Thu Mar
4.10
Here’s how I make stuff.
I’ve used this technique to launch multi-million-dollar software projects, write books, plan vacations, work in teams, work solo, and write a blog. All are projects that ship on time.
1) The first step is to write down a due date. Post it on the wall. It’s real. You will ship on this date, done or not.
2) The next step is to use index cards, Post-it notes, Moleskin notebooks, fortune cookies, whatever you can embrace. Write down every singly notion, plan, idea, sketch, contact. This is when you go fishing. Get as much help as you like. Invite as many people in as you can. This is their big chance.
This is where the thrashing and dreaming begin. It’s very hard to get the people you work with to pay attention at this moment. Since the deadline is so far away, their lizard brains are asleep and there’s no fear or selfish motivation available.
3) People focus on emergencies, not urgency’s, and getting yourself (and them) to stop working on tomorrow’s deadline and pitch in now isn’t easy. A big part of the work, then, is to get yourself and your team, to step up and dream. On a regular basis, collate the cards and read them aloud to the team. This process will inevitably lead to more cards.
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Mon Mar
1.10
Carl Jung believed that art provides insight to the subconscious. But his brand of psycho and art therapy assumes that there is depth and discovery to the subconscious in question. That is not always the case. Peter Max scrawls his intentions clearly (in three letters) across every canvas he covers.
Proof that you don’t need psychoanalysis to be happy—Peter Max is ecstatic. Billions of dollars and worldwide recognition can do that to a man. And his art reflects happiness—it is bright and nonsensical and cheery. Perhaps that’s a contributing factor to his mass appeal—Max paintings sell like Disney t-shirts and McDonalds cheeseburgers. The concepts behind his creations are so absurdly simple that Max himself can’t even predict in advance where his brushes will go. He dips and dabs and scribbles with velocity until something feels right. And when it’s all over the product is so absurdly simple that Max can’t explain what it is. “These shapes, I’m used to these kinds of lines. I like to scribble.” If he were an abstract expressionist this Pollack-like statement could imply emotional depth, where the act is the art. But he’s not an abstract expressionist, or a surrealist. There is no depth. Max is a commercialist.
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Mon Mar
1.10
How can I explain the never-ending irrationality of human behavior?
We say we want one thing, then we do another. We say we want to be successful but we sabotage the job interview. We say we want a product to come to market, but we sandbag the shipping schedule. We say we want to be thin but we eat too much. We say we want to be smart but we skip class or don’t read that book the boss lent us.
The contradictions never end. When someone shows up and acts without contradiction, we’re amazed. When an athlete just does the sport, or when a writer just writes the words, we can’t help but watch, astonished at the purity of their actions. Why is it so difficult to do what we say we’re going to do?
The lizard brain.
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Thu Feb
25.10
Dr. Carl Marci is CEO of Innerscope last week. Innerscope is a fascinating company with roots in psychiatry and neurology. Dr. Marci is an emerging leader in the relatively new field of neuroscience and neuromarketing.
Innerscope use new tracking technology to analyze how media stimuli result in behavior. This has allowed them to prove that the old model of advertising where people receive a stimulus, think about it and then decide on how that will affect their behavior is inaccurate. Instead people receive stimuli that may or may not pass the emotional filter we all have deep inside our brain. Only if the stimulus triggers an emotional response, it can also generate a rational response. After that, behavior is changed as a result of a complex interplay between rationality and emotion, both of which can reinforce each other.
The main difference about this model is that “feeling” generally precedes “thinking” and “doing”. This is why Innerscope have developed a set of diagnostics that measure how emotionally engaging media stimuli are. They do this through measuring 4 physical changes people experience when emotionally engaged:
– Skin Conductance : changes in sweat levels of the palms
– Respiration : changes in our breathing patterns
– Heart response : changes in our heart rate
– Movement : changes in physical movement
Innerscope measures this through a specially designed vest their respondents wear during the research. The vest has built in sensors that track these metrics while a person is watching TV, browsing the web or even walking through a store.
These biometric diagnostics measure activity in the oldest parts of our brain – the “lizard brain”. This gives Innerscope data points on the unfiltered emotions a person experiences when exposed to certain stimuli. They use these data points to measure levels of emotional engagement communications generate.
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Thu Feb
25.10
If economic value is increasingly deriving to knowledge, inspiration, and creativity– why is art still viewed as a commodity? Maybe we should look at buying art as an investment of sourcing time.
The narrow-gauge mindset of the past is insufficient for today’s business world.
Consumers are not loyal to cheap comedies. They crave the unique, the remarkable and the human. At least that is what Seth Godin is tell us in his new book, “Linchpin”.
Unfortunately, most business managers are deaf, dumb and blind when it comes to valuing the creative process. They learned how to follow instruction and the power of consumption as an aid for social approval.
This is illustrated perfectly by a story about railroad baron Collis P. Huntington, who visited the Eiffel Tower just after its completion. When an interviewer for a Paris newspaper asked him for a critique, he said, “ Your Eiffel Tower is all very well, but where’s the money in it?”
It’s not that spreadsheet thinking is wrong. It’s just inadequate. An artist might have offered a completely different critique of the tower, “What a stirring symbol of achievement! From now on, people will never forget their visit to Paris.” Accounting to one estimate more than $120 billion worth of Eiffel Tower souvenirs has been sold since 1897. The trinket business alone has been worth the investment.
