kadavy.net

My TED Talk: The New Literacy of Design

2013-05-14T17:51:37Z

I wrote Design for Hackers to teach hackers about design. But that wasn’t the hokey pokey of it.

That wasn’t what it was “all about.”

I wrote it for hackers because hackers have the most power to do great things with the things that they make.

But that’s changing.

Hackers have made makers

All of that collective work, all of the long hours of coding, sharing and contributing to open-source work – and of coding and making for profit – are distributing that power to people who don’t even know what a <br> tag is. (They should learn, but that’s another story)

Hackers have brought the power to make things to the mainstream. All sorts of people are making things, and more people have the ability to get their ideas seen by the masses.

Along the way, they’re learning about design. You can talk about the differences between Times New Roman and Helvetica at a party and people will know what you’re talking about.

Do you realize how huge that is?

Do you realize that wouldn’t have worked 20 years ago? Not even 10.

Regular people are learning about design

We already know that communicating with the visual language of shapes and lines and white space can be the difference between someone dismissing what we make, or embracing it.

Regular people are already learning about design without even being aware of it. They may as well be intentional about it and harness its power.

This is the subject of the talk I gave at TEDx DePaul University in Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. If you watch the video, you may think I’m just speaking to the “exit” sign, but I swear, there were lots of people there.

I’m very excited and proud to have had the opportunity to share this idea through TED!

Stuff & Things

2013-04-25T04:11:59Z

The world is just stuff and things. They sound similar, but they’re very different. To be effective, you have to be really good at turning stuff into things.

To me, my business is just a bunch of stuff. There are a bunch of cells in my body that work together to turn stuff into things, sometimes for reasons I understand, sometimes for reasons I don’t. (“Reasons” are just stuff anyway)

But, to my accountant, my business is a bunch of things: dollars, time periods – months, quarters, years. All of the dollar things that I spend and make have to go into these things, and also into category things.

To the government, my business is its own thing. It’s even an “S-Corp” type of thing. There is stuff inside the thing, and stuff outside the thing. You don’t want to mix stuff outside the thing with stuff inside the thing. That’s bad.

The world moves forward when people turn stuff into things. It’s all just a nebulous collection of atoms, but they comprise “customers,” “markets,” and “technology.” You have to turn stuff – whether it’s raw materials, bits of code, or even thoughts – into things to create a “product.”

I really just want to do stuff all day, but no, I have to turn that stuff into things. That is, if I want to keep doing stuff.

My thoughts are just a bunch of stuff, and I have to turn them into word things. Then I package them up into something with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Stuff doesn’t have bounds like that, but things – like this blog post – always do.

One time, I even turned my thought stuff into a book thing. All of my thought stuff had to be put into word things, into paragraph things, into chapter things, and so on, like a bunch of Russian dolls inside one big Russian doll.

The cool part of turning stuff into things is that when you’re done people can put the thing in their brain with all of the other stuff in there and it gets mixed all together and sometimes even turns into other things. That’s how the thing you made came to be anyway: you mixed things in with your stuff and then it became things again.

It’s kind of brilliant, because people can then say they made that thing, and they can get things for that: “recognition,” “money,” “cred(it).” This is part of the fuel that gets people to turn stuff into things.

The challenging thing about this system is that some stuff is way easier to turn into things. Numbers, for example, they already are things. Since the number things represent the dollar things that represent all of the stuff, it only follows that people who control the number things representing dollar things get more dollar things.

Then there’s the other stuff that’s pretty easy to turn into things: like house things, car things, and ham sandwich things.

At some point in time, each of these was brilliantly transformed from stuff to thing. Now it’s just stuff that’s easy to make things out of. Some of it is important, but not that interesting.

Then there’s big piles of other things that are just made of stuff: degree things, marriage things, insurance plan things to protect your stuff things from unexpected appendicitis things. Then all of the law things that make things out of all of these stuff things; and the public office things of the people things that turn stuff things into law things.

Damn, there’s lots of things in the world. Things are easy to see. Things command your attention. You have to be looking hard to really see the stuff.

There’s the challenge: with all of these things in front of you, how can you ever see the stuff well enough to make things out of it?

You have to see the things for the stuff that they are. Call their bluff things! You have to see the stuff for the things it could become!

Most people, once they have things in front of them, it’s game over. They’ll smack their alarm thing, drink their coffee thing in their car thing, go to the job thing, then watch the TV thing or comment on the Facebook thing. It’s so easy.

But it’s also so hard. These things are robbing them of their stuff.

If you learn to see the things for stuff and the stuff for things, suddenly the things won’t overpower the stuff so much. The supposedly urgent email thing from the boss thing, and the oh-my-god-buy-this-stuff-thing-or-you’re-ugly-fat-and-stupid-thing on the TV thing will just look silly.

Suddenly the what’s-this-thought stuff will become the look-at-it-this-way thing, and the what’s-this-feeling stuff will become the here’s-what-I’ll-do thing. Suddenly the line between stuff and things starts to blur.

This is how really interesting things are made. When people start to see stuff: untapped desires, cultural trends, the very thoughts in their heads, human interactions, etc., and realize they can make things out of them: groundbreaking mobile devices, musical acts, books, social networks, and other stuff things that you can’t even dream of.

Don’t let all of the things make you lose sight of the stuff. The stuff, well, that’s the good stuff.

Go out there and make things out of stuff: kadavy.net/blog/posts/stu…

— David Kadavy (@kadavy) April 24, 2013

2008 vs. 2013: Reverse-Engineering the Redesign of kadavy.net

2013-04-10T20:20:56Z

It has been nearly 5 years since I redesigned my blog. I admit it: It was a bit “out-of-date,” or “dated,” as some may put it (especially for someone who wrote a book claiming to dissect every aspect of design). But what does it mean for a design to become “dated?” How is it possible that something that at one time looked “good” starts to look “stale,” or even just plain “bad?”

Here’s the TL;DR

Less IE, more iOS, and the need for Responsive Design made my site look dated
My goals are different now
User culture is different now
Text should be big, lines short, and design simple (but not too simple)
I’m hosting on WPEngine, and you can save with my coupon code
Get an under-the-hood screencast

As is true for any artifact of humanity, there are forces that bring said artifact into being, and forces that shape the form of that artifact. Over time, those forces change, as that artifact remains the same. This is how something begins to look “dated.” Here’s what a blog post page on my site used to look like. I last redesigned it in May 2008.

With my 2008 eyes, that design looked pretty good. With my 2012 eyes, it looked cluttered: too many elements, too many colors, too many subtle spacial relationships trying to organize all of it. To remember why the design looked like this, I took a look at the technology my users were using in April 2008.

Technology, Culture, Intentions

The overarching viewpoint behind Design for Hackers, is that technology, culture, and intentions of a design work together to shape that design. Here is how those factors interacted to produce the new kadavy.net, starting with the technology.

Cause: Internet Explorer acted like Internet Explorer

In April 2008, 52% of my users were using Internet Explorer. 71% of those users were on IE 7. I didn’t even bother with IE 7 on this redesign. In fact, IE 8 – the oldest version of IE I’m (loosely) supporting – comprises only 4% of my visitors today.

Effect: Less than pixel-perfection

Because so much time development time was eaten up trying to get things to look good on IE 7, and IE 6, it was hard to get very picky about the placement of different things. This often resulted in things being off by a couple of pixels, and simply accepting that as part of the design process.

Cause: “iOS” as we know it, didn’t exist!

In April 2008, .26% of my visitors were on the “iPhone” platform. That’s .26%, not 26%. Today, 24% of my visitors are on an “iOS” device of some kind.

Effect: more “stuff” on the page

In 2008, we were designing for a different kind of user. They were almost certainly using a computer, rather than a mobile device, and chances are they were even using a desktop computer. Once a user was on your site, you had a better chance of funneling them into another part of your site.

Cause: One resolution ruled

29% of my visitors in April 2008 were on 1024 x 768 resolution screens. It was the most popular of roughly 100 different screen resolutions of my visitors. 100 may sound like a lot of different screen resolutions, but in January 2013, visitors had 600 different screen resolutions.

Effect: more granular layout, one layout fits all

In 2008, desktop users ruled. They had longer attention spans, larger screens, and most of their screens were about the same size. You could just stick to a 960px wide grid and fill it full of stuff. Since they were desktop users, they didn’t need as large of click targets either. This made it very common to have three or more columns in a layout. A user could scan around the page with their eyes, and if something grabbed their attention, they could just click on it. These days, we don’t have so much real-estate to work with, and I posit that users get impatient more quickly if they’re unable to find what they’re looking for.

My Intentions: 2008 vs. 2013

In 2008, my goals for kadavy.net were far different than they are today.

My career was less-defined: When I redesigned in 2008, I had spent about a year moworking at cafes around San Francisco experimenting with different projects after leaving my last job. I had had my fill of living in The Valley and was on the cusp of escaping to Chicago where I could explore my own creativity outside of the noise. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. My plan was to make the minimum amount of money needed, and spend the rest of my time trying to unlock what was in my brain. So, I was experimenting with writing on a wider variety of subjects, while also experimenting with hackathons, video, acting, and improv. A couple of months after my redesign, I made a presentation on the idea that would eventually lead to Design for Hackers.
I wanted freelance work: I had been living off of savings for a year, and it was time to make at least a little money. So, I had a portfolio to showcase my work. Not long after moving to Chicago, I landed oDesk as a client. They came across my blog and got in touch with me. I loved their mission, and they had just the right workload to get me through the next year of experimentation. These days, researching design to try to make great content and talks is a full-time job for me, and luckily I have some passive revenue coming in to help get me to the point where that is what I’m actually making my living from.
I wasn’t sure what I was an expert on: When my 2008 redesign launched, I wasn’t writing about design at all, and instead was mostly writing life hack type things. This genre is still important to me, and I plan to keep writing on it, but I’ve recognized and accepted that I can make an impact writing about design. It’s funny, looking back I remember I often got frustrated when people would introduce me as “a designer,” when I thought of myself as an entrepreneur. Sometimes the observations other people make about you are more lucid than the ones you make about yourself.

Compare that with my goals today for kadavy.net

There is nothing more important than this post: 99% of visitors to kadavy.net land on a blog post, so the content of that blog post – the reading experience of that blog post – is the most important thing. Why try to distract the user with a “Popular Posts” widget, a blog roll, and a search box when 90% of visitors bounce? I’d rather use the quality of the content and the reading experience to compel them to investigate more. They can do so through the “best of” on the home page or by clicking through to category archives.
Buy my book: I still do (and plan to continue) to write about things that interest me outside of design, such as entrepreneurship and productivity, but my book is my calling card. After all, it encompasses my entire viewpoint on what makes good design – which I’m not too humble to admit is probably the thing that I know the most about. So, in what limited space isn’t dedicated to this post, my book is the one thing that I’m promoting.
I wanna talk: In the nearly 18 months since Design for Hackers was released, I’ve had the privilege to travel the world speaking about design. I’ve now spoken in 5 countries on 3 continents, including all over the U.S.. I love speaking, so I want to do more of it. So, my blog now has a dedicated “speaking” page. If you’re organizing something, let’s talk.
Twitter matters: In 2008, I had been on Twitter for several months, but – after initial excitement – hadn’t recognized the value of it. Things are of course different today, and Twitter is an important place for dispensing and testing thoughts and directions I’d like to go. So, I’ve gotten rid of most widgets from other networks and am concentrating on Twitter. By the way, are you following me?

2008 User Culture vs. 2013

The technology of 2008 and my own intentions are of course tightly intertwined with the culture. Here’s how today’s user culture differs from that of 2008

Affordance is cheap: My audience has used a computer before. You might be surprised to know that the majority of my audience isn’t the Hacker News crowd, but the general public is far more familiar with how to interact with a website than they were 5 years ago. Even the Neilson Norman group doesn’t underline their links. We’re also seeing giant companies such as Google move toward a “flat” design style. So, I’ve gotten rid of colors for links, in favor of a light dotted underline. My navigation is now simply words where you would expect a navigation to be.
Good design is expected: The bar for good design is way higher than it was 5 years ago. I could build an argument for this, but isn’t it self-evident? Users expect a better experience.

Guiding Principles

No matter how formulaic all of the above may seem, a design is also shaped in part by a designer’s point of view. Here are some things I believe that have also shaped this redesign.

Text should be big: I think most of the text online is still way too small. Designers were used to designing for print, but you don’t hold a computer screen as close to your face as you do a piece of paper. Additionally, most screens still aren’t up to snuff with paper. So, I wouldn’t blame you if you think that the text on my new design is a little too large. It’s 28px on widescreen desktop, and that’s big, but for once you won’t be hitting Cmd + right upon visiting a site.
Line length should be 45–75 characters: In part because of all of the small text online, in part because of the width of screens and the occasional abuse of responsive design, most sites have lines of text that are way too long. It’s an epidemic on even the most popular sites, even the most popular applications (I’m looking at you, Evernote Full-Screen Mode).
Death to Ornament: As long ago as 2001, I have been fascinated by the power of white space, and the minimum needed variation to express visual hierarchy. That’s when I rearranged the text from the side of a deodorant bottle, trying to use nothing but white space to express information. Why use a different size of type when a little white space will do? Why use a different typeface when another size of the same will do? Why use another color when a different weight will do? I had tried to design kadavy.net without ornamentation in 2004, but a lack of control on the web along with the need for affordance made it infeasible. With this redesign, I attempt once again to utilize the power of white space wherever possible. (If you’re such a design freak that white space somehow interests you, be sure to sign up for D4H emails. I’ll have something for you soon.)
…but, “flat design” is a bit much: I don’t doubt that “flat design” will be remembered as a historically significant design “movement.” It has all of the elements of such a thing (see my comparison of Impressionist painting and Web 2.0 in Chapter 4 of D4H). But, I feel it’s an overreaction to Skeuomorphism. Removing all texture and dimension from a screen doesn’t change the fact that screens are rather harsh as nothing more than blocks of color. Movies are skeuomorphs of live plays: do we have nothing but flat-shaped cartoons now? As much as I’m for measured visual changes to communicate meaning, I still feel that textures and dimensional effects are indispensable tools in the complex landscape of dynamic experiences.
I’m a Humanist: The design of one’s personal site should be an extension of his or her philosophies. I see technology as a tool to augment and harmonize with humanity, not to overpower it. So, if I must check a text message whilst having dinner with you, I will apologize for it profusely, but I’m not ever likely to delete my Facebook account for not thinking it’s healthy. Similarly, I’d rather write and operate from my heart than to A/B test to optimize a result I desire. I’m not likely to have a background of pure white LCD, use a rationalist typeface such as Helvetica, or use bright neon colors in my site. I wouldn’t be me, and it wouldn’t evoke the feeling of sharing a pot of tea with me on a winter evening in a cozy cafe.

The Results

The above comprises the most important facts, thoughts, and feelings that have shaped the new kadavy.net, which is:

Responsive, but not too much: With the variety of resolutions my visitors view my site on, there was no doubt that I needed a responsive design. But, a design should be responsive only to the extent that it improves the experience. So, there are essentially only 3 different modes, with a few tweaks made for iOS and other touch devices.
Lato, a Humanist Google font: I’m a little weary of all of the typefaces available for use on the web today. Very few are really good, and most people using them don’t really know which ones those are. I wanted to use only one typeface, in order to demonstrate simple communication. My first choice was Martin Majoor’s Scala Sans, but it’s expensive enough that it wouldn’t do my readers much good to see it in action. I was very pleased to come across Lato though. It has a sense of being visually inert, yet it’s proportions and shapes are Humanist. Additionally, it looks surprisingly good on-screen, even at tiny sizes. It was designed by Polish designer Lukasz Dziedzic in 2010.
Extruding navbar, disappearing header: There were just a few little bits of JavaScript magic that I felt were worth the trouble to execute. In pursuit of minimal affordance, I wanted the navbar of the site to be as inconspicuous as possible when first visiting the site, yet once the user had scrolled into the content, it needed to distinguish itself. The solution is a navbar that “extrudes” from the page while you start scrolling (this proved impossible to execute in iOS, so you’ll have to see it on a desktop). The other thing (also not visible on iOS) is the disappearing header. Sure, it would disappear when scrolling, but I liked the way a fading, static header seemed to say “all content on this site lives within this idea.”
Appropriate alert: People sharing my articles is really important to their success. Plus, remember that book of mine that is so important to this site? In the wider desktop versions of the site, a “notification bar” pops up as you near the end of an article. That is, of course, the appropriate time to ask for sharing and tell you how you can engage further with my thoughts. Since many people who share may not even get to the end of an article, I was tempted to mess with some of those buttons that float around next to content, but remember that “there is nothing more important than this post.”

The one agonizing disappointment is that I can’t style the Disqus comments because they’re in an iframe. Don’t get me wrong: they look good – they just aren’t as integrated with the look of the site as I would like. This is my first time using them, so hopefully the features will be worth it.

Credits

Initially, I considered hiring someone to code and even help out with design, but I ended up handling that on my own. It was a good experience in catching up with HTML5, LESS, CSS3, and JavaScript. But, I have to thank Alex Baldwin, who has been an invaluable advisor in keeping abreast with front-end technologies. Also, Aaron Crowder helped with the translation of static HTML into a WordPress theme. Of course, there are numerous others who have been a big help on Twitter, or on the D4H email list. The background texture used is “Cream Dust,” created by Thomas Myrman and posted on subtlepatterns.com.

Lovingly Hosted on WPEngine (get 25% off)

A few years ago, I messed around with WordPress Optimization on Rackspace. But, it turned out that I didn’t enjoy (and wasn’t very good at) managing my own server. I got tired of updating it, trying to set up my own CDN, getting hacked, and having to worry about backups and traffic spikes. I’ve since hosted sites on several of the available hosted WordPress solutions, and have concluded that WPEngine is the best one for me. So, the new kadavy.net has a new home on WPEngine. They keep my WordPress up-to-date, keep it secure and backed up, make it fast, and handle scalability. From the other providers I’ve tried, they have the best user experience (“how the %&*# do I get into my SFTP again?”) and customer service. They’re going to cost me a few bucks more than the other providers, but I’m serious enough about my blog that it’s worth it for me. If you want to try them out, I’ve lined up a special coupon for them just to celebrate the redesign. Get 3 months free with this WPEngine Coupon Code (when paying for a year up-front).

Get a look under the hood: D4H newsletter

If you’ve enjoyed this run-down, and would like to learn more about the technology and process behind my redesign, I’m preparing an under-the-hood screencast just for folks on my Design for Hackers newsletter that will cover:

Proportions: how did I choose font sizes and dimensions, and how did I integrate those choices with the technology. See how I used LESS to make these choices easy to adjust and maintain across responsive design breakpoints.
Responsive Design: I’ll explain how I balanced effort with results to chose the responsive design breakpoints I did, and what design choices I made to make each breakpoint look its best.
CSS3, LESS, and rems: I’ll explain some of the advanced CSS3 techniques I used, how I organized my LESS files, and how I used rem units to make a beautiful design with minimum coding.

I’ll be sending this screencast to D4H list members for free – one time only – on February 26. You can sign up here.

Eventually, you get there

2012-11-15T20:24:13Z

At age 31, I couldn’t swim. Every time I tried to swim, my Lizard Brain would send my body into a panic. My heart rate would skyrocket, my muscles would tense, and within 25 yards, I’d be out of breath.

It made me feel insecure, incomplete, and even weak to not be able to swim. I loved the water, but this stood in my way of fully enjoying that.

But standing in my way of learning how to swim was a tower of self-doubt: I took lessons as a child, and they didn’t work; I’m too lean, and not tall enough; how can I even fight through the shame and embarrassment of being an adult trying to learn to swim?

I decided I couldn’t allow this to continue. I gave myself permission to suck, and started going to the pool.

I was able to relate to Tim Ferriss’s story of learning to swim as an adult, so I decided to use the same methodology – Total Immersion (book & DVD) – to teach myself to swim.

Tim managed to teach himself how to swim in only 10 days. This is not such a story.

Just last week week – almost two years to the day after I bought the book and DVD – I finally had my breakthrough swimming workout. After doing my usual warm-up drills, I was able to continuously swim 7 laps (14 lengths, 350 yards), and eventually stopped, not because I was tired, but because I just felt like I had done enough swimming for that day.

Don’t let a little waiting stand in your way

How could I have the patience to spend two years learning how to swim? Well, it reminds me a bit of my first transpacific flight, which I recently took: 15.5 hours direct from Chicago to Hong Kong.

Thousands of people take such a flight every day, so it’s not really a big deal, but there are many people who would do anything to avoid taking such a flight. I even remember, when I was in high school, telling one of my friends that I had no interest in ever going to Europe, simply because I didn’t want to be on a plane that long.

Thankfully, I changed my tune. The thing I learned is that: eventually, you get there.

Patience, in pieces

It’s true. If you just sit on that plane for a bit, eventually, you will get there. To put it in perspective, 15.5 hours is less than .2% of a single year of your entire life. Of course, the experiences of international travel are ones you will remember for the rest of your life!

So, if you want to learn to do something, just spend two years practicing it, right? Like a transatlantic flight, eventually, you get there. Easier said than done. Here’s how to make it bearable.

Find pleasure in learning: At first, my swimming “workouts” were mostly frustrating. I had to do humiliatingly simple drills: just floating on my back, tweaking the position of my chest and arms and face. Inexplicably, I just didn’t float as well as the book and DVD seemed to assume I would. My goal was to find some way to enjoy my swimming workouts. Maybe I’d float the right way for a moment, or I’d really get the rhythm of my breathing down. If I couldn’t do that, I could at least appreciate the feeling of having water all around my body.
Wait for the want: Many times, I left the pool feeling totally defeated. I didn’t want to go back. So, I just didn’t. For weeks. Eventually, I would remember some moment of success or pleasure I had experienced in a previous workout – or the promise of eventually learning how to swim would spike enough dopamine to motivate me to go back. I waited until I wanted to go back.
Eventually, magic happens: Slowly, things started to happen. I didn’t feel panicked when I was in the water. The drills in which I just couldn’t float, suddenly and magically seemed to work! I moved on to more advanced drills that improved my rhythm turning over in the water. I started to get a clear mental picture of what a good swimming stroke was supposed to look and feel like. I even started to see flaws in the strokes of swimmers who could somehow swim much longer than I could.
In the right conditions, the snowball will grow: If you’ve ever made a snowball before, you know that you have to have the right kind of snow – or it just won’t stick. But if conditions are right, you can make the snowball roll it in the snow and – well, you know the rest. This framework I worked with – finding ways to enjoy swimming, only doing it when I wanted to, and trusting in eventual magic – lead me to want to swim more. I started going every week, sometimes multiple times a week, and my progress accelerated, until I had a total breakthrough in my ability.

It’s very easy to be impatient. I’ll avoid the cliché of suggesting that it has anything to do with this day and age, because it’s simply a part of being human to want progress and results. Your Lizard Brain wants to be reactionary, but your prefrontal cortex knows that if you’re patient and learn to enjoy the journey, eventually, you get there.

Eventually, you get there: kadavy.net/blog/posts/eve…

— David Kadavy (@kadavy) November 12, 2012

Permission to Suck

2013-02-11T17:08:23Z

My friend is one of those people who swears she “can’t” meditate. She can’t sit still that long. She can’t think of “nothing.” The times that she tried meditating, she kept thinking of things, and got frustrated.

It probably doesn’t help that my friend was once a soloist in one of the top ballet companies in the world. She has been trained to achieve perfection, and can’t accept any less.

My recommendations to her were: 1) meditate for two lousy minutes 2) do it every day, and 3) give yourself permission to suck.

It’s natural to think of other things when you’re meditating – especially if you’re just starting. If you didn’t think of other things, something would be wrong with you. However, if you couldn’t meditate for two minutes, something else would be wrong with you. Of course you can meditate for two minutes.

The first couple of times you do it, you’re not going to be very good at it. Hey, you might not be very good at it for months, but if you make it a habit to try it, slowly, eventually, you’ll actually be good at it. You’ll even start to like it. “Two minutes isn’t enough!” you’ll say to yourself, and you’ll move to five minutes. Then ten minutes. Then fifteen.

But before you can get there, you have to give yourself permission to suck.

It’s okay to suck, it’s necessary to suck

Most people don’t give themselves permission to suck. They think that there are people who are great at things (and are notable for being great at those things), and then there is them: ordinary person – and all of the ordinary people around them.

If they start trying to do something, their ordinary person friends try to push them down “why are you doing that?” “What a waste of time!” “Why don’t you just watch sitcoms and scan Facebook with your free time, fellow ordinary person?”

Unfortunately, most people give in. They can’t stand to suck.

I sucked until I didn’t suck, but I still suck

Eight years ago, I sucked at writing. Shit, I didn’t even like writing. But for some unknown reason, I felt compelled to start a blog. My first blog post sucks. It’s one long, disjointed paragraph. It has no real point. It has a misspelling.

You know what? My second blog post sucks, too; and the third. In fact, I have tons of sucky blog posts. Even today, I have a pile of documents full of sucky writing that will never see the light of day, and I’ll be adding to it tomorrow with more half-baked suckery.

Eight years ago, I sucked at writing; and today I’m a published author, of a book that has done pretty well. Is my book perfect? No. It has way more misspellings than my first blog post does, but I’m not too humble to admit that I don’t think it sucks at all. Still, some people disagree, but that’s okay.

Maybe someday I’ll write another book, and it will be a little better than my first book. It probably won’t be a perfect book, but I’ll be happy with it. Some people will still say that it sucks.

Other people will put the fear of suck in you

When I first started my blog, I heard a lot of the same things that most people hear when they start something they suck at. They wanted to know “why” I was doing it. How was I going to make money doing this? Shouldn’t I be working on my full-time job instead of wasting my time with this blog? (If this sounds totally ridiculous to you, keep in mind that I lived in Nebraska – I don’t know if this is what you would hear in other places, but certainly not Silicon Valley.)

What they didn’t understand – what most people don’t understand, is that someone doesn’t wave a magic wand and make you successful or good at something. You don’t just head down to the career center at your community college and fill out an application to be a successful entrepreneur, or a famous musician, or a professional basketball player.

You have to give yourself permission to suck first.

Why you should suck, and be okay with it

There is nothing about sucking to fear, except sucking itself.

Think about something you want to try, but are afraid of sucking at. Why are you afraid of it? It’s probably because 1) it will make you feel crappy about yourself, 2) it will make you feel crappy about what other people think of you, and 3) that will make you feel crappy about yourself.

Those are valid fears (albeit without tangible consequences), but they are terrible reasons to not do something. Here’s why you should suck:

Doing things you suck at can still be enjoyable. If you allow yourself to be okay with sucking, you can find bits of enjoyment in that activity. The crisp feeling of a well-struck golf shot, the satisfaction of a nailed yoga pose, or the feeling of dancing in time with a Salsa song for a moment can all be sensations that keep you coming back. Which leads me to the next reason.
Doing things you enjoy, can often lead to not sucking at them. If you find enjoyment in the things you suck at, you’ll do those things more, then – someday – you won’t suck at them anymore. Find a way to enjoy going to the gym (not overtraining, or by bringing a friend), or set small goals for yourself (just get yourself to the gym), and eventually you won’t suck at working out anymore.
One hone smooths another. It can be surprising what having varied interests – even ones that you suck at – can bring to your life. When I started taking dance lessons, I found that my typing got more accurate and fluid (seriously!). Doing yoga helped me discover that my brain works better when my muscles are stretched. It pays to nurture a Renaissance Mind.
Life is long, sucking is temporary. Remember my friend who couldn’t meditate? My final word of wisdom for her was “you have 40 or 50 more years to not suck at meditating. Can you give yourself permission to suck for a couple of weeks?” This is the most important reason to not be afraid to suck. If you find a way to be okay with sucking for a short time, you’ll have a whole lifetime to enjoy not sucking at that thing.

Now, what are you going to suck at?

Give yourself permission to suck: kadavy.net/blog/posts/per…

— David Kadavy (@kadavy) November 2, 2012

Thinking is a thing

2013-02-17T22:09:18Z

Thinking is a thing. Its own separate thing – crammed within the cracks between all the other “things.”

Thinking gets compressed, but it is limitlessly expansive. It can stretch as vast as the ocean, or tower as high as the stars. Thinking just needs the time to achieve its own bounds.

Thinking can be big. It can be as powerful as an atomic bomb. It can be as gentle as a violin. Thinking just needs the space to be whatever it is.

If your thinking is cast wide, it can sail the winds of your emotions. If it is furled, it will submit to stormy waters. Thinking just needs practice to master the seas.

But thinking is hard to see. It’s less urgent than an email, less mandatory than a meeting, less alarming than the 11 o’clock news, less menacing than political opponents.

Thinking is less demanding than your boss. It’s much quieter than your earbuds – more gentle than vibrate mode.

Thinking won’t openly ask of your time. You may not hear it, but it is always whispering.

It will collect clippings, and photos, and poems, and leave them in boxes astack in your attic – awaiting your next visit.

If you won’t answer its gentle call, thinking may think you’ve forgotten it.

You’ll forget to pick up the dry cleaning, you’ll write a terse email, you’ll feel sluggish about your work, you’ll make excuses for eating from the vending machine again.

Thinking needs space and time, and a place to be done. It needs candlelight and music and a glass of red wine. It needs majestic views and alone time. Thinking – needs to be thought of.

Thinking is a thing.

Prefrontal Mondays

2012-10-22T14:28:48Z

Productivity is less about time management than it is about mind management. Knowing when is the best time to use different parts of your brain can help you use those parts to their fullest potential. The better you understand how a tool works, the more effectively you can use it. There’s no more powerful tool in your brain than your prefrontal cortex.

Evolution of the prefrontal cortex

Your prefrontal cortex is a thin area across the front of your brain that is responsible for executive thinking. You use your prefrontal cortex to prioritize, to suppress urges, and to plan stuff. This is the type of thinking that really sets humans apart from other animals.

But, your prefrontal cortex is very energy hungry. It fatigues quickly. When your prefrontal cortex gets tired, your executive functioning suffers, and other parts of your brain take over.

The amygdalae

Now, meet what is pretty much the exact opposite of your prefrontal cortex. Your amygdala. Your amygdala is referred to by some as “the lizard brain,” because even lizards have a brain that is very similar to your amygdala – and that’s pretty much all that they have.

Your amygdala is responsible for your “fight or flight” response, and it’s really at odds with your prefrontal cortex, especially because your amygdala can elicit a response in your sympathetic nervous system before the rest of your brain is even aware of what is going on. This means when you see a bear, your amygdala tells your heart to start pounding before you can even consciously think “bear!” (This is why you run when you see a bear, despite knowing it’s a bad idea.)

Love your prefrontal cortex. Fight your amygdala.

When it comes to being successful in business, your prefrontal cortex is really your friend. Your amygdala is your enemy.

Your amygdala will run around trying to “put out fires.” Your prefrontal cortex will think about how to prevent the fires in the future.
Your amygdala will lash out at a colleague for making a mistake. Your prefrontal cortex will try to improve the process that caused the mistake.
Your amygdala will spend the whole day combing through “vanity metrics.” Your prefrontal cortex will concentrate on the metrics that matter.
Your amygdala will focus on the .1% conversion rate change caused by changing the color of a button. Your prefrontal cortex will dream up a product offering that will increase conversions 10x.

You have to be darn good to your prefrontal cortex.

Use your prefrontal cortex when it’s at its best

Because your prefrontal cortex is so powerful – can do such valuable thinking for you – yet so energy hungry, you have to really use your prefrontal cortex when it is strongest. This is why I’ve instated Prefrontal Mondays – and I think you should too.

On Prefrontal Mondays, I do executive-type thinking. I turn off social media. Heck, I get off of my computer entirely. I put a whiteboard on the floor, and I review – using only a marker and my prefrontal cortex – what’s going on in my business. What’s working? What’s not working? What should I do next? What should I stop doing? What is it, really (at the highest, most abstract level possible) that I’m really trying to accomplish, anyway?

Executive thinking: How Steve Jobs did it

It’s said that the prefrontal cortex is in charge of “executive thinking.” Really think about that word: “executive.”

In business, executives are in charge of the very thinking that I just talked about: providing the company’s vision, thinking about the future, scaling up, scaling back, and even cutting certain efforts, all for the health of the business.

You don’t have to do Prefrontal Monday by yourself. You can work with other people’s prefrontal cortexes. Steve Jobs probably didn’t call it “Prefrontal Monday,” but that’s exactly what he was doing with his Monday morning executive team meetings (from the Isaacson biography):

the key venue for freewheeling discourse was the Monday morning executive team gathering, which started at 9 and went for three or four hours. The focus was always on the future: What should each product do next? What new things should be developed? Jobs used the meeting to enforce a sense of shared mission at Apple. This served to centralize control, which made the company seem as tightly integrated as a good Apple product, and prevented the struggles between divisions that plagued decentralized companies.

Just as your prefrontal cortex serves as a sort of “mission control” for the various parts of your brain, so too did Jobs’s executive meetings “centralize control” for everything Apple was doing.

Why make “The Mondays” Prefrontal Mondays?

Why do all of this prefrontal cortex thinking on Mondays? If you’re living right, Monday should be the day that your prefrontal cortex is well-rested. You’ve spent time with family and friends, caught up on sleep, and haven’t thought about work.

On Monday morning, your mind should be about as disconnected from the little details of work as it will be any other part of the work week. So, you’re well-prepared to review the 30,000-foot view of what you’re working on.

The added benefit is that the thinking you do in a Prefrontal Monday session can inform the work you do throughout the rest of the week. If you’re one of the poor suckers that hates Mondays – and doing this doesn’t make them better for you – you should make some changes in your life.

Or, maybe there’s some other day or time that just works better for you. You get the idea. Make it “Prefrontal Saturday” if you wish. I’ll be at the farmer’s market.

Well, it’s Monday morning right now. Close your damn laptop, grab a pen and paper, and use your prefrontal cortex! Let me know how it goes (later).

Mind Management (Not Time Management)

2013-04-25T03:46:46Z

Productivity is less about time management than it is about mind management. We all have the same number of hours during the day. How effectively we spend those hours really depends upon how well we can manage and harness our fragile mental energy.

Productivity is less about time management than it is about mind management.

— David Kadavy (@kadavy) May 1, 2012

For example, when I was writing my book, I admittedly had a difficult time managing my mental energy. The project seemed to consist of 12 hours a day banging my head against the wall, only to get maybe 15 or 20 minutes of real “flow” – writing that really took a smooth path from my brain to my fingertips.

Imagine if I could have sat down for 15 or 20 minutes a day, did my writing, and then enjoyed the rest of my day. This seems unrealistic, but certainly I could have employed a strategy that could have made the process less agonizing.

Three Important Questions of Mind Management

Throughout the process of writing Design for Hackers, I did start to gain an intuitive sense of what was going on with my brain, and how to navigate my own mental landscape. I found myself consistently asking myself a few important questions:

What kind of work do I need to do right now? Is there anything extremely pressing, or can I let my mental state guide the work that I decide to do right now?
What kind of mental state am I in right now? Am I in the mood for draft writing, outlining, researching, exploring, or polishing? (Throughout the process, I began to codify the different types of work required to produce my writing.)
Is there something I can do to get myself into the right mental state? Over time, I realized there were different “hacks” or rituals that would help me switch mental states. Exercising, massages, different types of music, different types of teas, epsom salt baths, and neurotransmitter-supporting amino acids all eventually served their own purposes. I also had different venues to do different types of work: for example, a cafe in a skyscraper high above the city was better for higher-level brainstorming, while a dark, small room in the public library was better for polishing or research. (Which is consistent with academic findings.)

The goal of mind management is to align your mental state with work that needs to be done, while also allowing your mind to do the work that it wants to do.

Key Takeaways of Mind Management

I didn’t have much time to think about what was going on during the book writing process, but once the smoked cleared, I began to get more fascinated by what, exactly, my brain was doing throughout all of this.

I picked up a few armchair neuroscience books, the most powerful of which, by far, was David Rock’s Your Brain At Work. This book basically explains the brainwaves, neurotransmitters, the different regions of the brain, and how they all work together throughout your day. I highly recommend it.

By really understanding how your brain works, you can have a framework with which to understand what is going on with your mind, and thus, you’ll be better equipped to know how to better use your precious mental energy.

Here are a few takeaways and tactics that I’ve developed from my research and experimentation:

Your brain is plastic: Every time your neurons fire, it makes it easier for those same pathways to fire again. It used to believed that the brain was a static organ once you reached adulthood, but now we know that the brain changes throughout life. This means that each time you perform a thought or action, you make it easier for your brain to reproduce that thought or action. This has some pretty clear implications for positive vs. negative thoughts, and explains why meditation is so powerful (which I’ll get to in a bit).
Love your prefrontal cortex: Your prefrontal cortex is the “newest” (in terms of evolution) part of your brain. Your prefrontal cortex is in charge of things like prioritization, planning, and suppressing urges. But, your prefrontal cortex is small, but energy-hungry. So when it gets tired, it’s hard for you to think about the overarching purpose of what it is you’re doing right now, or to keep yourself from checking Facebook and Twitter every 2 minutes. So, it’s important to get mental rest to keep your prefrontal cortex working well, and to set aside special time dedicated only to prioritization (such as Prefrontal Mondays).
Fight your amygdala: Your amygdala is ~~the oldest~~ one of the older (in terms of evolution) parts of your brain. A lizard’s brain is basically all amygdala (this is why Seth Godin talks about the lizard brain). Your amygdala is extremely fear-driven, and is programmed to save you from danger. The really tough part is that your amygdala communicates with your body even before the rest of your brain (which can handle much more complex thinking). For example, if you see a snake, your amygdala tells your sympathetic nervous system to increase your heart rate before your eyes can even tell your brain “this is a snake.” The rest of your brain will then conclude “my heart rate increased, so I’m scared of this snake.” Your amygdala always wants you take the “safe” route, and will stifle your creativity, so you have to be wary of its power.
Restorative things are productive: Given this struggle between your prefrontal cortex and amygdala, and the fact that your prefrontal cortex is so easily fatigued, it should be no surprise that rest is important to using your mind effectively. If you think you’re getting more work done by working until you collapse every night, I’d argue that you probably aren’t. You’re probably depleting your prefrontal cortex, and instead of thinking strategically, are filling up the time with reactionary, fear-driven (amygdala-driven) “work.” Restorative activities, such as exercising, sleeping, and spending time with loved ones help your brain reorganize. If you’re skeptical, there’s research showing that positive mood and sleep encourage insightful thinking, and that close relationships strongly affect happiness.

Mind Management in Action

With the above in mind, here’s a few actionable tips you can use to manage your mind effectively.

Meditate: By practicing mindfulness meditation, you carve neural pathways to better process stimuli in your present environment, making you more calm and deliberate. To really get into it, I started with two sessions a day at 10–15 minutes for about 6 months. Now, I do one session a day. If you really think you can’t meditate, start with a 2-minute version of the 10-minute hack. If you can’t meditate for 2 minutes, you have bigger problems than being “too busy.”
Make time for planning: Making planning a separate, dedicated activity has two benefits: 1) You can do it when your mental energy for planning is high (I like Sunday evenings), so that you do better planning, and 2) It frees up your precious prefrontal cortex to do other activities – since the planning and prioritization has already been done. I like to do a “weekly review” (a term familiar to GTDers) in which I make a bullet point list of everything going on in the coming week. Even if something is in my calendar, the act of typing it out into this list helps program it into my brain, while also reminding me to think about any details I might not have thought about yet (for example, if my flight on Wednesday is at 2pm, what time should I head to the airport?) Also, you might want to try Prefrontal Mondays.
Trick yourself into starting: Just starting a task can be tremendously difficult. Without a clear goal in mind, your brain won’t produce enough dopamine to motivate you to start. The 10-minute hack gives you a really simple goal (work on this one thing for 10 minutes without stopping). The side benefits of doing this successfully are that resisting the urge to heed distractions helps strengthen your prefrontal cortex, and that once you’re actually 10 minutes into working on your task, it’s easier to continue working on it.

This is just the tip of the mind management iceberg, and as more great research is done, we’ll have more to go on in discovering how to manage our minds. If you’re into this content, I hope to expand on some of these ideas, so what sticks out to you? How do you manage your mind?

Minimum Viable Movie: How I Made a Feature-Length Film for $0

2013-02-20T23:08:25Z

Today I’d like to introduce you to filmmaker, and good friend of mine, Joe Avella. Joe’s short films have appeared on IFC and Spike TV, and in the SXSW Film Festival.

Let the fact that this is the first and only guest post in the 8-year history of kadavy.net be testament to how much his energy and passion for his craft have personally influenced me over the years. If you’re an entrepreneur, I think you’ll find inspiration in his story of making the most of his resources, however limited they may be. –David

Here’s Joe:

Everyone feels they have a good idea for a movie. I have, since as long as I could remember. Also, like everyone else, I never pursued it, because I thought it was impossible. The film business is a magical land that can’t be broken into, so I never entertained the thought past occasionally saying “they should make a movie like…”.

The Source of My Inspiration: Terrible Horror Films

My eventual path to making a film, unfortunately, doesn’t start with inspiration from an amazing film, but from working in a tiny Blockbuster Video (translation: only mainstream movies – no artistic indie films here), surrounded by crap. I was a night manager there for too long, and passed the time sifting through the terribly mediocre selection of bad films.

There’s an endless sea of big action films, obnoxious rom-coms, and poorly-produced direct to DVD horror films. I’m obsessed with horror, so I watched just about every one of these terrible, 4th rate horror trash movies: Draniac, King of the Ants, Bloody Murder 1 and 2, Python… all laughably bad and not worth Googling.

The amusement I got from their poor quality was quickly replaced by depression. How the hell did this garbage get made?

I spent that year cooped up at Blockbuster thinking about the awesome films I wanted to make, fueled by my distaste for the terrible films I was surrounded by.

Around this time 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead were released. Seeing these films was a revelation. Here were two drastically different movies, technically about the same thing, both with low budgets. What blew me away was their inventiveness and originality in a film genre that most people had written off as being over.

I felt it deeply. I could do something original and cool, like these guys. Or, at least, better than the garbage I was seeing at Blockbuster. But that confidence would quickly erode away when I started thinking about how to actually make a movie.

Making a Feature-Length Film Seemed Impossible

Here’s what I thought I needed to make a feature film, and also the reasons I didn’t finally do it for several more years:

MONEY: This is the big one. I figured I would have to get at least hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, to pay for a crew, actors, location permits, lots of equipment, etc..
Time: I thought I would have to quit my job, or at least go on a 9 month hiatus, to focus on the film full-time. Perhaps I could edit and have a part time job, but I though a majority of the production had to be done full time, without “distractions.”
Lots of equipment and a big crew: I would also need to hire a 10+ person crew for the production and who knows how many more for the post production aspect. I’d have to provide all the equipment for them. We’d be working 8 hour days for months, so again, I’d need big bucks to pay them, insure them, rent them equipment and feed them.
Knowledge: I would hav to be an expert on everything related to every aspect of the production. Why would the lighting guy listen to me if I didn’t know the difference between certain light bulbs or set ups? He wouldn’t! No one would! They would all pick on me on my own film set! Yeesh, I projected a lot of hostility on this imaginary crew I never hired.
Luck: Even if I could get all of the above things, the best I could hope for is getting the movie into big time film festivals and selling it. At this point I’d be in so much debt that I’d need to score a big pay day or the debt noose around my neck would strangle my financial future to death.

All of this was easily enough to scare me out of even attempting to make a feature-length film. But, now several years later, I finally created a feature-length film. Here’s how I figured it out.

Starting Small. Starting Short.

Since I had none of the “essentials” for making a movie, I devised a plan to start off making my own shorts, and learn every aspect of filmmaking that way. I cut my teeth writing my own shorts, borrowing camera equipment, and enlisting my friends to dedicate their time to my various projects.

I made short after short, refining my filmmaking abilities. Many of the shorts I made were downright awful. But, it didn’t matter; making crappy films was better than making no films, because:

I learned how to make films on a budget: That budget being $0. This lead to lots of creative solutions, like writing shorts around resources I had for free. One short, Scatterbrained!, is me and my friend Tim talking around an overhead projector. Why? We had a night to shoot something, an old projector my mom had sitting in her classroom, and I could print transparencies at work for free. Or Wheelchair Werewolf, which looks like an old movie trailer because I didn’t have great sound equipment or special effects so I made the video’s inevitable poor quality one of it’s strongest features. Also, There’s a place in my hometown where residents can rent, for free, wheelchairs, walkers, canes, etc. for sick family members. I told them I needed a wheelchair for my “sick grandma” for the weekend. Don’t judge me.
I learned how to work with actors: This is an often-overlooked, but critical, part of filmmaking. Actors are people: they have lives and will be late, or have trouble following instructions. Also, actors are actors, so they want to bring their own ideas and collaborate with the director on their part and not just show up and do line readings.
I learned who I work well with: Much like entrepreneurs do “founder dating,” making these shorts was a form of “dating.” I started to really understand who I wanted to work with more in the future.
I learned from my mistakes: I got chased out of a public place by the police. I filmed next to a running refrigerator (leading to terrible audio). Fortunately, I learned these things on small projects that could be adapted more nimbly, instead of having these problems lead to a tangle of other problems on a bigger project.

Here’s the before mentioned Wheelchair Werewolf. One of my bigger successes. It was accepted into several horror and comedy film fests, and won 1st place at the Abertoir Film Festival in Wales. Like I mentioned before, the style and look of the film was born from me accepting my technical limitations at the time and using them to my advantage.

The Challenges

It’s a good thing that I started small with these shorts, because they came with great challenges of their own, that would have been insurmountably frustrating had I met them on a bigger project, like a feature-length film.

Trying to “make it” in a non-industry town

One of the glaring challenges that I faced in trying to become a filmmaker was simply where I lived. Being in Chicago I had no access to the film industry. Not that being in LA or New York entitles people to anything, but in Chicago there’s no one looking to discover or meet with new talent. This is why most actors and filmmakers leave. Over the past 10 years some of the biggest films have been shot in Chicago, but still the industry doesn’t feel the need to look for talent other than in its own backyard.

So, why didn’t I move to LA? Because I shouldn’t have to.

The way I saw it, moving to LA would just set me back 8 years. I would have no equipment, no locations, and no personnel that I was comfortable working with. Additionally, everyone in LA is trying the same thing I am, so now everyone’s too busy working on their own films. It seemed a move would actually limit my resources.

Since my goal is to be a self-sufficient filmmaker – rather than an actor, writer, grip, or whatever, I didn’t see the point of spending 10 to 15 years trying to work my way up through industry bureaucracy. Why do that when I could stay in Chicago and work on my craft, using the resources I already had?

Skipping Film School

Another thing that went through my head as I was trying to become a filmmaker was similar to the debate you hear a lot of in the startup world: “Do I really need to go to school?” Or, in my case, “do I really need to go to film school?” For me, I decided the answer was “no.”

Every person I knew that attend film school regretted it. It’s would be incredibly expensive, it would take a very long time, and most importantly it would rob me of the very thing I was trying to do: become a self-sufficient filmmaker.

Like any other artistic or creative endeavor, you only learn by doing, and I was able to get my shorts made on my own. The only issue was to make “great” shorts. To do so I needed the experience and to keep working at it. I didn’t need to pay through the nose hoping I’d get secret tips from a film professor (who doesn’t even make films) or working alongside students who are all fighting for the same limited resource the film school promised them upon admission.

Getting equipment

The very first short I worked on was a collaboration with a couple of friends of mine who happened to work for a video production company. We were lucky enough that their co-workers agreed to help out by shooting and editing the short with company equipment.

Here, I'm using an office chair – pushed by an actor – instead of an expensive dolly.

While it was nice for them to help, I learned from the experience that if you want it done right, you have to do it yourself. Having three people involved muddled the creative vision. Additionally, the crew members were helping out on their free time, with their equipment, and they wanted creative input as well. Everyone involved was talented and had the best intentions, but 5 guys pulling one project in 5 directions doesn’t work. Thank goodness it was just a short film, because it was a shitfest. You’ll never see that film.

Just about everyone is no more than 2 degrees away from a camera owner who’s also an aspiring filmmaker of some sort. They’re dying to shoot some stuff, as long as you ask. So, that’s what I did.

My friend Ed volunteered to shoot my next few films, and eventually he was comfortable enough with letting me borrow the camera on my own. These days, he has a new camera, and lets me borrow his old one whenever I want. Many filmmakers would scoff at the idea of using an old camera, but I always relished the opportunity. For me, it’s about the story, not the film quality.

Getting locations

Getting locations was approached in a similar fashion: I looked at what I had for free first, confirmed I could use them, then wrote something that took place there. For instance Sassy Cops was shot primarily at the office Ed works at, or Action City Bathroom was filmed entirely in, you guessed it: my bathroom. Other great locations were found right outside my door and all around Chicago. Frosty Heart and Chinese Star Cop both use the city as a backdrop.

Locations still fell through, in which case I would change up the script to accommodate locations I had. Stakeout, was originally meant to take place in a record store and had nothing to do with cops. The record store I was going to film in kept dragging their feet, so I changed the setting: put them in a car and gave it the opening line “Man, I hate stakeouts.” Even named it “Stakeout” to drive that point home. Notice, the stakeout element of the short is minor, it’s all about the inane conversation about the name of the band they’re listening to.

Getting actors

Actors pitch in as crew. Actor Rick Stockel does sound, since he's not in this scene.

Since I have been a part of the Chicago comedy scene for well over 7 years, I’m surrounded by aspiring actors and comedians. So, getting actors was pretty easy for me. I would make it a point to use a new actor in some capacity for each short. To my above points about learning to work with actors and “dating,” I wanted to have a large pool to draw from in the future. So, having new actors come in for an hour or two was a great way to get a feel for how they work.

Although my friends are talented and nice, they’re still human beings with lives. I didn’t want to force or guilt them into dedicating a lot of their already rare free time. I purposely would write lots of small parts in my shorts, something we could knock out in a few hours. They were helping for free, so the quicker I could get them in and out, the better. Plus, having more people in my shorts meant there were more people who were incentivized to share them once they were done.

SXSW Film: The Big Break – In My Thinking

After several years of making shorts, I finally got into my first “real” film festival at SXSW, in 2009. I was under the impression that being in a fest like SXSW would cause my view counts to soar, get attention across the film community causing a tidal wave of new fans, and would gain the notice of the industry in the form of managers, producers, or investors for a bigger project. Getting acceptance to a big time festival would surely be the crowning achievement that would propel me to the next level, or so I thought.

A Tale of Two Festivals: SXSW Film vs. Interactive

To my surprise, the film festival was a bust. Instead of the industry people I thought would be at my screening, it was instead attended by other filmmakers, who seemed to look down on my short because it was low-budget, and low-production-value.

Trying to share ideas with other filmmakers only added to my confusion and disappointment:

“If you don’t mind my asking, what was your budget?”

“I do mind you asking.”

I would have been thrilled to answer questions like these, had the roles been reversed, but the culture of the film festival was not one of sharing.

It seemed every other filmmaker at SXSW went to a film school and/or lived in an industry town, and had come with the notion of being discovered too. But unlike me, they were carrying around a big amount of film related debt and a bigger sense of entitlement.

If I went through film school and was now living in LA, I would have walked around the fest with a chip on my shoulder too. It’s sad. Even sadder, I got the sense that the SXSW film festival was considered “settling” for a lot of these filmmakers. It’s not a festival that usually sells films.

I realized this route of “being discovered” and working my way through a traditional system did not work. I was surrounded by people waiting to get picked from a crowd of virtually millions, all wanting and doing the exact same thing.

A culture of sharing

This photo pretty much sums up SXSW Interactive for me.

Luckily, since David was also at SXSW, I spent a majority of the time with people in the interactive portion, and the experience greatly shaped my filmmaking attitude and life today. At the same festival, intermixed with depressing self-entitled filmmakers, was a passionate group of young entrepreneurs who shared my ideas on pursuing your passion with limited resources, and finding creative ways to reach your goals. Everyone I met was so excited and happy, talking about new ideas and ways of distribution. I was meeting people who were successful at the thing I was trying to do: reach people.

They had a business, I had my movies. As I told people why I was at the fest, the conversations would sometimes reach a fever pitch about the possibilities of content online.

One thing that kept coming up was “why don’t you make a full-length movie?” Up until this point I had convinced myself it was impossible. But this was the first time I had to be accountable for this attitude, and I didn’t have a good answer.

If someone could build a business with no money, start small, and grow it to be a job they love, why couldn’t I do the same?

My business would be my movies.

Making a Lean Movie

My time at SXSW lead to an epiphany: I already had everything I need to make a movie. I was already untangling my mind – taking notes inside of a book cover – on my flight back from Austin.

I was looking at it all wrong, looking at it from the angle of all the things I didn’t have. Before, I was floundering around, with no real direction, held back by vague fears of a leap I never fully thought through. After seeing how these entrepreneurs had used their resources, I went through my list of imaginary roadblocks and dismantled them one by one:

No money: Make the film with the resources I have now. Write a film that can be made for free.
No time: Instead of making a big, 6 month or year commitment, work on it during the nights and weekends, around my current life, and let it take as long as it takes.
No fancy equipment / no crew: Make it with borrowed equipment, whatever I could get my hands on. Like with the shorts, be a one man crew. Ask production friends to help out – sparingly – as to not burn them out. Same with the cast: don’t use anyone more than a few days unless they agree to work that much ahead of time.
No knowledge: The only way to learn how to do it right is to do it wrong first. I knew this process would be an invaluable experience for making movies. I would get first hand experience in every aspect of filmmaking.
No luck: If I make it for free, I won’t have to worry about selling it. Furthermore, I can share it generously online. I can use new tactics for getting people to see it, tactics traditional filmmakers tied to debt could not. I could use the movie as a “calling card” to make more connections with fans online, use it as a tool to build a bigger audience.

I would make this film the exact same way I made my shorts. I had been making shorts for 5 years, but instead of 3 more years worth of random shorts, why not make a full-length movie?

Getting money for my movie

I raised $2,000 using Kickstarter. This is, of course, nothing compared to some of the more recent success stories. To be honest, I could have done the film without it, but raising money on Kickstarter gave me some important side-benefits:

A built-in fan base: The little amount of money each backer donated was enough to keep her paying attention without being concerned about her investment. This built-in fan base also gave me all of the following:
A feedback loop: I knew I would be releasing parts of the film as they were completed (more on that later), so I automatically had people to show that content to. Based upon their reactions to pieces of the film, I could make tweaks as I worked.
A marketing team: Each backer got Executive Producer credit – and many of them were in the film (for reasons I’ll talk about in a bit). So, they were incentivized to tell others about the movie. Did I mention that David is an Executive Producer? Mwahahahaha!
Personal accountability: This was a big and daunting project, but having those backers helped me realize that this was a real thing people actually cared about, and made it something I couldn’t back out of. I didn’t want to let my backers down.

Just like my short films helped me get better at filmmaking, marketing to my Kickstarter backers also taught me about how to treat a fan base. I gave out fun things that would hopefully give the backers more incentive to share and talk about the movie: digital downloads, posters, producer credits, voice-mail messages… Stuff related to the movie we could give away and not spend a lot of money on but the backers would feel they were part of something.

I used the meager Kickstarter funds for these filmmaking necessities:

DV Tapes
Parking (for city shoots)
Props and wardrobe (all from thrift stores)
A Vimeo account to host the movie

And I still had money leftover for these niceties:

Premiere party for cast/crew
Food to feed the cast/crew during long shoots
Facebook and Youtube ads that I’ve experimented with for marketing the movie

All of the short films I made cost me nearly nothing, and with the Kickstarter backers, I had ample funds to make this entire full-length film using $0 of my own money.

Marketing while making

The movie I made is called “Master of Inventions,” and it’s about the world’s worst inventor. From the beginning, I thought about how this subject would help me break down the production of the movie into more manageable chunks, while making it easier to market online:

“Invention” commercials: Since the movie is about an inventor, it would naturally include many of his terrible inventions. So, I could release complete “commercials,” and produce them just as I did my shorts. The commercials could help me build a following – and my MailChimp email list – as I made the movie.
Digestible scenes: I made sure to write some scenes that could stand by themselves, because I knew I would be releasing them during production. Since I was producing scenes in short spurts (with a small number of actors, at a particular location, completed in one day), production was nimble enough to accomplish this.
Lots of actors: I had worked with tons of actors over the previous 5 years of making shorts. So, besides the few major parts there were in the film, I also had plenty of smaller parts. Since shooting would be sporadic – mostly on weekends – I wrote parts small enough that an actor could come in for a few hours, do their part, and their commitment would be over. The added benefit to this was that more actors = more people sharing the movie once it’s done.
Outtakes: With shooting being sporadic, (for example, the lead actor absent-mindedly shaved his head and put our production on hiatus for 5 months) I would have to use the time in between shoots to edit and market the movie. So, in addition to the invention “commercials,” I also released outtakes of the film.

This more iterative approach to making a film – which would be shunned by traditional filmmakers – not only helped me produce and market the movie on an extremely tight budget; but it also kept me motivated throughout production.

The positive feedback kept people talking about the movie and served as leverage to get more people on board. The frequent releases of material showed the Kickstarter investors I didn’t take the money and run. Most importantly, their support gave me the energy and inspiration to keep moving.

Here’s an example of one of the outtakes I released during production:

I knew this film was not going to be of perfect quality. But utilizing the skills I developed from all the shorts: losing actors, props, location, or whatever didn’t faze me too much. I could deal with everything that was thrown my way.

My Minimum Viable Movie is finally complete!

Now the movie is finished, and I present it to you for free! It’s already a success because it’s completed, it looks how I want it to look, the response from the fans has been overwhelmingly positive, and most of all I can share it with the world for free and not worry about paying off a debt. I’ve proven it’s possible – and to future fans and investors, Master of Inventions is the proof I know how to make a full-length film, and market it to the world. If this is what I did with $2,000 imagine what I could do with $2,000,000. Yooooo!

Check out the first 5 minutes above, and if you’re hooked:

watch the full movie at masterofinventions.com
Sign up for my email list: get bonus features, a welcome-pack collection of my short films, and to stay up-to-date with my future filmmaking endeavors
Keep up with my blog, where I share my experiences in film making and marketing

Watch Master of Inventions: Win a Copy of Design for Hackers!

I’m actually one of many, many, actors in this film – I even have *one* line. Watch Master of Inventions, and email my line to david at kadavy dot net (include “MOI” in the subject line). The 10th person to email my line to me will win a copy of my book, Design for Hackers. –David

P.S. I may be biased, but I really think it’s a great movie. Like any Minimum Viable Product, the production value is definitely rough around the edges (which Joe will openly admit), but Joe has proven that he is a great storyteller – and hilarious, as always.

The “Bicycle for Our Minds” Needs Gears: Restrictive Interfaces

2012-05-10T18:06:52Z

Steve Jobs has famously described the computer as a bicycle for our minds. In this video, he eloquently describes exactly what he means by that.

Much like the bicycle allows us to produce an astonishing result – considering the energy put forth – so do computers. But, much like some of the best bicycles (unless, of course, you ask a hipster), the computer needs to have different gears to more effectively navigate the terrain of cognition.

These “gears” come in the form of the User Interface. Restrictive Interfaces help your user conquer big hills without getting tired.

Restrictive Interfaces at work

As part of my morning routine – unless I’m doing the 10-minute hack – I take my time waking up my brain and preparing it for the day’s work. I’ll meditate, and go for a workout, usually before checking my email at all.

If I’ve already considered my objectives for the day, on the walk home, I may check my email on my iPhone. Doing email on an iPhone or iPad is a pretty restricted experience, and that’s what can be great about it. It’s like riding a bicycle up a hill in a low gear: minimal effort, and you can’t get too far.

The peril of “Unrestricted” Interfaces

How many times have you done this? You get to work, check your email on your computer, and are overwhelmed by a flooded inbox. Panicking, you start checking those emails, one by one.

Then you start responding one by one. Without even being aware of it, you become mentally exhausted, then – to get some form of satisfaction – you start checking Facebook and Twitter every 5 minutes.

The next thing you know, you’ve been at work for two hours, you’re mentally exhausted, your mind is littered with pictures of kittens and babies, and you can’t quite think of what your top priority for the day should be. Plus, you’ve hardly dealt with that pile of email. You’ve been pedaling up a hill in high gear, and your “legs” are shot.

Why Restrictive Interfaces can be good

This doesn’t happen when you check your email on an iOS device. Relative to a desktop computer, they have what I would call a “Restrictive Interface.” It’s damn hard to do a lot of things on these devices. It’s hard to type, it’s hard to deal with file attachments in emails, and it’s hard to switch applications.

But, it’s easy to do the two most important tasks for email: deleting, and archiving, it’s moderately more difficult to type responses (and what responses you type will likely be shorter and more effective), and it’s damn near impossible to do any real “work.”

What I’m saying is, this is a good thing.

Restrictive Interfaces and Mind Management

It’s unintuitive, unexpected, and thus barely recognized – that productivity is less about time management than it is about mind management. Your mental energy is far more touchy than you think.

Being restricted enough to prevent yourself from going off on a mental tangent gives you a chance to mentally process the demands of the day. You can respond to those non-urgent emails later. If you need to respond to an email wrought with complex social and business dynamics, you can process that in the background – while you walk to work, for example.

Then, when you get to work, you can do some actual work – maybe a 10-minute hack – and then deal with some of those emails.

Creating Restrictive Interfaces

Being aware of the advantages of Restrictive Interfaces doesn’t only improve your productivity. If you’re involved at all with creating interactive applications, you can create different “gears” for your user.

If someone is a new user, how can you help them understand why they need your product? Strip away the nonessentials.
If you’ve convinced them to start using your product, what’s the easiest way to get them going?
If your product has complex functionality, how can you hide some of it, so that it doesn’t confuse new users? How can you do so in a way that they will eventually find that functionality, once they get familiar with the basics.

There are plenty of examples of this in successful companies:

The home page of Dropbox is insanely simple. It’s just a download button (though recently a video has also been added).
Facebook simplifies their on-boarding process by walking you through getting the essentials into your profile. New users are prompted within the interface to add a profile picture, a cover photo, or to learn about privacy.
Google is just a search box. As you use it more and more, you discover deeper tricks.

Interestingly, Twitter has recently been experimenting with an “expand” or “open” link on each tweet in the main timeline. While the elegance of the rest of their interface does a good job at helping the user manage his mind, this may be making the interface excessively busy. Users quickly discover that they can click on any tweet to expand it.

When has a Restrictive Interface helped you manage your mind?

If you’re interested in learning more about managing your own mind, or understanding the mind of your user, read Your Brain at Work.