Solid 3.5 out of 5, but it’s a bit of an odd read – for reasons stated in the video.
Can’t see the video? Click here.
Archives for August 2011
The Mechanics of Ambition
Some time during the mid-nineties, we decided culturally that ambition was a bad sign in a person. That the seeking of wealth or achievement for its own sake was an indicator of selfishness, or greed, or a lack of awareness of one’s fellow humans. While one hundred per cent of these statements may be true, I think more broadly that we’ve lost sight of something very specific related to the idea of personal achievement.
Ambition isn’t just a feeling of need to achieve or acquire on its own.
It’s a process. Knowing your limits, setting the boundaries – and then trying to expand them. Ambition isn’t achieving a goal; it’s consistently setting newer, higher goals, every time you strike a milestone in your life or work.
- Get a promotion? Start working toward the next one.
- Trade up on homes? Look for things that make the new home better than it was when you got it.
- Finish writing a book? Pick your adventure – write a second one, or make the first one a real killer for sales.
There are all kinds of choice to be had for personal development, but it all comes down to a simple process:
- Deliberate over a goal.
- Decide on achieving the goal.
- Make a plan of action
- Enact your plan until your goal is achieved.
- Deliberate over an advanced goal.
Now, I know this is fairly reductive, but it’s the very motor of personal success. We work hard, we achieve (on our own behalf or on behalf of others), and we move on.
When did this become a bad ideal? Sounds like kaizen to me.
Proximity
We want to think outside the box – but then end up being too far from the box to be recognizable.
Being too close to the work gets us in trouble for different reasons; it means we limit ourselves and don’t take advantage of opportunities others see for innovation.
Measuring your proximity takes a particular skill, not only with your awareness of the needs of others, but your awareness of self.
Proximity doesn’t end with physical control, such as managing a task, etc. It ends much like personal space does – people have differing amounts of necessary personal space they must maintain for their own sanity. But how do we adjust for this? How can we ensure we’re the right distance from the box without being too close to the work?
We can’t. And perhaps we shouldn’t.
There are benefits to working closely with a subject – domain knowledge, an understanding of purpose, shared belief and the idea of why.
Similarly, there are benefits to being detached. Clinical examination, the agility that comes with sitting out the siege of new ideas. Awareness of a broader landscape.
It may be impossible to navigate between the two for every job – but this is yet another awareness trap we can avoid if we school our process, and think about our work differently.
After all, before knowing what the right proximity is comes knowing how close – or far – from an ideal you are. That, actually, may be far more important.
After This, Therefore From This
We’ve all heard the classic form of this problem – correlation does not necessarily imply causation. But, even knowing this, how often do we fall for it?
The internet followed where ARPANET began.
The internet became a craze in the late nineties.
LiveJournal followed on the text-file blogging craze of the mid-nineties.
Facebook followed on the heels of LiveJournal, and other networking platforms.
Twitter followed Facebook.
These are some really appealing matches to make, because they appeal to our immediate, emotional logic. Of course Twitter followed Facebook – it was a stripped down version of the same thing, for basically the same purpose. But was it? Similarly, did Facebook follow any other social network before it, or was it something new, bred from similar stock?
Take it a step further – if you tweet this post, share it to your Facebook stream, or give it a +1 or a share on Google+ – does it immediately follow that my traffic will increase? Further still – if I hadn’t posted this entry, would my site be getting any traffic today at all? Not necessarily – while I’ve been on an unintentional blogging hiatus for most of July, my traffic has only dipped a small amount, and my posts have been getting shared without my involvement. I’m not the only one to see this kind of behavior – Justin Kownacki did some forensics on his blog traffic when he got back into the blogging game, finding that traffic still happened.
So why do we post new articles? Why write on blogs at all if traffic does not necessarily follow?
Because there’s no black or white; new blog articles might mean immediate explosions of traffic.
They might get shared immediately, strike a nerve, and go viral. They might also take some time to gain uptake, and become search placement assets instead of social communications assets. We might also remix them eventually, with enough input from eventual comments, and build books or education pieces or seminars out of them. There’s no end to the usefulness of a large library of media assets sitting behind your domain. This applies whether you’re a well-meaning private person, or a multinational corporation. There is always potential, when information exists, that would not have existed if the information had remained unpublished or unused.
It’s so easy to trap ourselves into thinking either post hoc ergo propter hoc never applies, or always does; never anywhere in between.
After all, if I hadn’t a very large bank of past posts – nearly 400 at the moment – the natural search traffic and subscribers I have been gaining in absentia of new writing would not have existed. The ongoing interest in the history on my site wouldn’t have spurred me into thinking it was worth taking up the torch again – and I’m betting you might be in the same situation.
It’s about taking a long view, and in some cases ignoring the immediacy of natural steps to find the roots of current situations.
Post ARPANET, ergo propter Twitter.
Kaizen and Application Level Lifestyle Design
One of the intensely appealing things about the current app economy is the sense we get of kaizen from the aps we’re downloading – constant, consistent improvement in their features and value propositions.
If we opt in early, we get to see the growth, the longer we use an application. If we opt in late, we get to see a mature version of the thing we’ve heard so much about – often at the same price, as the early adopters finance the enjoyment of the majority.
Strong revisioning practice powers this in software; the idea of taking a feature set basic enough to get a job done, calling that 1.0, and working up toward your dream. Every process in between initial betas and 2.0, or even 3.0 and 10.0 is powered by a simple, 3-4 step iteration process:
- Describe the function
- Apply it to the existing features
- Gather response from users
- Describe new functions
In this way, application developers can call every choice they make the right choice. Even if a feature fails, or is unpopular, under this model, it counts as an experiment rather than an accomplishment; and experiments only fail if you learn nothing from the doing of them.
What I always wonder is why we haven’t applied this theorem to our lives yet in a conscious way?
I’ve spent the past month working toward getting back in shape. I’ve busted my knee twice, damaged my shoulders by pushing too hard on a workout, and been out of commission with delayed onset muscle pain for nearly a week. I’ve dug out my weights, started eating somewhat differently, and modified my sleep schedule to accommodate for the occasional first-thing-in-the-morning run. It’s been difficult, and injury is not my favorite thing in the world.
But I’m continuing to work at it – why? Because I believe in kaizen as a personal ideal as well as a working ideal.
It’s an iteration process. Every time I make a change, run a little faster, or work a little harder, I mark the results and adjust my course. I make optimization moves – not just to my own process, such as finding the highest-energy points in the day at which to work out, but also finding better routes walking to the office (and shaving 10 extraneous minutes off the trip in the process).
Why is this a big deal?
Because it’s an awareness trap. By not paying attention to when I hit the milestone – when Ian 2.0, or 3.0 appears – I’m making the work of getting each maintenance release out far more easy.
We consider so many things by their end results; weight loss goals, study for degrees, getting that black belt, learning Esperanto, and so on. These goals are ambitious for a reason – they make us want to exercise our need to accomplish, to build ambition toward a goal. However, I’d argue that as we divide our attention more, we’re losing the ability to maintain the salience of these large goals in the face of all the many small steps it takes to achieve them.
What would happen if, instead of broad goals, we began to make the work of improving – the process of kaizen – a central part of our personal planning?