Love Your Work
Love Your Work is the intellectual playground of David Kadavy, bestselling author of three books – including Mind Management, Not Time Management – and former design advisor to Timeful – a Google-acquired productivity app. Love Your Work is where David shows you how to be productive when creativity matters, and make big breakthroughs happen in your career as a creator. Dig into the archives for insightful conversations with Dan Ariely, David Allen, Seth Godin, James Altucher, and many more. "David is an underrated writer and thinker. In an age of instant publication, he puts time, effort and great thought into the content and work he shares with the world." —Jeff Goins, bestselling author of Real Artists Don’t Starve
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308. Why I Quit Podcasting
08/10/2023
308. Why I Quit Podcasting
After nearly eight years of the Love Your Work podcast, I’m quitting. Here’s why, and What’s Next. Podcasting is a bad business This is not the immediate reason I’m quitting, but it is at the root: Podcasting is a bad business. When the indirect benefits of an activity run out, it’s hard to keep doing it if it’s not making money. I realized long ago podcasting is a bad business, but I kept going for other reasons. I’ll explain why in a bit. Though I didn’t start my podcast with dollar signs in my eyes, I did at least hope I would grow to earn money doing it. I’ve earned about $32,000 in the eight-year history of Love Your Work. More than half of that has been from Patreon supporters, many of whom support for reasons other than the podcast. During that time, I’ve spent: $1,008 on hosting $11,749 on assistance with editing and publishing $241 on equipment And some other expenses, for a total of about $13,000 In raw numbers, I’ve made a “profit” on the podcast. But, as I broke down in my , my “wage” was about $6 an hour. My podcast comprised about 5% of my income over these eight years, and took much more than that portion of my time and energy. Of course, I don’t think about whether the podcast was worth it in terms of an hourly rate. Creative work happens in , and I’ve made to be free to explore creatively without worrying so much what I’m earning in the short-term. Ways to make money podcasting But there are many different ways to make a podcast a solid business, and none of them worked for me, for various reasons. Here are some of these business models, as they apply to the “thought-leader” space (I’ll ignore the more entertainment/infotainment space that podcasts like Gimlet’s inhabit). Be so massively famous, you can pick-and-choose advertisers, while demanding a lot of money. This is where Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan are. They both started with large platforms, and applied whatever talents that helped them earn those platforms to make their podcasts huge. After more than , I have a modest platform, but orders of magnitude smaller. Build a “content machine” that manufactures ad slots. I won’t name names, but you’ve heard these podcasts. They’re formulaic and don’t seem to discern much who they have as a guest, nor what sponsors they accept. This business model is why my inbox is still full of pitches – they think I actually want more guests, because more guests would mean more ad slots. It takes a very rare set of circumstances for me to be excited to interview someone. Share information that directly helps people make money. If you have tactical and actionable information that’s useful to professionals in a specific industry, you can charge for premium podcast content. I’m not as interested in the tactical and actionable as I am in the abstract and exploratory. Cover a niche topic. If you have a leading podcast about a very specific topic, advertisers within that niche will be willing to pay high rates to reach that audience. I didn’t want to build my podcast according to a specific topic – more on that later. Have a “back-end” business. If you have a thriving consulting business, or training programs to sell, you can attract more clients and customers through your podcast. As I wrote in my , “I want to make a living creating. I don’t want creating to be merely a marketing strategy for other things. Is that completely insane?” I flirted with success in a few of these business models. Early on, I hoped my podcast would be famous enough to pick and choose advertisers at high rates. For a while, it looked like I had a chance. I was approached by a , and I had some reputable advertisers such as LinkedIn, Skillshare, Casper, Audible, Pittney Bowes, and University of California. Various times, I thought I was on the cusp of my “big break” – such as when Love Your Work was . But the more I tried to go the “get famous” route, the louder the siren-song of the “content machine” route got. There were plenty of opportunities to do “interview swaps” with hosts I wasn’t interested in interviewing. There were a few advertisers that had money, but whose products felt sleazy. Joining a podcast network would have pressured me to crank out content even if I didn’t feel like it. There was (and still is) the never-ending stream of pitch emails for guests. I had too much wax in my ears to go the “content machine” route. Not included in my lifetime revenue-estimates for Love Your Work is money I made through the “back-end business” route. I was somewhat comfortable with this model, but I haven’t made a course in years, as I’ve been focused on writing books. And as bad a business as people say writing books is, it’s better than making a podcast. The podcast has helped me sell books in more ways than one. One way is that people who listened to the podcast bought my books. The other way is, making my podcast helped me write my books. This brings me to the reason I kept making my podcast, even after I realized it wasn’t a good business. Make for what making makes you In my sixteen years experimenting with different business models as an independent creator, I’ve settled on one thing that works: Make for what making makes you. If making a podcast, writing a book, sending a weekly newsletter – you name it – merely makes you money, and doesn’t make you who you want to be, what’s the point? Sure, sometimes you don’t feel like creating, and you do it anyway. Yes, sometimes you pick one project over another because you think it will be more lucrative. But you can only redirect the river that is your creativity so much before it overflows and returns to its natural path. I learned from my guests When I started Love Your Work, and was struggling to make it big enough to work with an ad model, even if I wasn’t bringing in lots of ad revenue, I was still connecting with and learning from my guests. It was an incredible privilege to have in-depth conversations with people like , , and . It was like having my own personal advisory board of heroes. Talking to them helped me learn how to go off the beaten path and find my calling. I was able to find patterns in their stories that I could apply to my own life and career. I would be a completely different person today if I hadn’t had those conversations. It was time to explore But there came a point when doing interviews was no longer serving me the way it once had. It was when I had gained the confidence – thanks to my previous guests – to explore further my own ideas. That’s when I stopped interviewing guests, so I’d have more time to explore. Love Your Work shifted from my personal advisory board to my personal sounding board – a sort of “open mic,” where I fleshed out ideas. I got to see how it felt to effortfully explore each idea. I got to hear how they sounded when I read them aloud. I got to feel how they resonated (or didn’t) with others. It helped me write my books A couple years after I started Love Your Work, I started writing a book called Getting Art Done. Getting Art Done turned out to be three books, two of which I’ve published. Love Your Work has been there to help me explore the ideas in these books. The Heart to Start was full of conversations from my early guests, and came from my very real struggles in gaining the confidence to take my ideas seriously enough to pursue them. Mind Management, Not Time Management came from my very real struggles to harness my creative energy and push my ideas forward. As I work on the final book in the Getting Art Done trilogy, Finish What Matters, I’m asking myself, What struggle does this book come from? Clearly, I’ve finished a lot of creative work: three books, over two-hundred consecutive , and over three-hundred episodes of this podcast. But as I’ve dwelt on that final word in the title, matters, I’m asking myself if I’m really working on what matters? Love Your Work and Getting Art Done have been an exploration in creative productivity. But at some point, writing about Resistance becomes a form of Resistance. I don’t feel I’ve reached that point yet, but I don’t want to. If I’m going to learn enough to write Finish What Matters, I have to really test my ideas of what matters. I’ve probably explored enough ideas, through Love Your Work, that I want to develop further in Finish What Matters. But for the time being, I need space to explore what matters. That’s the biggest reason I’m quitting Love Your Work. I had considered doing so in the past, but I kept hoping I’d know What’s Next before I quit. I’ve come to realize that I can’t know What’s Next until I have the space to explore. What’s Next is finding What’s Next It’s a little scary to have that void. But it’s also exciting. Furthermore, I’ve faced many times before: when I started on my own, after finishing each book, and a little bit after each podcast episode or newsletter. What’s scarier now than facing the void is that I’ll stick with what’s safe, and distract myself into dying with my best creations inside me. I could just say I’m taking a break, or not say anything at all and stop until I felt inspired to make a new episode. I’ve talked before about how I struggle to and close doors. So, I’m calling it quits, knowing I could always drop another episode in the feed down the line if I wanted to. But I hope I find something that matters more, before that ever happens. Thank you for listening! Thank you for listening to Love Your Work. Thank you especially to my Patreon supporters, who can of course feel free to stop supporting, or keep supporting for the bonus content, and to support What’s Next. To learn What’s Next once I find it, be sure to subscribe to my newsletter at kdv.co. One last time, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Image: About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of , and . Through the Love Your Work podcast, his , and David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Subscribe to Love Your Work New bonus content on Patreon! I've been adding lots of new content to Patreon. Show notes:
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307. A.I. Can't Bake
07/27/2023
307. A.I. Can't Bake
You’ve probably heard that, in a blind taste test, even experts can’t tell between white and red wine. Even if this were true – and it’s not – it wouldn’t matter. I was in Rome last month, visiting some paintings to research my next book, and stopped by the Sistine Chapel. I’ve spent a good amount of time studying what Michelangelo painted on that ceiling. There are lots of high-resolution images on Wikipedia. But seeing a picture is nothing like the experience of seeing the Sistine Chapel. You’ve invested thousands of dollars and spent fifteen hours on planes. You’re jet-lagged and your feet ache from walking 20,000 steps. You’re hot. When you enter, guards order you to keep moving, so you won’t block the door. They corral you to the center, and you can finally look up. When you hear wine experts can’t tell between white and red wine, you imagine the following: Professional sommeliers are blindfolded, and directed to taste two wines. They then make an informed guess which is white, and which is red. In this imaginary scenario, they get it right half the time – as well as if they had flipped a coin. If it were true wine experts couldn’t tell between white and red wine, the implication would be that the experience of tasting wine is separate from other aspects of the wine. That the color, the shape of the glass, the bottle, the label, and even the price of the wine are all insignificant. That they all distract from the only thing that matters: the taste of the wine. There’s some psychophysiological trigger that gets pulled when you tilt your head back. Maybe it stimulates your pituitary gland. When you have your head back and are taking in the images on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, you feel vulnerable. (You literally are . You can’t see what’s going on around you. You’d be easy to physically attack.) What you see is overwhelming. As you try to focus your attention on some detail, some other portion of the imagery calls out and redirects your attention. This happens again and again. After a while, your neck needs a rest, and you return your gaze to eye-level. And this is almost as cool as the ceiling: You see other people with their heads back, their eyes wide, mouths agape, hands on hearts, tears in eyes. You hear languages and see faces from all over the world. You realize they all, too, have invested thousands of dollars and spent fifteen hours on planes. They, too, are jet-lagged and hot and have walked 20,000 steps. You can look at pictures of the Sistine Chapel ceiling on the internet. You can experience it . In many ways, this is better than going to the Sistine Chapel. You can take as much time as you want, and look as close as you want. You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars and fifteen hours on a plane, take time off work, or even crane back your neck. But seeing the Sistine Chapel ceiling on the internet or even VR is only better than seeing it in person, in the way that a spoonful of granulated sugar when you’re starving is better than a hypothetical burger in another iteration of the multiverse. We’ve seen an explosion of AI capabilities in recent months. That has a lot of people worried about what it means to be a creator. Why do we need humans to write, for example, if ChatGPT can write? The reason ChatGPT’s writing is impressive is the same reason there’s still a place for things created by humans. Anyone old enough to have been on the internet in the heyday of America Online in the 1990s will remember this: When you were in a chat room, most the conversations were about being in a chat room: How long have you been on the internet? Isn’t the internet cool? What other chat rooms do you like? Part of the appeal of the question “ASL?” – Age, Sex, Location? – was marveling over the fact you were chatting in real-time with a stranger several states away. Or maybe you remember when Uber or Lyft first came to your town. For the first year or two, likely every conversation you had with a driver was about how long they had been driving, about how quickly the service had grown in your town, which is better – Uber or Lyft?, or which nearby cities got which services first. The first few months ChatGPT was out, it was seemingly the only thing anyone on the internet talked about. But it wasn’t because ChatGPT’s writing was amazing. ChatGPT is a bad writer’s idea of a good writer. It was because of the story: Wow, my computer is writing! Now that much of the novelty of ChatGPT has worn off, many of us are falling into the Trough of Disillusionment on the . We’re realizing ChatGPT is like a talking dog: It’s impressive the dog can appear to talk, but it’s not talking – it’s just saying the words it’s been taught. ChatGPT is very useful in some situations, but not as many as we had originally hoped. What made us talk about the internet while on the internet, talk about Uber while in Ubers, and talk about ChatGPT while chatting with ChatGPT was the story. Once the story behind the internet or Uber wore off, we started to appreciate them for their own utility. Part of what’s cool about seeing the Sistine Chapel ceiling in VR is that – we’re seeing it in VR. But even if that weren’t impressive, what would still be impressive about the paintings would be more than just that they’re amazing paintings. It’s incredible to us a human could paint such a massive expanse. We think about the stories and myths of Michelangelo, up on that scaffolding, painting in isolation. Part of our appreciation of the Sistine Chapel ceiling lies outside the ceiling itself. While marveling at it, we can’t help but think of Michelangelo’s other masterpieces, such as the David or the Pietà. Lloyd Richards spent fourteen years writing Stone Maidens, and had almost no sales for decades. Suddenly, he sold 65,000 copies in a month. He was interviewed on the TODAY show, and got a book deal with a major publisher. How did he do it? His daughter made a TikTok account. The first video showed Lloyd at his desk, and explained what a good dad he was, how hard he had worked on Stone Maidens, and how great it would be if he made some sales. Then the #BookTok community did the rest. Stone Maidens is apparently a good book. But it’s no better today than it was all those years it didn’t sell. Most the comments on Lloyd’s TikTok account – which now has over 400,000 followers – aren’t about what a great book Stone Maidens is. They’re about how Lloyd seems like such a nice guy, or how excited each commenter is to have contributed to his success. that started the myth that wine experts can’t taste the difference between white and red wine didn’t show that. The participants in the study literally weren’t allowed to describe the two wines the same way – they couldn’t use the same word for one as the other. It wasn’t blindfolded – it was a white wine versus the same wine, dyed red. The study wasn’t about taste at all: Participants weren’t allowed to taste the wine – they were only allowed to smell. And wine experts? That depends on your definition of “expert”. They were undergraduate students, studying wine. They knew more than most of us, but were far from the top echelon of wine professionals. Most damning for this myth was that the same study casually mentions doing an informal blind test: The success rate of their participants in distinguishing the taste of white versus red wine: 70%. That this myth is false shouldn’t detract from the point that even if it were true, it wouldn’t matter. What the authors of this study found was not that wine enthusiasts couldn’t tell between white and red wine, but that the appearance of a wine as white or red shaped their perceptions of the smell of the wine. Once you bake a cake, you can’t turn it back into flour, sugar, butter, and eggs. You can’t extract the taste of a wine from the color, the bottle, your mental image of where the grapes were grown and how the wine was made, or even the occasion for which you bought the wine. Something made by an AI can be awesome, either because it’s really good at doing what it’s supposed to, or because you appreciate it was made by an AI. Something made by a human is often awesome because of the story of the human who made it, and the story you as a human live as you interact with it. If you want to be relevant in the age of AI, learn how to bake your story into the product. Because AI can’t bake. Image: About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of , and . Through the Love Your Work podcast, his , and David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Subscribe to Love Your Work New bonus content on Patreon! I've been adding lots of new content to Patreon. Show notes:
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306. Summary: The Triumph of Doubt by David Michaels
07/13/2023
306. Summary: The Triumph of Doubt by David Michaels
We trust the food we eat, the drinks we drink, and the air we breathe are safe. That in case they’re unsafe, someone is working to minimize our exposure, or at least tell us the risks. In The Triumph of Doubt, former head of OSHA David Michaels reveals how companies fight for their rights to sell harmful products, expose workers to health hazards, and pollute the environment. They do it by manufacturing so-called “science.” Most this science is built not upon proving they’re not causing harm, but by doing whatever they can to cast doubt. Here, in my own words, is a summary of . Products we use every day cause harm Chances are you’ve cooked on a pan coated with Teflon. Teflon is one of many polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. When introduced in the 1940s, they were considered safe. We now know they’re linked with high cholesterol, poor immune function, cancer, obesity, birth defects, and low fertility. PFAS, it turns out, have such a long half-life, they’re called “forever chemicals.” PFAS can now be found in the blood of virtually all residents of the United States, and have been found in unsafe levels worldwide – in rainwater. You’ve probably heard that, in moderation, alcohol is actually good for you. But even one drink a day leads to higher overall mortality risk. More than one drink, greater risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer. Alcohol is a causal factor in 5% of deaths worldwide – about 3 million a year. 13.5% of deaths between ages 20–39 are alcohol-related. If you’re in pain after an injury or surgery, your doctor might prescribe for you an opioid. But the rise in opioid addiction is responsible for the first drop in U.S. life expectancy in more than two decades. It’s sent shockwaves throughout society. It’s helped launch the epidemics of fentanyl and heroin overdoses, and the number of children in foster care in West Virginia, for example, rose 42% in four years. You might love to watch professional football. But NFL players are nineteen times more likely to develop neurological disorders, and thirty percent could develop Alzheimer’s or dementia from taking so many hits. The “product defense” industry sows doubt How have they done it? How have companies been able to manufacture and sell products that cause so much harm, for so long? They do it by defending their products, when the safety of those products are questioned. On the surface, that’s not so bad. But besides lying and deliberately deceiving, they abuse society’s trust in so-called “science,” and our lack of understanding of how much we risk when we move forward while still in doubt. The tobacco industry is a pioneer of product defense There’s an entire industry that helps companies defend their products from regulation: It’s called, appropriately, product defense. The tobacco industry is most-known for its product defense. In 1953, John W. Hill of the PR firm Hill & Knowlton convinced the tobacco industry to start – one floor below his office in the Empire State Building – the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC). The TIRC was supposed to do rigorous scientific research to understand the health effects of smoking, but mostly they just attacked existing science, doing what they could to sow doubt. Just a few years earlier, in 1950, a study had found heavy smokers were fifty times as likely as nonsmokers to get lung cancer. With the help of the TIRC, it would take a long time for these health risks to influence public policy. About thirty years later, most states had restricted smoking in some public places such as auditoriums and government buildings. Smoking had proliferated in American culture when cigarettes had been provided in soldiers’ rations in WWI. Michaels describes one surgeon who, in 1919, made sure not to miss an autopsy of a man who had died of lung cancer, because it was the chance of a lifetime. He didn’t see another case of lung cancer for seventeen years, then saw eight within six months. All eight had started smoking while serving in the war. Today, more than a century after cigarettes were widely introduced, we’ve finally seen a massive reduction in smoking in the U.S. We can fly on planes and go to restaurants and even bars, without being exposed to secondhand smoke. The sugar industry has been at it even longer Predating the product defense efforts of the tobacco industry is actually the sugar industry. The Sugar Research Foundation was started in 1943. Scientific evidence first linked sugar with heart disease in the 1950s. In 1967, as told us, Harvard scientists published in the New England Journal of Medicine an article blaming fat rather than sugar for heart disease. Fifty years later UCSF researchers discovered the scientists had been funded by the Sugar Research Foundation – which they hadn’t disclosed. Even more misleadingly, they had disclosed funding that actually made them look more impartial – from the dairy industry. Companies and industries set up “astroturfing” organizations The Sugar Research Foundation and the Tobacco Industry Research Committee are are early examples of “astroturfing” organizations. This tactic of the product defense industry involves setting up organizations with innocent- or even charitable-sounding names, then doing low-quality research to defend a company or industry’s interests. The American Council for Science and Health has published articles opposing regulation of mercury emissions, and attacked science finding harm in consumption of sugar and alcohol. When the National Football League was first looking into the effects of playing their sport, they formed the MTBI. the “M” in MTBI gave away their stance: TBI stands for Traumatic Brain Injuries, and this committee formed for finding the effects of brain injuries was called the Mild Traumatic Brain Injuries committee. The alcohol industry set up the Alcoholic Beverage Medical Research Foundation. The first board of directors included Peter Stroh, William K. Coors, and August A. Busch III. Their first president, Thomas B. Turner, was former dean of Johns Hopkins University Medical School, a tie of which they made good use in promoting their agenda – more on that in a bit. The American Pain Foundation ran campaigns to make pain medication more widely available for veterans, running ads reminding patients of their “right” to pain treatment. Astroturfing organizations are funded by “Dark Money” Astroturfing organizations are funded by so-called “Dark Money”. In other words, they do whatever they can to hide where their funding comes from, lest their biases become obvious. The American Council for Science and Health claims much of their funding comes from private foundations, but investigative reports have found 58% of it coming straight from industry, and that many of those private foundations have ties to corporations. show a huge list of corporate donors including McDonald’s, 3M, and Coca-Cola. The NFL’s MTBI committee’s papers included a statement saying, “none of the Committee members has a financial or business relationship posing a conflict of interest.” Yet the committee consisted entirely of people on the NFL’s payroll: team physicians, athletic trainers, and equipment managers. Documents collected by the New York Times revealed that administrators at the The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism wanted to do a randomized clinical trial on the effects of alcohol. To fund the study, they went to industry, calling it “a unique opportunity to show that moderate alcohol consumption is safe.” They were going into the study with the conclusions already in mind, saying, “one of the important findings will be showing that moderate drinking is safe.” Several companies pledged nearly $68 million toward the $100 million budget. As part of the National Institutes of Health – a federal organization – the NIAAA was pitching this as a chance for the alcohol industry to use a government-funded study to prove their product was safe. Money directly from alcohol manufacturers was to be routed through the NIH Foundation, since it’s illegal for private companies to fund government studies. When the Senate Finance Committee began investigating ties between the American Pain Foundation and pharmaceutical companies, the APF quickly dissolved, apparently knowing what would be found otherwise. Besides private foundations, straight-up lying, and routing money through a federal foundation, another way of keeping money “dark” is by taking advantage of attorney-client privilege. By having the law firm pay accomplices, even if there’s a lawsuit, the documents are private. Using connections and flawed science to manufacture pseudo-events When corporations do get studies published about the risks of using their products, they’re often low-quality studies. If they don’t deliberately conceal their findings, they often use their connections to create what are essentially to prop up their flawed conclusions. Internal documents from DuPont show they knew the PFAS in Teflon was a problem. In 1970, they found it in their factory worker’s blood. In 1981, 3M told them it caused birth defects in rats, and DuPont’s own workers’ children had birth defects at a high rate. In 1991, DuPont set an internal safety limit of 1 ppb. Meanwhile, they found a local water district had three times that amount. In 2002, they set up a so-called “independent” panel in West Virginia, and set a safe limit at 150 times their own internal safety limit – so they’d have less-strict standards for polluting their community’s drinking water. In 2016, the Environmental Protection Agency set a safe limit of 70 ppt (trillion!) – less than one-one-hundredth DuPont’s previous internal safety limit. The NFL did very little for many years to ask serious questions about the long-term effects on their players. When players Junior Seau and Dave Duerson committed suicide, they both shot themselves in the chest instead of the head, so their brain tissue could be studied after their deaths. The MTBI argued that players were clearly fine if they returned to play shortly after concussions. They abused the concept of , arguing that those who didn’t drop out of football in college or high school and made it to the pros were more resistant to brain injury. The editor of the journal, Neurosurgery, which published MTBI’s papers, was a medical consultant to the New York Giants, and later to the commissioner’s office – a clear conflict of interest. I mentioned earlier the first president of the alcohol industry’s ABMRF was a former dean of Johns Hopkins. When ABMRF published a study, the Johns Hopkins press office would issue a press-release, which would instantly make the study seem more credible. One of the studies that has proliferated throughout media and culture, finding that moderate alcohol use is actually good for you, was a door-to-door survey – a very flawed methodology. Non-drinkers in a study are likely to include people who don’t drink because they’re already sick, or are former abusers of alcohol. One of the main “papers” the pharma industry used to defend their positions that opioids had a low risk of addiction was, from 1980, a five-sentence letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. It’s a letter, not a paper – there was no peer review. It has been cited hundreds of times in medical literature – often by researchers with ties to opioid manufacturers. TIME magazine unfortunately (This is a great example of a : the proliferation of flawed information throughout media made it accepted as true.) The double-standard in access to study data The papers that do get published by the product-defense industry are usually not original studies. They’re often reanalysis of existing data. Industry takes advantage of the Shelby Amendment, which the tobacco industry promoted under the guise of concern over pollution. The Shelby Amendment requires federally-funded researchers to share any data they collect. In this way, industry can reanalyze the data in ways that arrive at any conclusion they want. So, “re-analysis” has its own cottage industry within product defense. When industry does conduct original studies, they don’t have to share their data, and so it isn’t subject to the same scrutiny. Manufacturing doubt in other industries The Triumph of Doubt goes on and on with examples of deception and collusion from various industries. Some other highlights: Volkswagen installed a device in their diesel cars to detect when their emissions were being tested. The device would activate, causing the car to pollute forty times less, only when being tested. Johnson & Johnson knew as early as 1971 their baby powder was contaminated with asbestiform particles – asbestos-like particles that cause cancer – but pressured scientists to not report them. Monsanto publishes many studies in Critical Reviews in Toxicology, which Michaels calls “a known haven for science produced by corporate consultants.” Many authors have done work for Monsanto, don’t disclose their conflicts of interest, and have denied Monsanto had reviewed their papers – later litigation showed they had. Should chemicals be innocent until proven guilty? There’s a concept called the precautionary principle. It states that when we know little about what the consequences of an action will be, we should err on the side of caution. If a new chemical is developed, we should wait before we let it get into our food and water. If a new technology is invented, we should wait until we introduce it to society. In criminal courts, a defendant is innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. We like this, because we hate the idea of someone being thrown in jail despite being innocent. And we can physically remove someone dangerous from society and more or less stop them from continuing to harm others. Criminal harm can be halted, chemical harm cannot But this is also our policy for chemicals, drugs, and potentially dangerous activities. We have an extremely high bar for deciding something is harmful enough we should reduce our exposure to it. OSHA – the Occupational Safety and Health Administration – has exposure limits for only 500 of the many thousands of chemicals used in commerce. Because the regulatory process is so onerous, Michaels says, in the half-century OSHA has been around, they’ve updated only twenty-seven of those 500. Yet, as with PFAS, even after we start reducing our exposure, the effects of harmful substances keep going. As one Stockholm University scientist has said about PFAS in rainwater, “We just have to wait...decades to centuries.” And, unlike a criminal court, where the only people motivated to keep from punishing a defendant are the defendant’s lawyers and family members, huge networks of people stand to profit from harmful products – executives, shareholders, and entire industries have the incentives to conspire and collude. Balancing harm with innovation On the other hand, the precautionary principle can slow or halt innovation. Many products that may be harmful may also be useful. Teflon and other PFAS have a . Supposedly it’s been replaced by other chemicals in cookware – though they’re probably similar (taking advantage of loopholes in the slow regulatory process). Supposedly exposure potential from cooking is low – but you know now how hard it is to “trust the science.” As horrifying as some of these abuses of science are, you can’t be horrified by them without at least some sympathy for those who didn’t want to get the COVID vaccine: If a product is immediately harmful to everyone who takes it, that’s easy to prove. But could it harm some people in the long term? It’s nearly impossible to be sure. There’s more money and power behind sowing reasonable doubt than behind exposing sources of harm. Meanwhile, it’s easy to sow and abuse the existence of doubt, and that’s why it’s the main tactic used in product defense. There’s your summary of The Triumph of Doubt If you liked this summary, you’ll probably like . As a career regulator, Michaels comes off as somewhat biased, clearly partisan at times, a little shrill with his use of dramatic terms such as “Big Tobacco” and “Big Sugar.” Get ready for lots of alphabet soup, as you try to keep track of the myriad agencies and foundations identified by acronyms. Because of media’s key role in the doubt-sowing Michaels writes about, I’ll be adding this as an honorable mention on my list. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of , and . Through the Love Your Work podcast, his , and David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Subscribe to Love Your Work New bonus content on Patreon! I've been adding lots of new content to Patreon. Show notes:
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305. Hedgehogs and Foxes
06/29/2023
305. Hedgehogs and Foxes
According to philosopher Isaiah Berlin, people think in one of two different ways: They’re either hedgehogs, or foxes. If you think like a hedgehog, you’ll be more successful as a communicator. If you think like a fox, you’ll be more accurate. Isaiah Berlin coined the hedgehog/fox dichotomy (via Archilochus) In Isaiah Berlin’s 1953 essay, he quotes the ancient Greek poet, Archilochus: The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one thing. Berlin describes this as “one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general.” How are “hedgehogs” and “foxes” different? According to Berlin, hedgehogs relate everything to a single central vision. Foxes pursue many ends, often unrelated or even contradictory. If you’re a hedgehog, you explain the world through a focused belief or area of expertise. Maybe you’re a chemist, and you see everything as chemical reactions. Maybe you’re highly religious, and everything is “God’s will.” If you’re a fox, you explain the world through a variety of lenses. You may try on conflicting beliefs for size, or use your knowledge in a wide variety of fields to understand the world. You explain things as From this perspective, X. But on the other hand, Y. It’s also worth considering Z. The seminal hedgehog/fox essay is actually about Leo Tolstoy Even though this dichotomy Berlin presented has spread far and wide, his essay is mostly about Leo Tolstoy, and the tension between his fox-like tendencies and hedgehog-like aspirations. In Tolstoy’s War and Peace, he writes: In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself. Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity. In War and Peace, Tolstoy presents characters who act as if they have control over the events of history. In Tolstoy’s view, the events that make history are too complex to be controlled. Extending this theory outside historical events, Tolstoy also writes: When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it? Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur. Is Tolstoy a fox, or a hedgehog? He acknowledges the complexity with which various events are linked – which is very fox-like. But he also seems convinced these events are so integrated with one another that nothing can change them. They’re “predetermined” – a “coincidence of conditions.” A true hedgehog might have a simple explanation, such as that gravity caused the apple to fall. Tolstoy loved concrete facts and causes, such as the pull of gravity, yet still yearned to find some universal law that could be used to . According to Berlin: It is not merely that the fox knows many things. The fox accepts that he can only know many things and that the unity of reality must escape his grasp. And this was Tolstoy’s downfall. Early in his life, he presented profound insights about the world through novels such as War and Peace and Anna Karenina. That was very fox-like. Later in his life, he struggled to condense his deep knowledge about the world and human behavior into overarching theories about moral and ethical issues. As Berlin once wrote to a friend, Tolstoy was “a fox who terribly believed in hedgehogs and wished to vivisect himself into one.” Other hedgehogs and foxes in Berlin’s essay Other thinkers Berlin classifies as foxes include Aristotle, Goethe, and Shakespeare. Other thinkers Berlin classifies as hedgehogs include Dante, Dostoevsky, and Plato. What does the hedgehog/fox dichotomy have to do with the animals? What does knowing many things have to do with actual foxes? What does knowing one big thing have to do with actual hedgehogs? A fox is nimble and clever. It can run fast, climb trees, dig holes, swim across rivers, stalk prey, or hide from predators. A hedgehog mostly relies upon its ability to roll into a ball and ward off intruders. Foxes tell the future, hedgehogs get credit What are the consequences of being a fox or a hedgehog? According to Phil Tetlock, foxes are better at telling the future, while hedgehogs get more credit for telling the future. In Tetlock’s 2005 book, , he shared his findings from forecasting tournaments he held in the 1980s and 90s. Experts made 30,000 predictions about political events such as wars, economic growth, and election results. Then Tetlock tracked the performances of those predictions. What he found led to the U.S. intelligence community holding forecasting tournaments, tracking more than one million forecasts. Tetlock’s own won the forecasting tournament, outperforming even intelligence analysts with access to classified data. Better a fox than an expert These forecasting tournaments have shown that whether someone can make accurate predictions about the future doesn’t depend upon their field of expertise, their status within the field, their political affiliation, or philosophical beliefs. It doesn’t matter if you’re a political scientist, a journalist, a historian, or have experience implementing policies. As the intelligence community’s forecasting tournaments have shown, it doesn’t even matter if you have access to classified information. What matters is your style of reasoning: Foxes make more accurate predictions than hedgehogs. Across the board, experts were barely better than chance at predicting what would or wouldn’t happen. Will a new tax plan spur or slow the economy? Will the Cold War end? Will Iran run a nuclear test? Generally, it didn’t matter if they were an economist, an expert on the Soviet Union, or a political scientist. That didn’t guarantee they’d be better than chance at predicting what would happen. What did matter is whether they thought like a fox. Foxes are: deductive, open-minded, less-biased Foxes are skeptical of grand schemes – the sort of “theories of everything” Tolstoy had hoped to construct. They didn’t see predicting events as a top-down, deductive process. They saw it as a bottom-up, inductive process – stitching together diverse and conflicting sources of information. Foxes were curious and open-minded. They didn’t go with the tribe. A liberal fox would be more open to thinking the Cold War could have gone on longer with a second Carter administration. A conservative fox would be more open to believing the Cold War could have ended just as quickly under Carter as it did under Reagan. Foxes were less prone to hindsight bias – less likely to remember their inaccurate predictions as accurate. They were less prone to the bias of cognitive conservatism – maintaining their beliefs after making an inaccurate prediction. As one fox said: Whenever I start to feel certain I am right... a little voice inside tells me to start worrying. —A “fox” Hedgehogs are: deductive, close-minded, more-biased (yet more successful) As for inaccurate predictions, one simple test tracked with whether an expert made accurate predictions: a Google search. If an expert was more famous – as evinced by having more results show up on Google when searching their name – they tended to be less accurate. Think about the talking-head people that get called onto MSNBC or Fox News (pun, albeit inaccurate, not intended) to make quick comments on the economy, wars, and elections – those people. Experts who made more media appearances, and got more gigs consulting with governments and businesses, were actually less accurate at making predictions than their colleagues who were toiling in obscurity. And these experts who were more successful – in terms of media appearances and consulting gigs – also tended to be hedgehogs. Hedgehogs see making predictions as a top-down deductive process. They’re more likely to make sweeping generalizations. They take the “one big thing” they know – say, being an expert on the Soviet Union – and view everything through that lens. Even if it’s to explain something in other domains. Hedgehogs are more-biased about the world, and about themselves. They were more likely than foxes to remember inaccurate predictions they had made, as accurate. They were more likely to remember as inaccurate, predictions their opponents made that were accurate. Rather than change their beliefs, when presented with challenging evidence hedgehog’s beliefs got stronger. Are hedgehogs playing a different game? It’s tempting to take that and run with it: The close-minded hedgehogs of the world are inaccurate. Success doesn’t track with skill. Tetlock is careful to caution that hedgehogs aren’t always worse than foxes at telling the future. Also, there are good reasons to be overconfident in predictions. As one hedgehog political pundit wrote to Tetlock: You play a publish-or-perish game run by the rules of social science.... You are under the misapprehension that I play the same game. I don’t. I fight to preserve my reputation in a cutthroat adversarial culture. I woo dumb-ass reporters who want glib sound bites. —“Hedgehog” political pundit A hedgehog has a lot to gain from making bold predictions and being right, and nobody holds them accountable when they’re wrong. But according to Tetlock, nothing in the data indicates hedgehogs and foxes are equally good forecasters who merely have different tastes for under- and over-prediction. As Tetlock says: Quantitative and qualitative methods converge on a common conclusion: foxes have better judgement than hedgehogs. —Phil Tetlock, Expert Political Judgement Hedgehogs may make better leaders As bad as hedgehogs look now, there are some real benefits to hedgehogs. They’re more-focused. They don’t get as distracted when a situation is ambiguous. So, hedgehogs are more decisive. They’re harder to manipulate in a negotiation, and more willing to make controversial decisions that could make enemies. And that confidence can help them lead others. Overall, hedgehogs are better at getting their messages heard. Given the today, that means the messages we hear from either side of the political spectrum are those of the hedgehogs. Hedgehog thinking makes better sound bites, satisfies the human desire for clarity and certainty, and is easier for algorithms to categorize and distribute. , and nuance is cut out of the messages by the characteristics of the mediums. Which increases polarization. But, there is hope for the foxes. While the media landscape is still dominated by hedgehog messages that work as social media clips, there are more channels with more room for intellectually-honest discourse: blogs, podcasts, and books. And if many a ChatGPT conversation is any indication, the algorithms may get more sophisticated and remind us, “it’s important to consider....” Hedgehogs, be foxes! And foxes, hedgehogs. If you’re a hedgehog, you’re lucky: What you have to say has a better chance of being heard. But it will have a better chance of being correct if you think like a fox once in a while: consider different angles, and assume you’re wrong. If you’re a fox, you have your work cut out for you: You may have important – and accurate – things to say, but they have less a chance of being heard. Your message will travel farther if you think like a hedgehog once in a while: assume you’re right, cut out the asides, and say it with confidence. Image: About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of , and . Through the Love Your Work podcast, his , and David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Subscribe to Love Your Work New bonus content on Patreon! I've been adding lots of new content to Patreon. Show notes:
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304. Too Many Ideas, Must Pick One
06/15/2023
304. Too Many Ideas, Must Pick One
Many creators and aspiring creators struggle not because they don’t have enough ideas, but because they have too many. Their situations, in summary, are “Too many ideas, must pick one.” Embedded in this belief are assumptions that, if challenged, can help you feel as if you have just enough ideas. In my recent AMA, I got a question I’m asked about creativity, probably more than any other: How can you pick a creative project when you have too many ideas? I’ve experienced, “too many ideas, must pick one,” many times. I still often do. I of course , but here I’ll answer more in-depth. This is the thought process I guide myself through when I’m in the land of “too many ideas, must pick one.” There are three assumptions embedded in, “too many ideas, must pick one.” All these ideas are equally likely to succeed. I’m equally capable of succeeding at each of these ideas. I can’t work on multiple ideas at once. Let’s look at each of those. Assumption 1: “All these ideas are equally likely to succeed” If you feel you have too many ideas, you must think they’re equally likely to succeed, which is the first assumption. That might not sound correct at first, but think about it. If you were starving, and only allowed to eat one of various sandwiches, you would probably pick the biggest and most calorie-rich. You might not be able to tell so easily which is the biggest and most calorie-rich sandwich. In fact, there may be other factors that play into your decision. Maybe the avocado and pork belly sandwich is the most calorie-rich, but you’re craving roasted duck in this moment, and there happens to be a roasted-duck sandwich amongst the selections. While satisfying your hunger is one objective of choosing a sandwich, there are other goals in mind, such as satisfying cravings, which may compete with one another. If you have a hard time deciding amongst all the sandwiches, you expect eating one sandwich to be equally likely to succeed as eating any of the others. As with projects, “success” may come in many forms. We’ll get to that in a bit. Assumption 2: “I’m equally capable of succeeding at each of these ideas” If you feel you have too many ideas, you must think you’re equally capable of succeeding at each of these ideas, which is the second assumption. If assumption one weren’t correct, and you didn’t feel each idea were equally likely to succeed, you would probably pick the one most likely to succeed. The avocado and pork belly sandwich would clearly be more filling than peanut butter and jelly. Now, if you weren’t equally capable of eating each of the sandwiches, that would make your decision easier. If you’re choosing between avocado and pork belly and peanut butter and jelly, but you’re a strict vegetarian, the decision is easy. Same if you’re not a vegetarian, but allergic to peanuts. But since you feel each idea is equally likely to succeed, and you feel you’re equally capable of succeeding at all of them, you feel you have too many ideas. As with projects, you may have little information about your capability of succeeding, which is why, for all you know, your capability to succeed is equal across all ideas. We’ll untangle that later. Assumption 3: “I can’t work on multiple ideas at once” If you feel you have “too many ideas,” you feel they’re equally likely to succeed and you’re equally capable of succeeding at each of them. If you feel you “must pick one,” you feel you can’t work on multiple ideas at once, which is the third assumption. In our sandwich scenario, you’ve been told you have to pick one sandwich. If there’s no one else around and the sandwiches will go to waste otherwise, you might as well taste all the sandwiches, then pick one. Or eat a little of each, until you’re full. But, in that case, you wouldn’t finish any of the sandwiches. Challenging the assumptions With all three of these assumptions, you’re in a deadlock. Your ideas are equally likely to succeed, you’re equally capable of succeeding at each, and you must pick one. Well, how can you pick one if they’re all equally appealing ideas? There are five questions that can help you challenge these assumptions: What is success? What is my risk profile? What am I good at? What’s necessary to succeed? What pain do I pick? Let’s look at each of these. Question 1: “What is success?” Success can come in many forms. Maybe you want to make the most money possible. Maybe you want the most freedom possible. Maybe you want to do what you’re most passionate about. You may feel each idea is equally likely to succeed, because each idea is likely to get a different kind of success. One sandwich will fill you up, another will taste great, still another seems like the healthy choice. If you have a clearer picture of what forms of success are more important to you than others, your many ideas will no longer be “equally likely to succeed.” Question 2: “What is my risk profile?” Not only can success come in many forms, it can come with various risk profiles. One idea may have a big chance of bringing you mild success. Another idea may have a small chance of bringing you wild success. The overall of each idea may be the same, but the risk profiles may be very different. Some are . There are also various things you may risk in pursuing an idea. Mostly, what I call “TOM” – Time, Optionality, and Money. If you are young, healthy, and with no commitments, you have a lot of Optionality, but you might not have much Money. Making enough Money to live may take up much of your day-to-day Time. You can try a crazy idea, so long as it doesn’t take up too much Time and Money. If you fail, you’ll still have plenty of Optionality. Or, you might want to make some changes that reduce your Optionality, but free up your Time. For example, I live in South America, which limits my options for anything requiring physical presence, but it has reduced my need for Money, thus freeing up my Time. On the other hand, you may be in your sixties, retired after a successful career. You have plenty of Money and Time, but less Optionality than when you were in your twenties. You can only take on so many big projects in the rest of your life, and you may not have the energy you used to. But, you may feel you have nothing to lose by trying a wild idea. If you have a clearer picture of what your risk profile is, not all your ideas will seem “equally likely to succeed.” Question 3: “What am I good at?” Even if all your ideas seem equally likely to fit your definition of success and fit your risk profile, you’re probably better at some things than others. If you have a clear picture of what you’re good at, the assumption that you’re “equally capable of succeeding at each of these ideas” will no longer make sense. It may be that you don’t know what you’re good at, likely because you don’t feel you have information to tell you what you’re good at. You probably have more information available than you think. Think about times in the past when someone was impressed with or complimented you on something you did, which came to you naturally. Or, ask your friends what they think you’re good at. If you really don’t have information on what you’re good at, relative to your many ideas, then the third assumption, “I can’t work on multiple ideas at once,” no longer makes sense. In this case, you can and should work on multiple ideas, to get an idea what you’re good at. If you feel your ideas are too big to work on more than one, scale them back into smaller ideas. Don’t fall for “The Fortress Fallacy,” like I talked about in . Instead of building a fortress, try building a cottage. It’s important to remember that what you’re good at is not necessarily what you’re best at, nor what you most enjoy. This will make more sense as we answer the last two questions that challenge the three assumptions. Question 4: “What’s necessary to succeed?” In reality, you probably don’t have a clear picture of how likely all your ideas are to succeed, nor how capable you are of succeeding at each. You have to ask of each, What’s necessary to succeed? What’s necessary to succeed at an idea is usually very different from what attracts you to the idea in the first place. You may love to play music. You may even love to play music in front of an audience. But will you love driving around the country, sleeping in a van, lugging gear, and dealing with curmudgeonly AV techs at each venue? You may love the idea of signing books for adoring fans at the local Barnes & Noble. But will you love sitting in a room by yourself, writing several hours a day? It’s worth noting that what most people in a domain think is necessary to succeed may not be. Lots can change in the industry, and changes in can open up opportunities to succeed without doing some things that were once necessary. For example, thanks to , I don’t have to write boring book proposals or get countless rejection letters to succeed as an author. Question 5: “What pain do I pick?” You may be really good at what’s necessary to succeed at an idea that has a good chance of meeting your definition of success. But there may be some things necessary to succeed that you don’t enjoy. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pursue the idea. No matter what you do, there will be some parts of it you aren’t crazy about – especially at first. When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was draw. But making a living at drawing as an adult doesn’t fit my risk profile, and what’s necessary to succeed would interfere with parts of my definition of success: I can’t travel if I have to lug around supplies and artwork, and if I do all my work on a computer, then I’m chained to a computer. I didn’t used to like to write, but I found out I’m reasonably good at it. Forcing myself to write each morning was painful at first, but through , it’s transformed into a strangely enjoyable sort of pain. Additionally, there are parts of making a living writing that I don’t like, or at least didn’t at first. My first one-star review shook me for days, but now I can brush them off relatively quickly. Same with angry emails from readers. I used to really hate bookkeeping, but now that I write monthly , I actually look forward to tallying up my earnings. Do you really “have too many ideas,” and must you “pick one”? After all this, you may realize you don’t have “too many ideas,” and you don’t really have to “pick one.” If you don’t feel you have enough information to form a clear picture of the odds of success and your capability of success, even after asking these five questions, then you need more information. You get more information not by choosing one idea, but by pursuing many. You’ll more clearly see what has a chance of succeeding and what you’re capable of succeeding at, and choosing one – or several – will become easy. Image: About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of , and . Through the Love Your Work podcast, his , and David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Subscribe to Love Your Work New bonus content on Patreon! I've been adding lots of new content to Patreon. Show notes:
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303. Livestream/AMA: Publishing Outside Amazon, Focusing Curiosity, and Mind Management
06/01/2023
303. Livestream/AMA: Publishing Outside Amazon, Focusing Curiosity, and Mind Management
Today I have a special episode for you. If you missed , I’m delivering it right to your ears. In this AMA, I answered questions about: What’s the best self-publishing platform, and how did I publish 100-Word Writing Habit, non standard-sized, outside of Amazon? Buenos Aires versus Medellín, which is better for mind management? How to pick a creative project when you have too many ideas? What’s surprised me most in the past two years? What task management software do I use for mind management? How to focus on one project when you have multiple curiosities? How to keep from falling down a research rabbit-hole? How many half-formed ideas do I have captured somewhere? There are some parts where I refer to visuals, for the best experience, . About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of , and . Through the Love Your Work podcast, his , and David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Subscribe to Love Your Work New bonus content on Patreon! I've been adding lots of new content to Patreon. Show notes:
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302. The Four Sources of Shiny Object Syndrome
05/18/2023
302. The Four Sources of Shiny Object Syndrome
can be evidence of a problem, or it can be a normal part of the creative process. If you can identify the four sources of shiny object syndrome, you can tell the difference between being lost, or simply exploring. Three first three sources are problems The first three of the four sources of shiny object syndrome hold you back from finishing projects. They are: ambition, perfectionism, and distraction. Ambitious shiny object syndrome is starting projects that far outpace your abilities and resources. Perfectionistic shiny object syndrome is endlessly tweaking a project that could otherwise be called done. Distracted shiny object syndrome is juggling so many projects, you finish none. Before we get to the fourth source, a bit more about these three most dangerous sources. Ambitious shiny object syndrome You probably have a friend with ambitious shiny object syndrome. One day they proclaimed they were writing an epic fantasy novel. A few months later, they had dropped that and had a new plan: a feature film. A few months after that, they were starting a health-tech startup. All the while, you were shaking your head, because your friend clearly didn’t have the experience or resources to take on these projects. They were writing the epic fantasy novel, yet had never written a short story. They were working on the feature film, yet had never made a short film. They were working on the health-tech startup, yet had no experience in technology, the health industry, nor raising funding. Delusional optimism can be an asset. Maybe your friend will get lucky, and one of these projects will click. They’re more likely to get struck by lightning. Instead, you know what’s coming when you ask how the latest project is going. They’ve abandoned that, and are taking on something new. Conveniently, your friend always has a great excuse for why. They find a scapegoat: You can’t get a million dollars for a feature-film without a rich uncle. They claim to have never been serious about it in the first place: Oh, that silly book? I was just dabbling. More likely, they shift the conversation to another subject: Oh my god, did you see the article about the celebrity! If they had about their potential success in the project, you could hold them accountable. Yet they didn’t, so you have to take their word for it. Interestingly, you’ll never hear, That was foolish taking on that – I didn’t know what I was doing! Perfectionistic shiny object syndrome Or maybe you have a friend with perfectionistic shiny object syndrome. They endlessly tweak a project that could otherwise be called done. The “shiny objects” in this case aren’t other projects, but rather details within one project. Your perfectionist friend has one project they’ve been clinging to for years. Their novel has been through eleven revisions. It started as a memoir, but after becoming an urban-fantasy novel, it’s now a thriller. They had a great-looking cover for each of these. But they’ve changed some details about the plot since the latest world-building workshop they traveled to attend, and they want to try a different cover designer. But before they spend money on another cover, they want to decide whether they’re going to publish in places besides Amazon, because that affects the design specs. So they’re taking a cohort-based course so they can ask a successful author what she thinks. There’s nothing you could tell your friend to get them to ship this project. By now, they could be on their third book, having learned lessons from the previous two. Instead, they’ve convinced themself it has to be perfect. Distracted shiny object syndrome Or maybe you have a friend with distracted shiny object syndrome. They’re taking on projects they could conceivably complete, given their skills and resources. They don’t seem to suffer from perfectionism, but you can’t tell, because none of their projects get anywhere near the finish line. Instead, once they make a little progress on one project, they switch to another, then another. Once their screenplay is completed for their short film, they start recording demos for their album. Once they’ve recorded demos for their album, they write their memoir. Once they’ve finished a draft of their memoir, they’re writing a business plan for a non-profit. This “friend” may be you, and it certainly has been me. is difficult to cure, because these sources are often mixed together. You may take on projects that are too ambitious, but also be distracted by the many other projects you’re taking on. The perfectionism that is keeping you from shipping one project, may divert you to one overly-ambitious project, or a mixture of smaller projects. The fourth source is only natural Yet there is a fourth source of shiny object syndrome that doesn’t have to keep you from finishing projects: Natural shiny object syndrome. Natural shiny object syndrome is the diversions and dead-ends that are a natural part of the creative process. When you’re being creative and innovative, by definition, you are going to try some things that don’t work, or need to explore new areas with which you aren’t familiar. [Projects are like halfpipes.] It’s fun and easy to skate into a halfpipe – to start a project. But once you’re trying to skate out of the halfpipe, you’ve run out of momentum. It’s more fun and easy to skate into a new halfpipe – to start a new project, or tweak a new aspect of the existing project. But in the natural course of being creative and innovative, you’ll also start new halfpipes. When Leonardo da Vinci developed his painting style, he skated into many halfpipes. To accurately depict light and shade in his paintings, he systematically studied the way light traveled through the atmosphere, and interacted with objects. This led him into other fields, such as optics, fluid dynamics, and geometry. Leonardo da Vinci’s natural shiny object syndrome In fact, one of Leonardo’s most pre-eminent observations in astronomy greatly informed his painting style. He correctly theorized that the light area on the dark side of the moon was created by light reflecting from the sun, off the earth. By understanding how light worked, he was able to make paintings with an unprecedented sense of realism. The “earthshine” caused by light reflecting from the earth is the same phenomenon that causes a lighter area within the shadow on the underside of the chin of the Mona Lisa. That’s caused by light being reflected off her upper chest. Okay, so Leonardo had the other sources, too . In addition to the natural shiny object syndrome he experienced, he also had shiny object syndrome from the rest of the four sources. He had ambitious shiny object syndrome, such as when, over the course of decades, he failed twice to cast in bronze the largest-ever horse statue. He had perfectionistic shiny object syndrome, such as the fact that he never delivered the Mona Lisa to his client. He instead carried it around fifteen years, until he died, and well after it could have easily been called done. He had distracted shiny object syndrome, which caused him to run around Italy, trying to please his clients in art, architecture, and engineering. Don’t fight the fourth source You can do something about most sources of shiny object syndrome. If you have ambitious shiny object syndrome, take on smaller projects. You can use the . If you have perfectionistic shiny object syndrome, simply ship your project. Recognize . Like Maya Angelou said, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” If you have distracted shiny object syndrome, pick a project, and finish it. Build your as you work your way up to larger projects. But even if you clear those sources away, you’ll still have to live with natural shiny object syndrome. To connect ideas from disparate fields, you need to wander into them. To find out what works, you have to try some things that won’t. Image: About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of , and . Through the Love Your Work podcast, his , and David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Subscribe to Love Your Work Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Show notes:
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301. 1,500 Words on Writing a 5-Word Tweet
05/04/2023
301. 1,500 Words on Writing a 5-Word Tweet
Writing a tweet is a microcosm of . If you think deeply and carefully about every word in a tweet, and what the tweet as a whole communicates, you can extend those skills to all your writing. In this article, I’ll break down how to think about every word in a tweet, nearly tripling its performance. Step 1: The first-impression tweet The tweet we’ll work on came to me like most tweets, a thought that popped into my head. It was this: Ironically, strong opinions are the ones that are easily argued against. I could have just tweeted that. But I’ve made a habit of instead writing down my first-impression tweets in a scratch file, and later working on them before publishing. Here’s what my thought process looks like. As a tweet, this phrase is a little wordy, and weak. It starts somewhat nonsensically with an adverb: “Ironically.” What action is being performed ironically? Step 2: Improving word economy There are also some extra words that could be cut out. Do we have to refer to “strong opinions” again, by using the word “ones”? The word “that” is often not necessary, and it doesn’t seem necessary here. If we cut out all those extra words, we end up with: Strong opinions are easily argued against. Step 3: Adding back in meaning That’s shorter, more elegant, and economic. But now it’s weaker. It’s a simple statement of fact, without presenting what’s remarkable about that fact, or how anyone should feel about it. At least when it said, “ironically,” it pointed out the irony that strong opinions are those that are easily argued against. Also, since I’ve removed the second reference to “strong opinions” by removing the word “ones,” the statement no longer pits “strong opinions” against other types of opinions. Before, I was implying the existence of opinions that weren’t strong, and describing what was different about opinions that were. Our shortened statement is also in the passive voice, which makes it weaker. “Strong opinions are easily argued against,” by whom? Who is doing the arguing? It would be more direct to say: It’s easier to argue against strong opinions. But still, this statement doesn’t pit strong opinions against other types of opinions. Fixing that, we could instead say: Of all opinions, strong ones are easiest to argue against. Finally, I think we at least have an improvement over the original, “Ironically, strong opinions are the ones that are easily argued against.” It’s more direct, and pits strong opinions against opinions at-large. It also has the important quality, in tweet format, of delivering the most surprising – or ironic – thing about the statement at the end. There’s a bit of misdirection in this statement. We’ve addressed all opinions, homed in on the strong ones, which primes you to expect them to be lauded in some way. Instead, the statement points out the irony that what makes an opinion “strong” is that it’s easy to argue against. Step 4: Tweaking for the audience But this tweet is still not ready. The most glaring problem is, nowhere in the tweet is the term, “strong opinions,” and, as a tweet, that’s where its potential lies. “Strong opinions” is a term in the parlance of some sections of Twitter. This term became popular after , where he advocated for, “strong opinions, weakly held.” By trying to be economical with words in our tweet, we’ve broken apart this term. In our latest iteration, “Of all opinions, strong ones are easiest to argue against,” it’s simply referred to as “strong ones.” Depending upon how prevalent the term “strong opinions” is in the minds of our audience members, we could stick with that more subtle hint. Sometimes that’s more effective. In my experience, on Twitter, you have to bash people over the head with what you’re saying to cut through the noise. So we could instead say: Of all opinions, strong opinions are easiest to argue against. We’ve replaced “strong ones” with “strong opinions.” It’s less economical, but includes the term “strong opinions,” pits them against opinions at-large, and delivers the counterintuitive element at the end, like the punchline of a joke. Step 5: What are we trying to say? This is probably as economically as we can write this, meeting that criteria. But it’s still not ready. Now it’s not clear from this observation how the author wants us to feel about strong opinions. It’s, ironically, not a strong opinion. Is the upshot that you shouldn’t hold strong opinions? Is it that when you hold strong opinions, you have to be comfortable with the fact they are easy to argue against? What makes an opinion “strong,” anyway? Is it the force with with which you express the opinion? If so, the statement, “strong opinions, weakly held” would mean you express the opinion with force, but are quick to change it if presented with contrary evidence. Or maybe it means that you should take decisive action on your opinions, and if that action presents you with contrary evidence, you should change your opinion and act accordingly? Now we’re starting to get to what I, as an author, really think – which is like an excavation to discover, Where did this idea come from in the first place? My personal opinion is that to hold a strong opinion, you have to be faking. There are . Having a strong opinion is a very “hedgehog” way of being, and hedgehogs are scientifically proven to be wrong. Yet if you express your honest opinion – which is to be more like a “fox” than a hedgehog – you’re essentially expressing no opinion at all. Instead, you’re exploring thoughts around a potential opinion. Given today, few who see what you have to say when expressing your fox-like opinion will interact with it. And because few will interact with it, fewer will see it. So in a way, to be fox-like in media is doing oneself a disservice. Your message doesn’t get seen, and since nobody can disagree with your non-opinion, you learn less. It’s beneficial to masquerade as a hedgehog on social media, but be a fox in your private intellectual life. What’s our angle? It’s at this point in revising a tweet, where I often step back and write plainly the sub-text of what I’m trying to say. One angle is, In your pursuit of learning, you have to pretend to have strong opinions, because strong opinions are the easiest to argue against – which helps you collect information. Another angle is that When you express a strong opinion, be ready to be disagreed with, because strong opinions are by definition the easiest to argue against. So now I have two potential angles: “You should pretend to have an opinion.” “When you express your opinion, be ready for criticism.” Since this is a tweet, the sub-text of the tweet is very important. Because of , people will not like or retweet something that makes them look bad. The “You should pretend to have an opinion” angle is weak, because to retweet something that espouses being inauthentic is to admit to being inauthentic, and that’s socially repugnant – even if our angle has merit. Also important, it’s not socially-repugnant enough to get people to argue, which would be another way of driving engagement. The “When you express your opinion, be ready for criticism,” angle is somewhat stronger. It would be a small flex to like or retweet this, because it would show that you’re a person resilient enough to , a quality which has social clout in some circles. Moving forward with that best angle, in the clearest way possible, we could say: When you share strong opinions, you will be criticized. Because strong opinions by definition are the easiest opinions to disagree with. Besides the fact it’s much longer, there’s something weak about this tweet. I think it’s that it makes strong opinions not look good. Why have them if they’re so easy to disagree with? As someone with a fox cognitive style, to me it doesn’t feel right. So ultimately it seems, I believe a third angle: “Strong opinions aren’t good.” If we put that simply, we’re back to “Of all opinions, strong opinions are the easiest to argue against.” That still doesn’t express clearly how I feel about strong opinions. It’s just a statement of fact. Step 6: Applying rhetoric Maybe we can make this more economical, while also expressing more clearly my feelings about strong opinions, if we use a rhetorical form. Rhetorical forms are time-tested structures in language that add meaning beyond the simple content of the words. “Antithesis” is a good rhetorical form for tweets. Mark Forsyth in describes antithesis as “X is Y, and not X is not Y.” We won’t use that exact formula, which would essentially be “Strong opinions are easy to argue against, and weak opinions are hard to argue against.” Instead, let’s pit the word “strong” against its antithesis, “weak” – which is part of why the phrase “strong opinions, weakly held” is so memetic. As it happens, the idea of a “weak argument” is a commonly-used metaphor, so we can add extra power to our phrase by tapping into that existing idiom. With those elements in mind, we end up with: Strong opinions are weak arguments. That’s about as good as we can do. We’ve reduced the phrase from eleven words to only five. It’s now clearer what I think of strong opinions, and it presents the irony I wanted to point out in the first place. Was all this work worth it? So, how did this tweet do? I it, making sure to that I was 70% sure it would get (in 48 hours). It actually got 1,081. One month later, I the unedited tweet I presented at the beginning of this article. I was 70% sure it would get . It got 384. The data suggest that through all that excruciating detail – more than 1,500 words about writing only five – I nearly tripled the performance of this tweet. The tweet still didn’t go viral, which isn’t the point of thinking of language in this level of detail. The real point of this exercise is that if you make a habit of thinking carefully about language, you internalize much of this process, which makes all your writing better. Image: About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of , and . Through the Love Your Work podcast, his , and David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Subscribe to Love Your Work Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Show notes:
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[Bonus Patreon Preview]: Coffee w/ Kadavy #4
04/27/2023
[Bonus Patreon Preview]: Coffee w/ Kadavy #4
Here's a bonus preview of a new podcast I've brewed just for . It's Coffee w/ Kadavy. In this episode, #4, I talk about: I talk with special guest ChatGPT about why we will (or won't) see another AI winter An inventory of things I believe (at least more than 50%) A cool that makes reading paper books way more comfortable! A (controversial?) history about an amazing clash of civilizations For more episodes of Coffee w/ Kadavy, There are three waiting for you, and a sneak of a chapter from my next book.
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300. The Mechanics of Media
04/20/2023
300. The Mechanics of Media
Every message is shaped by the mechanics of media. Whether it’s a tweet, a TikTok video, a news article, or a movie, the characteristics of the medium determine how it’s made, how it’s consumed, and whether it spreads. If you understand the mechanics of media, you can more effectively communicate in a wide variety of mediums, and protect yourself from being . The message is the mechanics of media As media theorist Marshall McLuhan said, In , he wrote: The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium...results from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs.... In other words, it’s not the content of the medium we should be worried about, but the way the characteristics of that medium determine its content – the mechanics of media. The five characteristics of media I propose that there are five characteristics present in any medium, which determine these mechanics. These characteristics affect the creation, consumption, and distribution of media. (In other words, what message is delivered, how that message is received, and whether or not that message spreads.) Those five characteristics are: Incentive Sensory Physical Social Psychological The mechanics of media are so complex, these characteristics naturally interact with one another. I’ll give a brief introduction of each, then show how these characteristics work in the popular mediums of podcasts, Twitter, and TikTok. 1. Incentive The Incentive characteristics of a medium are sources of motivation, whether money or otherwise, that shape the creation, consumption, and distribution of messages in that medium. The creator of a piece of media is motivated by various incentives, such as money and relationships. Whether or not someone is able to consume a piece of media depends upon whether its affordable or otherwise accessible. Whether or not a piece of media spreads depends upon whether incentives are aligned for the distribution platform to allow it to spread. So, a journalist may be motivated to write a story that gets page views, because that’s how they’re paid. That’s how they’re paid, because the newspaper doesn’t have paying subscribers and thus relies upon ad revenue. The stories with click-bait headlines spread and get more page views because they increase engagement for the social media platform they’re shared on, which increases the social media platform’s ad revenue. 2. Sensory The Sensory characteristics of a medium are the ways in which the medium engages senses such as sight, hearing, and touch. Marshall McLuhan wrote about how so-called “sense ratios” were engaged by a medium. Sensory characteristics primarily affect the consumption of the medium, but those effects overlap with creation and distribution. Written content, for example, can be absorbed at a reader’s own pace. As Neil Postman pointed out in , the written word is especially well-suited to careful review and comparison, which makes it easier to convey the truth. Audio content can be replayed to be reviewed, but it’s more work than simply moving your eyes back over the content. 3. Physical The Physical characteristics of a medium are the ways in which the medium engages the body. The subtitle of Marshall McLuhan’s is Extensions of Man. As a medium extends our abilities, it also removes or “amputates” abilities. When you listen to a podcast, your entire body is free to do other things. You may be cooking, showering, or fighting your way to the exit of a crowded subway car. So, audio with dense content may not be absorbed as well as if the same content were printed in a paper book – which can still be read on a subway car, but not likely while walking. Podcasts became distributed more widely as they became easier to download on smartphones, which people physically carry around. 4. Social The Social characteristics of a medium are the ways in which the medium facilitates interactions amongst people. In the age of social media, these interactions affect creation, consumption, and distribution, in concert. Algorithms that drive distribution on platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok are designed to distribute a piece of content based upon its engagement. Much of that engagement is social. If you comment on, like, or share a piece of content, that social interaction leads to further distribution. Additionally, the level of privacy involved in consuming or sharing content has social consequences. You may be reluctant to even “like” certain content, for fear of who might see. But you might share the same content with a close friend through a text message – so-called “dark social” – or even a dinner conversation. 5. Psychological The psychological characteristics of a medium are the ways in which a medium interacts with human psychology. Cognitive biases affect the way people interpret a piece of media, and media platforms are designed to exploit these biases. For example, variable rewards make social media platforms habit-forming for both consumers and creators. You never know when you’ll find something incredibly valuable during a social media session, and as a creator, you’re always checking to see if you’ve gotten more comments and views. To go back to our example of a journalist paid by the page view, incentives may motivate them or the newspaper at which they work to cover more natural disasters, shark attacks, and terrorist attacks, which grab people’s attention as a result of the . Here’s a sampling of how these five characteristics shape various mediums. Podcasts 1. Incentive There are two main ways podcast creators make money: either have a lot of listeners and sell sponsorship, or have few listeners, but make money on some kind of “back-end” business. It’s very hard to get new listeners for a podcast, for reasons that will be clear when we analyze the other mechanics, so this motivates many podcast hosts to do “swaps,” wherein hosts interview one another on each other’s podcasts. 2. Sensory Many listeners listen to podcasts alone, through headphones. Audio can’t be rewound as easily as someone can re-read, so the content should present simple ideas with simple language, and storytelling can keep the listener engaged. 3. Physical Listening to a podcast doesn’t engage much of your physical body, so listeners may be doing nearly anything while listening. They could be driving, showering, or doing household chores. With AirPods, they could even be hitting golf balls. Listeners may be in distracting situations, so again, the mechanics of the podcast medium lend themselves to simple ideas presented through simple language, and strong storytelling. 4. Social A podcast host makes an intimate connection with a listener because they’re often talking right into the listener’s ear, often while they’re alone. In this way, the host becomes like the internal monologue of the listener. This is part of why there are so many podcasts despite it being so hard to attract new listeners. This intimate connection can attract new customers and clients for high-ticket items, and advertisers are willing to pay a lot per listener, especially when the host reads the ads. It’s hard to attract new listeners to podcasts, because podcasts don’t lend themselves well to social consumption and distribution. Podcast listeners are usually physically occupied when listening, and unlikely to engage through likes, shares, and comments. These features aren’t available in most podcast-listening apps, since podcasts are distributed through decentralized feeds that can be captured by one of many such apps. Podcast content can be several hours long, with the information presented in the disorganized form of a conversation. Even when pieces of a podcast are presented as clips on social media, there are a few formidable barriers to such clips attracting listeners: Editing long-form content to be interesting in short-form is difficult, audio content has trouble competing with other content on social media feeds, and social media is often consumed in contexts in which it’s not convenient to download and listen to a podcast. 5. Psychological Podcast producers take advantage of the ways in which audio content can affect the psychology of the listener. Narrative podcasts use music and storytelling to manipulate listeners’ emotions and build suspense and engagement. Compelling podcast interviewees know how to talk passionately and persuasively in a way that will excite listeners. Still other podcast hosts deliberately speak in an unpolished way, to make their shows feel more like listening to a friend. Twitter 1. Incentive On Twitter, journalists can build followings, which can help them get more page views, which can help them either get paid more, or not rely on their employers at all. Entrepreneurs can grow their businesses. Writers, such as myself, can test out ideas. People, generally, can be entertained, or feel as if they’re heard. Twitter is still primarily an ad-supported platform, so more engagement with the platform means more ad revenue. While I presented above an example of a social media platform presenting articles with click-bait headlines, the incentive characteristics of Twitter also work against this. If you were to click on a link, you would leave Twitter, where you could no longer be served ads. So tweets that are just links get less distribution. 2. Sensory Twitter is primarily text, which is supposed to be the form of media . Yet anyone who has used Twitter has noticed there is a lot of sensational content, with lots of arguing and fighting amongst tribes. How can this be? Since Twitter is mostly a collection of snippets of text, which can be easily skimmed, it puts people in a “hunting” mode. Unlike reading a book, where the sensory experience locks you into the progression of ideas presented by the author, on the Twitter timeline, the sensory experience is like scanning the landscape for the gazelle in the grass, or the tiger in the bush. 3. Physical Many Twitter users consume its content on their phones. They’re looking at their hands, often slouched over with neck craned downward. This is a posture that makes you more close-minded and negative, as opposed to say, standing up, with a monitor at eye-level, and shoulders back while typing on a . Users can be in a variety of settings, such as on public transport, or even crossing the street. On Twitter, consumption and creation can be physically the same, which lends itself to off-the-cuff and often reactionary or poorly-thought-out content. So content creators on Twitter who do the majority of their thinking away from the app, and put intention into their creation process, are essentially practicing attention arbitrage. 4. Social Twitter has followed the lead of platforms such as TikTok, and decoupled the distribution of content from the follower relationship, in lieu of a feed driven by engagement or relevance of topic. Still, the number of followers greatly influences distribution on Twitter. Thus, savvy Twitter creators know they have to be active “reply guys” – replying to tweets on related accounts – until they gain a following. Besides followers and the ever-more-rare retweet, the biggest driver of distribution on Twitter is replies. Therefore, tweets that drive conversation get more distribution. Ironically, if a tweet is clear and factual, it won’t get as much distribution as if it is unclear and controversial. So, creators who are either unintelligent in a lucky way, or savvy and enough to feign ignorance, see great distribution through “fake takes,” or expressing with great confidence a simplistic opinion people will argue over in the replies. 5. Psychological Almost all activity on Twitter is public by default, so this creates a media environment with a bias toward behavior that’s either prosocial or tribal. There can be social consequences for merely following someone or liking one of their tweets. There’s a lot of what Timur Kuran calls on Twitter, to signal that one is part of a tribe. The only characteristic that counters this is that expanding a tweet or media within a tweet is private, so this private engagement can help somewhat the distribution of content people may not be comfortable supporting publicly. TikTok 1. Incentive Many creators are attracted to TikTok because it’s a platform where it’s possible to have a lot of success very quickly, and seemingly for no good reason. You can get tens of millions of views just dancing in front of your bathroom mirror. TikTok is an ad-supported platform, so the platform distributes content that will overall increase the time spent on the platform. Yet TikTok overall has a more-positive vibe than Twitter. We’ll get to why. 2. Sensory If the sensory experience of Twitter puts the viewer into “hunting” mode, the sensory experience of TikTok is more like the campfire. You’re not skimming a vast sea of text. Instead, you’re immersed entirely in a video – at least for a moment. You’re often face-to-face with a person talking. It’s harder to get angry with someone when you’re looking right at them. This campfire instead of hunting experience makes content on TikTok more positive than on Twitter. But you’re not immersed in that video for long. Users can quickly swipe and be immersed in the next video. So, there is a lot of pressure for creators to create content that grabs the attention of the viewer. It’s not unusual, when looking at an engagement graph on a TikTok video you’ve created, to see a note informing you there was a drop in viewership at the one second mark. This is part of why TikTok has a reputation for being all about looks. Indeed their new “Bold Glamour Filter” reshapes women’s faces to an astounding degree (yet they still have nothing for my gray beard hairs). 3. Physical TikTok, like all social media, is primarily consumed on a mobile phone. So consumers may be in any of a variety of settings, including highly distracting environments where they don’t have control over sound. So, TikTok videos present simple ideas, presented quickly, and videos with captions perform better, as viewers may have audio off. However, there is some incentive for creators to present complex data associated with their simple ideas. If you flash a data-rich graphic in a TikTok video, viewers will try to pause it, which is a signal of engagement for the TikTok algorithm. You’ll do even better if the graphic flashes so quickly it can’t be paused the first time. The viewer will have to let the video play again, to once again attempt to pause at the right time. For example: 4. Social Since pausing or rewatching a video signals engagement to TikTok, dance videos have performed well on the platform. Consumers can become creators and post “duets”, in which they perform a dance next to its originator. Of course you have to watch the video many times to get your dance moves right, which signals engagement. This physical bias towards dance videos, helped along by the social characteristics of TikTok, may also contribute to its more-positive vibe. Like anywhere many humans congregate, there is still some negativity on TikTok. But if you’re going to be explicitly negative, you’re going to have to show your face. Comments are limited to 150 characters. Beyond that, you can make a reply video, a “duet” – such as in dance videos, or a “stitch,” where you place your video at the end of the video you’re responding to. 5. Psychological Because simple videos that viewers re-watch get more distribution, videos on TikTok resist the sense of closure humans have been used to since at least the time of Homer. If you summarize what you’ve covered at the end of a video, your engagement will drop and you’ll get fewer views. So videos don’t have the satisfying end we’re used to. Some creators make their videos “loop,” wherein the final thing said connects to the first thing, which hypnotizes the viewer into watching again. This being an article, it’s not bad for me to take the time to present a conclusion. That’s my overview of what I believe to be the five characteristics that shape the mechanics of media, and how those mechanics shape the mediums of podcasts, Twitter, and TikTok. The next time you’re creating something for a medium, or feeling highly-persuaded by a piece of media, take time to think about the five characteristics that shape the mechanics of media. Image: Thank you for having me on your show! Thank you for having me on your podcasts. Thank you to . As always, you can find interviews of me on . 300 episodes! This is the 300th episode of Love Your Work. Something I haven't asked in years: Can you please About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of , and . Through the Love Your Work podcast, his , and David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Subscribe to Love Your Work Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Show notes:
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[NOTE] Submit your questions for the upcoming AMA/Livestream! (kdv.co/ama)
04/13/2023
[NOTE] Submit your questions for the upcoming AMA/Livestream! (kdv.co/ama)
and for my upcoming AMA/Livestream.
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299. Why Make Predictions? (and How)
04/06/2023
299. Why Make Predictions? (and How)
Making, recording, and evaluating predictions is a simple way to improve your thinking and decision-making. But the way to properly make and record predictions isn’t obvious. In this article, I’ll share some predictions I’ve made, what I’ve learned, and how you can improve your thinking by making predictions. Making predictions has grown my business Five years ago, I had been running my business for , and it wasn’t going great. Then, I started publishing monthly , and along the way, making predictions. My income has nearly doubled, and I attribute much of that success to my habit of making predictions. I began by predicting how much money I’d make in a product launch, and grew to predicting how much traffic articles I had written would gain, and how many copies books I’d written would sell. I now routinely make predictions for things as seemingly mundane as whether I’ll enjoy a conference, whether I’ll still be publishing on TikTok a year from now, or . On the surface, making predictions seems like a pointless game. This is, indeed, true of making predictions the wrong way. But making predictions the right way helps you deal with uncertainty you otherwise have no hope of handling. Predictions help you bet your life, better Each of us has limited resources, such as time, money, and mental energy. We’re constantly making decisions about how to use these resources, and when we make those decisions, we are expecting outcomes. If we go on this date, will we find the love of our life, or wish we’d stayed in? If we , will we achieve fame and fortune, or feel as if we’ve wasted years of our life? If we spend an hour on social media, will we make valuable connections, or spiral into self-hatred over our lack of discipline? As , author of wrote: In most of our decisions, we are not betting against another person. Rather, we are betting against all the future versions of ourselves that we are not choosing. —Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets Each decision we make is a bet. We bet a resource, and expect something in return. Most of us don’t recognize or express the expectations of our bets. But we should. Some bets are clearer than others If you bet a dollar on a coin flip and only win $1.50 for guessing correctly, you’d easily recognize that as an unfair bet: There’s a 50% chance of guessing correctly, so you clearly should receive two dollars. But the more variable the odds, and the more vague your wager and winnings, the more difficult it becomes to think clearly. What’s the value of finding the love of your life? What other benefits can you get writing a book besides fame and fortune? What are the chances that during this hour of social media you’ll make a life-changing discovery? Making objective decisions taking into account all these variables becomes so complicated you might as well throw up your hands, surrender to randomness, and do what feels right in the moment. And that’s what most of us do. Case in point: The multi-billion-dollar gambling industry, propped up by people doing what feels right in the moment – their decision-making shrouded by the smokescreen of ever more complex and variable bets. The key to making predictions in a way that helps you evaluate your decisions is to avoid what Annie Duke calls “resulting.” If you wager a dollar on a coin flip, with a chance to win $10, and lose, the result of your decision was bad, but your decision was good. The odds were clearly in your favor. Mathematically, you were sure you’d win that bet one of two times. If you had won, you were going to win ten times your money. Now how do you apply this thinking to more complex and vague situations, such as a product launch, your Saturday night plans, or whether or not your new hobby is a passing obsession? The key is to make a prediction, the right way. How to make predictions the right way There are two components to making predictions the right way. Turn it into a coin flip. Identify the odds. 1. Turn the outcome into a “coin flip” First, turn the prediction into a coin flip. I don’t mean in terms of odds, but in terms of result. When you flip a coin, it comes up heads or tails. When you make a prediction about a result, that result must either happen or not. For a prediction to be useful, it has to be falsifiable. This is not easy to do, which is why few of us make predictions the right way, if at all. If you think it’s going to rain, in what area will it rain, by what time? Does a single raindrop count? If you think you’ll still be doing bird photography in six months, how many bird photos will you have taken, within the previous month? If you think you’ll enjoy going to the party, how many good memories will you be able to recall a week later? You can define a successful result in whatever measurable way you want. The important thing is that to make a prediction, you need to turn the result into a coin flip. Not in terms of odds, but in terms of how you define the result. Some actual predictions I’ve turned into coin flips: My Black Friday promotion will earn $3,000–$6,000. My blog post on will average worse than a ranking of 10 for the keyword “zettelkasten”, the first three months after publish, according to Google Console. I will sell 5,000–15,000 copies of within the first year. With each of these predictions, I was wagering resources. It took, time, money, and energy to run a promotion, write a blog post, and write a book. But what did I expect from those investments? I could have done any of these without making a prediction. Besides the long-term benefits of making these predictions – which I’ll get to in a bit – turning these predictions into coin flips had immediate benefits. Turning predictions into coin flips helps answer these questions: Is this worth doing? By defining a successful result, you’re forced to ask yourself if it’s worth the investment, based upon your expectations. How will I achieve this? In the process of defining a successful result, you start thinking about why you expect to achieve that result. Do you have prior experiences or past data to draw upon? You’ll never search as hard for these as when you’re making a prediction. Can I do better? Defining a successful result has a symbiotic relationship with the effort you put forth trying to achieve the result. Making the prediction motivates you to try to make that prediction correct, which sometimes motivates you to predict and try to achieve an even better result. When you flip a coin, you of course aren’t sure whether it will come up heads or tails, and when you make a prediction, you aren’t sure whether you’ll achieve that result. And that is how it should be. 2. Identify the odds The second way to make a prediction the right way is to identify the odds of achieving that result. You’ve turned the prediction into a coin flip, but it’s not necessarily a coin flip with 50/50 odds. It may be more like a die roll, with 1:6 odds, or a roll of four or lower, with 2:3 odds. If you’ve turned your predicted result into a coin flip by adjusting a range, you can adjust that range according to your expected odds. In this way, if you want to literally turn your prediction into a coin flip, you can pick a range you feel you have 50/50 odds of achieving. For example, I believed I had 50/50 odds of making $3,000–$6,000 on my Black Friday promotion, and of selling 5,000–15,000 copies of my book in the first year. I specifically chose those ranges based upon what I expected to have 50/50 odds of achieving. If your prediction doesn’t involve a range, such as whether or not you will regret going to a party, then you simply have to identify your expected odds of that result. For all odds, I think it’s easiest to choose a percentage of confidence, such as 50% for 50/50 odds, or 66% for 2:3 odds. For example, I was in Vegas last year. Each of these predictions is for one event. But the result will either be achieved, or not. Therefore, what you felt 70% sure would happen will in retrospect look as if it had 0 or 100% odds of happening. So what is the point of choosing odds for your prediction? There are three benefits of choosing odds: It helps you gain clarity on each decision. It helps you distinguish risky from not-risky decisions. It helps you rate and improve your decision-making, over time. Choosing odds helps you gain clarity First, choosing odds of achieving a result helps you gain clarity on a decision. Let’s say you buy your first guitar. Surely you’re picturing yourself being a pretty good guitar player someday. But how do you define that, how sure are you you’ll become a good guitar player, and how soon? A year later, when your guitar is collecting dust in your closet, you might feel pretty bad about yourself. But suppose that when you bought your guitar you had predicted that you were 50% sure, one year later, you would have practiced guitar at least fifteen minutes in the previous month? Based upon that prediction, it turns out you weren’t so sure to begin with that you’d become a good guitar player. Choosing odds helps you distinguish sure bets from wildcards Which brings us to the second benefit of choosing odds, which is that it helps you distinguish risky decisions from not-risky decisions. You took a chance buying a guitar, and it didn’t work out. That’s easier to live with if you know you were taking a chance. Some of life and business’s greatest benefits come from taking chances. But you only have so many resources to gamble with. Professional poker players know they need a certain “bank roll” to stay in the game and keep making bets. If they have a lot of bank roll, they might play a riskier bet than if they have little. They’re able to do that because they know the odds. In business, especially creative business, your . As you decide how to invest your resources, and evaluate whether you’ve achieved successful results, you’ll make better decisions if you know ahead of time whether you’re playing a sure bet or a wildcard. For example, I was 95% sure my blog post wouldn’t rank in the top ten for the search term, so I was clear going into it I was playing a wildcard. Additionally, while I was 50% sure I’d sell 5,000–15,000 copies of my book in the first year, I was 90% sure I’d sell fewer than 250,000 copies, which helped put a ceiling on my expectations. Choosing odds improves your decision-making Which is the third benefit of choosing odds: improving your decision-making over time. If you had been 90% sure you’d’ve practiced guitar ten hours in a month, you’d still feel bad when it turned out you didn’t, but at least you’d have data to learn from. Without that data, you might say to yourself, “I never finish what I start. I’m a loser.” With that data, you can say, “I overestimated my enthusiasm to play guitar. I’ll keep that mistake in mind in the future.” Notice you wouldn’t tell yourself you were “wrong.” Because you weren’t. Even if you were 90% sure you’d’ve practiced guitar ten hours in a month and didn’t, you’d only end up 90% wrong. Which means you were 10% right. When you choose odds of your expected results, it’s easier to learn from your mistakes because you’re never totally wrong, and always a little right – which makes your mistakes sting a little less. But to get enough data to know how good your predictions are, you need to make a lot of predictions over time. If you don’t know the odds of a coin flip, and your prediction turns out wrong, you don’t learn a whole lot. But if you make a hundred predictions, you’ll end up with a pretty good idea of the odds of that coin flip. Make many predictions with the same odds, for faster calibration The more predictions you make with the same odds, the more quickly you can tell how good your predictions are. I’ve presented to you examples of predictions I’ve made with various odds. But whenever possible, I try to choose “coin flips” I believe have a 70% chance of being correct. 70% is an arbitrary level of confidence. What’s important is that by making many predictions of which I have 70% confidence, I learn how accurate my predictions tend to be at that confidence level. I’ve made . Only 63% of those have turned out correct. By making and tracking many predictions, I’ve learned that when I’m 70% confident something will happen, it will generally happen only 63% of the time. I’m slightly overconfident at that range, and so should be more conservative with my future predictions. My prediction track-record I keep track of and publicly display many of my predictions on , which is one of those totally free websites with no ads that makes you nostalgic for 2007. Because I’ve made more than fifty predictions, I can see how good I am at predicting at various levels. For example, after fifteen predictions at 90% confidence, 80% have turned out correct. After five at 50% confidence, and five at 60% confidence, those have turned out correct 80% and 100% of the time, respectively. While I should to be more pessimistic about things I’m pretty sure will happen, it seems I should be more optimistic about things I’m not so sure will happen. It turned out the prediction that my Black Friday promotion would earn between $3,000 and $6,000 was correct. Since I was 50% confident, I was half-right, and half-wrong. I did sell between 5,000 and 15,000 copies of my book in the first year. Again, half-right, half-wrong. And the blog post I was 95% sure wouldn’t rank in the top ten, actually did! I was happy to be 95% wrong about that – it was a wildcard that turned out. Making predictions feels unnatural – which is why you do it The next time you’re choosing whether something is worth doing, I highly recommend you make a prediction. If turning the outcome into a coin-flip and picking a percentage of confidence feels uncomfortable to you – it should. Thinking in this way doesn’t come naturally – which is why it’s a superpower. Image: About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of , and . Through the Love Your Work podcast, his , and David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Subscribe to Love Your Work Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Show notes:
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298. Kellogg's 6-Hour Day
03/23/2023
298. Kellogg's 6-Hour Day
In the midst of the Great Depression, cereal manufacturer Kellogg’s switched to a shorter, six-hour day. This continued a trend that seemed inevitable: people would work less and less. But economic policies, management strategies, and cultural attitudes changed. The story of the rise and fall of Kellogg’s six-hour day is a microcosm of these changes, as well as of our attitudes about the roles of money, leisure, work, and women and men. In the book, , historian Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt shares his findings in studying Kellogg’s shorter workday. His main sources of information were 434 interviews conducted by the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor, 124 interviews he himself conducted of workers, and 241 responses to a survey he had sent. What follows is a summary of the story, and Hunnicutt’s findings. Kellogg’s switched to a 6-hour day to create jobs During the Great Depression, American businesses took on a policy of “work sharing.” The idea was that fewer would be unemployed if everyone shared jobs – more workers, working fewer hours. So, on December 1, 1930, W. K. Kellogg changed most departments in Kellogg’s Battle Creek, Michigan plant from three eight-hour shifts to four six-hour shifts. A shorter workday had seemed inevitable This continued a decades-long trend of shorter working hours. Labor activist William Heighton had written in 1827 that the workday should be reduced from twelve hours to ten, eight, and so on, “until the development and progress of science have reduced human labour to its lowest terms.” John Stuart Mill had written in 1848 about his vision for a “Stationary State”: After necessities were met, people would seek progress in mental, moral, and social realms. John Maynard Keynes would predict in the same year Kellogg’s switched to six hours, 1930, that we’d have a fifteen-hour work week by 2030. George Bernard Shaw and Julian Juxley had predicted a maximum two-hour workday by the end of the 1900s. Other businesses shortened their workdays, too Other businesses followed Kellogg’s’ lead. A survey by the Industrial Conference Board in 1931 estimated 50% of American businesses had shortened hours to save jobs. President Herbert Hoover was considering making a 6-hour day a national policy. In the 1932 presidential campaign, both major parties were advocating shorter hours. The 6-hour day was the hot business topic Not only did the six-hour day help create jobs, it seemed for a while like it was a better business policy. Forbes called it “the topic of discussion in the business world.” Business Week concluded it was profitable. The New York Times called it “a complete success.” Factory and Industrial Management magazine called the six-hour day, the “biggest piece of industrial news since Ford announced his five-dollar-a-day policy.” At Kellogg’s, 15% more shredded wheat cases were being packed per hour. Profits had doubled in 1931, versus three years prior. After five years with the six-hour day, overhead costs had been reduced 25%, labor costs 10%, with 41% fewer accidents. W. K. Kellogg said, “We can afford to pay as much for six hours as we formerly paid for eight.” (That should be taken with a grain of salt. W. K. Kellogg took pride in crafting a public image as a “welfare capitalist,” as evinced by the full-page newspaper ads he took out, boasting how Kellogg’s had done its part. In reality, nearly half of workers later surveyed recalled that their wages were reduced.) Kellogg’s returned to an 8-hour day for WWII In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order to direct the maximum amount of manpower toward supporting the country’s fight in WWII. Kellogg’s responded in kind by temporarily returning to eight-hour shifts. A rift formed between Kellogg’s management and the labor union This was actually an opportunity the company had been looking for. Kellogg’s management and that at other companies were beginning to resent the six-hour day, and workers were becoming divided over whether they wanted a shorter workday, or more pay. In 1936, the National Council of Grain Producers had started a union chapter in Kellogg’s Battle Creek headquarters. W. K. Kellogg had been proud to pay what he considered the best hourly wages in town. During the first meeting with union officers, he wept, and kept saying, “If only they had come to me, I would have given them what they wanted.” The union got an inch, and wanted a mile After this point, the relationship between Kellogg’s workers and management became adversarial. W. K. had left in 1937, after the union came in, and at that point the union leaders had been pushing to not only have a six-hour day, in which they could earn a bonus based upon productivity, but they had also wanted time-and-a-half pay for working more than six hours in a day. Hunnicutt wrote, “More than any other union demand, this position would come to haunt Kellogg workers.” Demanding overtime pay on a six-hour day helped turn management against the shorter workday, and create a rift between workers who wanted higher wages, and workers who wanted shorter hours. In the larger relationship between management and labor, the American Federation of Labor introduced a bill in congress, prohibiting goods produced by workers working more than thirty hours a week from being traded across state lines. Hunnicutt cites this as having shifted the business world’s stance on shorter hours from support to opposition. Shorter hours became exploitation, longer hours a reward In 1938, Kellogg’s management deepened the divide between six-hour and eight-hour workers by proposing they be allowed to schedule 40-hour weeks during periods of heavy production. Overtime became available instead of a productivity bonus. Senior workers had priority access to overtime, and so they lost interest in the productivity bonus. So in the early 1940s, before the war, worker opinions were shifting to view shorter hours not as a benefit, but as instead an exploitation of workers – making them bear the brunt of fighting unemployment. And Kellogg’s was actively campaigning against shorter days, asking workers to consider how much more they would make working eight hours. Human Relations Management saw work as life’s center Meanwhile, the business world was shifting from a Scientific Management philosophy to a Human Relations Management philosophy. Scientific Management practitioners were obsessed with efficiency, but Human Relations Management practitioners were more interested in imbuing work with joy and meaning – making work its own reward. The Human Relations Management school envisioned that as work brought satisfaction, engineers and scientists would lead society into an orderly world, where desires met obligations, consumption met production, and work and leisure merged. According to Humans Relations Management, time away from work and consumption was a relic of an illogical past. Instead of work becoming obsolete, giving way to more freedom, work would become the center of life, and help us ascend Maslow’s hierarchy. Fewer workers wanted to return to 6 hours After the war, many departments returned to six-hour shifts, but six-hour workers slowly lost their beloved shorter shifts over the following decades. Central to this struggle was how workers viewed leisure. Kellogg’s workers had previously voted to essentially “buy” shorter working hours, being paid less overall, in exchange for more leisure time. Employees used their time to improve their homes, go hunting, grow and can food in their gardens, and spend time volunteering in their communities. But slowly, workers became less interested in having time away from work. Leisure was outsourced to mass media One explanation from a worker Hunnicutt interviewed was, people were now outsourcing all things they used to spend time on. One place they were outsourcing to was mass media. Sports had been such serious business amongst Kellogg’s employees, they had hired “semi-pro” softball or basketball players to play on the teams. But why watch the company team play, when you can watch pros on television? One former six-hour worker bemoaned that even conversation had been outsourced – to radio, or television talk-show hosts. Shorter hours became seen as weak and feminine The question, Six hours or eight? became a gender issue. Early on, both men and women were interested in six-hour shifts. Three-fourths of men voted for six-hour shifts in 1937, but half of men were working eight hours by 1947. The six-hour departments began to be referred to as “girls’ departments,” doing “women’s work.” Management also assigned sick and disabled employees to the six-hour departments. Men who chose to work six-hours were labeled “sissies,” “lazy,” or “weird.” Men saw work, not leisure, as a source of control and identity Hunnicutt’s interpretation was that men were increasingly seeing work as a place for control and identity – that many hadn’t known what to do with themselves after their shorter shifts. They didn’t like spending more time at home and being assigned chores by their wives, or hearing what they considered gossip. As a result, men placed more importance on working longer hours – or at least appearing to. Hunnicutt said men he interviewed commonly claimed to have gotten second jobs while they were working six hours. How often is “commonly”?, he doesn’t say, but he points out only 35% ever did get second jobs. Men felt they “had to” work long hours This attitude, which we might today call “toxic masculinity,” extended into attitudes about leisure. When asked why they preferred longer hours, men spoke of necessity, and used dramatic language, saying they had to “keep the wolf from the door,” “feed the family,” and “put bread on the table.” When Hunnicutt pointed out to men who had been working in the 1950s that workers in the Great Depression had been willing to take pay cuts to have more free time, he says they got defensive, lectured him on “the facts of life economically,” called six-hours “nonsense” or a “pipe dream,” or dismissed the question as silly. While Hunnicutt’s conclusions here are plausible, it seemed like he really wanted it to be true, and didn’t present men’s attitudes scientifically. There’s no mention of what earnings were relative to cost-of-living, and no acknowledgement of what these men’s roles might have been, truthfully, in the economics of their homes. There’s not even a mention of how throwing thousands of young men into the meat grinder that was WWII, tasked with saving the world, might have affected their own perceptions of what was expected of them. Though he did present a story of one man who had found that the extra money he made going back to eight hours was due to his ex-wife, as alimony. A shorter workday became “a sexist ploy” In the 1970s, Kellogg’s women worked with a local women’s-rights group, who presented the case that six-hour shifts were a sexist ploy meant to subjugate women. They demanded management “allow” women to have “full-time” jobs. Kellogg’s posted notices in the plant claiming that to make pay “comparable,” they were opening up eight-hour departments to women. In doing so, they skirted the issue: The activists had wanted not just comparable hours, but comparable hourly pay. The 6-hour mavericks held on Workers who stuck with the six-hour shift – who Hunnicutt calls “six-hour mavericks” – were about a quarter of the Kellogg’s workforce from 1957, into the 1980s. The union worked according to a department-by-department vote on the length of the day, so long as the six-hour workers didn’t interfere with the union majority’s strategy to try to get higher wages and more benefits. With longer hours, efficiency fell by the wayside Overtime had previously been thought of as a penalty to the company for being understaffed, but it became a way for workers to earn more money while the company’s staffing requirements remained flexible. According to Hunnicutt, with overtime instead of productivity bonuses, workers were less-motivated and careful. The company had to resort to being more controlling, motivating workers with fines, threats, and firings. The death of the 6-hour shift The increased benefits the union had fought for over the years may have worked against the six-hour shift. The final nail in the coffin was driven in 1984, when Kellogg’s threatened to relocate if workers didn’t vote to abandon the six-hour shift. So the six-hour workers gave in and voted to give it up. Some retired, some worked eight hours, but the coffin in which this nail was driven was both figurative and literal. The six-hour workers held a “funeral,” building a full-sized cardboard coffin, painted black, placed on the workroom floor, a cut-out skeleton placed inside. Thus reversed a trend that had held on for over 150 years. The idea of less work and more leisure gave way to a stable amount of work, and more consumption. It’s tempting to blame the death of the 6-hour shift on one of many juicy narratives. You could say people forgot how to spend their leisure time. You could say people were overly-materialistic, and wanted more money, instead of time. You could say toxic masculinity and a patriarchal society tipped the scales so those who wanted to work shorter hours were no longer in the majority. You could say the unions got too demanding and sabotaged the long-fought battle for a shorter working day. All these are probably true to an extent. Ultimately, businesses want to, need to, maximize profit. They have to offer benefits to employees to stay competitive. To offer those benefits profitably, they need more work from fewer workers. If you believe the efficient-market hypothesis, if a shorter workday were indeed more profitable, some business would beat its competitors by offering one, and other businesses would follow suit. So far, that hasn’t happened. If, as I believe, creativity becomes more important, productivity will be about [, and a more-relaxed work schedule will be embraced. But probably not for boxing corn flakes. There’s your summary of Kellogg’s 6-Hour Day This episode is essentially a summary of the book, , by Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt. The book is very dense and written in an academic style, so I can’t recommend it unless you really want to dig deep into questions about work and leisure. It’s a provocative story that makes you wonder if we could be living in a world where a 6-hour day is standard. But it sounds like it wasn’t even close. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of , and . Through the Love Your Work podcast, his , and David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Subscribe to Love Your Work Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Show notes:
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297. Desire Paths
03/09/2023
297. Desire Paths
Desire paths are trails left on the ground, by anything that frequently travels along a route. There are subcultures fascinated by desire paths as symbols of collective wisdom, disregard for authority, or mere evidence of existence. Desire paths are also celebrated as a design technique. Desire paths in their pure form are about what you can see, but the characteristics of desire paths – which you can’t always see – can help you optimize your life and gain clarity in your creative projects. Desire path examples Desire paths are also known by a number of other names: cattle trails, cow paths, elephant paths, just to name a few. In forests or grassy meadows, it seems pretentious to call them desire paths – they’re just paths. Desire paths that question authority Desire paths are most interesting when they show up in places where a man-made path has already been put in place. A sidewalk turns a corner at a ninety-degree angle, but as people cut the corner, a desire path develops at forty-five degrees. An overgrown hedge encroaches on a sidewalk. To avoid squeezing between the hedge and a tree, people walk off the sidewalk and around the tree, and a desire path develops. A landscape architect tries to get fancy by building a curved path, but people instead take a straight path, and a desire path cuts through the grass. These desire paths that eschew the suggestions of man-made paths are like visual jokes that show a disregard for authority. Desire paths that acknowledge existence But some desire paths acknowledge the existence of a single being. A dog leaves a desire path where he’s cut across the yard a thousand times. A woman leaves a desire path where all summer she’s walked off the end of a dock, into the shallow water, to the shore of a lake. When a single being who has left a desire path passes away, the desire path remains as a reminder of their existence. The thought of nature reclaiming the desire path – for example, the grass growing back – is a sad reminder of how long they’ve been gone, and a reminder one day we’ll be gone, too. But the being doesn’t even have to be a living one. Delivery robots have left desire paths, their tire tracks marking the sidewalk with GPS precision. Desire paths as a design technique The most striking thing about desire paths is they can be used as a design technique. As I said, desire paths are like visual jokes that show a disregard for authority. They poke fun at civilization’s feeble attempts to plan, make decisions for others, or control people. Sometimes “authority” surrenders to the crowd and lets desire paths do the decision-making for them. University campuses are often full of desire paths. With so many students migrating from one of many buildings to one of many other buildings, there’s no way to predict what routes exactly will be the most efficient. So some schools, such as Ohio State University, held off on creating paved paths. Once the desire paths showed up, they then paved on top of them. The result is a latticework of criss-crossing paths, of varying widths, that no single human would have designed. Desire paths aren’t always good But sometimes “authority” has a good reason for building a path that seems inefficient. On the leading subculture of desire-path enthusiasts – – parks planners have explained that nature trails often have switchbacks going back and forth across steep inclines, because such a design prevents soil erosion. When people cut across these switchbacks, hiking directly up the hill, they hasten erosion. Additionally, desire paths express the desires of the majority. Sometimes the path expressed by desire paths don’t work for people in the minority. That curved path that looks like the result of a landscape architect gone wild might soften the incline for people in wheelchairs – and how does that work out when path installation is delayed until desire paths form? Ultimately, people are going to tend toward their desires to get to their destinations quickly. Whatever practical reasons “authority” has for designing a path, the wisdom carried by desire paths can’t be ignored. The power of invisible desire paths Desire paths, in their pure form, are about what you can see. It seems the use of desire paths in design projects originated with analyzing data you can’t see. A 1942 transit study in Detroit charted origins and destinations of commuter trips, to determine where best to build roads. If you break the phenomenon of desire paths down to its essential components, you can find desire paths you can’t see, and harness their power to optimize your life and achieve clarity in creative projects. When used as a design technique, a desire path essentially does four things: A good-enough solution Collects data Exposes a pattern in the data Which leads to an ideal solution The unmodified ground is a good-enough solution people can use. Through the usage patterns of that good-enough solution, data builds up. Each footprint is a piece of data. The footprints don’t overlap, all in the same place. Instead, a pattern emerges, in the form of a path. That pattern is then used to determine an ideal solution. In the case of a college campus, that ideal solution is usually a paved sidewalk where the desire path once was. 1. Start with a prototype When a desire path forms, the untreated ground is essentially a prototype. So to create an invisible desire path, build or find a prototype. Find a low-cost, low-commitment way to give yourself a good-enough solution. For example, if you’re looking for the perfect backpack, you could take the top-down approach that desire paths so often protest: You could plan out everything you want your backpack to hold and do, then design a custom backpack. Or, you could start with a prototype: Buy any cheap backpack at a thrift store, and try it out. 2. Collect data Desire paths collect data based upon use of a prototype. Once you have a good-enough solution, you’re collecting data as you use it. With your cheap backpack, maybe you notice the straps gets loose, or dig into your shoulder. Maybe a pen falls out of it, or you find yourself rummaging through a big compartment full of small items. 3. Look for patterns Desire paths collect data, but that data is only useful once a pattern emerges. When a desire path forms, you can see it, but when an invisible desire path forms, you can’t. After enough time using your prototype, individual bits of data turn into patterns. Maybe a pen fell out of your cheap backpack only once and you fixed the straps so they didn’t loosen anymore, but the strap kept digging into your shoulder and you got sick of rummaging through a compartment full of small items. You’ve found your invisible desire path: You want a backpack with comfortable straps, and lots of small compartments for small items. 4. Find a solution When desire paths are used as a design feature, the visible path becomes the backbone of the solution. The designers simply pave a path over the desire path. Once you’ve found an invisible desire path, that becomes the backbone of your solution. Now that you’ve used a prototype enough times for patterns to emerge, you can find a solution that fits those patterns. Desire paths in creative projects Now how can invisible desire paths help you gain clarity on creative projects? Creative projects are a lot like choosing a backpack: You have a variety of requirements and preferences, not all of them are clear, and many contradict one another. There’s no one perfect solution, but there’s some ideal solution that balances everything. Too often, we approach creative projects thinking top-down: We don’t want to act until we have the perfect plan. But the perfect plan doesn’t exist. The best way to find an ideal plan is create an invisible desire path: Find a good-enough solution, collect data, and see what patterns emerge. Only then can you quickly and efficiently get where you’re going. Thank you for having me on your show! Thank you for having me on your show. Thank you to Ajay Mathur at the . As always, you can find interviews of me on . About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of , and . Through the Love Your Work podcast, his , and David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Subscribe to Love Your Work Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Show notes:
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296. Beyond Vulnerability
02/23/2023
296. Beyond Vulnerability
The term, “vulnerability” has spread into realms where it’s not an accurate description of what’s going on. The case for being vulnerable often doesn’t make sense. In the creative realm – and possibly in others – we should pursue something beyond vulnerability. When I wrote about vulnerability to my , saying some of what I’m about to say, I got a lot of pushback. In the current – and what I believe to be incorrect – parlance, some might say I had made myself vulnerable. I don’t agree. I’ll build up to why in the course of examining the vulnerability movement. I’ll try to keep this organized, so that if you disagree with my line of thinking, it’s easier to identify where. It’s hard to talk about vulnerability in an organized way, because the more the term is abused, the more vague its definition gets. Vulnerability means “open to harm” Let’s start by defining vulnerability. In the most basic terms, vulnerability means, “open to harm.” If you want to be more technical and specific, “open” in this case doesn’t mean “inviting” harm, but rather “susceptible” to harm. Now I’ll paraphrase some examples of how vulnerability is espoused in the current movement: “Be vulnerable at work. If you need help, don’t be afraid to ask.” “Be vulnerable in relationships. Share your feelings, even if it means you might be rejected.” “Be vulnerable in your writing. Share your struggles.” (Anyone familiar with my work might be surprised to hear me tee up this last one.) I don’t deny that a person might feel vulnerable in these situations. I’m not convinced they are vulnerable. I’m definitely skeptical that striving to be or even feel vulnerable is helpful. Emotional harm is the most-subjective harm If being vulnerable is being open to harm, to understand vulnerability we have to define what harm is. There are many types of harm, but I think most are covered in three categories: physical, economic, and emotional harm. Physical harm is the least-subjective realm of harm. Yes, people might perceive their physical wounds differently, and someone can have physical pains with an emotional cause, but for the most part, you can measure physical injury. Economic harm is slightly more-subjective. If you lose your job in a flourishing modern economy, you won’t necessarily have scars, such as if you experienced physical harm. You may ultimately be better off. Emotional harm is almost entirely subjective. What seems like emotional harm to one person may not to another. Some can’t stand to be looked at by a stranger. Others don’t care if someone criticizes them. Importantly, what causes emotional harm to a person when they’re inexperienced in a realm may not – later, to that same person – cause emotional harm after they become experienced in that same realm. More on that later. The vulnerability movement: “Be vulnerable, and benefit” Now that we’ve defined vulnerability as “open to harm,” and identified most harms as physical, economic, or emotional, let’s try to identify the case being made for vulnerability by the vulnerability movement. When I say vulnerability movement, I’m not talking about any one person, but rather my perception as a very-confused outsider, trying to make sense of the conversations being had about vulnerability in TED talks, on social media, on podcasts, and at cocktail parties. As far as I can understand, the pitch of the vulnerability movement is, “be vulnerable and benefit.” To paraphrase, using the prior examples from work, love, and art: “If you need help at work, ask for it. You risk looking like you don’t know what you’re doing, but you and your team will perform better.” “Be the first in a relationship to say, ‘I love you.’ You risk rejection, but otherwise you’ll have a deeper relationship.” “Share your struggles in your writing. People may laugh at you, but your words will help others.” To be clear, I think these actions can be wise. But I don’t believe they’re objectively vulnerable, and you don’t have to make vulnerability a goal – and maybe you shouldn’t make vulnerability a goal – to catalyze these actions. These are all cases to “be vulnerable and benefit.” To be vulnerable is to be open to harm. If you ultimately benefit from an action, were you vulnerable – were you open to harm – in the first place? Is it vulnerability if it needs boundaries? Some might say, Well, you don’t know the outcome of these actions in advance, so you’re risking harm by taking them. Yet anyone who speaks intelligently about vulnerability rightly says it should come with boundaries. A CEO shouldn’t freak out about the potential fate of the company, in front of employees and shareholders. You shouldn’t spend your first date complaining about your ex. You shouldn’t share your struggles with depression in writing a user manual for a Bluetooth speaker. Too much vulnerability is oversharing. So, according to the movement, vulnerability should be a calculated risk, one you’re likely to benefit from, and one that isn’t likely to ruin you. Don’t seek vulnerability, seek ideals It seems to me the case being made for vulnerability is in pursuit of important ideals, including but not limited to truth, security, and alignment. The more we’re honest at work, the more effective we can be in an efficient marketplace. The more we share our feelings in our relationships, the more secure we feel. The more of our true selves we put into our art, the more it resonates with others. “Fear” is the word you’re looking for I think a better term for what we experience in pursuit of these ideals is “fear.” Fear is a feeling of discomfort in the face of perceived danger. Fear can be irrational. The perceived danger can be entirely in your head. Some people experience fear just looking at a spider that has no chance of physically harming them. Some people experience fear looking at birds. Valid vulnerability isn’t the type being promoted I’ve ventured into unfamiliar territory thinking about vulnerability and putting together this critique. I found many areas where truly being vulnerable resulted in benefits, such as in combat, activism, and workplace inclusion. True vulnerability, it seems, is the product of power, and people sometimes have to be vulnerable to dissolve that power. These areas are outside the scope of this short critique. Besides, I haven’t come across much chatter in the vulnerability movement that makes cases for vulnerability in these valid areas. But aren’t I a “vulnerable” writer? One area I am very familiar with is creative work. Some readers have described some of my work as “vulnerable.” I’ve written about , , and published . I’ve and published my in my pursuit of a career as a writer. I’ve written about my in graphic detail, and shared my struggles with . I’ve been publicly for years, starting when it was even less-impressive than it is now. I’m further critiquing vulnerability in this article, even though I got angry emails in response to my short newsletter on the topic. Was I, am I, vulnerable in creating these things? I don’t think so. Am I risking physical harm? Not likely. Economic harm? I don’t think so. Emotional harm? That’s not up to someone else to decide. What looks like “vulnerability” is “antifragility” Have I ever felt vulnerable writing these things? In retrospect, I guess I did. More accurately, I felt fear. Because I was not vulnerable. I benefitted greatly writing these things. I grew, and got to know myself. I found my voice and got closer to doing work that comes from my core. It was all real and came from an authentic place, but I grew my business in the process. I took calculated risks, and I got better at calculating along the way. I thought that by writing public income reports, I would improve my thought processes and grow my business – I did. I thought that having a public conversation about grief would help me live with it – it has. I thought that by writing about my mysterious health issues, readers would send me ideas that would help me get better – they did. I’m not claiming to be Galileo or Harvey Milk, which is kind of the point – their work made them objectively vulnerable. But I know I’ve never set out to deliberately be vulnerable. I’ve set out to face fears, because I believed they were irrational. Somewhere along the way, I stopped being scared. What once felt like fear morphed into excitement to see what would happen – to see if this action would take me closer to truth, security, and alignment. Vulnerability as a boundary, not a beacon Now that I’ve been at it a long time, if I were to feel vulnerable, I would see that as a boundary, not a beacon. That would be a warning sign that I’m oversharing, and needlessly putting myself in danger. That’s one problem with espousing the pursuit of a subjective feeling: Being afraid is not the same as being vulnerable. The more experienced you get – in work, love, or art – the more adeptly you can recognize when you really are vulnerable, and decide it’s a good idea to stop. Performative vulnerability is a slippery slope When I wrote about this in my newsletter, some readers said they had been in communities where appearing vulnerable became a sort of contest. People seemed to be oversharing just to outdo one another. That’s another problem with espousing the pursuit of a subjective feeling: If vulnerability is the goal – whether that’s being, feeling, or appearing vulnerable – you incentivize vulnerability. The definitions and the actions fitting those definitions tumble over one another down a very slippery slope. Vulnerability can be a productive lie Sometimes we tell ourselves productive lies. You can , knowing you’ll keep going once you’ve reached that goal. You can give yourself – notice that’s “permission,” not “directive” – knowing you’ll improve or do better than you had expected. Maybe the pursuit to feel vulnerable is a productive lie. It teaches you to face your irrational fears. But at some point you hopefully grow beyond vulnerability – where feeling vulnerable is a sign of danger. There are cases where danger – true vulnerability – is worth the risk, but that’s only because the ideals you’re pursuing are worth that much. What looks like vulnerability is a byproduct, not a goal Choosing your actions with vulnerability as a goal is like building a boat designed to splash water. Boats splash water because they’re traveling to a destination. You feel or even are vulnerable in the pursuit of something more important. A boat designed to splash water won’t travel as efficiently as a boat designed to go somewhere. I believe that a person designing their actions to feel vulnerable won’t be as effective as a person driven to pursue an ideal. That’s what lies beyond vulnerability. Image: Thank you for having me on your podcasts! Thank you for having me on your podcasts. Thank you to Brilliant Miller at podcast. As always, you can find interviews of me on . About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of , and . Through the Love Your Work podcast, his , and David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Subscribe to Love Your Work Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Show notes:
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295. Summary: The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
02/09/2023
295. Summary: The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
The Prince is a political treatise, written by Niccolò Machiavelli, first distributed in 1513. It’s infamous for its apparent advice to political leaders to lie, murder, and manipulate. It’s still a fascinating read today, and is thought-provoking when considering any context where the true motives of actions may not be what they seem. Here, in my own words, is a summary of Niccoló Machiavelli’s, . Is The Prince advice, satire, or sabotage? Machiavelli wrote The Prince while in exile from Florence. Since he opens it with a letter to Lorenzo d’Medici it seems like Machiavelli was trying to get a political position with the Medici, by demonstrating his political knowledge. (The Medici had recently returned to power in Florence, after themselves being exiled fifteen years.) But, some scholars think The Prince is satire. Others think the advice within was a ploy, in that if it were followed, the actions would weaken the power of the Medici. “The ends [justified] the means,” in Renaissance Italy Though the phrase isn’t in the book, The Prince is the origin of the saying, “the ends justify the means.” In other words, if you have an important goal, morality doesn’t matter. It’s also the inspiration for the name of the personality trait of “Machiavellianism”, which is characterized by manipulativeness, insensitivity, and an indifference to morality. Psychologists include Machiavellianism in the “dark triad” personality traits, along with narcissism and psychopathy. Sixteenth century Italy was the perfect environment for advice like that in The Prince to flourish. There was constant conflict amongst small governing bodies, including the most-notable city-states of Florence, Milan, Rome, Naples, and Venice. Additionally, there were frequent invasions by Spain, France, or the Holy Roman Empire. If the numerous examples Machiavelli cites in The Prince are any indication, if you didn’t lie, murder, and manipulate, you wouldn’t stay in power, and probably would be murdered yourself. You don’t have to be Machiavellian to learn from The Prince As you listen to this advice, it’s not hard to think of similar, less-violent situations in our everyday lives, as we build relationships and careers, or watch others vie for power. So what is some of this juicy advice that has made The Prince and Niccolò Machiavelli so infamous? I’ll break down this summary into two sections, followed by some historical examples Machiavelli cites, peppered with some quotes. Those two sections are: Gaining power Retaining power (Note this isn’t how Machiavelli organizes The Prince.) 1. Gaining power First how to gain power. Machiavelli points out that the people within a state are eager to change rulers. People naturally expect change to improve their lives, so, they’re willing to join in armed resistance against the ruling power. This attitude extends from the people, to other states. If a powerful foreigner invades a country, the states within want to help overturn the rule of the most-powerful state. But you have to be careful. It’s normal to want to acquire more land, but when you try to do it by any means possible, you end up making dumb mistakes. How this applies to other domains As you hear this, you may already have some parallels to other domains bouncing around in your head. How many times have you bought a product just slightly different from one you already had, because you believed the change would make your life better? Marketers take advantage of this. I’ve read one marketing book that advised to think of the product you’re marketing as a “new opportunity.” Changing leadership is a “new opportunity,” that temporarily makes you optimistic, like how we feel when a New Year comes around. But often, the new product, the new ruler, or the New Year doesn’t make your life better. We get stuck in a cycle of wanting change and striving for it, only to find we aren’t better off than before, which drives our desire to change once again. This is why, to quote Machiavelli: There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. —Niccolò Machiavelli The Prince In other words, you might get short-term support in the change you’re trying to introduce, but the support you once had will soon wane, and those who were doing well before will try to overthrow you. 2. Retaining power This brings us to the second section, about retaining power. Being able to retain power starts with choosing carefully where and how you gain power. This is why Machiavelli warns: He who has not first laid his foundations may be able with great ability to lay them afterwards, but they will be laid with trouble to the architect and danger to the building. —Niccolò Machiavelli The Prince Any new state is extremely fragile, unless the person who unexpectedly gained power over that state is highly-skilled. You can gain power by getting the help of the people, or other states, but whoever helped you will probably be disappointed in what they get from it, and will no longer want to help you. Be especially careful not to make your allies much more powerful, because then they’ll become threats. Additionally, they’ll distrust you, because in the process of helping them, they saw how cunning you are. So, if you’re invading a place, you want to be on the good side of the natives. However, if they’re used to being free, you’ll have to destroy them, or they’ll destroy you. As Machiavelli said: Men ought to either be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot. —Niccolò Machiavelli The Prince In other words, if they’re dead, they can’t get revenge. And: He who becomes master of a city accustomed to freedom and does not destroy it, may expect to be destroyed by it. —Niccolò Machiavelli The Prince If you want to retain power in a new state, you need to start a colony there. You don’t have to spend a lot on the colony, because after you take the land and houses of people, they will be, “poor and scattered,” and can’t hurt you. It’s important to be in the place you’re ruling, because otherwise you don’t find out about things that go wrong until it’s too late to fix them. Statecraft is a lot of work, because, as Machiavelli says: He who has relied least on fortune is established the strongest. —Niccolò Machiavelli The Prince How this applies to other domains Some of this advice may resonate with situations you’ve experienced. Some of it may be horrifying to you. Here’s how it can apply to other domains. Imagine you’re a CEO, and you’ve just acquired a new company. It’s best to get it right the first time. If you make mistakes, you’ll have a hard time leading the company. When a company acquires another, or a new leader comes into a company, you often see layoffs right away. This mirrors Machiavelli’s related advice, which is: Injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that, being tasted less, they offend less; benefits ought to be given little by little, so that the flavor of them may last longer. —Niccolò Machiavelli The Prince If done according to Machiavelli’s advice, after the brutal layoffs, there will be ice-cream socials, team-building exercises, and bonuses scattered over the coming months and years, hopefully without more massive layoffs. Whoever is in charge had better have close oversight to an office that’s far away from headquarters, otherwise by the time you find out about problems, it’s too late to fix them. How not to rule: King Louis XII A leader who Machiavelli uses as a warning for not ruling well is King Louis the XII, of France. The Venetians brought in King Louis, because they wanted to seize half the state of Lombardy. But they later realized, they had helped make Louis king of two-thirds of Italy. Louis was now well-positioned, but then his mistakes began. He helped Pope Alexander occupy the Romagna, divided the kingdom of Naples with the king of Spain, and turned around and tried to conquer Venice’s territories. So, he weakened the minor power of Venice, losing their alliance, made a great power – the pope – even more powerful, and brought in a foreign power – Spain. He didn’t settle in the land he had conquered, and didn’t set up colonies. How to rule: Cesare Borgia Like Louis XII when the Venetians enlisted his help, Cesare Borgia came into power through fortune. Unlike Louis, he made what Machiavelli felt were wise decisions. Cesare was the son of Pope Alexander VI, who himself was cunning. He wanted to give Cesare a state to rule, but there weren’t good options. For example, the Milanese or the Venetians would stop him, and anyone in Italy who might have helped knew better than to make the pope even more powerful. When the Venetians brought the French into Italy, Alexander didn’t make a fuss, and even helped Louis out by dissolving his marriage. He provided some soldiers to help out in a military campaign in Romagna, and now his son, Cesare was the duke of Romagna. But Cesare wasn’t thrilled with his military. The Orsini soldiers didn’t seem psyched to take Bologna, and when he attacked Tuscany after taking over Urbino, Louis made him stop. So Cesare decided to figure out how to do things on his own. Cesare Borgia followed Machiavelli’s advice (somewhat literally) Anywhere Cesare took power, he was sure to kill the nobles and their families. He weakened the Orsini and Colonna parties in Rome, by making them nobles and giving them a good salary. Then he brought in a Spaniard named Ramiro d’Orco (also known as Ramiro de Lorca) to govern the Romagna. The Romagna had been in disorder when Cesare took over, and d’Orco restored order, but through nasty means, using lots of torture, public executions, and fines. Once d’Orco had cleaned things up, Cesare – according to Machiavelli – didn’t want to be associated with d’Orco’s reign of terror. So, he had him publicly executed, and put his head on a stick in the town square. Machiavelli was an advisor to Cesare during this time, and felt that Cesare did almost everything right to make the best of the power he had gained through fortune, and lay a foundation that could withstand the inevitable death of his father, the pope. Machiavelli says: He told me that he had thought of everything that might occur at the death of his father, and had provided a remedy for all, except that he had never anticipated that, when the death did happen, he himself would be on the point to die. —Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (on Cesare Borgia) When the pope did die – sooner than expected – Cesare himself was nearly dead from malaria. Though he won the favor of the next pope, Pius III died after only twenty-six days. Machiavelli felt Cesare’s one mistake was then helping elect Pope Julius II, who had promised him favors in return. As Machiavelli says: He who believes that new benefits will cause great personages to forget old injuries is deceived. —Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince Cesare had slighted Julius in the past, and he wasn’t going to forget that. Julius seized land from Cesare, and didn’t support him. You can see a dramatization of the story of Pope Alexander and Cesare Borgia in Showtime’s excellent-but-incomplete series, . The Prince, today Machiavelli’s advice – if it really is that – sounds brutal to modern ears, but it was a product of the reality of the time. Machiavelli was the only one brave enough – maybe desperate enough – to describe that reality. In many areas of life, business, and politics, the true effects of actions are often more complex than they appear on the surface. Sometimes this is an accident, many times it’s deliberate. Why does a politician, a CEO, or a even a friend say what they say? I’m almost tempted to list The Prince on my list, because the effect of a piece of media is always deeper than it appears on the surface. Political leaders in sixteenth-century Italy influenced perceptions through public events that could be described as media. You could say Cesare Borgia’s public execution of Ramiro d’Orco was a . If so, Ryan Holiday’s is like a modern day, The Prince: exposing the fundamentally-ugly reality of how a complex and brutal system that affects public perceptions works. Why Machiavelli’s exile wasn’t lonely Lest you have a low opinion of Niccolò Machiavelli from the content in The Prince, I want to leave you with something more endearing about him. When the Medici returned to power, they suspected Machiavelli of conspiring against them, so had him jailed and tortured – a decent reason to believe The Prince may have been satirical or, fittingly, a Machiavellian gambit to cause the Medici harm. Exiled to his farm estate, and stripped of his position as a political advisor, Machiavelli did his best to keep doing the work he loved, and retain a sense of dignity. In a letter to a friend, he described his daily ritual: When evening comes, I go back home, and go to my study. On the threshold, I take off my work clothes, covered in mud and filth, and I put on the clothes an ambassador would wear. Decently dressed, I enter the ancient courts of rulers who have long since died. There, I am warmly welcomed, and I feed on the only food I find nourishing and was born to savor. I am not ashamed to talk to them and ask them to explain their actions and they, out of kindness, answer me. Four hours go by without my feeling any anxiety. I forget every worry. I am no longer afraid of poverty or frightened of death. I live entirely through them. —Niccolò Machiavelli, Letter to Francesco Vettori There’s your summary of Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince If you enjoyed this summary, I highly recommend you read . There’s also an excellent free online annotated version online, called . Thank you for having me on your podcasts! Thank you for having me on your podcasts. Thank you to David DeCelle for having me on podcast. As always, you can find interviews of me on . About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of , and . Through the Love Your Work podcast, his , and David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Subscribe to Love Your Work Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Show notes:
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294. Sure Bets and Wildcards
01/26/2023
294. Sure Bets and Wildcards
Which would you rather have? Mild success, or wild success? Most of us would prefer wild success. But we pursue mild success. And you can’t have one when you’re going for the other. The struggle of an aspiring novelist A more specific version of the scenario I mentioned in episode 253: Imagine you’re working at Starbucks during the day, and at night you’re writing novels – not just any novels, but your favorite kind. You call it Care Bear Fanfic Urban Fantasy. As far as you know, you’re the only person who writes Care Bear Fanfic Urban Fantasy. Judging by your sales, you’re also the only person who reads it. You’ve written three novels in this genre you’ve created, and there have been hardly any sales, aside from the handful of copies you’ve sold to your mom and close friends. After a couple years writing and promoting your Care-Bear novels, you decide it’s time for a change. You told yourself when you started writing that as soon as you made as much as your Starbucks job, you’d quit and write full-time. You’re not even close. Your hourly Starbucks wage isn’t great, but you’ve actually lost money writing your three novels, after investing in cover designs and some ads. A new opportunity Fortunately, one of your friends is a pretty successful author. She makes a middle-class living writing in a genre called Sweet Romance – mostly read by retired women, some of whom read a new Sweet Romance novel every day. You buy your friend a coffee – or rather steal it from work – sit her down, and drill her to tell you all about writing and selling Sweet Romance novels. She’s super helpful, and tells you everything you need to know about the story structure readers expect, what tropes each novel has to hit, and even what keywords to advertise under. Armed with your knowledge of the Sweet Romance genre, you get to work. It’s not your favorite, but it would beat serving coffee, you figure. The first couple novels are a challenge, but once you get it down, you’re cranking out a new one every several weeks. You’ve got it down to a whole system: You change the character names, the locations, and a few scenarios from your last novel, and they practically write themselves. Making it, as a middle-class novelist Three years later, you, like your friend, are a middle-class Sweet Romance novelist. You’ve written eighteen novels, in three series, and in the past year have profited $70k. You quit your job at Starbucks a couple years ago, and you were right: Writing Sweet Romance is way more fun than serving coffee. Still, something is missing. You’re getting tired of writing the same stories over and over. New ideas for Care Bear Fanfic Urban Fantasy stories keep coming to you. But you keep pushing them down. Why would you bother writing another Care Bear novel, when you’re sure you’ll sell none? Why would you not write another Sweet Romance novel, when you’re sure you’ll sell some. Besides, you’ve upgraded your life: You now have a mortgage and a car payment, and your dog eats Purina instead of the off-brand stuff from Aldi. These novels don’t sell forever. If you don’t keep the Sweet Romance machine going, you’ll make less and less money. A missed opportunity But, one day, you discover something that changes everything you thought you knew about the business of being an author. As you’re tallying up your earnings at the end of the month, you realize that your Care Bear Fanfic Urban Fantasy series has started selling. In fact, you’ve sold a hundred copies in the past month! That’s more copies than you’ve sold in all the previous years. You dig a little deeper, and discover another author, writing under the name Brave Heart Brian, has written seven Care Bear Fanfic Urban Fantasy novels. You’re filled with excitement, confusion, and envy. You’re excited to have some Care Bear novels to read, confused as to how Brave Heart Brian seems to have popped up out of nowhere, and envious that – judging from the Amazon ranks of his books – he’s making more money than you are! You take a deep breath and wash away the envy – it is fanfic after all, it’s not like you invented Care Bears. You email Brian to congratulate him on his success, and ask him how it all happened. It turns out Brian stumbled upon your Care Bear series last year. He loved it, and wanted to read more Care Bear Fanfic Urban Fantasy, but since you clearly weren’t active anymore, he decided if he wanted to read more, he’d have to write the novels himself. Not only has he built up a nice following of readers, he just sold film rights for his series, for millions of dollars! The good news is, Care Bear Fanfic Urban Fantasy is quickly becoming a popular genre. The bad new is, you’re not the author who will reap most of the benefits. Where did you go wrong? You wonder, Where did I go wrong? You tried writing Care Bear Fanfic Urban Fantasy for years, and the writing was on the wall: Nobody cared. The problem was, Sweet Romance was a sure bet – or at least one of the surer bets writing novels could be. You expected writing in Care Bear Fanfic Urban Fantasy to behave like a sure bet, but it was not a sure bet. The Care Bear novels were a wildcard. You didn’t distinguish your sure bets from your wildcards, so you gave up on your wildcards too soon. Sure bets for mild success, wildcards for wild success We’re used to playing sure bets. You didn’t show up to your job at Starbucks for the small chance of making a lot of money. You instead had a high chance – a guarantee, in fact – to make a little money. You knew how much you’d get paid every hour you worked. Sure bets have a good chance of mild success. Even when you fail at a sure bet, you succeed somewhat – if you slack off at Starbucks, you still get paid, so long as you don’t get fired. If your next Sweet Romance novel isn’t your best, you still make some sales. Sure bets have a good chance of mild success, but wildcards have a small chance of wild success. When a wildcard fails, all your effort goes to waste. You get nothing. But when a wildcard succeeds, the sky is the limit. In my second interview with , on episode 177, he told me this: Your last book was really juicy. Your last book did not sell a million copies. Those things aren’t completely related. But it’s very important that your next book not be something that you think fits into a juicy slot – not be something that is searched for from an SEO point of view…. That’s how you become a second-rate romance novelist. It’s not how you write The Martian. What Seth was telling me, essentially, was to not play sure bets – don’t write something just because you know some people are searching for it. Instead, play wildcards, to write what was interesting to me, and take the risk that it might not work. Don’t rate your wildcards as if they were sure bets Essentially, when you’ve played a wildcard, don’t evaluate its performance as if it were a sure bet. The number of sales you get on one book is not a direct reflection of the quality of that book. As Seth had told me in my first interview with him on , and as I explored on episode 286, . As I talked about on episode 251, if you keep playing wildcards forever, eventually , and one of them will hit. But you can’t play wildcards forever. Your life is only so long, and there’s only so much time in the day to generate wildcards. If you had kept writing Care Bear novels, there’s no telling how long it would have taken to quit your job at Starbucks – or if you would have ever succeeded at all. The security of sure bets + the success of wildcards You don’t have to choose between playing sure bets and wildcards. As I talked about on episode 256, you can play the . Have the security of . If, instead of going all in on Sweet Romance novels, you had written, say, one Care Bear novel for every three Romance novels, you’d’ve greatly increased your chances of being the breakout Care Bear Fanfic Urban Fantasy writer, at the expense of a small pay-cut in the short-term. You can play all sure bets, you can play all wildcards, or you can do a mix of both. But be clear with yourself when you’re playing one or the other. The quality of the decisions you make with your creative career depends on it. Image: Thank you for having me on your podcasts! Thank you for having me on your podcasts. Thank you J Thorn at . As always, you can find interviews of me on . About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of , and . Through the Love Your Work podcast, his , and David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Subscribe to Love Your Work Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Show notes:
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293. Carrots, Sticks, and Blinders
01/12/2023
293. Carrots, Sticks, and Blinders
You can’t get through a project on momentum alone. But there are mechanisms you can use to tweak your motivation and make better use of what momentum you have. These motivation mechanisms aren’t one-size-fits-all – you have to choose which ones work for you. Motivation requires self-mastery As I talked about on episode 291, getting through a creative project is like skateboarding through a halfpipe. You have a lot of motivation going into a project, due to your high expectations. Even if your expectations were to be met, it would still be impossible to coast through to the end of a project. There’s too much friction along the way. Experienced skateboarders know how to soar out of halfpipes, because they know how to tweak their momentum. Experienced creators know how to follow through on creative projects, because they know how to tweak their motivation. But gaining this experience is a catch-22: You can’t finish projects if you don’t know how to tweak your motivation, and you don’t know how to tweak your motivation if you haven’t finished projects. You have to learn, through trial-and-error, what keeps you motivated. Finish smaller projects and build your along the way. But it doesn’t have to be guesswork. If you know what motivation mechanisms are at your disposal – and the strengths and pitfalls of those mechanisms, you can more quickly gain an understanding of your motivation. Three motivation mechanisms There are three main motivation mechanisms: carrots, sticks, and blinders. The carrot and the stick are classic motivation mechanisms that have been in the scientific literature on motivation for a long time. If you’re riding a horse, there are two ways to motivate him: dangle a carrot in front of his face, or strike him in the flank with a stick. The carrot represents the promise of potential reward, the stick represents the threat of potential punishment, and what I call blinders block out distractions and keep the horse focused on the road ahead. We’re attracted to rewards, and we avoid punishments. If we set up our projects so action leads to carrots and inaction leads to sticks, we’ll get motivated and maintain the momentum to finish – in theory. Carrots: internal and external One way to work carrots into your projects is to have promising data. If you have market research that suggest you’ll earn a lot of money if you finish the project, you might have an easier time getting motivated. Or, you might merely be so curious about the outcome of the project, that motivates you to follow through. You can also use external rewards as carrots. For example, you might promise yourself a vacation if you finish a project. On a more granular level, you might promise yourself a piece of chocolate for every 100 words you write. Sticks: internal and external One way to work sticks into your projects is to do part of a project that will result in a punishment if you don’t finish the rest of the project. I called this “The Whip,” in my book, The Heart to Start. When I create a new email course, for example, I use the whip. I set up a landing page promising emails on a schedule, then send traffic to the landing page. Once I have sign-ups, I’m highly motivated to finish writing all the emails in the course, as the promised dates approach. This same tactic has worked for other people who have tried my “Explosive Email Course” formula. You can also use external punishments as sticks. You can promise to pay your friend $100 if you don’t finish your project by a certain date. On a more granular level, you can punish yourself for behavior that doesn’t drive your project forward. , who I interviewed on episodes and 117, created Pavlok, a wristband you can program to shock you when you do things you’d rather quit. I once used it to quit Facebook, and it was shockingly effective. Blinders: physical and mental Carrots can reward you for the behavior you want to be motivated to do, and sticks can punish you for what you don’t want to be motivated to do. Blinders can keep you more focused on what you want to be motivated to do, while blocking out what you don’t want to be motivated to do. Blinders can be physical, or mental. If you have a dedicated office, or space you do your work, that’s a form of physical blinder. By working in that space many times, your mind has been trained to focus on work when in that space. As I talked about in Mind Management, Not Time Management, even if you don’t have much space, you can set up certain cues in your environment to serve as blinders. When I was first starting on my own, in a tiny bedroom in San Francisco, I transformed that space from bedroom to office through strategic use of a room divider, aromatherapy, and lighting. Physically separating yourself from a potential source of distraction is another type of physical blinder. If you put your phone in another room, or , that’s a blinder. By using a , you’re also using a blinder. There are many options of , but I write my first drafts on an antique . Rules and schedules as mental blinders Rules and schedules can serve as mental blinders. Simply by deciding that you will or won’t do something within some period of time, you focus your mind on the target behavior, while blocking out distractions. The first-hour rule is an effective blinder: Spend the first hour of your day working on your most important task. You can get a lot done in an hour, and can usually hold off any other activity for that short period of time. Mental blinders with secondary benefits You can also use mental blinders not only for the benefits of the behaviors they promote, but also for the secondary effects of those behaviors. The – or setting a timer for ten minutes to focus on one task – isn’t powerful so much for the work you do in those ten minutes, but for the momentum it creates. Ten minutes is an easy decoy goal that short-circuits your ego’s excuse engine, but once those ten minutes are up, you usually have the momentum to keep going. On the contrary, “cheat days,” whether when dieting or reducing, say, social media intake, can let the superego take a rest, and let the id blow of steam. It can be hard or even detrimental to quit things cold-turkey, but if there’s one day a week you cheat, it can make the rest of the week tolerable. Pitfalls of motivation mechanisms As you can see, there is a huge variety of motivation mechanisms you can use to keep yourself going when projects get tough. But the motivation mechanism that works for one person won’t necessarily work for another. And some mechanisms are prone to particular pitfalls that others aren’t. Rewards lose effectiveness First, some of the pitfalls of these mechanisms. The biggest problem with carrots is eventually you get your fill of carrots. This tends to be more of a problem when the rewards you’re using are external, and not an integral part of the project. If you’re, say, giving yourself a piece of chocolate for every 100 words you write, there’s a good chance you won’t be as motivated by the tenth piece of chocolate as you were by the first. But even when the rewards are integral to the project, you can tire of those rewards, and need to search for another source – as I talked about in on episode 283. Rewards can backfire Also, external carrots especially can make doing the work more about the destination – the carrot dangled in front of you – than about the journey. External rewards can actually reduce your motivation. Behavioral scientist described on episode 51 that Intel lost productivity when an experimental monetary bonus was removed – relative to more integral rewards, such as verbal praise. Rewards require discipline When self-administering external carrots, you also need to be disciplined enough to dole out the reward to yourself properly. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how giving yourself chocolate for every 100 words could backfire. Punishments can lose effectiveness, backfire, and require discipline Sticks can be prone to many of the same problems as carrots: The punishment may lose its effectiveness, doing the activity while motivated to avoid punishment may cause you enjoy it less, and you have to be disciplined enough to administer the punishment for it to matter. Blinders entrain behavior Blinders tend to have fewer problems than carrots or sticks. They don’t use external stimuli, so there’s less chance of your motivation getting misdirected. Instead, the more you use blinders, the easier the target activity tends to get. As the neuroscience saying goes, “Neurons that fire together wire together,” so each time you do the target activity, it’s easier to do it again. Each time you work in your home office, you train yourself to work when in your office. When you spend the first hour of your day working on your most important project, you make it easier to do it again tomorrow. Blinders are nearly foolproof Blinders are nearly foolproof because the source of your motivation stays within the project or the activity itself – and that’s the best source of motivation. So if you must use external carrots and sticks, do so sparingly. If you’re relying on external rewards and punishments to motivate yourself, or if you can’t find the self-discipline to administer your own blinders, that’s a bad sign. You clearly don’t enjoy the activities involved in completing the project, and/or completing the project isn’t meaningful enough to you to be a source of motivation. Be an expert on your personal motivation mechanisms There’s of course a lot of research on motivation – how effective carrots, sticks, or even blinders are – but none of that matters as much as how each of these motivation mechanisms work for you, personally. A motivation mechanism, such as external rewards, may backfire in the confines of a scientific study, in a context different than your project, and averaged out amongst the study subjects, rather than on an individual basis. If you want to finish lots of creative projects, you need to become an expert on your own motivation. Be a curious observer of yourself, and how you respond to carrots and sticks, internal and external, and how well you can administer and react to your own blinders. You’ll get through more projects, and each time you do, you’ll learn a little more about how keep and build upon momentum to get through bigger and bigger halfpipes. Image: Thank you for having me on your podcasts! Thank you for having me on your podcasts. Thank you to Paul Millerd at . As always, you can find interviews of me on . About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of , and . Through the Love Your Work podcast, his , and David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Subscribe to Love Your Work Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Show notes:
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292. Summary: The Network: The Battle for the Airwaves and the Birth of the Communications Age, by Scott Woolley
11/17/2022
292. Summary: The Network: The Battle for the Airwaves and the Birth of the Communications Age, by Scott Woolley
The Network, by Scott Woolley, tells the history of wireless communications, and the stories of the characters that were a part of it. It’s the first book strictly about media history that I’m summarizing and adding to my list. Wireless communications start with wired communications Wireless communications today of course include cell phones, but The Network takes us from the wireless telegraph, to radio, to television, and finally to satellites. First, it gives a little background on the history of the electric telegraph, the invention which suddenly made it possible to move, in minutes, messages that used to take weeks to reach their destinations. The electric telegraph was able to change the world thanks to one simple action: The ability to move a piece of metal at the end of a wire. That was enough to develop codes that could transmit messages, based upon the simple movement of that piece of metal. This process started in 1822, when Christian Órsted attached a copper wire to a battery and saw a nearby compass needle move. There was a several-decade-long race to develop an electric telegraph. The first transatlantic cable was opened for business by 1866. A big customer of these telegraph services were stock traders, who could buy shares in London, sell them a few seconds later in New York, and always profit if their trades were executed in time. Morse code was the winning format for turning the movement of a piece of metal into messages that could travel around the world. A claim in The Network I couldn’t find a source for, but that sounds pretty cool: The clouds in New York City at night used to have projected on them news, election results, and sports scores – in Morse code. From a worthless accidental discovery to worthwhile wireless The history of wireless communication started with a discovery as accidental as Christian Órsted’s: Heinrich Hertz noticed that metal objects moved slightly when lightning struck nearby. He later conducted experiments where he successfully generated sparks through the air. It was pretty cool, but he concluded that the invisible waves he had discovered were “of no use whatsoever.” Electrical signals that traveled through the air were made very useful, indeed, by Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi. For much of its early years, most people thought his Marconi Company was a scam. Like the dot-com and crypto booms, many companies at the dawn of wireless technology made off with investors’ money. One article, with the headline, “Wireless and Worthless,” pointed out that more criminals were being prosecuted from wireless companies than from any other industry. Besides, what did we need wireless technology for, when there were companies such as The Commercial, which was probably the hottest tech company in New York in the early 1900s? It owned five of the sixteen cables crossing the Atlantic Ocean, and one of the two that crossed the Pacific – which was 10,000 miles long. 10,000 miles was pretty impressive, especially when you consider that in 1896, Guglielmo Marconi could only send a wireless message one mile. What was the point? The pseudo-events of Guglielmo Marconi Marconi was good at building buzz for his wireless technology through public demonstrations – you could call them , a la Daniel J. Boorstin’s , which I talked about on episode 257. In front of an audience, he’d ask a volunteer to carry around a “magic box.” He’d build tension from the stage, then push a lever, which would make the magic box buzz from afar. In 1898, when his wireless range was somewhere around ten miles, Marconi set up a telegraph receiver on the yacht of the prince of Wales. Queen Victoria sent the first mundane wireless text message, asking, “Can you come to tea?” The prince replied, “Very sorry, cannot come to tea.” After all, he was on the ocean. By 1899, Marconi could send a message over the English channel, and by 1901, he could send a message 225 miles. Marconi had competition in trying to send a wireless message across the Atlantic, which was 3,000 miles. Nikola Tesla, with the money of J.P. Morgan, was working on a fifty-five ton, 187-foot-tall steel super-antenna. And Marconi didn’t have the funding to build something like that. Marconi won that race across the Atlantic. In one of his publicity stunts, he was able to relay “Marconigrams,” as he called them, from celebrities in London to celebrities at a dinner party in New York. But, that wasn’t enough to impress stock traders who relied on wired telegrams – the messages took ten minutes to arrive, with pre-arranged help in expediting them as they traveled to and from coastal locations on wired connections. And radio waves are easier to transmit at night than during business hours, when radiation from the sun interferes with wireless signals. As the Titanic sank, Marconi rose But in 1912, the day before Marconi Company investors were to vote on whether to further fund the company, the Titanic sank. Using Marconi’s wireless technology, an ocean liner, the Olympic, fielded a message from the Titanic, over 500 miles away, which included coordinates, and said, “We have struck an iceberg.” Another ocean liner, the Carpathia, came to the rescue. Thanks to Marconi’s wireless technology, of the Titanic’s 2,223 passengers, 706 survived. What followed sounds like the third act of a great movie: When Marconi arrived at a lecture that had already been scheduled, there was a crowd overflowing out the building. He received a standing ovation, including from the once-skeptical Thomas Edison. And the vote of Marconi shareholders, on whether to issue another $7 million in stock to build stations for intercontinental telegraphs, was a no-brainer. David Sarnoff: The early days of an innovator Working at Marconi at that time was the young David Sarnoff, who had started at Marconi after being fired for taking the day of Rosh Hashanah off work at Marconi’s rival company, the Commercial. A Russian immigrant, Sarnoff’s father had recently become unable to work, so he had set off to support the family as an office messenger boy, at only fifteen. Being a telegraph operator was a hot tech job at the time. David Sarnoff bought a used telegraph key, so he could spend his evenings practicing his coding skills – his Morse-coding skills. He worked his way up until he was managing Marconi’s New York office, but then transferred to what seemed like a step down – as an inspector in the engineering department. Edwin Armstrong’s signal amplifier It was as chief inspector David Sarnoff met Edwin Armstrong, who demonstrated to him an amazing signal amplifier. From a Marconi station in New Jersey, Armstrong’s amplifier turned signals from an Ireland station from barely audible, to loud and crisp. They were then able to listen in on signals from competitor Poulsen Wireless, as their San Francisco station communicated with their Portland station. They were even able to listen to Poulsen’s Hawaii station, despite the fact Poulsen’s own San Francisco station – the breadth of a continent closer – could barely pick up the signal, amidst a Hawaiian thunderstorm. Sarnoff thought he had found the key technology that would help Marconi dominate wireless telegraphy, and free it from having to share its revenue with rival cabled networks. Instead, Guglielmo Marconi himself refused to believe the results of the story, and another executive publicly chided Sarnoff within the company for conducting the unauthorized experiments, which he believed merely drove up the prices of inventors’ patents. Edwin Armstrong becomes Major Armstrong Armstrong ended up selling the patent for his amplifier to AT&T. Through the use of that amplifier and other wireless-technology inventions, Edwin Armstrong achieved the rank of Major Armstrong in WWI. During WWI, Britain and Germany cut one another’s cables, making wireless communication even more important. The British military took over Marconi’s wireless stations within their empire. Armstrong helped intercept Germany’s wireless communications. RCA, born from a patent pool But during the war, the way wireless technology patents were split up amongst companies became a problem. It was impossible to build useful devices without using a variety of innovations, and thus infringing on other companies’ patents. The Navy used its wartime powers to allow American manufacturers to use any wireless patents they wanted, without consequence. Once the war was over, the military sought to maintain this freedom of innovation, and – as a matter of national security – keep the American radio industry out of foreign hands. They struck a deal to cut off the American portion of the British Marconi company, and pool together patents from AT&T, Westinghouse, G.E., and – interestingly – United Fruit Company, who had patents for communications systems on their Central American banana plantations. The name of this new company: RCA. Its general manager: David Sarnoff. Sarnoff’s radio Sarnoff had pitched to his bosses at Marconi, in 1915, a “Radio Music Box.” Far more complex than moving a piece of metal, voice had first been transmitted over radio waves in 1906, and The Navy had done “radio telephone” calls, but nobody had thought of using radio to transmit to a wide audience. His pitch described a box with amplifier tubes, and what he called a “speaking telephone.” He wrote, “There should be no difficulty in receiving music perfectly when transmitted within a radius of 25 to 50 miles. Within such a radius there reside hundreds of thousands of families.” Sarnoff had already experimented with the concept by transmitting music, to a boat cruising around Manhattan, from a phonograph in Marconi’s New York office. Sarnoff’s bosses at Marconi had ignored his radio music box pitch, but once he was in charge at RCA, he was free to pursue the idea. Sarnoff hadn’t gotten much support for his ideas at Marconi, but he had learned the value of a well-crafted . The upcoming boxing match between the American, Jack Dempsey, and the Frenchman, Georges Carpentier was the perfect opportunity to show the value of using radio waves to broadcast sound to a large audience. The pseudo-event that launched radio As was customary for big events at the time, if you wanted an update, you could gather near a telegraph station, where someone would announce a text-message update of the event. In Paris, a flare was to be released from a plane after the fight: white if Dempsey won, red if Carpentier. But if you truly wanted to know what was happening, you had to be one of the ninety-one thousand people there in the stadium. So, the rich and famous were flocking to New York. 300 rooms were booked at the Plaza, 500 at the Waldorf Astoria, and 800 at the Biltmore. Actress Mary Pickford took her yacht all the way from Hollywood, through the Panama Canal, and some came in the 1921 version of a private jet: a private train car. But for the first time, people who couldn’t be at the fight could get blow-by-blow updates. RCA teamed up with amateur radio operators, who rented out auditoriums and received a voice broadcast from ringside, via “radiophone.” This helped solve the chicken-and-egg problem of getting mass-audience radio started. You couldn’t get people to buy receivers if they hadn’t experienced a broadcast – and if there was nothing being broadcast – and it wasn’t worth broadcasting if nobody had receivers. By getting a lot of people together for a global event everybody was already talking about, it was worthwhile to do a broadcast, and people got to see the potential of radio. Radio in its infancy Over the next three years, secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover granted licenses to 600 radio stations – small ones that broadcast across a particular city or county. There were no radio stations or programs in much of rural America. But Sarnoff was pushing the adoption of higher-powered AM transmitters that could broadcast to multi-state regions. This idea was opposed by the smaller stations that didn’t want their audiences stolen, and also by AT&T. AT&T’s raw deal in radio AT&T believed that since radio involved transmitting the voice, they, as the phone company, should be in charge of it. They also didn’t want to lose revenue: For AM radio programs to be syndicated from one station to another, they had to be sent over AT&T’s phone lines, as they would come out distorted if transmitted wirelessly. Additionally, AT&T felt duped from the negotiations over the RCA patent pool, which Sarnoff had been in charge of. Sarnoff had proposed that AT&T get the rights to sell radio transmitters, while RCA would sell radio receivers. This didn’t seem like a bad deal in 1920, before the Dempsey/Carpentier fight, but now it looked like a raw deal, indeed. In 1924, RCA’s AM radio sales were over $50 million, while AT&T had a measly market of 600 radio stations. Most of those stations ignored AT&T’s patents and built their own transmitters, and AT&T wasn’t successful in getting the revenue that was rightfully theirs. The first radio ad The radio broadcasting industry was experimenting with business models. AT&T ran the first radio ad in 1922. For fifty dollars, a suburban housing development got to broadcast on an AT&T station. Herbert Hoover called advertising-funded radio “the quickest way to kill broadcasting.” He wanted instead to fund radio broadcasts by placing a surcharge on the sale of each consumer radio receiver. David Sarnoff was on his side, which was odd, since an advertising-funded model would make his radios cheaper to consumers. Divvying up the radio waves There were also fights over who could broadcast on what frequency. The Radio Act of 1912 had been passed, after amateur telegraphers’ messages had interfered with one another while communicating about the Titanic sinking. Hoover tried to regulate the frequencies some stations were broadcasting on, but it turned out the 1912 act had only regulated airwaves at least six-hundred meters long – the technological limit at the time. Some stations protested by deliberately overlapping their broadcasts, resulting in an hour of unpleasant squelches, followed by a message to support the passing of a law to regulate the airwaves. The Federal Radio Commission was formed in 1927, for that purpose. In 1934, it became the FCC, overseeing all types of electronic communications. How AM held back FM Sometimes, an inferior technology dominates, as VHS did over Beta, but sometimes, despite the best efforts of entrenched interests, the better technology prevails, as did eventually FM radio, over AM. AM radio signals are imprinted sounds on waves that vary according to amplitude, or the height of the waves. Thus “AM,” for “amplitude modulation.” FM radio waves are varied according to the frequency of the waves, or their width. Engineers in the radio industry and academia once thought frequency modulation wouldn’t work. A 1922 paper from AT&T claimed to prove mathematically that it “inherently distorts without any compensating advantages whatsoever.” But Major Armstrong was pushing hard for the FM method. Armstrong once again conducted a demonstration for Sarnoff. His “little black box” that transmitted an FM signal had vastly superior sound quality than an AM radio. Sarnoff let Armstrong run tests with FM equipment from RCA’s offices atop the Empire State Building – the tallest in the world at the time. The FM signal delivered better sound quality than AM with one twenty-fifth the signal power. FM threatened existing AM interests There was a lot at stake in switching to FM: It could deliver better sound quality, and – since signals could be transmitted on a variety of frequencies – it could add thousands of stations to the dial. But, there were already tens of millions of AM radios, and hundreds of expensive radio station transmitters that would become obsolete. A benefit to RCA, however, would be that with clearer signals, they would no longer have to pay AT&T for use of their phone network for syndicating content. Y2K of the 1940s: The bogus sun-spot scare In 1941, the FCC approved a band of FM stations between 42 and 50 MHz. At the start of WWII, Major Armstrong pushed the military to switch to FM, and waived any licensing fees, increasing adoption. After the war, there was a controversy about sunspots: They work in an eleven-year cycle, and in FCC proceedings, one engineer rose a stink about how the next time sunspots came around, they would interfere with stations on the existing FM band. Despite the fact nearly every expert disagreed with that prediction, the FCC moved the FM dial to the current 88 to 108 MHz band. This made $75 million worth of devices soon-to-be worthless, and pissed off hundreds of thousands of FM early adopters. (When the strongest sunspots in two centuries came along, the old FM band worked fine.) The stifling of FM radio continued. The FCC eventually cut FM broadcasts from a 150 mile radius to a 50-mile radius, which may not sound like much, but translates to a ninety-percent cut in coverage area. Conveniently, this meant FM stations could no longer send programs to neighboring markets through the air, and had to instead pay to use AT&T’s expensive and low-fidelity telephone wires. AM radio interests had also taken over most FM stations, where they simply rebroadcast their AM programs. There was little incentive to buy an FM set, and by 1946, nine of ten radio manufacturers weren’t bothering to make them. All of this was enough to prompt Major Armstrong to file an antitrust suit against RCA, claiming David Sarnoff was conspiring to stifle the FM radio industry. The bold bets Sarnoff made in TV David Sarnoff was very focused on making television work around that time. He made some bold bets that helped NBC, a spin-off from RCA, be the first on the air. Searching for office space during the Great Depression, Sarnoff had decided to move RCA and NBC into the expensive 30 Rockefeller Plaza, aka “30 Rock.” He pissed off shareholders by building elaborate radio studios. He had special wires installed in NBC’s studios – for transmitting TV signals around the building – that weren’t used for another twenty years. He had a giant studio built, with rotating stage, to work with television cameras that didn’t even exist. Overall, he spent $50 million on television research over the course of twenty-five years, and it took a long time to pay off. Battles over TV airwaves The FCC’s poor decisions continued in the proliferation of television. Despite warnings from engineers such as Major Armstrong, they allocated VHF channels so poorly, only one or two stations worked in most cities. They had to learn from their mistakes and start over with UHF stations. But UHF wavelengths were so short, the lower the channel number a station had, the further and more clearly their signal could travel. So, stations fought over the smaller-numbered of the sixty-eight channels. The television satellite David Sarnoff was there, once again, innovating in television. There was a battle over the color standard, and Sarnoff and RCA’s NSTC standard was finally adopted by the FCC in 1953. “Relay-1” was the first American communications satellite, launched in 1962. It helped bypass AT&T’s cables for syndicating programs, thus doubling RCA’s revenue. Some events had previously been broadcast via airplane to expand coverage area. Relay-1’s first trans-Pacific broadcast was supposed to carry to Japan an address from President Kennedy. Instead, it carried coverage of his assassination, and footage of the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson. There’s your The Network summary As you...
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291. The Project Halfpipe
11/03/2022
291. The Project Halfpipe
A creative project is like a halfpipe. The depth of the halfpipe from which you must ascend to finish a project is equal to the height of the optimism that prompted you to begin. But there’s a way to build your project halfpipe so the project itself keeps you moving forward. The gravity of optimism pulls you into a project When you begin a project, you are optimistic. Why else would you start? You’re interested in the subject matter, and you expect to succeed. This optimism serves as the gravity that pulls you into the project halfpipe. Without experience, you can’t maintain the momentum to finish The momentum you build from this drop into the halfpipe may get you through much of the project, but will eventually run out. By the time you get to the other side of the halfpipe – the end of the project – you’ve forgotten the optimism you once had, and the friction of reality has sapped your energy. The project isn’t as fun as it once was, and it hasn’t been as easy as you had expected. You face a steep incline, and don’t have the momentum to ascend. Experienced skateboarders know how to tweak their momentum, so they have enough energy to ascend the other side of a halfpipe. Like kicking their legs while riding a swing, they’re able to climb higher and higher, as they go back and forth. Experienced creators know how to tweak their motivation, too, to ascend the other side of the halfpipe. They’ve finished enough projects, they know how to harness their momentum to make the most of their efforts, and coast through the tough parts. But the need for this experience is a catch-22: You don’t know how to tweak your motivation to follow through if you haven’t finished projects, and if you haven’t finished projects you don’t know how to tweak your motivation. A halfpipe is a closed system A halfpipe, with nothing but a skateboard rolling back and forth, is a closed system. The first law of thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. The energy from the descent into the halfpipe is not enough to get to the other side of the halfpipe, because much of it is wasted on friction. When you put a person on the skateboard, that adds a new energy source to the system. The skateboarder can move their body in ways that overcome the loss of energy from friction, thus maintaining enough momentum to get out of the halfpipe. But the skateboarder is a closed system, too. They require energy to move. Shiny object syndrome sets in when projects get tough often sets in toward the end of a project. There are other halfpipes all around. The excitement of dropping into one and once again experiencing effortless momentum is a lot more fun than putting forth effort to get out of the current halfpipe. So, you switch projects – you switch halfpipes. Some creators, after dropping into enough halfpipes, figure out how to tweak their motivation to get through one – whether due to luck or experimentation. More often, they get frustrated with the endless cycle of shiny object syndrome, and burn out. They stop “skating” altogether. You learn to maintain momentum by finishing projects But, you can turn the closed system of a halfpipe into an open system that maintains your momentum, propelling you to the finish. If you use this method to finish more projects, you’ll gain experience tweaking your motivation. Maybe you need an accountability partner – or maybe you hate obligation. Maybe you gain momentum by building prototypes – or maybe you prefer to develop a detailed plan. Maybe you like to talk about ideas with friends – or maybe you discover it causes you to lose your momentum. Do smaller projects, finish more projects If you aren’t finishing projects, you can’t learn what works for you. A great way to finish more projects is simply do smaller projects. When you do smaller projects, two things happen: One, you make the halfpipe shorter, and less shallow, so you don’t run out of momentum so fast, and you can more easily find the internal motivation to get out of the halfpipe. Two, you can more easily get momentum from the project itself, in the form of feedback loops. For example, when I’m working on a new book, I don’t just sit down and write a book. That’s too long and deep a halfpipe. I might be excited going in, but I’ll soon lose momentum, and I’ll forget why I began in the first place. Instead, I break the process of writing into tiny projects, which feed into progressively larger projects. I write and share an idea on Twitter. If it does well on Twitter, I expand it into a newsletter. If it does well as a newsletter, I expand it into an article and podcast episode. After I complete this process enough times, I have a large collection of ideas I can share in my book. There’s still a lot of work to be done: I need to weave the ideas together into a cohesive whole, not to mention edit the book, lay it out, design the cover, and market it. But that bigger halfpipe of writing the book is much easier to get through when fueled by the momentum of the smaller halfpipes of tweets, newsletters, and articles. In fact, through these smaller projects with feedback loops, my halfpipe is no longer a closed system. The projects themselves are providing the momentum. Big projects are like halfpipes: You lose momentum and get stuck. Small projects are like waves: Feedback loops keep you moving forward. Turn halfpipes into waves When you surf a wave, gravity is still pulling you down the face of the wave, but the wave itself is moving, too. This is why you sometimes hear the expression of “riding a wave,” in business. The success of an industry or trend becomes an outside force that keeps you moving, multiplying your efforts. The success of a project itself can become a wave, too. As blogger has pointed out, one reason it’s hard to finish projects is that in the middle of the project, of working on the project, but none of the upsides of succeeding. You’re stuck in the halfpipe. But if you design the project so you get some of that feedback throughout the process, you get to experience some upsides that keep you moving. This works for a lot of creative projects. You can’t count the number of stand-up comedians who go to one open mic after another, testing out jokes, then take those jokes on the road to polish them, then weave it all together into a one-hour special, then repeat the process over again. Even War and Peace, written when publishing wasn’t so rapid and didn’t have such immediate feedback, was published serially, with a different name, and wasn’t even intended to be a novel. It wasn’t until later that Tolstoy wove it together, and re-wrote it. The next time you find yourself stuck in a project halfpipe, or switching to new projects each time a previous project gets tough, see if you can turn that halfpipe into a wave. Complete smaller projects that give you immediate feedback. You’ll finish more projects, and learn to tweak your motivation well enough to soar out of larger and larger halfpipes. Thank you for having me on your podcasts! Thank you for having me on your podcasts. Thank you to Ivan Farber at the . As always, you can find interviews of me on . About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of , and . Through the Love Your Work podcast, his , and David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Subscribe to Love Your Work Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Show notes:
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290. Leonardo Mind, Raphael World
10/20/2022
290. Leonardo Mind, Raphael World
The world expects us to be Raphaels, but some of us are Leonardos. Don’t hold your Leonardo mind to Raphael standards, because this Raphael world would be nothing without Leonardo minds. There’s an inscription in the Pantheon in Rome that says, “Here lies that famous Raphael by whom Nature feared to be conquered while he lived.” In other words, Raphael was such an amazing painter, Nature was supposedly shaking in her boots, afraid he would learn all her tricks. (Ironically, Raphael’s remains are sealed away in a sarcophagus, where Nature can’t get to them. Who’s afraid of who?) But Nature had nothing to fear. Raphael could not outdo her. As Raphael was being buried, the painter Nature should have feared lay hundreds of miles to the north, in a little church on the grounds of the King of France’s chateau. Raphael the young phenom, Leonardo, the old has-been Several years before Raphael’s early death, he was getting paid thousands of ducats to paint one fresco after another in the Vatican. Meanwhile, the aging Leonardo da Vinci was nearby, living off a meager 33 ducat-a-month stipend, not doing much of importance. The pope had tried hiring him to paint something, but ended up frustrated, saying, “This man will never get anything done!” When the prolific art patron, Elizabeth d’Este, who had hounded Leonardo for a portrait for decades, came to visit Rome, she didn’t bother getting in touch with Leonardo. He was a has-been, who couldn’t be counted on to follow through. Who was she there to see? The young phenom, Raphael. Raphael was very similar to Leonardo, but also very different. His most important difference was that he was a master executor. If you hired Raphael, he got the job done. He also had been raised in the workshop of his father, a court painter for a Duke, so Raphael was refined and well-mannered. He knew how to schmooze with nobility. He had the connections that came along with that background, and could get a letter of recommendation from one powerful person to another with ease. Leonardo, on the other hand, was born out of wedlock – which made him “illegitimate” at the time – and didn’t get much education. While he had gained a reputation as a brilliant engineer and architect, he had also gained a reputation as an unreliable painter. Raphael: A reliable Leonardo As Raphael continued his career as the pope’s wunderkind, Leonardo worked his way north. He left yet another project unfinished in Milan, then impressed King Francis I enough to be invited to join him at the Chateau d’Amboise, as the official painter, architect, and court pageantry designer. While a gig with the King of France wasn’t the worst thing in the world, it was a step down from what Leonardo could have been doing if he hadn’t been reputed as someone who couldn’t get things done. The pope and all the nobles in all the principalities of Italy just watched him go. He’d never return again. While Raphael had some clear advantages that helped his career advance, he couldn’t have done it without the ways he and Leonardo were similar. The frescoes being painted by the young Raphael – such as his most-famous School of Athens – were exactly the kinds of projects Leonardo would have been great for, if only he could have been counted on to finish them. In fact, there was no person in the world to whom Raphael owed his own painting style more than Leonardo. When it came to painting, Raphael was mostly a reliable Leonardo. Raphael’s “Leonardo period” Art historians call the years during which Raphael spent a lot of time in Florence his “Florence period.” But they might as well call them his “Leonardo period.” That’s the four years during which Raphael’s work started looking less like that of his mentor, Perugino, and more like that of his idol, Leonardo. During Raphael’s Florence period, Leonardo was in a public face-off with another young phenom, Michelangelo. Leonardo had been commissioned to paint a battle scene in the Florence Council Hall. As usual, the first deadline came and went. Meanwhile, Michelangelo had done such a great job with his David statue, the council decided it would be a great idea to have him paint a battle scene, too. It was a pretty awkward situation for Leonardo. He was already struggling to finish, and a committee of which he had been a part had gone against his recommendation for a less-conspicuous location and put the David right outside the entrance of the council hall. Michelangelo was an arrogant prick who openly taunted Leonardo for his past failures, and now Leonardo had to walk through the shadow of Michelangelo’s latest triumph to get to his mural. Oh, and Michelangelo’s battle scene mural was directly across the room from his. By all accounts at the time, this was a painting competition – a battle of battle scenes. Leonardo wasn’t competitive by nature, but this was supposedly going to motivate him to finish his mural. Today, we might say putting Leonardo in this position was pretty machiavellian. Which is ironic, because it was arranged with the help of none other than the inventor of machiavellianism, the council’s secretary, Niccolò Machiavelli. Once word of this painting battle traveled outside Florence, young artists traveled to Florence to witness it. One of those artists: Raphael – armed with a letter of recommendation from the mother of the future Duke of Urbino to the leader of the Florentine Republic, stating that the twenty-one year-old was “greatly gifted…sensible and well-mannered.” It’s during this “Florence period” that Raphael’s work changed dramatically. It started to look as if he might know a thing or two about anatomy, he started aping Leonardo’s smokey sfumato technique, and drawing contorted, muscular men in the heat of battle. He learned a bit watching Michelangelo, but he learned a lot watching Leonardo. As it turned out, neither Leonardo nor Michelangelo finished his mural. For Michelangelo, it wasn’t a big deal. He got summoned to Rome, where he eventually painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Leonardo, however, had more of his career behind him than ahead of him. Yet another public failure meant he never got another public commission. So while Leonardo, in his sixties, was wandering around Europe, chasing what work he could, Raphael, in his early thirties, was getting showered with high-paying papal commissions, as a more-reliable Leonardo. The rise and fall of Raphael These days, we admire Leonardo more than we do Raphael, but that wasn’t always the case. That Raphael is one of the few people entombed in the palace of the gods, alongside kings, is testament to his popularity when he died. Heck, at his funeral, the pope kissed his hand. Around 1800, the church in which Leonardo was buried was destroyed in the French Revolution. Nobody bothered to try to recover Leonardo’s remains. They were mixed in with everyone else’s and forgotten. Meanwhile, Raphael was as popular as ever. If you take a peek at Google Ngram, you see a sharp increase in mentions of Raphael around that time. For hundreds of years after Raphael’s death, he was considered the quintessential painter of the High Renaissance. The art academies around Europe, who controlled the opinion of what was or wasn’t good art, built their curricula around studying the work of Raphael. But as the influence of art academies crumbled in the late 1800s with the rise of Impressionism, so too did crumble the reverence for Raphael. Meanwhile, Leonardo has risen in popularity over the centuries. Today, if you want to find a good book on Leonardo, you have lots of choices. Raphael, not so much. The probable cause of this rise in popularity and the probable cause of Leonardo’s struggles with follow-through are one in the same: Nature had more reason to fear Leonardo than Raphael. Leonardo’s massive iceberg Through the centuries after Leonardo’s death, his notes began to resurface. They had been inherited by someone who was supposed to compile and publish them, but were so numerous and disorganized, that was a nearly impossible task. His notes ended up collated and bound into individual notebooks, scattered amongst collectors around Europe. One notebook was found as recently as the 1960s, hiding in plain sight in Madrid, in the collection of the library. These notebooks have revealed that for Leonardo, painting a picture was about much more than painting a picture. When Raphael did an anatomy study, it was all about knowing how the skin on the surface of the body was shaped by the muscles underneath. The only purpose was to mimic Nature, on a superficial level. For Leonardo, an anatomy study was about much more. He didn’t just want to know what muscles were under the skin. He wanted to also know which muscles were engaged by which movements, or which nerves activated by which emotions. As a painter, there was no reason for Leonardo to know what the human heart looked like, or how it worked. Yet Leonardo made observations about the heart that would have advanced science by centuries, had they been published. Leonardo searched, Raphael found As I talked about on episodes and , economist David Galenson would say Raphael was a conceptual innovator, while Leonardo was an experimental one. To Leonardo, there was no such thing as irrelevant information. In the course of researching how to paint something, he might make a new discovery about anatomy, metallurgy, geology, or some other field, that would set him down a different path. The art historian Eugene Garin , based upon Leonardo’s many thousands of pages of notes, that he was trying to compile a treatise of all human knowledge. Leonardo wasn’t studying Nature just so he could paint it convincingly – he was trying to understand all of Nature. Raphael didn’t have to explore all aspects of the world. He merely had to copy the result of Leonardo’s thinking. Galenson told me, “It’s what conceptual innovators do, it turns out.” Conceptual innovators take an idea, and make it their own. It’s what Picasso did with the work of Cézanne, what Warhol did with the work of Pollack, what Hemingway did with the work of Stein and Twain. The projects Leonardo pursued were impossible to finish Leonardo’s experimental approach meant his paintings were never finished. He was always discovering something new, so he was constantly revising. For example, after one of his anatomy studies, he realized he had painted some neck muscles wrong, so he went back and repainted them thirty years after the fact. He did the bulk of his work on the Mona Lisa during four years, but moved it around for fifteen, making finishing touches until a paralyzed hand rendered him unable. The patron never got their painting, Leonardo never collected payment, and the Mona Lisa was still collecting dust in his studio when he died. This experimental, iterative approach extended to Leonardo’s materials and methods, and made it even more difficult for him to follow through. The best-practice method of painting murals in fresco required laying down plaster and painting on it before it dried and literally set itself in stone. It wasn’t great for Leonardo’s blurry-edged painting style, and it made iteration impossible. He couldn’t lay down dozens of layers of paint over the course of years, as he did with the Mona Lisa. By the time Leonardo was painting his battle scene in the Florence Council Hall, his famous Last Supper was already fading and flaking, thanks to his resistance to painting in the reliable fresco technique. Not satisfied with adapting his style to this technique, Leonardo instead experimented once again on his battle-scene mural. He was almost finished, before the fire he was using to set colors got too close, destroying his work. This Raphael world is nothing without Leonardos Historically, the world rewards Raphaels. It rewards the ability to formulate a plan, follow through, collect payment and prestige, and move on. So, the world trains us to be Raphaels. Why do we follow a curriculum and fill out bubbles on standardized tests with #2 pencils? Because our teacher already knows the answer. They know the answer so well, they’ve programmed a computer to grade the test, and it’ll get confused if you use a #3 pencil. But for the curriculum to be designed to make Raphaels, we first need Leonardos. We need people who explore and experiment. We need them to ask questions that might not have answers, and to come up with new questions nobody ever thought of. That’s not a straightforward process. It’s messy and disorganized, and it would cause any Raphael to pull their hair out. When you don’t always find answers, and the answers you do find lead to new questions, you don’t always finish. The days of the Raphaels of the world are numbered. If somebody already knows the process, already knows the answer, we don’t need Raphael. A computer or machine can follow a process. Raphael knew this. Once his fame was established, he milked it for all it was worth. His later frescoes were painted by his staff of assistants in the largest workshop of the High Renaissance. He licensed his drawings to a printmaker, who sold copies of his work. As it becomes harder to make it as a Raphael, it’s becoming easier to make it as a Leonardo. I think Leonardo would have been a great blogger. He wouldn’t have to collect and document all knowledge, then rely on an heir to collate, typeset, and publish his life’s work on expensive parchment. He could instead write and publish one note at a time, gradually building his treatise of human knowledge. He wouldn’t have to wander around Europe looking for patrons – he could get them without leaving his home. If you’re a Leonardo, don’t bother being a Raphael If you’re a Leonardo mind, don’t fall into the trap of evaluating yourself by the standards of the Raphael world. There’s a reason why the Raphaels are so good at getting it done: Their task is simpler. Don’t beat yourself up by your inability to plan and carry out a vision no one could reasonably execute on their first attempt. Instead, find a way to explore in public, one little project at a time, building up into your grand masterpiece. Leonardo’s remains were forgotten for sixty years. Some scientist, perhaps motivated by the gradual resurfacing of the notes revealing Leonardo’s genius, gathered together some bones he figured were those of the master. They’re in a tomb in a chapel on the grounds of the chateau, and it’s one of the top attractions in Amboise. Are they actually Leonardo’s bones? Probably not. His remains are probably where they should be – not sealed away in some sarcophagus, but one with Nature. Thank you for having me on your podcasts! Thank you to Costa Michailidis for having me on the . As always, you can find interviews of me on . About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of , and . Through the Love Your Work podcast, his , and David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Subscribe to Love Your Work Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Show notes:
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289. Livestream/AMA: Book Marketing, Motivation, Language Learning, Picking a Project, and Selling Foreign Rights
10/06/2022
289. Livestream/AMA: Book Marketing, Motivation, Language Learning, Picking a Project, and Selling Foreign Rights
Today I have a special episode for you. If you missed , I’m delivering it right to your ears. In this AMA, I answered questions about: How should I start marketing my books? How can you cope with burnout that gets in the way of creative work? How can you market your books when it doesn’t come naturally? How did you build your audience and how long did it take? (How can you build an audience without “niching down”?) What’s the difference between an accountability partner and a creativity partner? How did you get your first book deal? How can you stay motivated and get help from others when you work in isolation? How can you create luck in creative work? Which is better: Medium, or Substack? Do you use editing software, such as Grammarly? How did you come up with the Seven Mental States of Creativity? Have you made soap lately? How are you improving your fiction and storytelling skills? How do you hack learning a new language? Why are you using a pen name to write fiction? What are good writing goals for a beginner? Why do you prefer self-publishing over traditional? How can you pick a creative project when you have too many ideas? How do you make foreign-rights deals for your books? What should do with lots of different content on different topics? I also mention in this , and I’ll tell you briefly about it now. I’m giving away 20 of my favorite creativity books. As you know from this show, I’m a creativity enthusiast. I love to think about how to tap into your creativity and motivate action, and I love stories about how all creators do that, whether they’re writers, painters, musicians, scientists – or do any kind of creative work. I’ve compiled a list of my favorite creativity books, spanning mindset, creativity science, biographies, and more. I’m reaching into my own pocket and buying all twenty book for one lucky winner. Find out which books are on the list and sign up at . About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of , and . Through the Love Your Work podcast, his , and David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Subscribe to Love Your Work Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Show notes:
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288. Summary: Old Masters and Young Geniuses, by David W. Galenson
09/22/2022
288. Summary: Old Masters and Young Geniuses, by David W. Galenson
The book, shows there are two types of creators: experimental, and conceptual. Experimental and conceptual creators differ in their approaches to their work, and follow two distinct career paths. Experimental creators grow to become old masters. Conceptual creators shine as young geniuses. University of Chicago economist, and author of Old Masters and Young Geniuses, – who I interviewed on episode 105 – wanted to know how the ages of artists affected the prices of their paintings. He isolated the ages of artists from other factors that affect price, such as canvas size, sale date, and support type (whether it’s on canvas, paper, or other). He expected to find a neat effect, such as “paintings from younger/older artists sell for more.” But instead, he found two distinct patterns: Some artists’ paintings from their younger years sold for more. Other artists’ paintings from their older years sold for more. He then found this same pattern in the historical significance of artists’ work: The rate at which paintings were included in art history books or retrospective exhibitions – both indicators of significance – peaked at the same ages as the values of paintings. When he looked closely at how painters who followed these two trajectories differed, he found that the ones who peaked early took a conceptual approach, while those who peaked late took an experimental approach. Cézanne vs. Picasso The perfect examples of contrasting experimental and conceptual painters are Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso. Paintings from Cézanne’s final year of life, when he was sixty-seven, are his most valuable. Paintings from early in Picasso’s career, when he was twenty-six, are his most valuable. A painting done when Picasso was twenty-six is worth four times as much as one done when he was sixty-seven (he lived to be ninety-one, and his biographer and friend called the dearth of his influential work later in life “a sad end”). A painting done when Cézanne was sixty-seven – the year he died – is worth fifteen times as much as one done when he was twenty-six. Cézanne, the experimenter Cézanne took an experimental approach to painting, which explains why it took so long for his career to peak. Picasso took a conceptual approach, which explains why he peaked early. Cézanne left the conceptual debates of Paris cafés to live in the south of France, in his thirties. He spent the next three decades struggling to paint what he truly saw in landscapes. He felt limited by the fact that, as he was looking at a canvas, he could only paint the memory of what he had just seen. He did few preparatory sketches early in his career, but grew to paint straight from nature. He treated his paintings as process work, and seemed to have no use for them when he was finished: He only signed about ten percent of his paintings, and sometimes threw them into bushes or left them in fields. Picasso, the conceptual genius Picasso, instead, executed one concept after another. He had early success with his Blue period and Rose period, then dove into Cubism. He often planned paintings carefully, in advance: He did more than four-hundred studies for his most valuable and influential painting, . One model described how he simply stared at her for an hour, apparently planning a series of paintings in his head, which he began painting the next day, without her assistance. Cézanne said, “I seek in painting.” Picasso said, “I don’t seek; I find.” Cézanne struggled to paint what he saw, and Picasso said, “I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.” Experimental vs. conceptual artists Here are some qualities that differ between experimental and conceptual artists: Experimental artists work inductively. Through the process of creation, they arrive at their solution. Conceptual artists work deductively. They begin with a solution in mind, then work towards it. Experimental artists have vague goals. They’re not quite sure what they’re seeking. Conceptual artists have specific goals. They already have an idea in their head they’re trying to execute. Experimental artists are full of doubt. Since they don’t already have the solution, and aren’t sure what they’re looking for, they rarely feel they’ve succeeded. Conceptual artists are confident. They know what they’re after, so once they’ve achieved it, they’re done, and can move on to the next thing. Experimental artists repeat themselves. They might paint the same subject over and over, tweaking their approach. Conceptual artists change quickly. They’ll move from subject to subject, style to style, concept to concept. Experimental artists do it themselves. They’re discovering throughout the process, so they rarely use assistants. Conceptual artists delegate. They just need their concept executed, so someone else can often do the work. Experimental artists discover. Over the years, they build up knowledge in a field, to invent new approaches. Conceptual artists steal. To a greater degree than experimental artists, they take what others have developed and make it their own. Other experimental & conceptual artists Some other experimental artists: Georgia O’Keeffe: She painted pictures of a door of her house in New Mexico more than twenty times. She liked to start off painting a subject realistically, then, through repetition, make it more abstract. Jackson Pollock: He said he needed to drip paint on a canvas from all four sides, what he called a “‘get acquainted’ period,” before he knew what he was painting. Leonardo da Vinci: He was constantly jumping from project to project, rarely finishing. He incorporated his slowly-accrued knowledge of anatomy, optics, and geology into his paintings. Some conceptual artists: Georges Seurat: He had his pointillism method down to a science. He planned out his most-famous painting, Sunday Afternoon, through more than fifty studies, and could paint tiny dots on the giant canvas without stepping back to see how it looked. Andy Warhol: Used assistants heavily, saying, “I think somebody should be able to do all my paintings for me,” and “Why do people think artists are special? It’s just another job.” Raphael: Who had a huge workshop of as many as fifty assistants, innovated by allowing a printmaker to make and sell copies of his work, and synthesized the hard-won methods of Leonardo and Michelangelo into his well-planned designs. Experimental & conceptual creators in other fields Galenson has found these two distinct experimental and conceptual trajectories in a variety of fields. This runs counter to the findings of Dean Simonton, who . Galenson argues that the complexity of having an impact in a field changes, as innovations are made or integrated into the state of the art. Sculpture In sculpture, Méret Oppenheim had a conversation in a café with Picasso, and got the idea to line a teacup with fur. It became the quintessential surrealist sculpture, Luncheon in Fur, but it was totally conceptual. She continued to make art into her seventies, and never did another significant work. Constantin Brancusi spent a lifetime as an experimental sculptor. He said, “I don’t work from sketches, I take the chisel and hammer and go right ahead.” He did his most famous work, Bird in Space, when he was fifty-two. Novels In novels, Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn experimentally, in at least three separate phases, over the course of nine years. He finally published it when he was fifty. Hemingway’s novels were conceptually driven, using his trademark dialog as one of his major devices. He picked up this technique and synthesized it from studying the work of Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, and Twain himself. When I talked to Galenson on episode 105, he explained the way to spot the difference between an experimental and a conceptual novel is to ask, “are the characters believable?” Conceptual novelists focus on plot, while experimental novelists focus on character. Poetry In poetry, Robert Frost, who spent his career trying to perfect how rhythms and stress patterns affected the meanings of words – so-called “sentence sounds” – wrote “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” when he was forty-eight. Ezra Pound developed his technique of “imagism” when he was twenty-eight, and had thought it through so well he published a set of formal rules. With this conceptual approach, he created the bulk of his influential poems before he was forty, despite living well into his eighties. Movies In film, Orson Welles created Citizen Kane when he was only twenty-six. The carefully-planned conceptual innovations in cinematography and musical score make it widely-regarded as the most influential film ever. Alfred Hitchcock didn’t make his most-influential films until the final years of his life, as he was about sixty. He said, “style in directing develops slowly and naturally.” Are you an old master, or young genius? I really enjoyed Old Masters and Young Geniuses. I find this dichotomy of experimental versus conceptual approaches really helpful in understanding why, in general, some creative solutions come quickly, while others take months or years of searching. Do you have a choice in the matter? Galenson is careful to stress that you aren’t either an experimental or conceptual creator – it’s a spectrum, not a binary designation. But in case you’re wondering if you can make yourself a conceptual creator, to become successful more quickly, Galenson says you can’t. You might switch from a conceptual to an experimental approach, and find it works better for you, as did Cézanne, or you might try to go from experimental to conceptual and find it doesn’t, as did Pissarro. But you can’t change the way you think. He told me, “It’s like trying to change your brain, and we don’t know how to do that.” About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of , and . Through the Love Your Work podcast, his , and David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Subscribe to Love Your Work Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Show notes:
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287. David Perell: Being a Hedgehog When You're a Fox, Living With the Twitter Algorithm, Learning from Tyler Cowen, and Building Mass for Leverage
09/08/2022
287. David Perell: Being a Hedgehog When You're a Fox, Living With the Twitter Algorithm, Learning from Tyler Cowen, and Building Mass for Leverage
Do you want to build an audience online, but have such a wide variety of interests, you don’t know what to focus on? I think you’ll like this interview with . David Perell () calls himself “The Writing Guy.” He runs the cohort-based online writing school, (I love that name). His marketing is very specific, but he has incredibly diverse interests, and enthusiastically shares content related to those interests online. I went through his links on his website (no longer posted) to prepare for this conversation, and just my highlights of his links were over 6,000 words long! The topics included economics, art, urban planning, golf, music, and much more. I’ve been really impressed watching David’s online presence, so I brought him on the podcast for my first interview episode in more than two years! We’ll talk about: The four grants David has gotten from . How did he get those grants, and for what projects? Have all the opportunities to grow your audience online passed? David will share what he thinks is the biggest growth opportunity right now. We’ll talk about how to please the Twitter algorithm. What about it is “so brutal,” as David says? Topics mentioned About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of , and . Through the Love Your Work podcast, his , and David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Subscribe to Love Your Work Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Show notes:
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[NOTE] Ask Me Anything Livestream (kdv.co/ama)
08/25/2022
[NOTE] Ask Me Anything Livestream (kdv.co/ama)
and for my upcoming AMA/Livestream.
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286. Nobody Knows Anything
08/25/2022
286. Nobody Knows Anything
In 1977, Richard Bachman published his first novel. In an unusual move for a first-time author, Bachman made his publisher promise to release his books with hardly any marketing. Bachman stacked the dice against himself Bachman’s books were to skip the hardcover format and go straight to bargain-bin paperback – the kind you’d find mixed in with other nobody-authors, at a truck stop on I-80, somewhere near Grand Island. He also insisted he was unavailable for interviews, which cut his books off from a key marketing channel. Most publishers wouldn’t agree to such bizarre terms, but they were especially excited to release Bachman’s books. But he still did pretty well Today, forty-five years later, most people have unsurprisingly never heard of Richard Bachman. His books did alright, though: His fourth was optioned for film rights, his fifth sold 28,000 copies, and he got a couple letters a month from fans of his writing. Bachman wasn’t Bachman But his books were so good, one Washington D.C. bookstore clerk was suspicious. Steve Brown dug through the Library of Congress copyright records, and confirmed his suspicion: Richard Bachman was Stephen King. Why did one of the world’s hottest authors publish – in the same genre – under a pen name? At the time, King’s publisher had an almost-superstitious belief that if they published more than one of his books in a year, they would distract readers from This Year’s Book (that they let King publish Bachman books with so little fanfare speaks to their conviction in this belief). King later described it as like being married to someone with a drastically-smaller sexual appetite: He had to find an outlet somewhere else. “Either find an audience or disappear quietly” While he was publishing under a pen name, he figured he’d conduct an experiment. He wondered, to what degree was his massive success due to luck? So, as he has said, Stephen King “stacked the dice” against Richard Bachman. He wanted Bachman’s books “to go out there and either find an audience or just disappear quietly.” After word got out that Richard Bachman was Stephen King, his books sold even better. That book that sold 28,000 copies for Richard Bachman – Thinner – quickly sold ten times that as a King title. Is seven years & five books long enough? At first glance, King’s Bachman experiment is an open-and-shut case: Bachman’s books sold way more copies with Stephen King’s name on their covers. But King himself feels his experiment got cut short. He said of Bachman, who he killed off in a press release by “cancer of the pseudonym,” “He died with that question – is it work that takes you to the top or is it all just a lottery? – still unanswered.” Bachman worked in anonymity for seven years, and released five books – how is that not enough? Even the pros don’t know William Goldman was a two-time Academy-Award-Winning screenwriter. He wrote the screenplays for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride, and Misery (which was supposed to be Richard Bachman’s sixth book, but instead was released by Stephen King). In Goldman’s book, Adventures in the Screen Trade, he pointed out that in one typical movie season, sixteen major films were released by the major studios. One was a runaway success, and ten of those sixteen lost more than ten million dollars. Why did those studios bother making the stinkers? Because, as Goldman said: Nobody knows anything...... Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one. Nobody knowing anything takes the appeal out of King’s Bachman story. It sounded like the perfect story for aspiring creatives to point to and say, “Look, the universe is conspiring against me. If you don’t have a big name already, you’re screwed.” Nothing guarantees creative success But really, nothing can guarantee success. You could say you have to have connections, and I could point out that Richard Pryor’s son played at the Apollo, and . You could say you need name recognition, and I could tell you that the 28,000 copies Bachman’s fifth book sold was four-thousand more than Stephen King’s own fourth book sold. You could say all you need is your big break, and I could remind you that Steve Martin was on The Tonight Show – the big break in the comedy business at the time – sixteen times before someone recognized him in public. Nobody knows anything. If movie studios knew blockbusters, that’s all they’d make. If record companies knew hits, that’s all they’d release. If publishers knew bestsellers, that’s all they’d launch. And if venture capitalists knew “unicorns,” they’d just be called capitalists. Quality can’t hide Nobody knows anything, but somebody knows something. As Goldman himself said, you can make an educated guess. I bet he’d agree that a ninety-minute cellphone video of a ham sandwich sitting on a plate is unlikely to fill theaters. There was another author, named Robert Galbraith, whose debut novel didn’t do great. It sold 1,500 copies in the first few months – not bad either. But there was something fishy about Galbraith’s work. A journalist tweeted that she had enjoyed Galbraith’s book, but it seemed way too well-written to be the debut novel of who was supposedly a retired military officer. An anonymous account tipped this journalist, saying That’s because it’s not a debut novel: Robert Galbraith is actually a really well-known author’s pseudonym. That led to a computer linguistic analysis and the London Times confronted the alleged author. J. K. Rowling admitted that she was Robert Galbraith, then The Cuckoo’s Calling, a crime novel, proceeded to sell like hotcakes. So, of course Rowling’s name recognition helped the book sell, but try as she could to hide her identity, she couldn’t hide her quality. Her writing was, to paraphrase Steve Martin, so good it couldn’t be ignored. Stephen King got to enjoy the anonymity of his pen name for seven years. Rowling hers about three months. Maybe there’s some others out there who never got caught, but it seems social media and computer linguistic analysis has shortened the life of pen names. But King and Rowling both had the same problem: You can’t hide quality, and you can’t hide voice. From the beginning, King got letters asking him if he was Richard Bachman. Bachman had the extra challenge that he wasn’t merely copying the style of an author already dominating a genre – he literally was that author. Sometimes a copycat does better than the original, because they can’t help but be different as they try to copy. For example, Kurt Cobain said he when he wrote Smells Like Teen Sprit. An exact copy doesn’t have much chance, because the original already punctured the exact same . You can’t know anything, so know your work Jerry Seinfeld likes to tell beginning comedians they’ll never make it. Because if they hear that from a comedy legend and still do comedy, he figures, they might have a chance. Maybe it’s not satisfying that nobody knows anything. It kind of makes you want to throw your hands up and say, What’s the use?! But maybe that’s a good thing. If you can know that nobody knows anything, and still be dedicated to your craft, maybe you have a shot. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of , and . Through the Love Your Work podcast, his , and David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Subscribe to Love Your Work Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Show notes:
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285. Crumb Time
08/11/2022
285. Crumb Time
“Crumb time” is the little pieces of time that get lost throughout the day. Instead of giving away your crumb time to unproductive distractions, build systems that complete big projects with small actions. Today, I’ll tell you how. Crumb time is everywhere throughout our days. Whenever we do something substantial with our time, little chunks of time of various sizes and shapes fall to the floor. What is crumb time? Crumb time has a combination of the following qualities: Short amounts of time. Crumb time can be less than a minute, or several minutes. Unknown lengths of time. You often don’t know when your crumb time will be over. It could end in a few seconds, or a few minutes. Distracting environments. It’s hard enough to focus when you don’t know when you’ll be interrupted, but the environments in which crumb time take place are often noisy, with lots of activity. Some examples of crumb time: Standing in line at an airport: Lots is going on, you’re waiting for your boarding call. Riding in a cab: The scenery is changing, but you might have a good idea how much time you have. Waiting for a friend to meet you for lunch: They could come in the door in two seconds, or twenty minutes. Why do we give away crumb time? Crumb time feels insignificant, and we think we need a controlled environment and a big block of time to do anything useful. You don’t have the time or mental bandwidth, it seems, to make substantial progress reading a book, or writing an article. So, we doomscroll on Twitter, blow off steam with a game such as Wordle, or do something pseudo-productive such as check email once again. Productive uses of crumb time We just give away our crumb time, but we could turn it into something useful. Here are some things you could do with crumb time: Review highlights in your : My favorite use of crumb time is reviewing my highlights from a book. I export them to Markdown, and whenever I have a moment, I scroll through the highlights in a plain-text app on my phone. I bold any of the highlights that are extra interesting. When my crumb time is over, I mark my place and lock my phone. Learn about something: A crumb-time list is a key component of a system of , which I talked about on episode 284. Keep a list of subjects you’d like to learn about, and when you have crumb time, read a Wikipedia page. (I’m not a fan of read-later apps, because the easier it is to save articles, the harder it is to read all of them). Brainstorm social media updates: Twitter is a great place to share ideas, a terrible place to have them. Brainstorm potential tweets in a text file, to polish and schedule later. How about doing nothing at all? Another valid use of your crumb time is simply doing nothing. But when you choose to do something, you may as well do something useful. Anything other than giving away crumb time is better than building that bad habit. The more you give away crumb time, the easier that becomes the default use of your crumb time. Take a seven-day crumb-time challenge You don’t need to change your crumb time habits all at once, forever. Instead, try a seven-day crumb-time challenge. Here’s how: Delete social media apps. You can do most things on Twitter or Instagram from desktop. Get them off your phone, to force yourself to make good use of crumb time. Block social media websites. Use the parental controls on your phone to block websites to which you give away your crumb time. For me that’s twitter.com and instagram.com. On the iPhone, use the “Limit Adult Websites” feature, and add whatever sites you want to the block list. (You can also add adult websites to the allowed sites if that’s your thing.) Set up crumb-time actions. If you have a Zettelkasten, you know what to do. If you don’t have one, for a quick-start you could export your highlights from your favorite book and have them available on your phone. Set up a list of things you’d like to look up when you have crumb time. Set up a scratch file for brainstorming social media updates, or set up anything else you could make progress on when you have a minute. Audio crumb time You’re of course not always able to use your hands during crumb time, such as when you’re driving. This is actually a great reason to have a podcast. Sharing your ideas with others is nice, but if you want to review your own ideas during crumb time, with a podcast you already have a convenient format in which to do so. But, you can also listen to articles or text you’d like to review using the text-to-speech feature on your phone, or an app, such as . Crumb time becomes something bigger I like the term “crumb time” not only because it implies crumb time’s perceived insignificance, but also because substantial things consist of crumbs. Bakers talk about the “crumb structure” of a cake, which is the mix of air and pastry that makes up the cake. In agriculture, soil has taken on a “crumb structure” when it has the right amount of moisture for the soil to bead into crumbs. Soil with a crumb structure has an ideal mix of air and moisture to be a good environment for plants to take root, and for microorganisms to assist in the plant’s growth. Crumb time is powerful because it seems too insignificant to be worth anything. But if you use your crumb time well, those little pieces of time can build into something bigger. Here are some ways: : A book is little more than a collection of thoughts, and crumb time is enough to develop individual thoughts. I shared my newsletter system, which makes use of crumb time: My tweets grow into newsletters, which grow into podcast articles, which grow into books. Or, you can take a more direct approach. Walter Isaacson has said he writes on his phone while waiting in the airport, and Kirsten Oliphant wrote an entire book during two weeks’ time on the treadmill. Build a database of knowledge: Instead of writing a book, you can aim to build a database of knowledge, such as the Zettelkasten I talked about on episode 250. Highlighting highlights is the easiest use of crumb time, but you can do other Zettelkasten tasks with your crumb time, such as clearing your inbox. Make real progress: Even if you don’t aspire to write a book or build a Zettelkasten, you can use your crumb time to make real progress on any of your projects. Think of crumb time as a “context”, a la . Just as you might mark a next action as “@home”, “@office”, or with my of creativity, you can mark tasks as “@crumbtime”. Then you have a list of tasks you can do with little time and attention. Imagine what your crumb time could become Pay attention to how you use your crumb time, and you’ll find significant uses of time and energy that could be put toward something productive. In the same time and mental effort it takes to play Wordle every day, you could build a database of knowledge, write articles, or even books. I encourage you to try a seven-day crumb-time challenge. Let me know how it goes! Image: Thank you for having me on your podcasts! Thank you for having me on your podcasts. Thank you to Ben Henley-Smith at Cord’s . As always, you can find all podcasts I've been on at . About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of , and . Through the Love Your Work podcast, his , and David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Subscribe to Love Your Work Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Show notes:
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284. Curiosity Management
07/28/2022
284. Curiosity Management
Do you ever feel like you don’t have the time and energy to learn about everything you want to know? Is it hard to stay focused on reading one book, when there’s ten others you want to read? You need curiosity management. Curiosity management is the management of your thirst to know things. In a world with unlimited access to information, and finite time and energy, it’s impossible to read every book, watch every documentary, or take every online course. Unmanaged curiosity leads to “curiosity pressure” This leads to a feeling of “curiosity pressure.” Curiosity pressure is the feeling you’ll never learn all the things you want to learn. When you’re under time pressure – curiosity pressure’s close cousin – and feel you don’t have enough time to do everything, your anxiety makes it hard to do one thing. When you’re under curiosity pressure and feel you can’t learn everything, your anxiety makes it hard to learn one thing. A good curiosity-management system matches your level of curiosity with an appropriate level of engagement with the topic, given your available time and energy. The downward spiral of poor retention, & feelings of inadequacy A day in the life of a curious mind looks like this: Think of thing you want to learn about, such as the chemical processes behind making soap. Instantly go to Wikipedia. Follow every link and every footnote. Regain consciousness four hours later, with one-hundred tabs open, and no recollection of what you’ve consumed. Inexplicably, one of the tabs is about the Lorena Bobbitt scandal. Feel bad that you got nothing done, and didn’t learn much either. Surplus curiosity When you don’t satisfy your curiosity, despite doing the activities of investigation – such as reading or watching videos – you’re overcome with “surplus curiosity.” Surplus curiosity is a feeling you should always be investigating more topics. The anxiety and inadequacy you feel from not satisfying your curiosity cause you to be curious about even more things. This drives a downward spiral: You feel bad for not knowing all you want to know, you want to know more things, but poorly managing your curiosity makes it impossible to satisfy your natural curiosities, much less your surplus curiosities. The goal of curiosity management: Learn just enough, and remember it You’re not going to stop being curious. Your curiosity is a good thing. But if you can manage your curiosity, you can remember more of what you consume and reduce curiosity pressure. If you successfully reduce curiosity pressure, you’ll reduce the anxiety and feelings of inadequacy that actually drive some surplus curiosity. The fundamental error: All-or-nothing curiosity The fundamental error most curious minds make is they want to learn everything about a topic the moment they become curious about it. Instead of spending five minutes perusing the Wikipedia page, they watch the four-hour documentary. Instead of reading the book summary, they try to read the whole book. This drives the downward cycle: At some point, the media they’re engaged with calls for more time and energy than their actual curiosity for the topic merits. This causes fatigue and frustration. Yet there are still so many things they want to learn about, and feelings of anxiety and inadequacy flare up. The most immediate solution seems to be to read more, watch more, consume more – surplus curiosity. Yet little of it is absorbed, and the original curiosity that began the cycle is only vaguely satisfied. The right engagement for the level of curiosity To engage appropriately with what you’re curious about, first assess the level of curiosity. There are three: Compulsory curiosity is a feeling that you should know about this. Like, “What is this TikTok thing about?” Cursory curiosity is a feeling you’d like to know something about this topic. Like, “What is Marie Curie’s story?” Compulsive curiosity is a driving obsession to learn everything you can about a topic. If you need an example, you don’t need curiosity management. Of course, as you learn about topics, your level of curiosity may progress. You try TikTok a few minutes and are intrigued. You read the Marie Curie Wikipedia page, and want to learn much more. Your compulsive curiosity may be more intense for one topic than another, or change from day to day. Three basic components of curiosity management The main mechanism behind curiosity management is categorizing topics about which you’re curious according to the level of curiosity, and engaging with those topics only to the point that your curiosity is either satisfied, or further aroused (with some exceptions). I propose four components to a good modern curiosity-management system: A rule: Never consume information upon first encountering it: (With one exception, coming up.) Take only a quick glance to assess your level of curiosity about the information, and the informations’ potential for satisfying that curiosity. Then put it in the appropriate place, for later processing. Keep a “crumb-time” list: Your crumb-time list has things about which you have either compulsory or cursory curiosity, with a simple action that will satisfy that level of curiosity. Use your crumb-time list during “crumb-time” – those little pockets of time of indefinite shape and size with which you normally do unproductive activities such as check social media or play Wordle. An example list item would be: “Watch a YouTube video on the chemical processes behind making soap.” Deep curiosity time blocks: Have regular time blocks for deep investigation about things that have reached the level of compulsive curiosity. Give yourself time to read books, and watch documentaries. ”Cheat” pockets: Freewheeling engagement with your curiosity is fun. If you never allow yourself to open a hundred tabs on your browser again, you’ll do it anyway and drive the downward spiral. Much like some diets allow a “cheat day,” a good curiosity-management system has pockets of time during which you allow yourself to be at the whim of your curiosity. It might be Friday afternoons, or fifteen minutes after lunch – so long as you’re actually able to prevent yourself from slipping into internet-induced comas. Using your curiosity-management system That’s the basic structure of a curiosity-management system, now, some examples of how to use it. A topic comes to mind that you’d like to learn about, such as Soviet dekulakization. Don’t stop what you’re doing or suppress your curiosity. Put it on your crumb-time list to look at later. You have a few minutes while waiting for an appointment to start – aka “crumb-time.” Open your crumb-time list on your phone, and find a topic that fits the time and energy you have available, and your level of interest. Do a quick search, or visit a link you’ve already saved. If your curiosity is satisfied, move it to a “done” section of your crumb-time list. If you’ve become more curious, move it to a “second-level” section, to investigate more, later. If you’re intensely curious and have time available within your deep-curiosity blocks, you may graduate to buying a book. You see a link you want to investigate, while investigating something else on your crumb-time list. Open it in another tab and give it a quick glance. If you’re interested in learning more, put it on your crumb-time list. Close the tab, then get back to the original article. Note-taking supports curiosity management You’ll better satisfy your curiosity if you don’t forget what you’ve just learned. So, a note-taking system, such as a , supports a curiosity-management system. Take notes even on items for which you have merely compulsory or cursory curiosity. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. You don’t even have to take perfect notes. You’ve just invested time and energy in learning about this topic, so you’ll never remember more than you do right now. Jot down a few of the things you remember. It could be as simple and informal as “saponification uses a strong base to break apart fat molecules and make soap.” Start managing your curiosity Those are my initial thoughts on curiosity management – why it matters, what it consists of, and how to construct a system for managing your curiosity. There are of course many details and inner workings I didn’t include, or that would vary from one person to another. Do you find this idea useful? Say hello , or email me. Image: About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of , and . Through the Love Your Work podcast, his , and David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Subscribe to Love Your Work Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Show notes:
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283. Fifteen Years as a Creator. (I'll Never Make It.)
07/14/2022
283. Fifteen Years as a Creator. (I'll Never Make It.)
Five years ago, I wrote about how - after ten years as a self-employed independent creator - I hoped to "make it." I now realize, I never will. Five years ago, I sat at my keyboard to have a serious conversation with myself. It had been ten years since I had woken up to a day with nothing scheduled, and wondered how I was going to fill it with something that both made life worth living, and also paid the bills. In this conversation, I asked myself, How did you end up here? Have you made a big mistake? I had spent a good chunk of my retirement savings, left Silicon Valley in the midst of a boom, and now found myself barely getting by in South America. About a thousand words in, I stopped and cracked into tears, not only because I was scared out of my mind, but because still – despite not seeing a clear path to making this work - I couldn't see myself giving up. I concluded: Take it from me, a ten-year veteran self-employed creator: If you are looking for security or reassurance, I do not recommend this line of work. However, if you are burning with curiosity – if your heart and intuition lead you to do things that don’t make sense – well, then you don’t really have a choice in the matter, do you? When I was done with that conversation, I had a massive vulnerability hangover. I felt embarrassed to publish it, but since I had resolved to be writer, I felt I had to. However, I didn't do anything I normally did to promote a post: no Medium publication, no email blast, no podcast episode, not even a tweet. I just quietly pressed “Publish” and got on with my day. It slowly, then quickly, became the most popular thing I had ever written. Now, five years later, I've been a full-time creator for fifteen years. (It wasn't called that when I started. I was just a weird guy who wouldn't get a job.) Not long after publishing my personal conversation, I started publicly reporting on my blog. While more famous bloggers were excitedly reporting six- and seven-figure months, I was reporting one three-thousand-dollar month after another. One month I even lost money. However, about a year ago, my numbers started to climb. I recently reported a six-figure-year for the first time. I had made six-figures before the reports, but most of that was from an uninspiring blog I had written under a pseudonym. This was the first time I could look at every dollar I had made and say to myself, "I made this money doing exactly what I want to be doing. I am officially me for a living." I looked in the mirror later that day at the gray hairs that have come to dominate my beard and the stray ones sprouting from my temples. I thought back to when I was twenty-five and I'd stare in the mirror, looking at the young man I felt was full of potential, but who had no idea how to get out of Nebraska. Every cell of skin and hair on my body had regenerated since then, but I figured I still had the same eyes. So I looked into them and said, "You did it, kid. You made it." Not the next day, nor the day after that, but soon after, I felt a deeper emptiness than I had before. I thought back to my twenty-five year old self hearing for the hundredth time the CAD technician with hair as tall as the man was wide yell out, as he waddled through the break room, “Kadavy, with another Banquet meal!” Those microwaveable meals had been frequently on sale at Hy-Vee, ten for eight dollars, and the best strategy I could come up with in 2004 had been to save up and buy Apple and Google stock. As I had rolled my eyes and sighed at the Office-Space-like monotony of my existence, I would have gladly traded places with my current life. I had struggled for so long, so hard, and had passed up so many other opportunities a normal person would have taken. I risked failure, and hadn’t failed. Why did I feel a lack of inspiration, a malaise? Around that time, I read and resonated deeply with an essay by Joan Didion, where she marvels at how a six-month stay in New York crept into eight years, "with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve." Young, foolish, and non-committal, she felt she "could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of it would count." It wasn't until it was over she had realized, "it had counted after all." The dozenth friend said to me recently, "If you can sell 25,000 copies of a book, do you have any idea how much you could make on a course, consulting, or coaching!?" I politely explained I had heard the same many times before and I had tried courses, consulting, and coaching, and didn't enjoy them. Basically, what I wrote five years ago: I want to make a living creating. I don't want creating to be merely a marketing strategy for other things. Is that completely insane? This friend, like seemingly all I had at the beginning of this fifteen-journey, is now a millionaire. Did I feel this emptiness because it had taken so long to get here? Because there are many more definitions of “making it,” financially, beyond a six-figure income – that everyone else seems to reach so easily? I know every time I hear an outrageously popular twenty-something creator on a podcast say, "I wrote online for a long time before I had success. Like eight months," I scoff and wonder, Just how fucking bad at this am I? Maybe this six-figure milestone so close to my fifteen-year anniversary was just a reminder that it had all counted. Maybe it brings to the surface memories of the times I almost had a big break: Like the time I paid my own way to fly from Colombia to San Francisco to be interviewed on a massive podcast, only for them to can it. Or the time a big chest-thumping entrepreneur podcast didn’t run my interview because I openly told them how little money I made (given my public income reports, I wonder why they bothered inviting me). Or, maybe I had failed at what I had actually wanted, but had invented a false goal ex post-facto, so what counted wouldn’t feel as if it had gone to waste. I dug into the paper trail I've left throughout this journey. The stack of journals I've collected confirmed that this, indeed, was something I had wanted all along. In 2007, just before getting fired, I wrote, "I have lots of projects in mind, but the main one is making 'being David Kadavy' my full-time job." There it was, plain as day. As I continued my investigation into potential revisionist history, I re-read , and saw a graph: On New Year's Eve, as 2008 turned to 2009, I stayed home by myself and schemed on my mission to make it as a creator. I knelt on the hardwood next to my portable radiator and drew this graph on an eleven-dollar piece of tileboard from The Home Depot. The plan was for "Active" income to give way to "Passive" income, to give way to "Speculative" income. In other words, I would freelance just enough to get by, build passive income on the side, and as that passive income built, I would follow my curiosity and see what I could find. I had done exactly that: I had freelanced ten hours a week, made $150,000 on , and through the exploration I had done on the side, gotten my , then built this career as an author. I had followed my plan perfectly. When a successful author friend had warned me not to write my first book – that there were better ways to make a living – I had reasoned I was just starting, maybe after ten years I’d be really good. In the back of my mind, I thought I could do it faster. Suffice to say, this has taken way longer than I had imagined. Didion’s essay resonated with me because some part of me didn’t expect these years to count. At forty-three, with one parent gone, having narrowly-missed losing the other, and with my own body declining, I feel as if I’m in the final levels of a video game. I’ve gained power-ups and magic swords hidden along the way and in many ways feel more capable than ever. But that meter at the bottom of the screen marked “life” is lower, and I’m increasingly paranoid I’ll be devoured by a dragon before I storm the castle. I ultimately realized, this emptiness wasn't unfamiliar. I had felt it in some small way at every major milestone in this journey. With every goal I had achieved, there had been emptiness that followed the absence of that goal. That emptiness was soon replaced by the pursuit of the next. But, this was the top of the mountain. There was no next goal on the horizon. Maybe I should feel bad for how long this has taken. Maybe I'm putting up blinders I won't see around until it's too late, and I'll later be overcome by crippling regret. More likely, the journey is the destination. The beginning of each creative project is characterized by an emptiness, a void that must be filled through the act of creation. It's a great feeling to go from spinning your wheels to getting traction, but ultimately, you want to go back to the starting line and do it again. To once more see if you can storm the castle. You could argue I feel this way because this struggle is all I know. I've been at it so long, like Red and Brooks in The Shawshank Redemption, I’ve become "institutionalized." But one got busy living and the other got busy dying, and as Victor Frankl has said, "What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task." So, after fifteen years, I've "made it" as a creator, financially-speaking, in a relatively minor way, for now. But maybe the best part of making it is realizing you now have the privilege of feeling you haven't. So you can freely struggle to reach your destination, only to do it again. Take it from me, a fifteen-year veteran self-employed creator: You’re burning with curiosity. Your heart and intuition lead you to do things that don’t make sense. You feel you have no choice but to take this path. But be forewarned: Once you get to where you so deeply ache to arrive, your journey won’t be over. You can "make it" in one way or another, but to be happy with this life, you must always find a way to feel you still haven’t. Photo by Ryan Halvorsen About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of , and . Through the Love Your Work podcast, his , and David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Subscribe to Love Your Work Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Show notes:
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282. How I Put My Book on a Times Square Billboard (What Did It Cost, & Did It Work?)
06/30/2022
282. How I Put My Book on a Times Square Billboard (What Did It Cost, & Did It Work?)
I recently advertised my book on a billboard in Times Square. It was cheaper than you think, and was up for less time than you might expect. But it’s still paying dividends. Times Square is a big deal (duh) Times Square is the epitome of mainstream success. The biggest brands have locations there, and any big brand you can name advertises there. 350,000 people walk through Times Square on a typical day. It’s also one of the most-photographed places on Earth, with many of those photos and videos being shared on television shows such as Good Morning America, and on TikTok or Instagram. A lowly self-published book advertised next to the biggest brands When my friend, , told me you can advertise in Times Square for cheap, I knew I had to run an ad for . A book about a new approach to time management, in a city obsessed with time management, in a place with “time” right in the name? It was a match made in heaven! The very thought of my lowly self-published book advertised on the front of Forever 21, above a Sunglass Hut, across from the Disney store, next to McDonald’s, in Times Square made me laugh the maniacal laughter of an evil villain plotting to take over the world – in some Disney movie, of course. Will a billboard sell books? Before I explain how I advertised in Times Square for cheap, I’m sure some of you are thinking, “Will advertising on a billboard sell books?” You’re right to think that since people are walking or driving through Times Square, even if they noticed my billboard in this place that is nearly all billboards, they’re not going to stop what they’re doing, take out their phones, and order my book on Amazon. The making of a pseudo-event But that’s not the point. By advertising my book in Times Square, I was creating a . I talked about pseudo-events in my on episode 257. A pseudo-event is a reality constructed just so it can be covered in media. By being covered in media, the constructed reality becomes reality. Pseudo-events can be funny, or horrifying. They can be based upon truth, or . But our media is full of them. Most “leaks” you see, every talk-show interview, and every planned event are pseudo-events. Instagram is one pseudo-event after another. Reality is constructed for media, and media constructs our reality. My book really was advertised in Times Square. My lowly self-published book really is a “big deal.” How much does a Times Square ad cost? People want to know, how much does it cost to advertise your book in Times Square? Some people guess five-thousand dollars. Some guess twenty-. I advertised my book on a Times Square billboard with . Blip is a platform that lets you buy short displays of an ad on electronic billboards across the U.S. Each “blip” lasts fifteen seconds. I paid about nine cents per blip in tests I ran in Chicago, and had a blip run in Times Square for as little as twenty dollars. “As little as” twenty dollars? I’ll get into my exact costs in a bit. But first, was my pseudo-event worth it? Here are some of my wins from this fifteen-second ad so far. Win #1: A retweet from Tim Ferriss My first big win from my Times Square billboard was a retweet from Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss asks his podcast guests what message they would advertise to the world. I’ve always thought if I were asked that question, my answer would be the title of my book, Mind Management, Not Time Management. So, I made sure one of my billboards was as plain as possible. It just said, “Mind Management, Not Time Management.” Then, I shared a video of the billboard on Twitter, making sure to tag Tim (whom I’ve never met nor talked to). It was a long shot, but it worked. Tim retweeted it. Tim has 1.8 million followers. I did see a decent spike in sales. Hard to know if this was the cause, but I didn’t have competing promotions. Win #2: Speaking for the New York Public Library My second win was speaking for the New York Public Library. When I emailed my readers to let them know my book was advertised in Times Square, it turned out one reader organizes events for the New York Public Library. This reader was excited to hear about my book being advertised in Times Square, and this prompted them to invite me to speak over Zoom to the library’s audience. They promoted the event to their email list of one million subscribers, and the day before the event, my new friend there informed me that: , in paper, ebook, and audiobook formats. My event was featured on NYPL’s home page My book was selected as the NYPL Business Center’s “book of the month.” The video of my speaking event is now listed on the library’s , along with talks by Marie Forleo, Seth Godin, and A.J. Jacobs. I also got a couple links to my website from nypl.org, high-authority links which boost my site in search rankings. Win #3: Advertising that paid for itself My third win is that some of my advertising paid for itself. And I don’t mean through book sales. If you , you’ll get $25 free advertising credit. Some people have already used that link, and apparently spent enough for me to also earn a couple $50 credits, which reduced the price of my ads! Win #4: ? My Times Square ad came and went in a flash, but it continues to pay dividends I can’t predict. For example, in May I was telling someone at a conference in Phoenix about advertising in Times Square, and it turned out they had already seen one of my posts about it. There’s no telling who is reading this article, and what effect it will have on them. Like I talked about on , hidden complexity makes simple actions very powerful. Fun pseudo-events like this breed positive . A pseudo-event lasts a moment, but lives on forever. A Times Square ad lasts a moment, but the photo, video, and story lasts forever. What did this cost? I advertised on a Times Square billboard for as little as $20, but what did this all cost in the end? Here’s the breakdown: Chicago test campaign: $65.58 (I ran some test campaigns in Chicago, to get familiar with the system.) Times Square campaign: $290 (I ran a small test, got impressions for as little as $20, but then increased my bids and budget to be sure the ad would run during a given time block.) Photographer: $200 (I got referred to a photographer from my friend, Robbie Abed, who had found them on Craigslist. I hired them for the one hour my ads were scheduled to run.) Blip referral credits: -$100 (A couple people must have used , and spent enough for me to get $50 in credits each.) Total cost: $455.58 This was a really fun campaign, and though the ROI isn’t as clear as the Amazon ads I talk about in , I think it’s safe to say it has been paying off, and still is. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of , and . Through the Love Your Work podcast, his , and David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Subscribe to Love Your Work Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Show notes:
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