Nathanael

Calling & The Story of Charlotte's Web

noreply@blogger.com (Nathanael Yellis) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:34:00 +0000

By his late twenties, E. B. White was a well-paid writer for the new and rising star weekly, The New Yorker. How did he get there?

Calling certainly starts with who you are, but it's found through what you do.

White edited the college newspaper at Cornell, but after graduation he found work in the advertising business, as a poorly paid and often part-time copy writer. He viewed the job as a means to an end: he continually submitted short paragraphs, poems, and other small pieces to the popular compilation columnists of his day. After he published a few short stories, The New Yorker's publisher sought him out. He started as part-time writer but soon became a key author for the weekly magazine.

He knew he was supposed to be a writer and kept at it, even when his best efforts resulted in uncredited (and unpaid) bits in other people's columns. That's how you find your calling. Do it!

White's calling was not an overtly predestined route. He found calling in hundreds of small and innate decisions.

Want to be a political writer? Write political stuff and submit it. Want to do something in research? Do and publish your research. The barriers to publication are almost non-existent. Apple released a publisher that lets you create and sell books on the iBook store for free. You will find your calling in concrete steps.

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And also this: while he was an influential columnist and essayist, it was his downeast Maine farm that gave him inspiration for Charlotte's Web. Summering in and later moving to Maine made his work culturally meaningful. That's cool. Maine is cool.

Private Equity?

noreply@blogger.com (Nathanael Yellis) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:21:00 +0000

Have you seen the coverage of Mitt Romney's work at Bain Capital? Wondering what an honest assessment of reality is?

Read this. (It's Aswath Damodaran: Private Equity: Hero or Villain?)

Key quote:

Is private equity good or bad for the markets? How about for the economy? And for society?For some of you, this entire post may be missing the point of the criticism, which is that private equity investors are job killers, not job creators. To me, that criticism is misplaced, because you cannot measure the success of a business by the jobs it creates or saves, but by the value it creates for its stockholders, by making money, and for its customers, by providing a needed product or service to customers. In the process, if it is successful, it will hire people and create jobs.

Key video embed:

Ethos Publishes Etch (& Me)

noreply@blogger.com (Nathanael Yellis) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:12:00 +0000

Check out the new magazine from Ethos Publications: Etch.

My real world debate serious, along with a bunch of other, more helpful stuff is available for free in the first issue [PDF link]. I recommend this for communicators of all stripes, and specifically debaters.

Christmas Vacation

noreply@blogger.com (Nathanael Yellis) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 23:14:00 +0000

What better way to spend the holidays than skiing and reading? Hot tub sessions and a super fantastic soundtrack made it more awesome than I deserve.

Reading

Remarkable for what was and what could have been, the Klondike gold rush saw a hundred thousand people set off for a barely survivable settlement just under the arctic circle. Reading about their epic journeys, fortunes, and failures made me want to grow a nasty beard and lug a ton of supplies into the wilderness. (That is true except for the literal ton of stuff.)

I learned more about modern middle America from this book about a highway than from any of the books I've read about middle America itself. The author gets at our soul by talking about towns, roads, and the people that fight for and against them. Fun stuff.

Interestingly, both of these books were by magazine people, one a writer the other an editor. They both had strong facts, compelling stories, and didn't waste words. More modern book writers should be like them.

The author of this book is very well read. He traces an anti-establishment thesis, that the Bible shaped western culture, through almost every aspect of western culture. As an Indian, he brings a unique outsider's perspective to the discussion, enabling an insightful comparative study of cultures not shaped by the Bible. Attention liberal arts teachers and students: you should be able to write books like this, or at least think along these lines.

Skiing
Brought to you by GoPro2HD-Awesome:

I'm going to go think about my resolutions over a stiff drink. Probably the one about avoiding alcoholism.

Book: You Are the Message

noreply@blogger.com (Nathanael Yellis) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 02:39:00 +0000

Earlier this year, I noticed that Paul Ryan had a pretty big "communications coaching" expense on one of his disclosure forms. This was right as he produced the videos on his roadmap, the ones where he went from wonk to convincing communicator. Clearly the help was worth the money.

I emailed the coach with a few questions, and he kindly replied with a suggestion to read his book.

I did. Here's my review: people that communicate with others need to do what this book says.

Mom's Legacy

noreply@blogger.com (Nathanael Yellis) — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 01:13:00 +0000

My mother would have been 59 today.

I'm thinking of course about her death and her absence, as I do frequently. But this morning I was struck by something more consequential: her legacy.

When she was in her early thirties, Mom made a significant choice. This put her on a hero's journey. Now that she's gone, her choice is her legacy.

When I was about to enter kindergarten, she pulled my brother out of the private school he'd attended for two years. She homeschooled us. I, of course, had no idea what was going on. As a former preschool and elementary school teacher, my mother's parenting had already converged with teaching. Also, I had no idea that a few short years earlier, authorities had arrested parents for doing that.

I'm not sure if she knew then the impact of her choice. Over the next few years it became clear: my Mom would spend almost every waking moment investing time, energy, and thought into her 4, then 5, then 6 children. We are her legacy.

By the middle of the 90s, we all knew we were different. We came up with easy to say explanations of homeschooling, which we'd recite to the new librarian, hairdresser, and grocery store clerk. My suave older brother and genius younger brother quelled doubts with exceeding politeness or recitations of literature. My badge of homeschool honor was different.

Prior to age 8, I could barely read. After 10, math was exceedingly hard. Mom's choice to homeschool all of us meant that I could catch up on reading. From then on I was well above average on the English half of standardized tests. Mom's choice to homeschool let me stay behind in math, at least until graduate school: during my MBA, my best grades were in the finance classes.

Her choice, legacy is us.

________
*Of course, my Dad made the choice to homeschool as well, but it was Mom that spent her waking hours parenting and teaching us.

Twitter Gold

noreply@blogger.com (Nathanael Yellis) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 17:19:00 +0000

I would be happy to sell you today's gold at yesterday's price.
— Nathanael Yellis (@inathanael) December 12, 2011

A Radical Thought: No Office Emails

noreply@blogger.com (Nathanael Yellis) — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 23:30:00 +0000

CEO Thierry Breton of the French information technology company said only 10 percent of the 200 messages employees receive per day are useful and 18 percent is spam. That’s why he hopes the company can eradicate internal emails in 18 months, forcing the company’s 74,000 employees to communicate with each other via instant messaging and a Facebook-style interface.

More from ABC.

Considering that most emails are either news bits (could be posted to a Facebook wall or other asynchronous method), or rapid fire conversations (more suited to IM), this seems like a smart move. But because people are creatures of habit, the ending of email needs to be a top-down mandate. I wonder how the email-restricted workers feel about this?

Spotting Cultural Trends

noreply@blogger.com (Nathanael Yellis) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 23:30:00 +0000

It takes a strong eye and a little courage to write about cultural trends. But Katrina Onstad gets a few just write in this fun NY Times Magazine piece.

Here are some of the best ones:

...an aggravating boho archetype: the dreamy, young hipster whose days are filled with coffee, curios and disposable enchantments...

... the Etsy-shopping, Wes Anderson-quoting, McSweeney’s-reading, coastal-living category of upscale urban bohemia that flourished in the aughts...

And this whole paragraph just nails it:

I understand this, at least in theory. The urban bohemian irks precisely because his or her quirky individuality is just part of a different kind of uniformity, where the uniform happens to be a bushy beard or Zooey Deschanel bangs rather than country-club khakis. Twee fascinations with childhood innocence can mask an unwillingness to tackle life’s darker quandaries. Who wouldn’t be annoyed by a guy who, say, finds a cracked milk bottle, makes a film about it, then silk screens it on a T-shirt and names his band Milk Bottle? The stakes are low. The results are soon forgotten.

I don't necessarily buy that the piece's character magically doesn't fall into all these traps. But the words about the traps are wonderfully spot on.

Off to grab some coffee and read the preface to a new worldview...

Book: Where Good Ideas Come From

noreply@blogger.com (Nathanael Yellis) — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 14:51:00 +0000

This great book will help you build practices that generate ideas. Subtitled "The Natural History of Innovation," Steven Johnson finds seven core methods of innovation in nature and history, providing concrete suggestions for personal and organizational use.

Here's the money quote:

The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let other build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled web.

Read This: The Lost Decade

noreply@blogger.com (Nathanael Yellis) — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 15:16:00 +0000

Thanks to my friend and colleague David Azerrad, I have a print copy of the most recent Claremont Review of Books. The Lost Decade is masterful, a thorough understanding of our most recent decade and the choice facing America now. I strongly recommend it to those thinking politically:

At home, the American people are less free, less prosperous, more bitterly divided, and much less hopeful in 2011 than in 2001 because a decade of the War on Terror brought a government ever bigger and more burdensome, as well as "security" measures that impede the innocent rather than focusing on wrongdoers. Our ruling class justified its ever-larger role in America's domestic life by redefining war as a never-ending struggle against unspecified enemies for abstract objectives, and by asserting expertise far above that of ordinary Americans. After 9/11, far from deliberating on the best course to take, our rulers stayed on autopilot and hit the throttles.

We must, then, understand what our bipartisan ruling class wrought in international and domestic affairs during the post-9/11 war, and how differently the decade might have turned out had our rulers pursued the proper ends of domestic and international statecraft.

Read Angelo M. Codevilla's article The Lost Decade here.

noreply@blogger.com (Nathanael Yellis) — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 18:10:00 +0000

Lunch and learn:

I like this guy's clear thinking. And his presentation style matches it.

I covered Rework, his book, previously on this blog. I still highly recommend it.

eNewsletter from Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton

noreply@blogger.com (Nathanael Yellis) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 21:08:00 +0000

I love getting email. This one not so much:

I loathe this. Let me count the ways:

Sender line: by only including an email address, it's impossible to see who this is from. Unlike the emails from my friends and colleagues, who have their names in the sender line.
From address: even mass email marketers should send from a real address and monitor it for replies. Isn't that why Members of Congress have interns? None of this "donotreply@" business.
Subject: related to the sender error, the subject is about as boring as possible. It has to have my Representative's name, but what is an "eNewsletter"? Why say "come to our town hall meeting"? That's actually interesting to constituents.
Over 900 pixels wide.
No font differentiation: be nice to my tired eyeballs. Load up a headline, right justify the body paragraph, and make it work at a glance. I have to strain to get this.

But I do love some things from this email. I like the phone number and specific details of the event.

Most importantly, I never asked to receive emails on "environment or energy issues."

Yikes.

Would Anyone Want to Work Here?

noreply@blogger.com (Nathanael Yellis) — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 23:43:00 +0000

From a job posting:

This individual must have THICK SKIN, this is a very busy office and there is no time to spend congratulating people on a job well done.

If you have no time for telling people they are doing a good job, something is wrong.

How to introduce an unfavorable idea

noreply@blogger.com (Nathanael Yellis) — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 21:54:00 +0000

This is a video of someone presenting an unpopular, generally opposed idea. He does so with great skill, especially at the introduction. Notice how, in the first three minutes of the video, he summarizes the prevailing notion, explains it as a series of logical connections, and then provides a perspective that makes those logical connections unfathomable leaps. He's caught our attention and readied us to hear the rest of his case. Notice how long it takes him to say that what we think is wrong and how much force he brings to that statement. Something to consider the next time you face an unfriendly crowd.

Rory Stewart: Time to end the war in Afghanistan | Video on TED.com

Creative Process

noreply@blogger.com (Nathanael Yellis) — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 23:00:00 +0000

I met Abigail Halpin at a PechaKucha in Portsmouth NH last June. She told the story of illustrating a children's book. I concluded two things: 1) you have to be really cool to illustrate a children's book and 2) peeks into the creative process are super cool.

Now, she's made the video below. Watch an artist at work:

Sketch from Abigail Halpin on Vimeo.

Scorecard

noreply@blogger.com (Nathanael Yellis) — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 13:03:00 +0000

I love filling out a baseball scorecard. Something about the intersection of rules and live game action, recorded in an historic format, is awesome.

I like the way baseball's scorecard is standard, and has been forever, but different people record the data in different ways.

Part of my job is preparing scorecard-like materials for our organization and the Congress, both as means for accountability. What makes a good scorecard? What are common flaws?

Google+

noreply@blogger.com (Nathanael Yellis) — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 13:03:00 +0000

Thanks to my new favorite person, I'm using Google+.

First thought: it's like Reader recommended items, but better.

Second thought: Buzz? Are you serious?

Book: It's Not About the Bike

noreply@blogger.com (Nathanael Yellis) — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 22:46:00 +0000

The Lance Armstrong of this book is bold, brash, and courageous. He's certainly not the kind of person I am, but that gives his story instructive power. Instead of wondering if I like Lance Armstrong, while reading I asked "what can Lance Armstrong teach me?"

He exemplifies tenaciousness. And honesty.

For those of us that know cancer, his honesty about being diagnosed and treated is powerful. I lost my mother to cancer almost a year ago. Every word of the cancer passages resonated with me, from the technical details to the soul-baring emotions. Sharing these stories is a somber, wonderful gift.

Book: The Weight of Glory

noreply@blogger.com (Nathanael Yellis) — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 18:38:00 +0000

The Weight of Glory could be a lesson in the unity of knowledge and practical wisdom. CS Lewis, noted for his scholarly approach to faith, struck me as uniquely able to tell me how to live. After the magnificent essay on the nature of humanity from which this book is titled, the other essays in this book are practical.

In The Inner Ring he describes the universal human desire to be one of the cool kids. Break that desire, Lewis warns, or else you will be broken by it. He then offers inspiration:

If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it.

This is true.

Introduce the next speaker like this

noreply@blogger.com (Nathanael Yellis) — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 20:44:00 +0000

This was witty. It enchanted the audience. Above all, it honored the speaker. Sure 8 minutes is a bit long, but wouldn't you rather this than a few mumbled bio lines, stammering uhs, and unmemorable accolades?

Switch

noreply@blogger.com (Nathanael Yellis) — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 22:23:00 +0000

When the Heath brothers write, it should be obvious that everyone must read and follow their advice. Even people only remotely connected to the subject matter stand to benefit. Thus Made to Stick is a must-read for people who communicate ideas. Switch is similarly a must-read for people who want to change anything.

I mean those sweeping generalizations to include everyone. These Heaths are genius.

Genius, above all else, seems to be derived from discipline. The Heaths' genius is demonstrated in the way Switch rigorously follows the communications patterns they offered in Made to Stick. If you study how Switch works, you'll be able to intuit much of Stick. For example, they don't offer a series of vague ideas, evidence, and some conclusions. They present the whole thing as a memorable package--bite-sized, sticky chunks, all connected to the main idea. Similarly, the evidence is sticky and the conclusions a sticky idea, sticky evidence, and sticky, applicable conclusions.

I wonder what kind of childhood experience these two had. Whiteboard-assisted brainstorming instead of backyard tackling? Lame, but such probably gave us their collective genius.

Aside from the genius of the authors, Switch reminded me to ensure my action steps are based on clear evidence and designed with a clear end in mind. These are the subtle but profound lessons of experience, encapsulated well in book form.

Reflection: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

noreply@blogger.com (Nathanael Yellis) — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 15:50:00 +0000

I found the examined life in this book's approach and commentary.

The sort of thorough examination, consideration, and explanation in Maintenance, if found in your life, would demonstrate deep meaning. By putting his life on the table, considering the relative virtue of choices, and explaining it all in the light of philosophy, the author provides an excellent example of the examined life.

Whether his conclusions are agreeable is almost beside the point. The act of squaring life, morality, and philosophy provides a challenging pattern.

Thus Maintenance is not only an autobiography, moral handbook, and treatise, it's a method of interrelated explanations. While it seems like a manifesto, its pattern was more challenging than its conclusion. I frequently put it down to attempt similar thoughts about my own life. Rather than adopt his maxims, I saw the value in overtly constructing my own. Rather than believe his conclusions, I saw the need to make my own.

It's in those three streams, or rather at their intersection, that life is lived. Good decisions are fully informed by one's history, conscience, and philosophy. Maintenance thought through each of those elements fully. This type of thought is prerequisite to living rightly; or, rather, the good life is the working out of the three.

The excerpt below demonstrates the analysis Maintenance gives to ordinary life events. Instead of assuming Chris is tired, the author lets himself, and us, learn to live rightly. This sort of consideration is often a vital missing component of contemporary life:

Up ahead all of Chris's movements seem tired and angry. He stumbles on things, lets branches tear at him, instead of pulling them to one side.

I'm sorry to see this. Some blame can be put on the YMCA camp he attended for two weeks just before we started. From what he's told me, they made a big ego thing out of the whole outdoors experience. A proof-of-manhood thing. He began in a lowly class they were careful to point out was rather disgraceful to be in . . . original sin. Then he was allowed to prove himself with a long series of accomplishments--swimming, rope tying . . . he mentioned a dozen of them, but I've forgotten them.

It made the kids at camp much more enthusiastic and cooperative when they had ego goals to fulfill, I'm sure, but ultimately that kind of motivation is destructive. Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster. Now we're paying the price. When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it's a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the feat that the image is not true and someone will find out. That's never the way.

Phaedrus wrote a letter from India about a pilgrimage to hole Mount Kailas, the source of the Ganges and the above of Shiva, high in the Himalayas, in the company of a holy man and his adherents.

He never reached the mountain. After the third day he gave up, exhausted, and the pilgrimage went on without him. He said he had the physical strength but that physical strength wasn't enough. He had the intellectual motivation but that wasn't enough either. He didn't think he had been arrogant but thought that he was undertaking the pilgrimage to broaden his experience, to gain understanding for himself. He was trying to use the mountain for his own purposes and the pilgrimage too. He regarded himself as the fixed entity, not the pilgrimage or the mountain, and thus wasn't ready for it. He speculated that the other pilgrims, the ones who reached the mountain, probably sense the holiness of the mountain so intensely that each footstep was an act of devotion, an act of submission to this holiness. The holiness of the mountain infused into their own spirits enabled them to endure far more than anything he, with his greater physical strength, could take.

To the untrained eye ego-climbing and selfless climbing may appear identical. Both kinds of climbers place one foot in front of the other. Both breathe in and out at the same rate. Both stop when tired. Both go forward when rested. But what a difference! The ego-climber is like an instrument that's out of adjustment. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. He's likely to miss a beautiful passage of sunlight through the trees. He does on when the sloppiness of his step shows he's tired. He rests at odd times. He looks up the trail trying to see what's ahead even when he knows what's ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions and when he talks his talk is forever about somewhere else, something else. He's here but he's not here. He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then it will be "here." What he's looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn't want that because it is all around him. Every step's an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.

That seems to be Chris's problem now.

Why I Just Unsubscribed from Hulu Plus

noreply@blogger.com (Nathanael Yellis) — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 16:11:00 +0000

Wow.

noreply@blogger.com (Nathanael Yellis) — Tue, 31 May 2011 23:54:00 +0000

A tremendous performance. Allow Sarah Kay to inspire you right now, via TED 2011:

There's a lot of technique, a lot of preparation, a lot in this talk. But, really, it's about moving your audience, and she nails it.