What Freelance Means

For most of the past year, I've described myself as some variety of "freelance hardware guy." It's an admittedly vague description, and every few days I'm asked what it actually means.

My stock response begins by acknowledging, with an ambiguous amount of humor and a full stop at the end, that it's a good question. I'm not comfortable with the hazy distinction between being freelance and straight hustling, which is a space I've explored in depth since quitting my job last January. I made a few quick changes in my life last winter, and did so without a plan for how my career was going to proceed. My path since then has been, unsurprisingly, a bit circuitous, and though I've managed that with healthy doses of humor and enthusiasm, I remain somewhat unsettled about where I've gotten myself.

It's definitely the case that I'm happier now - both with the direction I'm heading and with the work I'm doing - than I was in the year prior to leaving my job. Ditto with my time building custom bikes and managing construction projects - which is to say, the vast majority of my post-college life. My relationship with my work is probably healthier now than it was at any point prior. 

But defining my place is tricky. I am generally disinterested in pursuing freelance work. I want to be working intimately with a committed, integrated, cross-functional team, and the freelance channels I'm aware of tend to reward specialists, not generalists.

I have interviewed for a handful of full time jobs, and while I've generally enjoyed the process (true story) my results there have been decidedly mixed. "Cross-functional" isn't a term that pops up much in the hiring process, and my particular form of cross-functionality is additionally weird. I like to think that my formidability, intelligence, and broad skillset would make hiring me an easy choice, but i recognize that I'm a Jack of a particular subset of all trades - as all are - and that's not always a selling point.

I have been lucky to get a few interesting design contracts, and have hit them well. I've done my fair share of hustling, too. I worked as a CAD designer for an architectural metal shop for a few days, and part-time in a bike shop for a little while. I've spent a considerable amount of time doing maintenance on my dad's boat, which ends up being rather interesting. But it isn't exactly a path towards anything in particular, and it takes me away from the city, where I've built a richer social and emotional life than I've had since college.

The meat of my year has been spent on "independent work," which is both a euphemism for "whatever I want to geek out about today" and also a convenient shorthand for both diverse and serious entrepreneurial exploration. I've reimagined myself as a variety of types of strategist/designer/manager/promoter, and have put my whole self into developing those skills on projects that I strongly believe have legs. 

I've spent a ton of additional time learning. I've read more in the past year than anytime prior, and have documented my intake (along with the things I've done) more completely and succinctly than ever before. I've taught myself a few new CAD workflows, and learned a bit of Ruby, and would go so far as to call myself pretty competent when it comes to advanced manufacturing. I've stepped my game up with open source electronics, and taken a big jump with PCB layout as well. 

Sometime over the summer I acknowledged that this would be my hungry time, and hungry I have been. It's an exciting mode of existence, but it has been difficult, from time to time, to maintain my belief that I'm on a path towards the life I want. I crave daily external validation, which comes in discrete and all too infrequent spurts. And more importantly, my life now lacks a single, shared vision that what I'm working on is good. At my last job that feeling was at times palpable - though in the end it slid into a chilling sense of hubris. I recognize that one's hungry time will, as a matter of course, lack a sense of shared vision, and I accept that as a built in feature of the life I've chosen. But there are times when that tradeoff is difficult to bear.

My life now requires more of an internal locus of control than I have ever needed.  

I am not given to predicting what my next year will hold. It's a difficult idea to wrap my head around, and in all honesty I'd rather not consider the possibility that my hungry time will continue through 2014. But I must also consider that - despite my shaky income and inconsistent external validation - my life now is remarkably close to what I want. I'm working on things that I care about, and collaborating with people who I respect deeply. My ability to spend quality time with the people I love is as great as it ever has been, and my physical condition - though down a bit from a year ago - is generally good. 

The fact that these factors are all positive makes me question my desire for a traditional career. I wonder now what that's worth to me, considering that there are (presumably) other viable options towards happiness. 

So what does freelance mean? To me, it's about structuring your own life, and doing so in a way that involves many small commitments in lieu of one large one. It means following up on leads, emailing *all* of the people, buying them coffee. It means hustling. It means asking people tough questions, and giving yourself the same treatment. 

But most of all, it means holding an explicit belief that what you're doing is right, and making sacrifices in order to keep doing whatever that is.

Onward.

Yes.

I love working on projects where it’s not a given that the idea is even possible.

— Jonnie Hallman (@destroytoday) January 8, 2014

My steez.

Writer's Block

From Jerry Seinfeld's recent AMA: 

Q: How do you deal with writers block?

A: Writer's block is a phony, made up, BS excuse for not doing your work.

:)

Strategy Tax

From the second of Ben Thompson's posts on Microsoft's recent reorganization. Emphasis mine.

Let’s follow the typical path: Company A makes an amazing product, finds a great market fit, and starts to make a lot of money. They IPO. They continue to grow, and the stock goes up. And then the stock stops going up, because it’s not clear how they will continue to grow. A stock’s worth, after all, is simply the discounted sum of future earnings.

And so the company looks for another avenue of growth. They diversify, maybe successfully, but now they have two products. And soon, like DuPont, they see the wisdom in having two divisions.

Of course, those divisions are certainly related in some way, and it’s inevitable that considerations are given – or dictated, from the CEO – that decisions in one divisions favor the other division whenever possible. This consideration is called a strategy tax, and it’s a hindrance to product quality. So is the inevitable competition for resources, and the increasingly divided attention of the CEO.

Phew

My notes from a few years back, when I took MITx 6.002x - Circuits & Electronics. 

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If I recall correctly, this particular path was a wild goose chase - there's too much guzz here for it to have been the right solution.

Marc Barros

From his very good post, "What Can We Learn from Beyoncé?" Emphasis mine.

Having a purpose in the startup world is hard. The culture is built around ideas instead of meaning. Which is best exemplified by everyone’s two favorite questions: What do you do? and How big can this be?

Surround yourself with creators who first ask why you do it.

I've been asking this question of more and more of the folks I come into contact with when discussing a possible collaboration. I'm always surprised how few people seem to question why they're doing what they are, though I can relate - I've spent much time pursuing things for totally backwards reasons. I explored this a few months ago in relation to my experience building bikes, and have spent a lot of time in the past year thinking about how I want to address the Why of the next steps in my career. I certainly don't have it all figured out, but I definitely want to work with people who are thinking along these lines.

More Kahneman

Again, from "Thinking, Fast and Slow." Again, emphasis mine.

Reciprocal links are common in the associative network. For example, being amused tends to make you smile, and smiling tends to make you feel amused. Go ahead and take a pencil, and hold it between your teeth for a few seconds with the eraser pointing to your right and the point to the left. Now hold the pencil so the point is aimed straight in front of you, by pursing your lips around the eraser end. You were probably unaware that one of these actions forced your face into a frown and the other into a smile. College students were asked to rate the humor of cartoons from Gary Larson's The Far Side while holding a pencil in their mouth. Those who were "smiling" (without any awareness of doing so) found the cartoons funnier than did those who were "frowning." In another experiment, people whose face was shaped into a frown (by squeezing their eyebrows together) reported an enhanced emotional response to upsetting pictures - starving children, people arguing, maimed accident victims.

Simple, common gestures can also unconsciously influence our thoughts and feelings. In one demonstration, people were asked to listen to messages through new headphones. They were told that the purpose of the experiment was to test the quality of the audio equipment and were instructed to move their heads repeatedly to check for any distortions of sound. Half the participants were told to nod their head up and down while others were told to shake it side to side. The messages they heard were radio editorials. Those who nodded (a yes gesture) tended to accept the message they heard, but those who shook their head tended to reject it. Again, there was no awareness, just a habitual connection between attitude of rejection or acceptance and its common physical expression. You can see why the common admonition "act calm and kind regardless of how you feel" is very good advice: you are likely to be rewarded by actually feeling calm and kind. 

These are lessons that I should fully integrate into my everyday life. All the time I find myself scrunching my eyebrows and pursing my lips, and I'm sure it effects my overall mood. I imagine that I seem to see my work as a curse to be endured, whereas I truly enjoy and relish it... Kahneman leaves me somewhat unsure, though at least he gives a clear remedy.

=> :-)

Massive

From "Google Puts Money on Robots, Using the Man Behind Android," The New York Times, 2013.12.04. Emphasis mine.

“The opportunity is massive,” said Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at the M.I.T. Center for Digital Business. “There are still people who walk around in factories and pick things up in distribution centers and work in the back rooms of grocery stores.”

What McAfee is saying here is totally nontrivial. All around the world and across every sector of the economy there are human beings performing menial tasks.

Until I see evidence that menial work is useful for more than building character, I'm all for ending that.

Control

From "Why Gamers Can't Stop Playing First-Person Shooters," by Maria Konnikova, New Yorker Online. Emphasis mine.

Control, compounded by a first-person perspective, may be the key to the first-person shooter’s enduring appeal. A fundamental component of our happiness is a sense of control over our lives. It is, in fact, “a biological imperative for survival,” according to a recent review of animal, clinical, and neuroimaging evidence. The more in control we think we are, the better we feel; the more that control is taken away, the emotionally worse off we become. In extreme cases, a loss of control can lead to a condition known as learned helplessness, in which a person becomes helpless to influence his own environment. And our sense of agency, it turns out, is often related quite closely to our motor actions: Do our movements cause a desired change in the environment? If they do, we feel quite satisfied with ourselves and with our personal effectiveness. First-person shooters put our ability to control the environment, and our perception of our effectiveness, at the forefront of play.

Get the Facelift

From "Life Goals Matter to Happiness: A Revision of Set-Point Theory," published in 2006 by Bruce Headey, of the German Institute of Economic Research. Emphasis is mine; note that SWB is an acronym for subjective well-being.

SWB theory, as currently understood, has the depressing implication that one's level of happiness is extremely hard to change because it depends on characteristics one was born with or which are developed early in life. The most widely endorsed theory at the present time appears to be set-point theory...All these theories claim that a person's set-point or baseline or equilibrium level of SWB are near-automatic consequences of hereditary characteristics and personality traits. Conscious life goals play no role in these theories and major life events are viewed as having only a transitory effect.

In recent years there has been some questioning of set-point theory and its relatives. Some life events are so severe that victims never recover back to their previous set-point or equilibrium level. One such event is the unexpected death of a child...Repeated spells of unemployment, although not a single spell, have been shown to have a 'scarring effect' from which most people do not recover...Getting married temporarily raises the SWB of most people, but then most revert to their previous set-point. Entertainingly, the only positive life event which has been unambiguously shown to raise the SWB set-point is cosmetic surgery.

I should note that the takeaway from Headey's paper is that people who pursue non-zero sum goals generally have higher levels of subjective well-being. Basically, you're better off orienting your life towards family, health and altruism than towards financial success and social status. Heady also investigates internal locus of control as a factor in SWB:

People who have an internal locus of control believe that they can to a considerable degree control their own lives, that success or failure are in their own hands...There are theory-based reasons for believing that success in the pursuit of life goals may be related to internal locus. People with high internal locus tend to be persistent in pursuit of coals and have relatively good coping skills. By contrast, people who rate high on external locus of control tend to believe that outcomes are due to luck or the influence of powerful others.

So:

What makes for a happy person? Part of the answer seems to be a personality characterized by a high level of extraversion and a low level of neuroticism, coupled with a desire to pursue non-zero sum family related and altruistic goals...Such a person is likely to be happier in the first place, and to have a reasonable prospect of becoming happier over time. The role of internal locus s interesting in this context. Internal locus is probably best not thought of as a more or less fixed personality trait like extraversion or neuroticism. It is a disposition to take responsibility for one's own achievements and failures, and this is associated with persistence/perseverance and good coping skills. It is tempting to suggest that internal locus may be the link - the link in terms of perseverance and skills - between having non-zero sum goals, pursuing them effectively and increased life satisfaction.

So: Work on your priorities, and put family, friends, and health first. Take responsibility for your failures and accomplishments.

And in the meantime, get the facelift.

Subjective well-being

From the wikipedia page for "Hedonic Treadmill," emphasis mine.

Headey (2008) concluded that an internal locus of control along with "positive" personality traits (notably low neuroticism) are the largest significant factors affecting one's subjective well-being (SWB). The author also found that adopting "non-zero sum" goals, that is those which enrich one's relationships with others and with society as a whole (family-oriented and altruistic goals), increase the level of SWB. Conversely, attaching importance to zero-sum life goals: career success, wealth, and social status, will have a small but nevertheless statistically significant negative impact on people's overall subjective well-being (even though the size of a household's disposable income does have a small, positive impact on SWB). Duration of one's education seems to have no direct bearing on life satisfaction. And contradicting set point theory, there is apparently no return to homeostasis after sustaining a disability or developing a chronic illness. These disabling events are permanent, and thus according to cognitive model of depression, may contribute to depressive thoughts and increase neuroticism (another factor found by Headey to diminish SWB). In fact disability appears to be the single most important factor affecting human subjective well being. The impact of disability on SWB is almost twice as large as that of the second strongest factor affecting life satisfaction—the personality trait of neuroticism.

At the risk of sounding naive

The act of putting yourself out there, of being outside of your abilities a bit. You take your experience, your expertise, and you venture a little bit beyond them. And some of what you know is applicable, but you've always got to keep in mind that whatever frameworks you're bringing to bear don't necessarily apply.

I like being this way - a bit over my head. But I'm at my best when I'm honest with that fact. 

At the risk of sounding naive is a fairly good way to communicate this, in certain contexts. 

Naked

The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.

Neil Gaiman. Via Brad Feld and Tim Ferriss.  

Not about form

From Vanity Fair's recent piece on Jony Ive and Marc Newson. Emphasis mine.

“We are both obsessed with the way things are made,” Newson said. “The Georg Jensen pitcher—I’m not even sure I love the way it looks, but I love how it is made starting with a sheet of silver.”

“We seldom talk about shapes,” Ive said, referring to his conversations with Newson. “We talk about process and materials and how they work.”

“It’s not about form, really—it’s about a lot of other things,” Newson said. Both designers are fascinated by materials; they understand that the properties of a material affect the way an object is made, and that the way it is made ought to have some connection to the way it looks. Theirs is a physical world, and for all that their shared sensibility might seem to be at the cutting edge, it is really a different thing entirely from the avant-garde in design today, which is the realm of the 3-D printer, where digital technology creates an object at the push of a button, craftsmanship is irrelevant, and the virtual object on the computer screen can be more alluring than the real thing.

Ive is the son of an English silversmith, and Newson, who grew up in Australia, studied jewelry design and sculpture; both were raised to value craft above all. It’s ironic that Ive, who has had such a big hand in the rise of digital technology, is made so unhappy, even angry, by the way that technology has led to a greater distance between designers and hands-on, material-shaping skills. “We are in an unusual time in which objects are designed graphically, on a computer,” Ive said. “Now we have people graduating from college who don’t know how to make something themselves. It’s only then that you understand the characteristics of a material and how you honor that in the shaping. Until you’ve actually pushed metal around and done it yourself, you don’t understand.”

I should begin by saying that while I take issue with the finer points of Newson & Ive's comments - and with much of the pontificating that the Vanity Fair writer engages in - I found it refreshing to read this passage. I value my time building physical objects immensely, and while I'm somewhat ambivalent about some of the career decisions I've made, I'm proud of the artifacts that exist as a result.

Were I a bit more pushy re: my design career, I'd tout the above passage as gospel. But the truth is that I'm not sure I believe that designers *need* to make things first, and anyway it's not like the design world agrees wholeheartedly with Ive either (my file handling skills just aren't that much of a selling point, and with just cause).

I also take issue with the cynicism expressed re: craftsmanship being irrelevant in the age of the 3D printer. I see no a priori reason for that to be the case, and if it's indeed the way the design world sees advanced manufacturing, I'm certainly unaware of it. 

My time as a craftsman was brief; I shed the term almost as soon as it could reasonably have been applied to my work. But whatever its connotations are, I'm sure that my transition to digital design and manufacturing has not infringed. Craftsmanship - whatever it consists of - does not directly correlate with the size of one's calluses. Craftsmanship is an attitude about work and a focus on a particular (and generally small) skillset. And in my opinion, the romanticization of craftsmanship that I see around me (and in the tech world specifically) is unproductive and dangerous.

  Side note: I can't tell exactly which pitcher these dudes are drinking out of, but I'm pretty sure it's fancy as hell.

Two types of Uncertainty

What I think about when I'm working alone.

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I sweated my life out here, 2006-2007; in 2012, my best advocate appreciates my work.

In my career, I have experienced two primary types of uncertainty. They are characteristically different in nature, and produce correspondingly distinct effects on my mood and outlook. They are uncertainty that what I'm working on will be significant, and uncertainty that what I'm working on will be noticed at all. 

I am, like anyone else, motivated by self interest. I hope for some degree of public buy-in on the things that I work on and care about. I want people, and the market, to like me, and to think that the work I produce is worth paying for. And while I can be brash in certain circumstances, I remain deeply uncertain about the degree to which the market will value what I do.

But worse than that is the uncertainty of whether anyone will notice. I've spent much of my career working alone, and I accept that one needs to appreciate his own experiences outside of the possibility that anyone else cares about them. But that prospect remains a challenge to me. The idea that I will have struggled to complete things that nobody will see, that I will have felt deeply about things that nobody will be aware of, that I will have had experiences that I'll never be able to share with anyone else... it's a haunting sensation.

At the same time, there are things that are difficult to share - not because the act of sharing them is uncomfortable, but because they're not particularly relevant to anyone but myself. I write about as much of my life as I can here, but it's unclear how I would share a moment that transpired years ago and remains with me - but which, in itself, doesn't amount to much. 

So, what to do? About a year ago, I brought my German Shepherd, Libo, on a weeklong trip to Northern California, where I lived 2001-2007. I got Libo later, after I had moved back to the East Coast, and going there with him was powerful in ways I hadn't anticipated. There was no way to communicate to him how lonely I was for much of my time there, and how significant it was to me that I was now able to share something about that time of my life with him. It was deeply gratifying, though the logic doesn't really add up. He had no idea where we were, and my emotional state was (I'm sure) as opaque to him then as it usually is.

Writing here is much the same. I throw bits of myself into the ether, but rarely do I hear anything back. If somebody is reading this now then I'm certainly unaware of it, and although I wish constantly for feedback, I accept that I won't always get it. It's only lonely if you call it that, but sometimes it's hard to know what else to call it.

No happy ending here. Aaaand... back to work! 

:) 

Luck

I guess I'm a decade late to this party, but this interview with Dr. Richard Wiseman about his book "The Luck Factor" is really great. Excerpts:

BUT THE BUSINESS CULTURE TYPICALLY WORSHIPS DRIVE -- SETTING A GOAL, SINGLE-MINDEDLY PURSUING IT, AND PLOWING PAST OBSTACLES. ARE YOU ARGUING THAT, TO BE MORE LUCKY, WE NEED TO BE LESS FOCUSED?

This is one of the most counterintuitive ideas. We are traditionally taught to be really focused, to be really driven, to try really hard at tasks. But in the real world, you've got opportunities all around you. And if you're driven in one direction, you're not going to spot the others. It's about getting people to have various game plans running in their heads. Unlucky people, if they go to a party wanting to meet the love of their life, end up not meeting people who might become close friends or people who might help them in their careers. Being relaxed and open allows lucky people to see what's around them and to maximize what's around them.

WHAT ARE SOME OF THE WAYS THAT LUCKY PEOPLE THINK DIFFERENTLY FROM UNLUCKY PEOPLE?

One way is to be open to new experiences. Unlucky people are stuck in routines. When they see something new, they want no part of it. Lucky people always want something new. They're prepared to take risks and relaxed enough to see the opportunities in the first place.

BUT CAN WE ACKNOWLEDGE THAT SOMETIMES BAD STUFF -- CAR ACCIDENTS, NATURAL DISASTERS -- JUST HAPPENS? SOMETIMES IT'S PURELY BAD, AND THERE'S NOTHING GOOD ABOUT IT.

I've never heard that from a lucky person.

Startups Should Write Prose

And you probably should, too.

Note: I wrote this post in response to Eric Paley's "Startups Shouldn't Write Prose" post. While I disagree with the premises of his argument, I do concur with a number of his conclusions (e.g. that formal business plans have limited utility). Regardless, I have respect for his thoughts on the subject, and appreciate the ideas he puts forward in the original post.  

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I am a big fan of accepting and accounting for uncertainty. Uncertainty has been a big part of my life, and I suspect that its role in the lives of those around me will only increase over time. In general, I think that's okay. Partly because I think it's fun to embrace uncertainty, but mostly out of my feeling that, as Chuck Klosterman wrote, "the future makes the rules, so there's no point in being mad when the future wins." My best play is to construct general theories about what the world will look like in the future, and then try to position myself in such a way that the work I'm doing will be rewarded and the things I care about will be allowed to grow.

It's a tough thing to do. Humans are mediocre predictors, and they're terrible at understanding and evaluating predictions (see Subjective Validation, the Forer Effect, and whatever your friends think about their horoscopes). In philosophy and math, formal argumentation takes a large role here; it can be very helpful in evaluating the methods of reasoning used by predictions in general. 

While I was a passable student of higher order logic in college, formal argumentation has played a large role in how I understand the world. But I accept that my experience is not universal, and I care more about getting my point across than I do about the medium. And the fact of the matter is that prose remains my best tool for communicating complex ideas - and I suspect that the same is the case for most individuals and brands.

Startups, like the rest of us, deal in uncertainty. A startup is, in Steve Blank's definition, "an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model." That is, startups are inherently uncertain what business they're in, or what business model they will organize themselves by. The primary obstacle in any startup's path is figuring out what they can make that people will want.

In the early stages of a startup's life, investors constitute something of a separate class of customer; as funding options broaden (see crowdfunding; the SEC's recent actions), this line will blur even more. Regardless, all of a project's stakeholders will require some form of communication, and in the case of investors, a startup's goal is to show how and why its business will be successful. There are many aspects to that equation, of course. But they generally include at least an implicit argument, which is communicated in a variety of ways. Startups need to communicate that there is (or will be) demand for what they're working on, and they need to show that they are uniquely positioned to meet that demand.  These are complex ideas, and not to be taken lightly. Moreover, investors won't want to feel like they're being argued into something, so startups would be wise to let the logic of their product, and the makeup of the team behind it, speak for itself. 

Slide decks do not generally convey argumentative structure well. Arguments are not constructed hierarchically, but slide decks present information in a top-down, slide-by-slide manner. They also measure information in discrete parts - the slide being the smallest unit of measurement. But arguments don't conveniently break up well into slide-sized pieces, and the result is that key points are often truncated in order to adhere to a slide's predetermined size. 

What slides are good at is creating a rhythm during a presentation. For many presenters, this is highly useful - but to my mind, the content of the argument should not be sacrificed for the sake of presentation, and any presentation method that requires arguments to be abbreviated should be avoided. Startups should avoid hubris at all costs - and the presentation of an abbreviated argument in order to make a stakeholder easier to convince is not a step on that right path. As Edward Tufte wrote:

The pushy PowerPoint style imposes itself on the audience and, at times, seeks to set up a dominance relationship between speaker and audience...A better metaphor for presentations is good teaching. Teachers seek to explain something with credibility, which is what many presentations are trying to do. The core ideas of teaching - explanation, reasoning, finding things out, questioning, content, evidence, credible authority not patronizing authoritarianism - are contrary to the hierarchical market-pitch approach. 

Slide pitches encourage a presenter to elide the deductive reasoning of his company's work, and let the post hoc ergo propter hoc nature of the presentation seduce his audience. As Tufte says, "PowerPoint actively facilitates the making of lightweight presentations," and I would argue that startups should avoid lightweight presentations - especially when dealing with early stage investors.

Prose, on the other hand, is accessible, thorough and can be highly evocative. It's also platform independent, and doesn't require the author to be present to provide context to slides which have been abbreviated in order to achieve a consistent tempo. Prose can be used to convey complex, nuanced arguments, and it does so in such a way as to communicate argumentative style and personal character.

Prose also has the benefit of requiring verbatim proofreading, forcing its author to literally read back an argument to himself. This process can be extremely helpful to a project in which all of the details haven't been ironed out, as weak points are often glaringly obvious when they're verbalized explicitly. Slide decks, on the other hand, allow authors to gloss over difficult points in the text, with the intent that they will be filled in verbally during the pitch. Careful audiences will pick up on these argumentative gaps, especially when reviewing notes after the presentation, and the result doesn't reflect well on the author's formidability or command of the subject matter.

Of course, all authors need to find their own paths towards personal argumentative style and brand image. But the benefit of complete sentences, whether in the form of blog posts, executive summaries, or soliloquies, should not be undervalued. Prose is a powerful tool, and there is a wealth of historical examples of well composed prose arguments which - long after their authors are gone - remain convincing and powerful (see Chomsky's early syntax work, Boolos on incompleteness, Plato (take your pick), or any nearby piece of scientific literature). It's possible that the same will someday be the case with the slide deck. But I suspect instead that it's a transitional technology, and that presentations relying on PowerPoint-like technologies will be largely forgotten. Written prose, on the other hand, will be with us in some form or another for a long time, and I'm not in a position to argue with the future on that point. I encourage young teams - and anyone wanting to convey their ideas to others - to do the same.

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For anyone looking for a particularly acute parody of a slide deck, see Peter Norvig's Gettysburg Address. Note, though, that any medium has examples of poor execution - and please send along examples of especially good slide decks, if you've got them :) 

Special thanks to Hope Reese and Nick Fletcher Park for editing. 

More on Prose, from GitHub

This great snippet from FastCo's piece on GitHub's management structure hit me hard, especially as I've been thinking about the power of prose. See also: Ryan Tomayko on GitHub's open-source structure.

Communication isn’t just key to self-organization--it also solves or simplifies a bunch of other hurdles that growing companies face...

Marketing collateral is a natural by-product. When your company communicates internally with polished, clear, and well-produced content, it is easy to and repurpose that material for external communications. The kind of communication that is required for self-organization will end up producing all the events, schwag, and content you need to build and publicize an authentic brand.

I think that the power of this shouldn't be understated. Having a clear idea of the business you're in and how you communicate about it - which, as I've argued, can be done well through writing prose - can produce ripple effects throughout other facets of your company. 

It also strikes me, reading the above quote, that slide decks are almost never presented to potential customers.  If there are counterexamples to this, I'd love to see them. If not, I wonder if marketing departments are identifying weaknesses in the medium that upper level management is blind to.

Paul Graham

Paul Graham, from a high school graduation speech he apparently never gave. Emphasis mine. 

And yet every May, speakers all over the country fire up the Standard Graduation Speech, the theme of which is: don't give up on your dreams. I know what they mean, but this is a bad way to put it, because it implies you're supposed to be bound by some plan you made early on. The computer world has a name for this: premature optimization. And it is synonymous with disaster. These speakers would do better to say simply, don't give up.

What they really mean is, don't get demoralized. Don't think that you can't do what other people can. And I agree you shouldn't underestimate your potential. People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems like the subject's life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate genius. In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they'd seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends.

Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that's one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. If these guys were able to do what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it's not our fault if we can't do something as good.

I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius. But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.

Miyamoto

From The New Yorker's great profile of Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto. Emphasis mine. 

What he hasn’t created is a company in his own name, or a vast fortune to go along with it. He is a salaryman. Miyamoto’s business card says that he is the senior managing director and the general manager of the entertainment-analysis and -development division at Nintendo Company Ltd., the video-game giant. What it does not say is that he is Nintendo’s guiding spirit, its meal ticket, and its playful public face. Miyamoto has said that his main job at Nintendo is ningen kougaku—human engineering. He has been at the company since 1977 and has worked for no other. (He prizes Nintendo’s financial and creative support for his work: “There’s a big difference between the money you receive personally from the company and the money you can use in your job.”) He has never been the company’s (or his own) boss, but it is not unreasonable to imagine that Nintendo might not exist without him. He designed the games and invented the franchises that caused people to buy the consoles. He also helped design the consoles.

This is fascinating to me. I am unclear, in many ways, about the extent of my own desire for ownership of the products I create. Specifically, I can say this: I wish for the experience of providing value more than I do for ownership of what I'm working on. It's totally possible for that to come through individual endeavors, but my experiences working alone have in many ways been lacking in this area, and my natural inclination now is to look for value in collaboration, not solitude. Ownership is secondary, as the benefits it has provided me have been limited by the ultimate value of the work I've done - which value is, I suspect, greater in collaborative settings than not.