Recently, Steve Pavlina wrote an article entitle, The Value of Ideas. In the article, he talks about how ideas are cheap, the real work comes in implementation. This is an area I wholeheartedly agree with, as for every 100 “idea-people” there might only be one or two that can actually bring things into reality. Ideas are easy, work is hard.

While I agree that ideas are cheaper than implementation, I think the actual situation is a bit more complicated. One of the factors complicating this is the fact that great ideas do have a lot of value. The problem is, it’s incredibly difficult to see the difference between a great idea and a mediocre one in advance.

Technology in Entrepreneurship

This last term I finished an entrepreneurship course entitled, Technology in Entrepreneurship. The goal of the class was to find theories that could help explain why some new innovations are wildly successful (iPod) while others fail miserably (Segway).

After going through the entire class and working through several concept proposals, my biggest learning point was that great ideas do have value. The difference from and iPod and a Segway wasn’t just that Steve Jobs and his engineers worked a lot harder to implement the iPod. The difference is that an iPod is a better idea than selling a Segway.

The only problem is, who could have realized the iPod was a better idea than the Segway, in advance. You could pinpoint a few market trends or factors that might have led to the iPod’s success. But most of that is hindsight. It’s easy to look for trends and fits after the data is already in. It’s much harder to make predictions.

I’ve noticed a similar trend with my writing. Looking through my archives, I can come up with theories for why some posts were popular and others went unnoticed. But, even after writing for two years, my ability to separate hits from misses is not much better than chance.

Your Great Idea is Probably a Dud

Most ideas are relatively worthless because it is too hard to split the great innovations from garbage. It’s easy to fall in love with your idea, and avoid all the reasons why it will fail. It’s also easy for critics to pick apart one flaw in an otherwise fantastic suggestion. Gems and garbage wind up in the same pile.

People who can implement ideas are more valuable than idea-generators. Because it’s hard to tell whether an idea is a work of genius or just lousy. It’s too easy to sit on the sidelines and judge the implementation efforts of someone. In theory, great ideas are easy to spot and garbage is easily missed.

Implementation Can’t Fix a Broken Idea

Depending on what industry you enter as a start-up, your odds of succeeding go up dramatically. New startups in software had a much better chance of surviving than new restaurant chains. If you pick a bad idea, the odds are stacked against you before you start.

I think if you filtered most of the ideas you get, you would end up with two piles: obvious garbage and potentially great ideas. Your potentially great ideas probably have a lot of non-obvious garbage in them. Those are the cases where the idea is too blurry to see whether it will work out in reality.

Implementation can’t make a winner out of ideas from the “obviously garbage” pile. You aren’t guaranteed hits from your pile of potentially great ideas, but at least your odds are better.

Why Would You Work on Obvious Garbage?

Some people might say my above point doesn’t need mentioning. Who is going to work on their “obvious garbage” over their great ideas? That’s just stupid.

Well many smart people do stupid things, even if they don’t realize it. I have too, so I know what I’m talking about. People follow-up on obvious garbage when they get too attached to their ideas. If you’re in love with an idea, it is impossible to put it into the obvious garbage pile.

The solution is to talk to many people about your idea, in detail. Some people will give you an unfair gut reaction to the concept. But if you can get experienced people to understand parts of the idea, they may be able to expose weaknesses before you sell the farm. This might not matter if you’re starting something cheap, but if you’re idea will consume thousands of dollars and months from your life, you should probably pay attention.

If you can’t get great feedback, or you’re having trouble communicating your idea, build a prototype. Start with smaller implementations so that ideas with huge flaws are exposed early. As an innovator, your first goal with an idea should be to shake off the honeymoon phase where you can’t see any flaws.

When Working on Potentially Great Ideas, Fail Cheap and Fast

Let’s say your idea meets the basic standards to move it away from “obvious garbage”. The next step is to work on your idea, trying to fail quickly with low costs. I’ve made the mistake of keeping ideas locked away while I spend hours working on them before giving them a test run. The result is usually a disaster.

Whenever you start a new project, you goal should be to expose weaknesses as fast as possible. Get all the monsters out into the open so you either have a chance to solve them or abandon the project while you still have your shirt. Use the open-source software mantra of being in constant beta.

It’s easy to believe your ideas are valuable if you just sit on the sidelines. But until you build it, you can’t separate the truly great ideas from mistakes. If you can work fast and keep your projects in the sunlight, you can avoid the costs of staying onboard a sinking ship.

Two weeks ago I wrote about the virtue of being a geek. I explained that it wasn’t enough to be good at something, or be passionate about it. What really mattered was finding those peculiar areas that you were good at, interested in and most people didn’t care about. These are the areas where competition is low and it isn’t as hard to become the best in the world.

Now I’d like to take that idea even further to talk about another aspect of geekyness: diagonal skill building. This the ability to specialize yourself, not by just becoming great, but by having skill combinations that most people don’t have.

Diagonal Skills: Becoming an Uber-Geek

The reasoning from my last article was fairly straightforward. If many people are passionate about something, it is hard to become the best. You might win the lottery and play in the NBA or become a famous actress, but basketball and theater are passions with a lot of competition.

However, if you can separate yourself by picking your unusual passions and focusing on them, it is easier to be a winner. Unusual passions are the essence of geekyness, so embracing your inner geek is a good strategy.

Diagonal skill building involves takes the same reasoning a step further. If you have a pretty normal combination of skills, you face a lot of competition. However, if you have diagonal skills, or skills that don’t normally go together, you have an opportunity to build strengths other people can’t.

Finding Opportunities for Diagonal Skills

Steve Pavlina started out with online business and computer programming. Those skills combined with a keen interest in personal development gave him a unique advantage. He was able to set up a hugely successful website because few people in the self-improvement industry had much of online presence.

Although there were a lot of online business owners, and a lot of motivational speakers, there were relatively few people who had a combination of both attributes. Steve found a pair of diagonal skills that worked to his advantage.

The problem is you can’t tell the value of diagonal skills in advance. I doubt few people who have guessed that there was any potential in having programming mixed with motivational speaking skills. The value can only reveal itself once you’ve found a bridge between the two areas.

But while you can’t guess which diagonal skills will become jackpots, you can improve your odds. By building minor skills in areas most people ignore, you have an ability to see connections other people miss.

Be Good at What Your Friends Avoid

Skills tend to clump together. I’m a business student, but after taking several computer science classes, I’ve been contemplating getting a second degree. One of the striking things is how different the people are in my business classes from my computer science classes. I couldn’t imagine an entire class discussion about Battlestar Galactica in one of my accounting classes, but it was a regular event across campus.

From both of these sides, I tend to see the same clumps of interests and skills. Many of my friends in computer science didn’t understand a lot about economics. Many of my friends in business couldn’t do IT work to save their lives.

Obviously there are exceptions, but my point is that certain skills are more likely to go together. If I saw you were good at calculus, I’d be more likely to say you’re good at physics than interpretive dance. There are undoubtedly some interpretive dancing mathematicians, but I’d put them in the minority.

Get outside your comfort zone and explore interests that don’t fit nicely within your majors. You don’t need to be the best at these new skills. Diagonal skills often work best when you only have a moderate level of skill in one area.

Finding Diagonal Opportunities

Building skills isn’t enough. You need to find ways you can connect unrelated skills together.

One way to do this is to use one skill to give a new perspective on another. If you’ve spent a lot of time programming, the metaphors and skills for how to program computers can be applied to writing or public speaking. Even if you aren’t writing code while you’re on stage, you can still debug a performance and look for ways you can encapsulate unneeded information.

Another way to look for opportunities is to apply them directly. Look for joint spaces between two skills you possess. Entrepreneurs do this all the time by combining one of their passions with an skill few people possess. The Pandora music project combined computer and music skills, creating a new way of looking at music.

There are advantages to being a non-conformist. Especially if it makes you a geek with diagonal skills. If you have an obscure passion or unrelated interests, try to find connections. There are millions of people who share each of your interests. But there are far fewer who have the same combination.

Being successful isn’t enough. Success in most areas of life simply means you have one less distraction. You have financial freedom when you can stop worrying about money. You are fit when you can stop worrying about your health or how you look in a bathing suit. Social success means you are comfortable in a crowd or in isolation.

Success on its own doesn’t make you happy, it makes you bored. Winning in most areas of life means you have fewer distractions. If you’re rich, you don’t need to worry about paying the bills. Success only scoops out the negative parts of life, it can’t fill them back up with something positive.

Improvement is Only a Half-Solution

I was thinking about this imbalance recently, and how it has affected my own life. Since I started focusing on self-improvement about 4-5 years ago, I’ve made a lot of changes. I’ve improved my health, started a business, boosted my social life and learned many new skills. Although I still have a long way to go, I’m happy with what I’ve done in the last few years.

But one of the surprising things was how becoming better at something doesn’t help. When I went from being out of shape to above average fitness, my day to day life didn’t change dramatically. Sure, I had more energy, a better self-image and fewer sick days. But I still got up each morning, ate, worked, breathed and went back to bed.

Getting better just removed a few negative parts of my life, it didn’t automatically fill them back up with something better. Unfortunately, that is hard to see from the beginning. When you’re out of shape, broke and alone, it is easy to fantasize how being muscular, rich and attractive will solve all your problems. But when you start getting closer to those goals, you often aren’t any further than when you started.

Two Types of Success

The problem isn’t that self-improvement is a sham, but that it isn’t complete. Self-improvement is just one form of success, and unless you can succeed in the other half, it won’t help you. That other half is the intangible, mental success that doesn’t come from winning but from proper living.

By proper living I don’t mean anything puritanical or religious. I simply mean living in a way where the problems you solve and distractions you eliminate get filled back with something good. When you’ve scooped out the negative parts of life, you have something good to put back in their place.

It’s easy to see this problem from the perspective of time management. You start using to-do lists, outsourcing and overcoming your procrastination. As a result you have several extra hours in spare time each week. Unless you have proper living, the other half of success, that extra time will just be wasted on unfulfilling garbage. You haven’t moved an inch from when you were an unproductive slob.

Proper Living

I suppose this website is really about proper living. I’m hijacking the term to mean living in the best way for you possible. That could mean skydiving, going to all-night concerts or learning new languages from a hut in South America. I’ve been writing articles for two years trying to see if there are any generalizations that can be made about a better way to live.

Proper living is the substance that needs to fill the hole success gouges out. If your entire focus is on self-improvement, without any thought to how you’re going to fill it, that work is wasted. I remember hearing once that most people who win the lottery are back to their former standard of living only a few years after the windfall. Success without a strategy to handle it is squandered.

Recently I bumped into a problem of this type. After several years of consistently needing to do several things at once, for the first time I had four uninterrupted months of time. I wasn’t working or taking classes. Just this website and a few side activities. With the revenue from this website to pay the bills, I went from forced productivity to an abundance of time.

For my first week off, you know what happened? I was bored. I had achieved the time-management dream (at least temporarily) and I didn’t know what to do with it.

Since that point I’ve brainstormed a lot of ideas for how to add back high quality activities into my time. But without filling something back, success doesn’t make you happy, it leaves you bored.

Even if You Don’t Feel Successful, You Need Both Halves

While having near unlimited free time might be an extreme example, everyone faces this problem. Without the “something else” to fill up the mental space freed by self-improvement, you wind up bored and depressed. For most people, it’s easier to stay trapped inside problems than to face a hollow success.

What is the other half? That’s a topic too big for one article, but I’m sure you already have a few ideas. Learning, doing something your passionate about, having meaningful projects, trying new things and finding new challenges are all parts. Unless you have these things as a driving factor, anything you scoop out will be filled with more garbage.

The other way of looking at this is to examine your motivation. I’ve you’ve been hitting a plateau in your life, perhaps the reason is that you don’t know what to do when you find success. If you don’t have that other half driving you forward, you might be sabotaging your own success to avoid an empty victory.

Getting to “I Can Do This” - How do you build confidence? Ben shares a few tips such as, “Accumulate small wins. Successfully take baby steps.” and “…demystify the accomplishment. If you want to start a company, read tons of first-hand accounts.” He points out, however, that being skilled is only half the question, if you’re not passionate, your strengths don’t matter.

The Art of the Elevator Pitch - Tim shares his secret on how to make a memorable impression in 60 seconds. Establish credibility, make it clear you aren’t looking for a handout and mention something incredibly hard to forget. I’m sure if you bumped into Tim and he mentioned that he was the world-record holder for tango, you wouldn’t forget him.

From the Archives

20 Procrastination Hacks - An old guest post written by Zen Habits’ Leo Babauta. Here Leo shares some tips for how to combat the big enemy of productivity.

From the Shelf

The Count of Monte Cristo - For those of you who haven’t heard of Alexander Dumas’ classic, The Count of Monte Cristo is a great story. It follows the wrongful imprisonment of Edmond Dantes, his escape and his plot for revenge against his persecutors. Usually I find it harder to be entertained by books written over a hundred years ago, the cultural/language shift making it difficult. However, I’m pleased that the translation I’m reading is both easy to understand and fun to read.

If you see confidence as an absence of self, I believe it’s easier to avoid some of the pitfalls that come with the advice to “be confident”.

Is Confidence Important?

I have doubts that complete confidence is the answer. Yes, there may be some psychological benefits to believing you’re without flaws, but there are some dangerous consequences.

Arrogance can catch up to you and unrestrained confidence can cause you to misjudge plans and take unnecessary risks. The Sydney Opera House is a famous case of overconfidence. The project was originally expected to cost $7 million and finish in 1963. Ten years and 95 million dollars overbudget, the project was finally completed in 1973.

Humility can have advantages too. When you’re open to your own potential weaknesses and mistakes, you can seek to improve them. Too much confidence can stop improvement.

Arrogance is Low Self-Esteem

Bragging is usually a sign that you lack confidence in your abilities. If you feel the need to tell everyone how great you are, that is probably because you’re worried they won’t find out on their own. Arrogance can often just be a pendulum swing away from low self-esteem.

I feel this is part of the reason the advice to be confident never stuck with me. When you see that overconfidence is usually a symptom of the same disease, it becomes hard to believe that more confidence is the answer.

But if we redefine confidence to mean being so comfortable with your abilities that you don’t need to think about yourself, it takes a completely different perspective. From this outlook, you are neither boasting or self-bashing. You aren’t worried about yourself so 100% of your energy is devoted to the problem and people around you.

Generally I’ve thought of confidence as being on a scale with low self esteem on one end and arrogance on the other. Perhaps it would be better to see it as a grid, with a second dimension which resembles your level of comfort with your own abilities. This level of comfort doesn’t lie about your strengths and weaknesses, it just accepts them so completely you stop worrying about you and can focus on more important things.

I’m calling this extra dimension “true confidence” but that’s just a label. The concept, not the labels I use, are what matters.

Cultivating True Confidence and Breaking Bad Advice

From a rational perspective, any attempt to deceive yourself into thinking you’re worse or better than you actually are is dangerous. You might take costly risks or become unnecessarily cautious, depending on how you’re biased. How does this fit with the advice to “be confident”?

I think the answer lies in tweaking how you define confidence. When you see confidence as being this second dimension, it begins to make more sense. Now, instead of seeing yourself as horrible or excellent, you stop thinking about yourself at all. Everything becomes focused on the situation and environment.

I can remember hearing advice from someone that if you wanted to be incredibly social you had to “get outside your head”. When you spend your time thinking about “you” rather than just getting out there, you end up standing alone in a corner. Extroverts might have a mastery at this “getting outside your head” for social situations, but the same idea applies to every area of life.

When I write, I try to put complete emphasis on the article itself. Thinking about myself, my issues, some negative comment I received or even positive feedback is detrimental to the article. Only when I stop thinking about “me” and focus on the idea I want to cover does the writing become easy.

Cultivating this true confidence isn’t easy. There aren’t any tricks, just practice and building skills. But at least if you have a picture about what total confidence looks like, it is easier to improve.

Thought Ratio as a Measure of Confidence

I’ve noticed that the areas of my life where I’m least confident, are the ones I have wildly swinging self-oriented beliefs. When I lack confidence about something, I’ll sway from feeling mildly depressed about it to manically positive.

This pendulum swing doesn’t make much sense if you view confidence as being a linear scale. But it makes perfect sense if you see that both of these directions (feeling too good about yourself or being too hard on yourself) are symptoms of a low level of true confidence on this extra axis.

A good way to see your measure along this axis is to ask yourself how much time you spending thinking in a self-judging fashion. The judgment might be positive (“I’m great”) or bad (“I suck”). When your thoughts are mostly self-absorbed, that’s probably a sign you need to build true confidence.

In prison, the young Dantes meets the abbe Faria. A man who has used his isolation in prison to write entire books and use his sparse materials to create elaborate tools. When Dantes meets the abbe he is astounded by what he has accomplished while behind bars:

“I was reflecting, in the first place,” replied Dantes, “upon the enormous degree of intelligence and ability you must have employed to reach the high perfection to which you have attained. What would you not have accomplished if you had been free?”

“Possibly nothing at all; the overflow of my brain would probably, in a state of freedom, have evaporated in a thousand follies; misfortune is needed to bring to light the treasures of the human intellect. Compression is needed to explode gunpowder. Captivity has brought my mental faculties to a focus; and you are well aware that from the collision of clouds, electricity is produced – from electricity, lightning, from lightning, illumination.”

[emphasis mine]

Constraints and restrictions are more important than choices when it comes to creativity. Putting restrictions on yourself doesn’t need to be a sacrifice. Restrictions can be the very means to get new creative output. Having more resources, choices and options can cause you to be “evaporated in a thousand follies.”

I think this is an important reminder for the next time your inner dialog turns to complain about how you don’t have enough money, good looks or raw talent to succeed in an area. Sometimes having abundance can help, but often it is the restrictions themselves that force more creative solutions.

Superman can fly, see through buildings and listen from large distances. He can run quickly and lift large weights. More importantly he is virtuous and his alter-ego is modest about his abilities. With so many excellent qualities, why wouldn’t Superman be a good role model?

The problem with Superman, as it is with every role model that tries to be perfect, is that he doesn’t exist. Supermen don’t exist, so I believe it is better to have incomplete and imperfect role models than to try to find a hero without any flaws.

Who are Your Role Models?

Whether you deliberately think about it or not, everyone has role models. These are people that you use as a benchmark for living your own life. They might be people you know or just celebrities you’ve read about.

Having role models isn’t a bad thing, and it would be incredibly difficult to live without a few. When you hit a problem or dilemma, role models give you guidance about what the ideal decision is. Without any role models you’re forced to reinvent the wheel every time you face a new decision.

The problem is when you try to look for heroes. Your heroes are good at everything and can’t do anything wrong. They are your supermen and gurus, and it’s dangerous to follow after them.

Why Superman Isn’t So Super

There are two reasons why having a perfect role model is dangerous:

1. No human being can be perfect. As a result, you end up trying to take an imperfect person and ignoring any flaws. When you try to turn a regular person into Superman you are either going to be deluded or extremely disappointed.
2. You’ll become a weak copy of your hero. By building up one person as a perfect role model, you end up becoming a poor imitation. It’s better to highlight a mix of great qualities from different people than to copy one person’s example.

I remember reading on an online forum where a woman posted a concern about a famous motivational speaker. Apparently this speaker had said something homophobic and this person wondered if that was enough to scrap any advice he had given.

Perhaps as a heterosexual, white male I’m not in a position to judge discrimination. But, for me, I can respect someone’s advice when it comes to business or time management, even if I’m strongly against their political or social positions. This woman was trying to make the speaker into a hero, someone who was without flaws and she could completely agree with.

Incomplete Heroes

The fact is that almost everyone will disagree with you at some point. You’re better off having incomplete role models than trying to turn imperfect people into gods. Having a mix of role models who are each great at different things allows you to learn from those people without ignoring their flaws.

Steve Pavlina, who’s website is here, had a big influence on my writing when I set up this website. He has also written a lot about the Law of Attraction and what I feel are some questionable beliefs about science. But just because I disagree with him on that point doesn’t mean I can’t learn business or time management lessons from him.

Although luckily it doesn’t happen too often, occasionally I’ll get a message from a reader of this site which is overflowing with praise. I like compliments as much as the next guy, but I worry if a few readers have enjoyed a few articles I’ve written and expanded that to assume I’m without flaws.

In truth, I make frequent mistakes and there wouldn’t be a single reader here that isn’t better than me in one or more ways. Most of my writing is a way of sorting out issues for myself, rather than gospel. I try not to waste your time demonstrating my flaws, but I assure you, they do exist.

Incomplete Models Create a Unique Perspective

Another reason to focus on a set of imperfect role models is that going without heroes makes you a better person. By cultivating a mix of different perspectives and strengths, you become a unique person. If you focus only a few perfect heroes, you end up trying to copy them instead of being yourself.

It’s well known in biology that breeding within a family increases the risks of genetic defects. By keeping your gene pool highly focused, defective genes have a greater chance of making an appearance. Incest isn’t good for the health of a species.

By the same principle, intellectual incest isn’t good for your mind. When all your teachers and role models come from the same vein of human thinking, you breed mental defects. Having a diverse set of role models ensures that the flaws of one person are balanced by the strengths of another person.

When You Look for Supermen, You Ignore the Flawed Heroes

The real problem is that when you look for a person to be everything: wealthy, healthy, happy and morally ideal, you miss people that are fantastic, but flawed. Many of my friends I admire for one or more reasons. That is enough for me to learn from them and pick apart their way of thinking about problems. They might not be Superman, but they can still teach.

Last week I wrote about how working on projects is a great way to keep yourself motivated. The idea is that if you focus on results, it’s easy to get frustrated when you hit a patch of bad luck. If your emphasis is on completing projects, any feedback you get will come directly from your effort, so it’s easier to stay motivated.

Now I’d like to discuss another reason I’m a follower of living life through projects: self-education. Working through projects is a great way to learn faster. Educating yourself with a project also teaches you things you can’t learn from books or classes. In many ways, project-based learning cuts the fat from typical approaches, teaching you only what you need to know.

Two Approaches to Learning: Theorizing Versus Apprenticeship

If you go back in time, you will see that most people once learned through apprenticeship. This was the idea that you were paired up with a master, and he would put you to work. You would do all the boring and basic tasks until you mastered them. Then, after you demonstrated some skill, you would start working on more difficult assignments. Finally, after years of labor, the master would share with you his secret theories for how your field worked.

This idea of practice before theories was turned on its head in our education system. Now, before you’ve even touched the tools needed to perform your craft, students are asked to memorize formulas and concepts. The premise was if you learned the arcane theories first, you’d make less mistakes when you actually started working.

There are some benefits to a theories-first education system. I wouldn’t want my doctor “practicing” with open heart surgery if he didn’t have a good theoretical understanding of my circulatory system.

But a theories-first education isn’t without weaknesses. A big weakness is that the theories are disconnected from reality. A professor I had in a computer science class complained about how many other professors were horrible at programming. They were brilliant with theories, but didn’t have the field experience with actually creating software programs.

Education Through Projects

Teaching yourself with projects is a great way to learn because it overcomes some of the weaknesses when learning strictly through theories. Here are a few advantages of project-based learning:

1. You learn what is important to you. Instead of what a professor says is important, you learn only the things you need to do what you want to do.
2. You are motivated to learn. Even interesting classes have boring assignments. When you work through projects, you might be challenged or frustrated, but it is almost never boring.
3. You build skills instead of just concepts. I have had professors that knew the details of every business concept and theory of entrepreneurship. I’ve had informal teachers that read fewer books, but actually started their own companies. One person has concepts, the other has skills. I’d rather learn from the person with skills than the person with concepts.
4. You are doing something productive while learning. Most of the “learning” done in an educational system is worthless, by itself. Until you get into graduate research, all your paper writing and lab reports aren’t adding value back to society. With projects, not only are you learning new things, but the methods used to learn also produce something valuable in the end.

I started project-based learning several years ago when I became interested in creating computer games. The idea fascinated me, and starting with short ideas, I worked into larger projects. Because of those projects, I was forced to learn programming, computer graphics, interface design and even advanced mathematical topics.

Working on projects for this website has taught me web-design skills, writing, marketing and the details for running a small business. Although I’ve enjoyed taking university-level entrepreneurship courses, most of my knowledge about how to run a business has come from working on projects, not classes.

Setting Learning Goals for Projects

Today, whenever I start a new project, my first step is to see what my learning goals are for the project. Sure, it would be nice if I could make a lot of money, be recognized or receive positive feedback from people who have enjoyed something I made. But even if I can’t do that, I can still learn a lot from running a project.

There are two areas I look at when starting a new project:

1. Hypotheses I want to test.
2. Skills I want to build.

Testing Hypotheses

I consider every project to be an experiment. If I’m not trying or testing something new, it probably isn’t a worthwhile project. Hypothesis testing means simply that I have an intuition about the way the world works. I can then use the project as a means of testing that intuition.

When I wrote my first, free ebook for this website, I wanted to test the hypothesis that ebooks like this could be a marketing platform. I wanted to see whether people would share or link to the ebook and drive traffic back to the website.

After releasing that project and several others, I realized I was wrong. Ebooks, in my experience, don’t draw nearly as much traffic as writing a popular blog entry or collaborating with another blogger. What I did find out was that those ebooks are a great way to connect with the people who are truly interested in the website. Ebooks were a great way to add value to the blog, even if they didn’t directly bring in traffic.

That kind of first-hand experience is something that would be impossible to teach in a class. Even if I did learn from a famous blogger or ebook seller, the information wouldn’t necessarily work for me. For running experiments, projects trump theories.

Building Skills

The second type of goal I look for is when building new skills. I try to pick projects that are within my reach, but would force me to learn a few new things in order to finish them. When working on a software project, I was forced to learn an entirely new programming language and 2D graphics. When working on my last book, I learned how to set up an affiliate system.

I’m not promoting project-based learning as a strict alternative to formal education. Classes can teach you concepts that are easy to miss if you just focus on projects. However, I am recommending that everyone get involved in some form of project based learning. Whether it is just for a hobby or for your career, you can build skills while creating something meaningful.

What are some of the things you’ve learned by taking on interesting projects? What are some things you might like to learn by taking on a new project? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Self-Discipline Matters, Except When You’re Motivated - Cal Newport points to new studies that have been done in the study of procrastination. The article points to research claiming that self-discipline is like a fuel, that is drained when you perform tasks that require willpower. The exception, however, is when you are motivated internally to perform the task. For readers of this blog, I don’t think this will come as a surprise, but it’s nice to see solid research giving clear answer.

Should You Study the Best, or the Slightly Better? - Skip to the bottom paragraph where Ben says:

There are many successful CEOs and it’d be smarter, it seems to me, to find someone who is doing a little bit better than you (ie, 3-5 years ahead in terms of progress), and study that person.

Instead, we flock to read Welch and Trump and Gerstner, thinking that their experiences can help us understand our own. Worse yet, people fork over thousands of dollars just to hear Donald Trump speak in-person at a Learning Annex conference or whatever. I couldn’t think of a worse way to invest professional development money.

This is one of the reasons I love the blogging community. Instead of getting ideas from a crowd of experts, you get ideas from people who are in the process of solving problems themselves. Experts are often so removed from the realities of a beginner, that their advice may not be as useful to someone starting out.

From the Archives

How to Read 70+ Books in a Year - The last four months has seen my reading volume take a nosedive. I partially attribute this to taking on a far busier schedule, part of it can also be blamed on recently having read through several, dense 1000+ page books. With courses finished, I’m hoping to recapture my former book-lust.

From the Shelf

Lila - This book is the sequel to Robert Pirsig’s book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I’m still trying to wrap my head around a few of his concepts, but the ideas are interesting. Pirsig is great at breaking down highly intellectual problems into components that are easily understood.

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I’m in the middle of working on a book that will highlight some of the best articles I’ve written in the past two years. With over 500 posts, I can’t expect many new readers to search through an archive of that size. As a result, I’m picking my favorite articles and putting them into a book, which should be much easier to read.

I’m planning on releasing the book as an ebook and as a paperback/hardcover book through Lulu. The ebook version will be completely free, while the paperback/hardcover will be sold at the cost of producing it. I’m not expecting to make a dime off this project, but hopefully the people who enjoy this website will find some value in reading through the best posts written here.

Plus for everyone who has been nagging me to get some of my writing onto dead trees, this will be the first chance to own a hard copy.

I think most people like to see themselves as being unique. From early childhood most kids are taught that they are special and original. Western culture celebrates independence, so starting as toddlers, children are taught to think and act as being in a slightly different class than everyone else.

While there are some benefits to this viewpoint, there’s also a cost. The cost comes from deluding yourself into thinking that your problems, challenges and aspirations are completely unique. In reality, there has probably been a billion people who have had almost exactly the same problem you are facing. Chances are there are at least a million people, alive today, who have faced and overcome your challenges.

Instead of being unique, your problems are commonplace. Whatever you’re facing, someone has already checked that off their to-do list. Although this can be an ego-shattering realization, it is also useful. Because, if other people have solved your problem before, you can use their solutions as a cheat sheet.

Cheat by Having the Answers Before the Test

Your cheat sheet comes in the form of books. If somebody has faced a problem, they have written it down. Although the specifics of your problem may have changed since they were written, the core themes have not. Reading books is your way of collecting the answers well ahead of the test date.

When I realized I was making the same stupid mistakes other people had made before me, I started consuming books. I’ve read as much as 70 books in a year, and I try to read at least 300-500 pages a week.

Don’t Just Read Self-Help

I basically don’t read self-help books. Aside from genre-busting books like The 4-Hour Workweek or Getting Things Done, I don’t read much in that area. Instead, I strive to read as wide a variety of fiction and nonfiction as possible. Seeing as my writing could be classified as “self-help”, I feel my decision needs a bit of explanation.

Self-help books tend to produce a certain category of solutions to all problems. While the books are carefully marketed and sometimes well-written, rarely does a self-help book truly push outside those existing categories. If you haven’t read any books on personal development or goal setting, that perspective might be useful. But after a few dozen books in the field, it can become repetitive.

The problem is that while that category of solutions might work in some cases, it doesn’t work in all of them. There are a lot of oversimplifications and holes in typical self-help philosophy. I think this is part of the reason there is so much cynicism against it.  I’m not against self-help books, but I think there are limitations if that is the only kind of book that fills your library.

The alternative is to read a large variety of books. Read books that don’t look like they have any relevance to your life at first glance. While you’ll encounter some duds, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how many great ideas I can turn up.

The Value Doesn’t Come From Answers, But From Thinking

Another reason to read a large variety of books is that many of them take more work to connect back to your personal situation. Self-help books usually do most of the work for you, but reading a book on theoretical physics, evolution or the history of Southeast Asia is a bit trickier.

The more thinking you need to do to connect a book to your life, the more valuable that solution will be. If you want to look at it from the perspective of holistic learning, it means you need to create a larger web to integrate the new information.

Metaphors are Your Intellectual Weapons in Preventing Mistakes

It’s impossible to know exactly the movement of every atom and electron. Reality is too large and complex to fit inside our brains. As the saying goes, “the map is not the territory.”

New ideas and metaphors are the intellectual knives to cut up reality and fit it into your brain. Some of these simplifications are useful, and help you see answers that were previously invisible. Reading a large amount, and from a wide variety gives you the best chance of finding these ideas. Finding more ideas means fewer stupid mistakes.