nonsense Archives | Ian M Rountree

Do You Challenge Your Learning?

December 20, 2009 by Ian 6 Comments

There’s a huge gap in performance between people who know what they’re doing, and those who don’t. No-brainer, right? Where this falls down is that many of us don’t actively participate in our own knowledge unless we’re training for something; going to school, training at work, apprenticeship. But when we’re wrapped up in the doing of the work, and the work is learning, we often fail to see the possibilities associated with being a neophyte.

We need to appreciate more actively the time we spend as novices. The process of learning is a magical one; gaining knowledge, connecting with those further ahead on whatever path we’re pursuing – it’s a sequence that doesn’t repeat until we begin to teach others, if we do. And even when that happens, the experience is different because the discovery is lost, we’ve traded it in for observing the effects of discovery on others, which is its own kind of magic.

Part of this appreciation comes from first recognizing the real scope of our skills. A number of smart people have said essentially the same thing; you can’t learn what you believe you already know.When you’re a real novice, you don’t even know what you don’t know. As an advanced beginner, you begin to get a sense both of the tasks involved and how to do them, as well as a kind of depth gauge, that should warn you when you’re in over your head.

Another part is taking stock of where our newly acquired skills are leading us. If becoming a huge football star means eventually living in constant pain, do you really want the fame? Sure, you may have talent. A lot of people will put pressure on you to use that talent. But is it worth it, for you, to sacrifice health in the interest of a temporary paycheque and the ephemeral pain of fame?

The time you spend getting it wrong isn’t just an opportunity to make sure you can improve your skills. It’s also a chance to ensure that the skills you’re improving are going to be useful to you down the road.

What Pay Walls have in common with Maginot's Line

December 16, 2009 by Ian 4 Comments

After the Great War, France erected a line of defence on its border with Italy and Germany, hoping that it would provide a funnel for attackers wishing to avoid the line itself, or that invaders would simply get made into hamburger by the many many guns. Unfortunately, like many reactionary measures, it was built to deal with the tactics of yesterday, and then advanced around by the thinkers of the time.

Instead of traipsing up to the line and getting cut down, the Germans who invaded in 1940 got smart. They set out decoys, picked a target carefully, even sent the Luftwaffe straight over the line (which was not intended to defend against aerial targets so much less common in the previous war). Within five days of their approach to the line, Germany was in France. Maginot’s Line failed. But not the way most people believe it did.

The common misconception is that the Germans just went around by going through Belgium. It’s a limited myth; the actual attack was surgical and presented a scenario the wall was not meant to deal with.

I hope you can see where I’m going with this.

Not just speaking of news, there’s been a big kerfuffle for the last little while about monetizing services on the internet. Subscription-only news sites, limiting traffic from non-direct sources, any number of tactics in defence of digital turf – all of this becomes inherently futile once people figure out, in critical mass, how to avoid he need for access to the turf itself. The erecting of these walls – even the really small, annoying ones lime between-page ads – is a tactic that assumes those coming your way have no other savvy, that they’ll hit the wall and behave exactly as you want them to. The trouble is, we content invaders have already found our Luftwaffe, and it’s flying over your head right now.

Jeff Jarvis talks a lot about hyperlocal news. To an extent I agree with him. The idea that anyone, anywhere near an event can riff on it and get the word out to a place where it’s ready and waiting for an audience is a big deal. It won’t always be blogging or twitter, something else will eventually evolve in addition to the tools we have now, but the behaviour is already there.

You – as a content producer – are no longer defined by what you’re trained in, or what you’ve exposed yourself to in the past. Now, you can easily redefine your knowledge and gain new perspective with nothing more than thirty seconds and an internet connection. Like the scene from The Matrix, when Trinity needed training to fly a helicopter, and all she did was hit up the operator, hold her phone to her ear for a few seconds and download. Ok, so that’s an extreme example, but the analogue is there, isn’t it? I haven’t failed to answer a question in probably a year and a half since I got my first BlackBerry, mostly because I was already search-savvy, and suddenly had fairly universal access to snackable information.

Using monetization schemes as a barrier (even if the barrier is click-it-away like with interstitial ads) is a failing prospect from the get go, for the same reason as the Maginot Line was broken. Tactics never remain the same; that’s why they’re tactics and not practices.

What You're Building Already Exists

November 27, 2009 by Ian 1 Comment

We spend a lot of time working on getting bigger, acquiring more, whether it’s money, toys, symbols of status, or yes even networks. But how much yield does this give us after we gain certain volumes? The Law of Diminishing Returns claims that hour two on a task can’t ever equal hour one, but how much does this matter when some of us are nearing month two, or even year two and so on? Especially in internet scaled time, where tasks are faster and theoretically more efficient, diminishing return is an unknown quantity.

So much time trying to build, and what does it get us? Are we creating a new sphere of influence, or are we adding ourselves into the mix that’s there already? Sometimes the answer is simple; we happen on a new service like Foursquare and dive in with the early adopters, we become the loud first answer in the focus group behind which everyone falls into like. Other times its less simple, like when we join Facebook after having run a personal boycott for years because we don’t see the benefits of the service. Whether we’re the first on the scene, or the fashionably late arrival, the question we always end up with is a complex one: What do I do here?

Becoming a participant in a service is easy. Anyone can sign up for any website and start chugging along. But all of the media gurus tell us that if we want to get the most out of something we have to build a following, build a community. They’re doing it, and they talk about how, growing and reciprocating, and so on – but the advice is often difficult to follow because it’s almost invariably geared toward someone who speaks the same dialect as the person giving it. There’s a common disconnect, though, and it’s simpler than you’d think.

What you’re building already exists. Communities are everywhere – from the line at the coffee shop to the national identity you carry whether you’re Canadian, American, Egyptian, Iranian – on every scale, in every locale, community already exists. So why do we keep trying to build it?

Because building is always easier than serving. It’s the difference between a million casual followers only there to watch, and a hundred dedicated disciples, engaged superfans capable of further influencing hundreds of thousands of people on their own because they believe.

Some of us are just starting to build our networks, gathering followers, manufacture a platform for ourselves.We do this in any number of ways, but the thrust of it comes down to either social climbing or service to our peers in whichever community we’re acting on behalf of.

How do we know when we can call the process “done”, when we’ll be finished? When do we get to change from being One of Us to being the Leader of the Us? When can we start exclusively reaping the benefits of this circle we’ve joined, farming it for everything its worth?

Easy answer: Never.

Harder answer: Spend some time thinking about the communities you’re most active in, and try to figure out whether you’re enhancing the group by being there, or if you’ve self-included your way to influence without ever serving that community. If the answer is the latter, you’re done already.

And once you’re done, it’s time to leave the group.

Just a note: The force of this, the idea that what you’re building already exists, came out of an awesome discussion with Brendan Myers, author of The Other Side of Virtue, at an informal fireside he held passing through Winnipeg in October. If you’re still wondering hard how to use social media – indeed, any communication – in a noble way, it’s worth studying where your sense of nobility came from.