Rereading Tom Peters’ Little BIG Things.
GREAT how he has chosen the first little BIG thing to be The Loo!
A shiny toilet tells everything.
(Also notice the Discipline that these pages breathe.)
(And yeah, go fix your voicemail message (#2 little BIG Thing).)
All Families Are Psychotic is a journey through the chaotic events of a family get together.
I love these books from Douglas Coupland where the story brings you semi-random from one idiotic hilarious episode into the other. Btw why does Douglas Coupland remind me of Grady Booch? Both seem a bit scruffy outliers in their worlds – is how I would describe it in an instant answer without much further thought. It the same thing that attracts me in Haruki Murakami’s novels – the semi randomness of the events that lead the protagonists(s) through the story. The story is the way.
I believe my family is psychotic, but this Drummond family excels at it. What starts off as a family event around daughter Sarah’s jump into space – she’s an astronaut, develops into a wild road movie, with lots of collateral damage. So take Coupland’s title with a touch of salt, but it’s a great rollercoaster read.
While you are at it also read Coupland’s Player One which has a similar cadence.
I your more have time to shred also read Murakami trilogy 1q84.
I recently visited Belgium, the area of Ieper. The remains of the First World War there are impressive.
I got interested and purchased The First World War by John Keegan, which was according to the mass on google the essential guide to the First World War. My notes of this reading.
The incredible back story to this War. Starting with the long envisioned Schieffenplan, which had been cooking in Germany long before the war started. All the parties seems to be preparing their armies for a war. At a certain point the war became unavoidable.
How easily the war could have been prevented by some basic diplomatic actions.
Both sides hold on to very basic offensive tactic of frontal offence. Leading to many death. Both sides undertook these initiatives, which hundred thousand deaths or more in a week. This happened at all frontiers.
Besides the most well-known frontier in the West, mainly in Belgium and Norther France, the War was fought Africa in the German colonies, in the Middle East (Turkey being the ally of Germany in this war, in the Caucasus, Greece, Serbia, and at sea.
Germany was very successful with their submarines.
The war led or coincided with the downfall of the three large power centres in Europe: the tzar in Russia, the Austro-Hungarian emperor and the last emperor of Germany.
After the war Europe was fragmented in many new nation states due to the downfall of Germany and Austria-Hungary. This instabilities caused by this outcomes are still felt.
Keegan ends with the remark that is difficult to understand why a prosperous continent risked their achievements and values in ended up in such a bloody conflict.
A war that should never have happened. Not only was it meaningless. It was preventable.
Probably the greatest book title of 2016: Nobody Wants To Read Your Sh*t by Steven Pressfield. It’s a very practical book.
Pressfield describes how over the years he learned how to write. He goes through his lengthy career and shares what he has learned in all these jobs leading to success as a writer. He explains how he has learned from his job as a copywriter to cut down his messages to the core.
- Streamline your message. Focus it and pare it down to its simplest, clearest, easiest-to-understand form.
- Make its expression fun. Or sexy or interesting or scary or informative. Make it so compelling that a person would have to be crazy NOT to read it.
- Apply that to all forms of writing or art or commerce.
He goes with his main theme for this book, which is you have to seduce your readers to read your stuff because they are not sitting around, waiting for your genius.
Have you reckoned the two principles in these first few pages? 1) Nobody wants to read your shit. 2) If you want to write and be recognized, you have to do it yourself. From these twain, all else proceeds.
Pressfield finds having a concept in your writings of key importance. He is coming from a copywriting perspective, a product perspective. See your book as a product.
A concept takes a conventional claim and puts a spin on it. A concept establishes a frame of reference that is greater than the product itself. A concept sets the product in a context that makes the viewer behold the product with fresh eyes—and perceive it in a positive, compelling light. A concept frames (or, more frequently, re-frames) the issue entirely.
During his years as a copywriter and writer for movies and series, he has learned that being authentic, being yourself, is very important. You can only speak to the heart by being authentic. If it is not meant, people simply will not believe you.
I said to myself, “It’s okay to be the kind of person I am.” It’s okay to be anxious. It’s okay to be unable to sleep. It’s okay to lack self-esteem. It’s okay to be an introvert, to seek out the quiet corners at a cocktail party, to care about quality, and to have your mood be affected by your surroundings.
Stealing is ok. Stealing is almost mandatory. You learn from others. But it should not be copying. Stealing should be done well. Austin Kleon has dedicated his book Steal Like An Artist to it.
“Kid, it ain’t stealing if you put a spin on it.”
Besides the concept, you need a theme. Nobody want to read your shit if the theme is not clear. it is what is in it for the reader.
Ask not, “What is the solution?” Ask, “What is the problem?” The problem in fiction, from the thrashing writer’s point of view, is almost always, “What is this damn thing about?” In other words, what’s the theme? What’s the theme of our book, our play, our movie script? What’s the theme of our new restaurant, our start-up, our video game? When we don’t
Pressfield shares how to structure stories. Discusses practical advice like having a clear Inciting Incident – in a movie – and that is something to repeat in your writing. He learned in during one of the formal classes Pressfield took.
About an hour into Friday evening’s class, he introduced the concept of the Inciting Incident. What was revolutionary for me was not so much that specific idea (though indeed it changed everything about the way I worked) as the mind-blowing thought that this stuff could actually be taught. … The Inciting Incident is the event that makes the story start. It may come anywhere between Minute One and Minute Twenty-Five. But it must happen somewhere within Act One. … How can you tell when you’ve got a good Inciting Incident? When the movie’s climax is embedded within it.
He shares a useful complete set of non-technical skill he acquired over the years.
I had learned these storytelling skills. But other capacities that I had also acquired over the preceding twenty-seven years were even more important. These were the skills necessary to conduct oneself as a professional—the inner capacities for managing your emotions, your expectations (of yourself and of the world), and your time. 1) How to start a project. 2) How to keep going through the horrible middle. 3) How to finish. 4) How to handle rejection. 5) How to handle success. 6) How to receive editorial notes. 7) How to fail and keep going. 8) How to fail again and keep going. 9) How to self-motivate, self-validate, self-reinforce. 10) How to believe in yourself when no one else on the planet shares that belief.
The aspiring writer is challenged by Pressfield not to be constrained about the things to write about. It does not matter if you do not know about a subject or situation. Just let it go and it will bring unexpected results.
The conventional truism is “Write what you know.” But something mysterious and wonderful happens when we write what we don’t know. The Muse enters the arena. Stuff comes out of us from a very deep source.
All nice about his storytelling and structuring skills developed writing stories for television and plays. But the world of a novel is different.
A novel is too long to be organized efficiently like a screenplay. There aren’t enough 3X5 cards in the world. Too much shit happens. New characters appear. New ideas show up. The whole story can get hijacked by the apparition of Mr. Micawber or Hamlet’s ghost or Winnie the Pooh.
So you are on your own there. And in the end, Pressfield comes back to the eternal enemy, which he wrote about extensively in his book Do The Work: Resistance.
Remember, the enemy in an endurance enterprise is not time. The enemy is Resistance. Resistance will use time against you. It will try to overawe you with the magnitude of the task and the mass of days, weeks, and months necessary to complete it.
Required reading:
Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with A Thousand Faces, C.G. Jung’s Two Essays on Analytical Psychology and Symbols of Transformation, and, for the real Movieland nitty-gritty, Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey.
And Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder.
If you haven’t read Save the Cat! and Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies, get them right away. One of Blake’s principles is Keep It Primal. A great movie, he believes, should be so basic, so soul-grounded, that it could be understood by a caveman. In other words, without language. Without dialogue.
Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing is not about Zen at all. The Zen part is a marketing trick, he admits in the
book.
The book is about writing though. In a cast-iron writing style.
At the level of Stephen King’s On Writing or Steven Pressfield‘s War of Art.
Go Set A Watchman is als het vervolg op To Kill A Mockingbird. Maar het is donkerder dan The Mockingbird.
Atticus, de morele held in de Mockingbird, valt van zijn voetstuk in de Watchman. Vooral in de ogen van zijn bewonderende dochter, Scout.
Er is geen hoop voor Atticus, die vecht tegen onrecht in de Mockingbird. De kleurlingen hebben hun eigen advocaten gekregen en zijn niet langer afhankelijk van de weinige blanken die hen verdedigen. Deze ontwikkeling heeft echter niet tot meer eenheid geleid. Het heeft meer scheiding vergroot. Het heeft argwaan gewekt tussen zwart en wit. Het heeft de balans in het dorp verbroken.
Scout worstelt met dit karakter van het Zuiden.
Dr. Finch, Atticus broer, legt haar de geschiedenis van de oorlog in het zuiden uit. Het is een strijd om hun identiteit te behouden.
“Now then, Scout,” said her uncle, “Now, at this very minute, a political philosophy foreign to it is being pressed on the South, and the South’s not ready for it – we’re finding ourselves in the same deep waters. As sure as the time, history is repeating itself, and as sure as man is man, history is the last place he’ll look for his lessons.”
The Watchman beschrijft dat scherpe verschil tussen republikeinen en democraten in de Verenigde Staten, dat we nog steeds kunnen vinden. Diezelfde identiteitsstrijd. De oorlog tussen Noord en Zuid is nog steeds aan de gang. Nergens is de strijd tussen links en rechts zo fundamenteel en ook belemmerend als hier in de VS. Ik was stomverbaasd om te lezen dat er zo weinig is veranderd.
Nog schokkender vond ik de karakterontwikkeling van Scout. The Mockingbird en The Catcher in The Rye waren deze fantastische romans waarin de jeugdige hoofdrolspelers achter hun naïeve maar authentieke zelf staan, hoe erg het ook afloopt. Maar in The Watchman wordt het idealistische, radicale karakter van Scout verpletterd en lijkt ze zich eindelijk te onderwerpen aan traagheid, ze vindt haar thuis en innerlijke stabiliteit na een grote ruzie met Atticus.
Wat een duisternis: gelijkheid faalt, ideologie faalt, cynisme en traagheid overleeft.
I got the Mockingbird for my birthday. Along with Go Set A Watchman. I had not read it before and thought it was time now to catch up.
There seems to have been quite a debate about Go Set A Watchman, the Mockingbird sequel. Originally, the early version of the Mockingbird was published only in 2015, about 55 years after the Mockingbird. According to some, the publication was against Harper Lee’s will. According to other sources, Lee was not mentally capable anymore at that late stage of her life to put off the publication.
Harper Lee recently passed away, in February this year.
I only knew her name as the writer of the classic Mockingbird. She grew up in the south of the US, and some of the stories in the book, let’s say, show parallels to biographical facts in her life. After writing The Mockingbird, she slowly disappeared from public life. Her biography is shockingly uninteresting.
The book breathes the southern small-town countryside feeling I associate with William Faulker’s books, such as As I Lay Dying.
And Nick Cave’s And the Ass Saw The Angel. Rotten characters, Euchrid Eucrow-like. A lazy mood caused by early-day booze.
The introduction is the second-best book introduction.
“Please spare Mockingbird an introduction”
(The best is the Salmon of Doubt introduction by Terry Jones).
I also found a place where J.K. Rowling may have gotten her idea for Dementors in the Harry Potter series from Hot Steams.
‘A Hot Steam’s somebody who can’t get to heaven, just wallows around on lonesome roads an’ if you walk through him, when you die you’ll be one too, an’ you’ll go around at night suckin’ people’s breath -‘
Hot Steam is a southern US superstition.
Boo Radley, a dark small town legend, a potential Euchrid Eucrow, prefers to live indoors. Because he wants to. Because he hates the small town outside. But unlike Euchrid Eucrow, Boo remains on the light side and becomes a hero, saving the kids Jem and Scout from the real dark Euchrid Eucrow character of the story, Bob Ewell.
The story’s hero is Atticus Finch, the father of Jem and Scout. The story is told through Scout, who observes the small-town manners, flaws, prejudices, and discrimination. Atticus Finch is the moral champion. Against the will of the white people in the village, he defends the black Tom Robinson, who is accused of raping a white girl, even though Atticus knows the case can not be won and the jury has already convicted the black man.
Further reading.
Harper Lee – Go Set A Watchman
Self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy—these leaders are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will.
I was astonished, reading Good To Great. It has so many findings about great companies, that are massively ignored.
Many business leaders have referred to this book as a guide in their leadership practice. While in their own organisations the findings they cast aside the findings in this book on a day by day basis.
Let’s go through a couple of these themes.
Ten of eleven good-to-great CEOs came from inside the company, whereas the comparison companies tried outside CEOs six times more often.
So no need to attract expensive business leaders from the outside. What we hear about their compensations schemes we sometimes find unethical and excessive.
We found no systematic pattern linking specific forms of executive compensation to the process of going from good to great.
Not only does the compensation not necessarily need to be very high. Moreover, the leaders of these companies stand out in humility. Leaders of great companies are to themselves, focused on the company, not themselves, have a big sense of humility and do not have big egos, are persistent calm and determined.
Self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy—these leaders are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will.
As surprising, great companies are not great because they have such a fantastic strategy. Nor is it technology or acquisitions, a very promising industry or special program.
Discipline and perseverance are the most important traits of great companies.
Every good-to-great company embraced what we came to call the Stockdale Paradox: You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, AND at the same time have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
…
In confronting the brutal facts, the good-to-great companies left themselves stronger and more resilient, not weaker and more dispirited. There is a sense of exhilaration that comes in facing head-on the hard truths and saying, “We will never give up. We will never capitulate. It might take a long time, but we will find a way to prevail.
…
No, those who turn good into great are motivated by a deep creative urge and an inner compulsion for sheer unadulterated excellence for its own sake.
It is doing the work, a feel for business, grit, a lack of arrogance, not taking anything for granted, that distinguishes the great companies
It is in such a sharp contrast with what you see in the large majority of the Fortune 500 companies, that I wonder how the leaders in these companies, and the big consulting companies advising these companies, and likely the investors in these companies can continue to ignore such fundamental findings.
When you put these two complementary forces together—a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship—you get a magical alchemy of superior performance and sustained results.
Read on:
Tom Peters, for example The Little BIG THings.
Collins refers to Stockdale’s In Love and War, a book I would like to read next.
Work for Money. You are in business.…Anything I have to tell you can be summed up thusly: charge as much as you can, deliver an honest value, and never work for free. Unfortunately, most designers feel such pangs of guilt about.…The secrets to getting the price you want for your work are having done the homework to know you’re asking for the right thing, the confidence to ask for it, and the willingness to walk away when you can’t get it.
The myth of the magical creative is alive and well, and it’s powerful.…A designer requires honest feedback and real criticism, and that’s not going to happen in a realm where colleagues or clients are worried about crushing the spirit of a magical being.
A DESIGNER SOLVES PROBLEMS WITHIN A SET OF CONSTRAINTS.… any design task you undertake must serve a goal. It’s your job to find out what those goals are.
information about her clients and their goals. What do they want to achieve, what is the context in which they are operating, what their financial constraints are.Figure out what the client really wants early Most clients will approach you with a wish list of desires. If they don’t you should actually work with them on coming up with one. Assign a cost and a benefit to each one.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that you are evaluating the potential client as much as they are evaluating you. Prospective clients sometimes find this surprising.…I totally encourage you to go after clients you want to work for. Let’s just be realistic about the return on this type of business development. It is very, very low.…The clients you choose to take on define you. Your portfolio needs to tell a story and each client you add to it is another chapter in that story. Make sure you’re consciously building the story you want to be telling.
If you’re here it’s probably because you bought my book and read all the way to page 18, where I promised you a screener for ferreting out whether you’re talking to the right clients or not. Well, here it is.
Selling your work directly to clients is extremely important. Not only should you be able to explain why you made the decisions you did, but you’ll get first-hand feedback on where the work needs to go next.…Look for clients who have clear goals, not detailed punch lists. This is especially true of RFPs that require you to reply directly to each line item at the risk of being disqualified from the process. You don’t want to sign up for a process that you know is broken from the start. Once you set sail on a boat you can’t convince a captain to take to the sky.
Not knowing the design language doesn’t make someone a bad client. I doubt very much that most of you could have a medical conversation with your doctor on par with a conversation your doctor could have with another doctor, and that doesn’t make you a bad patient.…It’s your job as a designer, and a communication professional, to find the right language to communicate with your client. When you say a client doesn’t “get it” you might as well be saying, “I couldn’t figure out how to get my point across. I am a lazy designer. Please take all my clients from me.”…The biggest myth ever perpetuated in the design field is that good design sells itself.
Being able to present your own work is a core design skill. It helps build rapport with the client. It puts the person directly responsible for the work in front of them. It shows them that you’re presenting that work with confidence. And it gives them an opportunity to ask questions directly of the person who did the work.
Your first job is to separate the actionable feedback from the non-actionable feedback. Sometimes clients just like to document their thought process. Your job is to sift through and find the actionable from the non-actionable.
“I once argued with a client for an hour over an issue I didn’t care about (eventually letting him win!), because I really cared about the next issue coming up. At that point, he was so tired out and savoring his victory
Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World, which I will bluntly summarize like so: you are responsible for the work you put into the world.I urge each and every one of you to seek out projects that leave the world a better place than you found it. We used to design ways to get to the moon; now we design ways to never have to get out of bed. You have the power to change that.
Just as you’re responsible for the quality of a project, your project manager is responsible for getting it done on time. And with the maximum amount of profit. This doesn’t mean you’re not both thinking about those things. It means you each own your part of the project. This often leads to tension, as your ultimate goal is to do good work, and the project manager’s ultimate goal is to do the work on time. And that’s pretty much how it should work.
Perpetual intellectual curiosity is the greatest resource a professional designer can have. Barring that, an island hideaway is nice.