Houston... We have a problem

Every so often, I take a look at Google Maps to see whether they’ve finally put our house in the right spot. On the one hand, things are looking good. We’re only a quarter mile off now (as opposed to the 1.5 miles we’ve been off by until recently).

On the other hand, they’ve also added a bunch of landmarks to the map. Every single one of them is off by somewhere between a quarter mile and 25 miles. They even get the location of the famous Ahwahnee Dining Room wrong… by 17 miles. Though not on the image, they also put the Ahwahnee Hotel in the wrong place and show “National Park Services” in a spot that is, in reality, 15 miles from the nearest services (or buildings) of any kind, unless you count the roadside bathroom about half a mile from where they put marker. Keep in mind that this is a national park that got 3.9 million visitors last year, so screwing up the directions to basic services is not a minor problem.

Meanwhile, they succeed in successfully locating two well-known rock climbs, both of which likely have fewer than 100 visitors per year.

The only real bright side is that I can see is that they incorrectly label Carol’s house, so at least they’ve accidentally left her privacy intact.

However, I think everyone should start an interview podcast. I’ve always loved listening to interviews on NPR (especially Fresh Air), but it always seemed like something that only a journalist with a radio show could do. Then I stumbled across Andrew Warner doing interviews over at Mixergy. Great interviews, in fact, with people like Derrick Sivers (founder of CD Baby), Tim Ferris (Four Hour Work Week), and some guy who got lost in the Amazon and had to dig deep to survive and get out. Great stuff and, with Andrew’s podcasting advice and encouragement, I decided to interview people I care about. He mostly interviews entrepeneurs. I interview skiers or, more precisely, people who make it their mission to help others ski better (instructors, coaches, trainers).

I’ve only done four interviews, but it’s been great: You learn stuff, you help people establish themselves as experts, the kind of people worth interviewing, you provide useful information or at least I hope so, and you make some fun connections or reconnections (it’s a good excuse to call up an old friend or someone you admire but otherwise would never call).

Those are the obvious benefits, but there are effects that I hadn’t expected. You start to hear how you speak. I do the interview, and then go back to edit. When I edit, I um learn, you know, the uh obvious — I and all my guests love filler words. But there’s more. I realize that I have a very non-linear way of speaking that takes away from my effectiveness as a speaker and makes me harder to follow. For example, I might say something like this: "When someone is doing deadlifts. Let’s say you have someone who wants to get strong for skiing and they’re looking for a good exercise and decide to try deadlifts…." And then of course, pepper it with ums and you knows.

So what? Lots of people speak that way, right? I feel like after only four interviews, it’s changing the way I speak very subtly. When you write anything of importance, you do a rough draft and at least one edit. The more you do that, the better your rough drafts become and the better your final drafts become. We don’t typically have any similar feedback loop for conversation. In fact, in my experience, we tend to avoid that feedback loop. I always hated listening to myself on recordings and I know many people feel the same way about themselves. And my friends, mercifully, do not critique my conversation. So again, there’s no feedback loop. Editing your interviews provides the feedback loop.

I’m not sure it will change the way I speak, but I think it will for two simple reasons. First, just knowing how I speak is huge. Second, when someone speaks directly, clearly and effectively, it takes a lot less work to edit. And since I prefer to avoid work, it’s an incentive to try to get better at my rough draft instead of trying to fix it in the editing stage. Of course you can’t always fix audio in the editing. And video? Forget it.

We’ll see where it ends, but if you are thinking there’s a topic you want to write about, consider doing interviews instead. So far, it’s been an interesting experiment for me and worth the time invested.

If you have an interview show, tell me about it in the comments or through the contact form and I’ll list you here with the anchor text of your choosing to give you a boost from the search engines.

Interview podcasts I listen to regularly include

• Mixergy — Andrew Warner interviews entrepeneurs and people of interest to entrepeneurs. Some great stuff.
• In the Trenches — Mike Robertson interviews top strength coaches. These are the top guys in the business, the ones that train elite athletes and the podcast is packed with good info, though also a fair bit of jargon. If you don’t know what RDLs are, it can be a bit hard to follow (RDL = Romanian Deadlift).

I’ve already written about how I use Twitter and why I follow so few people. I’ve also thought about the possible ways to use Twitter. Greg’s situation got me thinking specifics of how to use Twitter as a writer. My books, being obscure scholarly tomes, I haven’t used Twitter to promote them, but I’ve been watching how people use Twitter and what works and what doesn’t and this is my best advice to Greg. If you have something to add, disagree with something, or think this is good advice and want to encourage Greg to follow this advice, please help Greg out by leaving a comment.

If you don’t need a pep talk about self-promotion, you can skip straight to the bit on how writers can use Twitter, but first I feel compelled to address something that might be the biggest obstacle for many writers…

Self-Promotion Makes You Feel Icky? Get Over It!

Best-selling author Tim Ferris gives a great interview on Mixergy.com that provides illuminating insight the new world of book publishing and promotion. Every author should listen to this. If you’re too much of an artiste to get out there and hawk your book, be prepared to see your book remaindered. Comfort with self-promotion is a major hurdle for many authors, especially those of us trained to life of scholarship and poverty. So before we even get into the specifics of Twitter, first ask yourself:

• Do you think your book is worthwhile and well-written?
• Do you think that there are people out there who would derive pleasure or useful information from your book?
• Do you think there’s something slimy about making it as easy as possible for people to learn about and purchase a useful and/or enjoyable book?
• You’re diligent enough to write a book, are you too lazy to do some work to spread the word about it?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, may you write the book of the century, so brilliant that word will spread all on its own with no help from you. Otherwise, may the Force be with you. I would say "no skin off my back," but if you have a book that I would enjoy reading, it is skin off my back. That’s the realization that changed my attitudes on the subject (though not always my practice). If you have something that could improve someone’s life, even "just" by being entertaining, and you do nothing to get the word out there, you are doing a disservice to all the people who could benefit and you are dishonoring your own labor.

That’s probably preaching to the choir. Most people probably agree with that already or need a lot more convincing than that. But in any case, ask yourself very honestly if self-promotion still makes you feel icky. I’ll be honest, it does me, but thinking about it like I just outlined, makes me a lot more comfortable with it.

Ideas on How to Use Twitter as an Author

Okay, so you’re convinced that you owe it to your soon-to-be adoring public to get the word out about your masterpiece. You’ll want to create a Facebook Fan Page. And you’ll want to build a presence and above all a following on Twitter.

Your goal is to connect with people who share your interests and might enjoy your book in order to create an audience who will be ready to buy when the book comes out. It’s not how many copies you sell in a year that affects your Amazon (or god willing NYT) ranking, it’s how many you’ve sold recently. So one of the keys is preparing the soil. You have all these people following you because you post on stuff they care about. They like you for it and they’re grateful, which is as it should be, because it takes actual effort on your part. Your book comes out. Your Twitter followers buy 500 copies. It’s not many, but it’s all in the same week. That makes you the #1 history book on Amazon and pushes you to the top to get noticed. Small numbers are big here.

• Remember: You’re reaching out to new people, not keeping up with your old surfing buddies. That has a big impact on what you’ll post and it’s good to be clear on your goals. I have two accounts. On my "just for friends" account, for the most part, if we’ve never had a face-to-face conversation, I’m not following you on that account and I’m posting stuff that only people who know me would find interesting (and often not even them). I’ve been playing with Twitter to help attract readers to one of my websites. For that, I tweet on personal topics, but not inside jokes for my friends, and I keep most of the posts on subjects in line with the website.
• Create a custom profile background. Your background should say something about who you are. Once you have a cover design, you need a photo of the book on your profile page.
• Link to your book’s website from your profile. You have at least a basic website for your book right? No? Why not? You can build a simple website in an hour.
• This is a marathon, not a sprint. You’re a writer, so you know all about persistence and marathons. If you have a year until your book goes to press, that’s great. You’ll need all of that because it’s important to start building that audience now.
• Content first, then networking. You can start following your real-world friends right away, but don’t follow people you don’t know until you have some posting history. I always look to see what sort of posts someone has before I follow back. If it’s just 2-3 vague posts, I don’t follow back.
• Write tweets on topics related to your book. When I say "related to your book" that doesn’t mean only self-absorbed posts about how the writing is going, but also just topically related. If you’re writing about pilots flying over the Himalaya in World War II, then you could have posts on WWII history, aviation, the Himalaya. Link to books or book reviews on something you’ve read lately that you liked. Share something cool you’ve found in your research. And yes, the occasional self-absorbed post about how the writing is going. Tweet enough about topics loosely related to your book that there is always one on your profile page.
• Don’t sell on Twitter. Your goal is to connect, have a presence and on rare occasions mention that you have a book for sale. Rare occasions. In other words, as often as you would want to get a sales pitch from every person in your stream, that’s how often they want a sales pitch from you. Save it for when you need.
• Sell on Twitter. Okay, sometimes you do need it. When your book comes out and you want to generate momentum to get higher listings in Amazon or, God willing, the New York Times. That’s when you call on the people who follow you and say, very simply, "If you’re thinking of buying my book eventually, it would be huge for me if you ordered it this week." That’s 101 characters, so there’s even enough left over for a link to where to buy it. Remember though, this it a rare event, calling in a favor from your followers in return for all the great links and thoughts you offer without asking anything in return.
• Regular updates are good, but more than a couple a day and people get tired of you. There are only two sorts of people who will put up with a regular output of 20 posts per day — people who are filtering and not actually reading you anyway, and people who are stalking you and you shouldn’t be giving them that much information. Everyone else is just getting annoyed and they will unfollow you. One marketer type I was reading said there is an optimum number of tweets per day, and that number is three. I think he meant it half tongue-in-cheek, but that correlates with my experience in terms of who I most like to follow. Also, it’s not about averages. The worst twitterers of all do no posts for a month, then do thirty in two days. Never forget that it takes only one click to unfollow you.
• No minute-by-minute updates. If coffee doesn’t play a big role in your book, nobody cares what kind of coffee you had this morning. I hate to break the bad news, but aside from your mother and a few friends, nobody cares about you. They will follow you because you have something interesting to say for them.
• Be personal, be real. The flip side of the last point is that you want to be a real person, the idea is to connect with people on a somewhat more personal level, so your Twitter stream needs some personal flavor, some updates that are not "on topic". It’s a balance, between letting people know who you are and burying them in an avalanche of personal detail. Write a fair number of posts that are specific to you (either personally or your book). If your best friend or spouse can’t guess from the content on the first page whose Twitter stream it is, you’re being way too vague and general.
• Follow the people who follow you if they don’t look like robots or spammers. If someone looks really off from my interests, I don’t follow, but generally you want to because this allows you to direct message each other which can really help get to know someone. If you’re writing non-fiction and still researching, you probably want to make it easy for people to communicate with you.
• Actively block spammers and robots. Some people disagree with this. What’s the harm in having someone you don’t like follow you and add to your follower count? The way I see it, when you follow someone, before they follow back, they’ll look at what you post, who’s following you and who you follow. You want that profile to look like "their people" (i.e. actual human beings who read books like yours). Put another way, think about how Google evaluates web pages. It’s who links to you and who you link to that helps them decide which "neighborhood" you’re in. I want my Twitter profile to show that I’m in a neighborhood of "our people". In the Twitter world, I live in a gated community. Spammer scumbags are turned away by security.
• Find people to follow with Twitter search. With some Twitter readers (Hoot Suite, Tweetdeck, Seesmic, etc.), you can create a column for a search if you really want to follow your topic. Put in some words related to your book and find people to follow and connect with. If you follow someone, he or she will likely look at your profile. If they see a kindred spirit, they’ll follow you.
• If someone mentions you, they’ll do so with an "at reply" and you must acknowledge it. To fail to do so makes you look like a prima dona too busy to respond to the little people. If you are like Neil Gaiman with thousands of followers, all reasonable people will understand that you can’t respond to everyone (though Neil gets complaints from people who just don’t get it). For most of us, though, it is completely manageable in a few minutes per day. If you don’t have those few minutes, then just don’t be on Twitter. Simple as that. Of be on Twitter, but just for social reasons, not to spread the word about your book.

I know there are many things I’ve left out and maybe some things that you disagree with. If so, please leave a comment to make this post better for other writers!

Fool’s Goal and the Value of Forests

Obviously, I’m not against long-term goal setting per se. As I mentioned, my weekly task list depends on having some longer term goals in order to decide what goes on the list. That said, if you set a long-term goal whose only value is in realizing the goal, it’s the wrong goal. As a historian, I’m in favor of long-term thinking. The problem is that when you chart a course into the future, you exclude the one-in-a-million probabilities, but over long enough spans of time, some of these come to pass, so there is too much uncertainty in long-term plans for them to have any degree of accountability.

It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make them, but the value in long-term planning is usually in the unintended consequences that result from the fact that projecting far into the future allows us to understand more clearly what’s happening in the present. I strongly recommend the best book I know on long-term thinking, The Clock of the Long Now, by Stewart Brand. Brand cites the example of the Swedish Navy who, in the eighteenth century, noticed that it was becoming harder and harder to find tall straight trees to make masts for ships. Since having fast, powerful ships was an essential strategic resource, the navy commissioned the royal forester to set aside areas to grow these trees. Two hundred years later, the forester notified the navy that their trees were ready. The trees no longer had any great strategic value, but they did have tremendous value as some of the last remaining old-growth forest in Sweden. The goal of securing an essential strategic resource had been rendered null by new technology, but long-term planning had enabled the navy to recognize the problem of the disappearing forests.

It’s the same with the majority of goals we set. If we decide to train for a marathon, it’s not really finishing the marathon that matters for most of us. Most of the benefit is in the training for it.

Having some long-term goals helps prioritize tasks, but I mostly focus on short-term tasks, for reasons I explain below. These, by the way can be anything, even something like “get to bed before 10pm five nights this week” or “go skiing”. They always include some fun things, usually including at least four exercise days. This article is one item on this week’s list and so was this morning’s run. The key is that they are things I not only want to do (write, run) or have to do (paint the house), but things I will do that week, not things I sort of vaguely might to do that week if I get to it.

Failing Has to Feel Like This

If I fail, I “fine” myself $250. If I finish it, I award myself $50. The 5:1 ratio there is not accidental. Humans tend to be more attuned to voiding pain than to seeking pleasure. Losing five weeks of reward for a single failure is really powerful. The reward money goes into a pot to spend on things I otherwise wouldn’t spring for. Wireless headphones for example, which I most definitely don’t need, but not things like shoes or pants. Having a defined list, a defined deadline and $300 riding on it helps me stay on track. It’s been an interesting experiment (going on about three months now). Depending on how miserly you are, maybe $300 won’t do it for you. Maybe you need to make it $3000. Maybe $30. One thing is certain: for the system to work, it needs to be an amount of money that will hurt and the loss has to be bigger than the gain. We humans are wired that way. It also helps to have it allocated toward something you really want, so you tell yourself you’ll get that plane ticket or iPod Touch when, and only when you’ve saved up by ticking your list every week. So if you go five weeks and you’re almost there, missing one goal that week sets your iPod purchase back six weeks! Then you have a dilemma — stay up until midnight writing that article or wait an extra six weeks to buy your bauble. It’s powerful.

So what have I noticed as a result of my experiment?

Short-term tasks allow for accountability.

It’s hard to be accountable on a daily or weekly basis for progress toward long-term goals. Something that will take a year to achieve or perhaps that I may never really achieve is just too abstract. That abstraction makes those type of goals very easy to avoid, shirk and procrastinate on. Because I choose actions I can control and that are achievable, I can hold myself accountable every week. Focusing on a weekly list of discreet tasks that I must finish has four consequences:

1. My weekly tasks are not all that ambitious. I set targets I can meet. This helps me be realistic and really prioritize.
2. My weekly tasks are things I can control. So I would never say “Talk to Bill about X.” I would say “Make at least three attempts to reach Bill to discuss X”.
3. I have more true free time because when my list is done for the week, I’m done and can pitter and putter guilt free.
4. I rack up victories, not defeats, successes, not failures.

The last of these may be the most important. At any given moment, I have 200 years worth of things I would like to do in theory, but the list grows faster than I can knock things off. Life is just too damn interesting! The downside of there being so many interesting things to do in life is that they pile up and that can lead to feeling that I just get further and further behind on those long-term goals and that’s depressing. Actually knocking of a list from start to finish every week can really change how you feel about the freedom and control you have in life.

Small steps are easier to take than giant steps.

As a mountaineer I have never found summits very motivating. I need to focus on the experience and on very small, intermediate milestones if I’m to get anywhere. On a long, steep snow slope, I often play the 50-step game, that is telling myself I will take 50 steps before I rest. Then I play the ten breaths game, that is, I’ll only rest for ten breaths, then start plodding again. The summit is too abstract. I focus on the immediate task and the experience and find that much better at keeping me going.

I once read something in Hindu literature which, sadly, I can’t find again, that said roughly: “If we dare too much, we will be destroyed, but by advancing in small steps, the gods themselves can be defeated.”

Any process you don’t break down into manageable components becomes overwhelming. Breaking it down into small unintimidating chunks makes everything more pleasant and manageable. Having these very discreet and achievable lists is like that. It’s a lot less intimidating to get going on something I can finishthis week.

It’s ultimately not the goal that matters

Mark Twight, one of America’s great alpinists, notes that it’s possible to “fail upwards”, that is climb yourself into a situation unintentionally where your only recourse is to continue up, possibly in bad style and often at increasing risk. He sees that as a failure because you reach the summit not because you choose to, but because you have to. Conversely, it’s also possible to have a great climb that ends in retreat, but retreat on your own terms, which can be a success (you have a great time, you learn a lot, you live). Ultimately, the value lies in the climb, not in the summit.

Or, you had an idea for this brilliant new service and you would have run home and started coding, but first you need to learn seven new technologies and, well, there are dogs to feed and you still haven’t learned how to integrate Ruby on Rails with SMS messaging, so you’ve been working away for three years, hundreds of hours, but you haven’t launched anything, so you don’t actually have a clue whether or not anyone actually wants your service. Have you been wasting your time and how will you know?

The best way to find out, is to get a simple content site up and start collecting data to find out whether there’s any interest at all. Launch simple and then, depending on what rolls in for data, build it out. At least, you’ll have some content that can site on the web and age.

Still stuck? I just gave a talk at Pubcon on the simplest, fastest method to get something online, because something, is better than nothing.

The idea was to inspire people to simplify the process and make it as easy as possible to get started, get some content up and start collecting data to find out if anyone but you actually gives a damn about your genius idea before you spend thousands of hours and thousands of dollars thinking about it.

You can download the Powerpoint Deck here:
Super Rapid Website Developement

I hope you enjoy it – if you have any questions, drop me a line.

It’s graduation season, but alas, once again, none of the fine high schools of America, or elsewhere, has asked me to bestow my great wisdom on their graduates. I’m not sure how such a thing could have happened yet again this year.

This season brings back the painful memory of the two valedictorian speeches at my high school graduation. One argued that life is like a mountain. We climb up and up, meeting new challenges, always rising higher. The other spoke about how life is like flying an airplane, we climb up and up, meeting new challenges, always rising higher. Those two speeches, and their strange resemblance to each other, pretty much encapsulate everything I hated about my high school years.

I’m not saying I’m a sage. I’m not saying anyone should follow my advice. Especially not with respect to money. But I think I can do better than "Life is an airplane." And just because I’m horrible at taking my own advice, does not make it bad advice.

So here’s what I would tell a crowd of restless high school students, veins coursing with hormones and minds and bodies, itching to get this over with and get on to the graduation party.

Welcome Graduates

Welcome,

Parents, grandparents, teachers and, above all, the Class of 2009 [pause for exuberant, self-congratulatory, cheers and applause].

I know some of you are asking how this dashing, exuberant youth before you could possibly have any wisdom to impart. To you, I say that I am here not for you, but for your grandchildren. They are the ones you have humiliated by forcing them to wear those silly hats and gowns and who, only seconds into what will, I’m sorry to say, be a long address, are already nudging their neighbor and saying "That old guy is boring."

Boring I may be and certainly no wiser than your grandparents and parents and teachers, but since you won’t listen to them, I have been recruited in a last ditch effort to repeat the same old saws you’ve heard many times these last 17 or so years. But don’t worry, this will all be over in less time than it takes to watch the Lords of the Rings movies. The director’s cut.

I have a few things I’d like to impart to you, the graduates of the Class of 2009 (pause for self-congratulatory cheers). Some are things I’ve learned through hard experience. Most of them are things I made up yesterday when they told me that they told me I had a full two hours this afternoon. In no particular order, here are eight things I wish I had known at your age, rather than waiting until yesterday to make them up.

1. Write Your Biography Now

You have a summer before you. Write your biography, but don’t stop at 17. Go to 70. It may seem early to write your biography, especially for the years you haven’t lived yet, but everyone is telling you who they think you should be. By everyone, I mean television ads, inane magazines at the supermarket, teachers and parents, friends and enemies. Take some time and sit down and write the biography you want to be able to write when you’re seventy. Record now the life you hope you will have lived. What will you have done? Who will you have been? Who will you have loved? Where will you have lived? Feel no need to stick to the boring details of your actual life. I certainly haven’t in my biography [originally, by the way, I had thought Raised By Turtles would be a place for people to exchange such biographies, and that's where it got its name ("I was raised by turtles"), but I never quite figured out how I would get people to do it].

This biography is not, in the end, a blueprint, a plan, a roadmap or a tick list. What it is, is a safe spot. It’s the place you can go to remember who you are and who you should be when your tin foil hat falls off and you get confused by those messages the government is beaming into your head.

2. There Is No Plan.

Why isn’t your biography a plan? Because there is no plan. There is value in planning for the long-term, which is fundamentally planning for uncertainty and varied outcomes. That’s different from thinking you can predict the future and make a step-by-step long-range planning. When you make a plan, you exclude the things that have a one in a thousand chance of happening. But played out over thousands of options, sometimes the one in a thousand chance will come to pass and your plan is out the window. If every five years since I was 15, I had predicted where I would be living and what sort of work I’d be doing, I would have have been wrong on one or both counts every single time. You’ve heard of Plan B? I think I’m on Plan BB now, having already gone through the whole alphabet once. Or twice.

That should be liberating. You don’t have to know now what you will become. You’ll work it out as you go mostly. One of the most dangerous myths foisted upon you is the idea that you should know today who you will be and what you will be doing (particularly what type of job) in twenty years. In addition to being dangerous, it’s ridiculous.

I’ll wager this: the adults that you really admire did not become what their sixteen year-old selves thought they would become (in my case, a medical doctor). My father was a university athletic director who had trained to be a math teacher, a fighter pilot and a health researcher, but never an athletic director. When I was 23 and anguished by the prospect of trying to plan my future, he said as only a father can "Remind me, how old are you now?" and then said "If someone had told me when I was 23 that I would end my career as an athletic director, I would have laughed. Just keep trying new things until you find something that excites you or you’re old enough to collect Social Security." That works for me.

Make plans. Have goals. But don’t be too upset when you have to scratch them and start over.

3. Life Takes Patience and Persistence.

I just made it sound like it’s no big deal to cast aside goals and plans, but it is. All I meant to say is that it was necessary, not that it was easy. Lou Reed says:

You’ve got to be very strong,
Because you start from zero
Over and over again.

Most great things are achieved not with brilliance, but with persistence and patience. That’s good news, because unlike genius and innate talent, those are things we learn, not things that we have to be born with. So they’re available to all of us.

Having patience does not mean sitting around waiting for something wonderful to happen miraculously, out of thin air. It means working the hard work and getting your hands dirty and sticking to it as the seed grows bit by bit until finally, something wonderful pokes through the soil. But when it doesn’t, when Plan A fails, you need persistence, because you start from zero, over and over again. The most powerful metaphor I’ve known in life is that of the phoenix, the bird that burns to ash and rises again stronger and renewed. It runs through my mind whenever I face hard times and setbacks. Sometimes in life, you need to burn like the phoenix before you can rise again and for that, you’ve got to be very strong.

4. Life gets easier.

Patience? Persistence? That makes life sound nasty, brutish and long. But in truth, for most people, life gets easier as you move from childhood to adulthood. That’s the secret that adults hate to tell kids. In fact, they constantly try to make you believe it’s the other way around.

In third grade they started telling me I wouldn’t be able to get away with that when I got to fourth grade, where we would get letter grades, the threat of which was supposed to shake me to my bones.Then they threatened me with the specter of not being able to get away with that in middle school, then high school, then college and then with the most ominous threat of all, the "real world". Nobody ever clearly defined what that was, but it was always something vaguely related to my laziness, incompetence, poor penmanship, inability to sit still in class or some other supposed deficit of mine that, in the end, never once hurt me in any way shape or form in the supposed real world.

That’s just me. I can’t guarantee that life will get easier for all of you, but the part they don’t tell you is that in general, the tools you have to work with and the freedom you have with which to use them will increase in much greater proportion than the tasks you’re given. So yes, you’ll be expected to do five times more and to do it five or fifty times as well, but by the time that expectation is placed on you, it will actually be easier than what you’re being asked to do now. If an adult in your life scoffs at this idea, ask if he or she wants to trade places. I guarantee none of them will. They’ll tell you "if only I could" but they are not being even remotely honest.

And adults in the audience, I have a request. I don’t know why so many of you have decided it’s your duty to fill the next generation with pessimism and foreboding for the future. Do me one favor: please, help them get started. Then get out of their way and let them create their future. They’re the ones that have to live there.

5. You Are More Free Than You Know.

It’s difficult for me to watch kids being told not to do things that their parents do. Really? That food is bad for them, but not for you? Me, I lead by example. The other day my wife and I were passing by the Lake Champlain Chocolates store in Waterbury, Vermont. Since they have the best chocolate ice cream in the universe, we decided to have chocolate ice cream for dinner. Being a grown up is great.

Sadly, most people don’t know how free they are. Much of what they see as natural and obligatory is just a set of circumstances handed to them because of where they live and who they know. When I was a few years older than you, I had the chance to meet Michel Foucault, one of the great philosophers of the twentieth century. He gave me something valuable that I keep with me at all times and which I bring out in times of need. Now I’m going to give it to you. What he gave me was an idea. He said "The purpose of my work is to show people how free they are." When you feel boxed in, you can pull that out too and remember how free you are.

It doesn’t mean you can be anything you want. Adults, please stop parotting that claptrap at young people. Some things are impossible or so difficult that only the foolhardy would even try. Some things require innate talents you don’t have. You can’t play pro basketball if you’re 5′2" and 120 pounds and you can’t be a pro jockey if you’re 6′10 and 280 pounds. Do not believe the snake oil salesmen who tell you that can do anything. You can’t. Being free doesn’t mean you’re God, Superman, Einstein or a shapeshifter.

But too many people see compulsion where they should be see choice. Consider two people:

• One says "I wish I could go skiing tomorrow, but my boss won’t let me".
• The other says "It would be fun to go skiing tomorrow, but I value my job more than a day of skiing."

One sees nefarious, external forces at work (the boss). The other sees a personal choice. One sees constraint. The other sees decision. We, as Americans in the 21st century, are unlikely to be sold into bondage. We lose our freedom in our minds. Never forget how free you are.

6. These Are Probably Not the Best Years of Your Life

Why do we tell people who are 17 to "enjoy it, these are the best years of your life"? That was actually the line they used to try to sell me a yearbook when I was your age. It seemed ridiculous to me then and now it makes me sad to think of the kids who believed it, who believed that at 17 years old their best years were behind them. Screw that. My grandmother told me her eighties were her best years, and not because the ones before that were especially bad. Her eighties were especially good. Let’s just stop and think about that for a second [pause].

If your high school years have been great, think how lucky you are. Even better years probably await and it’s way more fun to believe that anyway. If your high school years have been miserable, don’t despair just yet. Lots of happy, well-adjusted, successful adults with great friends and wonderful spouses and children were miserable in high school. How happy you are in high school is not a good predictor of how happy you’ll be as an adult.

If you have felt awkward, possibly miserable, these last years, don’t worry, you have a lot more company than you think. For the vast majority of you, better years are ahead. It’s dramatically easier as you get older to find a circle, a group, a tribe that you belong to. Just because you can’t be anything you want, doesn’t mean that the doors of possibility are not about to be thrown wide open.

7. Fear Is the Mind Killer

I stole that title from Frank Herbert’s Dune, a story about Paul Atreides, a boy who becomes a God. Your future is not nearly scary as his, but trying new things is a scary business. Remember this: the things that you fear the most will rarely if ever come to pass. Everyone repeat after me: "The things I fear the most, will rarely if ever come to pass." [repeat until crowd says it] You will worry and you will fret and you will at times be paralyzed with fear, and most of the time, nothing bad will ever happen. Remember that while you’re remembering how free you are.

8. Do What You Love, But The Money Probably Won’t Follow

I don’t know why adults insist on telling kids that if you do what you love, the money will follow. For the overwhelming majority of human beings on the planet, that is not true. In most times and places, the idea that the thing you love the most would also bring you enough money to live on wasn’t even reasonable. Most people will have to make a choice. If your passion is medecine, law or business, you might be able to have it all. Me, I loved history and I have been able to support myself as a historian in some form or another since 1989, though the first years were real lean. I’ve made a living, but it would be hard to say "the money followed". God forbid I should have loved to write poetry or spend my days fly fishing or playing basketball or writing a blog and hoped to make a living doing one of those. Perhaps for every 100,000 boys who love basketball, one makes a living at it as a pro. And let’s be clear here, you’re one of the 99,999. And that’s okay.

For the most part, if you are like 99% of humanity, your job simply will not be something you love. You can still do the things you love. You’ll spend less than half your waking life at work. So do what you love. But it need not be your job. Almost nobody can make a living writing poetry. But it doesn’t mean you can’t be plumber and a poet.

Last Words

I know I was supposed to tell you that life is wonderful, a world of possibility lies before you and you can do anything. I think my closing words were supposed to be "And now go out and change the world". That seems to be the standard script. Well, you can’t do anything, but it is true that the range of possibility stretches beyond your imagination and mine. You will change the world, but only a little bit. Still, try to change it just a little for the better if it’s all the same to you. And life is wonderful. But sometimes it’s hard too.

But I’m an optimist. I think a world in which you can both make a living and do what you love is a pretty good place, even if you can’t do both at the same time.

And now one last thing: take the rest of the afternoon off. Remember, life takes patience. Pace yourself.

There is a general bias in academic culture to focus on the fact that one of the things we learn through research is to be skeptical, at least in our fields of expertise. Andrew Pettegrew, a noted Reformation scholar set me straight though. We were at dinner and I started out a story by saying "You’ll never believe this." He interrupted me and said "I’m a scholar. I’m trained to believe the unbelievable." I don’t even remember what story I told, whether it dealt with my research or with something that had happened to me that afternoon, but his comment taught me what was hands down the single most important thing I learned in graduate school.

When I thought about it, I realized that is the more powerful and important skill that we learn through research. It’s not to have our bullshit detectors out constantly. Rather, it’s that we do research and testing and when the testing shows us something unbelievable, we don’t reject it because common sense tells us it isn’t so. We might need a second round of research and testing, more data, better controls. But in the end, it’s not our common sense and skepticism that allows us to think new things in new ways. Those are merely the obstacles that keep us from think foolish things in foolish ways, but nothing interesting, great or innovative ever comes from them.

Uncommon sense, backed with data, lies behind every idea worth propagating.

Telecommuting from my mountain hideaway, I’m blessed to be insulated from most biz-speak. I depend on my visits with my brother to tell me about the latest trends in useless business mumbo jumbo. As a former engineer and business strategist for HP and current executive leadership coach for HP, IDX and GE (he only works for companies that go by acronyms apparently) and now on his own, he hears a lot of it. Also, his in-laws are mostly real-estate agents, a profession that generally has a gluttonous appetite for devouring motivational speakers and such. So he’s virtually a certified expert on biz-speak mumbo jumbo.

Anyway, I was telling him something and he made some sarcastic response along the lines of "Yeah, 212!" I had no idea what this was until he explained to me the mathematically and scientifically challenged metaphor behind 212: The Extra Degree.

Motivational speakers tend to be mathematically challenged. The proper sports lingo requires that one give 110% or even 200% (100% psychological and 100% physical). Of course, anyone who tells you to give 110% is, ipso facto, full of crap or a very poor mathematician. Anyway, these people, who espouse the so-called 212 principle preach instead of the gospel of giving just a little bit more. They love to say things like you’ll see in the YouTube video such as:

• From 2000 to 2006, the average difference in PGA victories was 1.71 strokes.
• In the 2004 Olympics, the 200m freestyle swim had margin of victory of .43 seconds (hey, in 2008, some swim events had a margin of victory of .01 seconds).

The unreasoning goes like this. If you have some water on the stove and you start adding heat, you take it from room cold water right out of the tap to 211 degrees and pretty much nothing happens. But if you go just a little farther, to 212 degrees, there is a state change, the water boils, real action takes place, nothing is the same. That little change makes all the difference. So in your sport/life/business/blog you have to keep pushing because sometimes you’re at 211 degrees without really knowing it and if you can go just a bit farther, success, riches, sex and unlimited ice cream await you.

There is the minor problem that when you take water from 211 degrees to 212 degrees, in fact nothing changes under standard, idealized conditions (i.e. the thermodynamic equivalent of the frictionless surface used in mechanics). This then leads us into the major problem of taking water from 212 degrees in liquid form, to 212 degrees in vapor form. Since the latent heat of vaporization is roughly 540 calories per gram, depending on conditions, it turns out that the state change effect, which is "just a little farther", is in fact a hell of a lot of work. So to keep it all in metric, if the water out of your tap is 20 degrees, it takes 80 calories per gram to heat it to the boiling point. But, to actually get it to boil takes almost seven times the energy that it took to get it there. So you think you’re almost there, you’ve almost reached that pinnacle of unlimited ice cream, but whatever it took you to get where you are, you now have to be prepared to plow 6.75 times as much energy into it to achieve the state change.

In my experience as a historian, this pretty much correlates with what it really takes to push through to boiling and become one of the best at what you do. I read old manuscripts which can be very difficult to decipher. To get to the point where you can read 90% of the words and get the vague sense takes a couple of months. To be able to read 99% takes perhaps a year or two and you get the meaning right in 99.9% of the cases. To get to the point where you can decipher 99.9% of the words and are considered a leading expert and people come to you for help and advice seems to take some natural apptitude, dogged determination and over a decade of focussed effort. For most people it simply isn’t worth it to push form 211 to 212 degrees because of the massive amount of energy it takes to achieve state change.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article on Asymptotes

Put another way, excellence is asymptotic in my experience. An asymptote is a curve that approaches a line, but will never touch it. In other words, the trip from beginner to not bad goes pretty fast, the trip from not bad to damn good takes quite a while and the trip from damn good to perfect can’t be attained. Now, you might at this point say that I’m missing the point, that the metaphor works in that there’s a point where you break through and stand out from the crowd and magic happens. I understand that, but when you take into account the actual physics of boiling water, the metaphor makes a lot more sense.

I remember a great magician I used to like to watch on the streets. Someone came up to him and said "You’re really good." He said, "No, I’m great. Do you know the difference?" The difference is that it only took him 80 calories to be good. But long years of trial and practice, the investment of another 540 calories made him great. From incompetence to competence takes 80 calories. From competence to excellence takes 540 calories.

Marshall Goldsmith sees it altogether differently. He argues that it’s not that the amount of effort required for the state change is massively different, but that more of the same will typically not get you there at all. He’s the author of the top-selling success guide What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful. To stay with the 212 metaphor, Goldsmith thinks that it actually takes different skills to make a huge leap like the one from liquid to gas than the skills it took to get you from cold to hot.

Reason has failed the 212ers not because of flawed logic but because of bad information with the consequence that they don’t know when to give up. They don’t know that they’ve become competent but have neither the drive nor the aptitude to become excellent. I’m not, by the way, saying I do. I sing the praise of mediocrity in most endeavours (alas, that’s another topic, but I am not being facetious). I only strive for excellence in a couple of areas and, through long practice and much suffering, I have perhaps arrived in one or two areas. Mostly, though, I accept mediocrity for the simple reason that I understand how many calories are required for a state change and I know that I can only pour those calories into a few things and I had better be damn sure they really matter. 540 calories hurts! And if Marshall Goldsmith is right, more won’t help anyway. What is required is different.

Is it worth it to try to make the water boil?

But then comes the question of why and the authors pointed out that this is a common stumbling block, though it never should be (that is, you might have trouble proving feasibility, because that’s the nature of fresh research, but you should never be at a loss as to why finding an answer would be worth it). I’ve since had a chance to read several grant proposals and surprisingly, this is often where the applications fail. It’s not uncommon to see applicants who give a reason for their study that is no reason at all. Exampe:

Reason: “This has never been done before”
Objection 1: Maybe that’s because it’s impossible.
Objection 2: Maybe because it’s uninteresting.

In any case, the fact that something has never been studied before doesn’t mean it should and certainly not that I should give you money to do it. Also, the reasons you want grant money are not necessarily the reasons you deserve grant money and you always need to know which is which.

Tom Lambert
Dissertator. Slacker.
Appointments by request

This time I wasn’t doing something quite that flippant. These cards are for my position has “Hiker in Chief” at Yosemite Explorer, so I didn’t care about a unique, custom, professional product. I was fine with the 30 or so free business card templates they offer. At every step, though, you’re tempted to upgrade: more templates, custom fonts, no Vistaprint.com URL on the back ($3.99 extra). Then of course you get offered all sorts of complementary, but not complimentary, products: address labels, letterhead, pens and so on. Then when you’re all done and you’ve kept your exuberance in check and resisted ponying up for that killer premium font, you do have to pony up $5.68 for shipping and handling. That’s not really free, but it’s awfully cheap for 250 business cards.

Watch out for the $10 cash back offer.

I was also hit up for a special offer for $10 cash back. This was the only part of the process that bothered me. It sounds great: spend $5.68, give your email address and get $10.00 back. Net gain: $4.32 plus 250 business cards. Who can beat that? If you take a minute to read all the small boring text on the left instead of just the main offer box where they ask for your email, you realize that by giving your email at this stage, you are in fact authorizing a $14.95 per month charge on your credit card.. I thought all the other come-ons were more or less what I expected, very clear and up front about costs and easy to pass on, but this one struck me as deceptive.

I haven’t tried to free t-shirt offer, but apparently you can get one of those too. In general I’m kind of picky about my t-shirts and I like to design my own from scratch so I passed on this one. So anyway, click on the banners below and you’ll get 250 “free” business cards for $5.68 or a “free” t-shirt (true cost undetermined). Best of all (from my point of view anyway), if you use that banner, I’ll actually get a commission!

Update: Nice cards accompanied by email barrage

My cards arrived quickly. The quality was better than expected and people who see them are generally really impressed.

And once you order, the email barrage from VistaPrint begins. You can of course just unsubscribe, but if you don’t you’ll get an email just about every day from them with their latest specials and so forth. I wouldn’t exactly call it spam, but waaayyy beyond a reasonable quantity. But they’re basically an honorable company and will honor your unsubscribe. The thing is, I think they make a mistake by sending quite so much mail. If they sent an email every two weeks, I would not be annoyed and would be more likely to actually open the email before deleting it. I would think it would be a better strategy to send the occasional email with a special offer and maybe an occasional newsletter that I would select. Depending on my role in making business cards, for example, I might sign up for the graphic design newsletter, the marketing newsletter or the small business newsletter.

If you want to go to the source on this, check out these articles:

• Ed Eliot has a nice summary of various clearing methods as well as a browser support chart for each method. The clearest explanation anywhere.
• Phrogz.net has a nice basic overview on understanding floats, but not as in-depth as some others.
• An old article by CSS guru Eric Meyer has an excellent explanation of the way floats work and perhaps the original explanation of the nested float method. I found this article years ago and then forgot it and had to look it up again. Thus this article where I’ll know where to find it.
• Smashing Magazine has a comprehensive overview of float tips, including the various clearing methods. This article is pretty heavily linked and will get you to a bunch of other resources. Max Design also has a number of CSS float "recipes" (my term).
• Shaun Inman uses absolute positioning and javascript to avoid float idiosyncracies altogether.
• Tony Aslett developed the clearfix:after solution which is also discussed in detail at Position Is Everything. This is broken by IE7 unless you do something to trigger HasLayout.
• Finally, there are several articles from 2005 or so on the overflow:hidden solution. The original idea is actually part of the CSS spec on height and ‘auto‘ and was picked up and publicized by Alex Walker drawing on Paul O’Brien’s wisdom. Further refinements have been offered by Peter-Paul Koch over at quirksmode.org (CSS – Clearing floats). It was also picked up by my old friend Mike Papageorge (Simple Clearing of Floats) who is still waiting patiently for the ski site I announced in 2002, and from there was found by the folks at 456 Berea Street (Simple Clearing of Floats).

Normal Floats

So normally, you want a float to have all subsequent text to flow around it. That’s exactly what you want.

Notice how the text wraps right around the box every so nicely?

Problem Floats

But what happens when the floated box is taller than the non-floated element?

And normally that pooches out the bottom and would even overrun this text here, except that this paragraph has clear:both. I could clear the tall grey paragraph and be done. That’s the normal, old fashioned way to do things. It works, but it’s inelegant and sometimes it doesn’t actually work that well. For example, here’s the problem that got me digging around again. If this looks right, you’re not using IE. You can see some funkiness in IE7, and even more in IE6 if I recall right. Here’s how it looks in your browser and a screenshot of how it looks in IE7:

And the screenshot:

Floated paragraph doesn't respect padding.

Alternative Float Solutions

Sometimes, though, that’s an annoying solution and doesn’t really work. There are all kinds of hacks and what-not ranging from Shaun Inman’s absolute position and javascript solution to the clearfix:after solution. It’s giving me a headache, and the latter doesn’t work in the particular problem I encountered today where the containing element had a border, so forcing a clear is a problem and the Inman solution would work, but I really just didn’t want to add the javascript to the Wordpress theme I was fixing up (by the way, aside from that problem, it’s a nice theme called gardenz).

The Smarter, Better Way to Float

So then I stumbled on the slickest way to handle this. It’s an old method, but I had not seen it until recently and I just had to write it here not because it’s news, but so I wouldn’t forget it. It is described much better in the articles I mention in the credits, so if this doesn’t make sense in my disorganized sort of way, go there. Anyway, here it is: overflow: hidden a technique that dates back to at least 2005 and which, furthermore, appears to be based not on some hack, but on actually writing CSS the way the spec intended. The spec on height and ‘auto‘ (overflow being an attribute that effect height) states quite directly:

In addition, if the element has any floating descendants whose bottom margin edge is below the bottom, then the height is increased to include those edges.

That comes from a comment by Anne on the post over at 456 Berea. It’s so simple. You just apply this to the element that contains the floated element:


.floatedElement {overflow:hidden;
height:1%;}


Halleluja! Praise the Lord as only someone who has wasted countless hours on stupid float problems can praise something quite that geeky. Basically, it’s this simple, to take the example above.

A couple of notes: the reason overflow is hidden is so that you don’t get scroll bars in IE/Mac which otherwise adds scroll bars whether there is any overflow or not. You need to set a height or a width to get it to work in IE and Opera. I’ve opted to set a height, since a percentage height is meaningless in most circumstances and doesn’t affect the rest of the layout. It’s probably more robust across browsers if you set a width of 100%, but this creates a problem if you are using a standard box model and you have margins, padding and borders.

And now this paragraph is not cleared, but it’s still safe! Hopefully anyway.

Q. What did Tarzan say when he saw the elephants coming over the hill wearing dark glasses?
A. Nothing. He didn’t recognize them.

Q. Why do elephants have wrinkled knees?
A. Their pink tennis shoes are too tight.

Q. Why do elephants have flat feet?
A. From jumping out of trees.

Q. How do you spot an elephant up in a tree?
A. Look for their pink tennis shoes.

Unresolved Conspiracy Theory Question: why are there no elephants in the space program?

Why elephant jokes? Because I’ll be using this as a fun way illustrate a number of things in my upcoming series on setting up Wordpress and doing some basic search engine optimization.

By the way, these all came from a book I had as a kid. I lost the book 30 years ago, shortly before I lost my mind. These jokes are all that remain of either the book or my mind from that period. Of the two, I would really prefer to find the book.

Originally, I bought this domain with the idea of encouraging kids to write their fictional biographies—that is the biography of who they wished they were. Now it doesn’t seem like there’s any need for such a thing since they can post their writings on Facebook, Myspace, Blogger or whatever. So “raised by turtles” was supposed to be the tag line of my biography. I wasn’t raised by wolves. I was raised by turtles and as a result, I’m slow to get anything done, but I can hold my breath for a long time.

You know how they say you should find a focussed blog topic and stick to it? It’s possible that the fake-biography–fiction-history-memorials-wordpress–drupal niche is a little poorly defined, but it’s more about having a place to put my notes down, not about becoming the next inspiring celebrity hero like… um… Carrot Top. Yeah, I’m not shooting to be the next Carrot Top or anything, just putting down thoughts.