If you’re a creative person you know how bad it feels to have a dry period. Perhaps you’re a writer, an artist, a poet, or a journalist, and for the last few days (or weeks) you’ve just not had any good ideas. Or maybe you’ve had a couple of good ideas, but you’ve been unable to turn them…
Idea Expansion Format (IEF)
I think it’s far too difficult to extract the key ideas from most content. I’m mostly speaking of books, but the idea really abstracts to any medium where the goal is to transfer concepts to someone. What I want to be able to do is get an explanation about a particular piece of work that is tuned to…
Great Leaders Make People Feel Safe
When Rozovsky and her Google colleagues encountered the concept of psychological safety in academic papers, it was as if everything suddenly fell into place. One engineer, for instance, had told researchers that his team leader was ‘‘direct and straightforward, which creates a safe space for you to take risks.’’ That team, researchers estimated, was among Google’s accomplished groups.…
The Golden Circle
Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership — starting with a golden circle and the question “Why?” His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers … The Golden Circle of effective thought leadership: [ CENTER ] Why? [ MIDDLE ] How? [ OUTER ] What? Here are the main concepts: Great…
Seeing Education Differently
I’ve always seen education as important. I know it bestows advantage on those that have it, and this is pretty widely accepted. But I think I may have been wrong about what gave that advantage. I, like most others I imagine, would have said that education gives you: Basic knowledge of key subjects, such as arithmetic, history, language…
The Answer to Peak Content is High-quality Curation
For a long time, we’ve been creating too much content, so much so that I think that we’ve already reached Peak Content, the point at which this glut of things to read, watch and listen to becomes completely unsustainable. Source: Peak content: The collapse of the attention economy The problem of there being too much content isn’t new.…
Brainstorming Questions Instead of Answers
People often fail to solve problems not because the solution was bad, but because they solved the wrong problem. One of the things I do when approaching new problems is ask whether we’re asking the right question. Here’s a basic methodology for doing this: When you are first asked to solve a problem, ask everyone to slow down…
The Relationship Between Relaxation, Fun, and Success
I went to my first basketball game the other day. It was a Golden State Warriors game, and there is talk that they could be one of the best teams of all time. They remain undefeated 18 games into the season, which is an NBA record. I don’t like basketball, but I like witnessing and studying greatness. I…
Algorithmic Learning
I think people need to think more about how they learn. Too many treat the gathering of knowledge like an ancient spiritual experience; they do some hand-waving, mumble some incantations, and then they look to the heavens for a sign that something has changed. We can do better. Two kinds of learning I think there are two main…
Concise, Transparent Communication as the Primary Metric of Competency
Two of his biggest ideas were about how space and time work. This thing you’re reading right now explains those ideas using only the ten hundred words people use the most often.1 The doctor figured out the first idea while he was working in an office, and he figured out the second one ten years later, while he…
Learning is an Integration Problem
Gunnar Peterson is one of my favorite infosec thinkers. He’s extremely clear-minded in his approach to problems and solutions. Here he talks about security issues vs. integration issues: We don’t have a security problem with integration requirements. We have an integration problem with security requirements. ~ Gunnar Peterson I love this, and I think we can abstract it…
Powering Innovation With Inputs
In my own life, I found that whenever I wasn’t sure what to do next, I would go and learn a lot, read a lot, talk to experts. I don’t know how the human brain works but it’s almost magical: when you read enough or talk to enough experts, when you have enough inputs, new ideas start appearing.…
Jack of All Trades, Master of Some
In the modern world, where a very common job might require someone to be a social-media expert, public speaker, writer and data analyst, the polymath wins and the deep subject-matter expert is relegated to a back corner to be used as a resource for others. As an investor, if I were going to pick the perfect team, it…
How Science Will Help us Optimize Everything Through AI Curation
The interviewers detected lies less accurately among those with a full bladder. Subjects who needed to urinate showed fewer signs that they were lying and gave longer, more detailed answers than those who drank less.The findings build on work by Mirjam Tuk of Imperial College London, whose study in 2011 found that people with full bladders were better…
Ready Player One
I’m about halfway finished with an extraordinary book called Ready Player One. I’ll add it to my reading project when I’m done with it, but there will be no spoilers here. Here’s what I’m going to say: if you like any of these things: role-playing games video games the 80’s fast-paced storytelling a solid puzzle or mystery …then…
A New Approach to Television
Television is a word that we might stop using soon. What does it mean anymore? The problem is that it used to be two things: the appliance you watched content on, and the content itself. Sounds familiar. Anyway. I don’t watch much TV, and I tend to judge those who have nothing to talk about except what happened…
Project vs. Company
The best companies start out with ideas that don’t sound very good. They start out as projects, and in fact sometimes they sound so inconsequential the founders wouldn’t let themselves work on them if they had to defend them as a company. Google and Yahoo started as grad students’ projects. Facebook was a project Zuckerberg built while he…
Do You Have to Re-read to Retain Books?
“When we read a book for the first time,” Nabokov complains, “the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic…
Stop Being Proud of Complexity
The main virtue of an architect is the ability to reduce complexity. Thus, a good architect would never be proud of a complex diagram. Instead, he would be proud of a simple and easy-to-understand drawing with a few rectangles that perfectly explain an entire multi-tier application. That is what is really difficult to do. That’s where a true…
Possible Outcomes for Jon Snow After Book/Season 5 [SPOILERS]
The final scene in book and season 5 of Game of Thrones has a lot of people thinking about what could be next for Jon Snow. Here are my thoughts on the options. Jon Snow dies, just like the scene would have us think he does. The rest of the characters are strong, and Game of Thrones is…
Give Talks on More Than Just Your Job
I’ve come to see public speaking as a vital part of a thriving life, but not for the reason you think. Most people, if they do public speaking at all, give talks about their field. In my field, everyone is talking about how to attack and defend computer systems. And there’s nothing bad about that. Your own field…
My Favorite Book on Writing
I have a project where I parse the books I read and then summarize them for myself and others. I’ve just done this with my favorite writing book: ‘Spent: The Basics of Clarity and Grace’, and you can find it here. [ Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace ]
I’m Hiring a Part-time Researcher
I am hiring a part-time researcher to work on a project for me. The project is the following: For every member of congress, list their party and their top 10 donors For every donor, list the top 10 campaigns they donated to, the top issues they lobby congress on, and the top 3 goals they are trying to…
Better Superlatives
The thing I dislike most about Apple is their overuse of the word, “amazing”. It’s downright criminal. It’d be a good drinking game during new conferences, for sure. We think it’s amazing how amazed you’ll be when you see how amazing our amazing new products are. Amazing. Sadly, that’s not much of an exaggeration. The good news is…
Auto-Optimizing Images Using Folder Actions
I’ve been trying to keep my images down in size on the site, and there are a few steps that go into that: Resize to 640px in width Convert from PNG to JPG Optimize the image (smaller size) These three take time to do manually, so I just researched how to do it using OS X’s folder actions,…
GTD and Offloading
A study was just released that talks about the benefits of storing or saving information in a tangible way, such as saving information to a hard drive. The idea is pretty simple: Saving acts as a form of offloading. By ensuring that certain information will be digitally accessible, we can re-allocate cognitive resources away from maintaining that information…
The Wisdom Genome
I have many projects that I work on captured here on the site. Between the /projects page and the /ideas page, they’re pretty much all here. But there’s one that I’ve yet to capture, and it’s the most ambitious of all of them. It’s called The Wisdom Genome. The idea is simple enough: I want to capture nuggets…
The 4 Levels of Photographic Realism
I’ve often been fascinated by good photographic images that could have existed X number of years ago or been seen exactly as-is by someone living in that time. It’s the pictures of barns, or wheat fields, or people in a particular type of dress that come to mind. It’s remarkable to think that were you in the position…
Put Your Content on Your Own Website
I just read a decent post by some guy about travel. It was pretty good. It was on Medium, which is kind of like Svbtle, which is kind of like Tumblr. These are content collection websites where you can share thoughts or ideas with others, and they tend to have pretty good interfaces. It’s easy to create content,…
Changing my Approach to Blogging
I think I’m about to change a great deal about how I manage this site’s content. In the past I’ve used the site for basically everything—bookmarking things, making random comments, clipping videos and images, etc. I liked this approach because it felt natural and like it was an extension of my personality. But I think I’m about to…
How to Redirect Archives to Pages in WordPress
Changing your permalink structure on WordPress is non-trivial. It can break your site, orphan your content, and do murder to your SEO. I have a heap of very old links from Lifehacker and other domains that point to content on my old domain, when I was using an old permalink structure. So I needed to be able to…
The Difference Between Organic and Direct Web Traffic
If you host any type of website you’ve probably heard the terms “organic” and “direct” with reference to web traffic. Many people confuse the two, so here’s the difference. Organic traffic is traffic from search engines. Direct traffic is traffic from someone typing your URL into their browser or using a bookmark to get to your site.
The Difference Between Analogy, Metaphor, and Simile
Many people confuse analogies, similes, and metaphors. Let me help. Analogies compare things so that you can see a relationship between them. There are many ways to do it, but the key thing is comparing one thing to another. Similes do this by saying something is “like” or “as” something else. He’s like a wall. She’s as smart…
From Chartbeat to Google Analytics
I’ve been using both Chartbeat and Google Analytics for a couple of years now. I basically used Chartbeat for elegant and cleanly displayed realtime metrics, and Google Analytics for the drilldown data. Google Analytics released their Realtime view a long time ago actually, but it simply didn’t provide the kind of data I wanted to see. But with…
The Difference Between a Category and a Tag
If you’re into blogging at all you’ve probably come across the terms “category” and “tag”. There’s a lot of confusion around them, as they’re both terms that you assign to posts so that your readers can find them. Here’s a simple explanation of the difference. Categories Categories define a taxonomy to your site, meaning they’re hierarchical, (like folders…
Vim, Pandoc, and Happiness
Some days I take Vim’s power for granted. Today isn’t one of those days. I just got done migrating all of my content from shoddily-marked-up “static” PHP and HTML files into my CMS, and the cleanup has begun. The problem is that I’ve been writing articles and posts in various editors and formats (with varying code quality) for…
List all Social Shares of Your Website Using Google Analytics
There are many services out there that show you how many tweets you’ve received. Or how many Facebook likes, Google +1’s, etc. But it’s been more difficult to see all shares of your site across all networks. Turns out, Google Analytics actually has this built in; you just have to hunt for it. Clicking “Overview” in the Social…
The Secret to High Productivity
I get asked a lot about how I write so much. The answer is simple: I don’t watch TV I don’t use Facebook It’s remarkable how much time is available when you don’t do those things.
Speeding Up Nginx Caching With tempfs
If you’ve done anything with optimizing the speed of websites, you know that caching is a must. It basically means you’re creating a page once, and then using it multiple times—as opposed to having to create it every time someone asks for it. So caching is good, is what I’m saying. Caching 2.0 There’s a caching superpower that…
The Times Machine
From Times Machine: 129 years of New York Times journalism, as it originally appeared. Really cool project.
The Human Font
From Wired: BIC, the office supply company that makes the world’s most ubiquitous ballpoint pen, has launched a website that could prove to be excellent fodder for graphologists and scientists alike. The Universal Typeface Experiment lets anyone, from anywhere in the world, draw the letters of the alphabet and then submit them into a massive database. From each…
How to Add Social Media Sharing Buttons Without JavaScript
If you’re like me, you are conflicted on the issue of social media buttons on your site. You want people to be able to share your content, but You hate the performance hit that comes with social media buttons Social media buttons seem innocent enough until you look at your site loading with them. They usually add significant…
If You’re Not an Artist, You’re Support
In the Army, and the Infantry in particular, there’s a saying: If you’re not infantry, you’re support. The idea was simple enough: If you’re not taking and holding ground, then no matter how cool your job is in the military, you’re just supporting those who are doing that. I feel the same way about art and creativity. I…
The Relationship Between Clarity and Quality
“A turgid and polysyllabic prose does seem to prevail in the social sciences. . . . Such a lack of intelligibility, I believe, usually has little or nothing to do with the complexity of thought. It has to do almost entirely with certain confusions of the academic writer about his own status.” ~ C. Wright Mills
Scott Adams’ Writing Style
Here is a great example of Scott Adams’ writing style. [ http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/cause_of_death_wtf/ ] It’s humorous, obviously, but what hits me the most is its simplicity, clarity, and rhythm.
Aspiring to be a Quality Thinker When Everything’s Been Said
I think occasionally about the value that my writing offers the world. Common questions include, Hasn’t this probably been said somewhere else? Even for original thoughts, what value does an incremental improvement really bring? How much value is there in summarizing wisdom, with a “next steps” component added on?
The Effectiveness of Writing Styles
I think a lot about writing. I’m fascinated by those who do it well, and I wanted to take a moment to capture a few of them here.
The Grand Music Project
I have an idea for a music project. But not just starting a band or anything— no, this would be a music project like we’ve never seen. For reasons that will become evident immediately, it’s very unlikely to ever be done, but I want to capture the idea anyway.
On Art Interpretation
I was at MOMA in NYC last weekend and came upon an idea. I have many friends who claim an inability to be creative. They’re experts in their fields, and are able to cite and invoke any number of concepts and points when called upon, but when asked to create something new they become immobile. What struck me…
The Hacker’s Reason for Avoiding Clichés
Throughout our writing educations and careers we’ve been told that clichés are to be avoided. We’ve been given many reasons, but most reduce to: They dilute your message. Ok, fine, but how exactly? A hacker’s explanation What follows is a computer-centered explanation that I think will resonate with many: Good stories evidently activate the listener’s brain so that…