A quick heads-up on a couple of off-site items. First, I just signed on as a contributor at Forbes, and booted-up my new blog there, on technology issues. I’ve posted two pieces in two days (I don’t plan to maintain a daily-posting schedule, but I felt Steve Jobs’ passing deserves a reaction on any technology blog).

• Oct 6: We Are All Macs Now
• Oct 5: The Electric Leviathan

You’ll see some familiar ribbonfarm themes evolve in more focused ways on Forbes.  I am hoping to keep up a weekly schedule of posts there. They will be on the shorter side (for me). I’ll be aiming for 1000-1200 words at most, probably fewer.

Hope to see you in the comments there.

Second, the video of my talk on the Gervais Principle is now available on the Economist site. Now that I am writing in so many different places (here, the Tempo blog, the Be Slightly Evil list, occasional high-effort Quora answers, Information Week and now Forbes), I think I need to figure out some sort of roundup strategy. I’ll see what I can do. Perhaps a monthly roundup?

It’s been nearly a year of procrastination since I posted Part IV of the Gervais Principle, and I am finally getting my act together. I’ll post the final part in the next few weeks. Blame hugely inflated expectations for the finale for my tardiness. But I finally decided, like Tony Hayward, that I wanted my life back. So I have legitimately started work on the finale (for those who don’t know what I am talking about: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV).  Whether it turns out to be a smooth touchdown or a crash-landing, either way the end is near.

But this post is mainly a news flash. I will be doing a 7-minute talk based on the Gervais Principle at the Human Potential conference, Sept 14-15 in New York. It is part of the Ideas Economy series of events organized by the Economist.  As far as I know, this Slightly Evil revolution is not being webcast, but the video should be available at some point. If you are attending, make sure to say hello.

I am extending my stay by a couple of days to meet people. If there is enough interest, I’d like to do an NYC meetup (or  a couple of small group/1:1 meetings) on Friday the 16th. If you are interested, let me know your availability. I expect to do any meetings somewhere midtown, 34th – 44th st or so.

Also, if you can offer me a couch in Manhattan to crash on for the night of 15th or 16th, let me know.  Thanks to my nomadic summer, I’ve acquired a serious taste for couchsurfing as a way to meet interesting new people, and have actually started to prefer it to staying at a hotel or with friends/family.

There are two basic types of timing: bandwagon timing and biding your time. They are the extremes of a spectrum. Most people focus on the first extreme. A minority focus on the second extreme. Successful timing requires a synthesis. Only a tiny fraction of people achieve synthesis.

We use different kinds of language to talk about each type.

Bandwagon timing is associated with the following types of language:

• This is the right time to sell
• Computer science is a hot major right now, and you should focus on Web technology
• He was in the right place at the right time
• It’s the perfect time to move to China

Biding your time, on the other hand, is associated with very different types of language

• This is your moment
• “There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, lead on to success” (Shakespeare in Julius Caeser)
• This is an idea whose time has come
• This is the moment I’ve been waiting for all my life
• He was a visionary ahead of his own time

To synthesize the two, you have to understand how they relate.

[Read more…]

There is a very interesting article in the New York Times  on the phenomenon of “decision fatigue.”

Decision fatigue is the newest discovery involving a phenomenon called ego depletion, a term coined by the social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister in homage to a Freudian hypothesis. Freud speculated that the self, or ego, depended on mental activities involving the transfer of energy. He was vague about the details, though, and quite wrong about some of them (like his idea that artists “sublimate” sexual energy into their work, which would imply that adultery should be especially rare at artists’ colonies). Freud’s energy model of the self was generally ignored until the end of the century, when Baumeister began studying mental discipline in a series of experiments, first at Case Western and then at Florida State University.

These experiments demonstrated that there is a finite store of mental energy for exerting self-control. When people fended off the temptation to scarf down M&M’s or freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies, they were then less able to resist other temptations. When they forced themselves to remain stoic during a tearjerker movie, afterward they gave up more quickly on lab tasks requiring self-discipline, like working on a geometry puzzle or squeezing a hand-grip exerciser. Willpower turned out to be more than a folk concept or a metaphor. It really was a form of mental energy that could be exhausted. The experiments confirmed the 19th-century notion of willpower being like a muscle that was fatigued with use, a force that could be conserved by avoiding temptation.

Commentary: I haven’t yet thought this through since it is recent research, but in Tempo-terms, it seems to fit in with the general notion of the momentum and entropy of mental models. If you forcibly steer the momentum through an effort of will, you increase entropy and make the narrative less controllable further downstream.

This goes into the hopper for some serious future examination.

Yesterday, I spoke about Tempo at the SoCAL Kanban/Lean Software Meetup, hosted by Pascal Pinck. It was an interesting mixed audience of about 40 odd — designers, startup types, big company types and a sprinkling of entertainment industry people and others. Since this was Los Angeles, I decided to focus on the storytelling ideas in the book.

Here are the slides and video; both have the voice track. Should be self-explanatory whether or not you’ve read the book.

Venkatesh Rao on storytelling and complexity from Pascal Pinck on Vimeo.

On July 4th, it will have been FOUR years since I started ribbonfarm. It’s also been about a year since I started the Be Slightly Evil email list and 3 months since I published Tempo, which I started writing nearly 3 years ago. This is also the first ribbonfarm birthday since I quit my job in February. So somehow between 2007 and now,  I transformed myself from a solid, working engineer-citizen with a real job and a writing hobby, to a blogger/writer/random unemployed person.

So there’s a lot to celebrate, and ou’re all invited to The Ribbonfarm 4th Anniversary Field Trip, on Sunday July 17 at 10:30 AM. It consists of a tour of the Sausalito Docks and houseboats followed by lunch and a hike in the nearby Muir woods (apologies to non Bay-Area people, had to pick some location and the Bay Area has the highest concentration of ribbonfarm readers).

The field trip is free and I’ll be providing lunch, but you have to grab one of the limited tickets at the eventbrite listing linked above.

Sponsor and long-time reader Sam Penrose will be hosting. When Sam offered me a personal tour of the houseboats and docks using How Buildings Learn as a lens, the idea seemed to hit on so many high-frequency ribbonfarm themes (legibility, boats and water, aging organizations, urban infrastructure…) that I figured I had to share it.  There are some links with more background information in the eventrbrite listing.

And since the Muir woods, which inspired my going-rogue Wild Thoughts, are right there, I had to tack on a hike. We’ll pick an easy trail so it won’t demand peak physical condition. I am hardly in great shape myself anyway.

We can only handle a limited number of people. I haven’t set a precise limit yet, but it’s basically “the number of people who can troop around on the docks following Sam without him having to shout to make himself heard.”

So sign up now. We do need an RSVP so we can plan lunch. Please only sign up for extra tickets if you know for sure you’ll be bringing a friend/significant other.  Email me if you need/can offer carpooling.

The field trip is one of several open events I’ll be doing during my 4 week couchsurfing trip through California. I’ll be in the Los Angeles area July 11-14 and Bay Area July 15 – Aug 4.

Details are on the new Upcoming Events page on ribbonfarm. The other scheduled open events are two Tempo themed talks in LA (July 12, hosted by sponsor Pascal Pinck) and Santa Clara (July 19 hosted by longtime reader Sean Murphy) respectively. I am also doing a Slightly Evil improv-game party in Palo Alto hosted by sponsor Jane Huang.

All these events are open, but with limited capacity. I also plan to hang around area coffee shops in San Jose, Palo Alto, Berkeley and downtown San Francisco during my weeks in the Bay Area, and I hope some of you can drop by to chat. I’ll post details as/when on the Upcoming Events page and also tweet out locations/share on the Ribbonfarm Facebook page. I’ll also have some availability for 1:1 meetings.

I am really looking forward to this.  While I’ve traveled a lot to the Bay Area and LA for work and conferences in the past, and squeezed in the occasional off-ribbonfarm meeting, I’ve never done an extended trip like this with an open calendar, purely to meet new people.

Happy 4th of July and wish me a Happy Anniversary here :)