ideas

I’ve been following Seth Godin’s blog for years. I’ve been reading his books for years. (I think I started with Permission Marketing.) However, as he himself describes in a different context, we often experience a dip and so, as with anything that goes on over a long period of time, it waxes and wanes. Thus I read his blog almost daily for a while then other things get my attention or I get too busy and I go through a period of not following his posts, or seeing them only occasionally.

And then my interest renews and I start following daily again. I get past my “dip.”

Why do I read I him? I asked myself this question today while drinking coffee and freezing my butt off as I paced around my deck. (The pacing was about keeping warm; being outside was about waking myself up.)

I think I know the answer. Although often referred to as a “marketing guru,” and strictly speaking I suppose that is what he is, I don’t think that is what he is or does. What he does is observe and describe human behaviour – and that’s why I find him interesting.

You could probably say all marketing is about this, as well as using what we learn from it to create interest in products or services and ultimately stimulate sales. But it’s often at a distance, as if we’re speaking of something that is “other,” of which we aren’t a part.

From what I’ve seen, when the various aspects of marketing are discussed there is a degree of detachment. Maybe it’s the way we speak of it, maybe it’s because there is a heavy focus on numbers and charts. It’s a cerebral way of seeing it.

With Seth Godin, I sense the visceral. While the head may agree or disagree, it is the agreement or disagreement in the gut that is strongest. I’ll read something that he is describing, such as The Dip, and I know it’s true because I’ve experienced it or seen it in others. Often, he’ll describe something we’re already aware of, if only intuitively, but we’ve yet to formulate or articulate it. But there is an element of recognition we experience in what he says.

I came across one of his posts today, Random rules for ideas worth spreading, and it was the same thing. There is a list and much of it might be called common sense, even obvious in some cases, but each item resonates in one way or another with what we observe either in ourselves, in others or both. My favourite was this one: “Are you a serial idea-starting person? If so, what can you change to end that cycle? The goal is to be an idea-shipping person.” Yes, I know that one.

In his books Seth speaks of being remarkable, of tribes and now, in his latest book, of being a linchpin (Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?). Regardless of the words used, each term (and the ideas contained in the books in which they’re found) are born out of the observation and understanding of human behaviour, something we recognize as true in our guts.

I think that is the key to his success and, while I don’t know this to be true, I’d suggest at the core of what he does is a love of and fascination with people. I suppose someone could achieve success without this but I can’t help feeling that to do so would require so much more effort.

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Two related post subjects caught my attention last week and I’m trying to distill them here. The subjects are ideas (coming up with them) and mind-mapping. I began the post, How to find an idea (since abandoned) and also scattered a few comments on a number of blogs providing my own less than profound insight.

The more I trailed these subjects the more clear their relationship was and, despite my initial denials of having a particular process or an ability to mind-map, the more clear it was I did have a process and it was a kind of mind-mapping, albeit a chaotic one.

So this is me trying to distill and explain.

Finding ideas

I don’t find ideas, they find me. I don’t recall ever having consciously made an effort to find an idea. I have certainly been flat broke as far as ideas went and I’ve stared at either blank paper or a blank screen. But I don’t think I’ve ever gone out looking for an idea. It’s not because I have a rule about that or some distaste for it. It just never occurred to me.

To say, “I don’t find ideas, they find me,” is a cutesy little sentence and many people may have a vague sense for the accuracy of it, but it really doesn’t say anything. As with many clever sentences, it’s all style, little or no substance. So here is the substantive part that is missing. In a comment on Remarkablogger I wrote:

I think coming up with ideas has a good deal to do with state of mind, probably related to brain wave activity, and “getting away from my computer” is really about a mental reset.

I come up with ideas by walking the dog or buying groceries. Every so often I’ll write an idea down to work on later but the reality is that I rarely go back [to] it. I appear to be reactive to my environment so I’ll start scribbling about something that has been sparked by what I’ve seen online or in the news. Just as often, however, for reasons I can’t fathom, I’ll find myself thinking about something that apparently hasn’t been sparked by anything — at least not that I’m aware of.

This is why I say “ideas find me.” In some sense, it is a quest for ideas since when I do something like walk the dog it will be partly because I want a mental reset so an idea might find me. (Mind you, it’s largely because the dog is threatening to destroy the house.)

Something I did not say in the quoted comment was this: in almost every case I do not know what I really think until I have written it out. It’s one thing to have an idea, it’s another to have something to say.

Mind-mapping and process

This is where I get to the business of mind-mapping and process, process really being what mind-mapping is about. I had stated in another comment that I didn’t use mind-mapping, that whenever I tried it I failed. But as I kept thinking about it, I realized that was not true. I started thinking about process and then understood that is what is at the heart of mind-mapping. Strictly speaking, mind maps are graphical but in their essence they are about taking notes. (And notes themselves, in a way, can be considered graphical even though they are text, the traditional note taking method.)

I had confused technology (mind-mapping programs) and visual depictions like graphs, flow charts and coloured balloons with mind-mapping. They are simply tools people use. They aren’t, however, necessary to mind-mapping because mind-mapping is about process and clarity.

When I understood that, I understood that I had a process that brought me clarity. I mind-mapped without knowing it. My process is a ramshackle, chaotic amalgam of today and yesterday, technology and old school.

Often a post begins physically in a notebook with inked scribbles. Later, I transcribe it either in a Word doc or within Wordpress as a draft and continue writing. Later, I print it (back to the tactile). Printed, I read it and with pen or pencil start changing it: rewriting this, cutting that, moving this thing over there. There are arrows up and arrows down, ballooned comments in the margins. I see something is missing and, turning the paper over to the blank side, I begin scribbling again.

And then I take it back to my laptop, make my corrections and transcribe what I’ve scribbled. As the process goes back and forth, the paper side fades away and it is all done on the laptop.

As tedious as all this may seem it has an element that, for me, recommends it: it works.

For me it works though not necessarily for anyone else. I’m not usually the sort of person who can just sit down and pour out words that make a coherent post without any of that back and forth. It certainly doesn’t happen for something of any length. As an example of what I do and how and why it works, as I type this on my laptop I’m preparing to print it, sit down with it and a pen, read it over and orient myself as well as make some changes.

The word orient is key. Once I’m in the flow of writing I can go off on a related tangent. I need to go back and see what it was I wanted to say and if I’ve said it or if I’ve missed something or if I’ve inserted something unrelated to it. In other words, it helps answer the question, “What the hell have I been writing about?”

Conversations

I’m finished going through that process described above and, surprisingly, I think I’ve managed to maintain some coherence and say what I wanted to. However, I also discovered that, at the heart of all this, I think I really just wanted to state how it is I work. I’m sure other people work the same way. Let me add that while it seems tiresome and time-consuming and certainly not how everyone will work, it has the virtue of ebb and flow, back and forth. It is like a conversation with myself at the end of which I not only say what I want I also know what it is I really think.

If I may toss in one last thing on the subject of ideas, one aspect that really engages me and helps to define and inform an idea (for me) is a bit of online researching, sometimes of a simple word – like “idea.” You may have a topic, you may even know what you think you want to say, but a bit of online window-shopping of articles and blog posts can highlight aspects and details that may have escaped you. It may also show you what line of thought others are taking and that may be something you want to address, pro or con, or it may put the topic in a light you hadn’t seen it before.

In other words, it turns it into a conversation.

We sometimes think “conversation” in this context is about comments and tweets after we’ve posted. This is true, but the post itself is a product of conversation – one with ourselves as well as with the posts, articles and comments we’ve found online prior to writing it.

Note:

This lengthy ramble was prompted by posts on several blogs, including:

• Broadcasting Brain
• Remarkablogger
• Chris Brogan

Many thanks!

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Last week I came across a discussion over on LinkedIn about “real” writers. It began with a post about how sometimes you can come across a bully type in writing discussions, someone asserting that to be a “real” writer a person had to meet certain requirements. Often these assertions are followed by litanies of the person’s professional credentials, thus proving that they are real.

I find the whole business annoying, so I wrote my own comment, which reads as follows:

My own view, which is admittedly personal, limited and not necessarily a view someone else would take, is that I don’t really care if someone is a “real” writer. I’ve been doing what I do long enough that I don’t need someone else deciding whether I exist as a writer or not. More to the point, I want to spend as little time as possible with disagreeable people so, even if you are a “real” writer, if you’re an unpleasant person please go away. Besides, as my mother pointed out to me a long, long time ago, the best way to deal with bullies is to ignore them.

Too many people have romanticized ideas of what writers are and what writing is. Rather than focusing on the writing, they are focused on writer as social status. Even for poets, it is work and in that sense no different than accounting or plumbing. And if you like plumbing, it will be as rewarding as writing is to a writer.

I’m sounding more cranky here than I like to sound but this is a theme that irks me quite a bit (rather obvious, I suppose).

Finally, I have to admit that every so often I fall into that “real” writer nonsense, I think because I get the impression some people are bamboozled by romantic ideas of writing. When I do fall into this, I tend to say, “Anyone can write. Real writers rewrite.”

I don’t like that “real” business, but I think there is truth in it. I’ve seen too many people think that once it’s down, it’s finished. I think it has just begun.

And that’s my pontificating nonsense for the day!

To me, it seems really simple. If you write, you are a writer. Of course, differences occur when you start adding modifiers. For example, you may be a good writer or you may be a bad writer. Either way, you are a writer if you’re writing. If you are the latter of those two modifiers, however, you may want to work on it with a bit more diligence.

In my experience, everyone who is a writer is also a reader. Compared to the average person, they read a lot. Why they read so much is obvious to me: 1) they love it, 2) they encounter new styles and words, 3) it feeds their own writing with ideas and perspectives. Also, at least in my case, when I started writing it was largely imitative. I was like a bad version of many really good writers. Eventually, however, through constant writing, my own style, voice or whatever you want to call it emerged.

I guess if I had to make some grand claim on the subject I’d say writers write. And good writers rewrite. And everyone is as real as anyone else. (Aren’t there a number of famous writers through history who couldn’t give their work away? What kind of professional writer resume did they have? How real were they?)

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On the weekend I was going through some very old files. I bought a floppy drive for 3.5″ discs about two years ago with the intention of locating and moving files I considered important to my other hard drive, or burn them to a CD or DVD. Well, two years later I finally opened up the box with the floppy drive and went through some of my discs. (And believe me, it took a while going through the house and searching for where I had put them.)

The first thing that struck me was just how many of them there were. The second thing was just how much writing I had done over the years. They contained files from a number of different jobs I’ve had (as a writer) as well as a lot of personal writing such as fiction and poetry.

Good grief! I wrote a lot!

I was mainly interested in the fiction and poetry material. Or maybe I should say I was sidetracked by it.

Three things characterized the material: 1) the quantity, 2) how dreadful most of it was, 3) how good a very small amount of it was.

I think I knew even at the time that most of it was rubbish. But it was interesting to see what mistakes I was making (primarily three) and how, over time, I eventually began to eliminate those mistakes. In other words, there was progression in the quality. That has always been one of the aspects of writing I like most: seeing it improve.

And what were the three main mistakes I was making? First, there was too much telling and little showing, at least in the early stories. Second, there was a great deal of over-writing which could also be rephrased as pretentious writing. Thirdly, and related to the second, much of it tried too hard to be cute or clever.

But that was the negative side of things. From the positive perspective, a good deal of it was damn funny! I could also see I write fiction best when I begin with an absurdity. For some reason, that triggers my creativity. For instance, I had a very, very short story called The Itinerant Town. It was about a town that every day was in a different part of Canada. It was, as you can imagine, very difficult to find.

It was a fascinating exercise and, in some sense, gratifying because while I saw how utterly awful most of the material was, I saw the few that were pretty good. And even many of the bad stories and poems in those files have some good ideas at their core. It reminded me of Horace (I think it was Horace) who wrote somewhere that you should take what you write and bury it for a number of years. Then, when you finally go back and look at it, you’ll truly know if it was any good. In other words, it’s difficult to judge truly in the moment. Time gives you a more objective perspective.

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Some mental clutter … I came across David Winer’s blog (Scripting News) via Twitter and made the mistake of reading his piece, Fractional Horsepower Twitters? I say “mistake” because in reading it I realized how vast the expanse of my ignorance was. As I tweeted a little earlier, the more I know the less I know.

I’ve been using and reading about Twitter a great deal lately. My initial reaction to it was, “What’s the point?” To use a word I often use, it seemed slight. A kind of technological candy floss. However, I’m finding now my use of it increasing as well as finding it’s usefulness increasing.

A lot of this is due to an app that allowed me to add a lot of New Brunswick users with a technology focus, all at once. I’m in New Brunswick so I’ve been looking for ways to connect and follow people in the technology, business and marketing areas. Prior to adding the app, I primarily had friends who were located mostly in western Canada.

And what’s the value in following a whole bunch of people on Twitter? As mentioned, to have a connection of some sort with people of similar interests who were located relatively near me. In other words, locating a community I could interact with in some way. But that’s not all. Connection is nice, but is there more?

The answer is yes because in all the tweets I’m being directed to articles, blog posts and so on that I would otherwise have missed because I was unaware of them or, in the case of David Winer’s blog, I had forgotten was there. To put it more exactly, the current of tweets is like an endlessly flowing stream of ideas. It’s impossible to keep up with them all and there is the hazard of distraction to be cautious about but, for me, this is the biggest value of all things Internet related. Ideas.

Mind you, I often don’t quite grasp them or will misconstrue them, but that’s how it goes.

By the way … the thing about Winer’s Fractional Horsepower Twitters? has to do with his understanding of Twitter and mine. I’d like to get a better sense for what he means when he refers to it. For him, I think, there is a technical aspect to the word’s meaning whereas for me (a non-tech person with an interest in technology) it’s a limited meaning related to function (how people use it). So I don’t quite grasp what he’s suggesting when he asks a question like, “What if everyone could have their own Twitter?” If Twitter exists already, what would be the point of having a seperate one for each individual? Or is this a misreading of what he’s suggesting?

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Why do we add links to our posts? The conventional thinking says it helps you to build traffic. And that may be true though, with the proliferation of sites, most of which have been designed with SEO (search engine optimization) in mind, perhaps now not so much. Still …

I think I add links mainly because it seems discourteous not too. A large number of my posts are based on what I’ve found on other sites (and I suspect this is true for most people who blog). So it strikes me that the courteous thing to do is acknowledge that that is where the idea originates, the idea isn’t something that pop into my head from nowhere.

If I were to go over my archived posts I would likely find a large number of them were sparked by posts I’ve come across on Seth Godin’s blog. For me, he’s a motherload of ideas and generally compelling musings. Recently, I’ve also been finding the same on Nick Carr’s blog, Rough Type. So I often link to them.

Of course, if you have readers, it’s also courteous to them to link to the various pages you refer to, whether it’s a blog posting, an article, or a site. It’s nice to blather about something but, if it’s at all interesting, your reader shouldn’t have to search the web to find the thing you’re referring to.

There’s a problem, however. Frankly, it’s often a pain in the backside to add the links. It’s not that it’s particularly difficult to do, but retracing your steps to find where pages you refer to are located, can be. The way the mind works, you find an interesting post, you begin writing about the idea at the heart of it. As you do, a related idea/post is triggered and you refer to it. But it’s something you came across a day or two ago, or even a week or more ago … “Where in the world was that?”

The point here is that while I think linking is courteous, and perhaps practical in a traffic building sense, it isn’t always the best way to spend your time. With this in mind, I’ve recently stepped away from the obsessive linking that I use to do because it can take up more time than I can afford to spend. And really, the point is what you are writing, not all the links.

So … to link or not to link? Traffic building aside, I think you need to find a balance between the courteous thing and the practical. With that in mind, I’ll link to the primary one or two blogs/sites that seed the primary ideas behind a post (dispelling any notion that they originate with me), but I won’t pepper a post with every related link.

It’s beneficial from the time point of view but also from the clutter point of view. Too many links, and they all get obscured.

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I have a great dislike for the knee-jerk cynic. I have one residing in me and it’s often a tussle keeping him bound and gagged. But sometimes I let him have his say if only because he makes interesting observations (though not always for the right reasons).

An aspect of the tsunami tragedy in South Asia, and the ongoing tragedy of its aftermath, struck me after seeing some of the media reporting of the disaster. It has me wondering if, despite the scope of human tragedy, it would receive the attention it is getting here in North America if celebrities were not involved, if it didn’t contain the spectacle of scale. Would we care as much?

Countless tragic events occur in the world but most don’t get the media play this one has.

If it’s true we have more interest in this tsunami disaster for these reasons then I think it should also be pointed out that it doesn’t mean we are a hopelessly self-absorbed people. (Though I do despair sometimes over our obsession with celebrity and scale.)

What it means is that even with an event as horrific as this we find it difficult to be anything more than instinctively and briefly shocked by the spectacle of its scope. Most of us require relatable, human touchstones within such an event in order to connect on a visceral level. (I think this is where organizations like World Vision succeed. They have child sponsorship programs and these connect people with a bit more immediacy, putting a face to people living in places and cultures so distant from us.)

Our brain, with its moral sense, may be jogged by seeing and reading about an event like this – on the other side of the world, to a seemingly faceless people living lives we usually have no awareness of – but in order to be emotionally engaged we need something we can identify with. And crass though it may seem, celebrities and white-skinned tourists in bathing suits and shorts provides this. Scope grabs our attention. Distance (geographical and cultural) creates a disconnect.

So while part of me may see reports of celebrities and tourists and have a knee-jerk cynical response to it, I also know tragedies like this one will soon pass from sight without doing anything more than raising an eyebrow if we don’t find ways to connect people to these events and relate to them somehow. Celebrity and spectacle may not be the best, most seemly way of doing this but it is effective, to some extent at least.

And if you’re inclined to make a donation to the relief efforts, please do. Here are a few places you may want to consider:

• Red Cross — Tsunami Disaster Relief (on Amazon.com)
• World Vision – Help Tsunami Victims

UPDATE: Some of what I made a poor attempt at articulating above is touched on in David Akin’s blog entry, Reporting the disaster of our lifetime. My take regarding celebrity and spectacle is not what he discusses; rather, he looks at blogging and journalism. But his example of an article in the NY Times is what I was getting at when I referred to connecting people to an event on a visceral level. (His is an example of an excellent story, one that doesn’t rely on endangered celebrities or shocking us with spectacle but instead deals with the enormity of the event by humanizing it through individuals and their experience.)

As for the issue of blogs and journalism that he speaks to, this isn’t an issue for me. I think a blog can be a vehicle for legitimate reporting, in the right hands. But for me, this isn’t what I look to blogs for. Blogs alert me to what is happening, interesting ideas and so on. I take the blogger’s perspective with a grain of salt (though there are some exceptions). This isn’t because I distrust the blogger. Rather, I prefer to get a variety of perspectives – the traditional media, blogs and so on and then draw my own conclusions.

I know there is a debate of sorts about blogs and journalism. It strikes me as a debate over form rather than content. Both can be excellent; both can be garbage. The vehicle is irrelevant.

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