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I thought this was a pretty interesting blog post about the stresses of being an entrepreneur. Much of it is kind of obvious, like accepting mistakes, worrying about the next paycheck, etc. But the one that actually worries me most is:

“What is difficult (for me), and unexpected by many new entrepreneurs, is the psychological impact of having to leave things undone, not doing one’s very best work, and having to compromise on almost everything.”

I learned from personality tests that one of my core strengths is “appreciating excellence.” I’m not sure I could deal with a job where I was forced to do shoddy work. I can live with not being able to do everything – that’s inevitable – but the things I do choose to do, I want to do well, and thoughtfully.

I think in practical terms this could mean looking for startups that are “in it for the long haul” rather than ones that are planning to be sold to a bigger company which will just redo everything anyway.

I recently attended Patrick Winston’s famous talk on how to give good talks.  I will summarize what I took away as most interesting or important.

Starting.  Do not start with a joke.  Do provide a promise of empowerment within the first two minutes – why the audience should listen to you.

During.  Cycle back to main points.  Provide points in the talk where people can wake up and rejoin the narrative.  Use “near miss” examples – ideas that are similar but not yours.  Use logos and simple graphics.  Use the board.  Keep your hands visible, at your side or pointing/gesturing.  Ask rhetorical questions that are at the right level of difficulty, and wait long enough for responses (it feels like an eternity).

Ending.  Point out how you have delivered on your promise.  Tell a joke so that the audience remembers the whole talk as fun.  Ask for questions and always repeat the question before answering it.  Finally, “salute” the audience but do not thank them (this is incredibly hard).

Winston also talked about some specific “special cases” of talks.  For job talks, evaluators are looking to see that you have a vision and have done something about it.  He says you have 5 minutes to prove this, and a good method is to use narrowing steps to situate your work in the vision.  And the final slide should be “contributions” (not “conclusions”), so they can keep staring at what you’ve done.

Finally, he talked about “getting famous” which really means making your idea sticky.  His outline of how to do so is similar to in the book Made to Stick.  He uses 5 points:

• a memorable “symbol” for the idea
• a memorable “slogan” for the idea
• a “surprise” element that will be talked about
• a “salient” that captures the central idea
• a captivating “story” that explains the idea.

For me, the most surprising advice in his talk was to not thank the audience.  I had always taken it as given that you end by saying “thanks” – but Winston made a strong argument that you should resist the urge, because you want to avoid implying that it was an imposition on the audience to come.  Instead, you can talk about how great an audience they were.

You know, it’s amazing.  Back in high school I took a philosophy class and started telling people – half jokingly – that the famous philosophers got famous mostly because they promoted their particular idea to the point of absurdity.  Now I’m reading Made to Stick (by Chip & Dan Heath) and they are making the case that this is exactly right – ideas that “stick” lastingly do so primarily because their promoters focus on a single core argument, subsuming the details and excluding all other arguments.

In high school, the absurdity of the philosophers’ prose became readily apparent because of the juxtaposition of viewpoints that we would read, sometimes in a single homework assignment.  Philosopher A would say “X absolutely must be true; for these reasons there is no way I could possibly be wrong.”  Then Philosopher B would come along and say “here is why X is completely impossible; there is no way it could possibly be true.”

Philosophers A and B obviously could not both be correct.  Yet both sounded 100% confident that they were.  Thus I concluded that all famous philosophers stuck with an idea and sounded 100% confident about it.

Needless to say, Made to Stick refines this observation considerably.  It’s not usually enough just to have an elegant core argument and sound authoritative; there are other important features such as “unexpectedness” and “concreteness”.  Looking back, the philosophers did these things pretty well too.

So I guess my saying remains half joking – but really only half.

Scott Hudson (of CMU HCII) gave an excellent talk today, of which the take-away point was to balance the value of information with the attentional cost of displaying that information.

In an information-saturated world, the scarce resource is attention.  It’s easy to forget the significant cost associated with any given piece of information – the time spent absorbing it (or being interrupted by it).  This is similar to the sometimes-forgotten truth about innovation that figuring out how to do things more cheaply is at least as important as doing things that before couldn’t be done.

In interface design, Scott aims to maximize the “C*I-A model”:  (communicative ability) * (importance) – (attentional cost).  In other words, you show the things that convey more information that is more important and have low attentional cost.

On interruptibility, he advocates following the human 7-step process of greeting negotiation:

1. sighting
2. orientation – looking back
3. distant salutation (head toss, which is culturally independent)
4. approach (step towards and look away)
5. end approach (stop and look up)
6. close salutation (handshake, utterance, etc.)
7. reorientation (90° conversational stance)

If computers were better at following this type of process, they could more effectively negotiate for a user’s attention.

I recently submitted the following comment to MoveOn.org.

I care deeply about both the environment and reversing climate change. But I think these two issues must be relentlessly separated in public discourse in order to achieve the momentum we need on climate change. Here’s why.

There is a vocal minority of people, many of whom are involved in MoveOn, who really care about the environment. Cutting down trees and losing species and polluting the air really hurt them personally. I am in this minority, but most people are not. Most people care a lot more about healthcare and defending the homeland and keeping their friends. They see environmentalists as getting in the way of their dreams of health and prosperity. They can’t understand why environmentalists care so much about trees. And fish!

But the implication of climate change is not about the environment. It is not about trees and it is not about fish. It is about the future of humanity. It is about good long-term thinking that will save tremendous amounts of money and prevent countless deaths and wars. This is an issue that I believe many, many people can get excited about, and indeed are already excited about – you’ve sent me the poll numbers. But when climate change has all this environment baggage attached, the majority are hesitant to take a stand. They don’t want to be labeled as the sissy treehuggers that our culture has carefully shoehorned environmentalists into (with the help of oil company propaganda).

Leaders like Al Gore and groups like MoveOn are understandably cautious about alienating their strong, vocal environmentalist supporters. But I fear that if we do not separate climate change from environmental issues, we will not be able to engage the majority. The problem is that environmentalists support climate policy for the wrong reasons. It will save coral reefs, it will maintain ecosystems. Most people hear that and think, well I don’t really care much about that mumbo jumbo, so I guess I don’t care much about climate change.

You marveled last week that Fox News had asked more questions about climate change than the other networks. I have a guess why: they are just trying to cement further the connection to sissy environmental causes. They probably asked, “What is your stance on global warming and other environmental issues?” As if it’s just the latest thing those treehuggers are worried about. I cringe when I hear such questions even on well-intentioned NPR.

Let us remember that halting climate change is not a progressive stance. On the contrary, it is the only way we know how to protect the status quo. People need to see the connection not to coral reefs, not to glacier loss, not even to sea level rise, but to war, famine, immigration, and commerce. So far, these have been sidenotes to the environmental story. I believe they must become the very center of the campaign. Otherwise, most people will just not be interested.

We need to go on the offensive, and accuse Republicans of proposing to ruin the global economy, and therefore our own economy, by refusing to limit carbon emissions. We need to accuse them of starting new wars and provoking new waves of illegal immigrants by supporting the carbon-induced climate changes that forces these people off once-fertile land.

Of course, addressing climate change is equally good for preserving the environment and preserving human livelihoods. What I am saying is that we need to remove the environmental rhetoric so that people can instead see clearly the connections to all the things that they personally care about.

I first saw this video at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, and it floored me.  It provides a really visceral way to understand the population explosion and exponential growth in general.

Start at the 45-second point to skip the talking ’90s man.  Be patient – it’s only a few minutes long and the amazing part is at the end.

I recently read Influence: Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini, which was fascinating.  I just want to keep a list here of the influence tactics he describes:

• Perceptual contrast (starting high)
• Reciprocation (uninvited debts, unequal exchanges)
• Maintaining consistency (due to public commitment)
• Social proof (going along with the crowd)
• Likability (attractiveness, similarity, compliments, familiarity, and cooperation)
• Authority (or seeming authority)
• Scarcity (of quantity or time – making it a competitive situation)

Really important stuff to know, both as a marketer and an everyday citizen.

I just want to make sure it is noted that a tenet of design in the internet age is letting users do things for themselves.  Replacing human and physical infrastructure with computer+user infrastructure.  This is mostly obvious; it’s just worth keeping in mind as a way to frame new technologies.

Examples: online shopping, checking in online for flights, internet-mediated ride sharing.

Who needs congressmen in the age of the Internet?

If the people can write their own Wikipedia, why not write their own bills and then vote them into law? When popular opinion is so out of sync with congress and the president, it makes you wonder why this hasn’t already happened. When everyone has easy access to the internet, everyone can participate. If the software is open source and the audit trail is well documented, it can be made tamper-proof. George Washington feared the “tyranny of the majority,” but when everyone is a minority, compromise bills will be crafted.

The congressmen and -women who refuse to vote for the people-supported bills will be ousted. Those who remain will generally stick with the popular vote and will win elections primarily on personal appearance.

I bet it will happen. Just you wait.

I recently read that Wikipedia is planning to pay people to make illustrations for some articles. To justify paying for graphics but not article text, the interviewee claimed that “volunteers apparently don’t find it rewarding” to make illustrations.

But I ask: is this because of some inherent property of illustrating (as she seems to be implying), or is it because no good tools currently exist for collaborative, online image editing? If it were as easy to collaboratively make illustrations as it is to write wiki text, my guess is that lots of people would do it for free. It sure sounds fun to me!

Two of my colleagues at MIT are working on separate research projects which I think could greatly contribute to making such a tool practical. But I can’t disclose those projects here without their permission.