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- May 5, 2008
A “Make Your Own Museum” Text Adventure
May 5, 2008Read moreCharged up from our on-site experience at the San Jose Tech Innovation Museum, I had this funny idea about a museum that would house everything that I thought was cool. I realized that a lot of the things I like have some kind of transformative power, and that a lot of these artifacts were actually devices that were designed to translate from one kind of energy or data to another more convenient form. The idea that you can convert one thing to another is a foundation of practical engineering, and perceptually being able to switch your brain into a more convenient plane of reference is a skill that I’ve been interested in cultivating since the 10th grade.
Examples of Transformation Exhibits
- Devices that convert mechanical energy to electrical energy, and vice versa!
- Glassblowing: From sand to shaped glass!
- Mathematical conversion of coordinate spaces to imaginary spaces: Euler spaces come to mind…Ugh.
- Extreme Makeovers and Fashion: It’s amazing what you can do with a little bit of applied shadow!
- Empire Building: The process of integrating cultures is difficult and devious task.
- Landscaping, Feng Shui, Interior Decorating: Being able to transform the flow of a physical space is pretty amazing
- Baking Bread: The sheer number of variables involved in creating a great loaf frankly astonishes me. And who wouldn’t want to go to a museum that smelled like freshly baking bread?
Examples of Translation Exhibits
- Language Concepts, Linguistics, and Psychology of Communication: There are certain common concepts that most languages share. I’d like to know what they are.
- Codemaking and Codebreaking: Especially physical devices used for this. They’re just cool.
- Signal Reproduction: From sound to video, the ability to convert physical phenomena into digital form, and then store it in another physical-based media, is pretty amazing.
- The World of Signals: Everything in Electrical Engineering is a signal, and every signal is arbitrary. If I’d known that when I started engineering school, I might have been good at it.
- Time and Money: The idea that time = money dates back to Benjamin Franklin. Is it true? How do you measure it?
I’ve decided to call this new institution The Museum of Transformation and Translation (aka THE MOTT). Since creating my own museum and collecting all the artifacts that I’d like to have in it will be prohibitively expensive, I decided to create a Wiki version of it in the Public Wiki area. And because I’m an aging nerd, I am building it to resemble an old-school text adventure. I guess it’s more accurate to say that it’s a hypertext fiction approach I’m taking, but never mind that.
Right now it’s just a placeholder, but if anyone would like to come by and build an exhibit by describing an interesting collection of transformation/translation related concepts or artifacts, come on down!
- Museum of Transformation and Translation Wiki Entrance
- May 5, 2008
Ground Hog Day Resolution Review 03: Tentative Progress
May 5, 2008Read moreIt’s already May 5th, so it’s time for another Groundhog Day Resolutions review. I do these every month and one day: February 2, March 3, April 4th…you get the idea.
Recognizing Internal Motivation Limits
In the last two updates, I found I had floundered quite badly. I think it’s accurate to say that I’d stopped believing in the original mission I’d originally set forth:
- Commit to Deriving Income from Writing and Making Stuff
- Build Sustainable Social Networks
- Sell a Product
I’d even made myself a worksheet to help clarify my goals, but this was a big bust. Even I didn’t want to use it. It felt too much like work, and there was not anything I could immediately act upon without having to sit down and do some planning.
I was very bummed out by this failure in my ability to self-motivate, until I realized that there’s one key contextual difference between 2007 and this year: I have been on a full-time project since last November, and my patience for planning is all used up by the time I get to my personal projects. Do you know someone who is incredibly organized at work, but a complete slob at home? Or maybe you know someone who’s great at dealing with people all day, but just wants peace and quiet when they’re finally off the clock? I think something similar happens with me with regards to planning and organization: while I value and understand the processes and even have some chops at it, it taxes my patience and energy. Once my reserves are used up, it’s gone for the rest of the day. I want it to be as easy and natural as possible. So, I’d best find an alternate source of motivational energy, preferably one that is not as easy to exhaust.
One possibility: find someone to serve as the external source of motivation. This is a long-term prospecting job, because I know from experience that it takes time to mesh two people’s motivations together without one of them feeling put off.
Alternatively, I could try to achieve the same goals without planning. That might sound like a recipe for disaster to a veteran project manager, but consider this: the planning process exists so one can systematically create tangible results. People sometimes forget this, and that’s when organizational dogma starts setting in. If there’s another way to achieve the same results, that’s just as valid an approach.
The Goals In Review
So let me review last month’s goals, when I realigned them with personal desire and away from the implicit “desire for success” approach I’d started with:
- Figuring out how to be a full-time writer and content creator, because I like it.
- Reduce my needs. If I can live cheaper, then I need less money, and can work less.
- Work based on my vocation, so it’s work that sustains me in spirit, mind and body.
In the month since then, I’ve been thinking constantly about these three goals, and have come to some conclusions about how writing is my inexhaustable supply of expression. It is what I do constantly, so automatically that it didn’t even register as a “passion” or “vocation”. I also had the realization that it’s one-on-one communication that’s most important to me. That doesn’t mean that I can only write for an audience of one, it means that it’s important for me to reach the individual who’s reading to deliver my message, and ultimately help empower them with new ideas.
It’s also important for me to recognize that writing is not the only means by which I can express. I can work with digital media as a designer and programmer, and I can also put together functional information graphics design. There are a lot of ways one can express any given idea, and I’m quite excited by that. That said, it’s even more important for me to point out that expression is merely the vehicle for delivering that empowering idea or critical bit of information. If anything, I’d like to be creating or packaging those empowering ideas for consumption by people who will directly reap the benefits. I believe this is my true focus. I expressed this last time as “my vocation is understanding and communicating ideas so ordinary people are empowered by them.”
On a side note, the very act of declaring what I want to be…that is, to try to make a living as someone who does thinking and writing, is incredibly scary. It feels like I’m making myself a target because I’ve made a declaration without having a clear sense of what it means. However, I’m heartened by the memory of talking to a classmate of mine from the 4th or 5th grade in Harvard Square (yes, that Harvard). I was having a meal with a number of fellow high school alums who were attending, and this guy Lucian was there too. I hadn’t seen him in years, so I was asking him what he was up to for a major. He rattled through something about either Physics or Psychology, but then said that he was looking to make a change to do what he’s always wanted to do. Curious, I inquired what that might possibly be. At this he burst into a wild smile, and declared that his dream was to sing Opera. His parents, both artists, apparently weren’t so keen on the idea at the time. I remember the pure joy mixed with an aura of insanity and doom at that moment, and I wished him all the best. I think my enthusiasm surprised him, and he seemed to appreciate it. That was the last time I saw him, and I never did find out how the story went. I feel I’m in a similar place, some 20 years later, mustering up the courage to make a declaration of intent that will take me quite outside my comfort zone. Yikes!
Next Steps
I am going to let the entire next month go along the same lines of thoughtful reflection, though I am going to schedule two reflection days on the 15th and 29th respectively. I am deliberately not planning a course of action, but I am instead going to use those two days to identify opportunities that require zero planning and nearly-immediate results.
Incidentally, I finally fixed printing on the website, after a reader pointed it out. I believe it had been mentioned once or twice in passing to me, but I hadn’t actually seen the problem with my own eyes until recently. So you can now print out articles, stripped of sidebar images and pesky navigation, for your archives. I apologize for the long delay in addressing the issue. I figure having easily-printed content contributes a bit toward toward my writing goals by making the words easier to distribute.
- April 29, 2008
On The Road: Insights from Dogs, Babies, and Hard Drive Crashes
April 29, 2008Read moreI’ve been on the road for over a week now, travelling around California for business and pleasure. The business: the museum test of the interactive exhibit technology that I’ve been working on with Inquirium, a learning sciences and design firm I’ve worked with in the past. The pleasure: celebrating the 40th birthday of high school buddy and former co-conspirator Mark Kern.
The problem: Mark’s chocolate lab Chloe, a bouncy 4-month old puppy with an admirable enthusiasm for visitors.
On the very first day in California, Chloe joyfully knocked my Macbook Pro out of my lap and onto Mark’s lovely hardware floor. It didn’t seem to land that hard, so I thought nothing of it. But I noticed that the machine had started to act very sluggish. After killing some processes and determining it wasn’t some weird network-related thing, it turned out that the operating system was locking up because the hard drive was unable to read data from the hard drive reliably. In other words, the computer was hosed, along with all my work applications and data. The dog was not blamed or punished, as it wasn’t her (or anyone’s fault), but it did mean that I was doomed to enjoy my time in Southern California without doing a lick of work. In a way it is a good real-world test of my mobile development setup. This is the first time I’ve lost a hard drive to an accident like this; better it happen while I’m in California than, say, Costa Rica. I would have preferred that this didn’t happen before travelling to San Jose for 10 days of intensive development work. I was also pretty much offline until Tuesday night.
AppleCare Not
When I got to San Jose, my cousin Ben arranged for an appointment at the Apple Store Genius Bar, but ultimately they could not do what I wanted: give me rapid hard drive replacement and allow me to keep my old hard drive to recover my data. Apple Store policy, apparently, is to exchange hard drives; someone told me that Apple refurbs the returned drives and uses them again, but I can’t confirm this personally. Plan B was a visit to Mac Pro, an independent Apple Macintosh store that’s been around since 1988. I’d visited them for the first time a few months ago, because they just happened to be the exclusive North American distributor for those nifty Levertigo 17″ MacBook Pro Bags I was eying, and were conveniently nearby. Mac Pro’s staff were friendly and pretty helpful, and they possessed that fine balance between critical geeky competency and a desire to help their customers without making a lot of excuses. I had them take care of the laptop for me over the next two days while I was on-site at the museum. Though I could have waited until I got home and done an AppleCare exchange, I decided to just bite the bullet and get a new hard drive, upping the capacity to 320GB in the process. I used a SATA-to-USB drive interface to recover my data from the old disk, and restored a Windows XP bootable partition–yes, I’m running Windows XP on my MBP through Boot Camp. Although all my creative apps await restoration when I return home, all my source code and assets are on my Subversion server, and I was able to re-install Visual Studio 2005 without mishap.
One other good thing came out of this experience: the discovery of Portable Thunderbird for my email needs. I was without my own computer for a week, but I did have a 4GB USB thumb drive. With Portable Thunderbird, you can install your entire email program on a USB drive and carry your account profiles with you. While it’s a little sluggish compared to having the app installed on your hard drive, it’s very usable for day-to-day email checking. You can get a lot more open source apps from PortableApps website, such as Open Office Portable, Pidgin (formally Gaim) Portable, Firefox Portable, and The Gimp Portable. I’m pretty excited about Pidgin, the multi-protocol Instant Messaging client, because I can now have one master instant messenger setup that I can use on whatever computer I happen to be on. And even better: when I upgrade my computer, I won’t have to lose all my logs and re-setup. That’s a pain in the ass.
Hanging Out at the San Jose Tech Innovation Museum
As I’d mentioned in past posts, I’ve been working with Inquirium to create an interactive museum exhibit technology platform based on 3D motion tracking cameras and a high-end graphics PC. One of Inquirium’s contacts got us into an unused part of the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation, complete with a small video projector and screen, which is just right for our test. The museum staff has also been super-friendly and accomodating despite all the other stuff they have to do, providing us with some space and running cables for us.
On the technology itself: we have been able to use the infrared illuminators we got from Fry’s Electronics to improve the 3D camera tracking accuracy without washing out the projector screen, though it’s still prone to jittering and false positives. We think we can tune the interaction and jump detection further, but our greatest challenge is the small size of the interaction area. To accomodate dozens of kids flowing through the space, we’ll have to make some adjustments to our expectations of how to best manage traffic through adaptive interaction while retaining our commitment to delivering our core message in a non-superficial way. That’s what the rest of this week will be about. We’ve also learned a lot about the kind of code development we need to tackle next to support the next phase of interactive prototyping. I’m looking forward to writing that up.
The San Jose Tech Museum, AKA “The Tech”, is itself very cool; it’s been a while since I’ve visited any science and technology museum, the Boston Museum of Science nearby. I haven’t been to the MOS in quite some time, but I remember it being a somewhat cramped and dark space. The Tech, by comparison, has a very light and open hub by the entrance, with each floor running its own warren of technology-based activities. I haven’t really had a chance to spend much time with the exhibits there yet, though in my quick run through I saw several things I wanted to try, like a video-feed controlled submersible ROV in an enormous fish tank, a simulated space walk chair that uses jets of compressed air position yourself under a satellite, and a whack a spam machine situated in the informative yet festive Internet exhibit. There are also permanent exhibits on Invention and Innovation, which are subjects close to my heart; in particular, there are some life-size pictures of actual inventors photographed against white backgrounds with some words about what they do. I found the presentation to be striking while humanizing the invention process. I don’t know if kids would be as moved, but I certainly was. Next time I’m out on the west coast I should also check out The Exploratorium up in San Francisco, now that I actually have met someone that works there.
Insights Away from Home
Five years ago I would have said that the part of New England I’m from suits my temperament best:
- people are naturally reserved and keep their distance
- we have real contrast in our seasons
- the likelihood of earthquakes, tidal waves, poisonous snakes, tornados, tarantulas, scorpions is very low
Surprisingly, I find the San Jose area growing on me. It might be the combination of Fry’s Electronics, plentiful quality asian food, nearby relatives, and the mildly warm weather in comparison to the long winter. The ethnic diversity is also refreshing. There are also a lot more people here, and I’m finding that the relaxed atmosphere coupled with the high density of geek culture in Sillicon Valley rather attractive. I am missing home, though, because I have the nagging feeling that I’ve my life back home is “on-hold” while I’m out here working. While it’s only been two weeks, this is the longest amount of time I’ve been away since 2000, when I flew to Taiwan for my grandfather’s funeral. My friend Erin and I have a theory about “experiencing the true nature of a place” that relates to this: it takes at least two weeks to feel like you’re “there”, so you need to commit to at least four weeks before you’ll know what it’s like to live there. On this trip, I’m also finding it takes about ten days for me to start really missing home, and I think this helps corroborate the theory for my own use. I’d like to experience more places over longer periods of time. I think this might help reveal who I really am, whatever that means.
Also, while having the day-to-day continuity with real live people is really important to me, this trip has made me aware that there are “anchoring activities” that I can bring with me wherever I go and still feel pretty good:
- I can write to people: Without a working computer, I realized that of all the things I do the most, it’s writing to people. It’s impulsive and obsessive and a source of feeling connected. Being without a computer has been tough, but mostly because I have been out of touch with people. Because I’ve been so busy also, I haven’t maintained the regular dialog with whoever is out there listening. The urge to communicate is, I believe, my passion. It doesn’t matter what I’m communicating, so long as some connection is made and ideas are conveyed across it authentically.
I can take pictures: Taking pictures helps me remember places, and relate my experience when I email them later. I need to add video to the mix. As I edit and arrange the imagery at night, I find myself reliving the experience. This is kind of relaxing…it might be the closest thing I have to a hobby. Digital photography combines my enthusiasm for instant results while providing the raw resources for later reflection. It also gets me out of the house to look for new experiences.
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p>So if there’s a remote job I could do, it might be as a journalist for my own publication (this blog) and so long I had regular contact with the important people in my life, I might have a good time.
Resuming Life
There are a bunch of projects I left dangling at home that I want to pick up again: the gospel music project, for example, has been on my mind quite a bit as I’ve been listening to different kinds of music on the road. A couple realizations—that gospel music needs to be singable by a church congregation imposes a certain structure, and that you can get away with some pretty simple verses—has me itching to get back to it. I also miss my cats and my regular routine at the coffee shop and the gym; there’s a certain “cat energy” and “friend energy” that I guess helps power me through the day. Weird. Lastly, I saw myself in some photographs and I realized that despite improved cardiovascular endurance, I’m still way too fat. Certainly, my mental body image does not match what I see in photographs, and I am finding this extremely annoying and somewhat depressing. So I’m thinking of initiating some kind of intensive regimen to see what I can get done in a month, just to see what it’s like.
I’m still going to be on the road for a while, so all this will have to wait for a week.
- April 22, 2008
The Art of Not Finishing
April 22, 2008Read moreI’ve been preoccupied with how unproductive I’ve been lately…until recently, when I realized that the road to productivity isn’t the same road that I’m on. The road to productivity is paved with clear steps leading to an act of completion; essentialy, it’s finish what you start. However, as I sit here contemplating the rather large list of difficult-to-break-down tasks I’ve given myself, I’m thinking that there might be another approach. That is to relax and not worry about finishing. Or, perhaps, restart constantly. This is a way of not worrying about the result you want, and focusing on what you are doing right now. When practiced with honest intent, it’s possible that this approach will lead to the same destination: a sense of accomplishment. It may not be so important that it is a specific accomplishment that I intended. I’m reminded of what I’ve read about agile software development, and more personally it reminds me of mastering my fighting style against best friend / arch nemesis Alen in the martial arts fighting game Tekken.
That Feeling of Accomplishment
The model of productivity I have for myself is not unlike the software development process I’m familiar with. The particular hacks I’ve applied to it are designed to ameliorate my particular foibles when it comes to motivation, definition, maintaining momentum, and reaping that feeling of fulfillment.
- Motivation: A lot of my Printable CEO forms are designed around the idea creating tangible progress when it is otherwise intangible. For example, a lot of the forms count chunks of time, equating chunks accrued with actual accomplishment. The reason I did this is because long projects defer the sense of reward, and without some kind of sign that we’re actually making progress, our efforts will falter unless there is an overriding principle (e.g. duty, honor, love). Personally, I like to get feedback pretty instantly, because I’m an impatient person. Since I also work at home, I don’t get the low-level but constant stream of feedback that a team environment provides. People without managers (or with out-of-touch managers) are also in the same boat.
Definition: There are two kinds of projects that I have: projects with well-defined deliverables and expectations and those that, well, require definition. Project that require definition are almost always trouble, so when one of these bombs lands in your lap you actually need to spend a lot of time establishing assumptions and creating definitions that serve as the foundation of the project’s ultimate deliverable. If you know the deliverable and the desired result, so the reasoning goes, you can work backwards and figure out what to do to get there. This is a whole series of posts in itself because it’s not as straightforward as it sounds, but I think it’s safe to say that we never question the main supposition: there is a deliverable and an expected result. Otherwise, you’re just screwing around.
Momentum: In other words, getting it done. I was just scanning the Wikipedia entry on Agile Development and saw reference to the so-called Waterfall Model of software development, which on the surface is exactly what Management asked for: a sequential design-deploy-deliver process that is nice and tidy. I’m experienced enough to know that it’s difficult to predict exactly how it will come out or how long it will take. I make the best estimates I can, and discipline myself to push through the milestones so steady progress is made. If I’m smart, I also break down the steps into small-enough chunks so that a few can be done to completion every day, so theoretically I also have some way of measuring the rate of progress.
Fulfillment: This is what comes at the end of the process. You’re done! All that planning, working, slogging away every day to get to this point pays off. Or if it doesn’t, at least you’re no longer stuck doing it. You can count your chickens, collect your remaining marbles, and head home feeling like you’ve done something.
My education and work training has pretty much imprinted this approach on my brain, and it is second nature to me. However, I also have to admit that I really hate working this way. As I’ve mentioned, I’m a pretty impatient person, and for many years I suppressed this because the process works. Until I started blogging, I didn’t know that there was really another way of doing it. I enjoy free creation, which is probably why I like blogging and the ad-hoc projects that I come up with so much. It’s productive, but only in hindsight. Until now, this seemed acceptable to me only because I wasn’t doing “real work”; when the stakes are higher, productivity is supposed to produce results in the future. Actions are taken step-by-step, their results measured, assessed, and iterated through. While iteration is a built-in to the process, I think that there is still the stench of Waterfall embedded into it: we seek to optimize for minimum production time for maximum quality. This is a challenge, a burden, and a source of stress. What really matters to me is having that sense of fulfillment; in practical terms, it doesn’t matter how I get there. That’s what’s on my mind right now.
Walking The Path To an Unspecified Somewhere
Now, I’m not suggesting that we abandon professional conduct, especially while working within the bounds of established business expectations. Nevertheless, it’s occurring to me that for my personal business goals, I don’t need to adhere to the same standards. This is particularly true for me now, because I am open to all possibilities and am purposefully being vague about committing to any given path. Yes, I could very easily define a number of arbitrary business goals that would make perfect business sense given my demonstrated strengths and areas of expertise, but this is a trick that I don’t think will work without some kind of external moral commitment. In the absence of this, my natural values shape my activities:- I’m not driven by money, scale, or status.
- I do, however, want respect, trust, a place in the community, and to be a contributor.
Restart. A Lot. Maybe.
I am feeling a lot of internal resistance to this idea: don’t plan, do. I know I’ve seen this before. A lot. It bothers me. A lot. I don’t like not knowing what I’m going to do, but I have to admit that I don’t really know what I’m doing or exactly where I’m going. Therefore, there probably is no wrong way to do it. In a sense, my random path is already optimal :-) When Alen and I used to play Tekken back in the 90s, we noted that we had different approaches to learning the game. Tekken is a martial arts fighting game for the Playstation that has a lot of different attacks, defenses, and throws for each of 8 or more characters. There were over 50 distinct moves per character, and each character had strengths and weaknesses relative to each other, which means that mastering the game required a lot of practice. There are hundreds, of not thousands, of gameplay variables that could potentially affect the victory of one player over another. The main attraction of playing a game like Tekken is to beat your opponents like a drum so you can have bragging rights. It’s even better when you’re playing against your friend…unless you’re me. I tend not to play to “win” games. I’d rather understand them first. Alen had the opposite approach: he was in it to win. The way that this manifested in our playing styles was that Alen would find some button he could press over and over again as fast as possible–usually, this was the shin kick move–and he’d win the first 20 or 30 rounds. He would win because I would walk right into that shin kick, trying to find the counter to it, or find the hole in the timing of the move. It would take about 20-30 losses until I found it, and then the situation would reverse because by then I’d have formed a partial understanding of my character’s dynamics. Then I would win a bunch of games, until Alen adapted and found the next quick move. By then I’d have learned that there is a time for understanding how a game works, and then there’s a time when you just want to wipe the smug expression off Alen’s face, and then it was on. By the end of it all, hundreds of hours of play later, we’d both have arrived at something of the same level of play, having absorbed the lessons of the other’s playing styles by incorporating them into our own. The moral of this story is that there is the fast way and the slow way to learning, and that ultimately they may lead to the same level of mastery. However, if all you are counting are the first 20 rounds of play, then the lesson is play fast and cheap to kick the other guy down. Have no shame! It will get the job done. If you have time and can afford to lose a lot at first, then you can build toward a complete style of play by mastering the nuances of all game mechanics; indeed, this is the only way to reach the greatest heights of achievement. However, you’re going to get your ass beat a lot at first. Do you have the time?Applying These Lessons
Let me paraphrase myself.- I want to wander into an interesting life where I achieve in hindsight. I think this might suit my impatient, spur-of-the-moment creative nature.
- However, I’m worried that I’m being dumb, because I know that there’s a “right way” to start and finish a project. I also know that progress is made only by completing what you’ve started, and doing that over again.
- So how can I complete things, but not on purpose?
- Create the e-commerce side of the website, selling fancy productivity stationery.
- Redesign the website to provide focused yet diverse categories of interest.
- Create software products for time tracking.
- Write some stories and some books.
- A big serious task, with lots of complexity, is going to make you want to curl up and take a nap. You’ll procrastinate. Instead, run up to the thing and give it a swift kick in the shin and run away. Then run back, and do it again for as long as you can get away with it. Who knows, you might just start to win.
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A very simple task may become interesting if you put a lot of energy into making it complex. Or maybe the better way to think of this is by being mindful of what you’re doing, drawing that moment of simplicity out as long as possible. Through this, hidden meanings may be revealed. The example that comes to mind is the act of shooting a target with a handgun. Theoretically you just point the gun at the target and pull the trigger, but in reality there are dozens of interrelated micro-movements across the body that affect the accuracy of the shot. That moment of pulling the trigger can be an instant, which means you’ll shoot terribly. Or it will be a kind of timeless moment that fully occupies your mind and your body until the bullet leaves the barrel of the gun and marks that bull’s eye.
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p>My next step is to incorporate more shin-kicking into my to-do list, and not think about the finished projects down the road. That will take care of itself as they come together. What I would like to focus on now is winning and being short-sighted about it. I’m pretty sure this is not the best way for every project, but it might be what I need right now to just get moving.
- April 16, 2008
Splitting up the Blog by Topic?
April 16, 2008Read moreI’ve been contemplating one of my Groundhog Day Resolutions today: “figuring out how to be a full-time writer and content creator”. I like the idea more and more. I’ll still get to make things so what I’ve learned up to now will not go to waste. However, it means establishing myself in a new niche. I could just jump on in and flounder around for a while, but I have a preexisting commitment to a personally important project. Therefore, it makes sense that I establish the new niche while maintaining my old one.
Serving the Audience
There have been a few new topics that I’ve been interested in writing about: motivation, relationships, and real-life stories. Motivation probably can fit in with the Productivity writing, as it is one of the assumed prerequisites for wanting to be productive in the first place. I already blog about this topic indirectly under Introspection too. The two new topics, relationships and real-life stories, are a little different because they are not about me or my direct experiences, but are about other people. Much of what I write about now uses myself as the reference point for discussion, because the only person who might get embarrassed is me; no one else is likely to get hurt or feel under the spotlight. I also can safely use my experiences as the basis for drawing whatever conclusions I have, so long as I am clear that this is where they’re coming from.
There’s a voice in my head that is telling me that when I start to write about other people, I need to keep this content separate from what you’re reading right now here in the main site and feed. There are several assumptions that I’m making:
- Assumption 1: People are subscribed because of the productivity and process investigation, and skim through the occasional article on whatever crazy thing is on my mind.
- Assumption 2: Adding content outside of this is somehow not desirable, because it further clouds the nature of the content on the website.
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p>These assumptions have constrained my writing in the past several months, as I’ve struggled both with my own identity as a creator and freelancer. I also know that I get a lot of traffic from productivity-oriented websites. More recently, however, I’ve come to the conclusion that I should just write about whatever happens to be on my mind, just like the old days, and just try to entertain and inform as I indulge my whims. The reason behind this conclusion is pretty simple: writing something is better than writing nothing. But even that statement requires contextualization; my value system tends to emphasize the production of anything interesting over the production of the right things. And from a marketing and branding perspective, writing about a multitude of topics just clouds “my online identity”, which is bad when it comes to helping consumers make the decision whether they are interested in reading or not. Ideally, my writing would convey a clear message with an identified need, focus, dream, and vision of the future. Therefore, it makes some sense to metaphorically create a new product line for stories and reporting, a spin-off if you will, to neatly contain my journalistic intentions. This keeps the main niche “safe” by not muddling with it, allowing the new niche to develop its own following while drawing on the existing associations of the parent brand.
Serving Myself
The other approach is to not worry about “packaging content for the efficient consumption by market segments” and just assume one thing: continuity trumps categorization. That continuity is me, my voice, and my perspective. This presumes–and I feel kind of embarrassed to even suggest this–that the reason people are here is because they just like reading about what’s on my mind, and that is enough. If that’s the case, I could write about anything I want, so long as I maintain the continuity in whatever way makes sense. For me, I think that comes down to the core beliefs that I have: sharing inspiration where I find it, documenting what I’ve learned, and being supportive of anyone who is trying to make a go of it. I really don’t write about productivity at all: I write about people who happen to be trying to be productive. What’s interesting to me is the motivation behind the productive urge, which is one reason why I want to start collecting more stories. Creating the tools that allow people to be more productive, myself included, is really an exercise in creating our own life stories.
However, not all stories have any relevance to anything. For example, today I heard a good one while hanging out at Starbucks, where someone was complaining about how she hates it when someone doesn’t leave the towel in the bathroom after taking a shower. I nodded in agreement, but then I realized that there was an variation in domestic household operations at work here: some families share one towel. You’re clean coming out of the shower after all. This was news to me, as my family has always had separate towels for each individual in the house. We took an impromptu poll, and apparently the “One Household, One Towel” rule was not uncommon in the very small set that we were able to sample. The very idea of a single-towel bathroom seems incredible to me, as I personally like my towel to be my own. My sister would probably agree, because she goes to great lengths to ensure her own towel is fluffy and maximally dry; she would become very upset if someone else used it “by accident”. But I digress…the point I’m trying to make is that this little side trip into communal toweling has nothing to do with what I topically write about. It’s just interesting to me. The “gracious host” in me imagines people who are patiently waiting for that software update to the Emergent Task Timer Online going out of their gourd every time they read a detailed article about how sharing towels is OK, but sharing facecloths is not (FYI: I am just taking a stand here on that issue). If he’s got the time to write about stupid towels, he certainly could be updating something USEFUL instead…
Taking a Poll
So I’m torn. I’m leaning toward NOT worrying about branding as the motivating force for a redesign, but nevertheless creating a separate content blog (accessible through this site, of course) for story collecting, random encounters, road food, and visits to new places. Some existing categories would also move, such as the Encounters category. If anyone has any strong opinions or insights into what the best approach would be, I’m all ears. The issues boil down to this:
- Will moving non-productivity, non-design, and non-business content out of the main blog create a more optimal experience for both readers and myself?
- Is “managing my personal brand” really so important that it dictates how I organize the content on this site?
- Is it more important to write for myself or write for the audience?
- What is the more worthy goal: creating a focused blog experience which can serve as a content platform for more commercial activities, or just creating what’s on my mind? This issue is really which is more important to me: success/commercialization (freedom) or writing for the sake of creating “good” content (recognition). Both are important, so maybe I am actually looking for a means to do both.
