Ian M Rountree

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Thoughts from Average is Over

June 6, 2015 by Ian Leave a Comment

On Google Play, where I bought this book, I wrote the following terse book review;

This is not a book that you understand in the first twenty pages.

The concept is pretty simple – boredom and a want of simplicity are keeping us from working with all of the tools we have to build a better world, a better economy, and a better life. However, the volume of detail Cowen goes into on just how that world might look is compelling, dangerous, and a little scary – but in a good way.

I’ve already recommended this to at least 3 people – and will continue to do so in the future.

Average is Over - Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation - Tyler Cowen | Google Play Books
Oddly, I found this book via Imgur – not via a business blog.

The ability to work with and interpret for computers is a big deal – and it’ll continue to be bigger and bigger as computers get better. All those soft skills your councillors tried to foist on you will pay off, if they already haven’t. However they won’t necessarily just pay off with people – they’ll pay off with your ability to be the back-channel between those who understand computer work, and those who do not.

This is a core part of what Cowen is getting at, but the reasoning behind it is very important to understanding the why for why this interpretation is so crucial to developing personal and cultural economic success.

Bizarrely, while this is an economist’s book about computing, and it comes very clearly from a statistical thoroughness I can’t possibly recognize in a book review properly, Average is Over feels very much like a galvanizing agent for knowledge workers. It’s not going to teach you to handle margins, do statistics in any real way, or anything like that. What this book offers is an understanding – from a non-business point of view – of just why the rush in knowledge work is so meaningful, against the backdrop of “normal people living normal lives.” It’s also a fairly damning account of just why the middle class is evaporating – though, thankfully, the book has some things to say about why that’s not necessarily a bad thing either.

What I appreciate most, personally, is that Tyler Cowen is and behaves like a knowledge worker himself.

If you follow him on Twitter, or read the blog at Marginal Revolution, you’ll get a broader sense of what fuels Cowen’s work, and where his passion is; making life better through adding value to information, which should be the knowledge worker’s mantra.

Without becoming too exhaustive, I’ll leave some key thoughts I had from the reading of Average is Over – and hopefully they’ll either spark some discussion or urge you to read the book itself;

  • The “average” being discussed is the middle class, without a doubt. Strangely, how I read this is that – and I’m nowhere near equipped to back it against data – there’s going to be far more room to get into the “have” category none the less, for those willing to do so. We’re not all going to like that, on both sides. Barriers to entry to the have-class are going to relate much more to personal effort in the future than legacy advantages.
  • Elitism is OK, as long as it puts on a polite face. We see this in gaming culture all the time. Even the most staunch “git gud son” players of online games can be the best of people – if they understand, and have the soft skills available, how to manage their environments and the people in those environments. As a force for internal personal development, or even external encouragement, “good enough isn’t good enough” is actually really powerful.
  • Median inflation adjusted income is dropping, have we compared this to an increase or a decrease in consumption? What gets me is that, if needs-and-expenses are also dropping, then inflation might be more related to wants. Again, we’re seeing that “effort” as above, may relate to force of will and personal austerity in some areas. Maybe people who don’t get the Apple Watch are the winners, in other words.
  • Your data is your most valuable and irreplaceable currency – and I’ll probably talk about this a little more soon. Tim Cook (Apple) very recently threw a pooh-pooh at Google and Microsoft for making business out of people’s’ data. What’s interesting about this, as relates to the book, is the idea that aggregates most often trump individuals as far as big-enough-data is concerned, and oddly that makes us safer and not less secure.

There’s so much more here as fuel for discussion. What I’m electing to take away from the book en mass though is the idea that setting your expectations, and then learning how to back those expectations out toward reality, is a killer app in terms of thought technology.

Get Average is Over by Tyler Cowan on Google Play Books – or, you know, that other place that used to be nothing but books and now sends you toilet paper overnight.

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: book review, books, business, economics, success, tyler cowen

5 Questions You Need to Answer to Prove You’re Not an Imposter

April 10, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

Imposter - Minimoog - FlickrThe social media world is filled with imposters.

I don’t mean body snatchers or Capgras-style imposters – I mean real honest to goodness imposter syndrome candidates. People who call themselves successful, or have been called successful, but cannot line their accolades up with real business effectiveness or predetermined results. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of blogs, consultants, and other knowledge workers who profess and opine and editorialize while lacking hard and fast numbers to back up their success.

I’m not even talking about ROI – not directly. While ROI is necessary to businesses, it’s hard for individuals not intentionally engaging in business to process, especially as a retroactive ideal.

Without predetermined, idealized scenarios for success, we’re all subject to cognitive bias in our work.

We all know people who are visibly stuck believing their failings matter less than they actually might – and if we’re honest with ourselves, we can all recognize that the potential for that behaviour in ourselves. We’re wired to act as though everything we do is successful, because working under the opposite believe is soul-crushingly banal.
We all want to be successful – and yes, it’s possible to consider some ventures successful at far lower levels of performance than others. Not everyone needs 10,000 visitors to their blog per day. Some get by with 10,000 visitors per year and don’t complain. However, don’t call the latter success if you’re shooting for the former – that way lies madness.

To avoid being an imposter, you need to set goals.

If you’re in the middle of a venture – such as building a website or planning a blog – consider whether or not you can give business-grade answers to the following questions:

  1. How would you (personally) make money from your work?
  2. At what level, either of revenue or other static metric, do you call your individual tasks successful?
  3. At what level, either of revenue or other static metric, do you call your individual tasks failures?
  4. What price would you put on what you’re building if someone asked to buy it?
  5. What would need to happen in order to make you stop doing the work you’re doing now?

All of these questions seem simple, on their faces.

And all of them are intensely complicated if you’re looking at them from the middle of a project, rather than the planning phase. If you’re in the middle of a venture and can’t answer any of these questions firmly, I’d suggest taking a long hard look at what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and decide whether what you’re doing is a commerce-grade venture or not. Not everything is, and not everything has to be.

There are a lot of ways to use online platforms to directly generate revenue.

Thankfully, there are a lot of tried and true methods for creating clear business success with online content creation – many of which rely almost entirely on the backing of the sexy metrics like pageviews, subscriber numbers, and publishing consistency and practices. This is where life gets a bit easier, because all you have to do is decide on a model to follow, and begin changing your course toward behaviors which support those models. Monetizing a blog, while not easy, is relatively straightforward.

A person could, for example;

  • Set up a blog to make money through affiliate marketing or advertising.
  • Sell products, such as ebooks or seminars, or even physical merchandise.
  • Create a revenue-generating platform with the intent of selling it to a worthy buyer down the road at a further profit.

All of these are great business goals, and all of them can become long-term strategies for success. However, since some businesses rely on blogs for revenue generation not directly related to the blog itself, other varieties of success directly related to revenue could be;

  • Maintaining a blog for the sake of customer service and question-and-answer rather than a static FAQ,
  • Creating a blog as an SEO play to drive more traffic to your business website,
  • Using a blog as a referral tool, to direct more of that traffic to a company newsletter or into a sales funnel
  • Parlaying the success and social proof from the blog into a book deal for its author,
  • Parlaying the success of the blog into a speaking career

… Or any of the other plethora of strategies out there people have used to directly or indirectly create firm, financial benefit for themselves or their business from the creation of online content.

So how do you know if the work you’re doing is generating real success, or satisfying your want for the illusion of success?

It’s easy to believe that publishing your blog on a schedule, answering each comment as it comes in, or growing your Twitter following and subscriber count is success. After all, putting the numbers for any of these activities on a graph and seeing them moving the right way is satisfying. In the end, however, these are signs of action, not signs of success – the same way achieving the speed limit on a freeway isn’t the same as reaching the destination you’re aimed at.

What do you think?

Image by Oliver Chesler.

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy Tagged With: blogs, business, content creation, ebooks, imposters, list, products, success

Top 6 Best Ways How To Write Awful Headlines

March 22, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

At Rest
The Elephant in This Room

Writing great headlines is one of the key elements of good blogging practices – everyone says so, right?

There are dozens of tutorials out there explaining what makes a good headline; numbered lists, using the words How to in the title, addressing a key fear a large group of people have…

That’s fine, but what happens when you write what you think is a great headline and it doesn’t seem to be doing it’s job? Feels like a complex problem. Feeling like you need to do some analysis, get some feedback?

This is one of those things where I know – I know – you’ll be mad at me for how simple this is.

It turns out there are some really simple ways to tell if you’ve written a bad headline, no matter how good you think it is.

If you;

  1. make a joke your post doesn’t follow-up on
  2. make it the wrong length (too long or too short)
  3. don’t check the title to see if it fits once the post is written
  4. include an inaccuracy in the headline as relates to the post, but not on purpose
  5. imply something is new/old when it’s not (Even if it may be so for your intended audience)
  6. give away the entire post in the headline

… You might have written an awful headline. And when you have a bad headline, it doesn’t matter how good the post is. No one will read it.

Just like when you have a great headline, if the post sucks, you’ve jumped the shark. No one cares about the great headline, unless it’s tweetbait, in which case if they have share remorse, they’ll be even more ticked.

Law Seven – There is no more obvious way to kill your blog than inconsistency of form.

It could be consistency of message, consistency of schedule, or any number of other things, but when you break consistency, you’re making people think for the wrong reasons and making a withdrawal from the bank of social capital.

Unless you’re writing research papers or case studies, you want people to expend their energy considering that you publish, not examining it for lumpy bits like titles that don’t fit, or bad grammar.

Reducing the emotional overhead on your work helps keep the investment people make in your work valid.

Writing better headlines – as relate to the writing they represent – is a good start.

Filed Under: Content Strategy Tagged With: Blogging, blogs, headlines, learning, platforms, social-capital, success, twitter, writing

Journalists vs News Items – The Twofold Law of Blogging

March 14, 2011 by Ian 1 Comment

Some people know what’s going on. Everywhere. All the time.

We call these people journalists. They’re the gatherers, the curators. Journalists present the facts, add value and perspective, conduct analysis.

Some people are what’s going on. We see them everywhere. All the time.

Most of the time, when considering these people, we call them celebrities. However, in the blogosphere, we call them link bait. Reference points. News items.

Which one are you?

And do you know which one is better for you? Which one is better for your blog? Not everyone who’s great at delivering information is  good at delivering news for others. Not everyone who delivers news and commentary in a value-added, impossible to replicate way is worthy of news themselves.

This isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s an opportunity to differentiate yourself. If everyone in your industry is trying to be well known – to be the news – you’ve got a clear opening to be the journalist, and report the news. If you can learn to do the analysis, add value, and build a consistent perspective on what’s going on in your industry – and, more importantly, deliver that news to outsiders in a voice and language they’ll understand – then you’re setting yourself up to win.

It doesn’t matter if El Bigname knows who I am.

It matters even less to anyone who doesn’t know who El Bigname is. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter who in your industry knows how awesome you are – success comes from outside your fishbowl.

If you’re making yourself a news item, is anyone outside your fishbowl going to care?

And, if you’re reporting the news, are you reporting it to te echo chamber, or into the vastness of the outside world?

Filed Under: Content Strategy Tagged With: bloggers, blogs, community, journalism, news, opportunity, success

Cinnamon Toast and Success/Fail Ratios

March 5, 2011 by Ian 2 Comments

Cinnamon Toast Awesomeness

Have you ever made cinnamon toast? No? Wow. Let me tell you – it’s not the most fun thing in the world to get wrong the first time.

See, most people start off the fearless way. They think “aw, yeah, cinnamon on hot bread!” and stop there. Some butter, some spice later, they’re left with a bitter, mouth-belabouring mess that is a general discouragement against further experimentation.

I’m betting the failure rate is about 95% for first-time toast-masterers.

Success rate for people who get beyond the first fail and try again? Probably 70%. This isn’t based on a fancy manufacturing management process or anything – it’s human logic. Got bitter toast, but want not-bitter toast? Simple answer; add sugar.

Sugar? Really? Yes. However much cinnamon you think you need, add the same amount in sugar – makes for much better toast. I think I was on my seventh or eighth set of toast before I got the ratio right – and it turned out to be really simple. But that’s just me.

Your success/fail ratio is different than your neighbour’s is.

What’s more interesting, your success/fail ratio isn’t the same as it was last time you tried. Success gets easier as you practice. The more often you do something, with more attention to the details that led to previous lack of success, the easier it is to move the process toward success.

One of the things my many cinnamon toast experiments have taught me about success/fail ratios, is that there’s an expectation of “mediocrity” that eventually follows accepting success.

Once you know you’ve done something “well enough” – how hard can it be to find a better way unless you need it? Things like lacing your shoes, tying a tie, or preparing some toast. Success, in these cases, is often measured by way of “acceptable/not acceptable” rather than “optimum performance.” We even treat our health this way, believing that the absence of symptom equates to wellbeing.

Let’s jump tracks. Are you treating your online work the same way?

Are you writing the best possible blog posts? Are your tweets the best use of 140 characters? Do you have every subscriber you’ll ever need or want? Are you leveraging every opportunity to get better in an intelligent way?

Is your business “big enough” or just “big enough for today?” Are you being paid enough to say you never want a raise for the rest of your life? Is your house perfect? Your kids learning everything they need to at the pace that will set them up for a perfect life?

Or are you good enough for today, but not good enough for tomorrow?

Let yourself get better. Yes, it’ll take practice. Yes, you’re going to end up with some bitter toast. But if you’re always optimizing, always ahead of the details and minding the ratios, you’ll be better every single next-time.

Go ahead. Make some toast.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: food blogging, practice, six sigma, success, success-fail ratio, writing

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