

Most companies on the list I’ve compiled of 100% distributed/remote organizations are small, young, and technology centric. Some, about half, started as distributed companies with one or more of the founders living in a different city than the others. 50 years ago it’d would very hard to start a company that depended on remote work, but the technology of the last 10 years has made it easier, and in some cases preferable, to base a company on remote work. These are new times and the assumptions we have about work need to change.

Managing remote workers requires different skills from managers and employees. The skills are not hard to learn, but they are real. I wrote The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com & The Future of Work to document my own experience as a traditional manager forced to learn this new way of thinking and to show what it was really like.

Even in large companies, it’s often younger managers, on younger projects, that are willing to experiment and try new ideas. Remote work is one of many new ideas about work and productivity. See How To Convince Your Boss To Try New Things and How To Change A Company for specific advice for your organization if you’re looking to push your company forward, on remote work or anything. The book Remote by 37Signals is a great companion to the Year Without Pants for advocacy of remote work policies.

 4. Many companies are fundamentally dysfunctional

We have a paradox about progress: many people complain about how stuck in the past their organizations are, yet point to the lack of adoption of remote work as an indicator of it’s uselessnesses, rather than a reflection of their organization’s fearful grip on the status quo. The people with the most power in any organization are the most afraid of change.

Remote work, like many progressive ideas, depends on company culture. A company that is truly progressive, collaborative and communicates well will fare better with remote work than one that is hierarchical, political and territorial. I wrote Why Culture Always Wins to capture why WordPress.com (and WordPress itself) are able to use remote work to its fullest advantage: remote work fits their philosophy of empowering talented people and keeping management out of the way of progress as much as possible. Organizations that see middle-management as the most important talent in the organization often struggle to see how remote work can function well at all.

5. Remote work, like commuting, is not for everyone

We have widely diverse preferences for how we work. Some people commute one hour each way, every day. That’s ten hours a week in a car, not working and not reading. Some people would find this unacceptable, others like the tradeoff. Generally we have many work traditions that don’t make much sense anymore (e.g. 9 to 5 working hours, strict dress codes, etc.) but changing traditions takes time.  Remote work is another variable in the conversation between employers and employees and how they define what work is.

Paul Graham recently posted about the U.S. talent shortage of programmers, and Matt Mullenweg replied pointed to remote work as the solution. They’re both right. There will always be people who work best in the same physical space with their coworkers, and others who prefer the freedom of working from anywhere they want. More choices is the right answer for America or any nation.

Remote work should be a benefit workers can choose to use

My hope is more managers realize it’s in their self interest to give good employees the choice to work remotely. It’s in any manager’s benefit to encourage workers to find ways to be more productive. If you hire a talented professional they will know best how to be most productive and do their best work. And of course some companies will default to remote work, like Automattic and others have, and this is great too. Having more kinds of companies is a good thing.

Many workplaces offer benefits to employees that go unused (discounted gym memberships, etc.) – it reflects choice, not a failure of the benefit. Some workers will always prefer to be in a physical office, and that’s fine. But if they’ve never worked remotely when will they get a chance to see if it benefits them? The option to work from home when needed, or to try a different lifestyle without having to change jobs, is a win for everyone.

I’d like to measure how many companies offer remote work to their employees, rather than only how many use it. It’s signifiant that any company believes their employees should have the freedom to discover for themselves how best to be productive and strike a happy work/life balance is a great indicator of the health of an organization in attracting and retaining talented people.

You can see all of my posts about remote work and The Year Without Pants, including the FAQ about the Year Without Pants and remote work.

How can Obama & Congress foster innovation in 2015?

Each week I take the top voted question from readers and answer it (submit one here). I jumped this one, submitted by Mike Nelson, it to the front on the line since it’s timely in nature.

What us the most important, single thing that Obama and Congress could do in 2015 to foster innovation in the US?

You’d have to start by defining the word innovation. As you might be sick of hearing, I often complain the word has been abused into meaninglessness. In this case I take it to mean significant positive change, as that’s the best definition of the word I know.

Caveat: Democracy is not centered on change. The political system that allows change to happen fastest is a dictatorship. A dictator does not need to convince anyone, not even the citizens of his nation, and has the power to fire or kill anyone he likes (or, more precisely, doesn’t like). People forget a central motivation for modern democracies and republics is stability. Change is meant to be slow and require consensus, patience and cooperation (which was hard to come by even in 1783 when the U.S. Constitution defining the U.S. government was written). We like to pretend the U.S. President is a dictator and can do anything, but their power is kept tightly in check by design, unless there is truly enough of a problem to earn a consensus and a mandate, which is uncommon.
Push towards meritocracy in education.  Germany recently made state university education free, while in America 2/3rds of graduates leave college in debt (totaling $1.2 trillion, more than our national credit card debt). Which nation is raising a new generation of ambitious creative risk takers? That’s not a fair question of course because culture isn’t defined by education alone, but you see my point. One country is investing as best it can in it’s next generation and the other is doing… I’m not even sure. I don’t believe making things free magically solves problems, but I do believe in meritocracy and the more expensive a good education is, the more wealth, and not merit, determines who gets it. Anyone who believes in meritocracy has to believe in quality public education available to as many citizens as possible, especially young ones.
Push towards meritocracy in immigration.  I’ve never understood why we’d want to prevent the world’s brightest young talents from moving to the United States. The history of our growth hinges on the new ideas, hungry attitudes and different perspectives of immigrants. They take nothing of our wonderful country for granted, unlike many of our own offspring. Many of the most important innovations in U.S. History were made by people who were relatively new here. Right now it is very hard to get an H1-B visa, the primary work visitation visa used by technology companies, despite the talent shortages these companies have. If we believe in meritocracy we should have no fear of foreigners who enter the country based on merit as they will push us to be better in everything we do.
Reduce the reach of copyrights and patents. If you read the history of these laws it’s clear their utility has been stretched to protect the most powerful companies, as these are the companies with the most resources to invest in lawyers and legal services. It used to be that great ideas would pass into the public domain after 28 years, but we’ve recently extended the exclusive protections of copyright several times and now that protection is twice as much or longer. This protects the makers of the past, not the makers of the future.
Reform how campaign finance works. The episode of This American Life titled Take the Money and Run for Office documents how 60/70% of a senator’s time in office is spent fundraising for the next election. It’s shocking and it should be required listening for all Americans. It’s disturbing as it reveals how the modern system encourages the mortgaging of the present for the future by the very people we elect to invest in our future as a nation. Our Congress, as described in #1, is central to change in government. But the more focused Congress is on getting reelected, the more they must cater to the short term interests of corporations and wealthy people who are most interested in protecting their status quo, not the future of our nation. Any reduction in time Congressmen spend campaigning and raising funds is a win for the future of America.

What would be on your list? Leave a comment.

The distraction free life?

Maybe the challenge of modern life isn’t external distractions, but our lack of practice with concentration? I learned about how to concentrate when I was 15, when I dreamed about playing in the NBA. To help with my goal I read a book by Larry Bird. I didn’t make the NBA and don’t remember much about the book, except for this advice on concentration:

You can sit or lay down. Once  you are in position, close your eyes and relax. Just sit there for a minute and think about anything you want. After about a minute, start thinking about the neighborhood or subdivision in which your home is located. In your mind see your neighbors houses, the  roads, the streets, the trees. After you can see your neighborhood  clearly, move down the road your house is on and see the houses along the way…

Finally once you have studied yourself, still with your mind, concentrate on your belt-buckle. or a button on your shirt. See the button, for instance, in as much detail as you can. Run your mind over it again and again. See its color and texture, the way the thread comes up through it. if you can focus your thoughts on that button without thinking about anything else you are concentrating.

When you begin, you will only be able to concentrate on the button for a few seconds or minutes. If you work at it every day, though, you can build your concentration just as you can build the strength in your arms.

From Bird on Basketball: How-To Strategies from the Great Celtics Champion

When I hear someone say “I get easily distracted” I always think of Larry Bird’s advice. Maybe they haven’t practiced concentrating enough to earn the ability to control where their attention goes? I’ve heard about Hemmingwrite, a distraction free device, as if it’s the devices we currently have is what holds people back from writing the novels of their dreams.

You can also buy plenty of software that claims to free you from distractions, but if Bird is right the distractions are in your mind, not in the world. No matter how advanced the software, a mind that’s bored will always find a way to do something else.

Artists don’t get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working. — Stephen DeStaebler

It’s only by practicing with your mind, the most important software you will ever have, that you can control what distracts you and what doesn’t. Some of the most important things we want in life can not be bought or sold as a product: control over our own attention is one of them.

Saving Your Creative Soul (video from WDS 2014)

I’ve only given this talk twice, once before at TEDxDePaul. It’s about the mass confusion we share about creativity – why is it ideas are so much more fun when we get them than when we work on them? Through my own stories, and tales from Picasso, Michelangelo and Yoko Ono, I explain how to close that gap.

This version of the talk contains the largest live game about cognitive bias that has ever been played (as far as I know). Jump to 18:31 if you want to start there.

 

The Myths of Innovation: in 10 crazy acronyms?

A reader took their favorite ideas from The Myths of Innovation and made them into fascinating, but rather hard to remember, acronyms.

NSMM-I-MSIAOT ~ No Singular Magic Moment – Instead – Many Smaller Insights Accumulated Over Time
TORTLPISIBOTOPYAPIP ~ The Only Reason That Last Piece Is Significant Is Because Of The Other Pieces You’d Already Put Into Place
UTIIA-IWBQR ~ Until The Innovation Is Accepted – It Will Be Questioned Relentlessly
PAUTBAIIYIAYA ~ People Are Unlikely To Be As Interested In Your Ideas As You Are
TMVCINTMS ~ The Most Visible Contribution Isn’t Necessarily The Most Significant
TGMILFFTS-SOTPAEATHOFNI ~ The Great Mistake Is Leaping From Facts To Solutions – Skipping Over The Play And Exploration At The Heart Of Finding New Ideas
IDDM-IWDWTTM ~ Ideas Don’t Do Much – It’s What’s Done With Them That Matters
PAI ~ Problems As Invitations
AICGABEROTIOTIOHWDTA ~ All Innovations Combine Good And Bad Effects Regardless Of The Intention Of The Inventor Or How Well Designed They Are
ARAIITAANISBTN-IESTAATSBTT ~ As Ridiculous As It Is To Accept All New Ideas Simply Because They’re New, It’s Equally Silly To Accept All Traditions Simply Because They’re Traditions

You can read the rest of the points they thought best (the blog seems dedicated to summarizing books this way).

It’s always fascinating to see how readers digest what I had to offer. I’m just the writer, but if you want my take on the most important ideas, see my own easy to read summary of the book.

Who influences me as an influencer?

Each week I take the top voted question from readers and answer it (submit yours here).  With 35 votes, this week’s winner was “Who Influences you as an Influencer? ” submitted by Rebekah.

Who influences you as an influencer?

I must start by admitting I am a bad fan. I’m on few email lists or newsletters. I just don’t follow people well. As much as love music, I’m often surprised to hear a band I love has a new album out or are on tour in my town. I don’t entirely know why it’s true about me, but I accept, gladly, that I don’t seem to need much to be happy. My consumption habits follow my curiosity more than anything and I’m more curious about what I don’t know than what I do know.

My biggest influences by far are dead people. That sounds morbid and I doubt it’s the answer you were hoping for. I used to be embarrassed to admit it, but it seems obvious now. The perennial appeal of Shakespeare or Socrates speaks to deep questions and ideas about the human condition that we are never going to fully resolve but need to wrestle with to be our best selves. Those writers, and many others, captured this well, often better than modern writers do. I think of Voltaire, Emerson… very little of the great literature and thinking of the past is put into practice today, or even remembered. I’m just now catching up on Doris Lessing and Ursula Le Guin. It goes on and on. The adage that we repeat the past is entirely true, it’s just a question of who repeats it, when and why. This doesn’t prevent progress but it does mean anyone interested in progress, which I am, must understand the patterns of humanity that we’re prone to repeating. We assume what’s new is best but I don’t buy his anymore.

Readers are powerful. I’m in debt in a way to anyone who gives their time to consuming my work. When I meet folks who know who I am I’m often floored by how much they know about things I’m ignorant about, or how many questions they have that I haven’t thought of before. Half the reason I get up there on stage and write books is to invite a certain kind of discourse with people I don’t know. I’m a seeker and its often people who have read some of my work who are best at offering a suggestion, a book, a movie, a place, that challenges me or influences me the most. I consider my position a place of privilege and I honor that by reading every review, every email (or every ask berkun submission like this one). I want to stay in this position and I’m convinced my odds are best if I continue to be a seeker.

I look less to whatever is popular now. Being the most popular doesn’t mean you are the best. Many of our most popular influencers become popular by commenting on a very narrow subject repeatedly – they’re not the makers of movies or cathedrals or symphonies. They’re not necessarily offering the best commentary. They’re popular because they work hard, they reliably cover the same topics, and they’re good at drawing attention to themselves. The most influential people in the world are in some ways very conservative: their popularity hinges on them being palatable to a wide audience and as their popularity grows they fear losing it more than their interest in learning new things. The true progressives with the most interesting ideas are far more likely to be found on the fringes, not crazy enough to be completely ignored, but not attracted by popularity enough to let it dominate their choices. I follow what’s trending so I have a clue and I stay in touch, but I don’t chase trends (pssst: every trend we chase today we’ve chased before and will chase again). When you write to chase a trend it creates work with a short shelf life.

I’m deeply inspired by people who put take risks for the ideas they believe in. So many people claim to be passionate about something, but put absolutely nothing at stake for those ideas. Anita Sarkeesian has been on my mind often this year. For all the pundits I know, I cant think of many who have bravely endured what she has, simply for having a strong opinion and standing behind it. Voltaire wrote while in exile from his own country: how many bloggers or social media gurus care enough about an idea to put up with that? I’m inspired by benevolent conviction. I don’t agree with everything Sarkeesian has to say, but her work has made me think of the things I’m afraid to say and why I haven’t said them.

Books and movies influence me more than blogs and media. I’ve listed the books that have influenced me the most (see My favorite books and why I love them). I think of books first as they have a depth of thinking and experience that lasts with me far longer than magazine articles and blog posts. I usually read books over several days, or longer, and that time gives me space to think for myself in between the writer’s thoughts. I read ~20 books a year, possibly more if I’m working on a book, less if I’m not as dedicated to my craft (reading well is a big part of writing well). Movies strike deeper chords with me too. There’s something about a 2 hour immersion in a filmmakers world that has powers no other media has.

Twitter and Facebook are for serendipity. Social media helps me find and connect with people and I love it for that. For better and worse many people find my work through social media. It’s like a busy street corner, where sometimes you see old friends, sometimes you get into fights, and mostly you’re never sure what you’re going to get. But it’s a shallow media. You can’t get deep and it’s easy to read people wrong when you do. You can see who I follow on twitter and it gives a good idea of my social network and interests, but debates and discussions there only go so far. I much prefer boozy dinners and nights in pubs, with some people I know well and some people I don’t, who all enjoy serious conversation with people who don’t agree with them. I try to use Twitter and Facebook to get me face to face (or at least on email) with interesting people – thinking of social media as a means to other ends changes its value dramatically.

What should I read or see or do that you don’t think I have? My mind is open. 

6 reasons to read The Ghost of My Father

What? Who is this Berkun guy and why should I care he wrote a book? Good questions indeed. Here are the answers.

If you like my work, this is the most ambitious project I’ve done. At minimum you should want to see if I fall on my face. I’ve committed to taking risks with my talents and this is the biggest risk to date by far.  So far the reviews have been outstanding – what’s to lose? You can try before you buy.
We are our parents children. Is there something about your past that lingers on your mind? This book is about jumping in to sort those memories out. In a thousand ways our childhood defines who we are today. How can we not explore our past? My story is told in a way that can help you figure out yours. I’ve made plenty of mistakes but you can benefit from them.
It will start conversations for you / a great gift. Everyone who has enjoyed the book found it raised many important questions for them about themselves. Give it to a friend or family and use my story to help explain yours, or them theirs (Or it might make them cry, in which case send a box to your enemies).
Kirkus reviews said “…lucid memoir about the uncanny, precarious nature of family, masculinity and childhood.” Jen Moff wrote “…captivating, but also insightful… digs deep into many themes; family dynamics, forgiveness, grace, legacy, hope…” It’s the best reviewed of all my books.
50% of profits donated. The book explains why but the important fact is 50% of the profits from this first edition will be donated to Big Brothers and Big Sisters of America and Big Brothers Big Sisters of Puget Sound.
Instantly read part of the first chapter for free, now (PDF).

You can buy the book on Kindle (or Paperback right now.

How To Design A Book Cover (The Ghost of My Father)

Now that my sixth book, The Ghost of My Father is out, it’s time to share the process that led to the final design (I posted previously about how The Year Without Pants cover was created). This time I decided to work with Tim Kordik again, who worked with me on the excellent cover for Mindfire: Big Ideas For Curious Minds (see how Mindfire’s cover was designed here).

I always start with a one page design brief, explaining the goals for the cover. Since Ghost is a memoir, I spent much of the last year reading memoirs in preparing to write one. I picked some of the best memoir covers I found and shared them with Tim, and we talked about them over beers. We both liked the simple typography and the bold design choices (singular colors, simple imagery, etc).

 Round 1

I like working with Tim because he understands the fun of the first round. Round one is the time to try widely different ideas and break rules. He put together more than a half-dozen initial concepts. Some were all out pop-art (upper left) and others felt more like thriller novels (bottom left) but I was pleasantly surprised by how different the concepts were: shadows and cut-outs were excellent metaphors for a book about a distant parent.

I asked readers to vote on the design, and 359 people kindly volunteered their choice. The 2nd option above, with the family in shadows, won with 33% of the vote. I never let votes make choices for me, but it generates discussion and helps me think about the design, even if I don’t necessarily agree with the winner.

Round 2

We talked about how strong the metaphor of the chain from the first round was, but not the style (too much like a literary novel from the 1970s) which led to one of my favorite concepts of round 2, with a vertical chain over a patchy blue background. It was my favorite design for round two and a front runner for the final design.

Round 3 – New Concept

By chance a friend, Teresa Brazen, posted a photo of a hike she took on Facebook. It seemed a perfect theme: a place for contemplation, and perhaps sharing time with someone close, but that was obscured and uncertain (in much the way a difficult, but important relationship can be). It seemed worthy as a concept and I sent the photo to Tim with some brief thoughts. He liked it and ran with the idea.

We kept my favorite design from round 2, as it was the strongest concept so far, but spent the round focusing on the new bench concept. Tim found stock photos that captured the spirit of Teresa’s photo (the rough, dense visuals of the landscape in Teresa’s photo made it hard to use for something like a book cover).

Round 4

We finalized on the bench concept, and went with more abstract photo, as the not being able to see where the ocean meets the sky suggested so many things about how, when you really look closely, there is a surprising fuzziness to our memories and connections with some people we know. With most of the big decisions finalized, we got down to the graphic design details of spacing, font weight and composition. I still wasn’t sure if we’d have a subtitle or not, and after some advice from my kickstarter backers, I went dropped it. Simplicity wins.

 Final Design

Here is the final design of The Ghost of My Father. Below you can see the full front, back and spine design.

You can buy the book on Kindle or Paperback, or read an excerpt (PDF). Kirkus reviews called it “A sobering, lucid memoir about the uncanny, precarious nature of family, masculinity and childhood.” It’s the best and most personal book I’ve written and if you like my other writing, you should really give this one a try. It changed my life to write it and may change yours to read it.

The Rules I Live By

Each week I take the top voted question from readers and answer it (submit yours here).  With 225 votes, this week’s winner was “What Are The Rules You Live By?” submitted by Max. He wrote:

Over the course of life you make experiences, learn from them and have certain key “nuggets” of wisdom that you hold on to. These are rules that you found that make you more successful and happy, make you avoid stupid things and make better choices. What are those?

I have rules about rules:

Rules are magnets for cognitive dissonance. More than any generation in history we’re awash in lists of them: 7 secrets, 12 tips, insider tricks and hacks for living better lives. But I can’t say the abundance of rules has made much of a difference for our quality of life. Are we better people than we were 50, 100 or 500 years ago because of these lists? Take the Ten Commandments: it’s the most well known list of rules in the world, and the most frequently ignored, even by those most faithful to them. I’m afraid of rules for that reason. It’s easy to find satisfying rules, and even easier to delude ourselves that possessing them equates to following them.
I’m dubious rules for one person are useful to others. When I played for my high school basketball team, I used to write “Play Smart” on the top of my sneakers. I was prone to turnovers and it was my little way of reminding myself to calm down. Had I copied Michael Jordan’s rules for himself or Magic Johnson’s, it couldn’t possibly be aimed at what my real problems were at the time. It’s useful to learn from masters, but the copying and pasting of one amazingly talented person’s system for their work to a novice or beginner is just silly. Rules and advice are a place to start, but anyone who does the work of trying to apply any sets of rules to their daily lives soon customize them, and it’s the work and self awareness that’s the hard part, not the rules themselves.

Instead there are pairs of contradicting rules I think about often. Each side of each pair are true, but never to the exclusion of the other. The uncertainty generated by these “rules” keeps them alive and pushes me to revise and review the rules themselves.

The Golden Rule vs. Capitalism. One of the greatest contradictions in America is our hypocritical notions of biblical and economic ethics. We believe in the golden rule, and treating others as we believe they want to be treated, but this is in direct contradiction to competition, a central element of capitalism. In effect every NFL or NBA game you watch involves thousands of people intentionally not practicing the golden rule (“I want you to lose and will rub it in when you do”). Life itself is based on both cooperation and competition, not one at the exclusion of the other (see Dark Nature: a natural history of evil for an excellent primer on the moral duality of life). I try to treat everyone as I think they want to be treated, but I know that to run a business or to treat myself with self-respect, I sometimes have to put myself first (which can be done with varying degrees of grace). I think about the idea of selling out as a writer all the time, and what integrity means for someone who sells ideas for a living.
Live for the future / Live for the moment. The philosophy joke at work here is “everything in moderation, including moderation.” Living a balanced life means sometimes going too far, and sometimes not going far enough. It’s only when you hit an extreme that you rediscover where the middle ground for your life should be. I love being disciplined, and I love being a hedonist. I believe in taking big risks, but I don’t see any reason not to think them through. I know I become more ambitious if I know what my safety net is, not less. When I decided to quit to write, I planned it carefully. I know some people lose their nerve when they consider all of the ways they might fail, but I don’t. I gain confidence from it. Generally I want to be wiser in the future which demands working on the edge of my comfort zone, sacrificing “the now” to get more data, which improves my judgement in whatever I’ll be doing a decade from now.
Make meaning, but accept meaninglessness. I believe the universe is unknowable and most likely has little to do with the human race. I don’t believe in god, gods or the supernatural. I think the most likely outcome is the human race dies with the sun in a few billion years. This sounds horribly depressing, but I find it liberating. I know how special conscious life is and I LOVE being alive.  Its all the more amazing when I consider the infinite wonder around me might never happen again: this could be a once in a universe experience. This also means it’s up to me to decide to care about the Golden Rule, or not, or about my my dog Griz, or not, or my friends and family, or not. I alone have to chose to put my limited energy into making those relationship meaningful (or not). It’s up to me to make the feelings and ideas I care about important in my life and no one else can do this for me (e.g. existentialism). I have to decide what matters and how much of my life energy I’m willing to dedicate to that decision. The very nature of the universe is a cry to anyone paying attention that we must decide what matters and act with the full force of our lifespans while we are here. Or concede we don’t care as much as we pretend we do, when there’s so much good TV to watch. If there is meaning, it’s up to us.
Everything is funny / Everything is serious. Every time you hear a joke that makes you laugh you have to know there’s someone out there who was offended or hurt by the joke. But we forget this when a joke hits too close to our lives, and that’s part of the rub of human nature. We’re emotional creatures who love to pretend we’re rational. My wife Jill is my best friend and central to our marriage is our deep, dark, twisted sense of humor. We eventually find a way to laugh at everything, even ourselves in our worst and saddest moments. I can’t take anything too seriously for too long and it’s a sign of my closest friends that they help me laugh at myself, at the universe or at the idea of life at all. Voltaire wrote “God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh” and I if I believed in God this is the kind I’d agree with. Things in life can be sad and funny at the same time, one does not preclude the other. I do take work seriously. I work very hard at everything I do. I’m extremely serious about the things I make. But I can’t let myself lose sight of how funny it all is, even my belief that my hard work, in the end, matters, which it probably doesn’t. Far greater writers and artists than me have long been forgotten to history. But if I believe in the kind of meaning I’ve chosen, I’m committed to doing the work anyway, almost inspired by the fact I can’t know what meaning it will have in the future, if any at all.
Feelings and Reasons. There is no such thing as a purely rational moment. The oldest parts of our brains control our emotions and drive our immediate responses to life (Read about your friend the amygdala). I used to pride myself on being logical, but as I studied the human mind, and myself, I discovered logic is a great disguise for emotions. We hide meanness and judgement behind “logic”. We often confuse debating skills and charisma with the hard work of truly thinking through both sides of an argument. Sometimes in life I have to let my emotions lead, and stop to ask myself: “What am I feeling right now? Why am I so angry about this Facebook comment? What feelings am I carrying around that are surfacing now?” And sort those feelings out before engaging with the world. Other times I have to let my logic lead, and focus on finishing the workout despite the pain, or writing the draft with complete disregard for my fear or self-loathing. Many of us live in denial of our emotions, pretending throughout our lives that we don’t feel the way we do, never understanding ourselves, and therefore never understanding anyone else. But we need a balance of logic and emotion to be the best version of ourselves.

What are your rules for living? How did you decide on them?

The Importance of What You Say

People laugh when I tell them I’m a professional speaker. They assume at first that I’m some kind of self-help guru or infomercial star. But when I explain that the average American says 15,000 words a day[1], mostly at work, and frequently to convince others of their ideas, they stop laughing. I explain I’m primarily a writer, but that to make a living as a writer I must often speak about my work.

Just about anyone in the professional world is, in effect, a professional speaker. Every single idea in the history of the business world had to be explained to at least one other person before it got approved, funded or purchased by anyone else. Call it what you like–sales, marketing, pitching or presenting–but I know the history. Despite dreams of a world in which the best ideas win simply because they should, we live in a world where the fate of ideas hinges on how well you talk about what you’ve made, or what you want to make.

People are surprised to learn that for centuries many of the great writers in history, from Emerson to Mark Twain to Peter Drucker, made much of their incomes not from their ideas alone, but from the interest people had in hearing them talk about those ideas in person. A different level of understanding comes from seeing someone explain her ideas to you, before your own eyes, in real time. You can’t shake hands or share some beers with an idea, but you can with its creator.

From my studies of innovation history (which led to my best-seller, The Myths of Innovation), I know that the difference between relatively uncommon names like Tesla, Grey and Englebart, and household ones like Edison, Bell and Jobs, has more to do with their ability to persuade, convince and inspire than their ability to invent, create or innovate. One potent thread in the fabric of reasons why some ideas take off and others don’t is the ability entrepreneurs have to explain to others why they should care. The bigger the idea, the more explaining the world demands. Yet these skills are constantly trivialized in many organizations, leading to dozens of great ideas being rejected, and their creators wondering why lesser rivals with weaker concepts are able to capture people’s imaginations and pocketbooks.

Dale Carnegie is often quoted as saying, “Tell the audience what you’re going to say, tell them, then tell them what you told them.” His intentions were less cynical than people take this quote to mean. The goal isn’t to treat people as if they were stupid. Instead it’s to get them to pay close attention to what you’re saying. Speaking is not trivial. The attention of people who have what you need is precious and special. It must be treated with the deepest respect. To learn how to tell a good story, one that connects your ideas to their needs, or your products to their dreams, without succumbing to the hawkish tricks of the latest gadget infomercial, requires effort and careful thought. How do you choose what to say? What angle to take? There are an infinite number of ways to introduce an idea. How can you be confident you’re choosing wisely? The only way to know is to pay attention to the craft of words, and the performance of presenting them. I see too many inventors and executives who see speaking about their work as the least important thing they do. And it shows. To the detriment of the quality of their ideas, their presentations are the spotty lens through which those ideas will be seen. Without dedicated effort, those lenses distort and betray what it is they truly have to offer.

The simplest step in the world is curiously the one few use. Anything you expect to do well must be practiced. Any kind of pitching or presenting is a skill, and no amount of thinking about doing it can compare with what’s learned from the experience of doing it. It’s taken me 15 years of pitching, presenting and teaching, giving hundreds of lectures around the world, to accumulate the knowledge represented in my book, Confessions of a Public Speaker. I explain for posterity the many mistakes I’ve made over those years, and the important lessons that could only come from those mistakes. It’s those mistakes, born from the effort of trying to convince others of the value of my ideas, that have led to whatever talents I now possess. And while books like mine can, through fun stories and insights, show a way, at the end of the day the choice is always up to you. How important to you is what you say?

[This post originally published at Forbes.com]

[1. University of Texas Study]