Alpha Mind Blog

Kami Huyse is making me rethink the bloggers’ code of conduct. The idea of a code was put forward by Tim O’Reilly after Kathy Sierra decided to shut down her Creating Passionate Users blog due to harassment.

The Bloggers’ Code died not with a bang but a whimper, and I was happy to let it. But Kami has got me thinking about it again with her post on ethics among journalists and PR practitioners. The point of her post is that few in either group even read their respective codes of ethics. According to Kami, this is a Bad Thing.

But if journalists should be reading and abiding by their own code of ethics, and if bloggers are the new citizen journalists, then shouldn’t they be reading and abiding by their own code? And wouldn’t that involve having one?

O’Reilly’s draft code had a lot more to do with simple decent conduct than with our taking seriously our roles as journalists. But a code like his would have started us down that path, and maybe that’s where we need to go.

(The foregoing is part I, the simple part of this post. My next post will get a little trickier, going into the depths of what my Alpha Mind blog is all about.)

Better to save his disappointment for when he gets back. I got all excited when he blogged that Kathy Sierra was back to blogging.

Oh how I wish it were so. Lee posted a link to Kathy’s last post from April, when she quit. Perhaps he hadn’t seen it.

It’s not nearly as funny as an Elvis sighting. Because so many of us truly want her back.

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.

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!