Alpha Mind Blog

Before I start talking about ancient Greek literature, let me assure you that I’m talking to you. Not only that, but I’m talking about you, and about your life. I’m talking about how you can win friends and influence people, how you can be an Alpha Mind, and how you can realize your dreams.

Promise. Cross my heart. That’s what I’m talking about here. Just bear with me while I go back a few millennia. I’ll bring it back to you. Really.

Okay. Ahem. I draw a deep breath and begin.

There are two kinds of people in the world. There’s a very large group who have never read Herodotus. Then there is a smaller group who are in love with Herodotus.

Oh, all right, then, I suppose there are a few who have read Herodotus and haven’t fallen in love, but I think these are people who lack the capacity to understand something essential about him:

Herodotus was writing about us, about our age, about our lives.

Every good storyteller does that. And every good story does that.

Now, I’ll admit Herodotus didn’t always clearly signal that he was writing about the future, about us. That’s why I chose not to make his mistake. That’s why I told you up front that, even though I’m going far back in time and far away in space, I’m talking about you and your life.

Because not everybody has the same capacity to understand this for themselves. In consequence, not everybody has the same capacity to be bowled over by great storytelling. Or more importantly, to be taught by it. That’s why some need help.

Okay, now a story from Herotodus. A very old story. But wait! Wait! I can bring this much closer to home because this very story was in a movie not too long ago.

In “The English Patient,” Katherine Clifton reads our story from Herodotus, aloud, around a campfire. The story is the one about Candaules and how he lost the kingdom of Lydia to Gyges.

To put it briefly, Candaules goes crazy for his wife, and having decided she’s the most beautiful woman in existence, decides he also needs to prove this to someone else. So he arranges for Gyges, his right-hand man, to see her naked. She learns of it, is outraged, and gives Gyges a choice: either kill Candaules and take the throne, or else be killed himself. Choosing to live, he kills his boss and takes the wife and the kingdom.

(Yes, Herodotus tells it better. I’m hurrying up to get to my own point.)

That is the story within the story. The story of the English Patient is this: Geoffrey Clifton, husband of Katharine, has half an insight (alas only half!) about this tale. He knows that Candaules’ obsession with his wife parallels his own obsession with Katherine.

What he fails to understand is how parallel the parallel actually is. He sees that he suffers the same uxorious daftness, but fails to hear the cautionary tale. He brags about his own excessive adoration for Katherine, but also about Katherine herself. And in the midst of this inane display, Almásy (the “English Patient”) falls in love with her. All of which results in death for all three, with gruesome injuries and horrid, lingering storytelling for Almásy.

Who can know how much Geoffrey’s silly spotlighting of Katherine contributed to the dreadful outcome? But it clearly did nothing to prevent it.

Geoffrey Clifton, alas, had only a partial capacity to understand that Herodotus, 2400 years earlier and without knowing a thing about airplanes or World War II, was writing about Geoffrey Clifton.

In the same way, I think, those few scholars and artists who sneer at Herodotus have failed to grasp how, in “The Fox and the Grapes,” Aesop, that other ancient Grecian, was writing about them. After all, here they are, living about 2600 years after the invention of literature…

Here they are, looking on a man who lived within a fewscore decades of that invention, and was making up a whole genre as he went along, and doing it masterfully…

Here they are, utterly incapable of rising to anything like the level of that old long-dead talebearer…

And so of course they are forced to say, “ah, those grapes couldn’t be any good anyway.”

Which only shows them to be particularly, especially, notably dense. Because, unlike Herodotus, Aesop tacked onto the end of each of his stories a big sign, in block capitals, underlined, saying “Here’s how this story is about you and your future.”

A very sad fact about humanity is that not only are many people so dense that they can’t read the big, underlined, block-caps signs plastered over a great story, but, oh worse! …

All of us are that dense, at least in places. In our blind spots.

Those of us who aspire to thought leadership face many choices. Once we know what point we want to make, we face a multitude of ways we might go about making it. Each decision we make leads to other decisions. Once we have chosen a particular story to convey our point, we still face a question as fundamental as: “After the story, do I tell them what I told them, like Aesop, or leave them to figure it out for themselves, like Herodotus?”

In this one instance, I’m going to be as obvious as Aesop. I’m going to make explicit what this post has implicitly assumed:

If thou wouldst influence the thoughts of others, thou shalt tell stories.

Why? Because people instinctively know that every good story is about the future. Is about their future. That’s why they listen to stories, remember them, tell and retell them.

The question for the would-be Alpha Mind is how to use the natural human interest in stories, not merely to say what we want to say, but to convey it into the part of the hearer’s brain, wherever it may be, where it will make a difference.

We’ll begin exploring this by looking at how people really feel about the six Ws. Hint: they don’t teach it in journalism school, but every good journalist understands it, even if only at the instinctive, know-it-so-well-we-don’t-know-we-know-it level. The level at which all of us understand grammar.

The six Ws: that’s where we’ll pick this up in the next post.

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.

The very charming Kami Huyse blogged about the 10 Most Irritating Words on the ‘Net and so sent me on a journey that has now gone 8 hours (with two major computer glitches and a pastoral visit sandwiched in.)

Based on Kami’s partial list and this article, it looks like the full list is probably:

1. folksonomy
2. blogosphere
3. blog
4. netiquette
5. blook
6. webinar
7. vlog
8. social networking
9. cookie
10. wiki

My vote is for “meme.” Yuck. It’s as bad as kudo, almost, but kudo antedates the Internet, while meme, I believe, got currency on the ‘net way back when The Well was new.

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.

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!

We live and die by ideas. Thinking is an endeavor of the highest importance.

Not only every person, but every social grouping lives and dies by ideas. Families, communities, non-profits and churches, business enterprises, nation-states, and even, when the stakes are global, all humankind, must originate, evaluate, accept or reject, and act upon ideas. As every problem whose stakes are large is a problem that will be thought about, effective thinking is as urgent a craft as any we engage in together. Thinking is a social endeavor of the highest importance.

This book concerns itself with how ideas are realized. It is a book about thinking, but its focus is not every kind of thought, but that sort of thought which aims toward an idea’s realization in the world outside its originator’s mind. In studying this matter I have, like many before me, found it to be immense. It is as if, wanting to explore the Azores, I had set out from Lisbon and discovered the Americas. The subject contains worlds; whole, well-established arts and sciences are encompassed within it. This, I believe, is why it is so little studied: academics by the nature of their work must go deep, so that each of them can necessarily study only part of a field so vast. Yet as a subject of keen interest to many people in many stations, thoughtcraft deserves, if possible, to be made manageable.

My model for this effort is a military document which, in two editions, has been made public. It is the small book Warfighting, and it treats warfare at a high conceptual level. At around twenty thousand words, it is a small book on a vast topic, yet, by staying above details, it conveys considerable wisdom in a short read. Like many war manuals, it has become standard reading for business executives. Its design is to establish for its readers (U.S. Marines) a common understanding of what is undertaken when a war is fought. My aims are similar, and so I use Warfighting as a model for this essay: “short and easily read.” My goal has been to discern the most important twenty thousand words that can be said about thoughtcraft and say them.
I borrow from Warfighting not only its brevity but its style, because those who need and will engage with my ideas are those for whom thinking is done in warlike environments, where much as at stake and thinking can seldom be allowed to become reverie. (I treat reverie seriously, as a legitimate and valuable form of thought, but those engaged in it will find little motivation to seek out my advice as to how it should be done.) Also, Warfighting is a very cold book about an art, and legitimately so. War encompasses many engineering problems, but is not itself such a problem. The warrior deals in too many uncertainties, and must make too many judgments in unclear circumstances, to succeed only through engineering. And so it is with thoughtcraft.

The quest of an idea for realization is in some sense a quest for territory. In most cases, that territory is other human minds. Even if an idea’s realization will be in a physical object, it must, in most cases, need to find its champions and defeat its opponents. At the heart of this book, then, lies the relationships between the thought and its thinker, and between the communicated idea and its receiver. Crucial, too, is the idea’s fate at the hands of multiple hearers, who will reject, adopt, or adapt it.

The highest duty of any leader in any group is to think clearly, creatively, flexibly, and effectively, and to help their organization to do so. And the highest duty of anyone who originates an idea is to give that idea its best opportunity to be realized and of benefit. This book is intended to provide practical guidance for both. It is not, however, a book of procedures and techniques. Rather, it provides a framework for discerning and understanding the challenges which face ideas and thinkers. Despite a certain arrogance in taking on so vast a subject in so few words, I offer it humbly, in hopes that it will be of help.

After quite some time blogging, I’m now pretty comfortable with it.

So I can see no further excuse not to get this blog onto its topic, which I have neglected for a while.

The premise of “The Alpha Mind” is that thought leadership needn’t always remain a nice-sounding, meaning-free buzzphrase. Quite the contrary, I believe it is worth taking very seriously, which means it is worth defining.

It makes sense to say that a thought leader leads thought. Fair enough. But, as we normally use the words, there’s already an inherent contradiction, or at least a tension.

Our normal thinking about thinking is that it is an individual endeavor. Our normal thinking about leadership is that leaders lead more than one person at a time—that is, leaders lead groups. Then the phrase “thought leader” seems to depict a person who leads a group in a process that is an individual not a group process.

Then the key to taking “thought leadership” seriously, and to understanding it, is to start thinking of thinking as a social activity. It has taken me only a few minutes of this effort to realize that, while we’re unused to conceiving it that way, thinking is a social activity. This is so in two ways:

First, even individual thought is informed by one’s social environment, and in fact a great deal of human thought is about how to negotiate the social environment.

Second, every act of communication between people is an act of corporate, communal thinking.

Clear as this seems to me as I write it, still the prejudice against seeing thought as anything a group can do is deeply held. It’s embedded in our language—notice we have a word “groupthink” which denotes flawed thinking. When we use this term, we use it in some assurance that groups cannot think.

Ah, but there’s precisely why I think the effort I’ve embarked on has begun to look valuable to me.

Because groups really can’t think.

And yet they must.

And so “thought leader” must morph from meaning someone who’s publicly opinionated and who wields opinions as a tool for self-advancement, to someone who is undertaking one of the most crucial human endeavors.

I named this blog a long time ago, so you might guess that I’ve done more thinking about this than I’ve posted. And I have. And tomorrow I begin sharing it.

I’m writing a book called Thoughtcraft. Tomorrow its chapters will begin appearing serially here on the blog.

I hope for feedback.

And I hope you enjoy the book.

…Shel Israel needs a nap. And maybe blogging is wee bit tired, too.

This page on Shel’s blog is a study in what I wrote about in Unfashionably Late. Read the comments.

Shel wants people to respond to his book ideas as they come out, and he’s not getting enough response. And we who commented are saying that maybe a blog isn’t the place to write a book any more. Shelley Powers is especially succinct:

Weblogging really has pushed the limits of ADD–creating it where it didn’t exist before. The medium doesn’t translate well into longer efforts requiring more work or analysis.

And Ted Koterwas chips in with this:

so, if blog posts are getting shorter, fewer people are taking the time to read and comment thoughtfully on long meaty posts, and the twitter hype is true, it would seem that for many people, the ability to broadcast and be social is much more important than having anything meaningful to say.

I appreciate Ted’s mentioning twitter. If blogging has shortened the attention spans of its practitioners, what will twitter do? Or perhaps, what is it already doing?

And maybe it’s not just twitter. There’s also the overabundance of all social media. Some of the best bloggers are getting positively lost to us as they explore Second Life.

Somebody has finally read and written about Unfashionably Late.

Ian Delaney in New Media Knowledge - Should You Blog? says:

Despite its alleged benefits, blogging costs time. And time is money. A new paper by Max Christian Hansen argues that new bloggers should count the cost before they enter the fray. Ian Delaney examines the arguments.

Thanks for paying attention, Ian!