“Men who believe they are accomplishing something by speaking, speak in a different way from men who believe speaking is a waste of time.”
— pg.372 of Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
On speaking differently
Reply
Tag Archives: Quotable
Rounders vs. Accumulators
“Most people have at least a few big problems in their life. But the vast majority of life’s problems are the little kind. There are two ways to deal with the little problems.
ROUNDERS: This group rounds things off. A problem that’s a two on a scale of one to ten gets rounded to zero. If a rounder has five problems that are all about a two on a scale of one to ten, he’ll tell you he has no problems.
ACCUMULATORS: Accumulators add up all the little problems until they equal one big problem. If an accumulator has five problems that are each a two on a scale of one to ten, that feels like having one problem that’s a ten.
At the end of this thought-provoking post, Mr. Adams gives his readers an assignment: Describe your own job in one sentence. For example: “I help people hate each other.” (Divorce Lawyer)
That “in one sentence” part makes it very difficult. The best I could come up with is: “I drive one of the Sunday School buses for the Church of the Web.”
The Dip: Knowing when to quit, and when to stick
“Every new project (or job, or hobby, or company) starts out exciting and fun. Then it gets harder and less fun, until it hits a low point-really hard, and not much fun at all. And then you find yourself asking if the goal is even worth the hassle. Maybe you’re in a Dip — a temporary setback that will get better if you keep pushing. But maybe it’s really a Cul-de-Sac, which will never get better, no matter how hard you try.
What really sets superstars apart from everyone else is the ability to escape dead ends quickly, while staying focused and motivated when it really counts.
Winners quit fast, quit often, and quit without guilt — until they commit to beating the right Dip for the right reasons.
Losers, on the other hand, fall into two basic traps. Either they fail to stick out the Dip-they get to the moment of truth and then give up — or they never even find the right Dip to conquer.” [Squidoo]
I don’t blame Mr. Godin for wanting to make a buck, but this little “book” (about 70 tiny pages) should have been an eBook. Which I probably would not have bought, so… there you go.
But it brought back some memories.
It only took me about 3 months (in 1970) to decide I did not want to be a lawyer. I quit and I quit early. I then spent about a year as a Postal Inspector before calling it quits. I remember my boss urging me to stick it out.
I’m a Seth fan and found The Dip worth the hour it took to read. A few quotes after the jump.
Seth Godin: Different kinds of advertising
“The first kind is the rational kind. Yellow Page ads, direct mail and Google AdWords fit into this category. This is advertising that works, if ‘works’ is defined as, “pay $3 and make $4.” With measurable direct advertising, you can count on profit-minded small organizations to give it a try (small buys) and if it obviously makes money, to buy some more.
The second kind of advertising is the glamorous kind, the kind that people think of when they think of the Super Bowl or Time magazine or of profitable ads that are worth selling. These ads don’t sell because they work. They sell because they are sold.
Let me be fair: they work if we define ‘working’ as: pleasing the client, pleasing the agency, increasing brand goodwill, and building, over time, a groundswell of awareness and brand respect that ultimately leads to profits.”
Seth’s Organic Path to Google Happiness
Seth Godin on the “organic success” path to a high Google rank:
“If you want to be on the front page of matches for “White Plains Lawyer”, then the best choice is to build a series of pages (on your site, on social sites, etc.) that give people really useful information. Once you’ve done everything you can… once you’ve built a web of information and once you’ve given the ability to do this to your best clients and your partners and colleagues, then by all means apply the best SEO (search engine optimization) thinking in the world to your efforts.”
Republicans and Democrats
I do love a Lucas Davenport novel. Nothing heavy, fun read. The latest —Invisible Prey— includes a brief exchange between Lucas and his boss, Rose Marie, on the difference between Republicans and Democrats:
“Wonder why with Republicans, it’s usually fucking somebody that get them in trouble. And with the Democrats, it’s usually stealing?”
“Republicans have money. Most of them don’t need more. But they come from uptight, sexually repressed backgrounds, and sometimes, they just go off. Democrats are looser about sex, but half the time, they used to be teachers or government workers, and they’re desperate for cash. They see all that money up close, around the government, the lobbyists and the corporate guys, they can smell it, they can taste it, they see the rich guys flying to Paris for the weekend, and eating all the good restaurants, and buying three thousand-dollar suits. They just want to reach out and take some.”
— Invisible Prey, John Sandford (page 141)
Seth Godin: “Blow up your home page”
“Do you really need a home page? Does the web respect it?
Human beings don’t have home pages. People make judgments about you in a thousand different ways. By what they hear from others, by the way they experience you, and on and on. Companies may have a website, but they don’t have a home page in terms of the way people experience them.
The problem with home page thinking is that it’s a crutch. There’s nothing wrong with an index, nothing wrong with a page for newbies, nothing wrong with a place that makes a first impression when you get the chance to control that encounter. But it’s not your ‘home’. It’s not what the surfer/user wants, and when it doesn’t match, they flee.
You don’t need one home page. You need a hundred or a thousand. And they’re all just as important.”
This post by Seth Godin perfectly says what I’ve struggled to communicate to clients and friends as I try to steer them away from traditional “home page” websites… and toward blogs. It’s a hard sell because it’s easy to throw up some bull shit copy from those old corporate brochures we spent so much on, and really hard to engage with your customers in a fresh, timely and relevant way.
Why do you want to be president?
“I’d like to be in charge for just five minutes. Balance the books. Get us out of debt. Be nice to our friends, tell our enemies to fuck off. Clean up the air and the water. Throw corporate crooks in the clink. Put dignity back in government. Fix things.”
— Randolp K. Jepperson. Boomsday by Christopher Buckley.
“In cyberspace everyone can hear you scream”
Christopher Buckley (Boomsday) gives us this wonderful play on the tagline from the 1979 scifi classic, Alien (“In space no one can hear you scream.”)
RIP-ware (fictional software)
BADMAP is an acronym for Bio-Actuarial Dyna-Metric Age Predictor. It works like this:
” A person’s DNA profile, family history, mental history, lifestyle profile, every variable –how many trips to the grocery per week, how many airplane flights, hobbies, food, booze, number of times per month you had sex and with whom, everything down to what color socks you put on in the morning– were all fed into the software. RIP-ware would then calculate and predict how and when you’d die. In the testing, they had programmed it retroactively with the DNA and lifestyle profile of thousand of people who had already died. RIP-ware predicted their deaths with an accuracy of 99.07 percent. In a simulation, it predicted the death of Elvis Presley — just four months from he actual date of his demise. The ultimate “killer app.”
Insurance companies had been working on similar programs. What a windfall it would be for them if they could sell life insurance to someone they knew was going to live another forty years–and conversely decline life insurance to someone the computer predicted would be pushing up daisies within two years.
Another field of vast potential were the old folks’ homes. typically, these demanded that a prospective resident turn over his and her entire net worth in return for perpetual care. You could live two years or twenty years; that was their gamble. But if a nursing home knew,in advance, that John Q. smith was going to have a fatal heart attack in 2.3 years while watching an ad for toenail fungus ointment on the evening news, they would much rather have his nest egg as advance payment than that of, say, Jane Q. Jones, who RIP-ware predicted would live another twenty-five years and die at the ripe old age of 105.
Page 119, Boomsday, by Christopher Buckley