I don’t understand why people are so insistent on remembering Paterno in a particular light. I’m still shocked by the whole story, and I have a lot of difficulty and clashing emotions contrasting the Paterno I knew about with the Paterno I just learned about. I can’t summon a single emotion that encapsulates these two very dichotomous narratives. The bad doesn’t cancel out the good, and the good doesn’t cancel out the bad. It is what it is; he was who he was.

People are complex creatures. I honor the good he did and I loathe what he allowed to happen, all at the same time.

A few days in I got my first review. I was a wreck. I packed my backpack as if I were paying homage to the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The most palatable meals I cooked were the ones that were burned beyond recognition. I might have been able to properly affix a rainfly to a tent, but I’ll never know because nobody trusted me to keep their tent dry. You know that guy who played on your middle school basketball team who had great hustle and personality but couldn’t make a layup? The guy the coach wanted to do well, but would never take chances with in the 4th quarter? That was me at the start of my first NOLS course.

My second review provided a laundry list as long as the first one. “Is there anything I’m doing right?”, I fished. The instructor looked me squarely in the eyes and told me that I’m accepting and responding to their criticisms very well – certainly better than anybody else on the trip, and maybe better than any other student he’s had. If I were young and stupid, I’d have thought this was the most condescending thing he could possibly say to me. Oh wait, I was young and stupid, and that’s exactly what I thought. Miraculously aware that acting somber or exploding would be of no value, I swallowed and said “thanks.”

I later came to understand that my instructor had actually paid me one of the most gracious compliments I’d ever receive. Over the next week, my skills improved — not hugely, but demonstrably. I continued receiving feedback and making iterative progress over the duration of the course, and it eventually became clear to me, and to others, that I had more than paid off my skills deficit.

The reason I was so offended at first is that I thought that taking criticism was the standard of a student in a student-teacher relationship. To me it was like force-praising a bad teacher by saying “you do a great job showing up to class everyday.” That’s what you’d say to a teacher who had no teaching skills. But I quickly learned that my analogy was flawed. Taking criticism was a skill in itself. There were students who did not take feedback well. To this day I feel very sorry for them, because they lost out on 75 days worth of fantastic wilderness lessons.

And here’s why: nobody was willing to criticize these people after the first week because everybody knew it would lead to conflict. And so by the mountaineering section, when I was getting advanced critiques on navigating through a whiteout (very, very difficult), the more defensive folks were just trotting along, with the same navigation skillsets they had when they started.

Eventually I returned to civilization, and a while later I got my first job. I learned that people function exactly the same way in the office. I’ve seen people at work who take criticism well and respond with a thank you. They continue to get constructive feedback because people feel safe giving it to them. I’ve also seen people who explode in the way that I miraculously avoided despite being young and stupid. I feel sad when I see people do this, because I know that when everybody else is learning the advanced techniques for navigating their corporate worlds (very, very difficult), these people will be trotting along, the same as they were when they started.

Do everything you can to be in that first group of people. No matter how harsh or personal or crushing someone’s feedback feels, take it constructively and with the best of intentions. Show them gratitude for having the courage to help you in a way that was probably uncomfortable for them. If you don’t respond positively, they’ll never be honest with you again and you’ll miss out on a lot of invaluable learning opportunities.

A similar problem occurs when authors write for companies instead of people. I see this most at business-to-business companies, where the customer is another company rather than a human. It’s important to remember that it’s always a human who will be reading your copy.

One way to make that easier is to imagine the people who are reading your copy. Conjuring that image forces you to speak to them on their terms. I think a leading cause of corporate nonsense speak is the failure of copywriters to personify the audience they’re talking to.

For the benefit of my Executive Speaking classmates, many of whom work at big business-to-business companies, I decided to make my final semester speech on this topic.

The slides contain several examples, citing both successes and failures. You can download them or view them below.

Credits

A few of my examples came from UX Designer Natasha Lloyd. Specific citations are at the bottom of each applicable slide.

Download link.

I wrote this song for the purpose of trying GarageBand for iPad this evening. I used vocals, guitars and virtual instruments in ways that I believe most people would use them, and I capped the project at two hours.

Composition

The above song was recorded entirely on a first generation iPad. It consists of eight virtual tracks: two recorded acoustic guitars, two recorded vocal tracks, two recorded electric guitars, a virtual bass, and a virtual drumkit. All audio tracks were recorded with the iPad’s internal condenser microphone.

Recording Process

The two acoustic guitar tracks are panned about 75% left and 75% right. The left is strumming chords; the right is alternating between chords and arpeggiated notes. I chose the “small room” preset for both to provide ambiance.

The two vocal tracks are separate takes of the same lines, panned about two thirds left and two thirds right. This process provides a full sound without requiring any unnatural reverb (Elliott Smith is perhaps best known for using this technique; John Lennon and Bon Iver have also employed it).

The two electric guitar tracks are panned about 60% each way. These are not virtual instruments; they are real electric guitars played through a Fender Pro Junior amp. I struggled to maintain a consistent volume because even at 15 watts my Pro Junior was too loud for the iPad’s internal mic. I got the levels manageable with a makeshift damper made from tissues.

I created the virtual bass lines by plucking individual strings from chords in the selected key. Non-musicians will appreciate this method because they can improvise without the risk of playing out of key. Musicians, and particularly composers, will find this limiting. There were a couple times when I wanted to create dissonance, and had to change the key in order to pluck an intermediate semitone.

The virtual drumkit is by far the most fun part of creating songs. GarageBand provides two ways to lay down your beats:

The first is a clickable drumset that plays the drum you tap at the time you tap it. Overdubs are allowed within a single track, so you can focus on one drum per take and get the timing right. If you have a specific drumbeat in your head, this is the method you’ll need to use to translate it for the virtual drumset. GarageBand lets you quantize virtual instruments (up to the nearest 64th note), so you can stay on rhythm even if your hands aren’t perfect.

The other means of entry is a grid onto which you place drums. The grid ranges from simple to complex and from quiet to loud. If you want to experiment with beats or just get a rhythm down to record with (metronomes are boring), this is the quickest way to get up and running. You can also click the die to generate a random beat.

Impressions

GarageBand has found its interface (spoiler: it comes in a 9.7″ version, but not 13″, 15″ or 17″). Buttons that you actually push. Sliders that you actually slide. Drums that you actually hit. Good riddance, mouse; you will not be missed. It feels like this is what the iPad was made to do.

But the impressiveness of the interface is only half of why GarageBand for iPad is so great. The other half is that Apple has proven that the whole of the iPad is greater than the sum of its parts. It isn’t that the GarageBand keyboard has better sensitivity and sound than Pianist (though it does), or that the virtual guitar is easier to use than Air Guitar (though it is), or that the beat sequencers are easier to use than Korg’s iElectribe (though they are), or that the drums sound better than those of JamPad (though they do), or that the recording interface is smoother than FourTrack’s (though it is). It’s that all of these things are now integrated perfectly into part of a larger whole. It is an all-in-one-piece music creation suite, and it is the most capable one on the market.

The closest competition it has is the Boss Micro BR, which trails far behind in several respects. GarageBand is easy and intuitive to use while the Micro BR’s functionality is arcane; GarageBand supports eight tracks while the Micro BR supports only four; GarageBand provides several virtual instruments while the Micro BR provides none. The Micro BR is smaller (5.5″x3.25×0.875″), which makes it slightly more portable, but this also contributes to its poor usability. My Micro BR has served me well for years. Tomorrow it goes up on Craigslist.

Room for Improvement

I’d like to see an input level adjustment in the next version. Controlling individual track volumes at playback time is not sufficient for this purpose, especially for songs that vary from quiet vocals to loud, distorted guitars.

A more traditional drum machine interface (with individual tracks for each drum laid out on a timeline) would be helpful for creating drumbeats that exist in my head. The touch sensitivity of the on-screen drumset is impressive but imperfect. It’s frustrating to get through 14 out of 16 measures and then miss a beat.

The condenser mic in my iPad (again, first generation) is acceptable, but leaves something to be desired, particularly on the high end. I don’t know if this mic has been upgraded in the iPad2, but something of higher quality would be much appreciated. In the mean the Blue Yeti is an excellent USB microphone, and works with the camera connection kit. Obviously, this makes the setup much less portable.

A Note on iPad vs iPad 2 Performance

GarageBand’s performance on my first generation iPad was noticeably but not painfully sluggish. The most frequent lag occurs when switching between the track and recording screens. It lasts for about one second.

There is another lag, longer in duration but less frequent in occurrence, that I ran into seemingly arbitrarily. A box will pop up that says “Optimizing Performance” and you will have to wait 15-20 seconds while it chugs along. I encountered this four or five times over the course of two hours. I suspect what GarageBand is doing is loading audio content into and out of RAM. If that’s the case, then performance should be better on the iPad 2, which has 512MB as opposed to the 256MB of the original.

TL;DR

GarageBand for iPad is the most complete and capable all-in-one music creation package available anywhere. It’s fun, it’s easy, and it’s effective. At $4.99, it has replaced my $220 Micro BR.

Whatever the kind, leaders have three priceless skills: they’re doers, they persuade, and they inspire.

Be a Doer

This is widely accepted as an absolute necessity in startup circles, so I’ll leave it at that and let you read 37signals’ take on it if you want an explanation.

Persuasion

To persuade is to find common ground among your audience, anchor into it, and use it to lead them stepwise through your train of thought, arriving with you at your conclusion or solution. It is a very logically-grounded process, almost entirely syllogistic, but with enough color along the way to keep people interested and motivated to take the next step with you.

At SAP I had the pleasure of working alongside Bob McCarty, an excellent persuasive leader. Sprint planning meetings were often a mess, with total incongruence between business needs and engineering needs. Management wanted more features out of a codebase that wasn’t ready for it, and engineering wanted to take enormous amounts of time to fix things that probably weren’t worth fixing.

Bob, a senior engineer, had a natural knack not only for seeing what was most important for the company, but for walking the rest of us through his thinking in a way that engendered a room full of “oh yeah, yeah!”s. We all knew where we were, but it took a Bob to see where we needed to get to. There was nothing magical about how Bob operated; he just had a lot of foresight and logical consistency, and used those things to build trust and get everybody on the same page.

Inspiration

Inspiration is taking something that seems impossible and making people believe they can accomplish it anyway. This lends itself to metaphor and abstract expression more than persuasion does, but fluffy thinkers are not off the hook: to sell your case, you have to convince your audience that they can really achieve this seemingly impossible task. If you don’t convince them, you’ll come across as naive and be ignored.

The proven way to convince someone that the impossible is possible is to paint them a picture of it and give them something tangible to do. Unlike persuasive leadership, you don’t need to guide them all the way to the solution; you just need to show them what success looks like, and give them an actionable first step that they feel puts them on the correct trajectory.

Obama, for instance, when running for President in 2008, convinced supporters that America could pass health care reform. It didn’t take a cynic to find this daunting. Health care has long been rigged by lobbyists on both sides, and Hillarycare suffered a demoralizing defeat in the mid-90s. These facts were inescapable in the minds of reform supporters, leaving them no reason for optimism.

But Obama was still able to sell it. He painted a picture of what success looked like, by speaking of an America that no longer sends the sick home from hospitals or the disabled into bankruptcy. He pointed to his history of delivering on seemingly impossible legal agendas, and he explained that his bipartisan methods were the first step towards bringing that change to Washington. With that, he gave them a first step – to vote for him.

When to Use What

When should you persuade and when should you inspire? Here’s a good rule of thumb: when a path from a problem to a solution is clear to you, persuade your audience to follow that path. If a solution is unclear, inspire them to find it with you.

Bob was able to map out a full solution to our sprint planning problem in his head and walk us through it. Obama, on the other hand, could not have possibly foreseen the political calculus that would exist two years later, so he opted instead to inspire us to get there with him.

When you’re leading others, consider which approach makes more sense. For an early, idea-stage startup, inspirational leadership will keep people’s minds open and ambitious. On the other hand, if you’ve found your revenue model, it’s probably time to paint the complete picture of what success looks like and explain to your team how they fit into that picture.

Credits

I became aware of most of this while taking Professor Steven D. Cohen‘s public speaking class in 2010. Steven deserves credit for much of what I’ve explained above, and I recommend his class to anybody who wants to become a better leader, speaker or writer.