I know this might hurt your sensibilities, and I’m really sorry for that, but let’s say it out loud…there is nothing precious about paper books. It doesn’t matter what form a book is in before you put it into your head. What happens as it goes into your head is what matters. It’s just gross to romanticize paper books. Millions of trees are slaughtered, habitat destroyed, and dead dinosaurs spilled (ink). They take up a lot of room and they eventually fall apart. Saying you can’t make the move to e-books because you “…love the look and smell of a ‘real’ book in my hands” is like Guttenberg saying, “I love unrolling a scroll, and the crinkle and smell of papyrus. To hell with this press idea. It will ruin books as we know them.” Real books are in your head The reality of your relationship with a book is what happens in your head. Most of the time, if the writing is compelling, you don’t notice the way the content is delivered. The only way you notice the form is when your hand cramps and you have to switch to the other hand (unless the book is too big for one hand). I’ve been a convert to electronic print for over a year now. I used to be one of you. I said all the same things I hear over and over now from friends and family about their unwillingness to give up paper books. “I love the look of real books. I love how they smell and how they feel in my hand.” Now I hate paper books. They’re heavy. They cramp my hands and arms. I’m loathe to mark them up with a highlighter or pencil. I can’t search inside them quickly. I can’t take 20 paper books on holiday. I never thought it would come to this. Books have been a huge part of my life since I was able to read. Before then, I mostly used them to reach my brother’s toys so I could break them. I still own over 300 paper books that look nice on the shelves but rarely get opened. E-books are real books. Books happen in your head. You read a novel differently than your neighbor does. (But that doesn’t really count because your neighbor only reads pictures on the Interwebs. I looked through his window one night.) Great authors rely on your imagination, which currently resides mostly in your head, to fill in details about plot, story, and character that would be ridiculous for them to write for the same reason that we hate exposition in movies. It’s unnecessary. Write the...
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Business bloggers, why do you hate America? I know you have deadlines and a paycheck to justify but you’re creating fear in the damaged psyches of the easily influenced. A better solution for your readers is right here and nearly any writer can achieve the goal. Forbes has an article about 25 Things Influential People Do Better Than Anyone Else. This kind of article hurts the Interwebs and also my head as a writer and thinker. (I don’t necessarily do both of those at the same time. It’s hard. Like the Maths.) It’s one of those “list posts” that web writers have learned to conjure up when they can’t think of anything else to write. I shouldn’t slam lists, I use them myself and even recommend them in my book. But they’ve become a kind of “go to” post that often doesn’t do anything to help the reader. They’re just there to take up bandwidth and the world is rapidly running out of bandwidth. We are heading toward a global bandwidth crisis! If I had any influence, this paragraph would scare the shit out of you. List posts are…listful The best thing about “list posts” is that the headlines offer the reader the promise of easy consumption of the content. You know the article is offering steps that are easily scanned and might be capable of implementation. Although a list of 25 or a 101 of anything is generally more than the twitchy Internet audience wants to read. Seriously, if you can sit through reading a list of 101 of anything, you are desperate, my friend, to find SOMETHING to make your life better. Anyone offering you a list of 101 things is really reaching, really stretching their ability to…list things. There is unlikely to be much there that will change your life or your level of influence (or the specific gravity of nickel, which as we all know would benefit almost no one. I have no idea what that means but I like how it sounds on the page). You need to re-prioritize your methods of gathering useful information. In fact, Forbes’ list of 25 doesn’t really fulfill its promise. It provides few usable examples for each of the 25 characteristics of influential people. But it probably does achieve the goal of getting clicks because the target demo for the article is…people who don’t have influence but crave a portion of it scooped up like non-fat ice cream and delivered to them for free. That’s not how actual influence works. Real influence arises from having something useful to offer a specific audience. People like to say that someone like Guy...
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What the hell, WordPress?…oh…I was about to curse WordPress, which actually I did already. I thought it was balking on adding “Random Shit” as a category for blog posts. I’m offended that WordPress would even consider doing this but apparently it was spinning CPU cycles because it took perhaps five or ten seconds to add the category. But I digress and I haven’t even progressed far enough to justify a digression. Except maybe now. I’ve decided I’m going to call talk to my money dude about getting some of my retirement savings. I’m not old enough to retire but that money is not really helping me right now. I mostly want to get it now because I want to take on less freelance work so I can take on more me-lance work. In other words writing my own books. NOTE TO THE WEBS (my affectionate nickname for the Web): I hereby claim ME-LANCE™ a certified original word invented by me on this day, in the year of our Lord, August 30, 2013 at the site of the landing of the Her Majesty’s ship, Cliteracy, witnessed by the noble savages found upon these shores (which live entirely in my head in a post-racial America that could only exist in someone’s head). I am, ever yours, the first ME-LANCER™ in the history of history, and ever more shall be, Kingdom until end, amen. (As a side note, Amen was an Egyptian deity, known as the “hidden one” or the king of the gods.) I’ve got one nearly complete and it’s a doozy (Book! Keep up, will you?). The world will be shocked and empires will collapse. But not if they follow the 16 rules in my new book. The Dalai Lama has already promised to canonize me, which he can’t even do that shit but, for me, oh yeah. So I got that going for me. Speaking of books, I read THE FUNNIEST BOOK IN THE HISTORY OF THE PRINTING PRESS this week. It’s the only book I can ever remember making me laugh uncontrollably out loud in public places. I have a high bar for humor. I have a high bar for chinups too and they both make me stronger. The book is this one: If you don’t read Jenny Lawson’s blog, The Bloggess, drop what you’re doing right now and go read it! And then click the link above and buy her damn book, Let’s Just Pretend This Never Happened. I’m not arguing with you about this. You can thank me later while you’re chortling over your iced grande latte with light ice and two Splenda. Sort of sad non-sequitur...
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A bridge in northwestern Washington State collapsed today. Thankfully no one appears to have been killed. I’ve driven across this bridge many times, including on the Harley. The bridge is part of Interstate 5, which runs from the Canadian border to southern California. It’s a major artery and I’m not sure what people in this area will do until a repair is effected. Friends were immediately expressing shock and horror on Facebook. I was not very surprised at the collapse. I read a book a few years ago titled The Edge of Disaster. The book, by a former disaster planning specialist, details how completely wrong-headed our national spending priorities have been in the past decade (the book was published in 2007). He makes the very cogent argument that the trillions spent on fighting terrorism have not made us fundamentally safer and the neglect of our national infrastructure threatens our safety and economic existence in a way that terrorism could never possibly do. The author even makes the argument that if a terrorist were to set off a dirty bomb in a major American city, the resulting effect, while horrible for those directly affected, would not come close to the cost to our security and economic health that will result from things like the I-5 bridge collapse. There is a tremendous amount of traffic between Seattle and Vancouver, BC that streams over that bridge daily. The lack of that traffic will have huge economic impacts in both directions. And there are literally thousands of bridges like this in the U.S. that are in need of repair. And there are levies, water systems, an outdated electrical grid, and on and on, that need to be fixed. No terrorist organization in the world has the capacity to bring down the United States at this point. Crumbling infrastructure can hurt us...
Read MoreThe theme of this video fits nicely with my last blog post. When we think about success, it needs to be defined by our own values and not by something external. Otherwise we’ll end up living someone else’s idea of a...
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I was flattered and very pleased this week to be selected by one of my favorite bloggers, Lisa, to guest blog on her site, 2CreateAWebSite.com. The topic that I’d chosen to write about was How to Court Failure. You might think this was a cautionary tale, and in a way it is. But not like you think. Read on… So what is the Harley emblem doing blazoned across the top of this post? I love Harleys. I hate loud noises but I love the sound of my Heritage Softail Classic. It’s also a beautiful piece of machinery, not unlike artwork by my friend, Ginny Ruffner, at least insomuch as they both use lots of heavy metal. Harleys were once the ride of the social misfit. Not that bikers were necessarily misfits but mainstream culture saw them that way. Now big bikes are the ride of corporate CEOs who want to play bad boy on the weekend. At $16,000 to $25,000 for a new Harley, that’s an expensive image. But it’s one that Harley has sold extremely well. Harley’s success cannot be measured in dollars alone. I don’t know what the company’s officers thought about their customers when Harley was associated with danger and criminal activity. But they effectively transformed the company into a respected worldwide product line that is one of the handful of instantly recognizable brands that scream “America” without being offensive (I’m sure that’s a matter of opinion, yes). McDonalds would have a very hard time doing that. In fact, part of the worldwide allure of Harleys is their association with “American” values of freedom and independence. (Please take note that I realize this is an illusion. My Harley does give me a feeling of freedom and independence but so did my Yamaha. It’s the association with those feelings that Harley markets so well. And there is something about the name, the styling, and the sound that sets Harley apart.) What does this have to do with illusions of personal success? Whether we’re talking about Bill Gates or Harley or AIG or you and me, we seem to have very narrow definitions of what success means. The worst part is that we often don’t define it for ourselves but we let the culture provide a definition into which we try to shoehorn ourselves. As I said in one of the comments on Lisa’s blog, perhaps the biggest failure we make in life is not defining success for ourselves, defining it narrowly by social standards, subsequently defining its absence as failure, and then being miserable with the results. I suspect what most people want is not really mega-success...
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