August 2010 Archives

Why Change Is So Hard: Self-Control Is Exhaustible | Fast Company:

Psychologists have discovered that self-control is an exhaustible resource. And I don’t mean self-control only in the sense of turning down cookies or alcohol, I mean a broader sense of self-supervision — any time you’re paying close attention to your actions, like when you’re having a tough conversation or trying to stay focused on a paper you’re writing. This helps to explain why, after a long hard day at the office, we’re more likely to snap at our spouses or have one drink too many — we’ve depleted our self-control.

And here’s why this matters for change: In almost all change situations, you’re substituting new, unfamiliar behaviors for old, comfortable ones, and that burns self-control. Let’s say I present a new morning routine to you that specifies how you’ll shower and brush your teeth. You’ll understand it and you might even agree with my process. But to pull it off, you’ll have to supervise yourself very carefully. Every fiber of your being will want to go back to the old way of doing things. Inevitably, you’ll slip. And if I were uncharitable, I’d see you going back to the old way and I’d say, You’re so lazy. Why can’t you just change?

This brings us back to the point I promised I’d make: That what looks like laziness is often exhaustion. Change wears people out — even well-intentioned people will simply run out of fuel.

(Via lifehacker.com.)

Sweet simplicity - Bobulate:

Every day, we must ask for things. We know what we need, ideas based on our own tastes — good, bad, but our own — and we find ourselves in a position of reaching out to others to ask for things. Important people. Busy people. People with their own values and tastes that differ from our own. And whenever you reach out to people, to strangers, to friends, to ask for things, the simple fact is: no matter how well you know them, you don’t know their context…

When we request value from another, we often make assumptions that impose another story on the individual. You know your own context, your own taste. Nothing more. Instead, be simple in your request. Just ask without assumptions.

An Error Worse Than Error | First Things:

The great French mathematician Blaise Pascal made [an] observation, which I formulate in the following way: The certainty with which we can know a truth is inversely proportional to its importance…

In my experience, although the modern university is full of trite, politically correct pieties, for the most part its educational culture is cautious to a fault. Students are trained — I was trained — to believe as little as possible so that the mind can be spared the ignominy of error. The consequences: an impoverished intellectual life. The contemporary mind very often lives on a starvation diet of small, inconsequential truths, because those are the only points on which we can be sure we’re avoiding error.

(Via Things that were not immediately obvious to me.)

Existential Primer: Søren Kierkegaard:

“If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!” Either/Or, vol. 1, “Diapsalmata” (1843)

(Via bobulate.com.)

Influencer – The Power to Change Anything – Exclusive Interview with Joseph Grenny « Blog – Just Ask Leadership, Executive Coaching – CO2Partners:

There are three powerful sources that influence motivation: personal, social, and structural. Rather than relying simply on incentives or verbal persuasion, it’s best to implement strategies that affect each of these three motivational forces. Never use incentives to compensate for your failure to engage personal, social and structural motivation. The most powerful, predictable, and effective incentives build on the foundation of personal motivation and social support.

Personal Motivation is an individual’s intrinsic satisfaction. Ask yourself if your employees want to do what is required? Do they think it’s worth doing? Do they choose to do it and do it well?

Social Motivation is the powerful influence others exert on an individual’s motivation to do what leaders want done. This source of influence comes from peers, bosses, friends — everyone in a person’s social network. It includes the power of praise and ridicule, approval and disapproval, acceptance and rejection. How does their interactions with others affect their desire to do what is being asked of them?

Structural Motivation is the non-human, motivating factors. These are extrinsic motivators like rewards, punishments, appraisals, ratings, rankings, incentives, etc… For example, how does their performance appraisal criteria affect their motivation to do what leaders want done? How are they disciplined if they don’t?

Influencer – The Power to Change Anything – Exclusive Interview with Joseph Grenny « Blog – Just Ask Leadership, Executive Coaching – CO2Partners:

The biggest barrier to change is that people are blind and outnumbered to the many sources of influence that dictate their behavior.

There’s not a single cause for our profound and persistent problems — there’s a conspiracy. We have to address all the reasons people are doing what they’re doing — all six sources of influence — or we’ll never succeed.

People’s behavior is shaped by six sources: values, skills, support, teamwork, incentives and environment. If you try to pile on incentives when people lack skills, you’ll fail. If you try to tap into their values when the environment is pulling against them, you’ll find them discouraged and cynical. If you put them through training when they just don’t care — you’ll waste your time.

Empowering oil rig workers to stop operations not a fail-safe plan:

It is hard to rock the boat — until it bursts into flames and sinks to the bottom of the ocean — and a safety policy based on the assumption that any individual will rock the boat is likely to be flawed.

iPhone Development: Time Moves On…:

Basically, we don’t know how to use new concepts “properly” until they’ve been used a lot, in a lot of different ways, by a lot of different people. There’s nothing to guide the use of the novel. There’s no way to find what works and what doesn’t except by trying. And sometimes the things we try won’t work, or won’t work for all people. Sometimes they’ll be downright bad.

(Via Jeff LaMarche.)

Clive Thompson on the Death of the Phone Call | Magazine:

If I suddenly decide I want to dial you up, I have no way of knowing whether you’re busy, and you have no idea why I’m calling. We have to open Schrödinger’s box every time, having a conversation to figure out whether it’s OK to have a conversation. Plus, voice calls are emotionally high-bandwidth, which is why it’s so weirdly exhausting to be interrupted by one. (We apparently find voicemail even more excruciating: Studies show that more than a fifth of all voice messages are never listened to.)

The telephone, in other words, doesn’t provide any information about status, so we are constantly interrupting one another. The other tools at our disposal are more polite. Instant messaging lets us detect whether our friends are busy without our bugging them, and texting lets us ping one another asynchronously. (Plus, we can spend more time thinking about what we want to say.) For all the hue and cry about becoming an “always on” society, we’re actually moving away from the demand that everyone be available immediately.

(Via bobulate.com.)

Scott Adams Blog: Conversation 07/20/2010:

Consider conversation. How many times have you been in a restaurant and victimized by the loud guy at the next table dominating the conversation without the benefit of being entertaining? It seems somewhat common that people who are neither alien nor Asperger syndrome types have no conversation skills. Indeed, it appears that many so-called normal people don’t even understand the concept of a conversation.

A conversation, like dancing, has some rules, although I’ve never seen them stated anywhere. The objective of conversation is to entertain or inform the other person while not using up all of the talking time. A big part of how you entertain another person is by listening and giving your attention. Ideally, your own enjoyment from conversation comes from the other person doing his or her job of being interesting. If you are entertaining yourself at the other person’s expense, you’re doing it wrong…

Prior to the Dale Carnegie course I believed that conversation was a process by which I could demonstrate my cleverness, complain about what was bugging me, and argue with people in order to teach them how dumb they were. To me, listening was the same thing as being bored.  I figured it was the other person’s responsibility to find some entertainment in the conversation. That wasn’t my job.

(Via Things that were not immediately obvious to me.)

Time Moves On…:

This argument reminds me of the arguments I’ve heard against dot notation in Objective-C. It amounts to “somebody might use it poorly, therefore it’s bad”.

I’ve got news for you: There’s almost nothing in life you can’t say that about. If you’re holding up the potential abuse of something as a reason not to use it, then you’re making excuses for your own desire for things to stay as they always were. In the history of human innovation, there’s almost nothing that couldn’t be abused or put to an inappropriate use.

(Via Jeff LaMarche.)

Master Planner: Fred Brooks Shows How to Design Anything | Magazine:

You can learn more from failure than success. In failure you’re forced to find out what part did not work. But in success you can believe everything you did was great, when in fact some parts may not have worked at all. Failure forces you to face reality.

(Via kottke.org.)

Visions of the Future (and how to get them) | Tapity:

We need a vision of the future. And the way to obtain such a vision is by clearly understanding and focusing on user goals.

In his seminal work on user interaction design (UX) About Face, Alan Cooper states that we need to shift from feature-focused to goal-focused and need-focused design. We need to reorient ourselves away from features and technology to user goals.

Users have definite, concrete goals. And current technology meets those goals to a certain extent. We can figure out our users’ goals and the areas in which current technology is failing to meet those goals. And in this way we can get some understanding of the direction in which technology must move to fill up this lack.

See no boundaries - Bobulate:

As you become comfortable in this open field — no matter the discipline — what is common is that you design for people. And an understanding of where design intersects with human behavior is critical to raising both the meaning and value of products and services. The studies of how people think (cognitive psychology), how people interact (interaction design), how people behave (behavioral economics), and the design of services for them (service design) can complement and enhance your understanding of your pursuit.

Games from Within | Nitty Gritty Unit Testing:

It’s one thing to see someone drive a car and have a theoretical understanding of what the pedals do and how to change gears. It’s is a completely different thing to be able to drive a car safely on the street. There are some activities that require many small details and some hands-on experience to be able to execute them successfully.

(Via 148apps.biz.)

The Top Idea in Your Mind:

Turning the other cheek turns out to have selfish advantages. Someone who does you an injury hurts you twice: first by the injury itself, and second by taking up your time afterward thinking about it. If you learn to ignore injuries you can at least avoid the second half. I’ve found I can to some extent avoid thinking about nasty things people have done to me by telling myself: this doesn’t deserve space in my head. I’m always delighted to find I’ve forgotten the details of disputes, because that means I hadn’t been thinking about them. My wife thinks I’m more forgiving than she is, but my motives are purely selfish.

(Via daringfireball.net.)

The Top Idea in Your Mind:

Everyone who’s worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. There’s a kind of thinking you do without trying to. I’m increasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful in solving hard problems, but necessary. The tricky part is, you can only control it indirectly.

I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That’s the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they’re allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it’s a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind.

(Via daringfireball.net.)

Princeton University - 2010 Baccalaureate remarks:

Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices…

I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story.

(Via kottke.org.)

The pancake paradox - Bobulate:

Letting go of the familiar, doing these kinds of personal experiments, gives things a foundation; it marks the authenticity of our activities. If your patterns include only the familiar, the routine, the rote, the comfortable, you may be efficient, but will you discover?

New ingredients — the new addition of every item, product, person, routine — gets a rigorous evaluation before I add it (“Does this fit into…”). Being aware of any addition makes it part of the conversation and, importantly, there is now a conversation to be had.

(Via @rands.)

Why Your Great Ideas Will Fail | Design Shack:

Douglas Olsen, my absolute favorite professor in college, developed a marketing theory known as the General Resistance Model.

The real heart of the theory is that there are a lot more factors at work for motivating customers than simply offering a better product. Instead of spending countless time, money and energy reaffirming your hopes about why someone would like your product, you should instead be focusing on why certain people would resist your product. Ultimately, what stands between them transitioning from their current system to what you’re offering?

To tie this whole thing back into… service creation and design, consider what people currently use and what would prevent them from using your service instead. You can create a service that blows Facebook out of the water with features, aesthetics and customization, but the problem remains: everyone already uses Facebook.

Even if you imagine that [your] idea for a [service] is completely unique, if it’s a service of any kind that people really need, they are already fulfilling this need through other means and your job is to find out what would prevent them from leaving that system.

(Via @smashingmag.)

How to Get Things Done When You’re Feeling Overwhelmed:

There comes a time when you just need to roll up your sleeves and start working. You can dream and worry about a project forever and never do anything — the key is to start.

Start with one of those bite sized bits that you identified earlier. Choose something you know you can achieve and that will lead you naturally to the next bite sized bit. You’ll find that once you start knocking off tasks that momentum will build and that it’ll get easier to keep things moving — the hardest part is often taking the first step.

(Via @steverubel.)

Things that were not immediately obvious to me » Blog Archive » Being Liked:

It’s been my experience that truly clever people have the ability to present matters so clearly that they impart understanding to those around them, making those people feel intelligent in turn. In fact, a reasonable definition of intelligence is the ability to make complex things seem simple.

The point of all the qualifiers in the preceding paragraph (”real”, “truly”) is that fake intelligence — flashy attempts to appear more clever than you are — are likely to backfire. In the first place, you can’t fake someone else’s feeling of understanding. In the second place, no one likes a braggart. So, if you’re lucky enough to be clever, don’t waste your time trying to prove it.