Carlos Miceli

What It Means To Be Wise

2012-02-22T12:40:41+00:00

What It Means To Be Wise

22 February 2012

Keith E. Stanovich explains on his book What Intelligence Tests Miss the mental dispositions that contribute to real world performance:

The tendency to collect information before making up one’s mind, the tendency to seek various points of view before coming to a conclusion, the disposition to think extensively about a problem before responding, the tendency to calibrate the degree of strength of one’s opinions to the degree of evidence available, the tendency to think of future consequences before taking action, the tendency to explicitly weigh pluses and minuses of a situation before making a decision, and the tendency to seek nuance and avoid absolutism.

It seems that real world performance depends on finding the gray areas. Entrepreneur and angel investor Chris Yeh summarizes Stanovich’s points as Wisdom. More brilliant people on gray areas and wisdom:

Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha explain on their book The Start-up of You the problem with this belief in extremes, which they call “false choices”: To get ahead in the professional and entrepreneurial world one needs to find a balance between seemingly opposed positions.
On his essay Is It Worth Being Wise?, Paul Graham defines a wise person as “someone who usually knows the right thing to do.”
Those that read Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, will sure remember his many examples of gifted people with extremely high IQs that didn’t achieve any significant success in the professional world, contrary to what one would expect of such genes.

Wisdom, then, is the key to results. And as I’ve said before (here and here), wisdom means acceptance of complexity. This is not to say that intelligence does not matter. But the uses of intelligence are complimentary to wisdom. Intelligence is the tool that will solve a problem, once wisdom tells you why that problem is the most important to tackle.

Conversation about "Good Will" with Sebastian Marshall

2012-02-19T12:40:50+00:00

Conversation about “Good Will” with Sebastian Marshall

19 February 2012

Before leaving Beijing to go back to Buenos Aires, Sebastian Marshall and I had a good talk about good will. It’s fun, high-level and a must-see.

My time in China was life-changing, and Sebastian was the biggest reason behind it. A trained, super-human commander of the XXI century. I’m grateful to all he’s done for me, and he has my eternal good will.

Conversation about "Good Will" with Sebastian Marshall

2012-02-19T12:40:50+00:00

Conversation about “Good Will” with Sebastian Marshall

Before leaving Beijing to go back to Buenos Aires, Sebastian Marshall and I had a good talk about good will. It’s fun, high-level and a must-see.

Ryan Paugh

2012-02-16T12:40:41+00:00

Conversation with Ryan Paugh

Ryan Paugh is the Chief of Staff of The Young Entrepreneur Council and former Community Manager of Brazen Careerist. This is a man who understands the blueprints of successful online communities as good as anyone. Richard Millington and David Spinks are the only other people I can think of that are at his level.

Ryan and I have known each other online for years, and he has always shown integrity and value consistency, which is why I respect him so much. What he and The Young Entrepreneur Council are doing for entrepreneurship in the US and the world is, I believe, very important. Critical, one might say. More people need to hear what this organization stands for, so I asked Ryan to join me for a video conversation to talk about it.

Some of the topics we discuss:

What the Young Entrepreneur Council stands for, and why it was created.
Why there’s room for improvement everywhere in the world regarding entrepreneurship, even in the US.
Why it’s the best moment to be an entrepreneur: finding support and mitigating risk is easier than ever.
Ryan’s experience in the early stages of Brazen Careerist, and what everyone can learn from the case of Brazen: connecting with fellow entrepreneurs and creating alliances.
How the YEC works: they represent exceptional, or up-and-coming top entrepreneurs. The look for diversity and leverage of technology.
The ideal outcome of the YEC, their big goal: become the answer to every problem that young entrepreneurs face.
Entrepreneurship as the American dream, and why the trend is going to increase.
The current legal deficiencies that young entrepreneurs have to deal with, especially for those with student debt.
The terrible equation of adding student debt to the uncertainty of the entrepreneurship path, plus the big mass of people going towards the safe path that doesn’t exist anymore.
My criticism towards most protests from young people around the world in the past few months. They’re missing the key philosophy behind entrepreneurship.
The elements that top entrepreneurs have that make them magnets of offers and opportunities.
Why I believe lack of clarity of incentives is what prevents most people from adopting the entrepreneurial path.
Ryan’s fine points on hard work and “insecurity work.”
Ryan’s understanding of the most important things a community manager must do.
The tactics of the YEC to create change.
How to join the YEC.
Why the YEC makes sure to communicate to its members that they own the organization too.
The potential backlash of getting a lot of young people involved in entrepreneurship because it’s a fad, instead of being their carefully considered path.
The best consequence of the recession in the US: learning to be extremely efficient. That know-how will stay once the recovery happens.
The increasing adoption of the “lean startup” mentality.

Relevant Links:

The Young Entrepreneur Council
Ryan on Twitter
Ryan’s email: ryan@theyec.org

David Cain

2012-02-07T12:40:41+00:00

Conversation with David Cain

David Cain, the mind behind the popular blog Raptitude, is a writer I’ve looked up to since my first days in the blogging world. It’s not surprising at all to see his philosophies and musings get more and more exposure as time goes by. He’s one of the deepest and kindest thinkers online.

David and I have known each other for years now, but we never got a chance to have a good, long conversation about philosophy. That’s why I was elated when he agreed to record one on Skype for my site. This conversation is simply spectacular, and it gets better and better as we start exploring and connecting more topics. I had this call for the selfish reason of getting some quality time with David, but the product is something anyone that thinks about life and humanity can enjoy. 100% recommended.

Some of the topics we discuss:

David’s famous 30-days self-improvement experiments, and his thoughts on habit implementation.
Our thoughts on bucket lists as a way to measure someone’s life, and as a motivational tool.
Our philosophies on stuff, things, and the material.
Why I don’t have a car or know how to drive.
Our thoughts on the stress/distraction of technology, and how to cripple it.
Our thoughts on why people don’t do what they love: attachment to security, lack of clarity, and the connection between clarity, incentives and security.
The problem with fluffy self-development.
Why David believes that us and our friends dying is a good thing, plus a great mental exercise on appreciation.
Thoughts on taking things for granted, stoicism and negative visualization. The connection between our stoic philosophies with the way we think about stuff and things.
The connection between our dissatisfaction and evolution. Appreciation goes against our biology.
The problem with believing in evil.
Why I believe misrelating is the biggest problem in the world, and the biggest disappointment of adulthood.
Simplicity as an obstacle for our learning process.
Our solution to save the world: Self-examination.
The problem with labels: simplification of complex individuals, communities, cultures, etc. People not liking to be replaced by patterns or symbols.
On society’s dislike to see some questions asked.
The effect society’s design has on our decisions. We’re not allowed to think independently because of poor design.
World’s complexity and our need for safety makes us resort to simplifications, despite of the terrible effects.

More about David:

David’s blog: Raptitude
David’s Experiments
David’s Bucket List
David on Twitter

Monica Leonelle

2012-01-27T12:40:41+00:00

Conversation with Monica Leonelle

Monica and I go way back. She’s a mentor and one of my best friends in the online world. She believed in my work since the very beginning, back when putting together two sentences in English was a challenge for me, and for that I’m grateful. I asked her to join me for a recorded call so she could share some of her marketing and publishing wisdom with the readers of this site, and she was happy to do it.

Monica has done amazing work for her age. She’s the author of two books: Social Pollination, a book on social media strategy for small companies, and Silver Smoke, the first book of a fiction series. She’s also worked in several start-ups, launched a couple of companies, done consulting work for clients such as Nintendo, owned a blog with +1000 readers (which she’s recently deleted), and is now exploring the world of full-time writing.

For anyone interested in writing, the current state of social media, making money from your online presence, self-publishing and online marketing, this call is a must. The back and forth between us is very natural, so the conversation has a great flow. Some of the topics we discuss:

The motivation behind the launch of our new websites and redesigns, and her new online projects.
Making a living as a writer, and her transition to full-time writer.
Our takes on the many waves of advice on how to make a living with social media, and blogging more specifically. The key lesson: Learn to convert one person into a buyer, then refine your offer, and then you go for traffic.
The typical situation of aiming for popularity instead of revenue, unconsciously in many cases…
People get distracted by the many tools, softwares, ideas and gadgets. They lose sight of their most important goal, and what’s the best way to achieve it.
As a consultant, how can we get people to see the need to focus their online efforts?
The importance of aiming for conversion first is that it leads to path verification: seeing how they go from step one to purchase.
Dealing with barriers to purchase. The misconception that quality is all that matters.
People will engage with quality, but one needs to structure one’s marketing channel in order to encourage engagement towards the preferred action. Without structure, engagement spreads out in all sorts of unwanted directions.
Monica’s efforts and strategies for cracking the formula to be a full-time writer.
Her experiments with ebooks and how to market them. What worked, what didn’t, and why.
Pricing tolerance of ebooks.
Making interaction simple to encourage engagement. Complexity is ineffective online when wanting people to take a certain action.
Monica’s feelings and ideas about writing fiction, compared to non-fiction. The difference in effective marketing efforts for each, and her thoughts on the state of fiction industry.
Her feeling on who can write fiction and who can’t.
The market trend of book series, such as Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, and why Monica thinks the strategy of a series can work so for self-published authors as well: Making a huge Harry-Potter-size hit is harder than ever, because one needs the massive financial support of the traditional publishing industry. However, the odds for doing good enough that one can support oneself through self-publishing are better than ever. This is what I’ve talked about before: the internet lowers one’s chances of being filthy rich, but makes it easier to support oneself with most types of work. Doing what one loves has never been easier.
Early adopters in the fiction world, and the word of mouth effect with unknown authors.
Monica’s advice on how to be profitable as a self-published author.
Learning to limit one’s offers. Focusing on a couple of things that work, and knowing how to say “no” (or at least “wait!”) to one’s ideas.

More about Monica:

Website
Monica’s newsletter (receive free ebook when signing up)
Monica’s first book: Social Pollination
Monica’s first fiction book: Silver Smoke

Criticism of Free Work

2012-01-26T12:40:41+00:00

Criticism of Free Work

26 January 2012

I’m starting to see a worrying trend with free work, especially in the US: it’s become “obvious”, as if expecting money would be crazy. This is sustained by a couple of so-called “realities”:

Many people are able and willing to do your job. If your expectations are too high, you don’t even compete because there are thousands out there that can do the work for free.
You have to prove your worth. Hiring is very risky and expensive, so free work is a practice employers have to do to lower that risk before committing to someone who may not be a good fit.
Money is tight. The business doesn’t have enough resources to pay a salary.
Technology can do it cheaper/faster/better.

These realities may be true in some cases, but not as many as you would think. I KNOW it’s not true for many businesses where free work is still the only kind of work coming aboard. Some of my responses to the points above:

There’s a terrible assumption that qualified candidates are all in some sort of bag where a recruiter can just grab someone who’s a fit and put him/her to work. It overlooks the fact that the competence, skills, chemistry and values required for each job are not easy to define, find and persuade to join.
When there’s money, it’s easier to get accountability and dedication. People don’t fuck around with their salary as much as they do with everything else that you can offer.
Paying shows you are serious about your commitment as an employer. It will make people trust you and commit to you as well. For example, Josh Kaufman was serious about paying me as soon as possible, and acted accordingly. That meant a lot to me, and I sticked with him for a long time because of that gesture (among many other things, of course).
Another wrong assumption: money is a good way to filter motivation. I’ve done great work for free, and unmotivated work for money. It’s not a good way to measure someone, because the context of a job is composed by many other things that can also increase/decrease output.
Money is rarely THAT tight. If you really think that you’re in a position to get help, it’s because you’re creating enough value that you know you can create even more with some assistance. There’s no need to start with a full-time salary, but some cash signals a lot and you can probably afford it.
The work technology can do better/cheaper/faster is the work no one grows much by doing. This type of work, and the work people are willing to do for free are pretty disconnected. Expecting technology to fill this void is a delusion.
It’s an opportunity to stand out as an employer: be the one who pays!

Here’s my theory: the free work mindset has become a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy in the US. Everyone says candidates have to accept it, and so they accept it. Everyone says employers can/should ask for it, and so they ask for it. And in many cases, both sides get hurt by it. I believe that this trend will only encourage qualified people to take their talents elsewhere (a trend that has already started, with Latin America and East Asia as good examples), and the US needs those talents now more than ever.

I told my father, a fairly conservative Argentinian, about a small project that I accepted to do almost for free for someone in the US, because I believe in the project and the people involved. His response was interesting: “Seems like the US has taken money our of the equation…” He has a point: every project or position that I’ve been offered in Australia, China and Argentina in recent times involved payment from day one. I no longer believe this is an economical circumstance, but a cultural one. The economy in Argentina hasn’t been in a great shape for a long time now, but people still expect and offer money in most professional agreements.

Let me be clear: this is not an all-or-nothing stance. Free work makes sense in many cases, especially the ones where learning and/or connecting are the main goal. We should analyze each case in isolation. But it’s the tendency to ASSUME free work what worries me. There’s a limit to how much risk someone can take, especially at a young age (and in debt in many cases). And free work is one heck of a risk, since it demands time and focus for no tangible results. Don’t young people in the US have it hard enough as it is?

In fact, the idea of “learning as payment” is widely overrated, IMO. I’ve done free work for some people in exchange of “learning” which didn’t teach me shit. It was just a waste of time, except for knowing to accept less free work in the future.

Look, I don’t mind doing free work under the right circumstances, but I’m in the privileged situation where I CAN do free work if I want! My finances are good enough that I can devote some hours to work without being remunerated. But that’s not the general situation, and it’s not a good idea to assume otherwise.

Personally, I’ve decided to slowly move away from free work, whatever the conditions. At a practical level this means moving away from a lot of work in the US, so I can explore other markets. I’m doing this because:

I want to do amazing work, and I need the best motivators (money included) for me to perform at my highest level. I have many ideas that would create tons of value for society, and I need funds for that.
It’s a stance against the ubiquity of the “free work” agreements in the US. I know I won’t be the only one in the near future to look abroad for paying opportunities, which leads me to the third reason…
I’ve learned enough from the good and bad things of free work in the US. I now feel I can create meaningful change in other parts of the world where I’m needed more.

This is a theory I’m starting to put together and it’s based mostly on my international and online experiences, so by no means I’m declaring it the truth. I look forward to your comments/emails with your feedback on this topic, because I think it’s a problematic and relevant trend. I’m sure I can learn a lot from your opinions and perspectives on the topic.

Caught In Play

2012-01-21T12:40:50+00:00

Book Notes – Caught in Play: How Entertainment Works on You, by Peter Stromberg

This is a well-researched and powerful book about a topic that is not discussed, from a scientific standpoint, as much as it should: entertainment. I enjoyed this book in a way that I rarely get a chance nowadays with most books: facing the opportunity to explore a relevant topic in MANY new ways.

The author starts by giving us many examples about how entertainment plays a fundamental role in our lives, which will get you excited about the message of the book. These are elements that we see everyday, but with a perspective that we rarely consider. He then proceeds to explain the history behind the industry, a colossal objective, although Stromberg does a great job. This part may be slower than the rest of the book, but it’ll be very interesting for anyone that always wondered how we became so obsessed with this part of society. Finally, as he takes us through case studies that he dissects for our comprehension, he reaches the very important conclusion of how entertainment may be hurting us more than we think. Stromberg suggests to adopt some caution when embracing entertainment, because the consequences of the industry are still somewhat of a mystery.

Entertainment is all around us. This is a fascinating book with many ideas and conclusions that will make you think about your relationship with entertainment.

I strongly suggest you to watch my video call with Peter Stromberg, or let it play in the background. The conversation is full of great thoughts and insights by Peter. I’ve added notes to the page so you can take a quick look at what we talk about on the call. Watch it here.

Below are some of my favorite excerpts of Caught in Play: How Entertainment Works on You…

On the ubiquity of entertainment:

“As Darwin argued for the survival of the fittest, we now have survival of the most entertaining: those forms that are not entertaining lose out to those that are. The entertaining politician gets elected, the entertaining class gets the enrollment, the entertaining car is the one that sells, and over time a competition emerges to enhance entertainment value wherever possible. Thus it is not just that there is more entertainment going on in our society; it is that entertainment begins to dominate over other standards of value in the society.”

On the origins of entertainment’s relevance:

“Just as Weber argues that through Protestantism religious energies were eventually channeled into the secular realm of labor, that Campbell maintains such energies were also channeled into the secular realm of leisure activities. In this realm it was above all one’s emotional reactions that were cultivated as a sign of moral value. Gradually, the groundwork was thereby laid for “emotional hedonism,” the idea that it is good to indulge and enjoy one’s emotional reactions to the world."

On the similarities between fashion consumption and romance:

“The basis of the consumption practices underlying the fashion pattern is that in fact consumers do not seek fulfillment from products. Rather, they derive pleasure from longing for products and for what they represent, those realistic worlds of fantasy. Thus Campbell sees modern hedonism as a direct parallel to romance in sexual matters; the pleasure is in the longing, the fantasy of fulfillment. Once the product (or the romantic partner) is actually obtained, its value begins to deteriorate. It is no longer the object of fantasy; now it is an object of reality, and like all real objects it can never measure up to its correlate in the realm of the ideal.”

On entertainment’s predictable unpredictability:

“The manipulation of feelings (and there is absolutely no need to distinguish between real and fictional feelings) is a prominent aspect of most entertainment. We players have learned to make our own emotions into a plaything such as a ball. We can largely, though not completely, control a ball when we throw it or shoot a free throw. It is the interaction between players and not-completely-predictable balls that makes for the fun and challenge of games with balls. The same is true of our own emotions. We can put ourselves in a situation in which we know we will have certain kinds of emotions, and as the situation proceeds we can influence our emotions, but they also lurch about somewhat unpredictably.”

On society’s contradiction between values and desires:

“We live in a society in which it is very important that people sustain two rather contradictory streams of motives. There are the motives of the daylight-those of work, production, and responsibility-and the motives of the night-those of leisure, consumption, and enjoyment. We might be inclined to call the former stream of motives values and the latter stream desires. What I have been saying here is that, roughly, as an initial generalization these desires of consumption are often reinforced through play.”

On the feeling of certainty during play:

“In ecstatic experience, the characteristic quality of human consciousness-that is, its self-consciousness-collapses (at least in part). With collapse comes compelling evidence of a dimension of existence lying beyond the imperfections and doubts of the day-to-day. This is surely one reason trance experiences are so often sought out; in trance, we can experience a level of certainty and unity that is elusive in everyday consciousness.”

On boredom and capitalism:

“Our powerful lust for consumer goods seems to us like a manifestation of human nature, but both reflection and the available evidence suggest that in some societies being acquisitive is neither adaptive nor held in high esteem. Similar reasoning tends to persuade me that boredom, like our versions of competition and consumption, is associated with the rise of consumer capitalism; what better way to fuel frenzied consumption than to foster nagging feelings of emptiness and discontent whenever one is not being stimulated by something new and exciting?”

Peter Stromberg

2012-01-18T12:40:41+00:00

Conversation with Peter Stromberg

Peter Stromberg is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tulsa, a Ph.D. graduate in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford, contributor at Psychology Today on the blog “Sex, Drugs and Boredom” where he writes about entertainment and how it affects us, and the author of the book “Caught In Play: How Entertainment Works on You.”

I read Caught In Play over a year ago and loved it. I even referenced some of its material on my essay (in Spanish) published on Ábaco, a journal of social sciences in Spain. Back then, I asked Peter to join me for a video conversation the day my new website was ready. Well, that day has come. Peter was very nice and agreed to have a candid talk about his book and thoughts on entertainment.

I’m honored to share this talk with you. It’s been, by far, one of the most interesting and stimulating conversations I’ve ever had. You’ll see me a bit nervous for the first 10-15 minutes of the call, because I was trying (maybe too hard) to match Peter’s eloquence and intellect, so I apologize for that.

I urge you to watch/listen to this conversation. I promise you’ll end up with new RELEVANT perspectives on entertainment. Some of the topics we discuss on the call:

Why write a book on entertainment, and the angle Peter chose to approach the topic: entertainment as an alteration of consciousness.
Similarities between drugs, hypnotism and entertainment: the choice to surrender ourselves.
Entertainment is about being a part of something bigger than ourselves, because of the emotional experience that it brings.
Peter doesn’t say entertainment is bad. Entertainment is here to stay. Peter just wants to call people’s attention to entertainment, so we can bring our own perspectives and make our own decisions as to how to engage it.
How entertainment is related to consumer society, why, and what this means to us.
Entertainment’s similarities to religion, and what Peter calls its “shadow values.”
The problem with associating play with children: it directs our attention away from the values that are essential to how we live today.
Entertainment as the end goal for many people’s lives, and why analyzing this escapism mentality is important.
Play is a good thing. The real question is “where is the line between healthy fun and escapism?” No need to work all the time.
The industry of entertainment as a preventive method for introspection. Entertainment doesn’t want you to look at yourself, but it’s the people that do who enjoy both their work and play the most. The line of what’s play and what’s work is blurry for the people that look inside them.
Entertainment and consumption need for flexible values in society, and why advertising is disorienting to a lot of people.
Introspection is what keeps entertainment in perspective, to enhance our lives, not dominate it.
Technology and advice as forms of entertainment. Why the mentality of “if only I had X, or did Y” leads to confusion, and makes us great consumers.
Our need for constant stimulation. Boredom as withdrawal.
Boredom as a new concept in history.
Why our ideas of uniqueness, authenticity, and all the “Follow your passion” type of content, come as a side-effect of mass migration.
Why this idea of self-realization is so central to our lives in a consumption society.
The role of fame in an entertainment society.

More about Peter:

The book: Caught In Play: How Entertainment Works on You
The website: Caught In Play
Peter’s Psychology Today blog: Sex, Drugs and Boredom
Peter’s profile on The University of Tulsa’s website

NOTE: I’ll be sharing my review of “Caught In Play”, plus my favorite excerpts on the next newsletter’s issue. I put a lot of work on every issue (sent every Saturday morning), so I strongly suggest you sign up for it. Find out more about what to expect on each issue here.

Fundamental and Subordinate Goals

2012-01-15T12:40:41+00:00

Fundamental and Subordinate Goals

15 January 2012

My friend Nicolás (the smartest Argentinian I know) and I were talking about a girl. I was interested in her for a while, there was a story between us, but because she lived in the US, we didn’t have a chance to see where it could lead. We met up again recently but by now she had a boyfriend, and even though there was a spark and some tension, it wasn’t enough to make it work.

My friends thought (and some still do) that I was gonna take it very hard. So many years waiting for a second chance, one would think that was going to be a tough pill to swallow. I thought so too. However, it was surprisingly easy to move on. And I think during that conversation with my friend I understood why:

She was a Subordinate goal, and I only care about Fundamental goals. Subordinate goals are problematic, because of their multiple applicability. Many experiences have led me to behave this way, but I think I’ve been on this path for a while, I just didn’t notice it until now. Let me explain…

I define Fundamental goals as the ultimate purpose, the underlying objective behind every step and decision one makes. On the other hand, Subordinate goals are objectives that can serve multiple Fundamental goals. They are steps that we make on our way to our Fundamental goals, and should NEVER be seen as Fundamental goals.

Some examples:

Wanting a job, or a higher paycheck, are subordinate goals. Create meaningful work, change the world, help others, support your family, express your creativity, these are all fundamental goals.

Wanting to get a girlfriend, or get laid, are subordinate goals. Have a family, create a dynasty, are fundamental goals.

Vacations are subordinate goals. Have a life that balances hard work with relaxation is a fundamental goal.

Clothes, make-up, credentials and resumés are subordinate goals. Wanting to impress someone, and communicate them your value in order to connect in a certain way is a fundamental goal.

Looking buffed is a subordinate goal. Being healthy is a fundamental goal.

Subordinate goals can be pursued for many different reasons. If you think that looking buffed means being healthy, then how do you explain the people that want to look buffed to be more attractive to the opposite sex? Being healthy means being healthy. Looking buffed can mean many things.

The key problem of not seeing the difference between fundamental and subordinate goals are:

We may be on a path that leads nowhere.
We may be unaware of other paths that could help us get to our fundamental goal (a decision-opportunity-cost, if you will).

In the case of the girl I mentioned, there were many elements that made it easy to move on: she lives in the US and I have no desire to move there soon, she doesn’t want kids ever, and it’s ridiculously hard to make a long-term relationship work, (not to mention a boyfriend at the moment). Trying to be with her was clearly a subordinate goal, but one that didn’t lead to my fundamental goal of having a family, or creating meaningful work, because I would have had to redirect a lot of energy and focus into relocating to the US.

For me, my shot at doing something interesting in life far surpasses the value of a fling.

Look, there’s nothing wrong with dating people that may not be your future wife, but when you know for sure that she is not the one, get out! Otherwise, you’re following a dead-end path, unless your goal is actually to get laid a lot or whatever, in which case there are more serious things to re-evaluate…

Subordinate goals are good. Making more money, getting laid, looking pretty, all fine things. But we need to be careful about how much energy and focus we put into them. Just because we consider them ultimate goals won’t make them so. The only thing achieving them will do for us, is confuse us, because we’ll be on the middle of a path with an unknown destination. A destination we may hate once we arrive.

Bottom line: Focus your efforts in discovering your Fundamental goals first, and make sure that your following objectives are aligned with them.

Some related concepts that are worth learning from The Personal MBA, by Josh Kaufman, my mentor and friend:

How Proust Can Change Your Life

2012-01-14T12:40:50+00:00

Book Notes – How Proust Can Change Your Life, by Alain de Botton

I love Alain de Botton. I’ve read many of his books, and if you’ve checked my Influencers page, you’ve seen how he has affected my take on philosophy. I’m also a big fan of his Twitter stream, filled with original thoughts. That’s why I couldn’t wait to dive in his literary biography of Marcel Proust. Being familiar with de Botton’s style, I knew the book was aimed at sparking intelligent self-reflection. Oh, and the title helped too.

The book covers Marcel Proust’s personal experiences and many takes on diverse topics of life that we all face daily. Chapters like “How To Take Your Time”, “How To Suffer Successfully” and “How To Open Your Eyes” were among my favorites. Alain does a fantastic job of switching between his own conclusions, Proust’s personal anecdotes, and direct quotes from Proust and people from Proust’s life. He does all this while adding a touch of humor every now and then, as is typical de Botton.

Proust’s wisdom can’t be ignored. Every chapter takes us through a rough series of epiphanies (which we easily connect with our own lives), thanks to his refutal of the most socially accepted beliefs. We feel like shit halfway each chapter, but that’s where the combination of Proust and de Botton is magical. Every chapter ends on a high note, with a moral or lesson, which though unconventional, promises to deliver more substance than the one we held at the beginning. The author does a fantastic job of filtering Proust’s ideas and leaving us with a beautiful new way to live, see, listen, suffer, read and love.

Below are some of my favorite excerpts of How Proust Can Change Your Life…

On life’s purpose:

“If due acknowledgement of our mortality encourages us to reevaluate our priorities, we may well ask what these priorities should be. We might only have been living a half-life before we faced up to the implications of death, but what exactly does a whole life consist of?”

On slowing down:

“Going by slowly may entail greater sympathy. We are being a good deal more sympathetic to the disturbed Mr. van Blarenberghe in writing an extended meditation on his crime than in muttering “crazy” and turning the page."

On suffering:

""Happiness is good for the body," Proust tells us, “but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind.” These griefs put us through a form of mental gymnastics which we would have avoided in happier times."

and…

“Perhaps the greatest claim one can therefore make for suffering is that it opens up possibilities for intelligent, imaginative inquiry – possibilities that may quite easily be, and most often are, overlooked or refused.”

On knowledge and ignorance:

“A precondition to becoming knowledgeable may be a resignation and accommodation to the extent of one’s ignorance, an accommodation which requires a sense that this ignorance need not be permanent, or indeed need not be taken personally, as a reflection of one’s inherent capacities.”

On clichés:

“The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones. The sun is often on fire at sunset and the moon discreet, but if we keep saying this every time we encounter a sun or a moon, we will end up believing that this is the last rather than the first word to be said on the subject. Clichés are detrimental insofar as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation while merely grazing its surface. And if this matters, it is because the way we speak is ultimately linked to the way we feel, because how we describe the world must at some level reflect how we first experience it.”

On friendship:

“I do my intellectual work within myself, and once with other people it’s more or less irrelevant to me that they’re intelligent, as long as they’re kind, sincere, etc.”

and…

“There seems a gap between what others need to hear from us in order to trust that we like them, and the extent of the negative thoughts we know we can feel toward them and still like them.”

On art:

“We might caricature the history of art as a succession of geniuses engaged in pointing out different elements worthy of our attention, a succession of painters using their immense technical mastery to say what amounts to “Aren’t those back streets in Delft pretty?” or “Isn’t the Seine nice outside Paris?”"

On appreciation:

“The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust’s therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.”

On voluntary memory:

“Voluntary memory, the memory of the intellect and the eyes, [gives] us only imprecise facsimiles of the past which no more resemble it than pictures by bad painters resemble the spring… So we don’t believe that life is beautiful because we don’t recall it, but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated, and similarly we think we no longer love the dead, because we don’t remember them, but if by chance we come across and old glove we burst into tears.”

On being bored with one’s lover:

“If long acquaintance with a lover so often breeds boredom, breeds a sense of knowing a person too well, the problem may ironically be that we do not know him or her well enough. Whereas the initial novelty of the relationship could leave us in no doubt as to our ignorance, the subsequent reliable physical presence of the lover and the routines of communal life can delude us into thinking that we have achieved genuine, and dull, familiarity; whereas it may be no more than a fake sense of familiarity that physical presence fosters.”

On long-lasting relationships and jealousy:

“When you come to live with a woman, you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love her; though it is true that the two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy.”

On reading books:

“It is one of the great and wonderful characteristics of good books (which allows us to see the role at once essential yet limited that reading may play in our spiritual lives) that for the author they may be called “Conclusions” but for the reader “Incitements.” We feel very strongly hat our own wisdom begins where that of the author leaves off, and we would like him to provide us with answers when all he is able to do is provide us with desires… That is the value of reading and also its inadequacy. To make it into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it."

Ikigai

2012-01-07T12:40:50+00:00

Book Notes – Ikigai, by Sebastian Marshall

Sebastian Marshall, who has recently became popular online because of his stand against traditional publishing, put together a brilliant set of philosophies, ideas, recommendations and statements for anyone that’s serious about becoming a better person. This is not fluffy self-development. It’s serious stuff for hard-working people that can take an honest look at themselves. Ikigai, which was marketed as the “one-week book”, is not original work, but a compilation of Sebastian’s fundamental posts of his blog. The book is divided in chapters such as “Be Principled”, “Empire”, “Rationality”, and “Dealing with Shit”, and each chapter has a series of posts and Sebastian’s answers on that particular topic.

I loved the book, and read it in a couple of days. Sebastian succeeds at making you want to do amazing things with the time that’s been given to you. The reason that Sebastian gets to you is because he’s real. He’s had a weird life, he’s kinda crazy, and he truly acts on principles. The book combines three elements very well: practicality, unconventionality and reach. Anyone can grow from reading Ikigai and applying its lessons.

The biggest criticism is that what was gained in compilation speed, was lost in tidiness. Some concepts appear many times in the book, and it can get tiring to read them over and over again. However, to be fair, it’s very easy to just skim what one has already read, and it doesn’t make the book any less powerful. This is life-changing work, I’ll recommend it often from now on.

Below are some of my favorite excerpts of Ikigai…

On people’s opinions:

“As you become excellent, you show them what they could be, and it hurts them. Viscerally. So don’t be too upset, your excellence hurts people to some extent. Expect constant discouragement from normal people. Eventually you’ll build a social circle of high-achieving, ambitious, expansive, cool, worldly, giving, encouraging, awesome people, and then you’ll be successful and normal people will envy and hate you, but you won’t care because you’ll have transcended it. So yeah, discouragement and warnings and crap? We all get it on the road to success. Don’t take it too seriously. Don’t hate people for doing it, but don’t give in either.”

On ethics:

“I put my ethics and values together slowly. I think most people struggle with getting an ethical system or value system because they’re looking for one overarching principle that makes everything else make sense. Frankly, I don’t think there is one.”

On low and high happiness:

“Low happinesses like contentment, sensory pleasure, etc. I don’t think those are important to pursue. High happinesses – triumph, camaraderie, epiphany, wisdom – those I think are worth pursuing.”

On having kids:

“Y’know how hard it was for people to have and raise kids throughout history? When I hear people saying they don’t want kids, not because they’re working on world-changing stuff like Albert Einstein, but just because they think they’d be happier without kids … . I don’t know man, it shocks me. There’s been a chain of people brutally struggling and striving forwards throughout history, and you’re comfortable breaking that chain? That’s … that’s … well, that’s something I’m not comfortable doing.”

On duty:

“If I’m duty-bound in a situation, I’ll aim to perform my duties as best as I can, happiness be damned. A lot of times, the best solutions aren’t necessarily the largest number of happiness solution. (Again, trying to explain this to a person who grew up in a happiness-is-most-important culture risks making you seem off your rocker, just like a modern Westerner trying to explain that happiness is more important than duty and loyalty would seem crazy to a samurai.)”

On wealth:

“Wealth is anything that’s suitable to humans that humans want. Reshaping matter and energy into forms more suitable and desirable to humans produces more wealth. There are near unlimited possibilities to reshape energy and matter into more and more suitable forms. Thus, there is near unlimited wealth available.”

On the right role for each of us:

“A captain, not a general, not a king. If one of my sons has the ability, drive, and desire to be a general or king, so be it. He’ll be learning lessons at age 5 that I started learning at age 19. When he’s 14, he’ll know much of what I knew at 24. But not me—no over-expanding, no going too far and losing it all. I’m fit to be a captain, an advisor, a high-ranked servant, but I don’t aim to rule. There’s still too many screwed up low born ideas in the back of my head.”

On wanting to do too much:

“Be careful about over-expanding—you don’t have to do it all in one generation. Have children, raise them well, have your son take over where you left off. There’s only so much a person can accomplish in one lifetime, whereas even a modest dynasty can accomplish much, much more.”

On consolidation:

“You know, the victors – the ones who build the really enduring victories – they’re often not the most brilliant or charismatic or brave. They’re the ones who are most patient, who are most rational, who have the most self-control. You can win 10,000 battles, but have it all undone in one rash misstep. You could perhaps lose 10,000 battles, but still win at a decisive moment and then consolidate intelligently.”

On knowing how to receive:

“Most people feel like they should be martyring and sacrificing themselves more, but they also don’t like to do it. Anyway, why cover all this ground? Because I don’t think it’s possible to be as gracious and helpful and friendly as a martyring self-destructing guy. Overwhelmingly, the most gracious people I know are comfortable receiving as well as giving..”

On embarrassment:

“Keep in mind you’re going to die. It puts things into perspective. Mild discomfort? Who cares, you’re going to fucking DIE at some point. DO SOME COOL STUFF BEFORE THAT HAPPENS. As far as I know, you get one bite at the apple that is life. Embarrassment? Dude, eternity stretches before and after us. Embarrassment is your neurochemistry in a mildly uncomfortable position. It doesn’t matter at all. None of us are such a big deal that we can’t be embarrassed.”

On oblivious people:

“You can plan around lack of skill or ability in many areas, or avoid those areas and key in on virtues. Really, I think there’s room in the world for people of people of all smarts and lack-of-smarts. Intelligence is overrated, and there’s a dozen or so traits I’d look for before intelligence in someone in my life. Stupid people aren’t a problem. Oblivious people, though? Oh, they break all kinds of shit. Oblivious people are a big, big problem. We gotta watch out for them.”

On Guiding Structure:

“A lot of people give up. You can reduce the chances of this by making the environment more supportive of your success, getting emotional support, and the old fashioned “burn your boats behind you.” Costs: I think if you’ve clearly identified the payoffs, it shouldn’t be too tough, but the road can get weary at times. Persistence can be hard and tiring. The most expensive cost is doing the right thing when you need to, but you’re not in the mood to do so."

On death:

“The question is, were you spending your life right, doing all the best things you could, searching out the most meaningful things, taking the best courses of action, training yourself, building your talent, spending your time well, serving people, appreciating life? If you were, it’s no shame to go when you go. The bell rings for all of us at some time.”

On finding your passion:

“Your interests flit around to different stuff? Yeah, me too. But more and more, I’m looking to build/produce/ship things when I have a passing interest. Obviously you can’t do that for everything, sometimes you can just be a consumer and be happy with that. But if you have a sincere interest, then why not try to write an analysis or critique or user guide or quick-start manual or observations or … something? Producing, shipping … it’s cool. I think it’s basically the way for people whose interests jump around to achieve lots of good stuff in the world.”

On excellence:

“If you want to make excellent stuff, you need to make a lot of stuff. If you want to make a lot of stuff, you’ll make a lot of crap. If you want to make excellent stuff, you need to make a lot of crap. And my personal opinion here: And that’s okay, because you get judged by your best work, not your bad work.”

Dumbing Us Down

2011-12-17T12:40:50+00:00

Book Notes – Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, by John Taylor Gatto

I’m not from the States, so this book wasn’t an obvious read for me, but when I got to it, I realized how essential Gatto’s ideas of schooling are. With his more than 30 years of experience as a teacher, and being the recipient of the New York State Teacher of the Year award, it’s safe to say that Gatto knows what he’s talking about. He knows how the system works, how to hack it, and what it does to the students. Let me assure you: the issue with schooling is global. Everything that Gatto points out as problems in the US, are issues that originated there, and then spread out to other countries.

The book is short, sort of a manifesto against traditional schooling, which is why I recommend it for anyone that still believes that traditional education is the best option for learning. Start here, if you dare. Get your beliefs questioned, become aware of the effect of schooling in all institutional levels, and carve your own educational path for you and your loved ones. Gatto does a brilliant job of articulating why schools were a corrupt enterprise from the start. The fact that we believe in them so blindly is only more evidence of their success. Perhaps, Gatto’s biggest point is the impact he sees from schools on our communities. By creating individuals disconnected from their own ideas and each other, it’s society that sees the greatest impact.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from Dumbing Us Down:

“Confusion is thrust upon kids by too many strange adults, each working alone with only the thinnest relationship with each other, pretending, for the most part, to an expertise they do not possess.”

“Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of them all: we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. The expert makes all the important choices; only I, the teacher, can determine what my kids must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions, which I then enforce.”

“Look again at the seven lessons of school teaching: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, and surveillance. All of these lessons are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And over time this training has shaken loose from its original purpose: to regulate the poor. For since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy as well as the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution’s original grasp to the point that it now seizes the sons and daughters of the middle classes as well.”

“In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.”

“In centuries past, the time of childhood and adolescence would have been occupied in real work, real charity, real adventures, and the realistic search for mentors who might teach what you really wanted to learn.”

“Networks divide people, first from themselves and then from each other, on the grounds that this is the efficient way to perform a task. It may well be, but it is a lousy way to feel good about being alive. Networks make people lonely. They cannot correct their inhuman mechanism and still succeed as networks. Behind the anomaly that networks look like communities (but are not) lurks the grotesque secret of mass schooling and the reason why enlarging the school domain will only aggravate the dangerous conditions of social disintegration it is intended to correct.”

Cognitive Surplus

2011-12-10T12:40:50+00:00

Book Notes – Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators, by Clay Shirky

This is a great book to have an idea of how the internet is changing the way we collaborate. Social media in particular, is more than just a way to get likes and retweets. It’s more than just a way to reach fans, and have an online presence. Its real impact is changing our notion of what’s valuable, what’s interesting, and how we all collaborate with each other to make more of it.

Clay Shirky, who became popular because of his best-seller “Here Comes Everybody”, is back tackling the topic of people connecting with each other, and shows why he’s one of the best in analyzing the effect of the internet and its tools on our lives. The one thing that I enjoyed most of the book is seeing someone defend what people create online, whatever that is. Bloggers reporting news, people being offensive on YouTube, countless funny but unproductive sites, these are just some of the most frequent areas of criticism from the elites.

Of course, coming from the group that’s being hurt the most by the now non-existent barriers to publish, this criticism is not surprising. It’s refreshing to see Shirky, as a scholar, defend the amateurs and their collaboration for once. “Cognitive Surplus” is well-researched, well written, engaging and relevant.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from Cognitive Surplus:

“The ability for community members to speak to one another, out loud and in public, is a huge shift, and one that has value even in the absence of a way to filter for quality. It has value, indeed, because there is no way to filter for quality in advance: the definition of quality becomes more variable, from one community to the next, than when there was broad consensus about mainstream writing.”

“Similarly, when publication – the act of making something public – goes from being hard to being virtually effortless, people used to the old system often regard publishing by amateurs as frivolous, as if publishing was an inherently serious activity. It never was, though. Publishing had to be taken seriously when its cost and effort made people take it seriously -if you made too many mistakes, you were out of business. But if these factors collapse, then the risk collapses too. An activity that once seemed inherently valuable turned out to be only accidentally valuable, as a change in the economics revealed.”

“Every service that wants to harness the cognitive surplus at large scale faces these trade-offs. You can have a large group of users. You can have an active group of users. You can have a group of users all paying attention to the same thing. Pick two, because you can’t have all three at the same time.”

“One of the weakest notions in the entire pop culture canon is that of innate generational difference, the idea that today’s thirtysomethings are members of a class of people called Generation X while twentysomethings are part of Generation Y, and that both differ innately from each other and from the baby boomers. The conceptual appeal of these labels is enormous, but the idea’s explanatory value is almost worthless, a kind of astrology for decades instead of months. Generations do differ, but less because people differ than because opportunities do.”

Amber Zuckswert

2011-12-09T12:40:41+00:00

Conversation with Amber Zuckswert

Amber Zuckswert (health coach, pilates instructor, dancer and entrepreneur), joins me to talk all food, health and habits. Amber is a wonderful example of someone doing Education-Based Selling the right way. Some of the topics we discuss on the call:

Getting people to see and want the foundations for a productive and healthy lifestyle.
The number one hardship for most people: implementing and changing habits.
Achieving clarity when choosing a course of action.
Everyone has their own diet school of thought. How do we filter the information to find what works for us?
The dangers of doing exercise the wrong way, and the price of being a top-performer in sports.
Amber’s style draws already active people wanting to take their health to the next level. Reminds me of Baltasar Gracian’s quote: “It is foolish for a forty-year-old to ask Hippocrates for health, and even more foolish to ask Seneca for wisdom.”
The social cost of choosing a healthy lifestyle, and balancing friends/buddies with colleagues and like-minded people.
The possibilities for innovation in coupling the internet with almost any traditional business.
The upcoming project of Miss Zuckswert: a 7-day retreat in Bali, Indonesia.

More about Amber:

EpicSelf.com, her official website where you can read her articles, watch and try some instructional videos, and learn more about her services.
Amber on Facebook
Amber on Twitter
One of my favorite posts from Amber on how sitting for so long is killing us.

Two-way Journalism, and 1000 Little IPOs

2011-12-06T12:40:41+00:00

Two-way Journalism, and 1000 Little IPOs

06 December 2011

Steven Johnson, best-selling author, talks about Disney’s recent acquisition of Babble, a parenting site:

The coverage of the deal thus far has focused on two primary angles: either Disney acquiring a “hipster” parenting site, or the vindication of the blogger-network content model. (Babble runs a large network of “mommybloggers,” as they have come to be called.) But I think there’s a simpler lesson here that’s being overlooked. Babble was a cultural and commercial success because it took on a topic that was exhaustively covered by existing media, and wrote about it in a fresh, nuanced, and more complex way.

There are two key takeaways from this deal. First, there’s room for both kinds of journalism. On one hand, traditional journalism with its politics and big budgets that can support extensive research for complex projects. On the other hand, “amateur” journalism, with their original agenda-free voice. If there’s still a debate, it’s because we’re failing to see that both styles are necessary. More from Johnson on this point:

The success of Babble should be a corrective for all those folks who think that the Web has lowered our journalistic standards, or that original, provocative writing online doesn’t have a business model to support it. Yes, Babble was not a commercial success on the level of Facebook or LinkedIn or Zynga. Content sites don’t have that kind of scalability. (Though they may well have an easier path to profitability.) But Babble did make a tidy return for their investors…

The second takeaway is, IMO, even more important, and it’s something Johnson noticed as well:

The commercial viability of the web shouldn’t just be about a handful of billion-dollar IPOs. It should be about a thousand smaller-scale successes, where new voices can both find an audience and create sustainable business models. Babble managed to do both those things in just a few short years — and that’s great news for all of us.

When I tell people that they should do their own thing because the tools to succeed are there, this is what I mean. This is the real value of the low costs of technology: improving the standard of living a LITTLE for EVERYONE.

The number of super-rich people is small, and it’s only going to get smaller. You can certainly try to get there, but taxes and popular opinion are not very friendly with the super-rich. On the other hand, going after a profitable small business, thanks to the use of low cost technology and communication, is a much surer bet. Not only in financial terms, but it’s also the best bet to achieve the three keys for satisfying work, according to Malcom Gladwell: autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward.

Think about it this way: what is the first clear advantage that people mention when talking about jobs? Safety. Which means, lower risk. Well, that’s what I mean with the tools being here for people to go solo: it’s no so risky anymore. The more people realize this, the more happy stories like Dabble we’ll have.

Einstein's Dreams

2011-12-03T12:40:50+00:00

Book Notes – Einstein’s Dreams, by Alan Lightman

Beautiful little book. A series of short stories with one common theme: time. Read one story per day, and let it sink in. The author takes us through a series of scenarios where the one variable is time, and reminds us of the unavoidable truth: time is all around us, it shapes every part of our lives, and the outcome of our actions ultimately depends on time.

There is some science behind this book. You can’t have Einstein in the little, and Lightman, a scientist himself as the author, and not have it be about science. We even get to enjoy some of Einstein’s scientific and philosophical chats with his friend every now and then. But the fantastic approach to the subject of time makes us forget about facts and reality, and redirects our focus to what matters: the way we see time, and what relationship we choose to have with it.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from Einstein’s Dreams:

“The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or of joy. The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.”

“With time, each person’s Book of Life thickens until it cannot be read in its entirety. Then comes a choice. Elderly men and women may read the early pages, to know themselves as youths; or they may read the end, to know themselves in later years. Some have stopped reading altogether. They have abandoned the past. They have decided that it matters not if yesterday they were rich or poor, educated or ignorant, proud or humble, in love or empty-hearted—no more than it matters how a soft wind gets into their hair. Such people look you directly in the eye and grip your hand firmly. Such people walk with the limber stride of their youth. Such people have learned how to live in a world without memory.”

“For those who have had their vision, this is a world of guaranteed success. Few projects are started that do not advance a career. Few trips are taken that do not lead to the city of destiny. Few friends are made who will not be friends in the future. Few passions are wasted.”

“Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free. Over time, some have determined that the only way to live is to die. In death, a man or a woman is free of the weight of the past.”

“In this world, the passage of time brings increasing order. Order is the law of nature, the universal trend, the cosmic direction. If time is an arrow, that arrow points toward order. The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation. Philosophers have argued that without a trend toward order, time would lack meaning. The future would be indistinguishable from the past. Sequences of events would be just so many random scenes from a thousand novels.”

“If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.”

Playing for Meaning

2011-12-02T12:40:41+00:00

Playing for Meaning

02 December 2011

Here’s Peter Stromberg on why some people play videogames (or even chess) too much:

In life, there is an ending, but we don’t get to know what it is, because we are dead. The point is that games are like living life—we make decisions that influence the outcome—but in games the situation is set up so that we can know how it all adds up. This adding up, this meaningfulness, is one of the most important things that draws people to games.

This makes sense to me, and it comes back to what I see everywhere around me: people don’t know how many options they truly have. If we have problems seeing meaning, is because we fail to see it, not because it’s not there.

Lack of clarity strikes again. Whether it’s improving our business, educating ourselves, or seeing meaning in life, clarity of the goal and our available options is step one.

Videogames are appealing because of how clear everything is: we know what we can do, and what’s out of the question. It’s the boundaries, objectives and a meaningful end what makes them fun. Clarity in our work and life should achieve the same thing: structure limits and goals around a self-defined meaning.

Here’s Sebastian Marshall on looking for videogames for inspiration. Here’s Paul Graham on technology’s addictiveness. Here’s my post on why we don’t want too much freedom.

Things That Compound

2011-11-28T10:00:00+00:00

Things That Compound

28 November 2011

Compounding, simply put, means generating earnings from previous earnings. It’s a common term in finance. This is how saving money and being patient makes you rich. You put money in the bank, which makes you more money, which you put in the bank again, and that makes you even more money. It’s a slow but steady approach that usually yields great results for those who can wait.¹

This process has a name that goes beyond finance jargon: Autocatalysis. Autocatalysis means that the process’ output produces the necessary input for a similar reaction. Anything with an element of autocatalysis will grow exponentially, and faster.

The important thing to learn then is how to apply autocatalysis to our lives. Some things can have compounding effects, such as savings, but some things can’t. Staying awake won’t compound, you need a consistent amount of sleep.
Here are three other areas of life that have compounding effects, when done right:

Productivity

The problem with most people’s productivity is their lack of systems in their daily lives. They trust their memory. They trust their willpower. They trust their energy. All recipes for disaster. We forget things, our willpower is limited, and our energy gets depleted. This is normal human behaviour. The solution is not to power through our human flaws, but to structure our lives in a way that we avoid them completely.

When you apply the right systems² in your daily life, things get done with less effort, faster, and better. You accomplish more. And when you accomplish things, you have more time to accomplish even more. This is the number one “secret” behind winners: systems.

Networking

There is no mystery behind the growth of social networks like Facebook or Twitter. The more people they reach, the more people those people will invite. That process happens over and over again, and before you know it, the network is huge. You start with one member, but because of the inherent autocatalysis of networking, things can grow damn fast.

However, networking doesn’t create value by itself. It’s only a platform. While it may feel satisfying to meet for lunch, or have a Skype call, the returns are limited.

The lesson here is to take networking in our lives seriously EARLY. Build many relationships fast, and then get to work. Once you start doing something noteworthy, the compounding effect of your network will take it from there and get your name across even more networks.

Flexibility

If I’d have to put the three areas mentioned above (personal finance, productivity and networking) in one group, it would be flexibility. Having more money, getting more stuff done, and knowing more people that can help you, are all elements that increase your options of where to spend your resources.

Once again, the key of having options is that it compounds. Having options means you’re valuable. It means more people demanding your knowledge or expertise. It means you’re scarce (or people would just go another way). The more impressive people I know spend a lot of time declining offers and ideas. Having options is the real wealth of the successful.

Bottom line: Implement autocatalysis in personal finance, systems and networking early in life, and your options will increase exponentially.

Notes

¹ For anyone interested in learning more about how to use compounding with their personal finance, I recommend I Will Teach You To Be Rich, by Ramit Sethi.

² If you want to learn more about systems theory (a topic much more philosophical than it gets credit for), I recommend Thinking in Systems, by Donella Meadows.

The Rapture of Maturity

2011-11-26T12:40:50+00:00

Book Notes – The Rapture of Maturity: A Legacy of Lifelong Learning, by Charles D. Hayes

This book was more than a pleasant surprise. It has become an all-time non-fiction favorite. It helped me understand what it means to be a mature adult. The beauty behind it is its simplicity and humanity. Anyone can relate to Hayes, a grandfather, who set out to remind us all what are our responsibilities in this world, and what kind of legacy we should live for our grandchildren.

In a nutshell, maturity means lifelong learning. This is why few people reach this state: because we believe our education and ignorance end with a degree, a job, and a family. Misrelating, a concept Hayes tackles many times throughout the book, is humanity’s biggest problem, and one that arises from people’s lack of learning from each other.

To act mature, we must understand others’ points of view. The moment we stop putting ourselves in social situations where we can keep growing, is the moment our maturity fades. The moment we believe that we know better, is the moment we start harming others with our arrogance.

I believe this book will warm your heart and force you to re-think your responsibility in this world. Some of my favorite quotes of the book below:

“My quest has been to show that the quality of our existence depends upon learning. By learning I mean, not the rote memorization of facts, but sincere efforts aimed at better understanding the very nature of knowledge and the tenuous, cultural construction of the things we call reality. I’ve come to the conclusion that rapture and maturity are reciprocal products of authenticity, and that authenticity involves living your life as if you are really interested in it.”

“Those who refuse to try to better understand the world will spare no insult in their contempt for those who act as if learning really matters in enhancing quality of life. Moreover, there exists enough collective guilt and uncertainty about knowledge and wisdom to make all but the most confident of individuals feel that the effort to learn may indeed be an exercise in delusion.”

“Regardless of who you are or where you live in the world, if you don’t deal with the problem of global poverty and human starvation with some level of intellectual honesty, then you cannot lay claim to moral high ground in any sense of the term.”

“I’ve come to believe that humans’ greatest fear about death is not the terror of nothingness, but the dread of remorse about all of the things we won’t know, the events we will not witness, and the joys we will miss.”

“Simply put, immaturity ups the price of existence. To spend one’s life spiraling in circles in constant pursuit of things one doesn’t need or even want is immature behavior and an exercise in bad faith.”

“Learning about the world makes it smaller. Learning about people who are great distances away brings them closer. Learning about enemies offers a chance for improving relations. Fully comprehending the forces behind human inequality gives us the capacity to achieve maturity and to help forge the capstone of civilization.”

Top 10 lessons from my year abroad in Australia

2011-11-24T12:40:48+00:00

Top 10 lessons from my year abroad in Australia

24 November 2011

Around six months ago, I came back home after living for a year in Perth, Australia. I went there to give first-world higher education a chance, and to step outside of my comfort zone. Life in Buenos Aires was easy at the time, almost boring, and university education had been a disappointment, so it was time to change things in a big way.

You can read the original post on my reasons to move to Perth here.

I thought of writing this post when I got back, but I quickly realised that I didn’t have much to say. I replied to most of the questions about my trip with short “it was good” type of answers. I didn’t feel like sharing, because I didn’t feel like the learning experience from the trip was over yet. Things would hit me later, once I saw life again with my new Aussie glasses.

Now that the new site is up, it was time to write this post. Here are what feels like the top 10 lessons from my year abroad:

1- Racism is contextual

One of the reasons I chose Perth, was that I knew many students from all over the world would be there. I was dying to see the interactions between people from all sorts of different backgrounds, with all sorts of different physical traits. And what I experienced was beautiful thing: it didn’t matter. There was no visible racism going on.

Note: Of course, one could argue that people still have racist thoughts, but I couldn’t care less about thoughts. It’s actions what matters, and I saw almost none.

Because of Perth’s multiculturality and lack of a dominant group (maybe white Australians, but all the other groups combined would give them a run for their money), there is no dominant insider/outsider mentality. This means that almost every race that would be discriminated in other places, goes unnoticed here. The one group that I felt was clearly segregated, was Australian aborigines. However, this group of people would fit fine in many Latin American countries, while maybe muslims would stand out more.

Another interesting thing that happened to me in particular, was that because of my Argentinian background, most people didn’t have any preconceived ideas about me, with the exception of soccer-loving internationals. Again, while I would have been labeled “mexican”, or “drug-dealer”, or “arrogant” in other countries, I was label-free in a place that had no strong previous connections with my ethnic group. Australia and Argentina are, simply put, too far to have prejudices towards each other.

My time in Australia only cemented what I’ve been preaching for a while: all sorts of “isms” are blown out of proportion by the media, while the real world rarely acts on them. The rules of who we discriminate has nothing to do with race, gender, religion, etc. It’s purely context-based, which is to say, it changes so much that it’s too imprecise to mean anything.

When looking for social fairness, it helps more to look at the context each group is in, instead of fixing on the fixed.

2- Independence and courage are contextual too

Many people told me that what I did was brave, moving to the other side of the world, being so far from everything I knew. I disagree. Only making the decision was brave. Once you’re there, you will step up to the circumstances. As opposed to life-or-death situations, most of the “adventures” that we set out to do nowadays, are pretty safe.

My favourite trip was backpacking through Vietnam alone. I got many cuts and bruises, got lost in islands and cities, couldn’t communicate with locals, got sick, cold and hungry, and went through some other shitty situations. But at no point it was courage or independence what got me through. It was just context. It was the obvious thing to do. It was what anyone would have done in my place.

The world nowadays is safe enough to put ourselves in weird situations. At some point, threat lockdown will go down, and you will start making progress. The only moment where you need some courage is to cut the tie with your previous context, to force yourself to be in a tough spot. It’s all uphill from there.

3- People are inherently good

This may be obvious for some people, and a cliché for others, but it was still a wonderful thing to experience firsthand in so many different settings.

On January 2nd, 2011, I spent a night in a hut in Sapa, Vietnam, with people from all over the world, chatting and playing games, away from civilisation and it’s still one of the most humbling and human moments of my life. It’s a moment I go back to time and time again to remind myself how nice we can be to each other, when we focus on communication instead of imposition.

Not a lot to say on this lesson, other than pointing that this is why traveling is so important: it brings down barriers, it lets us see our similarities instead of our differences. Cliché? Sure. Important? Definitely.

4- Standard of living is not all that matters

Under any famous world ranking of best places to live, Perth is in the Top 20. From my experience, this makes sense: Perth has great weather (to this day, the best skies I’ve seen in any city), great infrastructure, reliable services, etc. It’s safe, easy (although very expensive) and clean. It only took me a week to realise that Perth (and Australia in general) lives up to its standard-of-living hype.

However, I realized about the same time that I had to leave soon. Australia offers a comfortable life, but with serious trade-offs: too much control and regulation, a focus on leisure, and not much to do for the socially and professionally curious. Sure, there are outliers, and I got a chance to meet many of them, but like in Argentina, they are too few to make a serious cultural impact yet. So, while Australia and Perth are great places to live, they may not be great places to grow.

The ultimate lesson for me was that comfort is very costly at this age. When you’re in your 20’s, you can take more risks, put yourself in tougher situations, and struggle more, because you are strong and free enough to withstand it. However, choose comfort early in your life, and you may pay the price with early stagnation.

5- There’s healthy balance between rules and chaos, and I don’t know where it is

Like I said in the previous point, Australia is famous for its regulations and order. Signs telling you what you can’t do are everywhere. At first, I thought this was a good thing, until I started digging deeper into the locals’ opinions, which wasn’t that positive. Many Australians told me that they get tired by all the constraints in the system.

For example, lack of transportation and things to do after early hours of the night is a major cause of boredom among the younger groups. This may not seem like a big deal for people living in big cities with a wide range of interests to explore, but Australia prides itself of its gastronomy and night-life. It’s a bit contradictory for many to have their primary source of enjoyment so regulated. With so much focus on having fun, people sure get bored a lot.

Consider the somewhat opposite case of Buenos Aires. Contrary to most big Australian cities, the capital of Argentina is chaotic. Sure, there are rules, but the culture accepts and encourages to avoid them if you think it’s worth it. This may seem like a terrible thing, but there’s still a positive cultural effect: people are more relaxed, there’s a constant feeling of defiance which adds excitement to any activity, and the lack of rules keeps the mind open.

Now, I don’t have to clarify the negative aspects of Buenos Aires’ lack of regulated culture: more crime, more stress, more friction, etc. However, the key takeaway is to understand that no extreme is a good thing. There must be a healthy balance somewhere in the world, although I don’t know where it is yet (though I mean to find out!). There must be a place that enforces enough rules to maintain and organised and respectful society, but that also gives enough freedom to its citizens to explore and challenge the system.

6- The world is a very small place

There’s not much farther you can go from Buenos Aires than Perth, before you start coming back. Traveling, and more importantly, learning how everyday life is in the other side of the world, really puts distance in perspective.

When you’re a kid, you look at a map, and you see the “near” countries, and the “far” countries, but these distinctions stop making sense when you actually go there. Any flight to another country oscillates between an hour and 20-something hours. Wherever you go, that’s nothing! You get on the plane, watch a movie, sleep for a while, read a book, do some work and you’re there.

The lesson, of course, is not a technological one. I’m not revealing anything that we don’t know by saying that we can go anywhere super-fast now. The lesson is that when you do see how close people from all sorts of different backgrounds really are, you connect stronger with them. It may sound simple, but going from seeing people that dress differently and eat other foods on TV and books, to sharing a meal and a conversation in person in a matter of hours, strengthens your human bond with them. And once you do that as far as possible from home, it feels like all your fellow humans are right around the corner.

7- The less you know, the more you learn

I sort of have a problem with people choosing Europe as their default travel destination. Most of my friends from the Western world seem to prefer to go there before even considering other equally affordable places. Never mind that the natural wonders that Latin America, Asia and Africa have to offer will blow your mind. It’s not about competition. It is, however, about aiming for the unknown.

We’ve all seen the photos of a friend or family member on the Eiffel Tower, or the Big Ben. Everyone knows what to expect (which doesn’t make it any less beautiful). Not only that, most people that go to Europe for tourism, already know what they’re going to see before they go there. Their itineraries are very well structured.

On the other hand, when you go to distant places that you don’t know much about, there’s no clear expectations. You remain humble, you keep your eyes open because you don’t know what you’ll encounter. You struggle more, sure, but you also see things that you would have never seen if you would have gone there with a plan.

If you’re looking to have fun, most places will do. But if you’re looking to grow your mind, I’d recommend to go with the least information possible, to the least known place.

Finally, one more reason to visit most countries outside of Europe and North America when you’re young: they’re changing. While Europe is going to look pretty much the same 20 years from now (unless a natural disaster strikes), most countries in South East Asia and Latin America, for example, won’t be.

8- Education is screwed up pretty much everywhere

This was ignorant of me, but I truly expected university life in Australia to be different from Argentina. Supposedly, it’s first-world class. And from an infrastructure perspective, I can see that. But besides its multi-ethnicity, I didn’t see any major benefits from attending college there. And for their exorbitant fees, value in return should be obvious.

I had top grades while I was there, and had no problem socializing. There was nothing wrong with me as a student, except for the fact that I had prior experience with similar education for much lower costs (public education is free in Argentina).

This was my third strike with higher education, and the one that cemented my opinion that education is a problem worldwide. If my involvement with education activism ever leads somewhere positive, I’ll look back to my experience in Australia as the breakthrough moment that inspired me to act.

9- A minimalist lifestyle is a great first step towards stoicism

Minimalism means many things for many people, but there’s one aspect where everyone can agree: it’s about having less. I don’t consider myself a minimalist, or any label for that matter, but when you move so far from everything you own, you need to leave things behind. Minimalism is enforced upon you.

We all go through little minimalist experiments every time we pack before a trip. We choose what to take with us, and what to leave at home. My real epiphany came the moment I chose to take that decision to the extreme. Before going to Vietnam, I decided to only take what would fit in a very small bag, and it was a very fulfilling experience. I was flexible to move around, and I realised how little I actually needed.

When you have less, you learn to live with less.

This is what stoicism is about: appreciating what we have. Every time I find myself wanting some new gadget or piece of clothing, it helps to remember how much I enjoyed my time in Vietnam, with very few possessions at hand. Minimalism is a good experiment that we can all try every now and then, not to adopt it as a life philosophy, but to focus on the important things in life.

10- For the active mind, life has too many inputs to have rigid and specific long term plans

I’ve been called impatient and inconsistent many times, mostly by people close to me. I used to think that they may have a case, but I don’t anymore. For the active and responsible person, consistency has nothing to do with time spent doing something, or with following through with a plan. It’s all about input.

If you are a person that’s constantly reading, learning, experimenting, networking, traveling, or engaging in any sort of pursuit with high input activity, you will change direction more often. You’d be stubborn and/or dumb not to. When you receive new information, it’s only logical that you adapt to it to make sure you’re on the right track (this is what Seth Godin talks about in The Dip: things should be completed only if it makes sense to do so, otherwise we should re-evaluate our plan immediately).

I went to Australia thinking I was going to live there for, at least, the 3 years it would take me to finish my degree. But the feedback I got was too heavy not to reconsider my plan. Thanks to not worrying about sticking to some mystic blueprint, I was able to process the input quickly, and make the necessary changes. It’s because I’ve always believed in this that my life has seen a steady rise in personal growth, positive habits, life satisfaction, independence, healthy relationships and financial comfort.

I can’t stress this enough: if you are constantly engaging in activities that provide new information, it’s mandatory that you’re willing to analyse it and act on it. What’s the point in learning anything if you’re not going to use it? People with slow iteration cycles won’t understand your decision-making, because you’re learning too fast for them.

Bonus lesson: Gandhi is not loved by everyone in India.

According to my friend Mandeep, Gandhi is seen as a british ally, and the real revolutionary was Subhas Chandra Bose. It doesn’t really matter how many people feel this way, what matters is that SOMEBODY does. We learn in the western world that there’s nothing purer than Gandhi, Mother Theresa and Einstein. It’s good to talk with real people to get real opinions, instead of what the media forces down our throats.
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UPDATE: I got interviewed by The Punch, a newspaper in Australia, about this post and my thoughts on my time there. The +200 comments conversation has been interesting, to say the least.

Welcome to CarlosMiceli.com, and what I've been up to lately...

2011-11-22T10:00:00+00:00

Welcome to CarlosMiceli.com, and what I’ve been up to lately…

22 November 2011

It took me a while, but it’s finally here. Today, I’m proud to launch my new website, CarlosMiceli.com, which I designed in its entirety from scratch. For those of you that don’t know me, I used to blog at OwlSparks.com, but it was time for a more holistic approach to my online work and contributions, so I transitioned here.

If you used to read and enjoy my writing in OwlSparks, I encourage you to sign up for my Newsletter, and to subscribe to my RSS feed, so you can get all the new content on the site delivered straight to your inbox or reader of choice.

I have many ideas for this new site, but I’ll be releasing them slowly. Let’s just say that I’ve never been so motivated about the possibilities of creating content online. Hopefully, I won’t disappoint you.

What you’ll find on the site:

About Carlos: You can read more about what I’m working on, my past work, education and ways to connect with me.

The Blog: My writings and musings on a wide variety of topics, from business and productivity, to education and philosophy.

Newsletter: A brief explanation of my newsletter format, and a form to sign up.

Testimonials: Read what business leaders and influential thinkers have to say about my work and writing.

Press: A compilation of my articles, interviews and guest posts elsewhere.

Contact: Here’s how to get in touch with me, whatever the reason.

What have you been up to?

Many people have asked me what I’ve been doing lately. Here’s a quick run through:

Moved to Perth, Australia and lived there for a year. Also traveled through Vietnam, Thailand and New Zealand. Now I’m back home, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Have been working with Josh Kaufman, author of The Personal MBA on many, many projects, and it has been the most rewarding professional experience in my life so far. Josh is one of the wisest and kindest people you’ll find.

Learned the craft of business consulting and coaching from Josh firsthand. I’ve been helping clients work through their business and personal/professional goals and strategy for a while.

Became Director of Expansion of UnCollege. UnCollege is a social movement focused on showing that there’s more than one path to professional success than going to college. It has been featured by almost all major media channels and publications.

Made a conscious decision to step away from social media, and re-evaluate my approach and involvement with it. Things became much clearer once I became a temporary observant of the current trends, and more aware of my interests.

Read a lot. Around ~80 books in the last year or so.

Started working with Adam Gilbert, my health coach and CEO of My Body Tutor, and switched to a protein and complex carb diet. Have been enjoying abundant energy and focus because of it. I couldn’t be happier with the results.

Acquired, and learned to love, many skills that I never cared for before: HTML/CSS, SEO, online publishing, and more. I’m currently working my way through programming languages, such as Ruby and Python.

Working, struggling, and eventually succeeding, in building this freakin’ site. Why did it take so long, you ask? Because this site is being generated by Jekyll, and hosted on Heroku, two tools I had no idea how they worked at first. It was a rewarding experience to learn to use them, but it was damn hard.

Huge thanks to the these great people…

Huge thanks to Josh Kaufman for giving me countless tips on how to work with Jekyll and Heroku, the tools I’m using to generate and publish this site online, and with his constant encouragement with my crazy endeavours.

Thanks to Andrew Norcross for coming to my rescue during my many HTML/CSS breakdowns.

Thanks to Colin Wright for designing the banner for the site, and for his very valuable aesthetic feedback.

Thanks to Ash Moran and Jean-Daniel Tanguay for their restless technical support and tech skills. They saved me when I was about to give up.

Thanks to all the wonderful friends and colleagues who provided testimonials and words of support. It helps a lot to have you guys on the other side of the screen, even if virtually.

Finally, thanks to you for giving me some of your time. I’ll do my best to provide the best possible value in a consistent basis. See you around!

On Prompting Others

2011-06-06T12:40:48+00:00

On Prompting Others

06 June 2011

Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment — the moment when a man knows forever more who he is. – Jorge Luis Borges

Prompting others to act is something I approach very carefully, because I don’t believe in a standard method. Not even the “trust yourself” adage. Trusting yourself can be good for some people, helping them accomplish great things. However, for every person I’ve met that follows that philosophy, I’ve met other over-achievers who prefer to look for motivation outside of themselves, and let hard work and real-life results guide them.

Still, there’s one thing where I’d like to encourage action, and that is self-exploration. Mistakes. What my mentor calls The Experimental Mind-set. After some life-changing experiences in the last couple of months, I truly believe now that any sort of hierarchy of messages or philosophies of action is the wrong approach to inspire others. Not only that, but Eric Schiller proposed another theory:

“I now strongly believe that excess inspiration serves to cripple people, and actually prevent them from doing anything out of fear of not living up to case studies.”

The point then is to let your own experience define you, and not feel pressured to act or behave in a certain way. Trusting yourself is not a decision or a quality that some people have. It’s a consequence of introspection and humility. It’s the understanding that as long as you are willing to learn about yourself and the world, no one can have a better clue of what the best path might be for you.

The only thing that I let myself tell others now is “get to know yourself.” Anything that you do, once you know that it’s you choosing it, and it’s your personal philosophy of motivation what fuels you, is valid.

Ralph Merkle on Change

2011-05-24T12:40:48+00:00

Ralph Merkle on Change

24 May 2011

Stumbled upon this quote by Ralph Merkle on individuals leading change:

“What funding committee will agree to fund a book describing an entire new field that has never before been dreamt of? Committees base their conclusions on a shared understanding of a common body of knowledge. Their members are drawn from an existing society of experts to evaluate the next incremental improvement. What do you do when there are no experts? Who lays claim to expertise in nanomedicine? Who has spent their life in this field which is just being conceived? No one. The committee process breaks down when we move into truly new terrain. It fails us just when failure is most expensive: at the beginnings of new things. Here we must fall back on individuals – individuals who are bold enough to believe in themselves when there are no experts to turn to for help and support. Individuals who are willing to back up their own beliefs with action, who will nurture the truly new and the truly groundbreaking without having to first seek the approval of others. For there are no others! On the far frontiers there are very few, and sometimes there is only one.“

A More Positive Look on Flaws

2011-04-19T12:40:48+00:00

A More Positive Look on Flaws

19 April 2011

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the concept of human “flaws”, usually used to describe some sort of fixed “crack” in an individual that expresses itself through unwanted behaviour.

The problem with this perspective is that it assumes that the gap between our present self and our ideal self is permanent. It forces us to accept those “imperfections” as inherent to our personality.

I don’t want to discuss semantics in this post, but to offer a more positive definition of how that gap was formed, and how to make it smaller. Why? Because I believe that this positivity is not only more helpful, but also more accurate and closer to reality. So here it is:

What we typically call flaws, are in fact limits that arise from a combination of experiences, knowledge and genetics. These limits can be expanded with an increase of experiences and/or knowledge. Genetic limitations are inherent to all humans, and mostly similar across mankind.

That’s it. Anything can be changed with more of the first two elements. Genes are more deep-rooted so they are better left alone, or to evolution.

What I like the most about this definition, is that it vanishes concepts like stupidity, laziness or cruelty. Sure, these are unwanted traits on a person, but it’s much easier to transform them once we embrace new information, whether through experience or erudition. Most of all, it supports comprehension instead of judgement. It pushes us to increase our own intellectual efforts to expand our understanding of the world, instead of commanding others to fit in our limitations.

Finally, it lets us give ourselves a break. When do something “the wrong way”, this perspective helps us cope with it, while at the same time motivates us to improve ourselves. Since our “flaw” is no longer a rigid part of our personality, then there’s nothing other than some learning preventing us from making it better.

Hope this post makes enough sense and provides you with a more useful way to look at defects, whether they are our own or someone else’s.

The Teaching Cogs

2011-04-19T12:40:41+00:00

The Teaching Cogs

19 April 2011

In recent years, education has become a hot topic. Investors see it as the next bubble to burst. Students criticize their own educational achievements. People all over promote better, faster and/or cheaper ways to educate oneself. Traditional, institutionalized education is going through a crisis, and today’s immediate communication tools are making us all aware. I’d like to continue with this trend and target a specific component of this flawed system: the teacher.

I believe that education, once a student-teacher relationship has been established, always comes down to the teacher. You can have the best system, content and students, but a bad teacher would hamper the results. On the contrary, a great teacher can overcome many obstacles and, at least, install curiosity in the student (I believe this is the best accomplishment education can hope for in general terms, rarely achieved in our institutions).

I must clarify: when I say teacher, I don’t only mean someone giving a lecture in a classroom. Teaching goes far beyond that broken context. For example, the internet has made a teacher out of many of us. The amount of individuals with different interests and skills trying to show the rest of the world what matters and the best way to learn it has sky-rocketed in recent years. This is a responsibility we must assume. However, we must do this with caution. Bad teaching is worse than no teaching.

For example, I’ve been working with Josh Kaufman for a while now. I reached out to him, offered to help him with his work, and asked to learn from him in exchange. We now have a beautiful master-apprentice relationship. The reason I went to Josh after looking at his work, was because I saw the marks of a great teacher. I saw knowledge, energy, wisdom and kindness. Yet, what I believe makes the difference between good and great (and what Josh has plenty) is awareness. Awareness of the never-ending change that surrounds us. People that are exceptional at their jobs excel at being aware of their fluctuating context, and adapting to it (which does not necessarily mean accepting it). This lack of awareness in the teaching community scares me, and it’s even worse when combined with passion.

Silent or Passionate

If present education is a broken system, then bad teachers are the cogs that keep it running, and they fall in two categories: silent cogs, and passionate cogs.

I can tolerate the silent cogs. They are doing their job, and they don’t care about what you do as long as you don’t get in their way. You can listen to them or to your iPod. Maybe they used to believe in a bigger educational purpose, but not anymore. They see it as a job instead of a mission. They are just there for the paycheck.

There’s two reasons I’m fine with this kind of teacher. One, it’s easier to overcome. Just open your laptop and read that ebook that you believe is more interesting than the class. Being productive is up to you. Second, it makes it clearer to the student that the system is broken, and we need more people rising from within, more students having valid reasons to criticize it. Silent cogs give us that.

Passionate cogs are more dangerous. Their blind belief in the what they are told to do, and their reluctance to inform themselves or embrace change, makes them the hardest cog to overcome for the unarmed student.

These teachers promote and impose the old ways, even when they recognize their inefficiency (and believe me, I’ve heard many recognize this). Problem is, they refuse to see what else is out there. Maybe it’s because of very well camouflaged insecurity or laziness, maybe it’s choosing to stay in their comfortable illusion of good deeds. Whatever the case may be, these teachers are doing a big harm to countless students by ignoring the fire outside of the classroom bubble. There’s a harsh competition out there, and they are actively making it worse for their pupils.

Teaching and passion are two things that should be held to higher standards. This assumption that everything falling in those two categories are always a positive thing is what I’m calling out here. I fear that our society worships passion to an extreme, to the point where we don’t realize when it’s being harmful, when a bad or old message is being forced down our throats. And where could it be more harmful than in teaching? Like a virus, passionate but misguided teachings spread, and it’s rarely observed, rarely criticized.

Because of its purpose and consequences, teaching is a mission first and a profession second. The latter can’t compromise the former.

Let’s all be doctors

Josh told me that if I was going to criticize something, I should also offer a solution. Fair enough: I propose we emulate the medical community. They are a great example of how expertise should be approached, especially education.

To practice medicine, you need to do two things. First, become an expert, which means you have to learn the material. But second, and more importantly, you need to remain an expert. You need to update yourself on new discoveries, tools and systems. If you don’t do this, you can’t practice. The reason medicine works this way is because of the importance of our health, and how critical medical mistakes are. Ignoring change and sticking to the old ways could mean, plain an simple, killing someone.

Why is education different? We should treat it with equal severity. Education is innovation’s diet. We’ll have to be creative to solve our problems in the world, and it depends on what we feed our youth whether we’ll achieve that or not. It depends on teachers realizing that they must update themselves constantly on the best ways for people to learn. They must do this even if it means teaching outside the institutions that provide their safe paycheck, or realizing that they too must go back to learning because times have changed.

I don’t know what the exact shape of this adoption would look like. The reach of bureaucracy in our institutions escapes me. However, I do know that the details could be easily figured out if we wanted to. I also know that this problem becomes drastically simpler in the case of independent teachers, because of their flexibility. This is why becoming an independent teacher should be considered as an option too.

This goes for all teachers, it’s independent of fields of study. If you’re teaching in any way, you need to think about this. Teaching is a craft on its own, one with a critical responsibility that is being avoided by many. Let’s own this responsibility, let’s be aware of the need for change, let’s stop ignoring the educational fire.

Let’s do it before it’s too late and we have to ask our doctor friends not only for their methods but their services as well.

PS: I’m a college dropout, but it would be ignorant and unrealistic of me to suggest that path as the ideal one. First of all, every situation is different and the best way to achieve one’s goal may vary from one person to another. Second, the schooling experience is not composed only by cogs. This post is an attempt to point to the cracks, not to destroy the building.

Austin Evarts

2011-03-29T12:40:41+00:00

Conversation with Austin Evarts

Right before I left Australia, I had the chance to chat with Austin Evarts, a good friend and fellow writer, entrepreneur and world traveler. Following my preferred interview format, we just winged it. Some of the topics that we touch on the call:

His thoughts on minimalism and mobile lifestyle, and the decision to stay put in order to create value.
Taking a break from blogging, being creative and being an entrepreneur first, a blogger second.
Thoughts on the content publishing revolution.
His approach to businesses, and where he focuses his energy.
His new startup called Twepto, his experience in getting in Techstars, and the feedback and value of going through an incubator.
Our experiences with startup co-founders, the problem when involving friends, and thoughts on being a solopreneur.
Working full time on your project.

A Case for Love Vocabulary

2011-02-28T12:40:41+00:00

A Case for Love Vocabulary

28 February 2011

Julien Smith wrote an article titled “The Case Against “I Love You” where he argues that using the phrase “I love you” may not be such a good thing:

“I love you” isn’t a death sentence for relationships, but it sure as hell does make couples lazy. It takes all of these deep feelings and coalescing them into one vague blob of a sentence that is entirely meaningless.

Using the word “love” means a lot at first– there’s anticipation, tension, etc. It represents a million little things, but over time, it gets overused. It starts to mean nothing– especially if you’re saying it as often as the typical couple.

I have never said “I love you”, and I probably never will. It means nothing to me. I’d appreciate the intention behind it if someone was saying it to me, but I’d be curious about what that declaration entails. Like many other things in our society, it seems like one of those milestones that everyone is supposed to go through. It doesn’t matter why, it doesn’t matter how.

Smith goes on to offer a solution:

Try this instead: If you have feelings that are welling up inside of you and that you want to express how much you care about someone, tell them WHY and WHAT THEY ARE. Don’t just use a phrase that everyone else uses– tell them what’s unique about your feelings and what you think of them.

As I’d argued many times, the imprecision of some of our most used words is a big cause behind people’s unsatisfactory results. Words like happiness and love are in everyone’s list of goals, but they act as placeholders for more accurate concepts, later discovered (or never), instead of actual sensations. My idea of communicating my feelings and telling someone what they mean to me, means saying the unique things that only that person could spark on me.

When it comes to declarations of love, and following Smith’s recommendation, I’d dare any brave couple out there to ask the following: “What do you mean by that?” Be careful, you may not be pleased by their reply. In fact, I’d bet that most people wouldn’t go there because they may realize that love isn’t that special.

Uniqueness is.

Waking Education

2011-02-11T12:40:41+00:00

Waking Education

11 February 2011

Dialogue from Waking Life:

I like that. It’s like there’s this whole telepathic thing going on that we’re all a part of, whether we’re conscious of it or not. That would explain why there are all these, you know, seemingly spontaneous, worldwide, innovative leaps in science, in the arts. You know, like the same results poppin’ up everywhere independent of each other. Some guy on a computer, he figures something out, and then almost simultaneously a bunch of other people all over the world figure out the same thing. They did this study. They isolated a group of people over time, and they monitored their abilities at crossword puzzles, right, in relation to the general population. And they secretly gave them a day-old crossword, one that had already been answered by thousands of other people, right. And their scores went up dramatically, like 20 percent. So it’s like once the answers are out there, people can pick up on ‘em. It’s like we’re all telepathically sharing our experiences.

This is what I believe is happening with traditional education. Here and there, things are happening. You can feel it. Change is coming and it’ll be huge. Communication tools are showing us that we are not alone in thinking that the way we are taught doesn’t make sense, that this can’t be it.

It’s exciting, really…

Rejecting Simplicity

2011-01-30T12:40:41+00:00

Rejecting Simplicity

30 January 2011

One of the signs I look for in people to see if they’re smart, open-minded and well educated, among other things, is the rejection of simplicity. As someone who has sinned of being too passional and simplistic in the past, I now value meeting someone who realizes that almost no explanation is as simple as a) our initial reaction might indicate, b) the media tells us, or c) history tells us.

I have been a part of many debates where someone is tempted to explain the actions of an individual or group of individuals with concepts like racism, xenophobia, stupidity, evil, laziness, etc. While tempting, this way of reasoning is nothing short of simplistic, incomplete, and probably wrong. Some examples:

The casting director of the movie The Hobbit was fired for not hiring a black person to play as a hobbit, allegedly because he was racist. Is this racism, or is the director trying to stay loyal the original story and the way Tolkien portrayed it?
Are people like Hitler and Stalin evil assholes, or are they acting because of more complex motives?
When we procrastinate, are we being lazy, or are we being victims of a context that overwhelms our capacity to dictate our actions?

It seems to me that these concepts, as powerful and rooted they have become in our society, are now obsolete, or at least, weaker. I see the old vague terminology, the same way I see religion: a way to explain something that we couldn’t explain in the past. Now that we can, we must proceed to more solid (and correct!) explanations. Just because certain ideals or values haven’t disappeared yet, does not mean they are suitable for present times. Maybe science has not yet reached the point of knowing exactly why people procrastinate, or why there’s more corruption in Mexico than in Switzerland, but it has advanced enough to prove that explanations based on laziness or racism are wrong. I’m not trying to banish those concepts, because they do exist, they do play a role. However, I do suggest being more cautious when using them.

It’s important to clarify that I’m not looking to justify anyone’s wrongs, rather than get us closer to the actual reasons behind what should be prevented. Jarred Diamond proposes the same in his acclaimed “Guns, Germs and Steel”:

“If we succeed in explaining how some people came to dominate other people, may this not seem to justify the domination? Doesn’t it seem to say that the outcome was inevitable, and that it would therefore be futile to try to change the outcome today? This objection rests on a common tendency to confuse an explanation of causes with a justification or acceptance of results. What use one makes of a historical explanation is a question separate from the explanation itself. Understanding is more often used to try to alter an outcome than to repeat or perpetuate it.“

In other words, a problem needs to be seen as clearly as possible before an effective solution can arise. If we assume that someone didn’t get something done because he’s lazy, then we are accepting it as if it were a characteristic of that individual, like being tall or blonde. Hard to change. If, instead, we dig deeper we may find that there are more complex factors at play behind someone’s productivity. For example, a concept like guiding structure will give us a more realistic and gentler understanding of why we procrastinate and what we can do about it.

There’s one important thing that must happen if complexity is to be embraced: we must disconnect our sensitivity and ego from every subject, in order to be able to analyze it thoroughly without a) fear of repercussions, and b) history-motivated stubbornness and passion (“because that’s the way it’s always been”). One should be free to ask any question to the world, for the sake of curiosity and solution seeking, and expect a deep debate that provides a complex answer:

Do men only think of sex?
Are women less intelligent than men?
Was there something positive about 9/11, the holocaust, the latin american dictatorships, etc. to justify them?
Why do people drop out of college?
Why do people believe that most criminals in the US are blacks/mexicans, and the same in Argentina with Paraguayans or Bolivians (when, at least in Argentina, this has been proven wrong)?

The most brilliant people I know excel at this. For those that say that achieving this disconnection is impossible, I say that’s the simple mind speaking. If we can have meaningful conversations about the most sacred topics, then we can get closer to solving any issue. As fun as it may be to hear the same debates with the same incorrect reasonings that never help with anything over and over again, I’m ready to move on.

Erica Goldson

2010-12-14T12:40:41+00:00

Conversation with Erica Goldson

Erica Goldson stops by the blog to chat about our views on education, her future after graduating Valedictorian and our thoughts on many philosophical topics (even Hitler).

My Writing Hack

2010-12-06T12:40:41+00:00

My Writing Hack

06 December 2010

I don’t usually like to talk about methods of working because I’m a firm believer that personality is a critical factor usually ignored when people share productivity hacks and tips. For example, I’m a people person, a talker. I’ve learned tricks to become a “good enough” writer, but writing and working in isolation are not my strengths. However, I’ve been so pleased with my latest experiment, that I thought of sharing it here. Feel free to ignore it if you don’t think this is applicable to you, although I seriously recommend trying it.

My mentor has taught me some amazing concepts that I apply now everyday, such as locus of control, cognitive scope of limitation, iteration cycles, friction, and more. One of the most important ones is probably the “Experimental Mind-set”, seeing life as an experiment instead of a journey to success/failure. This removes a lot of pressure and makes every decision more fun. With this mind-set one never fails, he only gathers more information. Having that concept in mind, I decided to try new ways to get myself to write more often. The latest one involves the Pomodoro technique and the concept of “Guiding Structure.”

I recently bought a Macbook Pro, finally doing the transition from Windows to Mac. The question that I faced was what to do with my previous laptop, so I decided to experiment with it. I formatted it, deleted absolutely everything, except Word, Firefox (in case I need to retrieve something online), the Freedom software, and a Pomodoro timer. This way, I created a virtual office, where I can disable the internet, start the timer, and only write. I set up Freedom for a couple of hours, Pomodoro for 25 minutes, and then I just do what Pomodoro tells me: write for 25 minutes, rest for 5, and repeat.

My results: I have never been able to write for 90 minutes straight, except for when that VERY rare “inspiration” struck me, until now. For me, inspiration comes once every couple of months. If I want to write often, I couldn’t wait for inspiration to do the job, I needed to make myself do it. However, I’ve learned that trying to force yourself to do things, relying on your willpower is not the smartest choice either, because you may still fail and feel crushed afterwards.

What I’ve realized with this technique, is that the best way to get yourself to do things, is to get any kind of decision process or morality our of the equation. Once I didn’t have to choose anything, like what to do or how long to do it, I felt free to bring my best work to the table. This is “guiding structure” at its best: by changing my environment, I immediately changed my behaviour. It took some experimenting to get here, but it was worth it. I’m thinking of getting rid of my Vaio and buying a small netbook with more battery life and portability, since power is meaningless for this to work.

My next objective is to find a way to get started writing more quickly, because now that I know that this technique works, sometimes I dick around for a while before I sit down and set everything up. I tried scheduling my work time but that didn’t work, so I’ll be trying the “scaffold” technique: creating a structure, a clear guideline of what I’ll be doing during the day. Once again, it’s a way of removing the choosing out of my mind, and just following the steps instead. I’m also considering of creating virtual deadlines, but I still don’t know how that would look like in reality.

Hope this helps you with your writing too. If you do try this technique, I’d love to hear your results.

Shifting to a Daily Focus

2010-09-22T12:40:41+00:00

Shifting to a Daily Focus

22 September 2010

There’s something wrong about the way many people make life-changing decisions (e.g.: going to college, getting married, moving somewhere, etc): There’s very little differentiating between a simple everyday decision, and a this-will-affect-you-forever decision.

I was having a conversation the other day with a friend that was thinking of studying to be an auctioneer because it’s supposed to be a short degree, and you can make good money with it (if you have the right connections, which I think he does). The problem is, his whole view was based on this 2 year degree being just a quick step, a little thing he would get out of the way fast so he could start reaping the rewards. The reality is that 2 years is never a quick step. Studying a degree is never an “easy” thing. Even in the first world, most people don’t have college degrees, and not because they are independent thinkers that question the educational system (a very tiny minority), but because many of them are not capable or disciplined enough to go through the whole process. The amount of low-discipline college drop outs that I’ve met in the past few years is astonishing.

The problem doesn’t lie on the the decision my friend made, but on ignoring the day-to-day hardships of that decision. Same with marriage: when people get married, most of them create a happy moment photo in their minds that justifies the decision, while the real marriage happens every day, and is rarely as glamorous as people picture it when they say “I do.” Some people adjust to this surprise better than others, but the surprise is usually there. This is self-marketing at its finest. We sell an idea to ourselves by looking at the end result without shedding too much light on how we are going to “pay” for that idea.

The opposite happens (or should happen) when dealing with daily unappealing decisions that improve your life. If you’re going to the dentist, focusing on the process doesn’t help (unless you’re one of those freaks that love going to the dentist). It’s ok to ignore the hardships in simple tasks because the process will be over quick. Not so much with choosing what to study or who to be with for the next 5, 10 years, let alone “forever.” (Side note: This impulse is universal. I’ve seen it happen everywhere, regardless of culture, age, sex or race).

Another example: My brother is considering studying physics. I have a strong belief on letting people choose their own path and make their own discoveries, but I did have a conversation with him to make him consider the day-to-day struggles that such a decision implies, because that’s where ugly surprises happen. We can’t control everything, and we shouldn’t try, but there’s a harmful habit of overlooking the less appealing but more impactful consequences of that decision. By focusing on the end result, we may incur in a standardization of goals, which is a big problem for people choosing harder paths. There’s a major difference in the grade of difficulty between studying marketing and studying physics, but both paths lead to a diploma. The diploma is not the thing to focus on.

The end result is always easy to imagine. It’s the process what causes failures or stops. Once the surprise occurs, many people freeze because of little preparation and mental simulation.

Bottom Line: An end goal focus is better for daily decisions. An everyday focus is better for bigger decisions with long term effects.

The Need for Meetings

2010-08-23T12:40:41+00:00

The Need for Meetings

23 August 2010

Rebecca Thorman wrote today a post that should have been written some time ago: Meetings are not a bad thing. I’ve been thinking about this myself, but Rebecca beat me to it:

We’re running away and far away in the wrong direction. Away from each other and towards nothing at all more grand, preferring the safety and fortitude of our screens more than the uncertainty and uncontrollability of real-life interactions.

[…] The new economy will increasingly require us to work together, to learn through the discovery of dialogue, the challenge of ideas and the experience of being in the same room – after all, the subtleties of a person’s mannerisms just don’t come through in a smiley face emoticon.

Rebecca nails it. This idea of taking everything to the minimalist degree of just you, a computer and the floor, is not positive. Extremes rarely are. No meetings is as inefficient as all meetings. Just because it worked for 37 Signals doesn’t mean it has to work for everyone else. Let’s stop the idolatry, please.

There’s also another problem that I’ve encountered personally in all my ventures when there’s no frequent face to face interaction: lack of accountability. When nobody REALLY knows what the other one is doing, there’s a tendency to dick around (I’ve been guilty of this myself), or at least to do only what was agreed upon, which is another big problem. Nobody ever goes beyond what’s expected. When people are freed from seeing anyone so they can do “real work”, they just stick to their obligations so they can do everything in a very productive 4 or 5 hours and enjoy the rest of the day.

The other reason people don’t go the extra mile when there’s no regular offline conversation (or at least not as much as in traditional systems), is because everyone “knows” that the others are also doing only what’s expected. Nobody wants to be the idiot that worked harder without any compensation (I remember seeing a study proving this a long time ago, but you’ll have to forgive me for not being able to find it).

To conclude, meetings are a good thing. Like everything, it’s a matter of balance. Unless you’re a solopreneur, I guarantee there are big obstacles in coming up with ideas and solutions with people that have different time zones, priorities, activities and work styles. I stand behind Rebecca’s message 100%.

Dictatorship Thoughts

2010-07-27T12:40:41+00:00

Dictatorship Thoughts

27 July 2010

Being born in a country that suffered the horrors of one of the most systematic, calculated and violent dictatorships the world has seen in recent years (1976-1983), it’s hard not think about it. Here are some random thoughts on the dictatorships:

What would I’ve done back then?

This will probably be one of the biggest mysteries for me in the course of my life, since I highly doubt I’ll ever live under a dictatorship. The western world has become too flat, too decentralized, too connected and over-informed for a dictatorship to be the choice of any government, and the eastern world is catching up. Fortunately, only a mad man would believe in the year 2010 that a dictatorship is an effective way to rule, whatever his objectives are. The fact that dictatorships don’t work is too obvious by now.

One obviously appreciates being born after it was over. However, this sense of gratification is not enough to prevent one from wondering how one would have reacted in such a situation. Would I have been chased because of my thoughts? Would I have been too afraid to speak up? Or worse, would the system had such a prohibitive effect on my mind that I wouldn’t even want to speak up or question the establishment?

My guess: I would have been persecuted too. Not because I would have played a subversive role (I’m not a fan of politics and choosing sides). No, I believe I would have been punished because the prohibition to ask questions would have been unbearable for me. I hold objectivity, truth and integrity over any other personal value, and a dictatorship doesn’t allow that. I’m too curious and outspoken.

What would my generation do now?

Would the current western generation of young people fight against the system to the point of risking their lives, torture and even the safety of their loved ones? Are we capable of getting involved in a cause that puts everything on the line?

I don’t know. This generation is the most outspoken and self-entitled generation the world has seen so far, and there is certainly no lack of young activists. But it’s not a hidden cause, it’s not a rebellion, it’s never pain and death what’s at stake.

Again, I don’t know.

Permanent damage

I’ve always thought that the worst thing the last dictatorship did to my parents’ generation was to install the fear of asking. There’s too much status-quo worshiping in them, no risk taking, no questioning, no shining.

I blame the dictatorship. It has poisoned the minds of Argentinians and it only keeps spreading, from generation to generation, by being afraid to be different and challenge the system. It’s not just fear of failure, it’s fear of physical consequences, fear of being noticed.

The thing that saved me and all the other out-of-the-box thinkers in Argentina I know from that poison?

The internet.

The Fun Tragedy

2010-07-15T12:40:41+00:00

The Fun Tragedy

15 July 2010

A while ago, Duff McDuffee said that to make things interesting nowadays, we resort to “more.” Since stories can’t get better, we have to use more explosions, more 3D. This has become the entertaining strategy of most movies.

Consider sports. Players can’t play that much better than previous players. How do you keep it interesting? You talk more about it, before and after. You make them play more games. You show their highlights more times. You hold a one-hour special to announce a short decision.

Does this make you enjoy sports more? Of course not. In fact, the scarcity of past times may have been the reason you enjoyed them so much before.

The question then is, where does it end? I suspect that we will eventually witness the “Entertainment Tragedy of the Commons”:

“The tragedy of the commons describes a situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently, and solely and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long-term interest for this to happen.”

That’s where we are now. We are all self-interested in being entertained, and our limited resource, enthusiasm, is depleting. The reason entertainment works less and less is because it’s becoming harder to seduce us. In other words, the marginal benefit of adding explosions and highlights is decreasing with every movie and every game.

One wonders then… what lies ahead? What happens to a society that’s addicted to new, fun, adventurous and edgy?

Permanent dissatisfaction.

We are now embarked in a quest for experiences instead of growth. I believe growth is the end that makes not only individuals satisfied but also entire communities. By limiting our enthusiasm and focusing on other things less interesting but more fulfilling, we may reach a point where entertainment actually plays its proper role: to spice up life. Not to control it.

Some people might say that experiences make you grow, but I severely question that statement. True, some experiences will make you wiser. But traveling to get wasted in another country, or playing a new video game will not do that. Since when all fun brings wisdom? Fun is fun. It’s healthy and we need it, but it’s definitely not the way to become better, wiser or even funnier. Fun is quickly creating a generation of people that can’t find pleasure in anything for a continuous period of time. Heck, it’s creating a generation of people who can’t do anything for a continuous period of time.

Life is about choices, and with choosing comes settling. I’ve said it many times: you don’t have to settle, but you should know how to do it.

I dream of a society that understands the importance of settling to reach high levels of satisfaction (or happiness, if that’s the word you like) like generations before mine did, but that also is brave enough to challenge stability, like generations before mine didn’t.

(Thanks to Peter Stromberg for sparking the thoughts for this post.)

Briefing Freedom

2010-07-05T12:40:41+00:00

Briefing Freedom

05 July 2010

Mark Braddock, creative director at Block Branding, wrote a piece for the “Australian Creative” titled Advertutionalisation, where he talks about how he’s been “trained” to respond to a brief:

I get pretty much a free rein to write what I like (…) And that’s the bloody problem.

I have been trained, Pavlovian dog-style, to respond to a brief. I know how to take a brief, apply a little lateral thinking and create a serviceable, if not always groundbreaking, piece of communication.

We all dream about how wonderful things would be without the constraints of a brief. Oh, how wonderful it would be to have creative freedom, real creative freedom. Well, I’m telling you there is a reason that most real artists end up destroying themselves and/or those around them. When you remove the brief, you end up in one hell of a scary place.

I’d argue that it’s a tiny minority of people the ones that can work with real freedom. They don’t create to solve a need. They just create. If that creation ends up unleashing a need, that’s a different issue. Although I’m tempted to connect this “talent” with entrepreneurship, I quickly realize that I’m way off. Like in any other profession, most entrepreneurs create only after they had recognized a pain. On the other end, there’s people in a wide range of professions that create their best work only when they aren’t answering to anyone or anything.

Although we all dream of working without a brief, working with a brief gives us something to measure ourselves against. It gives us a nice, wide set of goal posts and a nice comfortable set of crutches. Clients give us the money and time, and all the excuses we will ever need.

When you aren’t free, you can rationalize any results. Even worse: you can rationalize your intentions.

I have therefore learned to love the brief like it is my own comfy little cell. It’s more than comfy; in fact, it’s like one of those cells that drug barons get to stay in. You know, the ones where they can pretty much live the life they want to so long as they don’t walk out the front gate. It is a cell, but it’s a very nice cell.

To hell with creative freedom… what about just freedom? The one we claim to enjoy, seek, fight for, miss, or whatever relationship you may have with it. What are we doing with it?

Let’s be honest with ourselves for a moment. We don’t want pure freedom.

We just want some wiggle room.

The Aussie Adventure

2010-07-03T12:40:41+00:00

The Aussie Adventure

03 July 2010

Here are the reasons why I moved to Perth. Once my adventure is over, I’ll write again saying whether my predictions were right or not.

(By the way, if you are in Perth, or visit Western Australia often and want to hit me up, please do! You can reach me at me@carlosmiceli.com).

- Cultural challenge:

I know my country too much. I can walk down the busiest part of Buenos Aires while listening to music and reading a book (with fantastic comprehension), and I can assure you I won’t trip, bump into somebody else or cross a red light even once. I may be able to do this as well in Perth, but I won’t want to because I care about what’s out there. New things to see and listen to.

- Personal challenge:

I’m a challenge-junkie. The good thing is that I aim high. The bad thing is that I get bored easily. This is why I always say that you don’t need have to settle. But you should know when and how to do it.

On a related note, this is why I’m starting to embrace the entrepreneur in me: the challenge usually lasts much longer.

- Early corporate pinnacle:

I was working as the youngest employee in the highest profile sector of one of Argentina’s top 5 companies. I got that job by the time I was 21, and I was working with people no less than 10 years older than me. With everyone promising me a bright corporate future and comfort, I realized that I could just turn on the autopilot and my work life would be pretty much solved, since the work experience in that company would open up doors for me in any other company, and I could always stay at that job and keep climbing the ladder.

Depending on who you are, this may be the best or worst discovery that you can have at a young age. For me, it was the latter.

- Education in Argentina:

I studied for 4 years in Argentina, the first 2 in the best public school (politic science), and the other 2 in the best private school of marketing. The first time I didn’t like the degree, but both times I had too much criticism towards the system. In Perth I’ll either try a new system, or realize that the education worldwide shares the same flaws. Whatever the case, it’s worth checking out.

- False notion of requirement of traditional education in modern fields of study:

I got the dream job without having a university degree. In other words, I got the job that my degree was supposed to take me to. It’s hard not to question the value of mainstream education after that.

Important clarification: Traditional degrees will always be necessary. You need to study medicine if you want to be a doctor. But modern degrees have become nothing but inflated products of these companies known as schools. After all, Steve Jobs and Richard Branson didn’t study marketing…

- Less known mediocrity:

Mediocrity is everywhere, but new mediocrity will still be fascinating. Always choose the less known mediocrity.

- Network and language improvement:

I want to perfect my English and expand my network. Moving to a new country is the best way to do this, and fast.

- Currency and cost:

Australia is one of the cheapest English speaking countries with top class education.

- Australia’s economical situation:

Thanks to their mining industry and the growth of Perth in particular, Australia has been one of the countries that better handled the crisis. I’m planning to graduate here, and have a valuable and big network by the time Australia is back on the top of the expansion wave, hopefully in 2 or 3 years.

- My bet on Perth:

The previous point applies particularly to Perth. Perth is ridiculously rich on minerals, and it has been focusing intensively on that industry in the last years. If you also consider its geographical location (nearest Australian city to India and China), you understand why it has been growing over 40% a year. It has played a major role in the expansion of those two countries of the BRIC, and I’m hoping to be here when the pessimism is over.

- Big dip, big payoff:

Perth is the most isolated city in the world. It took me 32 hours in total to get here from Buenos Aires. Few people would choose it as a destination, especially from South America. And that’s why I came here. The bigger the risk, the bigger the possible payoff.

- Weird background:

I already have a pretty unusual background of experience, hobbies and networks for my age and nationality (I haven’t met one Argentinian since I got here). Add Perth to the mix (with all that it implies), and I’ll be unique. I don’t know if for the good or bad, but unique for sure. I hear that being remarkable is kind of a big deal.

- Education as a way in:

To accomplish what I want, I need to spend a long time here. Coming here to study was the best way to do it because of all the visa limitations that countries like Argentina have. In all honesty, my decision to study here is just a mean to achieve my other goals. The academic education is a distant second. Or fourteenth.

- A girl:

Some time ago, one girl made me want to become the best possible version of myself. She started this snowball.

The Struggle for Objectivity in Global Jante

2010-04-19T12:40:41+00:00

The Struggle for Objectivity in Global Jante

19 April 2010

My unrealistically smart friend Anita Lobo pointed me to The Law of Jante:

In the imaginary small town of Jante there is an informal, oppressive law that forbids anyone from standing out from the crowd:

The Law of Jante

1. Thou shalt not believe thou art something.
2. Thou shalt not believe thou art as good as we.
3. Thou shalt not believe thou art more wise than we.
4. Thou shalt not fancy thyself better than we.
5. Thou shalt not believe thou knowest more than we.
6. Thou shalt not believe thou art greater than we.
7. Thou shalt not believe thou amountest to anything.
8. Thou shalt not laugh at us.
9. Thou shalt not believe that anyone is concerned with thee.
10. Thou shalt not believe thou canst teach us anything.

We are now living in Jante.

Better has died.

There are many reasons behind this, such as the need for empowered individuals that can consume stuff and an exaggerated fascination with democracy, to name a few. However, I want to focus on the fear of violence.

The horror of wars and recent dictatorships have made us afraid of the consequences that fighting for an idea may have. We worry that trying to impose objectivity will inevitably lead to some sort of authoritarianism and physical retaliation. Past (and still fresh) violence has left a bad reputation in people’s ability to handle disagreements. We prefer to say “to each its own” because we believe that a new Hitler can be just around the corner.

Terrorists prove everyday that this possibility is very real. Their blind and retarded belief in a “better scenario” lets them justify any atrocity to humanity. And this is why we need to learn from the past, not ignore it. We need to embrace the intensity of a war and apply it exclusively in an intellectual setting. It’s the year 2010, we have to be able to separate our ideas from our bodies.

Everyone should live with their needs covered in a peaceful society that respects every individual, I’m all for equality in every aspect of life. We can’t let any kind of moral debate overrun human rights.

But when it comes to debating, let’s beat the shit out of each other. We can’t keep putting our emotional fragility before intellectual objectivity either. Let’s stop respecting each others’ feelings so much.

Like Philip Pullman says, no one has the right not to be offended (h/t to Tyler for sharing):

In a world where feelings are a priority, quality of life, ideas and morals drop.

In a world where feelings are a priority, conflict and improvement become taboo.

In a world where feelings are a priority, mediocrity rules.

Here’s to a world that values rationality, logic, quality and growth before fear, feelings and ignorance.

Here’s to the end of Jante.

A Back and Forth with Tyler Hurst

2010-04-06T12:40:41+00:00

A Back and Forth with Tyler Hurst

06 April 2010

Some email exchanges are too good to be kept private. Here’s ours:

CARLOS: I’ve been labeled as an asshole many times because of my tactless way of expressing myself. I am constantly getting into heated debates with people that aren’t big fans of my choice of words. This is a struggle some days, but then I remember that there are people like you online, and feel comforted because I know that if I ever get into a philosophy, social media, or battle of the sexes word shootout, you’ll be right by my side telling it like it is.

Nevertheless, I find myself oddly challenged by you, and that’s why I’ve decided to finally call you out. Of course, being who you are, you agreed. I can only hope this exchange of romance-less opinions will make not only us, but everyone else who’s willing to go with us until the end, to come out smarter and stronger (because there’s too many soft people in the world already). And, of course, to declare me as the winner.

So, let me get into my first topic right away:

We live in an inclusive time. We are constantly talking about communities, and teams, and groups, and crowds, and many other similar concepts. Just to get the spark going, let me ask you: how can we be sure that this is a great thing? Considering how irrational the human mind can be, isn’t it possible that this has undesirable side-effects? Where are we standing and what are we producing?

TYLER: You may very well be an asshole, but how you phrase things isn’t tactless. The accepted definition of the rather annoying word “tact” is “consideration of others while avoiding giving offense.”

That’s an oxymoron right there. Is it possible to be considerate of others while lying to them? This may work for superficial or inconsequential situations where resolving the problems offers no real value, but your bluntness is most likely thought of as refreshing to those with at least an above-average IQ. The only people you should be worried about offending are idiots (look it up, everyone) and to those people, please do be kind. They don’t know any better.

I don’t admire your words, Carlos. I also don’t care what it is you do for a living, nor how you dress. What fascinates me is your ability to affect people, inspire people to change and deftly lead a group of followers (friends? fans? supporters? pick a similar word) toward whatever IS your end.

Andrew Keen, among others, has spoken and written at length of the inclusiveness of our time. I’ve even called this strange GenX/Y early-adopter social-media group our version of the inclusive, pot-smoking hippies of the 60s that seemed to unite my country (do you people even smoke weed there?) than anything else.

But this inclusiveness has come at a cost. The easier connecting and publishing have become, the more people have done it. Because we have some sort of trust associated with printed or published material, these publishers and some of their readers/followers now assume that they are valid.

They are not. We spend too much time talking about the shiny tools to DO anything with them. The less-skilled, less-motivated show up, clap a lot and then offer either unabashed praise or misguided criticism. Nothing gets done, nothing gets created…no one evolves. We produce nothing but minor thoughts, as the masses are a tsunami, leaving destruction in its wake, rather than a lava flow, which at least creates new land mass.

So, how do you beat back a tsunami? Go to a higher ground?

CARLOS: You make an interesting point when you mention the tact oxymoron. I believe that consideration is, in many cases, the easy way out. It is the rationalization of not caring enough. The problem doesn’t lie on the message that may hurt someone’s feelings, it lies in the reality that we have become too weak to hear what bothers us, because we live in a world that praises us and tells us that the sky is the limit, no matter how many defects you may have. A world that takes care of our soft spots since the day we are born, not by strengthening them, but by ignoring them. This creates an army of theories that delve around people’s fantasies because of their inability to grasp what’s real.

You also mention IQ as the reason behind some people’s acceptance of a “tactless message”, but I doubt that that is enough. High IQs and low over-dreaming can co-exist, sadly. The good thing is, I also think the opposite is possible.

We need more lava.
I’m going to try to get into the tsunami topic from two different points of views, but I fear that I know myself too well, I’m too realistic to believe that the second one is even possible. Nevertheless, I shall do it for the sake of the debate.

One possibility is, like you point out, going to higher ground. The problem is, it’s lonely up there. Tsunamis are devastating for a reason, and few are the ones that can motorcycle their way up Elijah-Wood style and see the chaos from the safe mountain. You can use your fast vehicle (your mind) to drive past the masses on foot but the realization that those masses will drown is heartbreaking and anyone would go crazy if left alone for too long, as high as that ground may be. In other words, the potential to create value is there, but what’s the point is everyone has drowned?

The handicapped dreamer inside me tells me there’s another way to beat the tsunami and to look at our purpose: to elevate the ground. If we can teach and show people that a different way of acting is possible, others may follow the example. This would of course be the favourite society’s response, since it’s a very positive message, just like we like it. But to prove how improbable (not to say impossible) that scenario is like, let me define it for you: a world where everyone is skilled and motivated, where people construct with the help of the tools instead of feeling good about them, and most of all, a place where words and their infinite influence are measured and used only to shed light on reality because demagogic inspirational messages wouldn’t be accepted in an already motivated and skilled plateau.

Yes, completely ridiculous.

There’s one more thing that bothers me about the improbable highland situation. I’ve come at the crossroad of empowering the world many times, and 99% of the times, I realized that taking that path would have come with the painful requirement of dulling the edges of the content. Is dumbing down one’s message condition sine qua non to become popular, to succeed, to be accepted by the masses? And if that’s the case, should we even do it? Are we really elevating the ground and helping people if we are aware that what we are communicating is stupid?

TYLER: Yes, we’ve created a world where safe not only means absence of harm, but complete absence of the possibility of harm. Most great ideas come out of conflict, and unless we can generate such, we’re cursed to never actually get better. If you’ve been following US politics, I’d say much of the frustration happening right now stems from the itch that something isn’t quite right, albeit answered with completely inappropriate actions (racism, hate, etc.). Similar to how our feet land HARDER on softer surfaces (because our foot’s natural inclination to find the hard bottom) we’re pushing harder because we know we can. Chris Rock will never hit a woman, but he’d shake the shit out of her. We’re too scared to even do that anymore.

Moving to higher ground isn’t the answer. As fun as elitism may be, practicing such in regards to the unwashed masses only insulates us and prevents anything good to actually happen. Surely we shouldn’t all drown together, but preaching from on high isn’t going to get the message across, as people won’t even be speaking your language.

The answer is subversion. The answer is becoming better storytellers. The answer is to find the liaisons that can act as a bridge between those acting and those wanting to, and I bet there’s a lot of the latter out there, they are just lacking the tools, the time or the nudge. (man, this sounds preachy and Buddhist-enlightenment like. Awesome)

The ramp and the jump.
It’s not about being accepted by the masses, it’s learning how to tell them what they need to know in a way they can understand. Similar to magazine developers programming their product differently for the iPad than in print, those who consider themselves intelligent must make the choice to become multi-communicable. Groups are, and will continue to be, as strong as their weakest link. The weakest link isn’t always the smaller or most puny, it can also be the one with the least connection to the group. Elitists must make sure they don’t end up as the latter.

CARLOS: I feel like Malcom Gladwell emailing Bill Simmons, it only takes you a couple of minutes to get back to me while I need days. I may take you on a Spanish back and forth some day, just to feel good about myself.

You are more imaginative than me, I’ll give you that. But until the world proves me otherwise, I’ll stick to my historical references, and in my case, admiration and competition have acted as better motivators. Seeing the elites comprehend things that I don’t makes me want to join them up there more than seeing the masses makes me want to help them comprehend what they don’t IF they are no interested to try by themselves. Because that’s all one really needs: interest. You say that people already have it, but I doubt it because we live in a society that lets people reach comfort very easily. And interest requires discomfort, a situation that people aren’t fond of. It also requires ignorance, and people aren’t willing to be ignorant (consider religion: people rather believe something proven wrong than say “I don’t know”).

It’s not that I don’t believe in bridges (or should I say ramps?), but I don’t believe those bridges should or will be built by those on the top, but by those trying to get higher. The elitists are not trying to preach, they are trying to be the proof of something better.

Do I believe in masses? Sure, but being condescending with them is as fruitless as being distant of them. I wish hardware development analogies would work here, but I they don’t. We are too flawed to think of us as precise codes and wires. Nevertheless, I will concede that becoming multi-communicative is important. The most important lesson while working in sales was to adapt your speech to the listener. But it’s impossible to do it online. You can only publish one message, and you lose validation the moment you start diversifying it.

Should one even want to be connected to the big group? Maybe the result of that will be one big beach instead of the current uneven territory. In that case, I’d rather have some people survive the flood before seeing everyone swim on one big ocean of mediocrity.

TYLER: You’re selling us both short. Simmons and Gladwell both try and interpret the past, when that’s not what either of us are after. It’s about what’s next, not about what happened.

Spanish would be fun. I’ll be sure to make up as many Spanish-sounding words as I can in order to stay up to speed.

Have you seen Religulous? Bill Maher makes a few excellent points, but none more poignant than his comment about how if any group was as homophobic, racist, violent and ignorant as most religions, that they’d be laughed out of the room and never taken seriously. Problem is, MOST of the world has fallen prey to such drivel. It’s not that I WANT to save them, it’s that I know Noah’s Ark wasn’t real and that a small group of people can’t turn their ideas into results without a lot of other people to do the work spreading the information.

Ramps is a tricky word. You’re basically describing elitism (yes, the actual practice of condemning others for their stupidity) and it’s a waste. Who gives a shit about followers? I’m not looking to build a bridge, a ramp or a ladder, I want to jump. Ain’t no safety nets where we want to go, nor should there be. Making it easy to get somewhere isn’t a worry those who are there first need to concern themselves with. Cartographers are of a different breed.

So what’s next? The purposeful and immediate disconnect from produced work. No more wasting time staring at finished pieces or polished manuscripts, rather an appreciation of what is REALLY there. Everything that we produce is simply a representation of what we truly think and like a straight line written on a piece of paper, doesn’t truly exist, and is rather a physical interpretation.

More trying. More failing. More dissent. More ideas. Admitting that we don’t know jack shit.

And no, this was not written from an iPad.

CARLOS: That’s some positive thinking, kudos. Want to share this with the world?

TYLER: Yep. It’s time.

- – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – -

Here’s Tyler’ blog. Here’s Tyler on Twitter.

Harsh Truths of Context Limitations

2010-03-04T12:40:41+00:00

Harsh Truths of Context Limitations

04 March 2010

Some guy is selling his Law Degree from Prestigious University X on Craigslist (thanks Ben for sharing):

This priceless collectible will permit you to be surrounded by hobby-less assholes whose entire life is dictated by billing by the hour and being anal dickheads. Additionally, this piece of paper has the amazing ability to keep you from doing what you really want to do in life, all in the name of purported prestige and financial success. Finally, girls in the Marina will swoon with retarded thoughts of sugar daddy when they hear you went to XXX prestigious law school and are a lawyer.

It’s a tragedy when remarkable people realize they are remarkable too late.

This case proves the sad reality that has struck me recently:

Context trumps individuality.

The reason an out-of-the-box thinker and ambitious person may follow a traditional and less fulfilling path is because either a) the societal pressure is too strong to avoid, or b) the context lacks the tools, means and support to exploit that capacity.

The reason I relate to this lawyer, is that we both realized too late that with a different context and more support for our ambitions, we would have gotten further. I will always wonder where I would be if I would have been born in the US, or at least, in another first world country that had similar intellectual opportunities.

For example, when I think of Colin Wright or Ben Casnocha, friends that have achieved much more than I did so far, I feel that I lost the race. Not the race with them (although I am competitive), but the race with myself had I had their context.

The obvious response is that things couldn’t have happened in any other way and that I wouldn’t have realized this if I hadn’t been through what I did. While true, the possibilities that escaped me since day one (and still do) are too many to be ignored in a flat world.

Another harsh realization of late awareness is the need to lower my expectations. While others were taking advantage of the entrepreneurial culture and taking unconventional paths, I spent most of my life realizing that there was such a thing as an entrepreneurial culture and an unconventional path.

While others were doing, I was catching up. I’m way behind on the path that society considers successful.

And there are real barriers, such as language, visa requirements and currency exchange, to name a few. While not impossible to overcome, they are permanent weights that slow down anyone that has to deal with them.

The hardest truth is this: The world doesn’t give a crap about what I’ve done so far. The world wants start-ups, Fortune 500 corporate experience and world traveling knowledge. It doesn’t care about self-realizations and unconventional personal philosophies, however hard it was to reach them.

This is not a regret. It’s coming to terms with reality. It’s what every ambitious person who lacks a supportive context has to understand:

My definition of success has to be unique and personal, because it will never match the world’s.

Morality's High Standard

2010-03-03T12:40:41+00:00

Morality’s High Standard

03 March 2010

“He insisted on holding himself to a higher standard than victory.“

Ryan Stephens recently published the post of the year because of the value of its lesson. Read the rest of the quote and his conclusion to understand why I criticize many people’s so called success.

You either care about results or you care about morality.

Avatar's Philosophy

2010-03-02T12:40:41+00:00

Avatar’s Philosophy

02 March 2010

I finally watched Avatar, and there are two symbols that are worth pointing out.

1) This one is obvious: The bad white military man that attacks poorer civilizations to steal their resources. Clear criticism towards corporatism and the American government, no further explanation needed.

2) This one is more subtle since it involves the spectator: We are embarrassed by what we have done to our planet. That’s why we, human viewers, end up wanting that they, human invaders, lose the battle. We want to learn the lesson.

Avatar makes a strong case on our primitive need to go back to a natural lifestyle. The spectator realizes that we are quickly moving towards technological progress and that living in nature is going to be impossible for most of us by now.

Our animal inside knows that societal satisfaction is less fulfilling than natural satisfaction.

Our animal inside wants us to cut ties and respect our home once again.

Our animal inside feels guilty.

The Human Equation Conflict

2010-02-24T12:40:41+00:00

The Human Equation Conflict

24 February 2010

A person considers himself as important and valuable as the sum of his tangible and intangible belongings.

Tangibles

How much money you make, which car you drive, where you live, the clothes that you wear, the food that you eat, the places you visit. If you summed the financial value of all the tangible things in your possession, you would get a “number”, which would tell you how much you are “worth.” This is why rich people are considered more important in society – or at least looked up to, and why a homeless person may feel miserable for not having any stuff.

The problem with measuring yourself in this way is that there’s so much tangibles can do for your sense of fulfilment. If we were to think of a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being absolutely miserable, and 10 feeling very valuable, even if you are the richest man in the world, you would only get to 3 or 4 just with tangibles.

Intangibles

How famous you are, how powerful you are, the amount of relationships you have, how many people are you in charge of, how successful you are with the opposite sex.These intangibles that society considers high-status define how valuable we think we are.

With a decent and balanced number of material possessions and experiences, a good rating of intangibles gives a person a high degree of value. For example, if you have enough stuff to live well, time for your hobbies, a good number of strong friendships, a loving partner and are respected looked up to by your peers, chances are you consider yourself a valuable person.

The Conflict

My point behind this predictable analysis: intangibles get in the way of people understanding each other.

If you became an 8 because you are a womanizer, you’ll consider yourself as important and worthy of people’s respect as an 8 who got there by being a famous rock star, or a respected scientist. When the ways to measure ourselves are so many, a unified way of valuation becomes impossible.

This is why people will call others arrogant, jerk, incompetent, lazy and nerd. Because the areas that they consider interesting and respectful are the ones where they themselves are considered interesting and respected.

This does not mean that we don’t see value in others. It just means that it’s hard for a regular lawyer to consider a regular doctor as valuable and interesting as him.

It means that most groups of people think they are better than others (even though some may be right).

It means that we are clueless when judging someone’s value.

But most of all, it means that you have to ignore anyone that defines your worth because they have no idea what they are talking about.

The Mistaken Priority of Happiness

2010-02-19T12:40:41+00:00

The Mistaken Priority of Happiness

19 February 2010

Happiness is the wrong goal.

If you are living your life looking for happiness, you’ll feel disappointed with the results, and here’s why:

1) There are more tangible things to look for (often not discussed in those happiness books and speeches): laughter, material possessions, sex, intellectual growth, free time, and more. These are much better symbols of happiness, joy and accomplishment than happiness itself. When we experience them, happiness becomes graspable. Those are the popular happy moments.

2) It’s hard to feel it as a whole. What usually happens is that we evaluate our life and calculate an approximate level of happiness depending on our current situation on many variables, like our jobs, relationships, achievements, and more. We define happiness as being “happy enough so far” instead of seeking sensations that are easy to describe and transmit.

3) Happiness is as imprecise and appealing as the idea of “heaven.” I’m sure that there’s some historical connection between the concept of happiness and a heavenly after-life. On a side note: writers and speakers who make money selling the promise of happiness are the priests of the XXI century.

4) If you lived most of your life happy, but you were miserable the last year, then you died miserable. Having an impact on the world and leading an exemplary, ethical life without regrets is more important than being happy, because it cannot be taken away by time and its randomness.

Here’s Betsey Stevenson on the difference between happiness and fulfilment (h/t Stephen Dodson):

There is probably more to life than even life satisfaction. I know that sounds almost oxymoronic, but perhaps we’re missing a sense of greater purpose or fulfilment. The example I give to demonstrate the limits of happiness data is that people with children are less happy than equivalent people without children. The only explanation that I can think of is that parents are more stressed and harried so when they’re asked about happiness or life satisfaction, they’re not quite as joyous or satisfied as people without kids. But it’s hard for me to imagine that they’re all making a mistake by having children.

To sum it up, there are bigger things in life.

Ben once asked me:

If you could be plugged to a machine that made you feel happy all the time… would you do it?

After thinking hard about it, I realized that I would not.

For me, and I suspect for more people as well, a happy life is an uncomfortable life. In other words, predictability and lack of hardships means an unfulfilled and unhappy life (although this may change in the future since my life philosophy involves the benefits of a healthy body and mind). By overcoming discomfort, I grow as a person and find meaning to life.

Bottom Line: Increasing my wisdom and passing it on to future generations is a more important goal for me than happiness. Each person may have different life objectives and value hierarchies, but I’m confident than most people don’t have happiness at the top, even if they say they do when they are hurried for an answer.

The End of Education

2009-12-23T12:40:41+00:00

The End of Education

23 December 2009

One of the most harmful consequences of our outdated educational system is the idea of an “end.”

No matter how inflated education is nowadays (I’m dying to see what the education industry will come up with once MBA’s fall into the commodity category), it always establishes graduations. When you graduate it means “you are done.”

Note: I also think that a degree lasts as long as the marketing heads of an institution think they can charge you, not as long as it should, but that’s a whole other post.

Most people that go through a degree in its entirety, develop some sort of rejection for information and culture. They believe that that’s what their degree was for, and now they can “relax.”

Disconnecting relaxation from growth is a serious disadvantage. When learning is limited to a specific period of time, it becomes a burden instead of a pleasure or a need.

Coming home from a walk yesterday, I saw many people graduating and partying in the street. I can assure you, you could see the expression in their eyes: “I’m never picking up a book again.”

Sad.

True education does not need to be imposed, does not expire and it certainly does not have any finish lines.

True education is a component of our everyday activity.

I know that most of the readers of this blog don’t have this problem, but most of the people outside of the online community of learners do think this way.

Those are the ones that need to embrace a holistic vision of intellectual growth.

Spread the word.

Scholars' Marketing

2009-12-10T12:40:41+00:00

Scholars’ Marketing

10 December 2009

Since when has our love for marketing been affecting the world?

Just because we didn’t have a word for it, not to mention an industry, does not mean that it didn’t happen.

Why do we assume that all those rules that Seth taught us over the years have been working only in recent times?

What if Adam Smith was not the wisest at his time, but the one who marketed himself the best?

Robert L. Heilbroner on “The Worldly Philosophers” says: “There is a long line of observers before Smith who have approached his understanding of the world: Locke, Steuart, Mandeville, Petty, Cantillon, Turgot, not to mention Quesnay and Hume.” What if they had better ideas of what people should do, but didn’t have a good network, PR skills or luck? When you read Smith’s history, you realize that these things mattered enormously, besides his ideas, talent and devotion.

I like to say that marketing makes the irrational sound rational. This is (not so) bad when it comes to purchasing an expensive phone or car.

This is terrible when it comes to the historical repercussions of not choosing the real bests in history to guide civilization.

This is of course just a supposition, but it makes you wonder where we would be in a world without marketing.

I’m guessing there would have been an Obama long ago.

To Hell with Personal Branding

2009-12-03T12:40:41+00:00

To Hell with Personal Branding

03 December 2009

Hey, Personal Branding, I have something to tell you:

I don’t care.

I just don’t care anymore. You have prevented me from having fun for the last time.

I bought my URL domain and secured a couple of social media profiles. Your job is done, I’m moving on now.

Because really, all that you’ve ever really taught us is stuff we already knew. Did we really need someone telling us how to be authentic or respectful?

Don’t tell me about those drunk girls that upload their pics on Facebook for everyone to see, or about those employees that publicly say that they hate their job. In reality, the problem is those people are just being themselves. The problem isn’t, “You’re awesome but because of that photo of you peeing on a dog while getting high, the company decided to go another way.” You were a mess to begin with. Do you really go showing that picture to everyone you meet?

This is not Personal Branding; this is common sense.

The two most harmful consequences of Personal Branding:

1) It makes you afraid. Not only afraid to speak up, be confrontational and even curse, like everyone does offline, but it also makes you afraid of taking life into your own hands. Personal Branding bases most of its points on not upsetting potential contacts, your interviewer, your boss, or anyone else who will decide if you “live or die financially,” depending on what they find out about you online. To hell with that: authenticity means upsetting people. Only by disagreeing and even fighting others will you do something worth talking about.

This does not mean being scandalous, this means being human.

2) It has made us so calculated, that I wonder how many people are able to live up to their online personas. Meeting online contacts in the real world has been very disappointing in many cases. What’s interesting is that the people who haven’t played the personal branding game, have been amazingly fun, interesting and wise.

Sadly, with all this forced authenticity, people are actually becoming fake. That’s why we love those people who speak their mind without worrying about the scandal. We envy them because they don’t over-think the repercussions.

To be honest, I’ve never been as fake as when personal branding was my top concern.

My advice: Do whatever you want. Your intuition will take you through the best path for you.

The funny thing about intuition is that it’s magnetic. When you trust your gut, you attract people that like what you do, what you say and the way you think. You attract the people that you need, the people that will help you. Yes, you also upset those that don’t– deal with it. There’s no shining without conflict.

Once I started not worrying about the repercussion of every word I said online, I truly connected at an emotional level with others.

Once I embraced my personality, I strengthened the connections that mattered and cut ties with those that didn’t.

Once I stopped caring, I started to actually have fun with social media.

Infinite Dots

2009-11-27T12:40:41+00:00

Infinite Dots

27 November 2009

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards.” – Steve Jobs

Here’s the best reason to do whatever you feel you have to do in today‘s world, without worrying about the consequences: today’s dots are infinite.

Fifty years ago, one of the strongest arguments to keep people on the safe path was predictability. It wasn’t that hard to foresee how many possibilities a person would have depending on what they studied, where they lived and which people they knew. This happened because the variables that influenced someone’s future (let’s call them “dots”) were very few. Money, heritage, and geography mattered. You could still challenge traditional paths, but the tools and reach were limited. Changing the world fifty years ago was harder than it is today, simple as that.

If you looked back and tried to connect the dots back then, the unpredictable ones were fewer. A linear path was easy to walk.

Now, the world is flat, globalization is happening and the internet is shortening the distance between each other. When the world truly is your oyster, every aspect of your life will get affected (and probably improved) if you decide to step out of your traditional boundaries. Thanks to today’s connectivity and the increasingly popular “world citizenship” mentality, the magnetism of people’s desires can bring them together fast and easy.

The process of dot connecting does not have to be hard, but it has to be consistent. With every little challenging step that you take now, you are opening the door to countless new opportunities. There are enough dots for everyone to reach an interesting life, but you have to keep opening doors.

You need to be strong, independent, and aware that you can’t know how things will work out. If you can see the outcome clearly, rest assured that you’re going after a boring and mediocre lifestyle. If you are trying to “make sense”, then you are going after other people’s definition of “sense.”

Lives full of exciting dots don’t make sense.

Happiness Hyperopia

2009-11-17T12:40:41+00:00

Happiness Hyperopia

17 November 2009

The concept of Happiness Hyperopia is very interesting:

Overestimating the benefits we think we will accrue at some mythical time in the future.

There are people who “suffer” from this condition. But there are also people who do not. I asked my friend Steve a long time ago: What is more likely to happen? Overvaluing or undervaluing the future?

Steve’s reply:

“My take is that it depends on who it is. For example, someone who does a lot of hard-core drugs or gets a facial tattoo is obviously someone who is likely to undervalue the future. On the other hand, the person who toils away in a miserable job just for the money that he theoretically will spend when he retires is someone who overvalues the future.”

While Steve may be right, those are extreme examples. They are not demonstrative samples of the rest of us.

My estimation is that most people do suffer from happiness hyperopia, whatever it is they do. You don’t have to be an executive that works 70 hours a week to overvalue your future. Happiness hyperopia is what feeds consumerism: the constant illusion of a better future. We become victims of this “condition” frequently, no matter how many times we have been disappointed before. We bought that device, we got that job, we dated that girl, only to end up looking for something else.

There are many reasons happiness hyperopia to be so prominent:

- Tradition would be one. The mentality that religion has impregnated in our culture for hundreds of years is all about happiness hyperopia. What’s religion if not a promise of a heavenly future as long as you pay your dues on Earth?

- The increase of our life span also has huge effects on our way to see the future. When people lived 40 years and the fear of war or many deathly illnesses was constantly present, there weren’t many motivators to wait, invest and play the “hope” game. Now, with many of those fears mostly eradicated, we can expect a wonderful future if we work hard enough. Not that this future will ever come, though.

- When one gets rational about this, one can’t avoid considering the “live now” mentality as the best choice. The problem is that “living now” is not that easy either, because dying now is hard. When you know that there’s nothing after you die (which more and more people are believing), there’s a lot at stake on living like a rock star. Basically, those that live the moment and undervalue their future aren’t ready to say their goodbyes before their undervalued future catches up with them, which usually does in today’s world. People get to live for many years regretting their past decisions.

In the end, happiness hyperopia is all we have. We can’t go any other way because we’ve been trained to overvalue our future.

Trying to be realistic and being ready to settle is the best choice. It will bring the most tolerant misery (or the most realistic happiness).

Ignore Reality

2009-11-11T12:40:41+00:00

Ignore Reality

11 November 2009

Our culture is seeing an explosion of social studies in the work environment, mainly focused on our irrationality and incapability to see the best logical response. We have been victims of our mind’s flaws since the beginning of time, but we are now fascinated to point out to everyone just how “crazy” we are.

Studies prove that tall people get further in the corporate ladder, women earn less, black people get interviewed for worse jobs, and many other harsh realities. I say realities, because they are true. They happen.

And they are completely irrelevant.

Just because they happen, does not mean they have to happen to you.

We are not getting smarter or hacking the system by knowing about these studies, we are just finding more ways to rationalize our fears and failures. Failing and blaming it on our physique is the ultimate excuse.

I remember when Ben and I were talking about IQ tests. I had just taken one, and after seeing my results (which I’m keeping to myself), I asked his opinion about IQ tests in general. This is what he told me (sort of, it was a long time ago):

“They are pointless. If you are dumb, you’ll only feel bad about yourself. And if you’re smart, what is it going to do for you to know that? It may even be get you to be complacent. We should ignore those things about us that we can’t change, and just work hard and believe in ourselves.”

Same goes for all these studies. Why does it help you to know these facts? The only positive effect that I could see is to motivate those that are on the losing side (and I’m skeptical about that). Feeling good about being a tall white man can’t help your attitude in any way.

There’s a bigger problem with these trends: they are statistics. Majorities. Generalizations. I’m between 5’7″ and 5’8″. Clearly not tall enough to succeed, maybe I should just kill myself. But until I hear of a study that says that 100% of a specific group of people suffers a certain negative effect, I won’t care about them. I just assume I am the exception.

Just believe you are that short, fat, ugly and lucky bastard that will power through.

Really, is there any other way?

The Contradiction

2009-10-23T12:40:41+00:00

The Contradiction

23 October 2009

We are seeing one of the biggest contradictions in history happen before our young eyes:

Pharmaceutical companies are improving the quality of our daily lives life.

Breakthroughs in medicine are letting us survive more accidents and diseases than ever.

Never before we have taken care of our health and fitness, worrying about what we eat, how we sleep and the exercise we do as much as now.

The result of all of this is that we are living longer.

We have more time.

On the other hand…

Corporations are looking for the young gems, trying to find the next genius twenty-something.

Kids finishing highschool and college are starting their own companies as soon as possible, so they can fund the next Facebook.

Education is hurrying us up to have as many degrees as fast as we can in order to be able to compete at the top (whatever that means).

The result of all of this is that we have to run to keep up.

We have less time.

Do you see the contradiction?

We are acting as if life were a race, constantly competing against each other, holding other people’s success as standardized goals. We are worrying about speed instead of direction. Our addiction to productivity and accomplishment is taking away the joy of today’s quality of life.

This would be fine if people were happier, if today’s youth were cheerful about their situation. But that’s not what’s happening, the burden is too heavy for many of them.

This is what happens when you’re constantly moving, constantly comparing, constantly winning: few get ahead, many quit, and many more just get frustrated.

I do believe that we have to invest and work hard when we are young, but we also have to understand that we have a lot of time ahead of us.

Don’t believe what they tell you, there is no rush.

It’s ok to unplug, it’s ok to relax.

It’s ok to slow down when you no longer see what’s happening out the window.

After all, the whole point of living longer is to live better.

Prisons, Fear, and Personal Branding

2009-10-12T12:40:41+00:00

Prisons, Fear, and Personal Branding

12 October 2009

Let’s skip all the positive things about social media that have been mentioned countless times, and criticize it for a change:

Social media is a prison.

It’s unnatural, we are not supposed to like everyone.

But we are trying.

The more you get involved in things like Twitter or Facebook, the more people you connect with, the more polite you have to be. Now, politeness is reaching a ridiculous level, where everything is awesome and everyone is cool.

You can’t tell someone you don’t like them or what they do.

One of the reasons for this, is the word “Friend.” Are we really buying that? Are we really considering everyone as a friend?

The problem with being “friends” with everyone you connect with, is that it makes you a prisoner. Everyone knows that “breaking up” with a real friend in real life, is not easy. Not impossible, but definitely not easy. Usually it happens over time.

But social media friends are not real friends. People shouldn’t feel obliged to keep that act going. People shouldn’t even give explanations. It shouldn’t be that hard.

I blame all those Personal Branding blogs.

Because of them, we are afraid.

Afraid of being honest and direct. Afraid of being human.

God forbid if we say or do something someone doesn’t like and then we are ridiculed by millions.

God forbid if we actually embrace conflict, one of the most natural aspects of man.

God forbid if we actually show ourselves how we really are.

We are lying to ourselves.

We are pretending to care more about the social part than the business/networking part.

Losing readership, customers, followers is not a social fear. It’s a fear of interests, of politics.

True relationships are not about politics.

Social media is all about politics.

The Challenge of Caring

2009-10-05T12:40:41+00:00

The Challenge of Caring

05 October 2009

The problem with being a “result-driven” society, is that we only believe in things that “work.” That’s the challenge non-profits and caring people have to face.

If a lawyer wins a case, he succeeds. It works.

But non-profits don’t function the same way. Their definition of success is different. Many successful non-profits are still fighting poverty, diseases, and many other issues. Maybe they always will.

That’s why they don’t share the glamour other industries have.

Just because a single person or organization can’t achieve complete eradication of the problems they focus on, does that mean that they have failed? Of course not, but society won’t reward them the same way they’ll reward “successful” people.

People who want to change the world don’t care about glamour.

They don’t care if it “doesn’t make sense.”

They don’t care if they “fail.”

It’s not just about results.

It’s about peace of mind.

They can sleep well knowing that it doesn’t have to work.

It has to matter.

Thank You and Good Bye, Seth Godin

2009-10-02T12:40:41+00:00

Thank You and Good Bye, Seth Godin

02 October 2009

Dear Seth,

The day has come for us to part ways: As soon as I publish this, I will unsubscribe from your blog.

It has been a great run, and I feel that I’ve benefited the most in this relationship. But unless I break this up, it will all go to waste.

Before I explain why I’m doing this, I must tell you how much I respect you. I’ve read most of your books, and every single post you’ve ever written. I have nothing but admiration for you, and I know that we will meet in person someday (hopefully because you’ll want to meet me as well).

Now, on to the reason behind my decision.

I’m worried about my generation and me. I’m scared that we are turning into the most informed, knowledgeable group of morons in history.

We are given every answer. We consume data instead of poise questions. There’s a lot of passion and is all being put into repetition. Instead of asking and creating, we are paraphrasing and echoing.

We are worshipers. We accept what you and other big names tell us. We are playing by your rules. We’ve allowed your predictions to replace our imaginations.

We think that we are ahead of the game, when we are actually going through just another safe path. Your path.

I’m sure there are exceptions. And I want to be one of them.

Here’s the thing: the only goal worth so much trouble, is a breakthrough. And I don’t think I’ll create breakthroughs by following anyone in such religious ways. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I should question you more, but I find it hard to do when the admiration starts early, and I don’t think I’m alone in this.

It’s not that we shouldn’t listen and learn from other people (your void will be filled with new material). But the moment the worshiping begins and our own ideas get left behind, we should cut ties.

To quote Alex J. Mann, “I question the edge a tool can provide once it’s become a standard.”

To be ahead of you, I need to leave you.

Thank you for all that you’ve done for me and many others (more than you can imagine).

Wish us luck.

Best,

Carlos Miceli

Time Relationship

2009-09-14T12:40:41+00:00

Time Relationship

14 September 2009

Random thoughts about our relationship with time:

If you let it, time will be ridiculously scarce. If you don’t, you’ll be left behind fast in the high-competitive world. This is either true, or it’s a choice we convinced ourselves we have to take.

It’s ok to take time to do nothing. But only when it’s a conscious decision. Having unplanned moments of “doing nothing” is a burden.

We can’t feel bored anymore. If we do, we think there’s either a problem with our personality or with our habits (this one’s obviously easier to change). This is a good thing.

Accepting that time is scarce is the first step towards full productivity and enjoyment of your decisions. Denying it (e.g.: by procrastinating) leads to more time-wasting.

Narrowing the quantity of our relationships (therefore strengthening the quality) is a great time-saving decision. Weak-ties are useful, but “keeping in touch” is overrated. It’s much better to show up with a concrete need or proposal.

The Common Achievement Effect

2009-09-09T12:40:41+00:00

The Common Achievement Effect

09 September 2009

From a Freakonomics article:

Brazil, a longtime leader in developing alternative energy, has recently discovered a truly gigantic supply of oil. Critics fear that the nation’s forward-looking energy policies have just taken a big step backward and that the country will become just another oil oligarchy.

This is what I call the Common Achievement Effect.

What this does is blind you. You get pumped up because you’re achieving what others consider valuable, and so you lose direction.

Let’s take Twitter for example. More followers and replies can make you forget that numbers don’t matter, that real connections do. When I see people getting more “attention” than me, I can’t help to question my current strategy, if I’m doing things right. Maybe I should do what others are doing.

That’s when we have to step back and remind ourselves to not get trapped into the Common Achievement effect.

It can make you lose sight of your goal, change it, or stop doing altogether.

When you go after achievements that you don’t truly consider valuable, you end up selling out. It’s ok for your goals to evolve, but it’s important to know why.

Bottom Line: Be loyal to your beliefs, they are there for a reason.

What Affects Us

2009-09-08T12:40:41+00:00

What Affects Us

08 September 2009

Kurt Vonnegut talks about our need for drama:

“People have been hearing fantastic stories since time began. The problem is, they think life is supposed to be like the stories.”

This has to make you wonder: how many other aspects of our life have been affected by supposedly “unrelated” industries?

I have reasons to believe that the beauty industry has been the most harmful one in history.

I believe that Hollywood has negatively changed the way both how Americans see many foreign countries, and the way foreign countries see America as well (this has been changing recently, thanks to globalization).

Understanding what affects us is the first step towards objectivity, don’t you think?

Great Teaching Works

2009-09-07T12:40:41+00:00

Great Teaching Works

07 September 2009

It’s not that teaching doesn’t work.

It’s what’s being taught what’s way off.

A bad teacher teaches you knowledge.

A good teacher teaches you passion.

A great teacher teaches you curiosity.

It’s exactly great teachers what we are lacking, so please don’t hold yourself from being one.

Keep Moving

2009-08-31T12:40:41+00:00

Keep Moving

31 August 2009

Competition nowadays involves one key attitude:

Not stopping.

It’s up to you how to keep moving constantly, what matters is that you do it.

Seven random choices:

Improve economically valuable skills.

Start new projects consistently.

Learn all about one thing.

Learn a little about a lot of things (this makes you more interesting too).

Travel and grow your vision of the world.

Physical exercise. Remember, body and mind are one.

Build more meaningful relationships.

Things like going to college or working your ass off at your job, while valuable, are standard. You need an edge. That’s what constant movement outside the regular paths will give you.

Placebo Education

2009-08-23T12:40:41+00:00

Placebo Education

23 August 2009

Tyler Cowen on the education and the placebo effect:

Placebo effects can be very powerful and many supposedly effective medicines do not in fact outperform the placebo. The sorry truth is that no one has compared modern education to a placebo. What if we just gave people lots of face-to-face contact and told them they were being educated?

Seth Says

2009-08-10T12:40:41+00:00

Seth Says

10 August 2009

Some extracts of many posts from Seth Godin:

The #1 cause of an idea that’s not spreading or a business that’s not growing is that they don’t have a committed group of people spreading the word about them. If you treat everyone the same, you’re not increasing the odds that some people will step up on your behalf.
This is the first question to ask someone who is frustrated at the rate their idea is spreading. “Who are you hoping will talk about you?” If you don’t know, it’s unlikely to happen all by itself. On the other hand, if a marketer is smart about finding, courting and delighting the group most likely to spread the idea, it’s time well spent.

If it’s worth doing, it’s probably worth paying to do it very well. If you’re going to do a presentation or write an eBook, spend the money to do it right. If you can’t be there in person (with an eBook, for example), the energy you get from great design really matters.

It’s very difficult to improve your performance on the downhills. I look forward to the uphill parts, because that’s where the work is, the fun is, the improvement is. On the uphills, I have a reasonable shot at a gain over last time. The downhills are already maxed out by the laws of physics and safety.
The best time to do great customer service is when a customer is upset. The moment you earn your keep as a public speaker is when the room isn’t just right or the plane is late or the projector doesn’t work or the audience is tired or distracted. The best time to engage with an employee is when everything falls apart, not when you’re hitting every milestone. And everyone now knows that the best time to start a project is when the economy is lousy.

I have no patience for bureaucracies that proclaim that they are unable to innovate. It’s not that they are unable to do so, it’s that they don’t want to do so. Go ahead, do something impossible.

Often, we’ll decide that something is full, stuffed, untouchable but then some Jello shows up, and suddenly there’s room.
Think about your schedule… is there room for an emergency, an SEC investigation, a server crash? If you took a day off because of the flu, is your business going to go bankrupt? Probably not.
So, if there’s time for an emergency (Jello), why isn’t there time for brilliance, generosity or learning?

Alain de Botton at TED

2009-08-09T12:40:41+00:00

Alain de Botton at TED

09 August 2009

Notes:

Career crisis hit generally on a Sunday evening.

It’s easier now than ever before to make a good living. It’s harder than ever before, to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.

We are surrounded by snobs. A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who your are. the dominant snobbery nowadays is job snobbery. Therefore the iconic question: “What do you do?” The opposite of a snob is your mother: someone who doesn’t care about your achievements.

We are not materialistic per se, we just want the emotional rewards pegged to those things. It’s not the material goods we want, it’s the rewards we want. “The next time you see someone driving a Ferrari, don’t think this is somebody who’s greedy, think this is somebody who is incredibly vulnerable and in need of love.”

Never before have expectations been so high about what humans can achieve within their lifespan. Anyone can do anything (wrong).

We are all basically equal. The problem with this is envy. The closer people are, the more there’s a sense of envy. Modern society has turned the whole world into a school: everyone’s the same, which makes it very stressful. It’s very unlikely that you’ll reach the position bill Gates reached, but it doesn’t “feel” that way.

There are two self-help books today. One tells you that “you can do it”. The other one deals with low self-esteem. Quite a correlation here.

We like to believe in meritocracy. The problem is that if you really believe in a society that those with merit to get to the top, get to the top, then you also believe by implication that those who deserve to get to the bottom, also get to the bottom, and stay there. Your position in life comes merited and deserved, which makes failure seem much more crushing.

In the middle ages, a poor person was unfortunate. Nowadays, a poor person is a loser.

There are more suicides in individualistic countries that in the rest of the world. This happens because people take what happens to them extremely personal. They own their success, but they also own their failure.

Meritocracy is an impossible dream. There are simply too many random factors. Hold your horses when it comes to judging people, you don’t necessarily know what someone’s true value is.

We fear failure because of the judgment and ridicule of others. The number one organ of judgment nowadays is the newspaper, full of people who has messed up their lives.

One alternative is tragedy, tragic arts. We should learn sympathy from tragic arts. It would be insane to call Hamlet a loser.

We have nothing that it’s centered that it’s not human. We worship ourselves.

We think we know what success means. You can’t be successful at everything. Work-life balance is nonsense, you can’t have it all. Any vision of success has to admit what is losing out on.

Our ideas of success are not our own. We are highly open to suggestion. We should not give up on our ideas of success, but we should make sure they are our own.

It’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want, and find out at the end of the journey, that it isn’t in fact what you wanted all along.

Family conversational skills

2009-08-09T12:40:41+00:00

Family conversational skills

09 August 2009

I believe that people with big families, used to big meetings, are better at having an engaged conversation in any topic. This may happen because politeness and looking like you’re interested in what others are saying is a must in these gatherings. Even if you don’t know them, or have nothing in common, one learns as a kid to shut up and listen a lot, even if you find boring what they are saying. Everyone puts an act. Not all family members “love” each other, but we act as we do.

Jason Fried at Omaha Big Omaha 2009

2009-08-08T12:40:44+00:00

Jason Fried at Omaha Big Omaha 2009

08 August 2009

Notes:

Failure is not cool: The phrase “fail early, fail often” is overused. Failure is actually not necessary. Failure is not a character-building thing and it’s not a prerequisite to success. Focus on the things that are going right and parlay that.

Planning is overrated: Business plans are just guesses. You can’t predict what’s going to happen. What matters is what you’re doing right now. You know more about something after you’re done with it.

Interruption is the enemy of collaboration: A big open loft space does not necessarily mean more collaboration and higher productivity. With so many interruptions, workdays become work moments.

Try this in your company or department. Every Thursday, nobody can talk to each other. Email and IM and other tools are fine but no talking. See if it’s the most productive day that week. Or that month.

You create valuable byproducts: When you make something, you make something else. We are all making byproducts. When building houses, the sawdust created from all the lumber was initially thought of as waste. Then, people found multiple useful applications for it and it ended up being a valuable byproduct, sold for money.

When 37 Signals built Basecamp, the byproduct was Ruby on Rails and they didn’t even know it at the time.

Sometimes the valuable byproduct is knowledge.

Share like a chef: Emeril Lagasse, Mario Batali, Bobby Flay. They share what they do on TV. They tell you exactly what ingredients they use and show you step-by-step how to do what they do. If you want to do it at home, you can buy their cookbook for a fraction of the cost of a single meal. This doesn’t make them less money, it makes them more. More people know about them. More people buy the cookbooks. More people eat at the restaurants.

Traditional business thinking would shut down this blatant sharing of intellectual capital.

The best thing you can do is share your knowledge.

What is your cookbook? Publish it. It helps you…

Build an audience: Every company has customers. Great companies have fans. At the least, you need an audience.

90,000 people read the 37 Signals blog everyday. It takes time to build but it doesn’t cost them a penny to reach this large captive audience.

Focus on the things that don’t change: What are the core, important things in your business that don’t change?

Amazon invests in distribution. Shipping. Customer service. Price. These things will be important to their business in 10 years.

37 Signals makes web-based software. They focus on making it fast, easy and usable. It may not be sexy but that is what will be important to their business in 10 years.

Ideas are immortal. Inspiration is perishable: We all have ideas. Ideas are immortal.

Inspirations however, are like fresh fruit or milk. They are very perishable. If you’re lucky enough to be inspired, do it. Do it now. The most energy you’ll ever have about an idea is at the beginning. You can’t sustain it.

Michael Wesch on "new media politics of authenticity"

2009-08-08T12:40:41+00:00

Michael Wesch on “new media politics of authenticity”

08 August 2009

Notes:

“In the midst of a fabulous array of historically unprecedented and utterly mind-blogging stimuli……whatever.”

Why do all people think they deserve to be stars? American Idol phenomenon.

This generation is the most miserable one, because we all think we are the next american idol, and then when we’re not, we get shocked.

We know ourselves through our relations with others. New media creates new ways of relating to others. Therefore, new media creates new ways of knowing ourselves.

I don’t talk to you, but “this” (webcam, text case, etc.). Our conversations are mediated. The medium shapes the message, the conversation, the possibilities for identity construction, and ultimately for self-awareness.

“Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.” – Lev Grossman

Anonymity + physical distance + rare and ephemeral dialogue = hatred as public performance

Anonymity + physical distance + rare and ephemeral dialogue =freedom to experience humanity without fear or anxiety

Media do not just distance us. They connect us in different ways, that can sometimes feel distant, but sometimes that distance allows us to connect more deeply than ever before. New forms of community create new forms of self-understanding.

The Better Choice

2009-07-22T10:00:00+00:00

The Better Choice

22 July 2009

Yesterday, Ben Casnocha blogged about the Best vs. Better debate. Here’s an excerpt, but I recommend you to read the full post.

“I’m more interested in helping 7’s become 8’s than helping 3’s become 6’s. I’d rather have a smaller impact on a very talented person than help an illiterate person learn how to read. The self-interested explanation for this is that it’s more stimulating to me to work with someone who’s talented. The altruistic explanation is that some gifted people will use their gifts to help all of mankind.”

Personally, I’m with Ben, but I’m not saying it’s the right choice. Probably neither is. The world needs both kinds of people.

So, which are you?

Do you prefer to make good what’s bad? Or to make great what’s good?

If you work for a non-profit or travel abroad to help people in need, you’ll be (or should) at peace with yourself, but the impact and satisfaction you’ll have it’s very small compared to the amount of work left to do.

If you dedicate your life to fulfil your intellectual hunger, surround yourself with brilliant people and work towards ambitious personal goals, you’ll have privileged achievements. But what will be your impact on the world and people’s lives? (The altruistic explanation doesn’t satisfy me).

Balance is important, but one ultimately leans towards one.

When you do, make sure you understand what you’re getting into, because the pay offs are substantially different.