When I bought my first iPod, it opened me up to an idea: instead of carrying stacks of CDs in the car with me on road trips, with an iPod I could carry something the size of a pack of cards and have all of my music with me.
No more fishing for CDs, so more jewel cases slipping between the seats – everything about it was better.
The same thinking has not occurred to me with books, however. Maybe it’s that I don’t have a dedicated e-reader, so I don’t know what I’m missing. But I haven’t felt compelled to buy an e-reader, either.
So I still buy books. Good ol’ fashioned bound, paper, heavy books.
My favorites range all over the place: Carl Sagan takes the cake, of course, but also John Irving, a few political biographies, and a wide range of fiction and non-fiction. I like the heft of books, being able to open one anywhere and continuing where I left off. The smell of an old bookstore, the feel of the paper, my notes scribbled in the margins.
Some of that you can replicate with e-books. But not everything.
It’s not just books. It’s everything involved with books: libraries, book stores, “free books” carts in the classroom hallways. There’s a lot of infrastructure around books, and I like all that, too.
I understand that a lot of it is not necessary. Libraries are already evolving into “media centers.” Book stores are having a helluva time. Just as we don’t read scrolls anymore, the days of the book may be limited.
Unlike when we upgrade our video media, however, you can always pick up a book. It always works. It’s never obsolete or incompatible.
Maybe someday I’ll grab an e-reader and switch full-bore. Maybe. In the meantime, though, I’ll keep reading Dr. Sagan as I always have.
It had been so long since I booted up my Newton eMate that, before taking a photo of it, I had to recharge its meager battery.
But like clockwork (and like all of Apple’s Newton PDAs), it started up like no time had passed – it’s familiar grid of app icons hinting at future Apple products.
It used to be that I ran a decently popular blog, Newton Poetry, writing about the eMate and its MessagePad cousins. There used to be not a day that passed that I wouldn’t scribble on one of these green screens, hacking my Macs to get them to install new software, or discovering some long-abandoned app that still, after all these years, seemed useful.
But now my eMate sits on a shelf in my office, along with my Newton MessagePad 110, a few non-working iPods, and other miscellaneous Apple products. It’s joined the assorted classic Macintoshes that I just haven’t found room for in my life.
Not after buying a house, and not after taking up photography as a full-time hobby.
The truth, though, is that booting this little green guy up made me happy. It made me happy to still see it working. It made me happy to see all the apps I installed to monkey around with. And it made me happy thinking about all those fun blog projects, from 2007 to 2011, that I tackled.
I keep thinking I’ll kick-start the blog again, instead of leaving it languishing with a few random photo posts here and there. There’s a collection of articles just waiting for commentary. The project stuff, though – there just doesn’t seem much room for that stuff. Not any more.
Still, my eMate and I? We had a lot of fun together. And now that I brought it back to life, maybe we’ll have some more fun.
[Here’s something new: a series of things I like and use an awful lot around the house.]
I like coffee, so liking coffee mugs seems obvious.
But my coffee mugs tell a story: where I’ve been, where I’ve worked, what friends have given me gifts. My mugs come from Las Vegas, and Chicago (above), and Yellowstone National Park, and even Texas. I have mugs from my alma mater, my former employer, and a marketing company in Columbus, OH.
There are mugs I’ve designed, and mug I’d wished I’d designed. There are Beatles mugs, and NPR mugs, and patriotic mugs.
A lot of my mugs have broken handles. That’s because I’m a klutz. It usually happens when I’m washing the dishes. Either I’ll drop a mug and break it against another dish, or I’ll drop a mug on the floor trying to put it away. I drop lots of things.
There’s another class of coffee mug: the travel mug. These don’t last as long because they get more use. But here again, something always breaks. Usually it’s a seal, and so the mug starts to take on water, and I make a mess on my morning commute.
So I keep collecting them. And using them.
// edited with VSCO Kodak T-MAX 3200+ (switched to color mode)
So it’s with great pleasure that, after digging the spot out my galas with my fingernail, I can put that discolored depression to good use. Into my coffee can it goes, collecting with other vegetable matter, coffee grounds, and crushed egg shells. From there, it goes into my compost pile.
The whole concept of compost fascinates me. But maybe I said that already.
Anyway, now that the garden is finishing up, it’s a good time to reflect on what I’ve learned since March – and since my first garden project last year.
First, though, let me say that it’s a helluva joy to eat stuff you’ve grown with your own two hands – especially when it’s drop-dead delicious. That yellow tomato? Life-changing. The green beans that never stop coming? Tender and flavorful. I was a veggie fan before, but now? Died-in-the-wool, man.
Maybe you’ve heard, but there’s a lot of work involved in gardening. Milkweed plants were a problem. They would sprout up without fail in the middle of the spinach or bush beans. It’s not a pretty plant. When I would pull it at its base, the whole thing would come up easily.
Mosquitos were also a problem. Back in the garden area, the mosquitos were everywhere – especially when I would work out there, near dusk. I would head out to the garden with my gloves and bucket, start picking veggies, and be swarmed. Absolutely swarmed.
There were always weeds to be picked. Grass to tear out. Now, because I’m only out there once a week (if that), the weeds are taking over. Clover and milkweed and random grasses – they’re stealing the sun from the planted-on-purpose vegetables. Eventually they’ll take over, and once again the area will need to be cleared. Next spring, perhaps. It’ll become a perennial tradition.
In the meantime, the beans and tomatoes keep coming. They’re crowding each other’s territory now: the tomatoes are greedy with their sunshine, and shoot stalk into the zucchini plant’s territory.
Soil and sun and water join forces to make delicious. It’s an easy formula, even when you question if it’s going to work out. You plant the seeds and you wait. And you wait some more. And then some green appears, and you’re kind of worried because you don’t know how it’s going to do. It does just fine, thanks, and in a few months you see some produce. The green tomatoes stay green longer than you’d like, and the squash never really comes at all.
“Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube,” Hunter S. Thompson once said, and it’s true in the case of gardening. Gardening is, at its heart, a Zen practice: deep breaths, slumped shoulders, and just a little bit of slack-jawed senselessness. You want the damn things to be done already, but Nature says, “Hold on. Be patient.”
What choice do you have? Squeezed out of a tube it is.
Here’s the part where I rap lyrically about the Earth and the soil, and how deep and powerful it is. The truth is, the dirt is vitally important to the vegetables, and not at all to me. I deal well with plants, not with dirt. Sweaty is better than dirty, always. Except for a short period of time when I was toddler and ate mud, getting dirty has never been my idea of fun. I love to work and to put forth effort, to get drenched in sweat and have my hands raw with effort. But I don’t like to get dirty. I leave that to the plants.
But those tomatoes? They make the whole thing worth it. Every bite is a reminder of those weeks and months of work. The little seeds that started as sprouts and then became bushy food factories. Now I have more tomatoes than I know what to do with. So I bring them to work, and others enjoy them.
Step by step, food is born. It’s a beautiful thing. Delicious, too, not only in flavor but in appreciation.
What do you do to motivate the person who has trouble staying motivated? Or to the self-starter who can’t quite get started?
How about the person with the great idea but no self discipline to get the idea off the ground?
Seth Godin quotes the famous Steve Jobs dictum: “Real artists ship.” It means you can have all the great ideas you want, but if you don’t release them out into the world, they’re worth nothing. Godin says:
A check in your wallet does you very little good. It represents opportunity, sure, but not action.
Most of us are carrying around a check, an opportunity to make an impact, to do the work we’re capapble of, to ship the art that would make a difference.
My bet is that most people who are seeing the kind of change and growth and improvement that sticks tend to avoid these sorts of dramatic, geometric attempts to leap blindly toward the mountain of perfection.
…Calendars are just paper and staples. They can’t make you care.
For me, that’s tough to hear (for you too, Dear Reader, I’ll bet). I’ve long been a Project Guy – someone who sets challenges for themselves, just to see how it goes. To experiment. To learn and grow.
I’d never seen America West of the Mississippi River. So I got in my car and went there. I’d never not eaten potatoes for 90 days. So I took on a potato fast for Lent, just because. I’d never not imbibed alcohol for a whole month. So last January I did it. I’d never grown a garden before, so last year I gave it a try and it turned out great. Not perfect, mind you, but I “shipped,” to use Steve Jobs’s phrase.
It doesn’t have to be perfect the first time. My problem is, it has to be perfect the first time.
Self starting and self discipline – these are my weaknesses. It’s easy for me to think of a neat idea, and at least get started on it. But seeing it through has always been tough. And lately, it’s been a drag just to even start.
Take this idea I have. It’s a clear solution to an obvious problem here in Jackson, and the more people I talk to the more I realize it’s an idea worth pursuing. Like, this could be my Big Thing.
The idea is there, fleshed out on scraps of paper and in the brain of me and Kelli, my co-partner. But I’ll be damned if I can get the thing going. From brain to paper to real life – the shipping is always the hardest part.
Now, this idea isn’t going to make itself. Someone else could come along and ship it before I do, and then I’ll be one of those people who kicks themselves over not having the guts to deliver.
I want to deliver. It’s my responsibility to deliver. Even if it’s not perfect, even if there are kinks in the beginning. The point is to make something, not think about making something.
So the wheels are in motion, and the homework has begun. I’ve set a deadline for myself, and I’d like to run the idea by a few more people to get their feedback. But man. This thing has to launch. It’ll kill me if it doesn’t.
Even failing is a better option than not shipping at all, right? I mean, it could be that my idea floats and then pops like a punctured balloon. The grim reality of Jackson could render the whole venture useless.
Thing is, Seth Godin and Merlin Mann and Ben Franklin tell me that failing is always an option, because we need to fail at least once in a while to learn some things. If, however, you don’t have the guts to ship anything, you’ll never fail because your stupid pea brain shifts from “Drive” to “Safety Mechanism” and you become some depressed mutant reptile who mutters “Shoulda Coulda” to teenagers at the coffee shop. No one wants that.
I type this after having worked out at the gym, meditated on self-evaluation, and completed a project for my freelance business. Surely I have the wherewithal to do something as simple as ship an idea I’ve been kicking around since October. I mean, really.
This story gets told a lot, but after my first job interview, on the eve of graduating college, I came up to my journalism professor and trusted mentor. After explaining my reservations about the job, Dr. Renner looked at me, and said, “Dave, I had a brother who noticed the same thing in me from time to time. And he told me, ‘Dennis, you can him and haw and wring your hands and sweat the small stuff, but sometimes you just have to buck up and DO IT.’”
At the “DO IT,” Dr. Renner really yelled at me.
While I haven’t always been the best at applying that little lesson, shouted at me from Dr. Renner’s office at the newspaper, I’ll never forget it. Because he saw what my problem was. Dr. Renner had the same problem, and someone once upon a time told him exactly what he needed to hear to get him moving.
Owning a camera that shoots motion-pictures, i.e., video, does not make me a filmmaker. Filmmakers have a very unique skill set that I find myself lacking. I can operate a camera, but that’s pretty much where my skills end.
It takes a director, producer, editor and many more folks to make a real film. If you think it’s easy, you’re wrong. I’ve come to realize that I suck at trying to make films. I am pretty good at capturing the footage, but I need help knowing what to shoot so that the filmmaker’s vision can be executed.
I’ve learned that I’m more of a doer than a leader – that I can executive things very, very well. But having that “vision” thing is tough for me.
Creativity comes once in a while, and some of my professional work wins awards and compliments and whatnot. But I find it far easier to implement someone else’s vision than come up with my own. They think, I make it happen. That’s the kind of setup where I thrive.
Some blessed folks have both vision and know-how. And good on them.
A friend, Britt, wants to start a blog after getting laid off at her teaching job.
She wrote:
So, I have some questions about blogging. You seem to know what you’re doing in this arena and I like what I’ve seen from your work. I outlined my Blog Plan below the questions so you can get an idea of what I am going for.
Some questions:
1. Preferred blog host? Blogger vs. WordPress vs. TypePad? Most book blogs use Blogger, but I don’t like the look of most of them. I think that I’ll go with Typepad because Andrew said that it was the best (but what does he know anyway?)
2. Do you have an editorial calendar? How far in advance do you plan blog postings?
3. Do you have any advice for community building?
4. Any advice on a good name?
5. Any advice in general?
How fun. And I must say, it’s great that you’ve put a lot of thought into this.
To answer your questions:
1.) I’m more adept at WordPress, and I love its flexibility. Chances are there’s a theme you’ll like and they’re all hackable, so you can tweak it to your exact liking. But something like Tumblr is worth looking at. It depends on how much upkeep you want to do. If you’re geeky and want to dig into some HTML, then WordPress or Typepad will be good. If you want a no-frills, just-let-me-write-and-post blogging tool, something like Tumblr, or Posterous, will work well. There’s also a question of cost: Tumblr/Posterous are free, but WordPress/Typepad may cost you – even if you only buy the domain name (like www.loblawlaw.com or something).
2.) My editorial calendar depends on the blog. For Newton Poetry, I try to do two or three posts a week, and at least one longer one every few weeks – posts where I really get down, dirty, and detailed. My personal blog is whenever I get an idea or see something I think it worth commenting on. But I do type up posts ahead of time, sometimes weeks in advance, and just sit on them until I have a slow idea week, and then I can reach in the grab bag and fill in a pre-made post. But two to three a week is good, with maybe little “here’s something interesting” posts as you find them.
3.) Your community building starts with the people you know, so this could be as easy as posting your blog on Facebook, e-mailing all your friends and family (this is no time to be shy), maybe starting a Twitter account – that kind of thing. My community was built from classic Mac nerds, so I went to where they were, delved into the culture, made posts on other’s blogs, and made myself known. Most importantly? Write good stuff. When someone finds it, your audience will build itself.
4.) Short and sweet – so loblawlawblog.com or something. Head to 1and1.com, type in some domain name ideas into their little input box, and see if someone has it already.
5.) Yes. Before anything, you need to listen to John Gruber (of Daring Fireball) and Merlin Mann’s (of 43 Folders) podcast/talk from South by Southwest on finding your voice, and finding the point of your blog. It’s a must-listen for anyone who wants to bootstrap a blog.
Also, just start writing – even though you don’t have the darned thing set up yet. Get a few draft posts in the hopper, ready to go. Show them to Andrew. Then kick him in the pants.
You’re right about those book blogs being too cluttered. You want a unique style without all the crap. If, hey, you get popular enough that advertisers want to put ads on your site – that’s gravy. But you don’t have to make it look like crap with ads and links and little “POST TO DELICIOUS!” boxes everywhere. Again, my philosophy is minimalism. Let the content speak for itself.
The cost thing again: It’s about $10/year to buy a domain name. A lot of the blogging platforms have free hosting and setup, and then you buy the domain name and point it at yourblogname.wordpress.com or whatever, but to the reader it’ll appear as yourblogname.com – so that’ll be the minimal cost, the $10. From there, if you want to do your own hosting (read: super geeky and technical), then the cost goes up.
Most of my blogs, with the exception of Newton Poetry, I let the blogging platform host, and I point my purchased domain name at it and no one knows the difference.
You’ve thought a lot about what kinds of posts to write, who your audience is, and what you want to focus on – that’s the tough part, really. Now you just need to write, find a voice, and make it all look pretty.
Laying out the design of a page or a flyer so it looks like a pro did it takes about ten times as much work as merely using the template Microsoft builds in for free, and the message is almost the same…
Except it’s not. Of course not. The message is not the same.
The last ten percent is the signal we look for, the way we communicate care and expertise and professionalism. If all you’re doing is the standard amount, all you’re going to get is the standard compensation. The hard part is the last ten percent, sure, or even the last one percent, but it’s the hard part because everyone is busy doing the easy part already.
This is what makes what I do paradoxically enjoyable and frustrating. I love concentrating on the stuff that no one else cares about because I care intensely about it. Things, little things, do matter.
On the flip side, I encounter people who are template humpers and think good enough is good enough. They have no respect for, or are totally ignorant of, that last 10 percent – and have no interest in it. It’s the interest part that’s frustrating.
For some, Microsoft Word is good enough, and Times New Roman is good enough, and an photo stolen from Google Images is good enough. For me, the fun is in tackling the good enough and making it even a tiny bit better.
Even if I never approach something a tiny bit better (and often times I don’t), the pursuit is, in of itself, a worthy goal.
There was a time when I could hear a song on the radio, pick up my guitar, and strum it out until I got the hang of the song’s chord progression or riff.
In high school, after I picked up my first guitar for $100, I could sit for hours and learn my favorite songs. Over time, I built up a competency for guitar playing. No, I couldn’t hammer out solos like my friends. I didn’t have a knack for songcraft, either. But I had enough skill to play what I wanted to play, and to learn something I heard and liked.
I like to think I still have that skill set. Like riding the proverbial bike, from time to time I pick up my acoustic guitar and everything comes back to me. The time I spent in high school was an investment that pays off every time I play.
My guitar playing came to mind during Merlin Mann’s 37-minute-long video on expertise and fake self-help. Mr. Mann learned that there are several levels of expertise, ranging from novice to expert, and your placement on the gradient is proportional to the time and attention you place on whatever it is you’re studying.
A novice, the thinking goes, starts out knowing nothing, and learns by doing exactly what they’re told. Learn the basics. Simple enough.
My journalism professor, Dr. Dennis Renner, said that “rules are made for smart people to break.” That little maxim always stuck with me because it makes so much sense. Learn the basics before you go sprinting off to change to world. You have to know something before you can’t start messing around. You don’t get smart until you move past the novice level.
So the expert and the master, as Mann labels a sixth level, are free to break the rules because they know the rules inside and out. They know the rules so deeply and personally that the rules fade into habit.
It’s the step above novice, what Dreyfus calls “advanced beginner,” that has me thinking.
For years now, I’ve dabbled in many things and have become an expert of none. It’s the Renaissance Man Syndrome: know a little about a bunch of stuff, enough to talk intelligently during dinner hour conversations, but not enough to go out and change the world. Or get anything practical done. Just knowing is different from actually doing.
Take graphic design. I’ve been doing design work for almost seven years now, from my first design class in college, yet I wouldn’t call myself anything next to an expert. I know enough to get my job done, to dabble in freelance projects, and that’s it. Mostly, I think it’s because I never developed a strong enough foundation. No art training and little design sense handicap me, and prevent me from developing my craft to an expert level.
Writing, however, is something I know deep and well. My whole life, I’ve studied grammar and story telling and expository writing. It made English an obvious bachelor’s degree choice, and helped journalism come naturally to me. Writing isn’t easy. But I know enough to do well, help others, and critique bad writing when I see it. This comes from years of doing writing.
As Merlin says, every writing book on Earth has one shared piece of advice: sit in a chair and write. That’s the only way to get better.
Well, that and pick up a goddamn book now and again.
But besides writing, I don’t have a particular skill I can call my own. Sure, I can fix a computer – but I get the knowledge to do that from online searches and a bit of history. And yeah, I can take a decent photograph – but that comes from seeing how others have done it, not from any particular depth of knowledge.
I respect men and women who can work on cars so much. They have to know a vehicle deep and well or it doesn’t get fixed. It’s a skill I’d love to pick up (and it has me researching some ways to do just that).
Mann argues that so much of our knowledge about a particular subject doesn’t get much deeper than a Wikipedia search and a few how-to articles. We become beginners at something and never really advance beyond that. It’d be like Michaelangelo putting tracing paper over a painting he saw and transferring it the Sistine Chapel. From afar, it might look nice, but up close – well, anyone could do that.
That little bit of knowledge makes us arrogant. We end up thinking we know more than we actually know.
Renaissance Men and Women of old, especially some of our founders like Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin, knew a great deal about many things. They were deep and wide. Their lives were dedicated to learning and thinking, and – in all fairness – few of us have time for that today.
Instead, we take up hobbies and learn a lot about one or two subjects. But knowing something deeply doesn’t simply affect what we do in our free time. It also affects our prospects for employment and advancement.
And shucks, it makes us interesting people. Deeply interesting. Like, magazines-or-NPR-will-interview-you-for-your-expertise interesting.
That’s not for everyone. Some people (and you know them well) are comfortable with a mile wide and an inch deep. I respect that, and it’s naive to think that everyone will become an expert in something.
But man, wouldn’t it be great if we had more people who knew what the hell they were talking about when they open their mouth?
Wouldn’t it be cool if more of us moved past the “advanced beginner” stage?
