Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

[author's note: I wrote most of this post nine months ago, but never got around to finishing it. It seemed an appropriate companion to my recent series of "Social [X]” posts, so I added a couple paragraphs to the end and am posting it.]

I was reading a gapingvoid post, and saw this wonderful quote (for reference, gapingvoid is the blog of Hugh MacLeod, who’s using social media to advertise for a wine company among many other things):

The main thesis is that it’s not the wine per se that is interesting, it’s the conversations that happen around the wine that is interesting. And that is true for all social objects. People matter. Objects don’t.

I love this quote because it gets at an idea that is very important to me, which is that nothing matters without people. I never got around to writing a This I Believe essay, but my premise was going to be that the most important thing in this world is the connection we make with each other. All of the objects and experiences in the world are means by which to satisfy the end of connecting to others.

Why do sports matter? Sports are just grown men playing kids’ sports, and yet we are willing to pay for the privilege to spend hours watching them. But it’s not about the sport itself, or the game. It’s about the connection with the other fans, about the instant communities that watching sports creates.

To illustrate this point, imagine somebody that cared about a sport that nobody else cared about – let’s say javelin throwing. This hypothetical person obsessively follows javelin competitions, can quote stats of the top throwers, etc. Most of us would consider this person to be a loser, and borderline insane. And yet they’re doing nothing different than fans of sports like football or baseball – they just don’t have the community in place to validate their behavior. Being a sports fan without connecting with other people is pointless.

I’m trying to think of objects or experiences that don’t qualify as “social objects”. Even though purely individual experiences like riding a motorcycle down the Pacific Coast Highway can be enjoyable, they only mean something when we share the story of the experience with somebody else. When we get a nifty new toy, we don’t keep it to ourselves – we want to show it off to our friends. When we find a new restaurant, we want to take others to it or at least tell them about it. We watch movies and read books and are disappointed when others haven’t because then we can’t talk about our experience with them.

I think that this social object concept can change the rules in a market. One of the reasons that the Nintendo Wii has been staggeringly successful is that Nintendo realized that gaming was not about the game, but about the social experience, and designed the Wii accordingly. Apple’s renaissance has a similar tone. Saturn was initially successful because they realized that a car wasn’t just a car, but an experience and a community which they bolstered by hosting homecoming events for Saturn owners to meet. Rock Band has been a recent phenomenon that illustrates that the games that people most enjoy are the ones that they can play together.

The Internet has been a boon to making these sorts of connections. No matter how obscure your passion is, there’s a community for it on the Internet. Sports of all kinds, crafts, do-it-yourself, hipster music, social software, Buffy the Vampire Slayer – okay, those aren’t particularly obscure, but they are the ones I know about.

This gets back to a point I made in my social technologies post – when social and technology mix, it’s the social that is interesting. We’ve been focused on the physical technology, but it’s the newly possible social communities engendered by such technology that change markets (and possibly the world!). Twitter/Facebook/LiveJournal are interesting because now I have an ambient awareness of my friends that enables me to maintain communities with them across physical boundaries. I know more about my friends that keep up such accounts regardless of where they are than I do about friends that live in the same city as me. These technologies are changing our communities and creating new ways for these communities to interact with themselves, and that sort of meta-interaction will accelerate the evolution of communities.

Hugh Macleod has continued to emphasize the importance of social objects – he believes that any marketer whose product isn’t a social object is in big trouble. See Social Objects for Beginners for another take. I’m more interested in the change in viewpoint when we stop focusing on the object, and focus on the connections the object creates. I could get really esoteric now and explain how this all relates to actor-network theory, but I’ll refrain. I’m also not sure how to tie this into creating new social technologies or what this has to do with social capitalism. Maybe one of you will make the connection for me.

Last night after class, I was skimming through my RSS feeds and saw Kevin Kelly’s post on how creators can make a sustainable business for themselves if they can get 1000 True Fans. I really liked Kelly’s take on it being more important to reach a smaller number of fanatics than to reach the mass market, as fanatics evangelize for you in a way that casual fans do not (plus they spend more).

That article linked to an article co-authored by Bruce Schneier, called The Street Performer Protocol, which suggests a way for artists and fans to securely negotiate with each other, so that fans can donate money and have some assurance that the artist will deliver a product. This is similar to the model that Jill Sobule is apparently using to fund the recording costs for her next album.

The real problem was that Kelly also mentioned that Sharon Lee and Steve Miller are doing the same thing. I adore the Liaden Universe books, and they’re posting the newest book online a chapter at a time, fuelled by donations ($300 of donations is another chapter). I said “Oh, I’ll only read a few chapters”, and the next thing I knew it was 1am and I’d read all 31 chapters (then I read the 6 chapters of the next book this morning). *sigh* I did chip in my $25 donation towards the cause, which felt good as their books have given me many hours of comfort reading pleasure over the years (plus it gets me a trade paperback edition when the book is completed and published).

I wrote about the growing Internet donation culture last year, and it’s cool to see the different ways in which it is being taken. That post mentions the different strategies people can use to get their work funded, from straight up donations to selling merchandise (T-shirts or books) to posting ads.

My favorite movie reviewer is currently struggling with these issues (see his entries on February 3rd and February 10th). He’s added several ads to his site (including a pop-under – yuck), and has been asking his readers to click on an ad or two per visit to show support. I wrote him and asked if he could add a donation button since I’d much rather give $20 directly to him than to click on ads. Interestingly, he feels more comfortable with ads than with donations, as he feels indebted if he receives donations. I don’t particularly get that, but I loathe ads.

As Shirky observes, the Internet is giving us many new ways to organize ourselves. Instead of having to go into debt with a record company to make an album, Jill Sobule can raise the money to do so from her fans. Radiohead can sell its album online with a pay-what-you-wish model. Kevin Kelly is writing his new book online in front of all of us as he tries out ideas and gets feedback. Sharon Lee and Steve Miller are writing their book online, but trading chapters for donations. So many different ways to do things, and new ones are being invented all the time. It’s a pretty interesting time to watch as the “standard” way of doing things collapses because the barriers to publication have collapsed. Now it’s up to us to iterate and find new ways that suit our needs.

Wax Banks pointed me at this lecture which you can see on Google Video by a CMU professor named Randy Pausch.

Dr. Pausch has lived an incredible life, and this lecture is about achieving your childhood dreams – he talks about his dreams, from being in zero gravity to being an Imagineer for Disney to being Captain Kirk, and how he achieved them (he didn’t get to be Captain Kirk, but he did land a walk-on role in the new Star Trek movie). He goes on to talk about helping other people achieve their dreams, and the satisfaction that comes from that. It’s a great lecture – I meant to only watch the beginning, but I ended up staying up late and watching the entire hour and a half.

One thought-provoking moment from early in the lecture is his experience as a high school football player. He had a bad day, and the coach was yelling at him throughout the practice. At the end of practice, an assistant coach sidled up to him and said “Coach was riding you pretty hard today”, and he glumly said “Yeah.” The assistant coach said, “That’s a good thing. When you’re screwing up and nobody’s saying anything to you any more, that means they gave up.”

I love that one line summary of the importance of criticism and feedback. I’ve written about the importance of feedback and the feedback sessions. I’ve also written about the value of harshness where I say “I want to be criticized. I want to find out what I’m doing wrong. How am I going to get better otherwise?” And I agree with that unnamed assistant coach – if you’re not getting feedback, that means that people have given up on you.

That sentiment also reminds me of my time at Signature. Signature BioScience had many young folks in their first or second jobs, and we were complaining about everything, sometimes legitimately and sometimes not. One of the older and wiser engineers told me at one point “You don’t understand this now, but it’s a good thing when people are complaining. When they stop complaining, that means they no longer care.” Same sentiment from the opposite direction – if I’m a manager and I’m not hearing anything from my employees, they are either still complaining and I don’t know about it (bad) or they have mentally checked out of the company and are looking for other jobs (worse). Complaining can be a sign of a healthy company where debates are happening between people passionate about trying to make the company successful.

There were lots of other great moments in the lecture, like when he described brick walls as an obstacle to help one figure out how to get past them. It was inspiring to hear about all of his accomplishments and I’ll have to see if I can figure out what my dreams are and how to move forward on achieving those dreams.

Paul Graham makes the provocative claim that “It may not matter all that much where you go to college.” He’s been evaluating startup founders as part of his Y Combinator program for a few years now, and “what we’ve found is that the variation between schools is so much smaller than the variation between individuals that it’s negligible by comparison. We can learn more about someone in the first minute of talking to them than by knowing where they went to school.” While I agree with his premise that it’s important to evaluate people on their merits, not on where they went to school, I disagree with his conclusion that the college choice does not matter.

Going to a school like MIT drives one to achieve more than one would otherwise. Graham acknowledges that “The other students are the biggest advantage of going to an elite college; you learn more from them than the professors. But you should be able to reproduce this at most colleges if you make a conscious effort to find smart friends.” But I think he underestimates the difficulty of finding those “smart friends” at a typical university as compared to the elite.

In high school, I was never particularly challenged despite being in all of the gifted classes in a very good public school with other privileged intelligent kids. Most of my classmates went on to the University of Illinois, which is a great school, but I would have been able to continue coasting there, getting high grades without really trying. Maybe there would have been a few people there who could challenge me, but finding those few people out of the tens of thousands of students would have been extremely difficult.

Going to MIT raised the bar for me. At MIT, I had to work much harder than I had ever worked before just to keep up. My freshman year, I had a physics classmate who regularly doubled my test scores (he’d get a 96 when I got a 48). Other friends were able to maintain their straight A average with ease while I was struggling to learn study habits that I had never previously needed. I learned humility at MIT in a way that never would have happened at someplace like Illinois.

And such humility continues to be reinforced. While I might be considered successful by many people based on my income and my achievements, I’m below average for my friends. On one mailing list of my friends who are managers, the introductions made me realize I was among the oldest and least accomplished of the participants, as everybody else was a CxO or VP or Director. I haven’t been featured in a New York Times article, as many of my friends have. I don’t have a patent to my name. I am not the world expert at anything. Just this past weekend, it was amazing to hear about all of the great things that people I know have been doing. Because my friends from MIT set a high standard, I am driven to achieve more than I would settle for otherwise.

Graham’s point may be that entrepreneurs need to be sufficiently self-motivated as to not need the competition of others to drive themselves past their limits. I agree with him that one can get an education of similar value at other universities, as the actual course material is the same. Perhaps a proto-entrepreneur would take full advantage of such opportunities without being forced to by the competition of other students. But I know I would not have – that may just demonstrate my laziness, but I often don’t see a reason to work harder than I have to in a given situation.

I also agree that it’s possible that the people that get into elite universities and do well at those universities are the rules-followers, and that to be a good entrepreneur means being a rule-breaker. I would contend, though, that if one can’t figure out how to master the college grading system, one is going to have a significant challenge figuring out how to master the ever-shifting economy of the real world. Learning the rules of a system and how to win under those rules is a skill that is only dismissed by those that can’t figure out how to beat that system.

As I said at the beginning, I agree with Graham’s premise that we should judge people on their own merits, not on where they went to college. But I strongly disagree with his conclusion that college therefore doesn’t matter, as I believe that my merits are much stronger than they would otherwise have been because I went to MIT. I have achieved more and gone further because I struggled through MIT than I ever would have if I had coasted through another school. And I still believe I have a long way to go, because my MIT-educated set of friends makes me believe that I shouldn’t settle for where I am now.

P.S. Having said all that, the admissions process to get into an elite university is truly ridiculous at this point – they may just be flipping coins in the back as there are far more qualified applicants than there are spaces in the incoming class. But I still believe that the education you get is worth it if you can get in because of the caliber of the other students.

P.P.S. Speaking of university, I went to the first class of the term this evening, and this is shaping up to be our hardest term yet. Man, this class is going to be rough. But it’s going to be really good for me if the prof follows through on what his intended goals are.

I liked the career advice from Scott Adams last week (also seen at Seppo’s blog), where he points out:

…if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:

1. Become the best at one specific thing.
2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.

The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try.

The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort.

I think that Adams’s point is that no matter how narrow a field you define for yourself, you’re not going to be the best in the world at it. However, once you start combining fields, the possibilities go up exponentially so intersections of two or three fields are less populated and competitive.

Adams is also right about not having to reach the top of a field to reap the benefits. Most fields have a learning curve of diminishing returns, where you can learn 80-90% of the field in a few years, but have to spend the rest of your life to get the last 10-20%. Even worse, other people in the field are simultaneously mastering the field, so you have to work continuously to match the rising level of mastery. However, if you settle for the competence of 80% rather than mastery, you can leave the field after a few years and learn something else.

One important benefit of competence in a field is the ability to speak the language or the jargon. Being able to communicate with the masters of the field means you can benefit from their expertise without having to attain it yourself. You can engage their interest and convince them to apply their skills to the problem by framing it in terms they understand. This skill is particularly important when dealing with a discipline that tends to be dismissive of outsiders, like, say, software developers.

Adams’s post reminds me of Grant McCracken’s post where he points out the importance of hiring people who have more than one deep interest:

Once someone has mastered one additional identity (or deep interest) it is easier to master new identities in the same way (and perhaps for the same reason) that knowing one additional language makes it master more languages. The candidate has learned to learn.

By learning how to learn, people can reach the point of competence in a field ever faster, increasing the number of possible ways to combine their competencies and create a niche for themselves. They can speak the languages of the experts, making them a “boundary spanner” across different areas of the organization. They can find the innovation happening at the constructive interference between fields.

I’m biased, of course, in that I call myself a generalist. I have to take the Adams strategy of combining fields, because grad school in physics proved that I don’t have the necessary focus to succeed in a single field. I’ve covered this terrain before (see the comments on my post about passion), but it’s always going to be a continuing theme in my life until I find a niche where I achieve “success”.

I’m still working out what fields I want to combine. Given my previous careers in physics and software development, and my current foray into management, leading a team to develop scientific software might suit me nicely. I’m also interested in the possibility of leading an interdisciplinary team – I really enjoyed working at Signature with the mix of biologists and physicists and engineers and software developers. The post by Adams is a good reminder that I’m not necessarily drifting – I’m just building up competence in the several fields I need to create my niche.

Thanks to Penelope Trunk linking to me from her most recent Yahoo column about productivity, it looks like I’m going to have a lot of traffic today.

For you readers that are curious, the quote she mentions (“The particular goals aren’t as important as the process of setting goals and working to meet them.”) was in an email I sent to her after writing posts about the importance of self-discipline, and how that leads to mastery. I’d love to hear any further thoughts you have on the subject.

It’s interesting how wishing sometimes makes it so on the Internet. Or at least how enough people are thinking along the same lines that ideas pop up in multiple places last month.

A few months ago, I went to a Social Media Club meeting, and came back musing about feedback karma, where it “would be a really validating thing to have a site where people came by whatever you were doing and offered encouragement.” I suggested having to comment on other people’s work to get your own reviewed, and things like that.

And apparently that site debuted at the NY Tech Meetup this week – it’s called Urbis. Check this out:
—–
The Creative Review Engine

1. Receive as much as you give using the Urbis credit system. Earn credits by reviewing people and spend credits when receiving reviews. Learn more about credits.
2. Choose whether you want supportive reviews from people you know (in-network) or unbiased reviews from strangers (out-of-network)
3. Qualify what kind of people you allow to review your work by specifying age range, location, talent, experience, and more. (coming soon)
4. Hold members accountable for reviews that don’t meet the high standards of the Urbis review guidelines.
5. Understand the value of the reviews you receive by viewing Reviewer stats.
6. Receive ratings (algoratings) that are weighted to provide a true reflection of the community’s opinion of your work.
—–

Cool stuff. Now if I could only take some of my ideas and do something with them. Inspiration, perspiration and all that.

I’m sitting in a barren apartment, stealing wireless from one of my neighbors. The movers came by this morning, and put all of my stuff on a truck. I’m taking a break from cleaning up the place a bit, throwing away the piles of trash that were generated by the packing process, sweeping up, etc.

Tonight I’m having dinner with friends at Bay Wolf, and then I get on a plane tomorrow morning to start my new life. Freak me out.

Wednesday morning, I start looking for apartments – I’ve got an appointment with an apartment broker at 10am. Hopefully the apartment search only takes a couple days, then I can enjoy the weekend before starting work on Monday. Cross your fingers.

Packing took much much much longer than I expected. I’ve probably been dealing with logistics in some form or another for a solid 6-8 hours a day for the past two to three weeks. In some ways, it will be a relief to start working again, because then at least I’ll be “done” at the end of the day. Plus my job will be more interesting than packing boxes, getting rid of stuff, and sorting through responses to craigslist ads.

It is pretty satisfying to have gotten rid of a lot of stuff. I just hope it remains satisfying when I unpack at the other end and start realizing what I don’t have any more.

To keep this from just being a boring journal post, I’ll link to two posts over at Creating Passionate Users: How to be an Expert and Don’t Forget Square One. Kathy Sierra captures a lot of the ideas driving this particular uprooting of my life – I was never going to be more than a talented amateur at programming because I was not driven to continuously improve. And the move scares me senseless, but I think that’s good because it means I’ll be operating out of my comfort zone for the first time in several years. I don’t know if this is the right thing for me, but it will be good to find out either way. Anyway – read her stuff. She’s awesome.

I’ve mostly spent today packing, but took a couple breaks to comment on one of Dave’s posts about social identity, which I’m linking to in the spirit of “owning my comments”, as Dave often does.

Other posts I’ve done that are vaguely relevant:

• Thoughts on community and identity, as inspired by Orson Scott Card
• Identity as context
• Collaborative selves
• Social butterfly

P.S. Packing proceeds apace. Discovery of the last two days – people on craigslist will take _anything_ if it’s free. I had a Salvation Army pickup yesterday morning – they took a bunch of stuff, but refused to take the furniture I wanted them to – they don’t take furniture that’s scratched, plastic chairs, or particle board bookshelves. So I put it on craigslist, and it was gone by the end of the day – that’s right, craigslist folks will take stuff that even Salvation Army won’t take. Today I put up my old skis, the straight ones that are 200cm long – Goodwill and Salvation Army won’t take these because _nobody_ uses these any more. I got a bunch of responses. It’s crazy. Free is the magic word.

P.P.S. Alas, charging money works less well. Trying to get $20 for my old bike rack has been fruitless so far – I may put it up for free tomorrow just to get rid of it. And I’m still working on getting somebody to take my dining room set and living room table, although somebody’s coming to look at the dining set this evening. Other than that, I think I’ve gotten rid of everything, assuming the guy who said he will haul away my old desk comes this weekend.

I’m not sure whether I can make it yet, but I figured I’d toss a pointer to Web 2.1, a “BrainJam” for folks who can’t or won’t pay the $2800 to go to the official Web2.0 conference this weekend. Chris Heuer decided to organize his own “unconference” to move beyond Web 2.0, to Web 2.1. Sounds like fun and really interesting. Unfortunately, it’s on Friday afternoon, so I’ll have to see if I can reconcile it with my work schedule.