Scott Berkun's Blog, page 61

Quote of the day

Some folks at Pixar, like their President Ed Catmul, offer great and true insight into the creative process. Here's Lasseter with an excellent quote:

"I will never let a story reel go into production without it being great… I can show you early versions of the Pixar films when they are terrible. Every Pixar film was the worst motion picture made at one time or another. People don't believe that but it's true. We don't give up on the films… we work, and re-work these story reels and [only] then we go into production. We then do the staging with the camera work. We go and record the dialogue with the actors. We'll do the animation. Meanwhile, all the things that have been modeled that's in the set and the characters has to be colored, with texture, and then it's brought together, and lit, and we do the final rendering… it's a lengthy process. It's hand made… it takes 4 years."

John Lasseter, Chief Creative Officer at Pixar, on Charlie Rose, 12/5/11

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Published on December 29, 2011 07:45

Quote of the day

"I don't write to get something through to somebody. I write for various reasons. Some songs I write for the pleasure of writing the song. It doesn't have any great meaning, it's just a song. Songs are nice. Kids sing songs all the time for the pleasure of the singing. The pleasure of the rhythm. London bridge is falling down… There's a pleasure in singing the songs, there is a pleasure in writing the songs. Some songs you try and express yourself emotionally. Those are different songs for me. And they express what I feel and they relieve tensions that I feel when I express them. But I don't think about getting through to somebody."

– Paul Simon (From "Songs of America" documentary)

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Published on December 26, 2011 20:44

Some of you know, in addition to my writing and speaking work, I work as a team lead for WordPress.com, managing a team of developers and designers. It's an amazing place to work, and I've given a few talks about how we make design and engineering decisions.

You can read a popular post I wrote called How WordPress.com is made, which focuses on how our 100 person company works, even though we are distributed around the globe, all the time. You can also read Automattic CEO Toni Schnieder's post In praise of Continuous Deployment, about how we deploy new features and code.

I gave a short lecture on how wp.com is made at WordCamp Seattle (an informal series of events around the world for people interested in WordPress) which you can watch below. When I gave this talk again in Portugal, someone from Corefactor made a sketchnote, documenting the core points I made.

Here's the talk from Wordcamp Seattle:

If you get bored, skip to 18:30, where i talk about how we almost never use email. I talk about Jetpack at 23:00, and Q&A begins at about 31:00. If you have trouble with the embedded version, go here.

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Published on December 22, 2011 10:16

Quote of the day

Here's the quote of the day. I wish more stars in all workplaces felt this way (Although Kobe has plenty of history of being less than coachable):

"[Brown] was not afraid to criticize the star guard [Kobe Bryant] after the exhibition opener Monday against the Clippers, pointing out to reporters that Bryant was one of many Lakers whose defense was subpar.

Brown called a timeout less than a minute into the third quarter that night after Bryant left Clippers guard Chauncey Billups open for a three-point attempt. "That's his job," Bryant said. "I'd be upset if he was letting me skate through things. If you make mistakes, it's a coach's responsibility to point those out. If he can't point that out to me, he has no chance in pointing that out to anybody else."

From The L.A. Times article on Lakers coach Mike Brown

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Published on December 22, 2011 08:15

The gift of Innovation (photo)

Timothy Meaney, CEO of Kindling, a collaboration tool used by Symantec, Motley Fool, Nordstrom and Credit Suisse, sent out copies of The Myths of Innovation to some of their favorite customers.

He kindly sent me a photo, which I promised to post here.

Should you be inspired to do something similar with one of my books for your clients, friends or armies of creatives under your employment, and give me an interesting picture, I'd be thrilled to post about it here too.

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Published on December 21, 2011 10:04

Amazing list of what people want me to write

At the book launch party for Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds last month, Much fun took place.

I set up a big wall upstairs in the back where people could write topics they wanted me to see me write about.

Wow.

It took up three huge sheets of paper, and some folks drew pictures, diagrams and other creative ways to express their suggestions.

Here's the list. Some silly, some serious, some both:

The history of the London Underground
The history of the Velvet Underground
The history of Velvet Curtains
How to beat the house in Vegas
Does philanthropy work for today's generation?
Does philosophy work for today's generation?
How to write a book about public speaking
How to speak publicly about writing a book
How to freelance as a subject matter expert
What is the most important topic today? Why?
Why does Steven Gerraud matter so much?
What does fear hinder within us?
How do you not keep up with Jones' and not care?
How to keep focus in a world that does not stop
How to best disseminate and grow a disruptive business idea in an organization averse to change?
How to avoid cynicism in a system determined to create and maintain it
Write about me! I'm fascinating (But you're not that bright – you didn't say who you were).
Why bacon is the only thing a man (or woman) really needs to survive. (Why bacon goes so well with everything)
The nature of friendship in the era of Facebook
Romance in the middle ages
Extend "Complexifiers vs. Simplifiers" - does this map to englebart/Kay or Jobs/Gates? @strayideas
Resourceful or smart?
Should we privilege content creators as a potent segment and work to prefer their favor vs. consumers of content & passive commenters? – Andy
How to fix the floating plastic garbage in the pacific
Technology as a way to reduce consumerism?
Balance of intuition vs. data/tangible in our human experience and how that translates to business/culture.
Non-profits.
Should we focus on removing waste or adding new net value? – Andy
How the future depends on our rejection of four ideas: competition, scarcity, individualism, and the endless pursuit of more.
The randomness and influence of the general media
I want to read the novel. Finish it!
Crowd-sourced, real-time digital social media in the streaming cloud!! OMGR0X0RZ!!!
Ten years from now, why will authors need publishes? What's their value add?
Life after Facebook, Google+, Twitter, 4square.
Writing about writing a book about writing a book.
How to create and share with audio in ways similar to the way people share through photos and writing today.
How to win at everything
How to make a living traveling in other countries (South America)
Learn about a write about a random subject each of a month
Why the world NEEDS EUGENICS!
How to recover after a terminal failure.
A day in the life of MS – before and or after .com
What should we do about the media in this country. Where should we look for reliable insight into public topics. Who should we trust. *Is it more important to fix the media or our political system?*
I'm originally from L.A. and have experienced the Seattle freeze. What's up with that?!?
Courage
As everything gets more digital, will our children miss that we left behind fewer keepsakes?
Monkeys!
Monkeycats
What does Occupy Wall street look like 100 years from now. Is it a new sub-culture / political party? Something else?

Have something to add? Leave a comment.

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Published on December 21, 2011 08:00

Quote of the day

No introduction necessary:

We believe life is a constant series of small decisions that most of us leave up to someone else to decide. By taking charge of those decisions yourself – even the smallest ones – you can change your life from mundane to magnificent.

From the Married with Luggage blog (A 40 something couple sold everything and travels the world)

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Published on December 10, 2011 16:30

The secret life of blurbs

Blurbs, the quotes from famous people that appear on books, are curious things. They've been around forever, and show no sign of going away.

Most people assume these arrive through magic. Since they appear prominently on every book in the bookstore, its easy to forget there is work required to make them happen.

The work involved goes something like this:

Publishers and authors want to sell books
Endorsements from famous people, in theory, help sell books
To get a blurb, authors reach out to everyone famous they know
They ask for a blurb or an endorsement, based on a draft of the book
Some of those people agree to look at it, many decline or don't respond
Some of the people who agree, actually look at the book
Of those people, some offer a blurb, many decline here too
Of those that offer a blurb, some are good enough to use

It's a long, nag-filled process. Reading a book takes time, as does writing a short quotable summation of it. As is often the case in writing, there are many more rejections than approvals.

My first 3 books have many great blurbs from famous people, and I'm grateful for them. But for such a small piece of copy, people have very strong opinions about what they do or do not imply.

Some famous people never give blurbs (I know because I've asked them, and they told me). Other famous people love to blurb as many things as they can (It'd be interesting for someone with google-fu to see which famous people give the most blurbs). There is definite evidence some people give blurbs without even skimming the book (quid-pro-quo blurbing is not uncommon), whereas others insist on reading the entire thing before considering anything.

I've been asked about the singular blurb for my new book, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds. It's unusual because unlike every other blurb I've seen, I, the author, wrote it myself.

This is unusual. I hope you find it amusing, or at least clever. Here's why I did it:

Most blurbs sound the same. I figured a more interesting and honest blurb may earn more attention than a famous person you don't really know saying "I love this. It was better than Cats" or "Amazing read" or another thing much like what others have said about other books.
As a self-published book, I'd rather invest time in making the book awesome. If I could skip the laborious and unavoidable steps listed above for hunting blurbs, I could focus more energy on making the book itself worthy of attention. Was it a mistake? I'm not sure.
Given a chance, people can evaluate things themselves. I decided to give 1/3rd of the book away, for free, as a Preview (PDF). I think most people know how to skim a book and decide if it's interesting or not, all on their own.

Did I make a mistake? Do blurbs make a big difference in your book purchasing decisions? If not, what does?

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Published on December 08, 2011 14:56

Mindfire Day: the summary

You folks are awesome.

I know it's annoying to keep getting asked to tweet, and post, and dance, in the name of some thing made by someone else. I know you have many other things to do. And I'm grateful to every single one of you who helped out today.

I promised a summary, and here it is.

The summary:

Amazon.com rank hit #6500 – highest ever for Mindfire
Amazon.com kindle rank hit #2036 – highest ever Mindfire
For those who don't know, that means of the 8 million books on amazon.com, Mindfire was the 6500th most popular today.
Nearly 30 people on facebook posted about the book (Possibly more, these are the ones I was able to track)
8 new amazon.com reviews on one day (likely a record for any book I've ever had)
187 tweets (!) by over 105 people - Bonus thanks to @cecildijoux (20), @c_marcant (15), @rwaymarcant (10),@smarandacalin (8), @16_9 (5), @stevetayloruk (4), @robmcnelly (3), @duffbert (3) and @davidwlocke (3)

I promised prizes and I will gladly give them out – tomorrow :)

Of course its never too late – if you forgot, the book is still new and every bit of PR helps. All of the specific and easy to follow tasks listed here are always welcome and have value.

Thanks again. More soon.

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Published on December 07, 2011 22:58

Sorry if you lost a comment

Due to some unintentional shenanigans on my part, comments were not working here for most of the day. I'm sorry. Thanks to some help from Mike Adams, a developer on my team at WordPress.com, all is now repaired.

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Published on December 07, 2011 22:40