My mentor from the Columbia program, Jon Williams, recently started a blog, and asked me if I had any advice about blogging. That got me thinking about what makes for a good blog, so I’m sharing my thoughts here. The blogosphere is intensely competitive in terms of the attention economy. When blogs I read link […]
Category: thoughts
Embracing constraint
A friend recently told me about his vacation where he felt surprisingly productive despite not having access to his normal resources (he only had a carry-on bag of clothes, a laptop and a couple books). Because he had fewer choices about what to do, he just picked a task available to him and started working […]
Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert
Amazon link This wasn’t at all the book I was expecting when I ordered it, but ended up being much more satisfying. I thought it was going to be some tract on how and why the brain feels happiness, and what we can do to make ourselves happier. Instead Gilbert, a professor of psychology at […]
Artful Making, by Rob Austin and Lee Devin
Amazon link Subtitled “What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work”, this book addresses the question of managing knowledge workers who are more independent than ever before. The authors study how a dramatic troupe puts together a performance for ideas on how to assemble talented and creative free agents into a coherent effort. In […]
Laying the foundation
Twyla Tharp, in her book The Creative Habit, tells the story of working on the musical Moving Out, set to Billy Joel’s work. She listened to all of his music, watched all of his music videos, read or watched every interview with him, watched iconic movies of the Vietnam war like Full Metal Jacket, read […]
Telling the story of our lives
This week’s New Yorker has an article describing Gordon Bell’s MyLifeBits project. I’ve heard about this project for years, and I’ve never understood what the point is. Collecting all of those pictures and articles and emails about one’s life just creates an overwhelming mass of data that can’t be processed effectively. It’s like the shoeboxes […]
Mastery
Following up on the previous post about discipline, I think another reason for discipline is that it’s necessary to achieve mastery. I was reminded of this while reading Artful Making, by Robert Austin and Lee Devin. They relate the process of management to the making of collaborative art, such as putting a play together. I’ll […]
Discipline
I was talking to a friend over the weekend, and somehow we got onto the topic of discipline. I think we had been talking about PhD programs. We’re both generalists and tend to have interests that are broad rather than deep, so there’s no intrinsic appeal to the idea of getting up each day and […]
Is a Maven “The Guy”?
Two different commenters have now said that my conception of “The Guy” was what Malcolm Gladwell dubbed a Maven in The Tipping Point. That didn’t feel right to me, so I went back and re-read the “Law of the Few” chapter where Gladwell describes Mavens to see if I could figure out why I thought […]
What makes a community?
I’ve been thinking about what it means to be part of a community. There’s so much mixed up in it that I’m having trouble disentangling all the threads, so I’m going to do what I always do and blog to try to make sense of it. One thread is the community of family. Families are […]
