The List – Or: Whatever it Takes

I have a list.  The list lives on my bathroom door (courtesy of Michael’s craft store and awesome pens that write on glass).  I see the list every day several times from the front as it’s meant to be read. I see the list once a day from behind as it’s not supposed to be read and I know the list by heart. 

There are only seven items on the list: it’s my job list, the über-to-do-list.  One through seven: the things that generate income or might generate income, my projects, my jobs, my films, my ‘stuff’.  It’s a very diverse portfolio.  Ever since I started the list good things are happening.  Why? 

Simple: I have the list. I look at the list many times a day, …but I repeat myself.  And that’s the point. I have a tendency to get completely immersed in what I’m doing to the point of (mild, very mild) obsession.  So the list gets me back on track.  

Item #1 is my obsession du jour, Item #2: need to schedule a half day to finish reading the article. Item #3: have to follow up with client. Item #4: a quick phone call to keep the ball moving. Item #5: need to invoice.  All my balls in the air and not, as pre shopping spree to Michael’s, two in the air and the rest collecting dust in the corner.  

ANY portfolio has to be diversified and so does mine as a small business owner and a filmmaker and a freelancer and consultant and a gym class teacher and a crazy woman.  What?  Yes, that too. I had a friend visit and I guess he couldn’t resist.  The day after his visit I realized that I had an item #8 on my list.  It read “crazy woman” and decidedly in a different hand. So, it wasn’t me sleepwalking.  I take my newest job very seriously: crazy woman, yes sir.

Stickman Addiction

I’m not one for video games or on-line games for that matter. I like Angry Birds, but wouldn’t play it for any length of time (although I did have a serious Solitaire addiction when I got my first Treo with stylus (remember Palm?), but that had to do as much with its nerve-calming properties as it did with the fact that my maternal grandparents loved to lay a “Pacience” (as it was called in Germany back then).

Anyway – I came across this website Draw a Stickman, thanks to Swiss Miss, that has your own stickman go on adventures. It’s interactive and it's cute. I love its message of creativity and if you play episode one and then two…. well you’ll see.



"My" stickman, episode 2 - Isn't he cute?



And Off You Go...!

Found through www.bblinks.blogspot.com

Links and Plain Old Plagiarism

Sometimes an opportunity or a trend just hits you over the head every which way.  You guessed it: time for a blog entry on the topic of plagiarism, or maybe we call it links, pingback, copy and borrowed.

(As an aside: plagiarize is one of my favorite English words. I learned it as a teenager listening to Tom Lehrer songs and was mighty proud to know such a difficult word – the song in question is on YouTube.  If you don’t know Tom Lehrer – you must! Harvard mathematics professor fired for singing political songs back in the 50ies and 60ies; darkly funny, cynical and on the money with his social observations.)

To the point: I met with a serial entrepreneur last week. We were connected through an acquaintance. I had looked at his LinkedIn profile, looked at his newest venture and figured he’d be interesting enough to meet.  We met and turns out he’s a twenty something. I went back to his bio on LinkedIn and looked at the dates more carefully.  It seems this young man has achieved more since high school than most of us will in a live time. He told me that he didn’t want to waste his time with University he had too many ideas of what he wanted to do so he DID them. 

I visited his blog and found a profoundly funny and interesting infographic on getting things done (I’m a fan of that; getting things done I mean), some of the infographic. I do not agree with but that’s beside the point.  On a second visit to his blog, now with a bit more time on hand to read further I see that the infographic is linked to a different source. Totally legit, but still, I felt a tiny bit put off, because for that 12-or so hour span in-between I thought he was beyond brilliant – which I’m sure he is, but not THAT brilliant – as in coming up with THAT infographic.  I was wondering if I’m just too naïve, or if I missed the point somehow.  

I subscribe to the wildly popular Swiss Miss blog, not only because I know Tina (she designed the first Clock Wise Website back in the 90ies), but also because her blog is a collection of all things design – and her taste is towards the clutter-free, clean, minimal, fun and very sophisticated.  Through her blog posts I found another design blog that I liked enough to subscribe to it as well, only to find out that I looked at the same content every once in a while. Are there enough readers or subscribers for both to duplicate? It seems so.  Do they copy from each other, or do the same people submit their ideas to both. I guess the latter.  

It begs the question however, where does link end and plagiarize start? Is this a cultural phenomenon or a generational one?  Are we faster to read a visual image and to ‘link’ it to the publisher without paying attention much to its true origin?  Why do the links on Swiss Miss not bother me and why was I bothered with the infographic on the serial entrepreneur’s blog?

It’s all about trust and context.  Today’s hyperlinks are the footnotes of yesteryear.  The difference is that formats of delivery and context change from blog to blog.  With the overflow of information I choose a few blogs and newsletter to deliver information (of whatever kind) and with that I curate content and I do so by choosing trusted sources (see earlier blog entry on trust agents).  Swiss Miss is a trusted agent and her blog is set within the context of: “I show you the design world through my eyes”. Naturally that means she goes out and curates for me, the reader, and I know that I’m looking at other people’s work (be it jewelry, art, design elements or furniture). On the other hand the young serial entrepreneur is not a trust agent (yet) and so with I was missing context. 

But there is also the cultural versus the generational phenomenon.  Americans are much more at ease in passing along a great idea without much concern about, or burden of crediting the source.  A Swiss person would much more so be reluctant to pass an idea along without making sure it was clear that they really aren’t the brilliant ones to come up with the idea in the first place – this modesty also creates a buffer of “not my idea originally” when it falls flat.   

As for the generational difference: stuff gets shared and if possible for free, this holds true for my generation to a big degree, but even more so for a younger generation of millennia, irrespective of culture. Not only geographical boundaries are taken down by the World Wide Web (sic), but also intellectual property rights are fuzzy at best, and I’m not talking about the major film studios, record labels and publishers. Context is important and ‘knowing’ your source.   

The moral of the story:  make the context of your blog entries crystal clear, hyperlink diligently and only plagiarize when you’re sure the idea is beyond brilliant and you WANT to be credited for it (oh, and take some error and omissions insurance out).   

When to Send an Email

As I’m doing some reading on my next blog post I came across this tongue in cheek post by Seth Godin on WHEN to send an email and to go with it and even funnier infographic below (or use link for bigger format).    On a more serious note, but no less insightful, a post by Chris Anderson with some really good points to consider.  

My biggest email pet peeve that makes my toes curl is when someone sends an email with the message: “see below” or worse: “FYI”.  “FYI” what? The attachment, the 10 pages of correspondence below, that fact that you just outed yourself as a complete moron?  You have no CLUE what you’re fishing for. 

I remember being yelled at (yes, in all CAPS) by a vendor (no less) for continuing a conversation with his technician but on a different topic and not changing the subject line.  In hindsight I agree with him totally (minus the yelling) when he chided us that he would be misfiling our email conversation if it didn’t have the right subject line.  I had to ruefully think of him recently when I took advantage of a new (at least to me) feature on Outlook where email ‘conversations’ get bunched together.  It was a great feature until I sent out a whole bunch of emails with the subject line “thank you”, (this to be filed under: no good deed (thanking someone) goes unpunished). My ‘thank yous’ where very varied and the different conversations had no businesses being all bunched together under one conversational string, but that’s exactly what outlook did (and don’t tell me that’s a PC thing, ‘cause it ain’t). Totally idiotic. 

As for cc’ing: most people’s banes of existence are all the cc emails that need to be digested.  Here I’m of the mind that today where I do not necessarily sit in the same office with my production team anymore I want to be cc’ed on EVERY email.  Yes, a lot of reading but it makes up for not being in the same room or office suite anymore. It keeps me in the loop, but that might also have to do with my line of business.

Next time I send out a marketing email from Clock Wise I’ll try to look at my email addresses a bit more carefully (yuikes).

Via www.FastCoDesign.com

What If?

What if my birthday were on February 29^th? I could claim to be three quarters younger than I actually am. That in itself is a very scary idea; imagine having to go THERE again. And if you wonder what “there” is, divide your age into four and remember how that felt. 

Most likely that was a time when you hated your parents, actually all grownups pretty much. You couldn’t WAIT to be grown up and make your OWN decisions and not follow those STUPID rules. Needless to say, taxes, rent, college tuition (your own or your kids), and (talking of which) kids, spouses, pets, errands, leaky pipes, bosses, deadlines and the whole lot seemed so lovely (if you knew of them at all) and certainly better than the BS you were dealing with right then: OK, I’ll turn the music down – say what? I can’t year you – speak up.

In reality of course, I’d still be mpf-old, but I would have only had mpf divided into four birthdays. That would SUCK. I love birthdays – if you have ever have been fortunate enough to be invited to one of my birthday parties you’ll know what I’m talking about. 

Here in New York we often go out to a restaurant to celebrate a birthday and the bill gets split up such that the “birthdayee” is invited.  I tried that a few times myself, but always felt bad for my less economically fit friends. 

And I must confess that once or twice I bailed on a friend’s birthday because I knew there would be some big spenders and it was an expensive restaurant. I have not taste for paying for someone else’s three cocktails, entrecote, desert and port wine – although I pull my weight in the wine category.  I find it awkward at best. 

So, I celebrate my birthday the Swiss way. I invite my friends to my house. I bake my own cake, buy the booze, prepare all the food and in general go pretty much nuts to have a great party for my friends. Not me, because after all I want everything to be perfect.  So really, it’s not a birthday party as much as it is my annual thank you to friends for being just that.  It just happens to be around my birthday.  The cake baking is up for grabs by the way… hint.

In Switzerland kids bring a cake to class on the day of their birthday to share with the others.  I think it makes an awful lot of sense, because the kids (their mom most likely) are not going to forget their birthday and so with a cake each time there’s a birthday is guaranteed – unless you’re one of the super unlucky ones to have a birthday during vacation time.  And that’s worse than having a birthday only every four years!

The Importance of Local

As I am sloshing through “Within the Context of no Context” by Georges Trow I find myself torn between total awe for his insights and alienation for his fragmented writing style and the realization that it is the style that makes the reading so thought provoking and painful but also beautiful.  I’m a fast reader and this is a slim volume, but this book is one paragraph, often just one sentence, at a time reading. I’ve been digesting “Within the Context of no Context”, morsel by morsel for well over a year. 

Today I came across ChrisBrogan’s latest blog entry about how “local” will become more and more important, and I immediately had to think of “Within the Context of no Context”.  It made me realize just how much more we feel disconnected the bigger our virtual reach becomes and that a need for immediate connectedness and belonging to a smaller subset that is ‘manageable’ might not be filled in the physical world, especially where business is concerned. 

Trow talks about those opposing forces as quadrants. The quadrant of man alone and the quadrant of all (in this case all Americans). Trow writes about the loneliness of man in terms of one person looking for a connectedness in a one-way relationship with the TV (Trow’s essay was originally published in the New Yorker and as a book in 1981) and how we personalize and ‘make our own’ the stars and TV personalities we watch every day in an effort to shrink the distance between our quadrant of physical living and experiencing and the quadrant of the rest of America. Trow might as well have been talking about the internet 2.0. 

I would that that a step further and say, that the larger our network becomes the more we become a group of one in the physical world.  In an effort to manage our growing reach, we create an “us”, which in our own eyes encompasses “all”, but really only means an “us”; a group who’s sentiments, or geography, or political views we share. Everything beyond “us” is foreign and out of our reach, sic understanding. This, also a powerful explanation for any ‘club-yness’ to the exclusion of ‘the other’ (another favorite topic of mine). 

The internet has made the stakes higher and the distance between man and the ‘rest of the world’ more distant. Trow’s quadrants have moved even further apart.  Any business who understands to fill the void between the quadrants has a lottery ticket in hand.  

If a business can reach out and have a meaningful two-way interaction with its customers on a global, virtual, all-connected platform, AND can give them their local 'heroes’ on the ground (as Chris Brogan calls them) – it will have a very powerful brand and a very strong relationship with its customers and consumers indeed.