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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I went to New York Bite Club last weekend. Bite Club is an underground eating club which serves gourmet dinners in private apartments around New York. It was excellent. I highly recommend it.
It was an amusing process to get into the dinner. I had to apply online at their site, and then exchanged a few emails with the organizer. Then to ensure my seriousness in attending the selected dinner, I had to drop off a cash deposit - it was fairly odd to walk into an office building, go into a random office, and drop off an envelope full of cash to a receptionist with a knowing nod. I was then sent an email with the location, with the warning “IT IS VERY IMPORTANT that silence is maintained while walking through this hallway. All noise can be heard by neighbors and that can bring a lot of attention to our operation, which isn’t going to be acceptable.”
Saturday night finally arrived. I got into the elevator with three other people. We realized we were all going to the same floor, and grinned sheepishly at each other. We walked into a typical New York apartment with the main room filled with tables and chairs, and a couple people working feverishly in the kitchen. We were assigned seating (the organizer had tried to balance the tables with appropriate dinner partners). I was at a table with a Wall Street trader and a manufacturer’s representative. We started talking, but our thoughts were on the food to come.
The night that I went was a 7-course winter tasting menu with a wine pairing (click on any picture for the Flickr set). It was _fantastic_. Comments on most of the courses:
The thing that amazed me was that this was not a specialized kitchen - this was a regular New York kitchen. They brought in extra dishes, an extra set of shelves to hold them, and a table for prep, but other than that, there’s really no excuse for me not to be able to make such dishes myself. Well, except for lacking culinary skill.
Oh, that was the other amazing part - when we inquired as to which restaurant the chef was associated with, we found out that he just does this for fun. His day job has nothing to do with food. He just really enjoys cooking and trying new things, and started throwing bigger and bigger dinner parties until he decided to make it a regular event.
All in all, it was a lovely evening. Four and a half hours of good conversation, while being pampered with a wonderful seven course dinner, each paired with a well-chosen wine. It was pricy, but still far cheaper than a similar dinner would be at a haute cuisine restaurant. Definitely an experience I look forward to repeating as soon as I can raise the funds 
Official book site, including the full text in PDF format
Amazon link
Solove is an associate professor of law at the George Washington University Law School who blogs at Concurring Opinions. Being involved in the blogosphere has given him a unique perspective on how new social technologies are pushing the boundaries of what existing law covers. This book, subtitled “gossip, rumor, and privacy on the internet”, is his exploration of some of those issues.
It was interesting reading this book immediately after Here Comes Everybody, in that Shirky’s book explores the capabilities that new social technologies are enabling, whereas Solove’s book explores the accompanying risks and consequences. Shirky tells us about all the great ways in which we can collaborate to create new content and publish it worldwide. Solove reminds us that when we can publish, so can everybody else, which means that your reputation can be destroyed with a few clicks from a malicious source.
The book starts with the story of the “dog poop girl”. A Korean teenage girl was on the subway when her dog pooped. She was asked to clean it up, but refused. Twenty years ago, people in the subway car would have cursed her under their breath, but the incident would have been forgotten within a few days. What happened instead was that somebody snapped her picture with their cell phone, and posted the incident to a popular Korean blog. The picture and post went viral, crossed into the mainstream Korean media, and she became infamous throughout the country, harassed wherever she went and forced to drop out of university because of the shame.
The following paragraph from the book is the central issue that faces us:
There’s a paradox at the heart of reputation - despite the fact we talk about reputation as earned and the product of our behavior and character, it is something given to us by others in the community. Reputation is a core component of our identity - it reflects who we are and shapes how we interact with others - yet it is not solely our own creation… Our reputation depends upon how other people judge and evaluate us, and this puts us at the mercy of others. Our good reputation can quickly be lost, with deleterious consequences to our friendships, family, jobs, and financial well-being. We must all cope with the fragility of reputation, the delicate porcelain vessel that carries our ability to function in society.”
Solove titles one of his chapters “The Digital Scarlet Letter” to indicate how we can be branded with shameful behavior online. If we do something that somebody else thinks is inappropriate, they can call us out in a blog post, and our indiscretion will be forever archived and searchable from Google. And if the story is entertaining enough to get passed around (as did Aleksey Vayner’s ludicrous video CV), then your story will become a punchline to people who would otherwise have never heard of you, an aspect of your past that you can never escape. Solove tells us of a world where we can never live down our past indiscretions, where every mistake we have ever made can be magnified and used to shame us.
Some might say that people like the “dog poop girl” deserve to be shamed, that if they behave that way in public, it is appropriate to shame them in public as well. But who gets to decide what behavior is shameworthy? Should the person get a chance to explain their behavior? And is it fair to punish them with the irretrievable loss of their reputation without some sort of due process?
When the means of publication were valuable and restricted to only a few outlets, we could assume that information published about others was likely to be true, as the punishment for libel was the loss of the right to publish, and newsworthy, as it wouldn’t be worth publishing otherwise. Those assumptions do not hold true with free and easy Internet publishing. There is no incentive to check for truth, and any perceived slight can be published without rebuttal.
Solove brings up excellent questions about reputation and privacy in the Internet age, but I was disappointed in his proposed solutions. It’s not surprising that this lawyer proposes law as the appropriate response, but Solove did not convince me. He suggests that we need more torts for loss of reputation, and for breach of confidentiality. He does note that informal mediation and arbitration should be the first steps in redressing a perceived wrong, and that lawsuits should be the last resort. But given the glacial speed at which legal precedents evolve, I’m nervous about using it as the stick by which we create the social norms that guide us through this world of new social technologies.
I think that our best bet is to wait for social norms to evolve, rather than depending on the clumsy tool of the law to preemptively shape those norms. I think that our expectations have not caught up to the technology capabilities yet - we don’t have an intuitive sense that our words, published on a blog intended for just our friends and family, can suddenly go viral and be read by millions, many of whom have no idea of the context in which those words were written. We haven’t developed the skills to read virtual cues, or the ability to articulate those virtual cues in a way that makes it clear to our social brains what the appropriate behavior is. Most people now understand that private email should not be forwarded to a list of thousands. We need similar norms to develop around our publications and public actions - just because something is not inside our own homes does not mean that it is meant to be broadcast worldwide. The transparent society may be coming, but we’re not quite there yet.
I highly recommend this book as a thoughtful exploration of some of the troubling issues associated with the rise of new social technologies. While I don’t agree with Solove’s conclusions about how to address those issues, I appreciate his asking of the questions, and I will be curious to see how our society answers those questions.
Thanks to danah boyd who recommended this book last month.
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.
While introducing ourselves at the Tech Dinner Salon on blogging last week (which I really enjoyed), one of the points of information everybody included was how long they had been blogging. The newest blogger had just started two weeks earlier. And then there was me, who realized I’d been doing this for five years. My first blog post was on March 3, 2003, five years ago today.
You can look back at that first month and see how things started - every post is a one paragraph summary of a book I had read. It wasn’t until September of that year that I started writing about other things, and in November, I merged the “ramblings” blog with the book review blog.
I had actually been writing online for many years before starting a blog. I put up my first web page in 1994, and wrote several rambling posts over the next few years. I also regularly wrote up brief book summaries on that web page. But blogging software obviously made it much easier.
I first started blogging with Blosxom, where I just had to create a text file and then run a script to push it to my blog’s website. After a couple years, I started running into limitations like the lack of comments, the inability to keep drafts easily, and the fact that I could only blog from my home computer. I eventually switched to Wordpress, which has been a joy to use for the last three years. I highly recommend it.
It’s interesting to look back and see how this blog has evolved for me. It started off as a place to do quick book reviews so that I could record key ideas from books as I finished them. I then started using it as a place to rant about politics, which culminated in my trip to Ohio for the 2004 election. And now I mostly use it as a place to publish essays on a variety of topics that interest me.
It’s also interesting to think about what my blog is not.
So why do I blog? (another good question from the Tech Dinner Salon)
So where do I want to take this blog over the next five years? I’m not really sure yet. I’d love to find a way to make the sort of writing and thinking I do here more of my life, possibly even as a career path. I’ve been tossing around the idea of turning this blog into a community site for generalists, because there are too many specialists in the world. I even grabbed UnrepentantGeneralist.com recently in case I decide to move in that direction (it just points here for now).
In the meantime, I plan to continue writing here, thinking about different things, and hopefully providing a perspective on the world that you hadn’t considered.
While I’d get some benefits from writing into the void, it makes a huge difference knowing that there are people out there reading what I have to say. I think making connections with other people is one of the most important goals in life, and so I want you to know that I really appreciate each and every reader out there. Thanks for reading.
I was listening to Kevin Kelly’s Long Now talk this afternoon while out for a walk (as an aside, the Long Now talks are one of the things I miss about the Bay Area, but I’m catching up on the ones I’ve missed over the past two years by listening to the podcasts on my iPhone). I liked Kelly’s book Out of Control many years ago, and in this talk, he applies some of those ideas to science. In talking about how science is evolving, he discussed the contingent nature of Truth, and got me thinking about science as a system. But let’s start with something easier: Wikipedia.
Clay Shirky has a great quote in Here Comes Everybody, where he says “A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product, and as a result, it is never finished.” Think about what Wikipedia is. If you took a snapshot of all the articles at a given point in time and recorded it, would that be Wikipedia? No.
Wikipedia is not just the knowledge contained in Wikipedia, but also the process by which that knowledge grows. It’s the thousands of people fixing typos and subscribing to articles to revert vandalism. It’s people building on each other’s knowledge (Shirky points out that the initial entry for asphalt was just “Asphalt is a material used for road coverings.” and has since evolved into a detailed entry). Wikipedia is an evolving system that includes the people, the knowledge embodied in the articles and also the wiki technology that enables the system.
Shirky’s other point that “it is never finished” is also important. Wikipedia articles are never “done”, with no more that needs to be said. Articles can always be improved. More citations can be added. Topics can be made clearer. New information can be included.
The analogy to science is clear. Science is a process, not a product that can be “finished”. It is a systematic way of expanding our knowledge. Scientists are always looking for ways to improve scientific knowledge, by running experiments to test the outer limits of current theories. Kelly touched upon this in the question and answer period - he said he realized that science was not about discovering the Truth, because Truth is a contingent entity (shades of Latour’s “Constitution”). The goal of science is instead to continue doing science, to continue expanding the realm of questions that we can ask, because good discoveries always bring more questions than answers.
Kevin Kelly described science as an infinite game, a concept which I learned about at the Long Now talk of James Carse. Infinite games are where the goal is not to win the game, but to keep playing the game, changing the rules as necessary so that the game endures. Science keeps on evolving, not just in terms of its knowledge, but also in how it is done (see the talk summary for a chronological history of improvements of how we do science).
I love this vision of a contingent, fluid, evolving system. I don’t like absolutes, or the idea that there is a single answer, or that there is only one way of looking at a situation. This may be because that’s just how my brain works. But I think the infinite game is a powerful vision of how we should conduct our lives. It’s why I felt discomfort with The 4 Hour Work Week, as that treats life as a finite game where the goal is to win. But how would one play an infinite game in other areas of life besides science?
Built to Last is a business book designed to extract the lessons learned by companies that have been successful for decades. Yet one could interpret the ideas in that book as a guide on how to play business as an infinite game. “Preserve the core, but stimulate progress” - stick to your core values, but be willing to change everything else from your business model to the products you make. Keep changing the rules by which you’re playing towards the goal of continuing to play the game.
Preserving the core is also important in playing an infinite game. With nothing to cling to, the game spins out of control and loses meaning. Kelly was asked about “intelligent design” in his talk. I see “intelligent design” as mimicking the trappings of science, without applying the core values - the scientific method and controlled experiments and falsifiability. Creationists are trying to win the finite game of we’re right and you’re wrong, but in doing so, lose all credibility in the infinite game.
We see this cargo cult science all over the place, where people take the surface lessons and try to apply them in such a way as to win their finite game, without understanding the core lessons that are what made the original an infinite game. I’m thinking of how we are fooled by randomness, or how people imitate the clothing and affectations of wealthy people in the hopes of becoming wealthy.
Another interesting aside is thinking through the implications of the idea above that it is the process that is important, not the end result. You may recall that I am scornful at best of process in the workplace, preferring to put my trust in the resourcefulness of people. So how can I support this idea of science as a process?
My review of a Six Sigma book gives a hint: “when process is an end in itself, … it can choke an organization and prevent people from achieving what needs to get done.” In other words, when the process is viewed as a finite game that takes precedence, it is a bad thing. However, if process is viewed as part of an infinite game, where it is being used to promote core values and where the process can modify itself to improve its ability to achieve those core values, then I think process can be valuable. Science is a great example - it continues to evolve in its search for answers, answers which then provoke more questions.
This is a big topic and I need to think more about it. I should also probably re-read Finite and Infinite Games for ideas. But I really like this vision of things like science and Wikipedia being processes in a continual state of evolution without an end goal, and of how that ties into the idea of infinite games. I think there’s a powerful idea lurking here someplace, and I’ll have to see if I can tease it out. I also need to figure out if I can apply these ideas to running one’s personal life - where the goal of life isn’t to have the most money, or most knowledge, or most fame, but to have created a process by which one is continually growing.
What do you think?
Over the holidays, I got in a conversation about various social technologies like Twitter and Facebook, and found myself defending them as useful (which is interesting because six months previously, I said I “dislike the minimal information content transmitted via Facebook status messages or Twitter messages”). Other people couldn’t understand the point of posting one line updates about oneself to the Internet. They thought that it was the peak of vanity to think that anybody cared that one was taking a walk, or working on homework, or any of the numerous mundane things that people post as status updates.
I tried to convey Grant McCracken’s description of phatic communication, which is the idea that the actual content of the communication is meaningless, but the communication itself is not. The communication demonstrates that a human connection exists. It’s like a tracer bullet that has no impact itself but illuminates the path that a more impactful communication could follow.
Another tactic I used to try to explain the point of one-line status updates is the water cooler chat. You see a coworker at the water cooler or coffee machine, and you say “Hey, how was your weekend?” They respond with a one line summary. You both go on your way. Or the one line summary prompts a response which starts a conversation.
A Twitter or Facebook update serves the same purpose - it’s a placeholder that often just disappears but occasionally can spark a useful conversation that would not otherwise have happened. The conversation may not happen via the status updates, as it can range across different media. This separation of the useful consequences from the status update itself may make it appear that it is useless, but the status update should be seen more as the tip of an iceberg, signifying a larger mass of social connection.
Clay Shirky observes that one reason we may be confused by status updates is that these new social technologies have blurred the line between the public and the private. He pointed out that if you went to a mall and sat at the food court near a group of teenage girls, you would overhear a conversation including gossip about various boys and who was seeing whom. The mall is a public space, but “if you were listening in on their conversation at the mall, … it would be clear that you were the weird one.”
However, with tools like MySpace and LiveJournal bringing the cost of “publishing” to zero, now those same conversations are happening online. Shirky’s insight is that when people post about their cats or the gossip they just heard, they aren’t talking to you, the random stranger listening in - they’re talking to their circle of friends. In some ways, publishing to the Internet is more efficient; instead of having to make ten phone calls to share a particularly juicy piece of gossip, a teenager can post once and reap the social benefits of breaking the news.
Publishing used to be difficult and expensive, so we assumed that anything that got published was valuable in its own right. We aren’t used to the idea that the equivalent of water cooler chatter or gossip at the mall is now preserved in a more permanent form. As Shirky observes,
“what was once a sharp break between two styles of communicating is becoming a smooth transition. Most user-generated content is created as communication in small groups, but since we’re so unused to communications media and broadcast media being mixed together, we think that everyone is now broadcasting. This is a mistake. If we listened in on other people’s phone calls, we’d know to expect small talk, inside jokes, and the like, but people’s phone calls aren’t out in the open.”
But status updates are, and it’s blurring the lines between public and private.
Our social lives would be poorer if one line status updates were the only way we had to communicate with each other. But as one tool in a growing array of social technologies, status updates serve a useful role as the virtual equivalent of the one line update at the water cooler. They can maintain connections that already exist, and sometimes even initiate conversations that would not otherwise happen.
P.S. I still don’t actually use Twitter, although knowing that I can re-broadcast Twitters on both LiveJournal and Facebook may convince me to give it a try at some point. The wacky thing is somebody else grabbed the nehrlich username on Twitter - I almost never have that happen to me, but Nicholas Ehrlich scooped me this time.
A couple of us in nextNY were discussing the need to have the chance for more in-depth conversations than can be had in the typical environment of meetups and happy hours. And since nextNY is a user-driven organization, we realized it was up to us to make it happen. So Jean Barmash and I are organizing Tech Dinner Salons, with the first one this Wednesday on the topic of blogging. If you’ve been reading my blog and looking for an excuse to come chat with me, this would be an excellent opportunity.
[Disclaimer: I received a free advance copy of this book for review, but would happily have bought this book from Amazon.]
I have been a fan of Clay Shirky since I first found his work. Several early posts on this blog were commentary on his articles covering topics such as process, situated software, and the semantic web. As a faculty member of the ITP program at NYU, he writes incisively about the impact of new social technologies on the communications of many to many, the title of the group blog where he posts. So I was thrilled when he mentioned that he had written a book. And after blasting through the book over the weekend, my expectations have been exceeded.
Shirky starts off with the story of a lost phone. The phone was left in a taxi in New York, but eventually ended up in the hands of a teenage girl. When asked politely to return the phone to its owner, the girl responded with taunts; after all, what could the owner do? A friend of the owner started a web page to tell the story of the lost phone. Since the phone’s data was mirrored on the cell phone website, he posted pictures that the girl had taken with the phone as well as the email address she was using from the phone. The story went viral, and thousands of people started emailing with advice, including members of the New York Police Department, and eventually the girl was found and arrested for holding stolen property.
How did this coalition of people come into existence? How could this story of a lost phone reach thousands of people and convince many of them to help find the phone? Shirky provides a guide as to how and why the world has changed in response to evolving social technologies such that the lost phone could be found in a way that would be unthinkable even ten years ago.
Shirky sets the stage by discussing the work of Ronald Coase, who wondered why companies existed. Free markets suffice to connect buyers to sellers, so why were markets unable to connect individual workers together to make products? He suggested that transaction costs explained this inconsistency. Transaction costs are the externalities associated with a market transaction, the time spent finding the appropriate people and “making and enforcing agreements among the participating parties”. If the transaction costs are high to find coworkers (as anybody who has spent time interviewing potential employees will attest), then companies make sense so that the transaction cost is a one-time cost of hiring rather than having to find coworkers for each new project.
Shirky posits that in such a world, there exists a Coasean floor, below which there are types of interactions that are impossible because the transaction costs are too high. Such activities “are valuable to someone but too expensive to be taken on in any institutional way, because the basic and unsheddable costs of being an institution in the first place make those activities not worth pursuing”. Shirky uses the example of the Coney Island Mermaid Parade. Hundreds of people take pictures of the parade each year and share them with friends and family, but had no way to share them with each other. In 2005, Flickr appeared and now it’s trivial to find pictures of the Mermaid Parade taken by dozens of people. A company would never find it profitable to organize this sharing of pictures, but Flickr enabled it by letting people organize themselves, an activity that would previously have been below the Coasean floor.
These newly possible activities are moving us towards the collapse of social structures created by technology limitations. Shirky compares this process to how the invention of the printing press impacted scribes. Suddenly, their expertise in reading and writing went from essential to meaningless. Shirky suggests that those associated with controlling the means to media production are headed for a similar fall. Twenty years ago, achieving an audience of more than a few dozen people required signing a deal with a publishing house, getting on TV, working at a newspaper, etc. With the global audience of the Web, everybody is a publisher, and the concept of a professional publisher or journalist or broadcaster is disappearing.
This collapse of institutions comes at a price, as it has become increasingly difficult to find the “good” stuff. Under the previous regime, quality was implied by publication, as the costs of publication meant that institutions would filter material before publishing it. With publishing costs dropping to zero, anything can be published, so we must find ways to filter for quality after publication. We are quickly developing the tools to handle this filtering, starting with Google, whose PageRank algorithm rewards pages that are linked to by others, and continuing with our communities, where we check out links that our friends email to us or post on their blogs, but we are still learning to live in this paradigm.
These new social tools are enabling new social patterns. Shirky suggests that group activities are being enabled at three levels:
The rest of the book is filled with wonderful examples of each of these activities, such as Egyptian activists using Twitter to keep each other updated of their activities and confrontations with authority, or Belarussian protestors using LiveJournal to organize flash mobs.
I started to write up all the bits that I liked, but realized that I was just repeating everything in the book, so you should just buy the book and read it yourself. To whet your appetite, I’ll include his practical advice on how to form a sustainable social group:
Every story in this book relies on a successful fusion of a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the users. The promise is the basic “why” for anyone to join or contribute to a group. The tool helps with the “how” - how will the difficulties of coordination be overcome, or at least be held to manageable levels? And the bargain sets the rules of the road: if you are interested in the promise and adopt the tools, what can you expect, and what will be expected of you?”
Shirky’s book is a terrific introduction to the world of social technology, with an overview of both the social and the technological and how they are interacting with each other to form new mashups. I highly recommend it to anybody who has the faintest interest in how new tools are giving us more power by multiplying the number of ways in which we can interact with each other.
P.S. Some quotes I particularly liked:
P.P.S. If you prefer to watch rather than read, check out Clay Shirky’s Long Now talk, where he covers some of the same material. In particular, he discusses the power of tagging to organize the world’s information without anybody actually taking responsibility for the organization.
I’ve been mentioning several theories to several different people recently and decided it’s time to put them all on my blog so they are easy to reference. Some are prescriptive, some are descriptive, but I find all of them useful in certain situations.
It seems like a silly theory, except that it explains so much. Our parents always think of us as the little kids we once were. Our friends tie us to specific periods of our lives, and we behave differently with our high school friends, our college friends, our work friends, etc. And when they meet us in a different context, they don’t know what to make of us not being the person they expect, which is also why we feel such tension in situations where worlds collide, such as when parents attend a gathering with friends.
I keep on trying to rebel against this theory, under the pretense that I can do more, but I never seem to manage it, and always end up wearing myself out. One of the results of that initial conversation was that I found a new job a month later as I realized I didn’t want to be spending one of my two “big things” doing what I was doing. Fortunately, in May I’ll be done with classes and able to select a new “big thing” at that point - now I just have to decide what that will be.
I’ve been following that advice ever since, and it’s led me through a couple different career paths and a number of different industries. I think it makes a lot of sense - I can come up with all sorts of reasons in my head for why something would or would not be a good fit, but none of my thinking can help me understand the day-to-day decisions and challenges of a job or activity.
There are probably others, but these were the ones that have come up in recent conversations. What theories do you use? Any you’d like to share?
The idea that we can work less and free up time to pursue our own dreams is highly attractive for most people and this book is a guidebook on how to do it. The methods that Ferriss recommends to achieve that lifestyle provoked both admiration and disgust from people I know who read it, and I’ll get more into that below. Let’s start with what Ferriss says before getting into reactions.
Ferriss recommends a four step process to changing your life, which he abbreviates DEAL:
The process makes sense. And I think it would work if followed. So why not follow it?
Ferriss is exploiting the existing system, something he takes great glee in doing. He brags about winning a world championship in a martial art by figuring out that weigh-ins were the day before, so he dropped 20 pounds of water weight for the weigh-in, rehydrated before the match, and took advantage of a loophole in the rules that awarded a TKO for pushing his opponents out of the ring by using his longer reach. For selling a training CD, he describes the process of becoming perceived as an expert:
I admire his chutzpah and his ingenuity in figuring out how to live life on his terms, but I still don’t completely subscribe to his ideas.
Everything he’s doing is within the rules as they currently exist, but that just perpetuates the system. He’s playing the game as it’s given, rather than trying to improve the game (it reminds me of the difference between finite and infinite games). Maybe changing the system isn’t possible and the best we can do is to exploit it to our advantage. I’m not ready to do that yet, and I will continue trying to live my life “as if” things could be different. Maybe in a couple more years I’ll be ready to concede and I’ll just want to cash out as he did.
I still recommend reading the book, although I’d borrow it from a friend or the library. It’s a quick read, and it’s definitely a strong meme going around my generation, so it’s good to be able to participate in the conversation. There are several good lifestyle suggestions in the book, especially in clearly defining one’s own goals, and eliminating behaviors that are not contributing to achieving those goals (tasks that would be valuable in one’s professional life as well as one’s personal life). I need to commit to some more specific goals, and start hacking my way towards them, and we’ll see if the ideas from the book can help me with that.
