Democracy of tools

Don't let people tell you that democracy of tools is a bad thing. More people having access to the resources that allow them to create is unequivocally good. This applies to agriculture, websites, and everything in between. Whether a machine supplants a plow or Squarespace supplants coding, anyone who says that democracy of tools is a bad thing is merely protecting what they perceive as their real estate.

They don't want more of us to be able to make things with better, more democratic tools, because it erodes their status & price point.

Don't get salty that a 12 year old with an internet connection in Bangladesh can build his own website, celebrate the next flattening of the earth through access.

More access means we're closer to better solutions, and that fact should help us all continue to learn and diversify our skills.

The future is decidedly against protectionism. Deride the future at your own peril.

In the way of good

In looking back, revelations that have improved the way I work were always the result of having tested something inferior before that. Rarely do we jump into the game (whatever game it is) and hit a crescendo from the outset. People who can do that are the .0001 percent, and we should probably be more forgiving with ourselves when it comes finding better, more efficient ways of doing the work we do.

Good is how we get closer to perfect, and we won't know what should be tweaked unless we run experiments. Impact, productivity, and enjoyment are the direct result of solving, launching, & iterating.

Let's not be overly precious about the things we're building.

Let's not let perfect get in the way of good... because perfect isn't the goal. Better, is.

Half of our population lives in 146 counties

It's incredible how much social dynamics help to create perceptions of reality. And social dynamics are informed by everything from coincidence to geography. In Europe at present, everyone lives way too close to one another to build up false and irrational views of their neighbors. Sure there are slums outside Paris and stark divisions between ethnic groups in countries like Spain or Greece, but in the United States, half of our population lives in 146 counties tightly clustered together around America's largest cities.

Those numbers prove that the red state v blue state divide is much starker than we might have ever realized.

It shows us that half of all U.S. citizens almost never experience people outside their racial, ethnic, or cultural perspective, and when we do, it's rarely socially.

I've always thought that access to different people, places, & experiences was the most direct route to understanding.

This information makes that undeniable.

Let's disagree

It's easy to curate consent in the digital age. Algorithms that batch & feed, the ability to unfollow "friends" on Facebook, and demographic grabbing advertisements that are all about how we label ourselves, and what we do or do not want to hear.

That goes from our latest purchase on Amazon to whatever political candidate currently causes us the most stress.

If we want to avoid anything contrary to our current belief, it's a fairly simple exercise. What's more, if we're looking for proof of something, we can surely find it.

I'm probably guilty of it as much as the next person, but it's given rise to a question about how to access information outside that which will merely confirm our biases. (It's also made me think of a digital property that could be the solution, but I better keep that to myself for now.)

One media outlet that helps me check myself is The Economist. It's always full of great information, supports a global citizen worldview, and gives plenty of insight into macroeconomic trends.

It's also hilariously biased in favor of free markets, is borderline unethical in their manipulation of graphs & tables, and can't help but lavishly romanticize capitalism of years past.

They've taken a stance and they're out to prove it.

All in, I know they're going to help me learn because I know how to decode the real info from the bullshit. I subscribe every other year, inevitably, because I need a break from the machinations of it all.

That said, I propose a resolution: when someone advocates for an idea contrary to our own (outside of racism, sexism, or any other -ism we have no lack of moral clarity on) lets invite them to tell us more, and ask them why, without condescension or sarcasm.

I don't expect us to do it every time we hear something that seems far out, but it's a good reminder for the certain, jaded, lummox in us all.

Even if that person doesn't satisfy our curiosity, it'll at least it give us a chance to listen and something new to research.

Let's gain more perspective. Let's disagree.

Problem solving and creativity

When we figure out new ways forward, we're being creative. The thing is, creativity isn't often associated with problem solving, and it should be. From a brass tacks perspective, how art fits into productivity, marketability, and business has been nebulous at best (if you're talking to your math professor). In fact, most of the time art's value is derided by those who don't think colors & numbers can mix.

But they can, and they do.

I'm not just talking about creative people earning a living designing, writing, & illustrating, or the fact that there are more working artists in 2016 than ever before...

I'm talking about the way most of us creatively problem solve every day. We do it with our children, at work, for the community groups we're a part of, or our neighbors.

Being creative is the ability to not only think outside the box, but to create new boxes and repeat the process.

If creative endeavors are how we breed a future full of problem solvers, doesn't it become obvious what we should be investing in?

The Diderot Effect

'The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption which leads you to acquire more new things. As a result, we end up buying things that our previous selves never needed to feel happy or fulfilled.' Interesting.

As a lover of good living, beautiful things, & unique experiences, I've often been tempted by the lust of wanting. It makes all the sense in the world to me that it's a slippery slope.

Diderot or not, it seems we have to choose at some point. Not only to keep the ship afloat, but also to manage why we want the things we want & to preserve the experience of joy.

People & experiences are always better than a purchase. I hope this influences us to invest wisely.

Celebrating emotion

In our culture, being emotional isn't nearly as valued as being logical. I've also found that saying someone "got emotional" is often used in a way that seems to reflect a lack of control, a weakness, or a vulnerability that is almost silly or worth pity. You all know me, so you know I go the other way on this issue.

When it comes to business or relationships, irrationality or blind adherence can get you in trouble. Miss the pattern because of emotion and it's hard to defend.

But what if being emotionally open helps you get the deal or genuinely connect with the person you're interacting with?

I think it always does.

"Getting emotional" isn't about over-expressing, gushing, divulging too much, or making one's self vulnerable, it's about creating a pathway for being able to see and communicate what is actually happening in a way that stimulates connection.

Saying what we mean, being fair, and opening up, is what emotion is all about.

I celebrate it.

The Age of Earthquakes

I read The Age of Earthquakes last night. I forget how I came across it, but it's been on my bedside table for a month or two now. I might describe it as the Be Here Now of the digital age.

High praise, indeed. I couldn't put it down.

There's mixed reactions out there about it. I'd venture to say that's because many readers feel indicted somehow. I know I did. There were definitely moments that made me question my relationship to all things digital. There were also moments that felt concise, clear, and poignant.

This book is a trip.

Some of my favorite portions were...

'We haven't just changed the structure of our brains these past few years. We've changed the structure of our Planet.'

'By rewiring our brains on the internet, we've tampered with the old-fashioned organic perception of time.'

'The natural human attention span is the length of a Beatles song.'

'Time snack (v.) - Often annoying moments of pseudo-leisure created by computers when they stop to save a file or to search for software updates or merely to mess with your mind.'

'Memory is irreversibly addictive.'

'The future loves you but it doesn't need you.'

'We all should give ourselves a pat on the back for absorbing as much technology as quickly as we have.'

'I miss getting emails from Nigerian princes.'

'Bored people crave war. Fact.'

'There's no shopping in Star Wars.'

'Healthy people are bad for capitalism.'

'A one-way trip to Mars would actually be okay if it had smoking hot wifi.'

Steady over fast

My pops used to always tell me to 'play the game.' It always made me insane. As an immigrant, my pops learned to do exactly that, and he's way less political or even out there as I am, so that worked for him and didn't feel like a huge compromise. He was also part of a different economy, a different time in history, a different social mix. I remember losing it in high school or college when he said that, a bit of a breaking point... I think it had to do with cutting my long hair to please an authority figure.

My deepest conviction, for some reason, was that being who I am is not something to compromise on, being a better version of who I am, is.

The question to me is, do we really even want to work, play, or commune with the people who will only accept us if we are a carbon copy of them? Why 'play the game' the gatekeepers have set up? Why curtsy when we can create?

I'd argue there is way more room to roam, be creative, and play our own game when we build projects based on models that don't revere lottery logic. The tortoise and the hare, y'all!

I'd take steady over fast, any day.

Think, speak, do.

There's a certain audacity to thinking we can succeed. Most of the time, regardless of what we do, we're trying to make something from nothing. No small feat.

But to be fair, it's no more likely that we'll fail. Success and failure are two halves of the same coin and it seems like intent could go a long way in tipping the balance, not matter how we measure it.

Over the years, I've thought about the process of taking something from idea to reality. That's where think, speak, do comes in. In the most rudimentary way, that's how we take things from initial spark to final product.

First we have the thought. A solution comes to mind. And it's precisely this gap between thinking & speaking that trips most of us up. We hold back and keep the idea internalized, not letting it out into the real world. This is the "safer" solution in one sense, but we also risk more than we ever could by stifling our unique contribution.

If we can bridge that gap and speak the solution, making it happen is so much more realistic.

Maybe we have to wear our heart on our sleeve more.

Maybe we have to risk getting it wrong.

Maybe we have to think openly, annunciate clearly and get to work.

Visualizing information

I'm fairly obsessed with infographics these days. They've taken storm over the last decade, proving to be an effective way to communicate granular information that people might just glaze over if embedded among 1000 words.

In writing an article about the decay of media standards for Mode, I found this awesome infographic entitled Media Consolidation: The Illusion of Choice. It shows just how unilateral the media is, & does so with imagery not alphabet.

One solution is for us to create the media outlets ourselves, especially because of my belief that advertising as a means of funding media is the inherent problem, but that's another post altogether.

The idea I wanted to chat with you about though, was this notion of making information more real for our communities. Images, illustrations, video, and increasingly flat tools for creating those assets allow a larger segment of the population to utilize them every day. We have the ability show instead of tell.

By turning our words into visual content, we help bridge the gap. Instead of eye test their way into alignment with us, why don't we make it easier for our advocates, communities, supporters, and confidants to message for us?

Part of that is why we created the IPaintMyMind 2015 Annual Report Infographic. We wanted to make our impact easier to understand, and I'm super happy with the results. I hope it shows people that our mission is not only worthwhile but picking up steam.

Going forward, regardless of the project, I wonder how we can all distill our verbose concepts into meaningful visuals that cut to the chase. It's an exercise of turning words into images and thus reducing the essence to the point where clarity is inevitable.

How can your company, project, movement, or idea communicate better?

How could visualizing information be an asset to you?

I need to find the manifesto I wrote about IPMM before we incorporated. Way too many words.

Expression v Communication

For those of us with opinions, it can be tempting to give way to our latest linguistic guitar solo. Passion turns into words and we get our point across. What comes into focus is our intent, as well as each one of our abilities to read our audience and understand what approach might be best. Even so, speaking with is different than talking at.

In my mind, expression is about getting something off one's chest, about making a statement and not necessarily being that aware of or interested in how it lands. The artist, creator, or speaker is in a position to express themselves, and they do.

Communication by contrast, takes the observer, listener, or collaborator into account a lot more. It's intent on sharing space instead of claiming it, and doing so in a way that invites the listener to participate.

Being aware of this has helped me pick my spots more, but it's also helped me show up to situations in ways that I'm prouder of.

Expression and communication each have their place. The question seems to be about whether or not we can remind ourselves when it's time for each.

Collective bargaining

Last weekend, Liverpool fans walked out of the fabled Anfield Stadium in northern England in the 77th minute of the match against Sunderland to protest the announced rise in ticket prices to 77 British pounds. En masse, over 10,0000 fans walked out to show their displeasure at ownership's approach to the economic future of the club.

As a fan of soccer and of sport in general, one of the obvious critiques is that we follow blindly. We rationalize any method that keeps the team profitable (public financing of stadiums, trading players that could help the team win for cash, higher ticket prices), and often times act as if we have no other option.

But we do.

As fans, as customers, as citizens, we vote with our wallets more than we vote at the ballot box. When Liverpool fans walked out of Anfield to protest ticket prices that keep the common fan on the outside looking in, they came together and showed their collective power.

Fenway Sports Group, the Boston-based (Red Sox owning) group that owns Liverpool Football Club subsequently announced a two-year freeze on ticket prices.

I guess we really can demand more from our businesses, leaders, & government...

But I think we're going to have to do it together.

'Everybody else' (an energetic source)

Sometimes it can be easy to think that it's about us... but it shouldn't be. 'Everybody else' are powerful.

When we look around, it's clear that a lot of people doing bold things. Challenging norms, rethinking constructs, building systems, developing relationships, solving problems, organizing communities, offering value, connecting people, and together, building the reality of tomorrow.

Whether it's Levi developing his own card games & communities, Jonathan speaking to thousands of people weekly via his podcast, Sam making great beer, James doing every creative thing under the sun, Dustin launching a new business, Brian traveling the world doing incredible qualitative research, Chad & Leonard following their culinary dreams, Molly making art into her career, Lindsey making malas, Katherine putting container architecture to great use, Jeremy angling on strategy around sustainable reuse of cell phones, Aaron managing water treatment at a vineyard owned by a man named Coppola, Saya rethinking community building, or KC launching a new career through meditation & speaking...

'Everybody else' are an energetic source.

Here's to finding the everybody else's that make us feel like what we want to do is possible too.

Operation 'time recovery'

Over the last 6-9 months, I've been kind of obsessed with figuring out ways to work smarter. Whether segmenting my time in new ways or finding certain hacks that help streamline aspects of my work, doing things more efficiently creates time, and that concept of creating time by getting my shit together has become a huge motivator for me.

I've been thinking to myself, how can I create a better system? How can I enhance operation 'time recovery', and spend that earned time doing the creative or connective things I love?

I'm not saying I've achieved some singularity of mind that keeps me entirely organized, but I am saying that we're probably kidding ourselves if we think that the current way we're operating is improvement-proof.

For 2016, I'm trying to batch-method things more. I'll let you know how that attempt at improvement goes.

In the meantime, if you discover tools, resources, strategies, or ideas that help you in your own time recovery, definitely share those with me!

Incredibly intentional

I went and saw Quentin Tarantino's newest film, The Hateful Eight at The Music Box Theatre for the second time in two weeks this evening. The film was shot in 70mm, a super wide, high resolution format that's stunning. I'm a big Tarantino fan, mostly because I admire how exacting he is. I marvel at the clarity of his visions, the detail, the language, the contrast, the dynamics.

Clocking in at just about 3 hours, it doesn't feel long at all. Everything he included was needed and served the end product extremely well. It's clear that every single element in the film was incredibly intentional.

Every shot was skillful.

The sound design was impeccable.

The lighting was uncanny.

The costumes were precise.

He was thinking about every detail when he made that film. And rightly so. It had been 4 years since his last film, which means he took his time.

My question is... how can we slow down enough so that our vocational and creative contributions are that accepted, strategic & valuable? 

I think it might have something to do with patience.

Questions of measure

No matter what we make, some people will like it and some people won't. This applies to everything from art to public transportation. For me, it's been awesome to realize that when I'm both passionate about a project (creation) and am helping someone (service), I'm at my best.

The issue ends up being which questions are used to measure the results.

There are the creative questions...

Did I like making this? Am I happy with the end result? Did it turn out how I planned, and if not, is it cool anyway? Did I learn something or improve by doing more of that thing?

And then there are service questions...

How did it serve? Did people enjoy it, gain perspective from it, or feel supported by it? Did it help someone? Did it make a difference?

If the answer to the majority of those questions is YES, I tend to think we're in the right place.

Break the right rules

I'm not a big fan of rules. Part of my personality is figuring things out for myself, trusting my own judgement, and charting my own path.

I think a lot of us can relate to that.

The thing is, rules can be helpful. They create a format, a road forward. And even though that's true, what I find most helpful about rules is that they are ready to be broken.

Buuuuuuuut.... breaking every rule clearly won't work out. There are reasons (some of the) rules are in place - they help achieve a viable result. My gripe is with the particular rules that are more about gatekeeping than producing better work.

The challenge becomes deciding which rule to break. Test the wrong one and you just make things harder on yourself. Test the right one and you venture into evolution. You create a new option.

That said, we have to be discerning.

We have to break the right rules.

- - -

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Thanks in advance and have an awesome end of the year.

- Ev

I see you, Buenos Aires

It's been fun walking around Argentina the past few weeks. This country has so much cultural richness, it' astounding. I used to visit often as a kid, when my parents would bring us here to see my dad's family... but getting to know Buenos Aires as an adult has been eye opening.

A few ideas have come to mind.

1) It's amazing how much we are hung up on appearances in the US. Image is everything, and that's not necessarily a good thing. In Argentina, the lack of resources in certain areas creates an entirely different set of priorities. The result is a somewhat more practical, yet defeatist approach... and it's hard to blame them.

Not only should we be thankful for how great life is in the USA, but we should also think about how we might want to adjust our own priorities.

2) Not being in the loop for the political nonsense and awful instances of gun violence for a mere two weeks provides a new perspective as well. I think we've mistaken quantity for quality, again.

The 24 hour news cycle is insane, and the shock and awe approach undoubtedly keeps us reactive.

3) I prefer texture to cleanliness. Walking through the streets in BA, where graffiti and street art aren't controlled at all, the confluence of art, color, paper, grit, and greenery is a sight to behold.

For me, these three ideas are attached by a single thread...

Travel is a gift.

Hasta la proxima....

Respond or delete.

No more of this opening an email only to mark it as unread, which requires coming back to it later... I resolve to handle shit in the moment. No more making a single email consume more of my time than it needs to.

Respond or delete.

Maybe this applies to more than just email?