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When you are building up an asset, you’re either spending time or cash.
Renovating a house requires either your handiwork or someone else’s. Getting a charity off the ground requires legwork or funding. Often a combination of both is required. Sometimes you have more of one than the other, or you have no choice which to use.
But somewhere along the lines of industry, digital, and social, things broke down.
You can pay someone to tweet for you, but consistent participation is expensive and doesn’t work very well if it’s outsourced. Being clever is hard (impossible?) to pay for, but personality plays such an important role that often, it’s best just to do it yourself. You can’t pay to keep passion going, either; instead, it often gets snuffed out just as you’re trying to encourage it by paying for it.
Now, the web might be one of the only places where spending time trumps money. If you don’t care, you’ll drop out. If you get paid, you’ll phone it in. The only thing that will make the grade is to really care about it– only if it’s your ass on the line will you really be able to put in the time. It’s the only reason you’ll care enough to compete.
If it’s just a job, others will out-sweat you. And sweat is what built the web.
10 years ago, the web was expensive, or complex, to work on. Now, infrastructure is in place, so it’s easy. The only remaining factor, the one that can’t be bought or commoditized, is the human one.
Robots will get faster. Information will get faster. But human will stay human. That is why you must put your effort there.
I could be wrong, but don’t bet on it.
Filed by Julien at 8:53 am under random
4 Comments
An MP3 used to be a concert. A Kindle used to be a bookstore.
Is this you? You listen to music personally on your MP3 player. You read books by yourself and watch your TV on your laptop or iPad. You eat alone at least 50% of the time, rarely go to concerts, and watch more movies at home than in theatres.
Do you recognize yourself in this profile? ;)
A side effect of the digitization and portability of cultural artifacts is that they have also been brought from the public to the private. A gramophone used to be expensive, and a community might have had only one, so they shared it. Now we all have iPods, so we have our own music collection. We can download our favourite songs privately, so we don’t have to talk to a record store clerk– or anyone, for that matter.
What was once necessarily public has become private. What used to belong to a community has become private property. This might be a normal process of commodification– food becomes affordable, so we have snack foods or protein shakes instead of feasts. Stuff get cheaper, more portable, and private.
Interestingly enough, this also leeches value out of the public domain and into the pockets of corporations. This may, or may not, be an accident. But that’s not the point. The privatization of culture is a fact, and we have to deal with it. Though it fuels a sense of personal power, if we’re not careful, it also feeds loneliness.
Collective activity is a pillar of connection inside a community, helping people laugh together and share good conversation. It fuels a sense of belonging and happiness. How much of it are you doing?
If this is a normal phase of cultural and technological evolution, then it might be unstoppable. But your personal choice will reflect your priorities and decide the kind of life you live. The more public, the better you are at conversation and the more you feel a sense of kinship with others. The more private, the less conformity, but at the expense of belonging. You are either a wolf or a sheep, but the choice often happens without your consent.
Creative Commons people and programmers tend to get this, and bloggers often do too– the more you give stuff away, the more you get back. But often we live this only in regards to the web, and miss out because of it. Dungeons and Dragons has become World of Warcraft– an impression of being public, but without the actual increase in satisfaction or happiness. It is a trompe-l’oeil that mimics depth.
My strategy to trade favourite books with people, to have weekly ‘dates,’ and to have people over for supper. These are not exciting things.
They are not about technology. They are about people.
But if you’re part of the social web, and all you get excited about is the New Twitter, you do not see the big picture, and you are mistaken about why it matters.
Take a step back and look again.
Filed by Julien at 11:04 am under random
15 Comments
You may not have had the pleasure yet, but trust me: Cooking for friends is actually pretty great.
I did it yesterday while I had some friends over to roll some dice and, man, was it different than ordering pizza. I also put down some charcuteries out on the table and we devoured that stuff. Really happy about the result. A++ would buy again.
For a long time I resisted the basic skill of cooking while people around me learned about it. I figured if I could afford it, what was the harm? As it turns out, there can be a lot. If you cook for yourself, you know what goes into your meals. By definition, you eat healthier. You learn how to welcome people at home. You put yourself closer to the source and know what you’re supporting. These are all good things.
So I’ve decided to throw myself headlong into this by eating at home for 30 days, and I recommend you do the same. Here are my ground rules– feel free to make up your own.
I’m not a big drinker, so this shouldn’t be a big deal. I am allowing myself to have coffee or tea, but not to consume any calories, so no food can be eaten outside my house. If I’m not at home, no big deal, I just won’t eat.
I travel a lot for work, and if I look at my calendar over here, it has a few engagements I’ve agreed to already. I don’t intend to break them, but I’m also not making any new ones. So this will be 30 days of eating at home while I’m at home in Montreal, obviously.
I happen to be in the process of trying to make my house more welcoming, so this will be a good way to apply pressure to that goal, too. I just invited three acquaintances from Twitter over for breakfast. I intend to do it again. This will help me spend more time with people I want to get to know better, rather than having superfluous lunch dates with them.
I eat a paleo diet, so as long as what you offer me can be eaten that way, I’ll make it for myself and/or for others. Have a favourite recipe? Send it my way, as long as it’s grain- and sugar-free, and I’ll try it and let you know how it went.
You will probably lose weight, learn a lot about food, and make your significant other, children, and/or friends very happy. Blog it, tweet it (#eatingin), and tell your friends– the social pressure will help you make it. See you in 30 days.
Filed by Julien at 2:53 pm under random
10 Comments
So I took the advice of this book last week and made a To-Stop-Doing list.
The idea is to notice what activities are sucking your energy, wasting your time, and making you feel horrible– the opposite of a to-do list. Anyway, social media activities, in their various forms, made the top 5. Interesting right?
Blogging I felt was awesome, and lifted my spirits almost every time I did it. Reddit tended to waste more than 2 hours of my day if I let it, and checking Twitter while waiting for a subway generally didn’t do my mood any good, either. Pretty remarkable.
I did a talk at Jeff Pulver‘s 140 Conference the other week that discussed this– how fundamentally human social activities such as play and work get our spirits up by their very nature, but social networks themselves don’t really leave us with any lasting happiness. I relate this to a general thesis that makes a lot of sense to me. Here it is:
If we trust for the same reasons we always have, and we are made healthy by the same food we have always been, then we should also be made happy by the same stuff we always have. The puzzle then becomes to assess what those things are, and do more of them instead of the stuff people are telling us.
On a similar note, I was in a funk all last week until I started exercising. Miraculously, when that began, I suddenly felt better. Know what else works? Going to bed early. Amazing huh.
My point is that this happiness that we want so badly, the basic purpose of our existence is often unrelated to grand things like career, money, etc. and often far more related to basic human needs such as sleep, food, and exercise. In fact some of the best advice I ever got was just that: If you’re ever in a bad mood, try doing one of those things before lashing out at someone. More often than not, the mood passes.
So I’ve been reading the Happiness Project with this in mind– the idea that basic things that make other people happy will probably also do the same for me, and that the fundamental building blocks of a good life are often the things we see in commercials for mutual funds– you know, walks on the beach, sunsets, that kind of thing.
We visited my friend Dan (also my tattoo artist) a few weeks ago in Belgium and I noticed how much waking up to his gorgeous backyard, with trees, a well, etc and how much it impacted my mood to have that kind of space as a backdrop instead of concrete. We don’t want to believe in how easy it is, and we’d like things to be different, but they aren’t. Very fundamental things work– complicated plans do not.
The photo above is one I took yesterday of some graffiti I saw on Notre-Dame here in Montreal. It says, in French, “Perdre sa vie à la gagner,” which roughly translates as “Wasting your life trying to make a living.”
It’s a good thing to think about. What do you actually need? What do you want? And finally, what are the (often free) alternatives that no one is telling you about?
Filed by Julien at 10:19 am under random
16 Comments
I was checking out some graffiti in my neighbourhood the other day and thinking about gentrification.
It seems natural that those that are poor would be able to see opportunity in places (neighbourhoods) where the rich are not looking yet. This is how startups get profitable and why artists move into sketchy areas of a city.
As these same areas become profitable, though, big organizations move in and build condos, or Facebook gets into location based social software. This eventually crowds out the poor or small as the rich lean into the problem with their increased resources. Depending on laws (anti-monopoly, rent control, etc.), this may take longer, but it can’t really be stopped entirely. This is “fine” (not really), as long as there are new places to go.
When the poor of Europe took boats to America to have access to new land and to stop oppression of their people, they had to work hard in order to make it livable for their families, but their hard work was rewarded. They had more opportunity and freedom than their class normally allowed. They became rich in a new way by changing the pond they swam in.
This is all fine and good… until you run out of land.
I’m asking myself where settlers go now. When all neighbourhoods become gentrified, when all areas of business become monopolized by larger enterprise, where do the disenfranchised go to seek new opportunity? Do they have to move out to the North of Canada, the wilderness where no one really wants to be, in order to find something new for themselves?
Another question to ask yourself is where you are on the spectrum. Do you seek out opportunity by finding strange, uncomfortable places, or do you look for areas where risk is lower? This is the spectrum from angel investor > venture capitalist > shareholder in a blue chip company. Each has methods of profit but they are based on ability to understand risk. (Of course it all comes back down to this.)
Wherever you are, it seems inevitable that someone bigger will eventually come in and crowd you out. This force exerts its influence wherever you are on the chain.
So, everyone must become a settler again in order to find better land. Best that we adjust to discomfort now and find new ways to increase our liberty and profit– before the tides turn.
Filed by Julien at 6:02 am under random
6 Comments
Voting, food, career, spending, success– all of these and more are political acts.
We don’t realize it while we’re doing them, but all are meaningful in terms of who they help– ourselves, our families and communities, or the world at large. The mere act of paying rent to the stranger who owns your apartment building, for example, is a behaviour that enriches someone you don’t know instead of you and your loved ones. This is the same for every dollar we spend or every minute we pay attention to something.
We all live in a web of relationships and attention that include friends, family, and co-workers, but you also choose the web you live in, and the ones you decide to help. Every time you choose one web over another, it can change your quality of life for the better.
By deciding to optimize your health by eating at home, for example, you are already deciding not to participate in the McDonald’s and Olive Gardens of the world, choose better quality food for yourself, all while increasing your own competence. By taking part in a farmer’s co-op you are enriching your own neighbourhoods instead of the Wallmarts and Carrefours of the world who would rather shut down stores than allow unions.
Every time you take part in a scheme that favours the rich, you also increase their power over the poor. This also happens every time you talk about Twilight over some other (less popular) movie. Even more important: If you are part of the attention- or capital-poor class, you’re also impoverishing yourself.
Making the choice to be healthy only benefits you and those around you. But if you choose not to care, you take part in a massive web of insurance companies, take out restaurants, and doctors who count on your apathy to profit. Then, the choice of what to do is theirs, not yours.
All acts of purposeful ignorance or negligence enrich others instead of yourself. All acts of learning empower you and those you care about. This is why you should learn to read more, be more crafty, and know how to fix your own car and bike. The sense of competence it comes with is like gold, and you will wonder why it took you so long to get it.
I know I did.
Filed by Julien at 10:43 am under random
19 Comments
Your fashion choices, your words, your decisions–all need more BALLS.
You worry what people think about you because they won’t like you, or they’ll talk behind your back. But really, they’ll admire your courage and adjust just fine.
You’ll question yourself at the last minute, maybe think you’re crazy, but sometimes, you need to be uncomfortable and make mistakes. Jumping this far will give you the strength to jump further next time.
Sometimes, I like to think about all the people who almost made the right decision. They got to the edge and then just… stopped. These are the almost-Steve-Jobs, the almost-Vivienne-Westwoods, and the almost-MLKs. They all had very good reasons. There are millions of them, and you know none of their names.
Where are you right now? What is the worst case scenario? How likely is it? What about the best?
Either way, you’re going to be dead soon. You might as well do something fun, in the meantime.
At worst, you’ll laugh about it later. At best… well, you know.
Filed by Julien at 7:43 am under random
25 Comments
One of the best books I read while in Paris was The Gift of Fear.
It was recommended to me by Chris Penn a long time ago, and basically talks about how women can deal with creepy guys and/or stalkers. Chris said I couldn’t understand trust until I understood how people abuse and manipulate trust.
He was right. I learned a ton. But here’s something amazing I read that has more to do with fear than trust– something so fundamental you have probably never thought about it.
Fear means it isn’t happening.
Think about it. If you’re afraid you’re going to get raped while walking home at night, you clearly are not being raped. If you were, your animal instincts would kick in (if you listen to them) and you would try to escape, hurt your attacker, etc. But if you’re worried about it, you’re probably in the clear.
This was an amazing thing for me to think about. Just like everyone, I worry about regular daily stuff, I sit next to assholes on the subway, etc., and sometimes I think that something could happen. Since realizing this simple thing, though, I have relaxed significantly.
Let’s say you’re worried about not having a job, or going hungry. If that’s the case, then you are clearly not going hungry. If you were, you would find a way to find food. It’s that simple.
You can apply this to a lot of your life. If it’s happening, you deal with it. If you’re just worried, you’re already probably doing fine.
On the back of the book (which I have recommended so far to at least 5 people), it says: “Fear is a gift, but unwarranted fear is a curse. Learn to tell the difference.” How true– and how vital to the way we live our lives.
Filed by Julien at 11:12 am under random
19 Comments
Imagine a prison with a hundred inmates and one guard.
All the inmates want to escape. Of course the guard does not. He stands up on a wall with a rifle and fires at anyone trying to climb it to take him down. If one prisoner tries it, he fails and dies. If they all do, they win.
This is the essence of web businesses. Low startup costs increase reduce the cost of failure, break down barriers to entry and provide opportunity to many more people than previously possible. This reduction in friction leaves you more of a chance, with your stronger opponent being taken from all sides.
So, all that is required to destroy monopolies and hierarchy is for more people to allowed to try. That’s because it doesn’t matter if YOU succeed, as long as they do not.
You can apply this to any circumstance: social coercion, politics, writing, or art. In all cases low cost of failure reduces risk and makes trying plausible. This distributes success more widely across the population (though outliers will still exist).
Here’s what I’m thinking: the society (or individual) who makes the cost of failure the lowest, while retaining the ability to reap rewards, gets the greatest increase in productivity and living quality. In a sense, this increases the biodiversity of a society and therefore, its ability to survive disasters.
This quality could be defined, by your society or yourself, as a right to play, and it’s probably the most important thing you can allow yourself, as a creative person in the web age. Google does this with their 20% time, paying employees for what may result in nothing but could also result in huge hits. They make this viable by defending their cash cow (defense, or the game of the old) while embracing innovation (offense, or the game of the young).
Strategically, I think this means you’re supposed to look for a big hit, then move it into your portfolio when it’s maxed out and look for another blue ocean.
This is turning into one of those posts where I just seem to be rambling, so I’m just going to stop here. Hope this makes sense to you.
Filed by Julien at 10:21 am under random
5 Comments
“Because” is the place where experience ends and faith begins.
Children have two ways of discovering how the universe works: one is to experiment, and the other is to ask “why.” The result is a complex series of if-then conditions that tell a child what can be done, and what can’t, creating flags that are used later to navigate the environment.
We’ve already talked about the first type– now let’s talk about the second.
Children don’t ask why to be careful with a knife if they’ve already cut themselves– they only ask with something that is outside their experience, that is abstract. This is the evolution of because, an if-then condition that is outside of experience, and that we don’t really understand.
The danger of because is that we take things on faith because it comes from an authority. As time goes on and our understanding advances, more of our questions now have actual answers, but the because remains anyway.
God is because. Zeus is why the lightning strikes and good people die but God has a plan for them.
Science can be because. We have faith in doctors who reflexively prescribe medicine instead of get to the root cause, and don’t get second opinions.
Dogma and rules are because. Gay is wrong because it is against nature, and you need to eat breakfast because it’s the most important meal of the day.
Everytime we don’t understand something, because takes its place and we stop there instead of testing. We have faith in the system, even though its purpose is to sustain itself, not to help you.
This is a way that the social system has protected itself since the beginning of time, ensuring that we can work together to build a better world. This works for the system that we live in and can make our lives better, but if you don’t want to be a middle manager, it may leave you feeling incomplete. It isn’t the only way.
You can be outside the system, and you can live well doing it. But your first step will be to ignore because… and to start asking why again.
Filed by Julien at 6:05 am under random
8 Comments
