Scott Berkun's Blog, page 64

Answering Proust: a fun interview

My friend Sara Peyton at O'Reilly Media interviewed me in '08 using questions from the famous Proust questionaire. Recently I stumbled across it again.

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

An evening spent drunk as a loon, looking up at stars, sitting by a bonfire, laughing with friends.

What is your greatest fear?

Waiting to die with a mind full of regrets.

On what occasion do you lie?

This is the first lie I've ever told.

What is your favorite journey?

Wherever I'm going next that I haven't been to before.

Which living person do you most despise?

It's a tie between Bill O'Reilly and Dick Cheney.

Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

My friends would say its mother*****r. But I don't think this word can be overused.

Which talent would you most like to have?

Mind-reading is hard to beat, but I'd settle for time-travel.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

The willingness to let myself make more mistakes.

If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be?

Open their eyes.

If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what would it be?

If a thing, the most perfect object in NYC: The Chrysler Building. Or maybe Central Park (is it cheating to call that one thing? I like to cheat). If a person, I'd like to be me again.

What do your consider your greatest achievement?

Writing every day. Ok, that's a lie. I don't write every day. But just trying to write every day is hard enough.

What is your most treasured possession?

My mind. I dont care much for material things. Besides, you never have to worry about someone breaking into your mansion and stealing your mind, you know? It's the only thing than will always be only yours.

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

Watching someone innocent suffer for your own carelessness.

What is the quality you most like in a man?

Integrity.

What is the quality you most admire in a woman?

Curves.

What do you most value in your friends?

Brutal honesty, dark comedy, and trust under fire.

Who are your favorite writers?

George Orwell, Henry Miller, George Saunders, Raymond Carver, Bertrand Russell, Peter Drucker, Loren Eisley, John Gardner, Ray Bradbury, Hubert Selby Jr.

Who is your favorite hero of fiction?

How can you top Don Quixote? There's no way.

Who are your heroes in real life?

Don Quixote isn't real? Are you sure?

How would you like to die?

Drunk as a loon, looking up at stars, sitting by a bonfire, laughing with friends.

What is your motto?

Be amazed by everything.

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Teaching Seattle How to Drive – in 5 minutes

The good folks at Ignite Seattle let me do this fun, ranty talk, pointing out the annoyances of driving in Seattle and how we can fix them. May apply to other cities too.

Very happy to share this: I've been wanting to do this talk for a long time.

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Feedback without frustration (video)

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Last month I spoke at Hive 2011, an event for developers and designers hosted by AIGA and Microsoft here in Seattle.

It was an exceptionally well planned event. They did smart things like keeping talk length down to 20 minutes, having a social room with a live-simulcast, and mixing in ignite talks for a change of pace. They also sent all the speakers a dossier on the attendees, with demographics on their background we could use to aim our talks at. It makes my job as a speaker so much easier when the organizers are committed to making the event a great experience.

Hive is releasing all the talks for free on youtube, which is why I'm posting. I spoke for 20 minutes about design critiques and how to give and receive feedback, which you can watch below:

The talk is loosely based on two essays: How to give and receive criticism, and how to run a design critique.

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Let time work for you

Yesterday, while running on a treadmill at the gym, I realized something: I do not like to run on treadmills. It's repetitive and boring, and unlike true sports where there is someone playing defense to overcome, all I have is myself. I looked to my left and right and everyone else running on treadmills looked just as sad and bored as I felt. Not a smile among the 2 dozen people racing away, without moving anywhere, like hamsters in a row of hamster wheels.

But then I noticed something on the wall. A little digital clock, slowly counting away the seconds of my run. And as I watched the clock count away I realized as long as I continued, time was working for me. I just had to keep doing what I was doing and my goal of running 4 miles would take care of itself.

Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot. As long as I didn't think much at all, I'd achieve my goal. We don't like the idea of not thinking being useful, but there is repetition in all important things, and not thinking about it, and letting time take over, can improve the odds you'll make it to the finish line.

Studying for a college degree, practicing the piano, going for a daily run, these are all ways to let time work on our behalf, if we just give in. Passion and pleasure have their place, but sometimes that comes only after we've put in enough time at something for the payoff to come back out.

Woody Allen once said 80% of success is showing up. Perhaps that means 20% of success is showing up at the right thing and staying there?

Let time work for you is the mantra I've been playing with in my mind all week.  Does it mean anything to you?

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Now scottberkun.com has threaded comments

It only took a zillion years, but scottberkun.com finally has fully threaded comments. Now you can disagree with someone, and have them disagree right back, with visual formatting that fully clarifies they are disagreeing with just you and your post, and not anyone else.

Jokes aside, it does make long comment threads easier to read. It also gives feedback to commenters on which new comments are in response to their previous ones.

Oddly enough, I work for WordPress.com on comments and other UI features, so it's particularly embarrassing it's taken me until this decade to finally getting around to adding this simple little feature. For good measure, there is also comments paging now, so posts with 50+ comments are faster to load.

If you have other feature requests for the site, now is the time as I'm on a roll.

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How Microsoft kills cool projects

There's a good article detailing the death of Microsoft Courier, a tablet device project from 2009/10 led by J. Allard, of XBOX fame. The core story rests on this observation:

Within a few weeks, Courier was cancelled because the product didn't clearly align with the company's Windows and Office franchises, according to sources. A few months after that, both Allard and Bach announced plans to leave Microsoft, though both executives have said their decisions to move on were unrelated to the Courier cancellation.

Most interesting products for today's world can not easily align with business models created in 1995.  I know many smart people who had great prototypes for new products while at Microsoft, who were saddened to learn the escape velocity of a project is, at minimum, greater than the gravity of its two largest businesses (Office & Windows). They'd watch with sad eyes as their well conceived plans were smashed to pieces against the massively successful, but ultimately boring, twin leviathans of Microsoft.  The details of the Courier story, a well designed product, fully staffed with 100+ creative employees, is sad indeed. A very different future for Microsoft was ready to born, but never saw the light of day (photos and demos).

During the browser wars, a similar, but rarely told, story explains why IE4 was the pinnacle of browser innovation in 1997, and then took a right turn into stagnation.

Brad Silverberg, VP of internet things circa 1997, intended for the web to replace Windows. He wanted Microsoft to make the web a platform, and launched versions of IE on Mac and IE on Unix (to the dismay of the industry. It's the only UNIX application Microsoft has released).  The idea was to leave OS'es behind, and focus on the web as the core way people will interact with computers. A prophetically Googlean strategy.

But when it came time for Gates to make the call, Jim Alchin, the VP of Windows, won. Windows was more important. As a result, after IE4 (and the implosion of Netscape), plans for making the web the future platform for the company were shut down, in favor of protecting the Windows franchise.

Many lament these choices. It seems boring to continually protect the status quo. But when your status quo generates $60 billion annually, a rate of income only a handful of companies in history have achieved, few complainers would have the courage to act differently if they were in charge.

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Mindfire: Free preview now available

[image error]For 52 hours, the entire book was available for free. But don't worry. If you like free things, you are still in luck

You can download a free PDF preview of the book (nearly 1/3rd of the content), right now.

Click here to get it: free sample of Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds (PDF).

If you like what you find, I hope you'll pay a few bucks for the rest.

The book is on sale now at  amazon.com, in print and kindle editions, and on B&N and iBookstore.

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Mindfire: Free download, now over

Dear blog readers:

[image error]The new book is here. It's a collection of my best short work from the last decade, including many posts from this blog. Since you've been reading my blog all along, I wanted to ensure you regular readers could get the new book, in digital form, for free. You'll find old favorites, as well as great essays and writings you missed over the years.

Hi there. Sorry to tell you, but the free download period is over. It actually went about 52 hours if you want to be all precise and such.

However, do not fret if you like free things: You can download a free PDF preview of the book (nearly 1/3rd of the content), right now.

If you like what you find, I hope you'll pay a few bucks for the rest.

The book is on sale now at  amazon.com, in print and kindle editions. Some good reviews are already in. It's also available in the iBookstore (for iPhones, iPads and such).

 

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The new book: Mindfire. What is it?

Mindfire: Download free for 48 hours

Dear blog readers:

[image error]The new book is here. It's a collection of my best short work from the last decade, including many posts from this blog. Since you've been reading my blog all along, I wanted to ensure you regular readers could get the new book, in digital form, for free. You'll find old favorites, as well as great essays and writings you missed over the years.

If you want the print edition, it's $11 at amazon.com, on sale now.

All you have to do to: join my monthly mailing list. I send my best posts each month out in one simple, hassle free email.

Enjoy and spread the word.  When finished, please review it on amazon.com.

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NameFirstLastEmail*Format*PDFePub (iBooks, Sony Reader, Nook)Mobi (Kindle)

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The Jobsian fallacy

I'm sad Steve Jobs is gone. I'm sadder still to see the vultures of shallow thinking circling his name. There is a fallacy around great men, a notion we can learn best from their behavior for how we ourselves can achieve. But that's only true if we study them with an honest eye. When writers are clouded by mythology and hero worship, they do more harm than good, as sloppy thinking is often the mortar used to put men on pedestals.

Before anyone takes Jobs as an example to emulate, remember the following:

You did not have the good fortune to meet a Wozniak.
You are not as smart as Steve Jobs was.
You do not have the talent to back up a Jobs sized ego.
You are not willing to take the same kinds of risks.
You do not work as hard as he did.

Using Jobs as an example without due recognition of these facts makes you a fool.

We overstate how much can be learned from exceptional people. Their success is a product of circumstance, among other factors, but we dismiss those circumstances when we wishfully consider our own futures. You can't copy and paste success. We learn of people like Jobs in retrospect, long after they've proven their value to the world, and most of what we learn of their lives is tainted by romance and dreams.

Articles with idiotic premises  like Steve Jobs solved the Innovator's Dilemma, or In Defense of Steve Jobs, would likely annoy Jobs to no end. He had a humble attitude about innovation theories and doubted the utility of thinking of work in such abstract terms. He was too busy working to formulate a 'process' or a 'model', much to the frustration of tech and business writers everywhere. He was asked once 'How do you systematize innovation?' and his answer was 'You don't' (See BusinessWeek, 10/11/04). He was in some ways more humble and practical than writers who use his name as a puppet to make half-baked, poorly researched points, that help no one achieve anything.

We are fascinated by our giants and this fascination motivates us to learn. This is good. But we continually forget every story in this world is unique. We can't cherry pick the convenient elements of one successful life and graft it into our own, expecting the same results. Had da Vinci or Ford been born today, they might have ended up janitors or car salesmen. And a school teacher or gardener from their times, born today, might have transformed the world. We don't want to see success as fragile or circumstantial, but the slightest touch of chance in the lives of any great man or woman, and we'd never know their names.

The unspoken part of greatness is the courage to venture into the unknown. But if we look too closely at the great people of our past, and use our hindsight of their lives as a map, we end up seeing the world backwards. They had no map in front of them when they lived their lives. The flawed persistence of studying a person from history too closely, means you will keep your eyes buried in the fantasy of repeating someone else's past, instead of looking to horizons of your own making.

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