Dave Baldwin

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Is the Past a Thing of the Past?

May 16th, 2012

dave

I like to make a habit of stretching my thinking a bit at times. It’s helpful, for market research and other purposes, to know where the human race is headed—or to at least have a good working theory about where things are going.

Given that the human attention span is getting shorter and shorter as the number of shiny objects increases, I’ve noticed that our capacity for short-term memory seems to be decreasing as well. It’s not that our brains are losing their ability to remember (far from it). What’s happening is that we’re coming to realize that a lot of the things we used to consider important aren’t worth remembering.

I’m also noticing that the more complex projects I take on, the more I start to see different patterns that appear in different areas. This is good and bad at the same time. On the one hand, it helps me to find creative solutions to different problems. On the other hand, it creates confusion and makes it easy to forget the details.

If you follow where I’m going here, it’s easy to predict a point in the future where all memory of the past will disappear. Instead of remembering, we will develop hyper-efficient systems for recording data and presenting the important parts when we need to see them. At the same time, we’ll reach a point where we learn how to pay attention to the right things in the present, and by extension, we will have no further use for the past.

Perhaps multitasking is not a problem, but a practice we’ve adopted because we know, at a deep level, that we will need to master the skill of shifting rapidly between different kinds of thinking in the world where we will soon be living.

What do you think will happen when time begins to disappear from our language? We’ll need a whole new lexicon, actually. Maybe we should get to work on inventing it and using it now.

Day of Silence

May 12th, 2012

dave

What if, for one day a year, everyone agreed not to talk?

What would it be like if you had to find a way to interact and communicate without speaking? We
might choose to allow written communication, or we might even bar that for the day. We might
choose to allow hand gestures, or not.

We might choose to allow TV and radio, or we could turn those off as well. We could even *gulp*
turn off our computers and electronic gadgets for a day. What if we sat around campfires and
kitchen tables, saying nothing?

We might learn to get comfortable with silence.
We might clear our heads a bit.
We might start to like each other a bit more.
We might start to understand each other a bit better.
The economy would improve.
People would have a more interesting sense of humor.

I’m quite sure it would be unforgettable.

Morale vs. Mood

May 9th, 2012

dave

I think that a lot of people confuse morale with mood.

Morale is defined as “confidence, enthusiasm, and discipline.” If you look at each of those words, you will find that morale is an complex thing indeed.

I’ve heard people throw the word “morale” around in ways that seem to imply that morale is fickle and easy to influence. “Let’s have an office outing; that will help to boost morale.” No, it won’t. It will help people feel better for a little while. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it has nothing to do with morale.

A group of people that is infused with a strong morale is willing to go on three hours’ sleep because they believe in the value of what they’re doing. Morale is the kind of excitement that can only come from being part of something bigger than oneself. Morale trumps mood every single time.

Mood-lifting activities do nothing to boost morale. Boosting morale takes serious work – the kind of work most teams aren’t really willing to do (but should be).

Privacy? There Never Was Any of That.

May 6th, 2012

dave

Seth Godin echoed my thoughts on this a couple of weeks ago. (Or maybe he thought of it first).

No one ever had any privacy. Facebook, Google, Twitter, Foursquare, and the government didn’t take privacy away, nor did the invention of drones. Technology has only served to make it more painfully apparent how little privacy we’ve had from the beginning of time.

Spying isn’t new, nor is gossip. In the days of old, we could rest in the comfortable delusion that no one was paying attention to us. We were wrong. If you had any idea how much people notice about you, you would have been uncomfortable long before computers were invented.

People are nosy. Your neighbors take note of what time it is when your call pulls of the driveway in the morning, and they talk about it. People notice which places you frequent, what clothes you wear, and the expressions on your face. They already form opinions about you based on your eye movements, the way you sit, the way you walk, and the way you stand. They judge you based on your accent. They judge you based on what you order for lunch. They judge you based on the car you drive.

Everything about you is already written all over your face for the entire world to see. Astute people know how to read your life like an open book by taking one look at you. When people misjudge you, you are the one who has to live with the consequences.

Privacy? Come on. Who do you think you’re hiding from? Even before we had telephones and wiretapping, we had curiosity. Before we had the internet, we had determination. If people want to stick their nose in your business, they will. They already have been for a long time. You might as well accept it and move on with life.

Do you think it is possible to have real privacy? Chime in.

Government Policy Should Be Based on Fiction

May 3rd, 2012

dave

Fiction is a far better basis for government policy than logic. We’ve been trying to create policies based on logic for as long as I’ve been alive, and I suspect much longer. In other words, we attempt to reach a majority consensus on what is right and what is wrong – and then we create policies designed to maximize the good and minimize the bad.

We’ve had the answers for a long time. They’re written in novels and short stories.

For example, in A Spell for Chameleon by Piers Anthony, everyone is required to demonstrate a unique talent by the age of 25. If they fail to do so, they are permanently banished.

What if a small town tried experimenting with putting a policy like this into law? People would talk. They would visit the town. It would generate plenty of tourism, to say the least. Or, maybe not. Maybe, it would fail dismally. We won’t know until we try it out.

Our legal system could advance at light speed if we tried experimenting with this sort of thing, at a small scale, then at a larger scale after meeting with initial success.

We’ve already been running the government based on stories for a long time. We just don’t remember which ones any more.

Reasons for Writing Ahead

April 30th, 2012

dave

I participated in NaNoWriMo during 2010 and 2011. In 2010, I crashed at burned at 38,000 words and change. In 2011, I crossed the finish line at just over 50,000 words (the standard benchmark). In both cases, I ended up with a horrendously disorganized collection of material, nowhere near ready for publication.

What I learned from the exercises was useful in terms of staying motivated. In 2011, I allowed myself to cheat a bit. I started two days early, and each day, I made a point of writing around 2,000 words. I only needed to write 1,667 to stay on track, but I wanted to give myself some room to breathe if I missed a day.

However, the extra margin wasn’t much. I ended up missing three days, and at one time during the project, I found myself behind schedule despite having written ahead. This was discouraging t0 say the least.

The way I’m going about this blog is different. I’m writing two posts per day until I reach a point where I will be 90 days ahead of schedule. In other words, I will reach a point where I could stop blogging for 90 days, but my blog will still show a fresh post every day for the whole time. Two posts per day is easy to maintain, especially if they’re short posts.

Unlike NaNoWriMo, where I wrote enough extra every 3-4 days to pick up the slack for one missed day, I now write twice as much as I need to.

Bear in mind that no matter how far ahead you write, you still need to write every day.

Credit Card Security

April 27th, 2012

dave

A few years back, on a business trip to Brazil, my friend showed me how he got a text message on his cell phone every time someone charged his credit card. Every time we were at a restaurant or a store, it would go off like clockwork, about five seconds after the charge was approved. This was 2007.

I’m wondering why we don’t have this in the states. Text messages aren’t that expensive to send, even by the hundreds of thousands. If it did incur a significant cost, I’m sure that most credit card customers would be willing to pay a reasonable premium for the service, say $2/month or so.

Has anyone heard about this? Do you know if anything like this is in the works for the U.S.? Does anyone know why it’s not already here?

Throw Ideas Away

April 24th, 2012

dave

Recently, I took inventory of the books I’ve started and not finished. I discovered that I had started a total of 28 books, containing over 300,000 words of content. All of these half-written books are sitting on my hard drive. That doesn’t include any of my articles, my short stories, my old college projects, or the books that I actually finished.

This is the kind of thing that happens when you think up too many ideas.

The urge to chase shiny objects is undoubtedly my Achilles heel. If I were a mechanic, I would probably have 10-15 bays containing strewn car parts amid shells of cars that don’t run. They could start a 12-step group for people like me.

There came a point when I realized that narrowing my focus and eliminating large numbers of potential solutions to problems is a silver bullet for me. I don’t run the risk of running out of ideas. There’s no harm in throwing some out the window indiscriminately. I’m just offloading surplus goods.

Do you hold on to ideas, afraid to let go of them? Don’t be. Not only is there an abundant supply, but there is a gross excess beyond anyone’s imagination. Throw away as many ideas as you want.

It’s All Greek

April 21st, 2012

dave

No two people ever speak the same language.

It’s been said that to a carpenter, every problem looks like a nail. I would take this analogy further. Anyone who’s spent any time working as a carpenter will start speaking the language of hammers and nails. That is a foreign language to anyone who’s never been a carpenter.

If you’ve ever sat in a meeting with a roomful of IT professionals shooting off acronyms left and right while the non-technical people’s eyes glazed over, then you’ve observed exactly what I’m talking about.

Imagine walking into a room filled with people who have never seen color. Imagine that you have been tasked with the challenge of selling them a pill that will give them the ability to see color. How would you explain the benefits of color vision? How could you convince them that the ability to see color is worth money?

Every salesperson faces this exact same challenge. You might think that it’s less drastic than the difference between color and shades of gray. However, it’s often not.

One of the biggest challenges that we all face—day in and day out—is the fact that each of us communicates on a different wavelength. Have you ever tried to explain a basic concept in vain, wondering how the other person could fail to notice something so obvious?

What do you do to overcome the inherent language barrier that comes with being human?

“I Know a Blog Post You Should Read”

April 18th, 2012

dave

Most of us still recommend books. There’s nothing wrong with recommending books, but what about recommending blog posts?

A blog post takes five minutes to digest, if that. Recommending a book as the solution to a problem is the shotgun approach. It will probably work, but in many cases, it may not be necessary. For someone who has a very specific problem or challenge, a single blog post may have everything that they need.

One of my favorite blog posts of all time is Timothy Ferriss’s The Margin Manifesto. If you’re planning to take a new product idea to the market, this post is a must-read. I also keep a spreadsheet containing links to some of the blog posts I’ve appreciated.

Small is the New Big by Seth Godin started out as a collection of blog posts that he assembled into a book. Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte started as a series of articles that he wrote for Wired magazine. They are both great books. I’d recommend the blog posts if I knew where they were. I’m mentioning them now to emphasize that most blog posts fit into a greater purpose. Recommending a blog post may result in creating a new fan.

Have you ever found a great blog post that you recommended to someone?