Philosophy
The Biggest Loser
Mar 4th
I know the Biggest Loser in game show history. He’s my friend, Pete.
Mind you, I am talking single-day loser here. It took Ken Jennings 76 appearances to top the $3-million mark, so his Jeopardy victims don’t count.
Pete was on the Wheel of Fortune episode where a woman won the first million-dollar jackpot. Pete finished third, which by all accounts makes him the Biggest Loser in game show history.
Odds are, you won’t be able to find anything about Pete online, because losers are seldom remembered. And the ones that do get remembered had to do a whole lot of winning to get there. The Buffalo Bills lost four straight Super Bowls. Dewey didn’t defeat Truman, but he had to beat out other losers (that you can’t name without Google) just to be nominated. Unless you’re really engaged, you don’t remember the losers.
But they were in the game. Pete – despite hitting Bankrupt on two of the four chances he had to spin the wheel – walked away with more money that day than I did for not playing. He’s also got a great consolation prize, the awesome-sounding title of “Biggest Loser in Game Show History.”
All I am is a phone-a-friend, and that didn’t get me squat.
Even the losers have better stories than those who never played.
Taking the Long View
Feb 9th
(the following is mine and mine alone, and does not in any way reflect opinions or viewpoints of my employer.)
I understand when people get on indignant rants. You see something that is so clear to you, and you just feel like verbally slapping a few people across the cheek to wake them up, so they can see what is so plainly in front of their faces.
However, the Indignant Rant often reveals the boundaries of one’s concern. When I was a reporter, I recall many people who would call and berate me for not giving ________ more time and attention than it was getting. “But you don’t see, if they name Mr. So-and-so to the committee, it will mean the end of civilization as we know it!”
Okay, their lips weren’t foretelling the end of Western Civilization, but their body tics, tremors, and voice inflection certainly did. It was classic fight or flight, and it’s definitely not what our bodies evolved as a proper response to our anguish over the makeup of the school textbook committee.
The Whiffle Life
P.J. O’Rourke – in his classic Parliament of Whores, calls this the “Whiffle Life.”
My friend’s kid lives in a well-padded little universe, a world with no sharp edges or hard surfaces. It’s the Whiffle Ball again. The kid leads a Whiffle Life, and so does my friend and so do I.
The premise is that we’ve dumbed down our existence and taken the risk out of so many things, that we’ve literally knocked evolution for a loop. Some of us (in the modern, industrialized West) live in a world where our mistakes have virtually no consequences for survival. You can screw up often, and the worst that happens is you get a little unpleasantness. Much in the same way that a thrown baseball can hurt, so we replace them with Whiffle Balls instead.
When you live in a Whiffle World, you don’t worry about being eaten by hyenas, you worry about whether pets are spayed and neutered.
When you live in a Whiffle World, you don’t worry about your teeth rotting out, you worry about whether they are white enough.
When you live in a Whiffle World, you don’t worry about having access to safe drinking water, you fret over whether it’s the right flavor or brand.
When you live in a Whiffle World, you watch the thermometer like a hawk because of Global Warming, and doom the planet to extinction.
History in an Icicle
Yes, this is the Indignant Rant that reveals the boundaries of my concern. I happen to think that human beings are wonderful creatures, and we have shown an amazing capacity for creating beauty and hope. I also worry that in trying to preserve our accomplishments, we’re squinting at the tiny and ignoring the very real, big threats to everything we know.
I want you to look at this graph by J. Storrs Hall. It’s taken from a Greenland ice core:
Yes, that is indicative of temperatures increasing. But notice they’ve been going up since the 1830s. You could try to tie this to industrialization, but remember, this is just one sample from one location. What I want to do is change your perspective for a moment. Let’s roll back even further:
It would seem that 1000 years ago, we were warmer than we are now. But that’s not enough of a Big Picture.
Go back a little over 10,000 years, and look at where we were. Ice Age. Pay attention to that little uptick at the end that so many people are getting all frothed about. Watch where it goes when we dial the Wayback Machine to 50,000 years ago:
That tiny little tick mark at the end of that line, which is smaller than each of the commas in this sentence, is the danger? Seriously? Pay attention to the scale at the left of the graph. We’re looking at temperatures 10-25 degress Celsius cooler than what we have now. Human civilization, and agriculture, and iPods could not have emerged before now. And what makes you think we could survive when it does get cold again? Switching to the Vostok core in the Antarctic, we see this:
Where is that 150-year rise at the end, again?
Cultural Arrogance
I’m fairly certain, that even if the planet heats up a little more, that we could adapt. People along coastlines move a little inland. Arable farmland actually increases, so we’d be better able to feed the masses.
What worries me is that in concentrating on this tiny epoch of time, we ignore the real threat. It’s clear from the graphs that we live in an epoch that is an anomaly. Yet we pretend as though nothing ever happened before recorded history.
Every time someone shows you one of those pictures of a glacier from 150 years ago, ask them: “And just what is the optimal climate for the Earth?” They can’t tell you. But for some reason, the Arrogant Anointed have decided that the Earth is supposed to be exactly the way it was when their great-grandparents moved to Martha’s Vineyard. Or when their daddy was sworn into the Senate. It is foolish to believe the Earth is not in a constant state of flux.
There are people who believe God created the world 6,000 years ago. I am not one of them, and boy would I be pissed off if a bunch of them started crafting public policy that would wreck the economy, based on their belief that the world ought to be Eden, and Eden started the moment they opened their eyes and started drinking Enfamil.
There used to be astronomers who believed in the Steady-State Theory, that stars and matter must be continually created to fill the void left behind, as galaxies move away from each other. (Doppler red-shift tells us galaxies are all moving away.) Not as many do, because it requires a belief in spontaneous creation of matter.
And here we are today, with environmentalists who cling to the belief that our planet, the way it is today, is the way it has always been and ought to always be. They have absolutely nothing to base that belief upon. And in a way, they deserve even more scorn for that belief than the traditionalists who tout a 6,000 year world history.
I’m all for being a good steward of the environment, but before we wreck the global economy chasing a fantasy about a steady-state Earth, how about putting some research dollars into the threat we know is coming? How does man survive when it gets too cold? Are we going to move out and find new sources of food? Look for hospitable worlds elsewhere? We have the time and the resources to do it, if we don’t starve ourselves to death on granola and pray to Gaia as the ice envelopes us.
Fire From the Sky
Forget about how we’re overdue for an Ice Age for a moment. We know we’ve got at least a thousand years or so to lick that problem.
What about a comet strike? Or a sufficiently large meteorite?
In 1908, a piece of a comet nailed a remote section of Russia. It created an explosion and a mushroom cloud, and wiped out everything for miles around. If we didn’t know any better, it would have been called a nuclear bomb. In fact, it’s a good thing we didn’t know any better, because if it had happened 50 or 60 years later, the world would have been glowing from the remains of retaliatory strikes before anyone bothered to figure out it was a natural occurrence.
But what if the Tunguska comet had been larger?
Make it larger by a factor of 10, and it would have rocked the world. Make it even bigger, and it could wipe out nearly all intelligent life on the planet.
So while we’re dickering with Mars missions and Moon missions and all manner of foolishness, we’re ignoring the very real instant threat to civilization. (And that means all the puppies will die, too. And the Black Eyed Peas.) We’re investing next to nothing in discovering or tracking the large objects that sweep into near-Earth orbits. We’re investing even less in researching technologies that would allow us to alter their orbits, or even explode them remotely where they would pose less of a threat.
I’m talking about something that could strike tomorrow. Or a year from now. That’s the Indignant Rant that keeps me up at night.
The Big Picture
We’ll solve the plastics problem, and the Styrofoam problem, and the nuclear waste problem. We’ll figure out how to leave cleaner and meaner and smarter, because we’re humans and that’s what we’ve done for 10,000 years. Occasionally, in the middle of miles of steps forward, we take one or two back. That’s okay, because we learn from those missteps.
Or at least we do, when we bother to look back with enough perspective.
Attack the Puzzle
Nov 30th
How do you attack a jigsaw puzzle?
Odds are, you are constantly staring at the box it came in, looking for the bigger picture. You’re probably searching through the pieces, separating the edges and isolating those all-important four corner pieces.
Then, you start matching similar colors, and jamming and wedging whatever fits.
Not my wife’s Aunt Marjorie.
She’s more organized than that.
She has developed her own system, classifying the pieces by general shape. There are “pieces with two outies and two innies,” and “three-outie one-innies,” and “stars.” Some pieces have the odd “foot” in them.
Marjorie has them all laid out by shape, because when she needs a foot to fill a gap, she doesn’t want to look through a bunch of three-outies.
After separating the pieces by general shape, she lays them out on cardboard palettes, where she can at a glance spot the color she needs from the sheet.
It’s odd to me to see four palettes of puzzle pieces stacked on top of each other — but it works for her.
I can’t say whose system is more efficient, because I don’t know how long she spends sorting and organizing her palettes. I can say that her method is more efficient for her, and she has a lot more experience putting puzzles together.
It’s definitely something to keep in mind, that we often just jump into tasks and projects the same way we’ve always done, and never thought about the existence of a better way. Likewise, we never really benchmark the cost of organization and structure, to be sure it is providing value.
Building a Dynasty
Oct 8th
“Do as I say, not as I do.”
Culturally-speaking, that’s often seen as a statement of weakness – uttered by one who lacks the willpower to stick by their own rules. However, we tend to take that concept further than we should. And it has to do with our forgetting the difference between practitioners, teachers and coaches.
Practitioners get things done. They perform the actual tasks. They play the game from whistle to whistle, they run the track. And while practitioners can eventually become teachers or coaches, there’s no guarantee they have the skills to succeed.
Teachers exhibit a level of mastery, and their job is to bring their students to the bar. Whatever that bar of expectation is, the teacher must bring the student along. To do so, the teacher must demonstrate the same level of ability in performing the task. A math teacher can’t teach you the quadratic equation without showing you how it’s done on the board.
Coaches are a little different, because no one expects the coach to run every lap faster than the student. It’s the coach’s job to help practitioners figure out how they can improve, and set them on a path for that. Often, that requires a level of mastery in the theory of an activity, even if there is no longer the physical ability to carry it out.
Why do I highlight these distinctions? Because the failure to understand them is resulting in a lot of ill will in the communication arts.
When everyone is an expert.
I’m flabbergasted at the number of people who sell themselves as “Social Media Experts” or “Gurus” or whatever the title du jour is.
Being free to start and easy to learn, one of the selling points of these revolutionary tools is that “anyone can do it.” But how many can do it well?
- The ability to dribble a basketball doesn’t make you Michael Jordan.
- The ability to recite Dennis Hopper’s “run the ole Picket Fence at ‘em” speech from Hoosiers doesn’t make you a basketball coach.
- Neither does it make you Dennis Hopper.
- The ability to be a goalie in soccer won’t help you be a goalie in hockey, much less a forward.
We’ve got a lot of people who have proven they can do one thing, and they are hanging up a shingle to sell you on something else.
Choosing the right path.
Now, if you’re a business looking to get involved in a new endeavor, you have some options:
- Hire a big name and let them carry you to the top.
- Hire someone cheap, and hope for the best.
- Hire no one, and let best practices bubble up from your own people.
- Hire a coach who can bring the best out of your people.
Notice that I am not talking about Social Media here. This goes for anything, but let’s see how it applies.
Go hire that big name (like a Robert Scoble) and that person will bring you an instant audience and instant credibility. But when that person leaves, who owns the knowledge? Who owns the relationships? Who owns the accounts? Who is ready to step up and fill the shoes?
Go hire that affordable alternative. Why not? In the grand scheme of things, you can write it all off as a pilot project.
Don’t hire anyone. (Be prepared for very mixed results, and a very nervous legal team.)
Go get a coach, who has a proven ability to elevate your game. Build bench strength. Build for the future, by injecting the change comfortably into the culture. Granted, there are very few of these coaches around. Within Social Media, there are many people who are great at what they do, but it might have little to do with coaching ability and everything to do with their own knowledge of the industry they are augmenting.
Past performance is no proof of future success.
Here’s the dirty secret: there are several reasons why social media practitioners do well. Some are just born with the right attitude for personal and conversational communication. If they have that knack, you can take someone with a few years experience in your company and they might shine. But take them out of your company, and they will be hopelessly lost (like the guy who won every golf tournament, until he got on a real course and couldn’t find the Clown’s Mouth.)
That is the Practitioner - very skilled, but not necessarily versatile enough to change games.
Some have the ability to show you what they do and how they do it, and you are able to follow the steps and emulate their success. This can be a good thing, but it also deceives. The guy who shows you how to get 80,000 Twitter followers might not have a clue what to do with them. His strength is solely in acquisition, not in leveraging or in calls-to-action.
That is the Teacher - who can instruct you on how to do what they’ve already done.
How to spot those who can really help you:
- They have proven their skills in different kinds of businesses and business models.
- They don’t have immediate answers, but instead follow with more detailed and insightful questions.
- They create ideas, concepts and systems that no one has ever seen – because your challenge is unique.
That’s how you know you’ve found a Coach. The person who will push you to heights you couldn’t have reached alone, and will leave you better than she found you. The person who will draw indirectly from past experiences and directly from sound principles to craft solutions to your problems. The individual who can fade into the background after launch, confident those he trained are self-sustaining and know how to improve on their own.
You know when you’ve found a coach, when you hear his students calling their own shots.
Better than Best
Aug 30th
“Libertarianism is the faith that individuals pursuing the better will succeed over Experts dictating the Best.”
