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Just make this annoying thing go away.
All things digital are inherently vulnerable to inflation.
Spam takes advantage of the limits of digital interaction to create scale from the (previously) unscalable, then profit from it. We normally apply this to email, but it could apply to Twitter, Facebook, or Youtube views. It could apply to pageviews to your website or anything else where scale can create money or reputation.
When there is no sacrifice, cost of “production” is near zero, which opens up new avenues of profit. This was the principle of Chris Anderson’s Free, but it’s also the principle by which spammers make money. Both take advantage of the ability of technology to bring the cost of scale dramatically downward, but we don’t talk about the other side of it.
Anyway, this same characteristic of digital technology is what allows people to have 1,000 Facebook friends. The upkeep cost of a friend is near zero, so I can have as many as I like due to reduction in friction. Since social network head in two directions, either more popular (towards ubiquity) or less popular (towards obliteration) every popular service experiences friend/follower hyperinflation which only the most popular can keep up with.
There are four things that I want to mention about this.
If you start off with a platform, or you start early, you can keep accelerating at the same rate the service does, keeping you in the top tier of users. But almost no one can do this. Inflation follows, where the number of connections accelerates exponentially while your own go up only marginally. This means you don’t have the same access you did yesterday, just the same way your dollar doesn’t go as far as it did yesterday, either.
You must find a way to keep your channel popular or risk irrelevance.
This may mean you need to take advantage of scale, leveraging existing advantages to keep yourself afloat when 100 friends yesterday has the same value as 200 today. It may also mean you need to gain access to larger platforms to give you more credibility or access to a larger audience. Basically, you only win by giving in to the “more” mindspace by reaching more people, or the same people more often.
As more and more people use social networks to upkeep their online presences, a need to upkeep these friendships will occur, and services will arise to fill that need. Facebook shows you your friends’ birthdays for this very reason, and that’s why sending a birthday note on Facebook is not a measure of closeness.
But Facebook and other companies will take it further, mentioning to you that you haven’t talked to someone in a while or maybe eventually suggesting things to say or sending automatic updates. In a sense this is one of the “services” foursquare offers users; same with Farmville etc.
None of this matters, because none of it will make you happy. Only real friends will, and those require communal sacrifice to upkeep, and cannot be scaled.
At the end of the day, we’re still human. Our emotions can’t and won’t replace one great friend with 100 acquaintances; it’s simply impossible to create the same feeling, endorphins, etc. and will probably inevitably lead to depression of at least sub-par enjoyment of life.
My point with all of this is to understand that although all of these forces surround us at all times, and the speed of the world accelerating at a point no one can really keep up with, the things that make us strong, healthy, happy, and free are the same as they were two thousand years ago. And those are the things we should focus on.
The end. Make sense?
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Filed by Julien at 10:47 am under random
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“I literally could not come up with a better use for my time.”
I’ll never forget the phrasing of this sentence at the GEL 2010 conference, spoken by Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy. He was justifying why he had created the largest, most exhaustive library of free educational videos on the web (over 1100 ten-plus-minute videos), a kind of Librivox for education, but created by one man. Amazing.
Sal could not come up with a better use of his time. Watch the video below (click here if you can’t see it) to get an idea of what he’s about.
I spent five days in West Virginia in July studying MovNat, a natural way of moving and exercising (and possibly, thinking) founded by Erwan Le Corre and based in the Natural Method. While George Hebert’s slogan was “be strong to be useful,” Erwan’s slogan could be “be strong to be free.”
Later in the Charlotte, North Carolina airport on my way home, I would read some of his quotes from a Men’s Health article I came across. They read like sections of my blog.
During these five days, Erwan and Vic would teach us to climb, swim, run, balance, and defend ourselves more effectively. We came away from it with a sense of increased competence, an understanding of our surroundings not only as scenery, but as environment. You come away with the impression that you can better help yourself and others. It’s a very strong, and addictive, feeling.
I think of this blog as one of the best uses of my time. I write to help me get ideas straight in my head, to help me understand myself and my surroundings better, to spread my ideas, and to help people in the best way that I know how. It literally is one of the best uses of my time. So is writing books. I can help a lot of people at a time, writing about the things I know better than others and spreading those ideas.
This is something everyone can do. You should know that understanding risk, knowing yourself and your abilities, and seeing the world as an environment instead of a corridor will help you become your best self. It’s so important that it should be taught in school. If you don’t learn it there, where better than starting with your body?
Physical competence is running faster than others, jumping over obstacles and not getting winded when you’re going up the stairs, or helping someone out of a burning building.
Social competence is understanding status and not being afraid of talking to people.
Emotional competence is not being stopped by your own flags.
When you have all of these, you are supremely useful, and you are close to being the best human being that you can be. You are also a Renaissance Man (or woman), the kind of person people remember for generations.
Shouldn’t this be everyone’s goal? Is it yours?
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Filed by Julien at 3:33 pm under random
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Dogs are great people trainers.
Those of you that have dogs know this already, but my girlfriend and I have been learning it over the past few weeks with a new Whippet/Lab mix. It’s amazing.
A dog will try to exert dominance over you again and again. If you don’t react appropriately, the dog realizes it has power over you. It doesn’t respect your authority because it’s getting mixed messages. The dog wins.
People are also great people trainers. They teach you how to treat them. They test you to see how you react, often without even knowing it.
I have a great story about a girl I know whose boyfriend had cancelled on her one night. She didn’t know what to do, so I suggested she call and say in no uncertain terms that it wasn’t acceptable.
She did this. He showed up with flowers.
I don’t know for sure, but I imagine kids are great people trainers too. If they whine and get a sugary treat to shut them up, they will detect a pattern and act on it. We teach them to do this. Am I right?
Confidence is a circular pattern. It will reinforce itself in either direction, heading either towards zero or infinity, until it is regulated by an outside force. Whatever outside force stops it is an outpost of dominance, a kind of flag that says “beyond this point, you shall not pass.”
These flags eventually start feeling like walls, and these walls impact what decisions you make about your life.
Maybe this is the reason you stopped playing guitar, or stopped working out. This may be why you haven’t quit your job, I don’t know. But the reality is that these markers of confidence are just as fluid as the relationship you have with your dog. They are fluid. They can be changed.
We act as if our life right now is the way our life is supposed to be, but you could just as easily be a CEO as you could be a janitor or homeless… or dead. But you happen to be alive, and you happen to gave a fair amount of freedom in your life.
Maybe it’s time you exerted it.
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Filed by Julien at 12:18 pm under random
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This is a guest post by Chris Brogan of [chrisbrogan.com]. (Julien will be back tomorrow.)
You have a finite amount of time on this planet. You have multitudes of ways to spend it. It’s up to you. Think about all the decisions you have to make.
After you wake, you pee and wash up. It’s breakfast, the first real decision of the day. Do you eat a bowl of cereal because it’s easy or do you go find a delicious-but-time-consuming meal somewhere out and about in the city? Do you create something healthy or do you eat leftovers? You will make this decision almost 400 times in this year alone.
Will you commute to some office? How far away is it? How long do you sit in traffic? What do you do with the traffic? Do you even like the job? Does it pay enough? Are you feeling satisfied by the work? If there’s a no somewhere in the last three questions, why are you doing it? Most people’s answer: because I have to, and/or because I’m waiting for something better.
Waiting. Time is rushing by like a storm and you’re waiting. How long will you live? 80 years? If you’re lucky, 80 is a great and long life for many. A friend of a friend just fell dead in her sleep. She wasn’t even 40. Nothing particularly wrong. She just died. One of those diseases no one has and you never see on a bumper sticker ribbon.
Our lives are filled with the shadows of stories unwritten. Our lives are filled with waiting and hoping and putting off and stuffing the cracks with papers from other people’s lives.
If you KNEW without a doubt that your decisions were the measure of who you are – and make no doubt that they are – are you PROUD of your decisions? Are you living the story you want to live?
And what will you do with tomorrow that you haven’t done with today? What lighthouse will you point yourself towards? And what flag will you fly?
Live now. Don’t wait. And fill in some of those shadows with stories you’d want to see written about you.
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Filed by Julien at 8:48 am under random
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This is a guest post by Everett Bogue the author of The Art of Being Minimalist and blogger at Far Beyond The Stars.
Julien wrote a post a few weeks ago that breaks down the essential elements of any success story: Cultural Transparency ÷ Risk = Upward Mobility.
Hopefully this guest post can help expand on the idea and enable you pursue what’s important to you.
Here’s what I’ve been thinking since reading that post: it’s a lot easier to take risks if you have less to lose.
It doesn’t matter if your goal is to spend a few months gatejumping, or you’re putting all of your effort into achieving escape velocity. If you have a lot to lose, you’ll inevitably sabotage yourself, leading to failure and an inevitable return to the status-quo.
Alright, so how do you position your life so you have less to lose?
It’s almost deceptively simple: eliminate life overhead to enable success.
Most people get out of college, get a day job that pays a little more than they need to survive and then proceed to accumulate as much as possible as quickly as they can. The house with too many rooms, the new car every two years, new gadgets every three weeks, and an entertainment system the size of their living room wall.
There’s nothing wrong with this picture for most people. This is what they’ve been told they want, so they buy into that system.
The thing is, maintaining a life like that becomes expensive quite quickly. All too soon you have the be making $6,000 a month in order to keep all of your expensive plates spinning.
Being required to spend that much is a 100% guarantee that you’ll never take risks again, and thus will stay comfortably stuck in your current place in society with no upward mobility.
In order to escape this reality, you need to opt-out (maybe even temporarily) in order to be able to take the risks you need to take in order to build a better life.
How do I know this? Because I did it. One year ago I was trapped in a job that bored me, in a city I was tired of, working 40-50 hours per week for a paycheck that barely covered my expenses. So, naturally I quit in order to pursue living a location independent life. One year later I live and work from anywhere and I’ve doubled my income.
Obviously you might not care much for living and working from anywhere, that’s just one goal. You might want to write a book, train to be a yoga teacher, or make time to go to the beach more often.
So many people fail at it for one simple reason: when they quit the job they don’t eliminate their life overhead. This makes it impossible to take risks.
If your life costs $6,000 a month, and you suddenly quit your job to pursue what’s important to you, you’ll quickly drown. If your life costs $1,000 a month, you’ll be able to risk it all in order to build a better life.
It all comes down to flexibility in lifestyle choices in order to study cultural transparency and take risks. If you aren’t flexible, you can’t make the changes you need to adapt to a new world.
How to reduce your life overhead in order to succeed at risk taking.
1. Track and then eliminate all unessential spending. Everything needs to go. Sell your house, your car, move to a walkable city with public transportation (yes, these places exist.) Stop shopping for stuff you don’t need, buying things won’t make you happy anyway.
2. Eliminate all obligations. Time is your number one asset, and you can’t risk it if you’re constantly busy doing things you don’t care about. Tell everyone that you have too much going on and you need to stop doing so much, repeat for everything until you have an open schedule.
3. Start dedicating your time to achieving what’s important to you. Learn about harnessing success systems by studying the cultural transparency that’s becoming more accessible to everyone because of the Internet. Then, start investing your 100% free time to taking the risks necessary to move to the next level.
Once you do these things the question becomes so much easier. Why not take risks? You have nothing to lose.
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Filed by Julien at 8:34 am under random
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If you do yoga, your body is relaxed, so your mind is relaxed too.
If you push yourself through long, tough endurance races, you know that pushing past your mental barriers is just as essential as training through your physical ones. In a lot of ways, the body and the mind are connected; just not in that weird, pseudo-spiritual way that some people believe.
You need to train to relax and to push through barriers. Both are necessary so that when you come across obstacles, your mind knows how to react. If something is difficult you will either relax or you will force your way through, depending on the situation. If you never trained, you won’t know how to react. You might freeze or shy away. You might avoid pain because you’ve never learned that you’re capable.
Physical pain is important because it’s so much more visceral than emotional pain, which we can avoid or numb if we know how. Physical pain is there, in front of you, and it always has your attention. So dealing with it is a lesson.
The lesson is this: The same way a body develops scars, a mind forgets and becomes happy after its time of suffering. As David Horton said in The Fighter’s Mind, “it never always gets worse”… at some point, it gets easier.
This is another way of talking about The Dip– a personal way that will teach you how to deal with your professional life, instead of the other way around.
When you have the right attitude, it all becomes possible. Some people prepare through prayer and meditation for the moment of death. We prepare through physical training for a mental challenge.
It’s contradictory, but it works.
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Filed by Julien at 9:02 am under random
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Culture is liberated by delivery technology, but is restricted by business.
The web is a delivery technology. So is the US Postal Service. So are text messages, and so is language. All of culture passes through these methods. It cannot exist without them.
Culture is restricted by business models. The album is not the ideal packaging for music, but it was the only one available that would help people make a living, so it holds on even now, when it is obvious that it’s obsolete.
Friction in delivery technology is inversely proportional to its ability to support an industry. Therefore the better delivery gets, the less we need an industry to support it.
The ideal environment for culture is one in which business cannot make any money from it. Then culture naturally flows rather than being about what can be made money with (the Canadian art grant structure comes to mind).
There is a theoretical future where ideas take as long as they need to get explained. They don’t take 250-300 pages, which is an artifact of the publishing industry. Most ideas can be explained briefly, so they will be. Packaging will naturally move to what is most appropriate for the idea/meme in question.
Existing businesses will do as much as they can to prevent this from happening, because they need the model to support themselves.
It’s possible that the end game to this is ubiquitous information, on every device, in every location, instantly available when it is created. When this happens we have reduced the infrastructure and its cost to the bare minimum, and almost all commerce becomes part of the long tail.
But in the meantime, relic industries are important to you because they provide credibility and mainstream attention. This is why bloggers publish books– because not everyone can (that’s admittedly different these days).
This means you use what people believe in (the past) to support your goals (the future). But you cannot ever believe in the methods of the past. Once you do, you’re maintaining (eventual) residual infrastructure in order to support yourself.
This is bad because that is the point at which you stop growing and start becoming a relic yourself. I don’t want that, and I’m guessing you don’t either.
Become any of these, in either equation, and you will become the others.
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Filed by Julien at 11:15 am under random
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When I was young I utterly worshipped Midnight Oil.
They were a highly political, environmentally-conscious Australian band who wrote an 80s hit, Beds Are Burning, but who had done a lot of other records they aren’t as well known for. I learned about them around 1992 from my cousin, bought all their records, and listened to them every day. Even now, I’ve listened to more Midnight Oil songs than to any other band in the world. I was even crazy enough to get send CDs of their concerts from other fans all over the world. This obsession must have lasted 10 years.
Anyway, sometime around 2007, I found out that they had broken up. I remember it really vividly. It was dark and I was sitting in front of my computer screen and I started Googling feverishly, looking for information about what had happened, etc. I learned the whole story and stayed up until 5 in the morning, falling into a kind of depression. My heroes were no longer really there.
Midnight Oil used to shake up their audiences and demand that they pay attention, learn from the past, and make the world a better place. It was an idealistic message that stood with me, but this band was gone now.
That’s when I realized that it was up to me. I had to be my own saviour.
When Joseph Campbell discussed the Hero’s Journey in the book The Hero with 1000 faces, a fundamental building block of the storytelling process, he described a part of it called The Refusal. In this section of the journey, the hero hears the call for him to do a great deed, to go on an epic quest, but he refuses, because he thinks he isn’t worthy or can’t do it.
This is the kind of feeling I had. This is probably the kind of feeling you have to, that it can’t be done– or that if it can, it certainly can’t be done by *you*. In other words, there’s no faith.
Here’s what happens afterwards though. At some point, the hero receives a second call. These calls can be subtle, but he recognizes them. Although it frightens him and there is a serious chance he may perish, he goes forth anyway. He realizes it’s his destiny to take part in the quest. He can’t escape it anymore.
Of course, this is just a story, so it doesn’t always happen that way in real life. You can reject the call, or ignore it, multiple times, even for your whole life, and no Greek deities will come from up on high to demand that you save them from whatever happens to be threatening their ancient world.
But the reason stories like these are so prevalent is because they are universal ways to teach us about life. So when the Hero’s Journey tells us about the call, the refusal, and the eventual acceptance of the quest, it’s telling us that it’s how we, as people, should behave.
We can refuse the call several times. That’s natural, even heroes do it. But we still have a quest to perform, and we know it, and eventually we will need to take responsibility.
There’s probably a few things you are waiting for. Your relationship is getting weird, or work isn’t as challenging as it used to. Maybe you hate where you live, who knows.
Whatever it is, the responsibility for it lies on you. It’s up to you to start the ball rolling. Other people are busy, and they have their own stuff to work on. They won’t do this for you– they won’t save you, because they have their own crosses to bear. They can help, but ultimately, the initiative has to be yours.
No one else can do it but you. No one else will save you. It’s your responsibility alone.
Accept your current situation, and move on it.
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Filed by Julien at 4:11 pm under random
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I was at the bank today, dealing with a young, freshly-hired teller. It got me thinking about how my life could have been with just a few different turns.
I used to find big, comfy jobs very seductive. I remember getting hired at Fido in 2002 and thinking “This is a big brand, a well-paying job, this could really work for me.” The idea of finding your place is seductive and it’s very easy to get lulled into a sense of having “arrived.”
I thought about this as I chatted with the teller. I could have been her. She looked really happy working here. She had been chosen among numerous applicants. Her employer puts her in a kind of prestigious position. I remembered applying for bank jobs before, and how it made me feel to possibly be a part of that team.
That isn’t what happened to me, though. Laziness set in. I almost got laid off repeatedly because I hated it. This is what happens to most people, I’m guessing. They slack off and coast and, as a result, stop getting promoted. They get put into a position where they’re no longer advancing. They settle.
The thing that kept me out of this was being on the web in a really significant way. I saw alternatives (podcasting at the time) that were different from what I was doing or what my parents taught me, a different form of upward mobility that relied on my wits and ability to create content and compete. This helped me let go of the safe job. I eventually reached what some people would call escape velocity and got out for good.
I wonder now about how I could have done it on purpose, instead of just floating around on a sea of chance, and I think that one way to have done this is to make myself unemployable on purpose. But there is an inherent conflict here inasmuch as one of the things that keeps one moving is tension, but the more broke and down on our luck we are, the more we will search for an easy liferaft (like a cushy job).
What is the solution here? Is it to purposefully put restraints on yourself so that you can try harder? Is it to put yourself in a comfortable position so that you feel the liberty to do riskier stuff (and land on your feet)?
I think that the answer to these questions lies in a definition of risk that changes for each person. To one person, starting a company is infinitely risky because they aren’t comfortable with what they assume it means– a misunderstanding of risk in which we assume that certain projects are way more dangerous than they really are.
This weekend in Vermont we spent a few hours hanging out by the river and we were jumping into a deep section of it. Some of us were obviously more comfortable with this than others. Some needed to see someone else jump before we were willing to do it ourselves. This is natural, environmental feedback that tells us that something we do is safe instead of dangerous. Without it we are ignorant of the true danger of any situation and, as such, we make it seem bigger than it really is. This applies not just to jumping in rivers, but to everything. We don’t know how deep the water is, so we don’t risk it.
So maybe the solution is environmental. One of the people I read the most about when I was young was Shannon Larratt, who founded BMEzine.com in the nineties and was largely unemployable because of his tattoos and huge lobes (far bigger than mine), but who was simultaneously highly employable as a programmer. I think this became my water depth– so the place from which I chose to jump was very similar. I saw that the jump was possible, so I did it too.
So if you are young and looking for career advice, I think my best advice may be this: Find people that do not do normal things. Be traditionally unemployable but have many friends and associates who are working doing extraordinary things. This will give you alternative paths to follow than what your parents surrounded you with early on, possibly helping you reprogram yourself. The result of this is hopefully new neural pathways that you can follow yourself. Good luck! :)
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Filed by Julien at 2:08 pm under random
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If you want to change, create tension.
Some people join the army to do this. I don’t know if it works for them. Thankfully there are other options.
Place limits on yourself, even though you don’t need to.
Break up your unhappy relationship, even if it’s comfortable.
Stop talking, stop going out, or change your diet for 30 days.
Refuse to leave your house until you’ve made progress.
Move somewhere different. Get rid of your stuff.
Quit your job, even if you have no other options.
When you start nowhere, you have nothing to lose. When you get rich and famous, you go on defense and, next thing you know, you’ve lost your way. You don’t produce relevant work any more because your purpose is to defend what you’ve built and avoid to mistakes.
Those that are able to keep tension in their lives despite their success are those that will endure and have a chance to become great. Those that coast on their success will not. One is easy. One is hard. Choosing is not obvious.
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Filed by Julien at 11:47 am under random
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