Alpha Mind Blog

Dave Winer (in 2005) on professional journalists: “They take longer to get it wronger.”

Here’s the proof:

NPR : Bloggers Debate Code of Conduct. Nothing wrong in the audio, but the written intro has Kathy Sierra calling for a code of conduct that, as 100 blogs have told me over the past many days, she has come out against.

And, folks, this whole story is as stale as last week’s tuna sandwich. I have several good excuses why I was late picking up on it. But it’s now 17 days later than that, and NPR, with resources vastly greater than mine, is just getting around to stating Kathy’s opinion 180 degrees wrong.

Chapter 1.2: Modes of Thought

There are many ways we might classify thought processes. I make no claim that the scheme I present here is more correct or useful than any other. However, it forms the basis for an analysis of thought processes which has been fruitful in practice.

Thought processes fall into these categories: random, maintenance, psychomotor, explanatory, puzzle-solving, visioning.

Random thought occurs simply because the mind has to do something. Just as the bodies of most animals prefer to spend much time in motion, the mind spends more time on than off, and will function whether or not there is any externally imposed work for it to do. Random thought plays a major role in dreaming and reverie, but is also an important component of other processes.

Maintenance thought is that which occurs in order to keep the mind and body in working order. For example, much of reverie is rehearsal; memories are kept fresh by active recall, and this is the basis of rote learning. More complex mental processes are probably enabled by exercise in a similar manner. That we expend thought on our physical maintenance is even more obvious.

Psychomotor thought is that which directs the conscious movements of the body. Fluid action of the body happens when the consciousness of thought is as little conscious as possible, yet all non-autonomic processes of the body are conscious at some point and in some way. Psychomotor thought will play very little role in this essay; when these modes of thought are analyzed in various contexts in this essay, the psychomotor will usually be omitted.

Explanatory thought is directed at understanding. Just as a dictionary defines words using other words, most (perhaps all) new concepts must be learned by reference to already understood concepts. Explanatory thought makes these associations and relationships.

Puzzle solving is the search for an answer to any question, where there is believed to be some criterion for correctness in the answer. Note that only the belief matters; all the thinking applied to Fermat’s last theorem would have been the same puzzle-solving process even if the theorem had been unproveable.

Visioning is the conceiving of new ideas or conditions. It is by definition original thought. Note, though, that it is original in the context of the thinker. That the resulting idea may have been developed by another elsewhere makes no difference to the definition of the thought process.

There are not always clear and precise boundaries separating these modes of thought. Several of these modes may be performed in concert, all guided by a single motive, and it can be difficult to untangle and define what processes are occurring. However, it can also be helpful to do so, clarifying what our minds are doing, and permitting us to judge what processes are actually likely to move us toward our goal.

If there’s something annoying about Seth Godin, it’s that he’s so truthful. Even when he wears that nose.

But before I go on to discuss Seth, let’s get our bearings.

Kathy Sierra Week

It’s Kathy Sierra Week here at the Alpha Mind Blog. The idea is that, while Kathy isn’t blogging (a situation I hope is temporary), the rest of us can express our appreciation for what she’s done for us so far. I’ve identified a number of ways Kathy’s Blog has improved my thinking, my blogging, even my attitude, and I’m writing a post a day about it. Today’s post is about Seth.

Can Everybody Rule?

How many people can be the best in the world? Sounds kinda silly, but the answer is not “one, dummy.” And this fact is at the heart of what Kathy helped me understand about Seth.

I don’t want to overdramatize. I don’t want to let on that Kathy turned me into a Seth Godin fan (I already was), or even caused a very radical shift in my attitude toward Seth. But while the shift wasn’t radical, it was important.

To begin with, my problem with Seth happens to be pretty well laid out in this exchange between Seth and me here on TAM. (An exchange in which I was perhaps a bit snarkier than I wanted to be.)

For the point I’ll be making today, the key words in my reply to Seth’s comment are:

Life’s choices do not consist only of supremacy and mediocrity. The distance between good and best is greater than that between mediocre and good, and yet good is good.

What Seth’s Been Up To

What was I responding to? For those of you who aren’t Godin fans, you’ll need to follow the link from my above-quoted post to the one of Seth’s that I was writing about. And if you still don’t get it, you need to read more of the recent stuff on Seth’s blog. But in case you haven’t time, I’ll just give a quick summary of Seth’s latest currents of thought.

In a nutshell, what Seth is telling us these days is that none of us should settle for anything less than being the best in the world. No lesser goal is worthy. And we should drop anything we’re doing that keeps us from pursuing the one righteous goal. This is the thrust of his forthcoming book, The Dip.

My reaction to this idea, when I first heard it… well, I put it most strongly on Lucy Kellaway’s forum at the Financial Times:

….honestly, I’ve begun to think that the most brilliant people in the blogosphere positively enjoy having the rest of us think that if we’re not equally clever, we’ve no reason to live.

This was still pretty much how I felt when I started my systematic reading of “Creating Passionate Users” a couple of weeks back.

Not Everybody Can Rule, But Kathy Says Let Them Anyway

And there, as I read, was Kathy Sierra telling designers of everything and anything, “Help Your Users Rule!” And she told them this over and over. It became one of her most important mantras (although she never put it in just the words I used. In fact she put it in about a hundred slightly different ways.)

And on my umpteenth reading of this mantra, the thought hit me:

How many users can really rule?

How many users of how many software applications can rule?

How many producers of how many software applications can rule by doing what Kathy suggests?

How many producers of how many other kinds of products can rule?

How many kinds of products are there? Not to mention services? Not to mention roles we can all play that aren’t defined by “product” or “service”?

And finally it all came together for me. Seth isn’t an elitist for whom only a very very few are worthy to survive. Because Seth knows (and I’d seen it all through his other writings even if I hadn’t grasped it) that…

There are a gazillion things, a gazillion truly different and differentiated thing, a gazillion things of genuine value, to be the best in the world at.

And that has made all the difference.

If you tried to create a contest to determine the greatest software developer in the world, where would you start? If you got five undoubtedly great developers into a room and asked them to design the contest, betcha they could talk for days and never agree on a set of criteria. Betcha before too long they’d come out and ask, “What kind of developer?”

Because what makes a great game coder won’t make the best coder of real-time satellite controls. And those two things are a lot closer together than other pairs I could name.

For every category of software on Tucows, there’s an opportunity to be best in the world. That’s a lot of categories. And there are subcategories galore inside those.

Seth’s many riffs on being remarkable set this up perfectly. Because when you set out to be remarkable, you’re creating a whole new category to be the best at. And there are nearly limitless possible ways of being remarkable and creating the category that won’t be categorized.

Why I Had a Problem

In All Marketers Are Liars, Seth makes a lot of us squirm by how he talks about lies and truth. But, on a close reading, it sure isn’t because Seth is lying. Quite the contrary.

He makes me squirm by saying, in essence, that one and the same story is a truth and is a lie, and doing this so many times in the book that my head spins and I get a little dizzy.

The awful thing is that he’s telling the truth.

If it gets confusing, it’s because, in reality, our human capacities for discerning truth are lousy. What we’re good at discerning are consistency and authenticity, which is why Seth winds up saying that we need to aim for those while telling good stories.

It’s that same truthfulness about the whole new world we’re living in that made me take a ten-foot pole to Godin’s latest riffs.

I think I’m a little more sensitive than most to just how confusing the post-internet world is. So I’m not always inclined to focus on its brighter facets. Seth is inclined to view both sides, and to speak strongly about both. His focus on permission marketing addresses head-on one of the dark sides of the loud new world. His focus on being remarkable, and his new focus on being the best, address one of the bright sides.

That bright facet is that today’s environment offers opportunity for self-expression like none before. It offers to millions the chance to say and live the truth, “The thing that I am matters, and the thing I choose to do matters, and I will be the best at it!”

Coda: You Can Move In With Seth

Three days into KS Week, I’m noticing that not many of the things I’m appreciating Kathy for are very direct applications of what she’s taught. Rather, they’re mostly wonderful things that happen inside my head while I’m reading CPU, that result from my mind wandering several steps away from what she’s saying. She’s my starting point.

Better, maybe, to say she’s a catalyst. I love what Kathy teaches, but I also like Kathy simply because I’m smarter, cleverer, more creative, when I’m in her virtual presence.

The same is true for Seth. One reason it took Kathy to get me to grapple with an aspect of Seth’s thought is that I don’t read him only for his ideas, but for his thinking process, which serves to start fires in my brain. I’ve only seen him in person once, but it happened then, too.

Having said that, have I interested anyone in this offer from Seth? Not tempting enough for me to leave the coast I love (the left), but a pretty wonderful idea. Move in with Seth Godin and watch the creative sparks fly.

So there I was reading this immense fat packet, my printout of “Creating Passionate Users.” (Hmm, that should have been italicized, now that it’s a book, even if the world’s only copy is the one I’m reading.) And I’m looking for what made Kathy a successful blogger. In this process, it wasn’t my first revelation, but it was my first big one, when I realized that Kathy knew her subject.

Yeah, I hear you muttering “Moron!” under your breath. But wait till I explain what I mean by knowing a subject.

Again, I have to say not everyone will get as much out of this lesson as I did. Because not everyone is doing what Kathy set out to do. Here at The Alpha Mind, though, I am.

When You Map Out a New Field, You Have to (Duh) Map It.

Kathy created a whole new field of study. Although “brain science,” if I may use such a loose term, is at the heart of Creating Passionate Users, CPU is without doubt a cross-disciplinary field. And it’s a practical field, not a laboratory undertaking or (at least not yet) an academic major.

So the first challenge that Kathy faced was to understand where its boundaries were. She whipped this challenge by mind-mapping.

Now you’re about to find out something about how I read. Because I’m going to confess that I read a world into this one picture in that post:

The picture is a mind map Kathy used for a seminar she conducted. But when I looked at it, it came to me in a flash that Kathy has her entire subject mapped out in just this way, and, I’d wager (if not for my scruples) that she had that map in her head, fairly complete, when she started the blog.

Before last week, “The Alpha Mind” lacked such a map. Here I am, trying to develop a field of endeavor that nobody’s ever defined before, and I’ve been trying to do so without defining it.

This week I’m correcting the problem. (Okay, total digression here. I remember when I worked in Silicon Valley for a French software company, and they sent a new build with release notes which included the luscious sentence “This lack has been suppressed.” Many smiles in native-English-speaker land.) My lack of a mind map has been suppressed.

What difference does it make?

First, this one. When Kathy decides to blog something, she knows exactly where it fits onto the map of her subject. Comparatively, some of my past posts suggest a man groping in darkness. Even when Kathy blogs something that doesn’t map, she knows it, and she doesn’t do it all that often. When the connection is tenuous, at least she knows how to make the connection.

For example, check this out. (You don’t have to stay for the video, but I recommend it.) It’s one of my favorite CPU posts.

Now that you’re back, in case the video overwhelmed you so you forgot the last line of the post, I’ll remind you:

By this morning, both foals were crossing the “kick ass” threshold, and loving every moment of being alive.

Of course, the “Kick Ass Threshold” is a key Sierra theme, and so she was able, cleverly if preposterously, to tie that morning’s trip to the stable to CPU’s main topic.

It was Kathy who talked me into trying mind mapping, mostly through this paragraph:

The key to using mind maps for brainstorming…. is to go really fast. The idea is to engage your “right” brain (metaphorically speaking) while simultaneously supressing your judgemental, logical, rational “left” brain. Something magical happens…

“Hold on!”, Max butts in rudely. Before I let Kathy finish, I just have to say that something magical happened indeed. That Kathy could use “right-brain-left-brain” and not lose me completely is almost a miracle. “Right-left-brain,” as the notion is popularly used (and as Kathy is using it here) is nonsense. Note that even as she trots it out, Kathy tries to distance herself from it by her insertion of “metaphorically speaking.” I can’t help it, both of my lobes say gak. It isn’t my right brain that says “Max, lighten up,” it’s whatever mysterious zone is controlled by the Law of Charitable Associations, which I invented last week as yet another result of reading Kathy, and about which I promise a post next week. Anyway, I lightened up and accepted the kernel of what Kathy was saying.

Okay, Kathy, you can go on now…

…when you just start throwing down nodes and drawing connections and linking ideas without giving ANY real thought. The moment you start thinking/analyzing, you’re screwed. But if you just let it happen, you’ll find yourself looking down at your paper 10 minutes later and seeing things you never would have come up with using a logical thinking process. So it’s not a matter of “waiting for the muse”, but it’s also not a matter of using brute force thinking. You just have to do something!

Something here grabbed me. Perhaps it was a vague sense that, when I outline, I always run into a wall, and the wall always seems to have a little voice, only audible subliminally, in the deepest depths, that goes “who’s this idea’s boss?” It’s hierarchy rearing its head, long before it has any usefulness. Whatever it was, I found that what Kathy was saying had a clarion ring of truth to it.

So I got a mind mapper (freemind, open source, free, works this year which wasn’t true last time I tried it.) I’ve started using it. I’ll tell you what I’ve observed in a separate post. For now I’ll just say that I love it, and I expect it to be a boon to me in these ways:

• It will conduce to good choices in where I read and link.
• It will help me maintain focus.
• And that will help me find my audience.

So…

Look, Ma, I made a mind map!

…so The Alpha Mind now has a mind map. And I have some serious plans for that mind map.

First, I hope to make it my site map. I hope it will let me lose that stale linear list of categories. Instead, a reader will be able to go to the mind map, get a quick vista of what I’m doing here, identify the sub-topics of interest to him/her, and unfold nodes and follow links to posts and pages.

I also hope that, when I find readers who really engage with the subject, the mind map will be a powerful point of engagement. They’ll be able to critique my approach to the subject at a high conceptual level, forestalling my devoting lots of time to ill-conceived sub-topics. (Why fix your grammar when you’ve written a plot that stinks?)

Here’s the map, folded up to show only one node out from center. Click on it to view it unfolded.

Some day I’ll work out how to publish a living, responsive, foldable mind map that will work in all browsers. That day is not today.

So here are two versions.

The Live Map should work in Firefox and IE under Windows. Might work on some Mac browsers. (Your Java must be up to date and you might need to be kinda patient.) Click on parent nodes to fold/unfold them. If doesn’t work on your system…

PDF version will work if you’ve got Acrobat Reader, but is completely non-interactive.

From the BBC, we get the news that Chocolate is ‘better than kissing’.

What’s “better”? How about “different”?

The article defines “better” as “a more intense and longer lasting ‘buzz’.”

I did a little interview with the loser of this competition, and I think he makes a very valid point in his own defense.

“I didn’t train for this contest,” said Kissing. “If I did, I’d be dead meat for what I’m actually meant to do. Sustained satisfaction? Dude, what kind of criterion is that? ‘Sall well and good if you ain’t got no stake in propagating the species. Look here, does chocolate care about making human babies? Not last I heard. I do, so I’ll be doggoned if I’m gonna leave folks satisfied with kissing! Getting folks’ lips together don’t get the job done, knowwtI’m talkin’?”

I know what he’s talkin’. I love theobromine, and chocolate helps me blog. But if it’s something bigger than a post I want to produce, kissing just might be the better stimulant, knowwtI’m talkin’? Y’all who want families, please don’t get confused about this.

[I continue the draft of Thoughtcraft.]

Section 1: The Nature of Thought and of Thinkers

Chapter 1: Thought and Ideas

In discussing the workings of the human mind, it is all too easy to go down long paths in pursuit of useful terms and definitions. Better at the outset to admit that all our definitions and distinctions will be faulty, but to go ahead and state them anyway, as tools by which we may begin thinking about thinking, and refine our understanding as we go along.

Thought is any mental process of which we are in any sense aware. An idea is a result of thought, which we are aware of as being discrete from, and definable in contradistinction to, any other idea. While our awareness may be dim, we are aware of ideas as the beginnings of other things. An idea may be an impetus to action in the outward world, or it may be a tool whereby we guide further thinking. We are aware of it as a being connected to our actions or other thoughts.

Thought is the process by which ideas are formed and evaluated. But the result of thought is not always an idea. It may be an image, sound, word, or sequence of words, that is scarcely even evaluated. This is the stuff of dream and of daydream, or reverie. It comes and it goes. Only when a thought is held, evaluated, considered for use in some way, is it what we commonly think of as an idea, and this is what I will mean by the word in this essay.

The best working definition of an idea is that it is a thought which vies for territory. As any idea is put into use, or even evaluated for usefulness, it is in competition, potential or actual, with other ideas. The key difference between idea and daydream is that an idea gives rise to or embeds within itself a decision. Daydreams do not. Even the act of our evaluating an idea aims at a decision: is it useful and/or correct? Reverie (asleep or awake) is thought in the absence of such evaluation. It is the awareness of, and the perceived need to evaluate a thought, which makes that thought an idea. Its evaluation may be brief, its rejection swift. In such a case, its life as an idea was brief, may in fact be so brief that such a thought shows us the borderline case, demonstrating that we cannot truly distinguish between thought and idea. But just as hard cases make bad law, these borderline cases will distract us if we let them. Let us not. The ideas we are concerned with in this essay are far from the borderline. They are the ones which pass their first evaluation, and which go on to vie for territory in a process of which at least one person, for some time longer (and usually much longer) than a eye’s blink, is aware of.

One of the many things I’ve appreciated about Kathy Sierra is that she’s not the least bit interested in making “victim” part of her identity.

And so…

After I got tired of being frustrated that I can’t do anything for Kathy, I realized there’s something I can do, and I will.

I’m going to make it Kathy Sierra Week on the Alpha Mind blog.

Here’s the concept. Having spent more than two weeks miserable about Kathy’s recent trials, I’ve decided I’ve had enough of gnashing my teeth over them. I also feel they’ve gotten more than enough coverage on other people’s blogs. So, this week, I’m going to leave all that alone, and I’m going to celebrate Kathy for what I believe she wants to be celebrated for: providing a blog which offered knowledge, wisdom, and good whole-wheat substance. (And which I hope will offer it anew, before too long.)

The Genesis of Kathy Sierra Week

Last week it occurred to me that, since Kathy’s stopped blogging, at least for the time being, her blog is a completed product. So I have a chance, foolish as the idea is, of catching up.

I printed out all the posts on her blog. I formatted them in Word first, and made the graphics all uncommonly shrunk so I could get the whole thing under 600 pages. I finished out a toner cartridge and made a bit of a dent in another.

And now I have this unbound more-than-a-ream on my shelf, called Creating Passionate Users, which has become one of my favorite books.

I haven’t finished reading it, and in truth I probably won’t. It’s a boatload of pages, and was never intended to be a book. (I do hope Kathy will edit what’s there into a book, some day. Some day soon.)

One reason I won’t finish reading it soon is that the first quarter of it set off so many explosions in my brain that it’ll take me several weeks to act on the great wealth of ideas it generated.

KSW: a Preview

This week I hope to write about what Kathy has done for my thinking. It’s not exactly the same as saying why Kathy’s wonderful, which I can’t do without the standard caveat that “your mileage may vary.” I can’t say that Kathy is or can be wonderful for everybody, but I can say what she’s done for me. I also can and will invite others to share their own experiences of having grown by reading Kathy’s blog and using her ideas.

My topics are already lined up, and here they are–a short list of the most important things Kathy Sierra has contributed to my life:

• Tuesday: The Alpha Mind Map. Kathy got me to try mind mapping where several others had failed. I’m pretty sure it’ll mean an order-of-magnitude improvement in my blog.
• Wednesday: Getting Seth Godin. I’ve been a fan of Seth’s for years. In fact I’m rather in awe of the man. But KS helped me grasp Seth’s thought in a way that had previously eluded me.
• Thursday: Every Graphic Is a Rebus Only Better. Reading CPU, a light bulb went on about the relationships between–
  • words and pictures
  • the several minds we are of, all of us, and
  • teacher and learner when the teacher understands co-creation.
• Friday: Consultants Rock. Based on those last three lessons, I have a much clearer idea of what I’ll be offering my clients when my church unleashes me on the world in my consultant suit.
• Saturday: The Suck Threshold In Personal Relationships. Why I intimidate Rock Star Daughter and what I can do about it.
• Double-Dip Super Sunday:
  • The Gospel According to Kathy Sierra. I have five sermons left to give at church before I retire. One of them comes from KS. Did you catch her thing about how to read sacred texts? Even she might not be aware she wrote about that, but I, for one, caught the lesson, and I’ll try to convey it on Sunday. I’ll post the audio on my other blog.
  • What Kathy Did Right. I printed out that monster tome in order to study how a blogger succeeds. I’ll summarize what I found. (On this blog.)

Has Kathy Helped You Grow?

I’m hoping some of you will leave comments during the week about how reading Kathy’s blog has helped you grow (as bloggers, tech writers, programmers, teachers, communicators generally, human beings…)

And, BTW, I’ve done my best to fix some problems that have recently made it hard to leave comments. I’ve put in a captcha doohicky and have turned off moderation. (I do reserve the right to delete offensive comments.) Please let me know if you have any problems.

And please contribute!

They talked one of the world’s best violinists into playing in the DC metro at rush hour. A superb article. Pearls Before Breakfast – washingtonpost.com

I like to think that, if I’d been there, I would almost certainly have been among the few who’d have stopped and appreciated the music. Not because I know Joshua Bell, but because I always listen to street musicians, even when I’m late for work. I always give them a few seconds, at least, to prove to me that they’re so bad I should just walk by without a listen, without giving a dollar.

Next time a newpaper wants to pull a stunt like this, let it be at a station I’m passing through.

By the way, there’s an audio effect in the video that you might attribute to the poor quality of the camera mic, but which would have been nearly as apparent if you’d been there in person: the cacaphony of the place sometimes makes the music sound genuinely bad. There are times when the pitches collide, Bell’s and the crowd’s, and your ear wants to blame Bell for the horror of what you hear.

It’s a factor the article doesn’t mention. But not a very consequential one. Even in a Metro station, anyone with an ear for music should have known Bell was, not Bell, but at least very good.

I love this latest salvo in Seth’s neverending campaign against mediocrity. Seth might be ignoring the lawsuit, by the author, that might ensue on a publisher’s issuing a book with a blank cover. But his idea is spot on…

…in certain situations.

But hey, what about “Don’t Worry, Be Crappy”? (It was a chapter title in Guy Kawasaki’s Rules for Revolutionaries.) If crappy is okay, isn’t mediocre even more okay?

No, it’s not.

Rule number 1 about rules is that you have to know when they apply. “Don’t worry be crappy” applies when the following are true:

• A product is upgradeable, i.e. the crappiness can be worked out in new releases for which users won’t have to wait too long.
• The product has functionality whose value outweighs whatever crappiness exists in the initial execution.
• The crappiness is not such that it will insult the user outright.
• (optional but very helpful) The product has such hooks that the user will love it even if it’s ugly, or will be compelled to keep using it (like Microsoft Office) even if they can’t love it.

In the case of a book, yes, there can be subsequent editions, but there’s a danger in making the cover of a second edition radically different from that of the first. A book may or may not have functionality of the kind that will override a mediocre cover—it depends on the book. It’s hard to insult a book reader through mediocrity. Mediocrity is seldom outlandish enough to truly insult anyone. Usually a cover bad enough to be insulting is one that somebody in the publishing process thought was a work of genius. (Here’s one of my favorite examples. Just here, in case you wondered, is the distinction between crappy and mediocre. This is far too ghastly to be mediocre—somebody had to have thought it was art.) And finally, books seldom have hooks of the kind software has.

All in all, then, a book is not a good candidate for “Don’t Worry, Be Crappy.” This also means a book is not a good candidate for sending out with a blank cover.

Still, I’m with Seth on the general concept. If management insists and consistently acts upon the conviction that mediocrity is failure, and refuses to let it go out the door dressed as something else, mediocrity will vanish.