Monthly Archive for December, 2008

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Impatient Experts: Deciding When (Or If) To Try Something New

Published by Jarred on December 17, 2008 in Careers and Culture. View Comments

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, gave an interesting piece of advice on his blog last night: “Do something new every three years.” He writes:

For the first ten years of my career, I changed jobs every three years. Then, for the seven years I was at The Economist, I changed countries every three years (London, Hong Kong, and New York, although sadly not long enough at the last). Here at Wired, I seem to have achieved the same rhythm by publishing a book after my fifth year and, next summer, my eighth. Each time it changes my life and puts me back on a steep learning curve with a new subject to immerse in and a new pace of travel and speaking. I’ve got a new foreign land to explore.

Anderson goes on to tie his “three and flee” advice (my words) to a theory advanced by Malcolm Gladwell in his new book Outliers: that it takes about 10,000 hours of disciplined application to something to create a true master. In an excerpt from the book provided by The Guardian, Gladwell writes:

This idea – that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice – surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.

“In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals,” writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin, “this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years… No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”

Though I appreciate the unique insight he brings to interesting subjects — and I’ll also admit I haven’t yet read Outliers — I’ve always been slightly skeptical of Gladwell’s reductionist theories (see also: Thomas Friedman’s Flexible Deadlines and the F.U.). My skepticism aside, Anderson calculates that (60 hours/week) x (50 weeks/year) x (3 years) = (a little under 10,000 hours). And so, according to rough Gladwellian-Andersonian metrics, if you work your butt off for a little over three years, you can consider yourself a master in your field.

Having done that, Anderson writes: “Great. Now go do something else.”

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How Blogging Changed Me (For the Better)

Published by Taylor on December 12, 2008 in Blogging. View Comments

Andrew Sullivan wrote a terrific essay on blogging in which he said:

For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud. [...]

To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm’s length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others [...] pivot you toward relative truth. A blogger [...] can provoke discussion or take a position, even passionately, but he also must create an atmosphere in which others want to participate.

That sentiment is in many ways how blogging has changed my life and perspective. To blog–in the purest and most engaging sense– is to be vulnerable. Blogging means pressing forward with sometimes whimsical or under-developed ideas; it means relying on often-times sharp-tounged commentors who will tell you that you’re wrong/stupid/crazy in no uncertain terms…but who will also introduce new ideas and perspectives to what would otherwise be an internal thought process.

That’s how I’ve changed through blogging. I’m less likely to deliberate quietly on an issue and instead more likely to provoke debate. I’m quicker to throw my thoughts or beliefs into the (modest) spotlight and more likely to change my mind. I’m thicker skinned and more aware of what I don’t know as well as those beliefs that I consider core to my being. I’ve opened up, to a potentially limitless audience, and I’m stronger for it.

But blogging is about more than vulnerability. It’s about finding new and creative ways to parse our inner struggles–be those issue debates, political choices, career decisions, or relationship woes–in the public square, engaging an audience and finding what I think of as the generalizable lessons or questions in the personal detail. This is, by itself, stepping out on a limb but it’s also a healthy way of maintaining perspective. A readable blog can’t be overly self-pitying or boastful, and in that sense blogging forces me to consider a larger picture and an audience that cares not about me but about the topics of my post.

Blogging is sometimes stressful. When I neglect the blog for days at a time (as I have all too frequently in the past few months) I feel the same guilt that I felt when I procrastinated on final papers in college. The web never sleeps, and blog posts don’t write themselves, but that too has been a lesson. We’re fortunate enough to live in a world with endless information, issues and questions worthy of our attention, and smart people to learn from. But we can’t cover it all. Blogging has forced me to focus, to recognize that sometimes being connected to the latest information must be secondary to offline or unplugged reflection. When I neglect the blog I feel as though I’m neglecting my audience to be sure, but more importantly and more deeply I feel that I’m missing an important part of my growth as an individual.

I have a few modest examples of how writing a blog has opened doors for me in my career and life, but the most signficant way that blogging has changed my life is by habitualizing my thinking and reflection in a way that exposes me to more ideas and viewpoints than I could ever hope to consider through my own (previously) silent intake of information.

The Future of Writing

Published by Jarred on December 10, 2008 in Culture and Reading. View Comments

I hesitate to even post on this, because I feel like I’ve written too many “does the dominance of computers spell the end of __________” entries over the life of this blog. But for whatever reason, when I was out riding my bike this weekend, this question came into my head: what is the future of writing? We’ve certainly talked about the future of reading here before, but what about its counterpart?

I don’t really have to write anything by hand at work (and actually, I think I’ve probably printed less than 30 pages for business purposes in the almost five months I’ve been at Google). I do jot down a few bullets when an attorney comes by to give me an assignment, or I’ll throw a few reminders on a sticky note if I’m afraid I’ll forget something. At home, I’m mostly electronic as well. Besides signing checks, writing thank you notes, or putting together a grocery list, all of my personal “inputting” is digital.

Earlier this year when I was traveling for work, I decided to ask the young attorney I was assisting for tips from his days at law school. His number one piece of advice to me was, “No matter what your classmates do, do not take notes on your computer.” He went on to explain that there’s nothing wrong with taking notes on your computer, per se. It’s certainly easier at the time of the notetaking to do it that way. But by writing notes by hand, you a) spend that much more effort and time forming the words, and thus thinking about them; b) are not distracted by the dozen other things you can do on your computer instead of paying attention; and c) have that much more of a motivation, when it comes down to studying for an exam, to type up your notes. This is what I did in college, and I think it played a large part in whatever success I had at tests (personally, I’d write a paper any day over taking a test).

Actually, the first time I did this was in 9th grade. When it came time for my biology exam at the end of the year, our teacher told us that we could bring in one 5″x8″ index card with whatever information we wanted on it. Already a computer geek by that age, I decided that I’d do this on the computer where I could type and print much smaller than I could write. I spent most of the weekend before the exam on that card: inputting information from my notebook, moving it around, and organizing it so I could find it quickly and easily on test day.

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Lala: Send Your Music To The Cloud

Published by Jarred on December 9, 2008 in Apple, Business, Music, Social Networks and Web 2.0. View Comments

There are a whole lot of companies and products trying to be “The Next Big Thing” in digital music. Apple’s iTunes is clearly dominant these days, a combined result of its deep (and sometimes exclusive) catalog offerings, easy-to-use software, and killer hardware lineup. Add to that the tight integration between those three, and you truly have a killer combo. Amazon seems to have posed the biggest challenge to the Apple machine so far, competing agressively with lower prices (around $0.79/track and $5.00/album as opposed to $0.99 and $9.99 respectively for Apple) as well as DRM-free tracks. One area in which both Apple and Amazon have failed to innovate, however, is universal accessibility to your music.

The Problem

First, let me describe my music set-up and listening habits:

My music, currently totaling 4,415 tracks, lives on my laptop’s hard drive. That corpus of music is duplicated in its entirety in two other places: my backup hard drive, and on my iPod. I use my iPod primarily to play along with music on the drums, but also in the car through an audio-in jack.
Using a playlist, I’ve designated a subset of that music (right now, 850 tracks, or about 20% of my total collection) to sync onto my iPhone; when I walked/bused/metroed for an hour every day in D.C., this came in handy. Now that I bike to work most days in about 15 minutes, I have a no-music commute.
While I could take my iPod to work and have all my music on hand, I know that inevitably I’ll leave it there one night and want it for the drums, or it’ll run out of juice and I won’t have a cord, or something. And given that there seems to have been a rash of disappearing devices at work recently — including my G1 and a coworker’s iPod — I try to minimize the gadgetry I have (and perhaps accidentally leave) at the office. So, until recently, I would just fire up Pandora.

So the biggest question I’ve faced with regards to music is this: “How do I access my entire collection of music remotely without having to bring along a separate device?” Earlier this year, I tried a product from SimplifyMedia that let you listen remotely through iTunes (or the iPhone), but I encountered too much lag. For the past month or two, however, I’ve been trying out a new service called Lala. Lala is a completely web-based music jukebox and storefront. While that’s pretty standard, the real beauty of Lala can be found in two key offerings: the Lala Music Mover and web-only purchases.

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Monday Links: December 8th, 2008

Published by Taylor on December 8, 2008 in Monday Links. View Comments

Super sized links this week to make up for my absence last week. Please be patient with us as we continue to tweak the new layout. And by “we” I mean Jarred.

Better Place is a California company based on the idea that switching to electric cars need not wait on as-of-yet undeveloped next generation batteries (often cited as what’s holding electric cars back), but rather can be accomplished by leasing batteries to electric car owners and offering a large number of swap stations for freshly charged batteries. For those of you who have propane grills, you’ve probably done this with your propane tank for years: you drop off the empty tank and pick up a full tank. Shai Agassi, the founder of Better Place, was profiled in Wired a few months back. Well it turns out Better Place will be able to test their system in Hawaii:

The State of Hawaii and the Hawaiian Electric Company on Tuesday endorsed an effort to build an alternative transportation system based on electric vehicles with swappable batteries and an “intelligent” battery recharging network. [...]

By using existing electric car technologies, coupled with an Internet-connected web of tens of thousands of recharging stations [...] Better Place L.L.C. of Palo Alto, Calif., will make all-electric vehicles feasible.

Here’s a good piece from the Guardian (UK): 10 big energy myths. The only myth on the list that I find objectionable is this one:

Myth 7: climate change means we need more organic agriculture

The uncomfortable reality is that we already struggle to feed six billion people. Population numbers will rise to more than nine billion by 2050. Although food production is increasing slowly, the growth rate in agricultural productivity is likely to decline below population increases within a few years [...] So we need to ensure that as much food as possible is produced on the limited resources of good farmland. Most studies show that yields under organic cultivation are little more than half what can be achieved elsewhere.

This response from Treehugger is well taken:

[W]e need to both tackle rising meat consumption and improve the yields of organic agriculture and decrease the impacts of conventional farming if we are to achieve sustainability – fortunately there are plenty of ideas to help us on our way without reaching for the pesticides just yet, from vegetarian and low meat diets to urban aquaponics to wireless soil sensors. And of course agrichar, which Goodall is a big supporter of, offers great opportunities to increase yields while producing energy and also sequestering carbon in our soils.

Austin is the latest city to explore Smart Grid technology:

In technical-speak, the project addresses the software challenges of “distributed generation” – the idea that people will start generating power from their homes, reducing dependence on centralized power plants.

Scoble vents about the many ways in which direct messages on Twitter are completely useless. I agree wholeheartedly; while I don’t get the volume of Twitter DMs that Robert does, I can vouch that there are well over 100 Facebook messages sitting unread in that inbox waiting for the day when Facebook gives me a “Delete All” button. I read the Facebook message when it’s emailed to me. Why make me delete it twice?

I expect to write about the potential for Obama’s network soon, but in the meantime I thought this post was spot on (emphasis in the original):

Look, the administration’s efforts are admirable. [...] I think it’s great that the Obama people are committed to trying, and to involving people with the process by some means other than providing their credit card numbers [...]

But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The magic value of social media tools is that they let people communicate among themselves, not that they let them communicate with a big institution.

Social media lets you listen in when people talk among themselves. The social web helps people self-organize into groups and movements. It helps them share collective intelligence. If used by government itself, these tools can open up government process to public inspection. It’s socially transformative technology that enables a constant, real-time, global conversation. It will change the world in ways we don’t yet appreciate.

But it’s intellectually dishonest to lay these tools out there and pretend to listen attentively to the incoherent rumble of a billion fingers pounding keyboards all across the land.