Get Shouty

Would you call you clients experts in online?

Would they have spent 10,000 hours devoted to this understanding ?

How about you? Have you spent 10,000 hours?

Malcom Gladwell’s latest thinking in his book Outlier describes the conditions which bring about expertise. I think this can help shed light on why it can be so difficult to get an “I see. I agree” from a client.

It might be this experience lag- not an unwillingness to learn, not a love of another media channel, not an inability to grasp the concepts- that is preventing the uninitiated from embracing new ideas.

The biggest misconception about success is that we do it solely on our smarts, ambition, hustle and hard work. There’s an awful lot more that goes into it than we admit.

This idea – that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice – surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.

You couldn’t say that it was a rocket science style observation that practice makes perfect, and that concentrated diligence on a task goes a long way to achieve mastery. For me the question is: how can you get people to understand new ideas when the experience gap is so large?

Cramming. The answer has to be: Tutor. Tutor. Tutor. You have to give your clients experience. So that they can get your experience. They won’t have time to practice.

“People don’t rise from nothing,” he writes. “They are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot … It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.”

You need to be the beneficiary for your clients, build extraordinary opportunities, be the hidden advantage to their success and help make sense of the world in the way that others can’t.

“We’ve been far too focused on the individual—on describing the characteristics and habits and personality traits of those who get furthest ahead in the world. And that’s the problem,” says Gladwell.  “Because in order to understand the outlier I think you have to look around them—at their culture and community and family and generation. We’ve been looking at tall trees, and I think we should have been looked at the forest.”

Do more than look at the forest for the seeds of success. Plant one.

Found here.

Click image. Read. Laugh.

For all the God-like powers that video games have bestowed upon us — from slaying armies to pretending to be rock stars — it wasn’t until now that players could actually build life. Spore, designed by Will Wright of Sim City fame, is based on evolution: you start with microbes and customize on up. Seth Schiesel declares it “probably the coolest, most interesting toy I have ever experienced.” Go create your universe.

“Playing God, The Home Game,” by Seth Schiesel

“Gaming Evolves,” by Carl Zimmer

Contageous special report on gaming

How internet famous are you? Type in your name and find out.
Go here then scroll down.

Woot! I’m a 57.

Via: The American Copywriter Boys (and Pablo)

Jessica Hagy’s lovely requiem for Authur C Clarke He knew science fiction didn’t have to be an oxymoron.

Thanks Arthur:

• “Life is just one big banana. Science fiction allows us all to peel open the reality and discover the yellow truth inside.”

• Clarke’s three laws:

1. “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
2. “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”
3. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

• “The truth, as always, will be far stranger.”

• “Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.”

• “How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.”

• Of UFOs: “They tell us absolutely nothing about intelligence elsewhere in the universe, but they do prove how rare it is on Earth.”

• “Somewhere in me is a curiosity sensor. I want to know what’s over the next hill. You know, people can live longer without food than without information. Without information, you’d go crazy.”

Wired’s Adam Rogers wrote a lovely, sweeping obit for Dungeons and Dragons creator Gary Gygax in this weekend’s New York Times that included this flowchart showing how D&D was a gateway drug into every kind of nerd-dom: great D&D geek love flowchart by Sam Potts.

Coke Zero has launched in Brazil an extreme guerrilla marketing campaign using people’s tongues. Trendhunter reports that several shops in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre and Salvador give free piercings with the brand logo, with the only condition of taking pictures to publish on the website which redirects to a Google Picasa Album set. It would seem that the promise is that the brand can do your talking for you while you can’t.

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners,
contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love
chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the
servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter
the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company,
gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their
teachers.”

Sound familiar? It’s a paraphrase of a quote about two and a half thousand years old.  Socrates knew that the more thing change……

• Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions; but those who kindly reprove thy faults
• True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.
• We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is a habit.
• Philosophy begins in wonder.

These are all robust building blocks to create a sustainable CRM strategy, which can be seen as your philosophy for generating great relationships:

• Value criticism
• Know that you can’t learn without questioning
• Excellence is not set and forget
• Genuinely want to know the people that you communicate with, genuinely believe that your relationship can be better the more you learn

I went to a forum this week : Is online media dumbing down journalism? Liz Jackson (Four Corners), Peter McEvoy, Catharine Lumby, Dylan Welch (Sydney Morning Herald Online) and Jacqueline Breen (ElectionTracker.net) were on the panel put together by New Matilda.

I won’t summarise what was spoken about ’cause Tim does a great job here:

“What has happened to newspapers could be summed up as follows: once upon a time newspapers were sold as three course meals, and no one really knew what was being eaten – the entré, the main or the dessert (or all three?). Now we can measure readers, it turns out most people are just interested in the dessert. So does that mean you just focus on desserts and stop making nutritious mains? Or does it mean you have to work harder to make the mains more appetising?

It seemed to me the room last night was full of people that just love to eat vegetables. They know how good vegetables are for them and they’ve acquired a taste. Now they’re nervous – if people are only eating dessert, what does that mean for the health of democracy? or ‘public discourse’? And more importantly, if we’re the only ones eating vegetables, who’s going to be paying for them?”

My outtake was that it seemed to me that what was missing from the debate was any real vision of how the online medium might advance the essential offer of journalism which was put forward as ‘originality, credibility and analysis’.

The focus of the panel seemed to be on how online effects the economic model of a news masthead and then how that relates to the resources that are given to journalists in order for them to deliver their craft.

I’m into the notion that in the current explosion of data there is a valuable role to be played in an offer of synthesis of information, contextualisation with authority and transparency of agenda. In this scenario a newspaper might be seen as an umbrella brand with its journalists becoming brands of their own. The role of the newspaper is then to facilitate and add value to the relationship between the content created by the journalists and the audience.

An example of this might be a meme/topic tracker so that you can follow issues as they unpack over time or visualize how silos of news interact with each other (a finance story and a policy decision or a gossip piece and a media merger).

The Digg Arc model is a baby step towards this- imagine if you could colour code and navigate your way through topical information and see how it related and informed other silos of activity….

The ability of the online medium to tell stories and to allow journalists to create new ways of creating understanding and describing the agenda seems to be lost in the contemplation of dwindling revenue.

In response to will online “Shaft or Save?” journalism I come down on SAVE, so long as there is a willingness to innovate.

UPDATE: I watched the 2007 Andrew Olle Lecture given by John Hartigan broadcast last night on the ABC.

You can read the transcript here or listen to it here.(MP3 RealMedia 28k+)

Amazing. No really. Inspirational, visionary, passionate. Go check it out:

‘….journalism is in very good shape. In many ways, better than ever. There has never been a better time to be a journalist. And the value of good journalism has never been greater. ”

‘…digital technology is delivering a more diverse range than ever of wonderful journalism. Our audiences are capable of telling the difference. The one thing they don’t have is enough time to consume what’s available. This is why demand for high quality news from credible sources will grow, not decline.”

“Newspapers draw our attention to things we didn’t know we were interested in. The internet hasn’t induced passive browsing in the same way but I think the content that achieves this will attract a huge audience. As journalists we’ve never had more inducements to open our minds, stretch our imaginations or reach more people.”