Where the Wild Thoughts Are

March 1, 2011 By

For the last week, John Muir quotes have been floating into my head. Uninvited, but not unwelcome. This one in particular has been gently tugging at my attention:

“I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”

Some of you already know why my thoughts have been drifting in this direction. Starting today, I am a free agent, with Ribbonfarm as my base of operations. Some have asked me about the personal story behind this move, but that is frankly too mundane to share. Some have also asked about my business model. I’d share that if I actually had one.

So in lieu of either, let me tell you about the one thing I have sort of worked out: a business philosophy. I call it my “Wild Thoughts” business philosophy, and it was put to the test the very week I sketched it out on the proverbial paper-napkin: two friends independently sent me the same provocative article that’s been doing the rounds, Julien Smith’s The Future of Blogs is Paid Access. Reading it, I immediately realized that this was one decision about the future of Ribbonfarm that I could not postpone. For a variety of reasons, if I was going to consider paid access, I’d have to decide now.

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Memories of Namdapha

February 23, 2011 By

This piece was originally published in 1999, and is based on a 1996 camping trip. My thoughts have been drifting back to this experience lately, so I thought I’d share it. It’s a little overwrought, but it is significant for me personally because my writing voice first started emerging with this piece. Besides a few copy-editing and internationalization touches, I haven’t changed anything.

– One –

Namdapha, in an obscure corner of the subcontinent. Unobtrusive in a list of National Parks, among more famous names like Kaziranga and Corbett.

There is magic here.

I mean it. Many people know about it, and they carefully try to keep the place safe, by calling it a “National Park”. Not because there are tigers here, not because there are snow leopards, but because there is magic. There are other places that are wild — but nowhere else is there magic. You ride your bus through quaint places with names like Digboi and Miao, quaint but not magical; you pass through miles of lightly wooded country, green and natural, but again, not magical.

And then you enter.

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Waiting versus Idleness

February 10, 2011 By

We spend a lot of our lives doing nothing. Doing nothing is usually viewed as wasting time, and there are two ways it can be done. When you waste your own time, it’s called idleness. When others waste your time, it’s called waiting. I enjoy idleness.  I don’t like waiting.

Wasted time is not empty time. Empty time is meditation. You could argue that meditation is about subjective time standing still. Your productive potential, in theory, is either preserved or enhanced through empty do-nothing.  Wasted time is also not the same as recovery, relaxation or recharge time. That’s about using this minute to make another minute more potent.

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The Disruption of Bronze

February 2, 2011 By

I pride myself on my hard-won sense of history. World history is probably the subject I’ve studied the most on my own, starting with Somerset Plantagenet Fry’s beautifully illustrated  DK History of the World at age 15.  I studied the thing obsessively for nearly a year, taking copious notes and neglecting my school history syllabus. It’s been the best intellectual investment of my life. Since then, I periodically return to history to refresh my brain whenever I think it my thinking is getting stale. Most recently, I’ve been reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. My tastes have gradually shifted from straightforward histories by modern historians to analytical histories with a specific angle, preferably written by historians from eras besides our own.

The big value to studying world history is that no matter how much you know or think you know, one new fact can completely rewire your perspectives. The biggest such surprise for me was understanding the real story (or as real as history ever gets) of how iron came to displace bronze, and what truly happened in the shift between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age.

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Boundary Condition Thinking

January 19, 2011 By

It is always interesting to recognize a simple pattern in your own thinking. Recently, I was wondering why I am so attracted to thinking about the margins of civilization, ranging from life on the ocean (for example, my review of The Outlaw Sea) to garbage, graffiti, extreme poverty and marginal lifestyles that I would never want to live myself, like being in a motorcycle gang. Lately, for instance, I have gotten insatiably curious about the various ways one can be non-mainstream. In response to a question I asked on Quora about words that mean “non mainstream,” I got a bunch of interesting responses, which I turned into this Wordle graphic (click image for bigger view)

Then it struck me: even in my qualitative thinking, I merely follow the basic principles of mathematical modeling, my primary hands-on techie skill. This interest of mine in “non mainstream” is more than a romantic attraction to dramatic things far from everyday life. My broader, more clinical interest is simply a case of instinctively paying attention to what are known as “boundary conditions” in mathematical modeling.

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The Gollum Effect

January 6, 2011 By

Throughout the last year, I’ve been increasingly troubled by a set of vague thoughts centered on the word addiction.  Addiction as a concept has expanded for me, over the last few months, beyond its normal connotations, to encompass the entire consumer economy. Disturbing shows like Hoarders have contributed to my growing sense that conventional critiques of consumerism are either missing or marginalizing something central, and that addiction has something to do with it. These vague, troubling thoughts coalesced into a concrete idea a few weeks ago, when I watched this video of a hand supermodel talking about her work, in a way that I can only describe as creepy.

The concrete idea is something I call the Gollum effect.  It is a process by which regular humans are Gollumized: transformed into hollow shells of their former selves, defined almost entirely by their patterns of consumption.

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How Leveraged are Your Resolutions?

January 1, 2011 By

It just struck me that the Ben Franklin quote, “early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise,” implies a great principle of leverage to apply to your resolutions. The easiest way to visualize this is using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Modifying behaviors at lower levels automatically improves behaviors at higher levels. So your resolutions should be as highly-leveraged as possible. Call the layers of the pyramid P, S, L, E and A. Compute your leverage as follows:

  • A: 1 point
  • E: 2 points
  • L: 4 points
  • S: 8 points
  • P: 16 points

Your leverage is your total points divided by the number of resolutions. So the example above has a leverage of (1+2+4+8+16)/5=31/5=6.2. Do the math. If your resolutions aren’t sufficiently leveraged, reframe them to move them to lower levels.

A word to the wise, I hope, is sufficient. I am sure you can work out the benefits of leveraged resolutions for yourself.

Regular scheduled programming of 1000+ word posts will resume shortly. Happy New Year!

Ribbonfarm Complete 2010 Roundup

December 21, 2010 By
This entry is part 4 of 17 in the series Annual Roundups

It’s been a weird year. I think I did some of my best writing this year, and also some of the worst. I wrote some great anchor posts, but I also posted several pieces that I now regard as being far too hasty, fluffy and/or self-indulgent. A high-variance year in short.  Mostly a result of this being a very busy year on multiple other fronts: a lot of blogging for work (including a lot of guest posting), a product launch, a lot of work on my book, and the launch of the Be Slightly Evil mailing list (about 20 newsletters mailed out so far). The year has been an exercise in portfolio management.

So overall, I am pleased, but definitely not satisfied.  I am going to set more brutal quality standards for myself next year. Here’s the full list of posts for 2010 in chronological order. The ones in bold are either popular or personal favorites.  Here are 2009, 2008 and 2007 roundups for new-in-2010 readers who want to make this a ribbonfarm holiday marathon and catch up on previous seasons (you may want to print out a dozen or two posts to take with you on any vacation travels). This will be the last post of the year, so see you in 2011!

  1. On the Deathly Cold
  2. Drive by Dan Pink
  3. “Up in the Air” and the Future of Work
  4. Impro by Keith Johnstone
  5. The Misanthrope’s Guide to the End of the World
  6. The Genealogy of the Gervais Principle
  7. Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich
  8. Safar aur Musafir: The Hero’s Journey in Bollywood
  9. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor
  10. The Inquisition of the Entrepreneur
  11. The Expedient, Desirable Product
  12. An Infrastructure Pilgrimage
  13. Linchpin by Seth Godin, and 8 Other Short Book Reviews
  14. The Turpentine Effect
  15. Amy Lin and the Ancient Eye
  16. An Elephant, Some Batteries and Julianne Moore
  17. Against the Gods by Peter Bernstein
  18. The Gervais Principle III: The Curse of Development
  19. The Lords of Strategy by Walter Kiechel
  20. Intellectual Gluttony
  21. In the Real World…
  22. Digital Security, the Red Queen, and Sexual Computing
  23. The Missing Folkways of Globalization
  24. WOM, Broadcast and the Classical Marketing Contract
  25. The Philosopher’s Abacus
  26. Becalmed in the Summer Doldrums
  27. The Eight Metaphors of Organization
  28. The Happy Company
  29. A Big Little Idea Called Legibility
  30. Down with Innovation, Up with Imitation!
  31. How to Take a Walk
  32. Cultural Learnings of Blogosphere for Make Benefit Glorious Blog of Ribbonfarm.
  33. The Greasy, Fix-It ‘Web of Intent’ Vision
  34. Morning is Wiser Than Evening
  35. King Gustavus’ Folly: The Story of the Vasa
  36. Cricket as Metaphor
  37. The Seven Dimensions of Positioning
  38. Learning from One Data Point
  39. How Good Becomes the Enemy of Great
  40. The Gervais Principle IV: Wonderful Human Beings
  41. Coloring the Whole Egg: Fixing Integrated Marketing
  42. Warrens, Plazas and the Edge of Legibility
  43. Ancient Rivers of Money
  44. The World of Garbage
  45. What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from the Poor
  46. What Does it Mean to Work Hard?
  47. Socratic Fishing in Lake Quora

Update on Tempo

December 13, 2010 By

Okay, I’ve been stringing you guys along, promising a book, for nearly two years now. You could be forgiven for thinking that the project has fallen by the wayside. On the contrary, in spite of the insane pressures of leading a product launch at Xerox and writing this pretty demanding blog, by some miracle, I’ve actually been making steady progress on the book. I thought I’d share a few details. First, we’ve nearly locked down the cover. The ‘we’ includes my good friend and very talented designer/finance quant, Adam Hogan, who is doing the cover for me (while bumming around somewhere in the Czech republic). You’ll hear more about the talented Mr. Hogan on this blog soon.

As you can see, I’ve also nearly locked down a subtitle: timing, tactics and strategy in opportunistic, narrative-driven decision making. If that sounds like a bit of a mouthful, that’s because these are exciting days in book publishing. One of the things you have to do is Aim for Amazon, and strike a delicate balance between a great title/subtitle for humans and a search-friendly one for indexes and search engines. One of the proven strategies that has emerged is to optimize the subtitle for online discovery. The skill is not unlike the skill needed to think up great blog headlines, a game I enjoy a lot. I haven’t completely locked this down, but it’s getting close.

Let me share a few more details, including the final table of contents. And don’t forget to sign up for the announcement list, if you haven’t already.

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Socratic Fishing in Lake Quora

December 7, 2010 By

Allow me to introduce you to Seb Paquet, an expert Socratic fisherman on Lake Quora.  He is particularly adept at baiting the hook just right to catch fish of the species Wannabis Oracularis, to which I belong. He is entirely to blame for getting me addicted to Quora in the last month or so (you can follow me here). For those who haven’t yet heard of it, Quora is a booming Q&A site. It just might be the next big social media site to cross the chasm and go mainstream. It is certainly booming right now, and is the darling of tech watchers. But unlike other recent Valley favorites like FourSquare (narrow appeal) and Groupon (for shopaholics), Quora might well become as fundamental to the Web as Google, Facebook or Twitter. Everybody asks and answers questions after all.

If you think the Q&A market is a tired and played-out ancillary market (lazy schoolkids looking for help cheating on homework on Yahoo Answers, tedious transactional Q&A on LinkedIn, let-me-Google-that-for-you sites), you’d be wrong. Quora has demonstrated that Q&A is a viable fundamental market, not a bolt-on ancillary to other markets like social networking or asymmetric messaging. Hang Zhang first helped me appreciate the very subtle social design lurking underneath the apparently simple architecture of Quora, and Seb Paquet, through his baiting, has provided me, over the last month or so, with a crash course in the dynamics of Q&A. Initially, I thought Quora was a fad, that owed its initial meteoric growth to the pedigree of its founders and early backers. I even unfairly labeled it in my head as “Valley mutual admiration society,” but I have now become a convert.

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