About me: I'm an unrepentant generalist finding my way in a world of specialists. I started this blog to review books, but I now talk about topics ranging from management to cognition to social software.
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Last night, I attended the Mountain View Linchpin Meetup, inspired by Seth Godin’s blog post (speaking of which, I need to review Godin’s book Linchpin at some point). Spending an evening with a group of people following their passion inspired me to take a swing at restarting this blog yet again.
Today’s topic – the danger of the slippery slope, as represented by me having given up on following Facebook, or my RSS feeds, or Twitter, mostly.
Why?
Because there’s too much to follow in each of them. It takes too much time each day to stay “up-to-date”. And once I fall behind, it’s hopeless to catch up, and I have trouble letting the bits go, so I just give up entirely.
How did I get here?
By being tempted by the deceptive value of “just one more”. On Twitter, when I met or heard about somebody, I would look at their Twitter feed and if they looked marginally interesting, I’d start following them. And that was my mistake. I was comparing the value of following their Twitter feed to nothing – so long as I liked even a couple entries in the feed, I added it. But that doesn’t properly value my time – the time it takes to read those extra Tweets adds up. And because I have not been ruthlessly curating the people I follow, I’m not excited to skim through all the dross to find the gems that can appear in my Twitter stream.
In other words, a number of thoughtless incremental decisions have led me to a situation where the entire system has become useless.
The same was true of my RSS feeds – once it got to the point where it felt like a burden to keep up because I’d added too many low-marginal-value feeds, then I stopped checking, even though there are still several truly amazing people whose work I want to track.
I’ve noticed the same trend for me at work over the years. I’ll agree to take on a “quick” task, 10-30 minutes, because how can I turn down being helpful if it will take me less than a half hour? And yet, those “quick” tasks, in aggregate, add up to a significant burden.
What does this mean?
For me, it means I need to re-examine the choices I make. I need to realize that adding even a seemingly trivial task or input to my life can, over time, add up to quite a drag. I need to learn that unless my answer is “Hell, yeah!”, my answer should be no. I need to be stop wasting my limited energy on small things, and focus on what’s important.
Of course, that means deciding what’s important for myself, which is a whole separate problem, but let’s start by clearing out the unimportant stuff out first.
Thanks again to all the great people I met last night, and let’s see if I can stop making excuses and start writing blog posts again.
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Great post Eric. Time to clean up my RSS reader and the rest of my life… Your blog is staying put of course.
Its about time you start blogging. I went though the same ordeal of following every little thing that I am interested in. I had to reset my reading habits.
I was happy to see your blog. I don’t know you personally but your thought do influence me and this blog is the only link so please do write…
Do you feel that this conflicts with your being a generalist?
Thanks for the encouragement, Ella and Kiran. I need to get back in the habit.
Long, good question – I don’t think it necessarily conflicts with being a generalist. But it’s true that part of my value is fitting pieces together even when those pieces don’t seem relevant initially. Part of my strength is in constructing a structure in which pieces of information can be integrated, such that “random” facts actually fit together.
Hello Eric
Many thanks for the mention (and good luck with eliminating the busyness).
Best wishes from Wales
Michael
My approach, which may or may not work for you is:
1. Actively and attentively follow people I want to collaborate with.
2. Passively, in my free time, follow people who have interesting things to offer, until I’ve really absorbed and understood their most valuable ideas (the ones they keep harping on).
This way, I use my time and energy for it’s most effective purpose, while allowing me to learn somewhat random new things whenever I have the time to do so. And while some people I can pick up on their most valuable idea pretty quickly and can put someone new in their spot in my list, other people stay on for a very, very long time because their ideas are so complex and/or changing.
Somewhere, sometime it was decided that it was unacceptable to blog or tweet or interact online *occasionally*. It became an all-or-nothing process. And this fubar’d everything.
It’s not very authentic for everyone to have something valuable to say all the time, is it? Most conversations with friends and acquaintances contain filler in between the good bits. And sometimes, if we’re lucky, it’s the filler that ignites the good bits.
The question then is who’s filler is worth enduring or is most likely to lead to the good bits?
This is amazing, everyone has got to look at their life and decide whats important. I have a friend who complains about every little detail though, sometimes we gotta push through the small things in order to help someone especially if they are really close, but we shouldn’t put ourselves out too much either.
Eric,
It’s been a blast knowing you for the short time that I’ve known you. You’re even more of a generalist than I am – I speak admiringly.
As generalists, we’ll always have to expend energy distinguishing between signal vs. noise.
One thing I’ve found helpful is to focus on shipping and creating – it reduces your time of exposure to signal and noise. It sounds like a loss but I think it’s a good thing.