43 Folders

NaNoWriMo: A Pep Talk and a Warning

Merlin — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:20:48 +0000

I honor any project to write something — especially to write a long piece of ﬁction. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do but, like most people, I have always been too scared to attempt it.

So, kudos.

But, here’s the thing: it’s hard to start writing, and it’s almost as hard to keep writing. Believe me, I know. And, there will be times every day when you get discouraged or you want to throw in the towel because you feel lost or depressed or useless or just plain tired. Empty. That’s the word. Empty.

All I want to say is, keep at it. You can do this.

Every time you sit down to write represents a new chance, and I really encourage you to make yourself see it that way. That means set aside the time (with a beginning and end, if possible), take it seriously, and, most importantly, try not to think. Thinking is not writing; thinking is thinking. Thinking does not make books.

So, keep your hands moving [PDF], don’t self-edit, and above all, don’t let past failures (or successes) have any place at your desk during the time you’ve set aside to do your work. There’s no good that can come out of trying to see the present, creative moment through the overly emotional, shaded lenses of either the past or the future. Just be in the room with yourself and, as my pal Andy says, keep moving the cursor to the right.

And, the warning? Don’t read too many blog posts like this.

The hounds are out this month, guys, and they smell your fear and self-doubt. So, shovelbloggers will be offering you a tantalizing Vegas-style buffet of endless writing “help” that will range from the indispensable to the stupid to the unconscionably poisonous. And, smile though they might, those folks could care less if all those page views end up killing your word count or distracting you at the one delicate moment you were about to ﬁgure out your troubled third act. Their job is to make you stop working. Don’t let them. Okay?

Just as thinking is not writing, advice is not writing. Got it? So, don’t blow your day on metajunk.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t treat yourself to the best advice about becoming a better writer (see below), but it does mean you sure as shooting better not be reading blog posts about “surprising writing tips” during your Special Writing Time. Personally, I love books about writing, writing advice, and just plain talking about writing. But, I also know (all too well) that something that seems or feels helpful can quickly turn into an anti-pattern. Especially when it does anything to stop that cursor from moving rightward.

Seriously. Read the next sentence out loud to yourself three times. No, do it:

When I’m reading about writing, I’m not writing.

And, of course, the irony is, nearly every (good) book on writing will eventually end up telling you – or leading you to see – the same handful of things.

Set reasonable goals and honor them
Draft with complete abandon; edit with surgical precision
When you sit down to write, focus without distraction; when you’re not writing, keep it off your mind
Read great books (actual big books, not blogs or magazines) as often as you can
Just write, and just keep writing, and just keep writing, writing, writing. Then write more.

Good luck with your novel, and have fun. For what it’s worth, here’s a few of my favorite books on writing (alphabetically, by author). Just remember: if you read them during Writing Time, you must smack yourself. Hard.

Bolker, Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day; Sounds like a BS title, but it’s not. Again: process. How to think and when. How to approach a daunting project sensibly by “parking on a downhill slope.”
Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones; Shut off your monkey mind, get past discursive thinking, and keep that hand in motion. Like meditation, writing is a practice. You do it because you do it, that is why you do it.
Hart, A Writer’s Coach; Failures in non-ﬁction writing are almost always failures of process (especially during pre-writing). A must-buy for journalists (and serious bloggers).
King, On Writing; Writing is a craft, and it’s difﬁcult, and it matters. If you don’t believe it, get hit by a goddamned van. (N.B.: If you need to pick just one of these, get On Writing. No question. It’s the best.)
Lamott, Bird By Bird; Just so very, very wonderful. Heartfelt, funny, and desperately useful, if only for learning “The Shitty First Draft.”
Zinsser, On Writing Well; The Grandaddy of writing-as-craft books. Learn how making prose is like building furniture. You’re an engineer of words. Friend, you’ll close this book with a new obsession for tight and precise prose writing. I don’t pull it off every day (let alone every sentence), but it’s damned sure on my mind all the time.

”NaNoWriMo: A Pep Talk and a Warning” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 02, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Makebelieve Help, Old Butchers, and Figuring Out Who You Are (For Now)

Merlin — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:17:46 +0000

Makebelieve Help, Old Butchers, and Figuring Out Who You Are (For Now) - Vimeo [NSFW]

Here’s a video I made about a video I made. Consequently, it’s also about writing a book, fake self-help, the long road to developing expertise, and the ups and downs of repeatedly asking the world to tell you who you are.

The video is long. As usual. This is how it works.

I’d had this fancy idea that I’d do a DFW-style dump of annotations about what I talk about over these 40 minutes, and I might add that later, but for now here’s all you need to know:

Dish soap cleans dishes; Stuart Brown says everybody needs Play; Rands has a cave where he doesn’t multitask; The Dreyfus Model has ﬁve stages; Andy Hunt wants you to Think & Learn Pragmatically; my pal, Sean Hussey helped me ﬁgure some of this stuff out.

And, oh, what the heck. Here’s how to supercharge your zen turbocharger with “5 Surprising House Hacks!” [even more NSFW]

[Index Card Photo: Inbox Zero Tumblr]

”Makebelieve Help, Old Butchers, and Figuring Out Who You Are (For Now)” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 22, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Fake Rocks, Salami Commanders, and Just Enough to Start

Merlin — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:36:47 +0000

MaxFunCon: Merlin Mann on Doing Creative Work (via TSoYA)

Here’s the audio from a short talk I presented a few weeks ago at Jesse Thorn’s awesome1 MaxFunCon in Lake Arrowhead, CA. The talk is subtitled, “With All Due Respect to the Seduction Community”2, and it contains my typically NSFW use of, well, words, I guess.

It’s about how to get started—just started—with any project that really matters to you.

Listen above
- Embedded audio starts at 4:00 (where my talk begins)
Download MP3 of this episode
Subscribe to The Sound of Young America via iTunes or vanilla RSS

Foam Barriers (and Granite Fears)

It’s difficult to talk about how to get started with a project without addressing why it can feel so difficult to get started in the first place. And, as I said in the talk, I think this often comes down to perceived barriers. Barriers to even the most modest kind of starting. Barriers that seem entirely real, external, and immovable.

But, why “perceived?”

Thing is, when you really put your back into it, and push against your barriers a bit harder, they often turn out to be nothing very substantial at all. More like fake foam boulders that just look lifelike because they’re illuminated by the unreliable light of fear. See, fear’s the really hard part.

Yes, the barriers give you a theoretically dignified toupee for carpeting over your neuroses, but the underlying fears are still unspeakably real. And, you totally know it.

So, just humor me. Think about something you’ve been really excited to make or do.3 Maybe something you’ve been thinking about starting for weeks, months, or even years. Dance lessons? Short story? Web comic? MAME cabinet? Tree house? Doomsday laser? Excel spreadsheet?4 What stops you?

Remember now, we’re not talking about finishing a project or even making something that you know will be the greatest thing ever made. Just starting. What’s the barrier for you?

Well, at least in my experience, if you’re honest enough to push past those sensible, well-worn consolations of generalized procrastination and unrelenting “busy-ness,” you’ll discover how many hang-ups trace back to some dumb, shameful fear. Yeah, I know. Crazy hippie talk, right? Still.

Any of these sound familiar?

Fear of Apathy. “I can’t start this until I’m positive the work will never become dull or difficult.”5
Fear of Ambiguity. “I can’t start this until I know exactly how it will turn out (as well as the precise method by which I’ll do it).”
Fear of Disconnection. “I can’t start this until I’m totally up-to-date and current on everything.”
Fear of Imperfection. “I can’t start this until I know the end product will be flawless.”
Fear of Incompletion. “I can’t start this until I’m already done with it.”
Fear of Isolation. “I can’t start this until I know making it will never be lonely.”
Fear of Sucking. “I can’t start this until I’m already awesome at it (and know that even horrible people whom I dislike will hail me as a genius).”
Fear of Fear itself. “I can’t start this until I’m guaranteed that making it will never be scary.”

There are probably a lot more, but these represent a few of the greatest hits spinning on my own particular jukebox.6

And, sure, there’s a lot of overlap, or if you prefer, design redundancies. Because once you let one fear hang out with you, it starts bringing all its buddies along to the party. And The Fears are a tightly-knit, mean-spirited posse who egg each other on and love nothing more than trashing your house while you sob in the guest bathroom. Fears are total dicks.

Then, There’s That Talking Lizard

To make matters worse, when it comes to strictly creative endeavors like making art7, your regular, old, garden-variety fears find an enthusiastic ally in the entirely rational, if philistine, voice of your Lizard Brain.8

Listen for it, because that voice speaks so often and with such consistency and unquestioned authority that it can begin to sound like common sense—even intuition. It’s the voice that sees you thinking about making something, then calmly, firmly reminds you where you’re going wrong, wrong, wrong:

Grow up. “You already have plenty of things to do with your Real-Life Obligations without wasting time dicking around with some doofy ‘art’ project. That’s for kids and people with sandals in California.
So, stop being childish.”
Eat your vegetables. “Even if you cannot be talked out of making something, remember that those Real-Life Obligations all need to be completely taken care of before you even consider trotting off to pretend you’re David Foster Wallace.9
So, stop having fun.”
No one notices and no one cares. “Why bother? Even if you were talented and interesting (which you’re not), you know no one will notice if you never make anything at all. Because no one really cares. Including you.
So, stop trying.”
Your time’s passed, Li’l DaVinci. “Seriously, look at yourself. If you were ever going to be anything other than what you are or make anything other than what you’ve already made, you would have done it years ago. It’s too late now.
So, stop evolving.”

See? What’d I say? The lizard’s a dick, too.

But, honestly, do you ever hear yourself providing a running commentary on how much you suck? Giving yourself a spirited anti-pep talk? Sure you do. I do. Everybody does—including people who produce unbelievably, unexpectedly successful work.

It’s not that successful and productive people don’t see those same barriers or feel that same fear—it’s just that most of the good ones have figured out how to either accept the fears as a natural part of the process, or they just choose to ignore each fakey barrier the second it appears.

And, that is precisely what this starting business is all about. Putting aside every “reason,” and announcing to your Lizard Brain that it can either evolve or suck a nut.

Not that this is easy. But, you know that, right? Exactly.

The Switch Flips

Think about the times you’ve tried to get started, but things just weren’t happening for you. What wasn’t right? What were you feeling?

Could be lots of things,10 but I’ll postulate one theory on how a lot of us knowledge-worker types get derailed at the point right before we really get started. At the point when we’re most susceptible to an attractive nuisance.

So, imagine the place where you go to make whatever you make. Could be a studio, a library, an office, a cafe, living room, or what have you. You’re sitting there. And, of course, you’re not doing Real Work for your Real-Life Obligations. You’re trying to make something new and perhaps wonderfully unnecessary. “Something useless,” the Lizard Brain whispers, “That no one will care about. That you won’t finish anyway. That you’re too busy to do….”

You’re now shamefully staring at your blank page or an empty canvas or a fresh Compass install or that unpopulated Excel spreadsheet. And your poor mind is already feeling like a lost duckling. You’re desperately casting about for something to save it—if not a big idea or the muse of “inspiration,” at least something that you really know. Something that you can get the hook into. Something that’s…important.

That? That right there? That is the enemy, my friend. That fear of your own inability and of the triviality of your non-work is so toxic. Because it opens you up to insane anxieties about what’s happening outside the studio or the library or office or the cafe or the living room or the what-have-you.

It’s all those fears tearing ass like a colony of E.O. Wilson’s ants. In growing numbers, they’re on to the scent of your anxiety, so now they can build new and customized barriers in record time.

Then, in what can amount to a split second, a switch flips. The Lizard Voice has gotten too loud to be ignored. You’ve come to what you believe are your senses, and you feel compelled to escape this Elysian dream world of nonsense and feelings and unfinished thoughts and “what the hell was I thinking?” After all. You’ve got real shit to do, right?

Ah. Those three horseman of the maker’s apocalypse have come to your rescue: the unknown, the ambiguous, and the incomplete.

Better go check email. Might be something “important.”

The Opposite of That Thing

So, are you getting the perverse irony at work here?

Given that your fears know you too well, they can capitalize on any uncertainty that they know you’d find intolerable. So, even a surprisingly trivial matter—so long as that matter might represent items unknown, ambiguous, or incomplete to you—can suddenly seem extremely important and will swiftly divert your attention from the cool stuff you’d like to be doing onto….oh, whatever that other stuff might be. Better find out.

And, yes, I’m waving at you here, email inbox.11 J’accuse, you horrible little troll.

But, you’re getting it, right? How the Lizard Brain lies and you believe it because it’s easy to believe?

When your resolve melts—when that switch flips and you’re pulled away from a generative kind of anxiety to be thrust into the more caustic and strangely addictive anxities of “real life”—you’re giving up a precious part of your real “real life” in exchange for security of the familiar. Problems you understand. Anxieties you’re comfortable being anxious about. Busy, busy, busy.

Problem is, all of this becomes like chugging saltwater.

Drinking saltwater is a terrible idea. Because it makes you thirstier than you were before you started drinking it. So, you have to drink more saltwater. Then, that makes you thirstier still, so you end up drinking more saltwater. Which makes you also drink more saltwater. And so on. Until you die. Still thirsty.

Ditto empty email checking. Ditto anxiety about anxieties. Ditto every other Lizard Brain impulse to solve a perceived problem by amplifying the thing that’s actually causing the problem.

Tolerance: Bulwark Against Fakey Barriers

If making anything substantial really matters to you, you’re going to need to take the cure. And, the antidote is nasty, difficult, and tastes way worse than saltwater. The answer? You do the hard thing. No matter what it takes. You stick with it at the time you’re most tempted to run away.

Like I said in the talk, developing those invaluable tolerances (the tolerance for ambiguity and the tolerance for sucking) requires the exercise of some very small muscles. The muscles are super-hard to locate, and once you do find them, they hurt like a bitch to exercise. But, doing that exercise repeatedly will pay you back ten-fold.

Because that next time you’re in the studio or the library or office or the cafe or the living room or the what-have-you, and you start to feel the fears building barriers, you’ll know what to do. And you’ll know how to do it. Because you’ve done it before.

There’s no trick here, guys. No system. No diagram. No hack. No tips, no webinars, and no Digg-able bulleted lists. It’s simply work.

You sit, you work, you tolerate. Then you do it again.

Enough. Just for Now.

I’m not sure whether this is precisely relevant, but as I’ve been working on the “Large Writing Project” I’d mentioned in the talk (more on that soon), a particular phrase keeps going through my head:

How do I know what I need to know…for now?

Not, “I can’t start this until I know everything about everything,” or “I can’t start this until I’m 100% up-to-date on every aspect of my life” or “I can’t start this until my skills, tools, expertise, and experience are flawless.”

Just really asking yourself how you know whether you have enough of anything—be it information, tools, skills, or coffee—just to literally start. Just start. Not forever. Just for now. Start.

So, how about instead of waiting for the perfect conditions, maybe try thinking about this stuff in a kooky, opposite way:

Assume there will will always be tools that are better than the ones you have now.
Assume that events in the world will continue to happen or not happen regardless of whether you learn about them immediately.
Assume that you understand and control an embarrassingly minute percentage of the universe.
Assume that none of this matters if you’re determined to make something you care about today.

You already have everything you need. It’s all there. And it doesn’t take sandals, or perfect pitch, or iPhone 4.0, or full-screen mode, or a ★★★★-star reputation on the seduction community forum to get started. Or re-started. Or re-re-re-re-started.

Seconds Away

Your Lizard Brain is absolutely right when it tells you that most people won’t notice if you don’t make something, and that a lot of people won’t particularly care if you do. But, how you choose to respond to that existential kōan will say a lot about your potential as both an artist and as an engaged human.

Because, if you’re relieved that universal apathy provides legitimate cover for eight blissful hours of “managing email,” then you’re in luck. Every day for the rest of your life. Punch out.

But, if you’re like me, you may find you’re invigorated—even challenged—by all that bigger ambiguity. By knowing that, at any time, you might be seconds away from starting something amazing that seemed impossible a minute ago. Even oddly prepared to drop the lizard crap whenever the need arises.

Weird to think how insanely different your day could be today. Purely depending on what you do in the next 10 or 15 seconds. If that switch gets flipped in the right direction, then stays there.

What can you tolerate? What will you start? Now.

See? You’ve got enough of everything you need. You’ve already started. Now just keep going.

MaxFunCon. Seriously. This was the best conference I’ve ever attended. Don’t have the space here to say everything I’d like to say, so I’ll just say I agree with Adam, Matt, and some other enthusiastic folks. ↩
The Seduction Community. How to trick ladies into having intercourse with you. ↩
Make or do. On that index card with the “notes” for my talk on it, you’ll see the spanish word, “Hacer,” which can mean either “to make” or “to do.” I’ve always liked the idea that making and doing are very closely linked, especially for creative types. Plus, I enjoy an irregular verb with a silent “h.” ↩
Excel spreadsheet. I have no idea why poor Excel is my default array item whenever I have to mention something that’s not a fruity art project. What I really mean is “something practical that’s not all arty.” I actually like Excel a lot. Well. I like Numbers a lot anyway. Starting is interest-agnostic. ↩
Fear of Apathy. This is one of the central, giant themes in Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow theory—that we do our best work (or, as he puts it, “live optimally”) when we are highly challenged by work in which we’re highly skilled. Apathy, on the other hand, is what we get from the dreadful combination of low skills and low challenge. Check out this cool diagram. ↩
Jukebox. In (7, Bird by Bird), the wonderful Anne Lamott talks about having a jukebox in her head that plays all the greatest hits of her past failures. As it happens, I have the same model. ↩
Making art. Yeah, I know. We’re not supposed to talk about making art. It upsets people because it sounds all fancy. Screw that. I think one definition could describe art is anything you make and care about that nobody but you really needs. Which necessarily makes it important. ↩
Lizard brain. Nah, I don’t precisely mean the amygdala, and I’m not (neurologically) talking about the actual reptile brain. But, I do suspect that a lot of dumb self-talk has roots in whatever parts of your mind are diligently trying to protect you from bear attacks. ↩
Footnote note. You know who loved him a footnote? Yep. David Foster Wallace. ↩
Lots of reasons. Lordy, there are so many reasons you might have trouble here. Including wrong timing, wrong modality, wrong mood, wrong setting, wrong “focal length”, wrong expectations, wrong preparation. But, be careful that you not use that as a checklist for not getting started. ↩
What’s an Inbox, anyway? Y’know, increasingly, I believe those three adjectives (unknown, ambiguous, and incomplete) tell us much of what we need to know about understanding why inboxes can be so difficult to keep away from. Much [*cough*] more on this coming soon. Ellipsis. ↩

Mud Rooms, Red Letters, and Real Priorities

Merlin — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 11:28:18 +0000

Thanks to my funny, literary pal, Jason B. Jones, today, I’m visiting lovely, warm Connecticut to do some talks and whatnot at CCSU. I mention it because I’d started typing this little post mid-way through the long eastbound ﬂight that delivered me here from three fun (but very long) days doing a comedy thing with You Look Nice Today and Jordan, Jesse, Go! over on that other, top-left, edge of our nation.

So, I was tired. Really tired. The kind of tired where your wallet hurts your butt, and coffee tastes weird, and you try super-hard to sleep, but – well – you’re just too tired to sleep. And, I was ﬁne with all that. Who can complain about being sleepy from hanging out with Adam and Scott? Exactly.

Except. The lady in the seat directly behind me was having grave problems with her “mud room.” Big mud room problems. I know this because she talked about it for several hours in excruciating detail.

I’ll spare you the nuts and bolts of the numerous and surprising ways that the room in which wealthy persons remove their shoes might contribute to causing a carefully-coiffed, 60-year-old woman to come unglued over “priorities.” Sufﬁce to say, ﬁxing this problem was a “high priority” for her. So, she said, repeatedly, as I shifted my wallet, let my coffee go cold, and balled the little blue pillow under my neck.

“Priority! Mud room!” I audibly mumbled, just loud enough to be heard exactly one row back.

Priority. Man, that’s a tough word. Because, depending on who you talk to, most people say “prioritizing” is either a giant problem, an underused skill, or a “Get out of Jail Free” card.

Me? I think priorities are simple to understand precisely because their inﬂuence is so staggeringly clear and unavoidable to behold, then act upon. Ready for this one?

A priority is observed, not manufactured or assigned. Otherwise, it’s necessarily not a priority.

Got that? You can’t “prioritize” a list of 20 tasks any more than you can “uniqueify” 20 objects by “uniqueness,” or “pregnantitze” 20 women by “pregnantness.” Each of those words means something.

An item is either unique or it is not. A woman is either pregnant or she is not. An item is either the priority or it is not. One-bit. Mutually exclusive. One ring to rule them all.

Why all the fussiness, Mr. Fussy?

When most people say, “prioritize,” I think they really mean to say, “force-rank” – to assign n items one and only one position between “1” and “n.” Right? So, yes, there’s one “#1” and one “#7,” et cetera. But that’s not “priority,” and that’s why you probably have at least one task on your version of a to-do list that has been “HIGH PRIORITY!!!” for more than a month.

Kind of unique. Sort of pregnant. “High” priority.

This is why I say priorities can only be observed. In my book, a priority is not simply a good idea; it’s a condition of reality that, when observed, causes you to reject every other thing in the universe – real, imagined, or prospective – in order to ensure that things related to the priority stay alive.

Even though their inﬂuence informs every decision we make on the most tactical level, thinking about priorities happens at a strategic, “why am I here?” level. Right? Maybe? Disagree? Pretty sure you can make priorities like biscuits or shufﬂe them around like Monopoly pieces?

Got news for you, Jack: if it moves, it’s not a priority. It’s just a thing you haven’t done yet.

Making something a BIG RED TOP TOP BIG HIGHEST #1 PRIORITY changes nothing but text styling. If it were really important, it’d already be done. Period. Think about it.

Example. When my daughter falls down and screams, I don’t ask her to wait while I grab a list to determine which of seven notional levels of “priority” I should assign to her need for instantaneous care and affection. Everything stops, and she gets taken care of. Conversely – and this is really the important part – everything else in the universe can wait.

Related example. You ever had a loved one – especially a very young relative – pass away unexpectedly? Brutal. What did you do when you found out? Did you “re-prioritize” your day and move a few things around? Or did you drop everything and join his or her loved ones in taking care of what needed to be taken care of? You just saw what needed to be done and likely had no compunction about telling everybody at work they’d either have to wait or move on without you.

And, let’s be clear: this is not all about “urgency.” Yes, an injured child and a grieving family need help now in a way that an M&A discussion or a CPR class may not. But, again. It’s not a question of order or shufﬂing. It’s a question of brutally honest decision-making and constantly saying, “No, I have another thing to take care of.”

Day One Buddhism.

Because, once you see what’s really there – once you know about an idea or a thing or a person or whatever that you’d reject 10,000 other things to protect and nurture – you’ve found your priority. And, consequently, you’ve discovered a bunch of other things that aren’t allowed to be priorities any more. Even in spirit.

Because, if you aren’t rejecting or dumping things every single day, you don’t know your priority. You’re making things up. If you think you have 35 priorities, then yes: you also think you have 35 arms. Is it any wonder you’re feeling awkward and unsure?

Maybe a mud room is a priority. I think more likely it was this lady’s emotional obsession. If I were the sort of person who coached people on these things, I’d ask her what piece of information she needed to get moving on the “mud room” project, then get it, do it, and move on. That said, dozens of thousands of feet in the air seems like a crummy place to realize a mud room is your “priority,” but I’m not here to judge. Much.

What I will tell you is that these ideas about scarcity and mutual exclusivity ﬂy in the face of most “productivity” and “effectiveness” nonsense, and frankly, they make most people bristle. Big time. When I tell someone who’s making 10 times the salary I’ll ever make that it’s literally impossible to have seven priorities, they look at me like I’m the biggest, dumbest hippie in the world. Sheesh, right?

For the Cult of Priority folks, two things:

First, ask yourself why any “high priority” item has remained unresolved in your life for more than 60 seconds. Why isn’t it done completely? Have you ever “re-assigned” “priority” to some task? Really? Because that sounds more like procrastination than management, let alone “effective” action and decisive execution. Sounds more to me like getting paid $10,000,000 a year to re-arrange your spice rack – then wondering why your company, marriage, and back porch are all crumbling under your “prioritization.” Sounds like maybe you’re just feeling crummy about not understanding your job and your life. Once you know a tree is falling on you, you don’t take a meeting to drill down on strategies viz. arboreal exit strategies. You just run.

Also, number two – and this is a biggie – I’m staggered whenever a Director-level or higher executive claims they have 3, 5, 7, or 27 “priorities.” Because, at that level, your entire career is deﬁned by the unbelievably great ideas that you reject. Painfully giant, wonderful, terriﬁc opportunities that you simply don’t have the capacity to address without screwing up the real priority.

No, no, no, no, sorry, later, nope, forget it, later, no, no, no.

Because only babies and crazy people get to pretend that reality actually changes when you close your eyes and hum. And, reality is the thing that priorities hang on. If you think you can change it by taxonomies and meetings, you still have only two arms, only now you’re also screwed.

So, if a mud room, or a crying toddler, or a CPR class, or even a short note from an old friend turns up on your radar screen today, don’t ask yourself whether it’s a “priority.” Ask yourself what you must not do in order to make sure it gets taken care of.

Once you see and accept real priorities, the rest just turns on the mechanics of fearless completion.

”Mud Rooms, Red Letters, and Real Priorities” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on April 28, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Free as in "Me"

Merlin — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 13:29:33 +0000

This unbelievably long article is related to (but not necessarily about) a discussion that I and several other people have been participating in online over the past few days. It’s about (and not about) the increasingly popular practice of re-publishing someone’s online work on another site without the attribution, formatting, and linking that many bloggers regard as standard, ethical, and fair.

It’s admittedly a polemic (which is what people who think they’re clever call, “a rambling rant”), but what may seem to many to be a childish and ungrateful pout about trivial status and self-esteem beefs turns out to be a kitchen table issue for me. Because, how people decide to reuse and attribute my work directly affects my career, my livelihood, and my ability to thrive based mostly on giving things away for free. I know. Paradoxical, right? Believe me, I know.

Anyhow. To get up to speed, please read these in order: Matt said something, Josh said something, I said something, Andy wrote this awesome post, Jason responded, then, Anil responded. For extra credit, and to get you in the mood, go back and re-listen to Gruber’s and my talk from this year’s SxSW.

I will wait here. Please read them all. This will take a while, and you should only continue if you’re okay with that. As ever, it’s kind of the whole point.

[Time passes, and then:]

Privileges, Fiat, and the Consequence of Guessing Wrong

Weird thing you eventually realize is the extent to which we all rely upon a certain amount of guessing about other people’s motivations. Call it a heuristic or a shortcut or whatever, but in order to make scalable sense of a very strange world, we each have to apply existential algorithms and SWAGs to help us turn a lot of unrelated crap into a sensible story that we can live with.

But. It is important to remember that it is just a story. And the truth behind our assumptions is often not only different than we thought or hoped, but can even be really difﬁcult to understand, summarize, or ﬁt back into our original story.

Eventually, you also learn that it’s sketchy to blame the truth instead of a broken story.

Which is why I said what I said about how All Things D’s Voices section obtains and presents the work of writers who do not actually write for them. It’s why I’m uncomfortable letting other people decide, by ﬁat, that their insight into my own motivations gives them permission to reuse my work however (and, importantly, wherever) they please while unilaterally setting the licensing and compensation to terms they’ve decided are appropriate.

In the case here, for Matt and Josh, that compensation was “a link” and – what? – I guess the opportunity to pretend that you write for a giant for-proﬁt corporation. And because, as the story goes, every blogger writes primarily (or even exclusively) in order to generate page views that bolster his site’s advertising revenue, they/we/I should all be grateful for the largesse of our True Fourth Estate. Even if a giant for-proﬁt corporation’s re-use of that work actually undermines the real motivations, it would be uncivil, ungrateful, and untoward for us to not thank them for helping us out with our little projects. Right?

Well. In my own case, anyone who guessed that motivation has guessed amazingly wrong. And, it’s not the kind of wrong without consequences. So, before I take up the rest of your morning, I’ll try to say this well and mostly once:

Nobody but me is allowed to decide why I make things. And – if and when I choose to give away the things that I make – nobody but me is allowed to deﬁne how or where I’ll do it. I am independent.

But, let’s start at the beginning. With a series of computer networks that were designed to help scientists keep talking after a nuclear holocaust. The network, of course, is the internet, and its oldest and best-known profession is advertising.1

Days We Were and Weren’t Working for Mad Men

As giant, popular websites have begun to struggle with a years-old decision to hang every nickel of their fortunes on CPM ads (and, consequently, on constantly increasing the volume of page views that make those ads theoretically proﬁtable), readers, fans, and independent makers of content have been forced to watch, ﬁdget, and, wince at their increasingly awkward tarantellas.

Because, as my friend, John Gruber, and I have grown fond of saying, page views and CPM ads can become a corrupting inﬂuence on whatever thing you really want to do – on the stories you hope to tell, and, cardinally, on the long-term success of reaching the niche audience who totally gets whatever unbelievably odd thing you’re uniquely capable of producing. Yes. Even if that thing involves not “just being a blogger”,2 maybe a few of us have the temerity to eventually crave something alongside or way beyond toiling in this noble, grinding, and often ghettoized occupation.

But. If your motivation is solely to be a blogger with a site that runs ads, it will necessarily mean thinking a lot about how you’re going to generate page views. Because without ads, most blogs would be lucky to generate bus fare.

When your sole metric is the number of times that pages on your site are loaded (and, that those delicious and life-sustaining ads are served along with them), it becomes unbelievably tempting to start doing things that you know are total bullshit. God knows I’ve done it. Probably dozens of times. Few of us haven’t followed that siren’s song in one way or another, but hopefully you evolve. Sometimes, you don’t.

The Lumpen Metrics of Page View Addiction

And, that is where things start turning to shit.

You “page” your articles to the point of hostile unreadability. You disguise or bury links to source articles in a way that makes your article seem a little more canonical than the real thing. You encourage unmoderated comment threads in which cheering an uncivil race to the bottom of the Port-O-Let means triple page views. You may even compel your indentured “writers” to hew to a stiﬂing regimen of post volume, pointless stock art inclusion, and even compulsory word count – simply because the cargo cult of statistics whispers which coconuts make the best headphones. You conspire to trick, deceive, annoy, and badger your audience up to precisely that moment when they say, “Screw it,” and just never come back.

You ruin the fun for surprisingly little money and eventually discover, to your surprise, that whatever shred of credibility you originally brought to your enterprise has disintegrated into a light dusting on some backﬁll banners.

Also, “links.” Wow. Links used to really mean something different. When I ﬁrst started enjoying blogs (maybe 11 years ago), links represented a semantic, curated map of the places where one writer’s attention tended to go.

Today, links have been converted into a wildly inﬂated currency – farthings that get hoarded and begged, then pushed around, re-counted, and stacked in ways that make you seem a lot less Charles Dickens than Ebenezer Scrooge.

Then, Presently, the Dark Night of the Soul

When page views run your life, you eventually start ﬁbbing about what you really care about. You start pandering to an audience whose depressing lust for new pellets keeps them pecking at a feeder bar for every waking hour. And, yeah, these pigeons eventually become the sole leverage behind your going concern; lose the pigeons and there’s no point pushing pellets, right? Why else would you bother tending the coop?

And, ﬁnally, as this weird darkness metastasizes, you may unintentionally abandon those ﬁnicky but inﬂuential creators of culture and content upon whose work and authority your whole rag and bone racket ultimately depends. Because, let’s be honest: people who make things tend to recognize bullshit the second it plops into the domain where they have expertise. So, a smart blogger knows horeseshit page games like a veteran carpenter can tell you which chair’s made out of masking tape and balsa scraps. (“Dude! No! Don’t sit there!”)

Thing is: the silence or indifference of the readers and fans you lose will never register in SiteMeter, or Mint, or Google Analytics. There’s no overt trace to warn you when things have gone awry. So, you may never know when someone awesome has decided you’re a charlatan.

Because, friends, when page views run your life, you get dumb. Fast. And you start making terrible decisions.

The Ingratitude. The Temerity.

So, where does some small-potatoes nobody like me (or, in this instance, my pal, Matt Haughey and Delicious.com founder, Joshua Schachter) get off? Some giant for-proﬁt publication (whose most evergreen topic, like my own, seems to be “How Everyone on the Internet Keeps Doing It Wrong”) shows the largesse to republish some digital peasant’s scribblings in their esteemed forum – and they complain? The very idea. Guys, this is a GIANT compliment, right? Because it “drives trafﬁc!”

Hey, trafﬁc. Right. I guess I’ll need that for all those page views, right? Well. Only kinda.

See, links and trafﬁc are great. Seriously. Especially when you’re getting started and when they come from a site run by people you respect and admire as much as I admire Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher (this beef aside, those two are the real deal). Links and trafﬁc are, as I said, the coin of the realm in some sense. They build awareness about what a person does, and they expose a person’s work to a large enough audience that one even hopes a few “ideal readers” might end up landing somewhere in the mix.

But, what if you’re trying to do something really different? What if the page views only really matter to you when they’re happening in front of a face you admire? What if your game is not primarily ads? What if – as I said in that email to Andy – what if you’re selling yourself? Or, even better put, what if you’re not really selling anything but the idea that you do interesting things? What if everyone’s best guesses about your motivation are wrong, cynical, and lead to decisions that actually harm rather than compliment? What if.

So, Who Died and Made You So Fancy, Mr. Fancy?

Anyone with the patience to read or hear anything I’ve had to say over the last year knows that saying what I have to say in the way I want to say it is orders of magnitude more important to me than driving a lot of pointless page views from people I never cared about reaching anyway. No offense, internet, but right now, I need links like Chasen’s needs chili.3

And, to clarify why I include myself in this particular discussion, even though ATD did not boost my own articles for their site, this kind of unilateral and dodgy “repurposing” of my work has happened to me many times. Even setting aside the truly black hat scraping that happens dozens of times a day, I’ve received this kind of left-handed compliment numerous times over the past 4 years.

The example that, for a variety of reasons, sticks out most prominently in my mind happened in May of 2007, when I awoke one morning to discover that the much-more-giant-and-ﬁnancially-lucrative site, Lifehacker, had suddenly started republishing my entire feed on their ad-crazy home page without even bothering to inform me, let alone ask if I was cool with it. Hey. Wow. Just look at all that honor. Lucky me.

I immediately complained about the nonsense to now-emeritus Lifehacker editor (and long-standing Top 10 human) Gina Trapani, and she was kind enough to remove me from the mix with all haste (thanks, Gina).

But, should I have had to ask? As I said in an email to Gina at the time:

I wonder how [Lifehacker’s hilariously Dickensian publisher, Nick Denton] would feel if a site like Engadget started automatically reposting every article from Gizmodo w/o permission or compensation – but wrapped it in Engadget’s ads. Maybe he’d love it. Who knows?

Personally, I think it’s always nice to be asked about this kind of thing ﬁrst.

Was it about “the money?” Was it because I think Nick consistently sets, funds, and promotes many of the most execrable examples in the history of publishing? “Not really,” and “kinda,” respectively.

This was about taking something I did and putting it someplace that wasn’t mine, and then acting like we’d both agreed it was a good deal. Like snatching the card off the gift-wrapped toaster I brought, scribbling your name above mine on the card, then handing the whole thing to the bride with a kiss. “Yay! Presents! Thanks, Nick!”

Money is only an issue inasmuch as the prospect of making it without effort or agency governs someone’s decision to stick their dick in my mashed potatoes and call it a birthday cake.

There’s Also No “I” in “We.” Not Until I Say So.

Here’s something like my point: there’s exactly one person on this marble who gets to choose what I give away, to whom I give it away, and under what conditions I give it away. It’s not folks who have decided via tarot or Ouija why I do anything that I do. And it’s damned sure not the esteemed employees of Rupert Murdoch or Nick Denton. It’s me, gang. Merlin is Merlin’s sole free-stuff decider. Full stop. Punto.

If it matters (and it certainly may not), my goal and motivation is to wake up early every day, drink coffee, play with my daughter, kiss my beautiful wife, and then spend double-digit hours trying to create things that will make people happy, productive, entertained, inspired, and even a little more awesome – and, on those rarest and most joyful of days, maybe I’ll even make something that combines all of those qualities.

But, all these ideas start and end with me. All the execution goes through me. If it sucks, it’s because of me. But it always has my name and my dorky icon on it, so you know where to either ﬁnd more or simply try to steer clear.

And, whether people love, despise, or feel indifferent about things I’ve made, it all comes down to me and my weird independent occupation. This is not simply a job; it’s an anxious daily adventure in fucking reinventing myself. While, I’ll note, paying my own way to keep every dinghy in this little ﬂotilla aﬂoat and barnacle-free. And while it’s undeniably the richest of ﬁrst-world problems, funding your own independence is the most insanely costly and addictive project you’ll ever love.

Okay, Shakespeare: WHY Do I Care?

What makes all this melodrama so interesting today, is that we are all in the midst of an unprecedented and unavoidable global re-thinking of what a lot of things really “mean.” Economy. Home. Family. Security. Entertainment. Identity. You name it. There are a shit-ton of grenades still rolling around on the ﬂoor right now, and I’m one of those crazy fringe types who publicly, ardently hopes that at least one of them blows out a few load-bearing walls inside industries that are in overdue need of a bottom-up redesign. No matter what.

And, even in the face of change that will be gut-wrenching for literally everyone, I pray that for each person whose occupation relied on a 100- to 900-year-old business model, maybe one or two might get to ﬁgure out something they can make and vend in a way that does not require the intermediation of the people who are currently steaming their unsinkable vessels into some surprisingly pointy and resolute chunks of ice.

Again: There are Many Like It, But This One is Mine

This is just my opinion and I speak for no one but myself. But, when somebody moves my work onto their shelf without asking me like an adult, one of the last things on my mind is stealing or piracy. Seriously. I know. Crazy.

Steal my stuff? Sure. Go nuts. Grab it. Read it. “Pirate it.” Put it on a Kindle. Put it in a torrent. Make it into LaTeX (whatever that is). But, man. Don’t sell it without asking me. Don’t be a dick about pretending I made it for your project. And, don’t try to shortchange me on copper pipe, then call it a special discount. None of that’s your call, chief.

I can make words and videos and pretty much anything to replace or augment the ones people consume; but I absolutely can’t do it if you rub my name and address off of the label. And, here’s the funny part: when people like me quit making stuff, guess what? Your shovelblog fodder and pigeon pellets start drying up. You’d have nothing left to churn. So, it actually beneﬁts all of us to take this stuff seriously.

The Niche Shall Set You “Free”

And, ﬁnally, as far as motivations go? If you’re married to page views, never assume that I am. If you’re angling for 1,000,000 Twitter followers whom you pretend to read, never assume that I am. And, if your project is based on generating compulsory year-over-year growth vis-a-vis market domination and ﬁduciary responsibility, never assume that I am.

The niche is the thing, friends. It’s the future, and it’s here. Things like this little rhubarb are just the earliest Braxton Hicks contractions of a change that will be getting way, way weirder than most people think.

But, if we each have the arrogance to demand the credit that we’re due, an astonishing number of opportunities begin to unfold. We learn who really made what we love; not just who put it someplace where lots of people can see it. We discover whom we admire and we make decisions about who to collaborate with.

And, if we do the right thing, we can each merge into an insane new caravan of makers who look out for each other, focus on doing great work, and who try to promote things because it made a connection with us. Not because it beneﬁts someone who pays us by the compliment.

But, the anecdote that’s on my mind today comes straight out of the warm and countless Wednesday night potlucks my family attended in the Fellowship Hall at White Oak Christian Church on Blue Rock Road in Cincinnati, Ohio. Where, even if you arrived empty-handed and unable to contribute on a given night, you were welcomed and encouraged to eat all you liked. But, when you ﬁnished, you wiped your mouth, straightened your tie, and personally acknowledged every single cook who’d just fed you. Yes. Even all those amateurs who ﬁlled your belly for “free.”

I have and will continue to run ads on some of my sites, including 43 Folders. It will be left to the reader whether this is wise, well-done, or simply hypocritical, so I’ll just simply stipulate that, in my opinion, ads alone are not the problem; they’re an easy revenue stream that can be removed with trivial ease. But. Making a career out of executing work exclusively to generate page views that support those ads? That is where this gets thorny. I don’t do that (at least now I don’t), but judge away. ↩
Not that there’s anything wrong with that; some of my best friends are “just a blogger.” ↩
Yeah. Totally stole that from Robert Evans. ↩

”Free as in "Me"” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on April 10, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

43f Podcast: John Gruber & Merlin Mann's Blogging Panel at SxSW

Merlin — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 23:33:08 +0000

SxSW ’09 - Gruber & Mann - HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility! (audio mp3, free on iTunes)

My pal, John Gruber (from daringﬁreball.net), and I presented a talk at South by Southwest Interactive on Saturday, March 14th. We talked about building a blog you can be proud of, trying to improve the quality of your work, reaching the people you admire, and maybe even making a buck (in a way that doesn’t blow your deal). Here’s what we had to say:

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N.B.: Awesome drawing by Dave Gray. Here’s more.

Selected Notes

”43f Podcast: John Gruber & Merlin Mann's Blogging Panel at SxSW” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on March 25, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Matt Jones: "Get Excited and Make Things"

Merlin — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:38:06 +0000

Don’t keep calm and carry on. by moleitau

Apart from noting that I adore Matt and want to acknowledge his inspiration for this, I have nothing to add.

This, my friends, is the thing.

”Matt Jones: "Get Excited and Make Things"” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on March 18, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Kutiman, Big Media, and the Future of Creative Entrepreneurship

Merlin — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 15:51:00 +0000

So amazing, so illegal. What are we going to do with you, future?

That’s my pal, Jonathan Coulton, remarking on the disruptively talented Kutiman, who has made an astounding series of YouTube video remixes that’s lighting up the web and (one imagines) generating a lot of wood amongst our nation’s libidinous entertainment litigators.

Here’s Kutiman’s “The Mother of All Funk Chords” (link includes credits for each video):

Unsolicited tip for media company c-levels: if your reaction to this crate of magic is “Hm. I wonder how we’d go about suing someone who ‘did this’ with our IP?” instead of, “Holy crap, clearly, this is the freaking future of entertainment,” it’s probably time to put some ramen on your Visa and start making stuff up for your LinkedIn page.

Because, this is what your new Elvis looks like, gang. And, eventually somebody will ﬁgure out (and publicly admit) that Kutiman, and any number of his peers on the “To-Sue” list, should be passed from Legal down to A&R.

Everybody knows the business has moved from legal to binary ﬁles. The question now is how much more lead time old media companies and other IP-obsessives can afford to burn by pretending it’s otherwise.

In the mean time, though, you have to wonder how much artists like Kutiman (or, for that matter, Jonathan), really need the mixed basket of theoretical beneﬁts that big companies with big distribution can provide. For a long-lived career, does a boot-strapping indie artist with giant niche appeal gain enough from a big-company relationship to offset the loss in agility, equity, and ﬂexibility? I guess we’ll ﬁnd out soon enough.

Because, even in the face of bullying, obfuscating, and throat-clearing from corporations with a homemade timetable for evolution, more and more folks like Kutiman will just keep making and releasing stuff. Cool stuff, “illegal” stuff, niche stuff, and stuff that doesn’t require the benediction of a middle-aged executive in order to reach its precise audience with almost zero friction or overhead.

And, that prospect should buoy and energize anybody with a scintilla of artistic entrepreneurship or the drive to just try making and offering their own stuff in their own way.

Man. What an exciting time this is. Seriously. We may not each have Kutiman-level talent and vision, but there’s absolutely never been a better time to at least give it a throw.

Remember: the only person who can sit on your ass is you.

”Kutiman, Big Media, and the Future of Creative Entrepreneurship” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on March 11, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

43f Podcast: Gangs, Constraints, and Courageous Blocks

Merlin — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 15:57:36 +0000

iTunes: “Gangs, Constraints, and Courageous Blocks”

Learn how ganging and constraints can help you create the blocks of time you need to devote 100% of your attention to making your best work. (10:32)

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Thanks for your patience, everybody. Nice to be back.

”43f Podcast: Gangs, Constraints, and Courageous Blocks” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on February 03, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Celtx: Powerful Free App for Script Writing, Pre-Production, and Collaboration

Merlin — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 18:27:10 +0000

celtx - Integrated Media Pre-Production

QPR - CryingStore - “Cold Tulips” by merlinmann (Celtx - Project Central)

I’ve recently returned to using the Open Source (MPL-based CePL license) Celtx app for all the script-ish stuff I write. But it does a lot more than just collect and format drafts (which, unlike a text ﬁle or MS Word, Celtx does in a way that lets you focus solely on writing, rather than ﬁddly formatting). It’s also an amazingly ﬂexible and robust app for managing all the pre-production materials for screenplays, comics, audio plays, or what have you. And, again: it’s totally free.

Celtx reminds me favorably of Scrivener, in that it takes into account that there may be much more to a very large writing project than just typing; that your ﬁnal draft only serves as the jumping-off point for another, more giant thing that you will need to make out of all your words.

To this end, you can choose to let Celtx handle as little or as much of the process as you need — anything from storyboarding and conceptualization through shooting schedules, prop management – even animal handling! (Memo to self: write more things that require animal handling.)

One neat feature I’ve just barely started playing with is the app’s ability to seamlessly share versioned drafts of your script via Celtx’s web-based Project Central. Looks like you can ﬂip a bit to make it public v. private v. members-only. And, I still haven’t touched the coolest online feature of all, which allows you to solicit criticism and notes from other users and even collaborate with colleagues, co-writers, and production staff – kinda like “SVN for Screenplays,” I’ll dub it, in a way that will probably infuriate everyone who uses either of those.

Anyhow, here’s the script for my recent public radio “CryingStore” parody as an example. Powerful app, and very ﬂexible and fun to use. And at $200+ less than the commercial gorilla, FinalDraft, it’s most deﬁnitely worth the free-as-in-everything download.

Celtx - FREE - Open Source - Application for Script Writing and “Integrated Media Pre-Production”

Celtx Links:

celtx - #1 choice for media pre-production. (Overview/Intro)
celtx - Screen Shots
Celtx Features: The Feature Tour
celtx - FAQ
Main Page - CeltxWiki
celtx - Download Version 1.0 (Dang, man: 4 platforms and up to 23 languages. Nice)

”Celtx: Powerful Free App for Script Writing, Pre-Production, and Collaboration” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on February 01, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Michael Bierut's Notebooks

Merlin — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 15:30:41 +0000

Design Observer: 26 Years, 85 Notebooks

Why a notebook link from the guy who’s supposedly over notebook pr0n? Easy. This is all about how Michael Bierut has used his 85 notebooks over the past 26 years.

The notebooks function like a security blanket for me. I can’t go into a meeting unless I have my current notebook in my hand, even if I never open it. Because I carry one everywhere, I tend to misplace them a lot. Losing one makes me frantic.

It’s a fascinating mini-memoir, told through almost three decades of lines in a go-to capture tool. To me, this is much more about habits, cognition, and memory than paper and cardboard.

Like most designers, I get asked a lot about my process. A lot of my ideas are so simple and dumb that a simple dumb drawing is all it takes to describe it. I probably did the drawing for the cover of Tibor Kalman’s monograph in a meeting. Picture on the front, stacked type on the spine: what if we did something like this? That’s how it came out. If a process is supposed to have steps, to reﬂect a method, that isn’t much of a process.

I disagree. Any process that stops feeling like a process has become an ideal process.

[via: Kottke: 26 years of notes]

[Note: This post originally appeared on our daughter site, “43 Folders Clips,” and we liked it enough to republish it here.]

”Michael Bierut's Notebooks” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 29, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

On Thumbs, Stars, and Little Men

Merlin — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 06:59:43 +0000

Robert Christgau: CG 70s: The Grades

I love Christgau’s original (pre-1990) explanation of how he grades the records that he reviews.

An A+ record is an organically conceived masterpiece that repays prolonged listening with new excitement and insight. It is unlikely to be marred by more than one merely ordinary cut.

An A is a great record both of whose sides offer enduring pleasure and surprise. You should own it.

An A- is a very good record. If one of its sides doesn’t provide intense and consistent satisfaction, then both include several cuts that do.

[… further explanations, then …]

A D+ is an appalling piece of pimpwork or a thoroughly botched token of sincerity.

It is impossible to understand why anyone would buy a D record.

It is impossible to understand why anyone would release a D- record.

It is impossible to understand why anyone would cut an E+ record.

E records are frequently cited as proof that there is no God.

An E- record is an organically conceived masterpiece that repays repeated listening with a sense of horror in the face of the void. It is unlikely to be marred by one listenable cut.

If every critic — ala Ebert, in his way — would disclose the yardstick by which he generates the “stars,” “thumbs,” or “Little Man” of his reviews, it would go a long way toward educating readers; as well as, I’d argue, potentially helping revive the increasingly one-star interest in professional arts criticism.

It’s not that people aren’t interested in hearing what anointed “experts” have to say about a given movie, CD, book, or what have you. And, it’s not even that the lumpenconsumertariat requires that everything be reduced to a pre-chewed paste about buying decisions.

But, disclosing the fahrenheit, celsius, or kelvin of a given reviewer’s mercury would make it much easier for readers to understand how closely a critic’s cognition maps to their own.

Because, by itself, a thumb is really just a decisive ﬁnger. And, by itself, a ﬁnger almost always beneﬁts from a little extra context.

[Note: This post originally appeared on our daughter site, “43 Folders Clips,” and we liked it enough to republish it here.]

”On Thumbs, Stars, and Little Men” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 29, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Video: Merlin's Talk, "Toward Patterns for Creativity"

Merlin — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 23:27:38 +0000

Merlin Mann - “Toward Patterns for Creativity” - Macworld PULSE

Here’s a video of my presentation, “Toward Patterns for Creativity,” from earlier this month at Macworld, here in SF.

My slides were kind of a mess thanks to a bonehead technical problem on my part, but you can follow along ﬁne below.

As I said, I’m very interested in seeing where a topic like this could go. Because I truly believe it’s an idea that could help push a lot of people to the next level.

Related: if you’re interested in where my head was as I prepped for this, be sure and catch the previous post, The Problem with “Feeling Creative”.

Also, if you haven’t done so already, do yourself a favor, and pick up the book I highlight in this talk: The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharpe.

Addendum: 2009-01-28 06:42:03

It should not go without mentioning ﬁve (5) John Gruber-related things:

Seriously. I really did like John’s talk, and I think he’s totally onto something with the Auteur thing. (cf.)
John very kindly let me borrow his laptop after my learning that my own was un-dongle-able.
The slide problem stemmed from my preparing the presentation on a newer version of Keynote than John had installed.
I’m pretty sure John did have Helvetica Neue installed. Because he’s a giant type nerd.
John invented Markdown. In which I write everything. Including this.

Which is just to say that John is a friend as well as my favorite person in the Apple universe. So, upon watching this a second time, I realize I’d hate to leave you with the impression that I feel anything other than embarrassingly abundant aloha for him.

Thanks, John.

[video via: Macworld Pulse: Merlin Mann | Macworld]

Like the Talk?

A big part of what I do these days is delivering talks like this and others all around the US and beyond. If you’d enjoy having me visit with you to present at your company, event, or conference, drop a line and my ninja assistant, Erica, will be happy to take your details and check for availability.

”Video: Merlin's Talk, "Toward Patterns for Creativity"” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 27, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

43f Screencast: Merlin's First Desktop Tour

Merlin — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 00:20:25 +0000

Merlin’s First Desktop Tour on Vimeo (Full HD Version)

After a recent “Most Days” episode, several people asked to see what all’s in my menu bar, so I made this little video using ScreenFlow. It’s a “proof of concept.” A “pilot program,” if you like. Again: an experiment. (Hint: this looks way better in full HD)

Watch this space next week for more info on these apps, plus discount codes and more.

Liked this? Want to see more of these? Got ideas? Stuff you’d like to see or have ever wondered about? Leave a nice comment on the Vimeo page. But, be gentle. It’s my ﬁrst attempt at a screencast, and I’m no Don McAllister.

Seeing Your App Here?

NB: If you’re a developer of one of the mentioned apps and want to give my readers a sweet discount via a coupon code, hit me up at macstuff at 43 folders dawt com with the subject “I Love 43f Readers.”

”43f Screencast: Merlin's First Desktop Tour” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 23, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Best Mac Ever? Duh. SE/30.

Merlin — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:27:56 +0000

The best Mac ever | Editors’ Notes | Macworld

I knew what the near-consensus would be before the page opened. Everybody knows.

The SE/30 (with a hard drive) was, pound for pound, the best Mac ever made. Not only was it when the Mac arrived as a serious tool for normal (albeit deep-pocketed) people, but it felt faster than homemade snot, and still had the awesome old-school form factor.

I liked using Ci’s and Cx’s and Fx’s and Quadras and whatnot, but no Mac ever brought the total package like the SE/30. In 1991, I laid the shit out of some PageMaker on my SE/30 and a big-ass Radius monitor. Good times.

If I could get away with it, I’d probably still be writing on one right now.

[via Daring Fireball Linked List: The Best Mac Ever]

[Note: This post originally appeared on our daughter site, “43 Folders Clips,” and we liked it enough to republish it here.]

”Best Mac Ever? Duh. SE/30.” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 21, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"