Work has been running full speed on the Bonneville Salt Flats for so long that lifting my foot slightly off the gas made me realized my leg was asleep. Every day we wake up is one where we can choose to be greater, help others be greater and hopefully shape a better world. How do you ever lift your foot off the gas on that?
People do it all the time and yet complain that they haven’t traveled as far. That is not to say taking breaks from some of the journey is not important – heck required – they are! Your daily life diversity makes you better at everything you do. It is what makes you uniquely qualified to do something remarkable. In the variety of things you do, how far down is the gas pedal?
From the moment of conception, we are dying. Life is not a dress rehearsal, yet we deliberate over most of our waking moments. It is this that makes time so precious. We have plenty of time, but spend it and spread it thin, leaving fragmented leftovers. Time and attention management skills go beyond the workplace helping you more effectively execute your priorities. What are your priorities?
If you know what is important and have the intensity to focus and dedicate time to those things, then your foot is on the gas moving you in all the right directions. When your foot falls asleep make sure you look around and make sure you are where you intended to be. Finding yourself off course is less critical than moving quickly and correcting direction – think of it like Agile development for living.
Microsoft asked “Where do you want to go today?” with the help of Wieden+Kennedy, a bold question in a time where computers were in the infancy of becoming bullet train to station you. Aspire to the grander responsibility of making a better you by spending your time attentively on the activities you love. Along the way help everyone you can do the same. Stop fretting over the destinations and start getting there intently. How we do what we do is as important as the doing and destination. The world is happy to pay you to do less. What is your time worth?
The shortest distance between a person becoming aware and buying – the act of exchanging currency at a higher rate than the service or product costs to produce – is the marketer’s benchmark. As such their motives should inherently be held suspect and yet we believe what they want us to believe.
Time is one of the key battles marketing message fight. Given enough time, anyone can sell anything (ideas or products), some better than others. People have been told time is money and usually that is true for the other person – your time is someone else’s money. Someone else’s time is likely yours. As such, marketing messages are short and repetitive – visually and aurally. It gets cleverer when the messages appear genuinely – products placed in unassuming ways that relate activity or quality to the product or service. Simplified messages attack the largest audience to force an action – thought or behavior. How much of what we know is fabricated?
Science and technology folks are all about details and complexity. One cannot fully appreciate wonders without understanding the complexity – one of the reasons we know less than we should. Scientists strive for truth or work with it to change it. Exactness is important. Any fudge work is noted and already calculated to be insignificant in the context of a more import result. They are biased, but their motives are purer. Of course corruption exists everywhere, so absolutes are tough to swallow. Scientific evidence is often positioned to accentuate the beauty but hide the wrinkles. We hold beliefs that are not always proven by a scientist or better yet ourselves-we call this faith. What do you have faith in?
I am not as interest in what people have faith in as much as that they do so readily. With good marketing, people believe and behave under the influence. People are generally anxious about mind control yet almost everything has been fabricated and more importantly specifically for you and people like you. As much as we are individuals we are actually more alike than not – scarily alike when it comes to what you think, what you believe and what you buy.
We are all participants in being under the influence
It is no wonder that so many people in the fields of communication, branding and marketing feel so powerful – their message in total create so much of the world. They start as the rock falling into the pond allowing ripples to hit us as they may. They drop more pebbles at the right times reinforcing messages, creating relationships and intimate richness. They are the origin and orchestration of the following conversation in what appears to be naturally occurring ripples. As individuals we faithfully internalize, reform and repeat – generating thoughts and actions that others listen to. These messages become defining attributes. Many people like fine wine, food, clothes, automobiles and the latest personal technology. Many desire upgrades to their current lifestyle in those ways and aspire for private jets, multiple homes in multiple countries and more. People consume what is made consumable. The rate of new content production for the individual is slower than the rate of content an individual produces based on someone else’s content. How much of what you think is new? When you talk, how much of what you say is something someone else said? How much of what you feel is yours?
Marketing messages create physiological changes in our understanding of reality – they are not artificial impacts. What is suspect is the initial message we chose to have faith in. If we inspected every message for such qualities we would crawl to a halt. It is not practical and, for better or worse, we are unavoidably consuming. This is excellent news for those who actually know how to communicate. The power to create the world’s thought and behavior is in the hands of those that strike clear and simple messages, rooted in fact and garnished in fashion.
Among the publications of Moses King is a curious postcard titled N.Y. 11 Future New York “The city of skyscrapers”. John Timberman Newcomb, teacher at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, wrote a piece titled The Footprint of the Twentieth Century: American Skyscrapers and Modernist Poems citing it as being published sometime in 1913-1918. I picked my copy up at a local store that sells old and used postcards.
N.Y. 11 Future New York "The city of skyscrapers" (Front)
The back reads, “Future New York will be pre-eminently the city of skyscrapers. The first steel frame structure that was regarded as a skyscraper is the Tower Building at 50 Broadway, a ten-story structure 129 feet high. There are now over a thousand buildings of that height in Manhattan, and hundreds in course of construction. The best known skyscrapers are the Singer Building, 612 feet height the Metropolitan Building, 700 feet high, and the Woolworth Tower which towers above them all at rises to a height of 790 feet. The proposed Pan-American Building is to be 801 feet high.”
N.Y. 11 Future New York “The city of skyscrapers” (Back)
For comparison, The Empire State Building is 1,472 feet including the spire, doubling what the 1900’s regarded as towering. It remains one of the tallest buildings in America and is currently number 15 world-wide. An impressive iconic structure, the Empire State Building is far from the vision that this postcard imagines.
Modern futuristic movies reach out into space (2001, Star Wars), explore extraterrestrials (ET, Alien) and robotic life (Short Circuit, Terminator). Others imagine close calls with the end of humanity (I Am Legend, Men in Black). Others yet explore genetic (Gattaca) and psychic phenomena (Minority Report). To make these movies commercially accessible they are kept edgy-plausible. In comparison, the minds of the 1900’s went far more radical imaging a metropolis of buildings stacked upon buildings with rail cars at high elevations and the possibility that a person’s world may be contained within one building. Movies have riffed on these concepts but at 750 ft, the Woolworth Tower was a far from the futuristic city New York was thought to become.
In general, the current state of futuristic thinking lacks radical imagination. The fiction has become too accessible offering probable possibilities instead of the kind of “what if” thinking that raises the societal consciousness – what could be beyond what we think.
There was a time that my work focused on managing technology diffusion and amplifying the volume on innovative activity at IBM. It is a space where there is literally no shortage of work to be done at every level. While people tended to focus on the tangible build out of infrastructure or web experience that facilitated innovation access, most failed to see how important the dream was. For example. “what if 30,000 employees were always running the n+1 version of the IT experience?” Dreams are lenses that provide a critical filter and check point as things naturally evolve and depart from the original motivations.
Making innovation accessible is an important part of the Darwinian selection. A more interesting topic is pushing innovation beyond current understanding. Quite simply, the majority of innovation today is incremental or copy cat – applying something from one domain to another in hopes it might be useful in a different context. Certainly interesting exploration, but not what I would call transformative. It seems real innovation comes in the form of individuals and when they move on for whatever reason, so does the dream. Who in your world is a dreamer that has started many fires but whose fires seem to be smothered or worse yet have burned the wrong forest?
Consider what is still an impressive demonstration, Jeff Han’s demo at TED in February 2006. It is 2009 and the best we have seen of gesture based and multi-touch, pressure sensitive computer screen technology and the best we can point to is Apple’s application in their mobile devices. More importantly, notice the first demo Han shows exploring human lava lamp interactions – more sophisticated than current interaction experiences that exploration is relegated to research scientists. The few hundred of audience members, purported to be some of the most connected in the world, were impressed and unmoved to imagine a different computing world, or if imagined selfishly horded.
What is beyond web-based anything, micro-blogging, social flows and the constant meme generation? I am not tired of the world we live in, but who is imagining the world beyond. If we simply evolve from here, the future will fall short, just like the New York and cities that never became. Some cite the state of the economical climate as the reason for such underwhelming thinking. I think it has been here for many years and it would be a good time to shake it up. If you are a dreamer, a futurist, a creative thinker, why is your volume so soft? The future is here and we need bigger thoughts.
Sophisticated organizations construct relationships with the people that enable the group. Even if all you do is punch the time clock at work, part of your identity is associated with your job, the building you work in, the company you work for and the people you work with. If you actually like what you do, have skills that help you deliver in meaningful ways and the stomach to deal with the human condition, then it is in your organization’s best interest to retain you – even better if they get you to retain you.
It takes an incredible amount of clarity to both understand what is important and why it is important. A few years back an executive offered some mentoring advice to help structure the conversation of what was important to me. Consider money, recognition, visibility and content. Assign a percentage to each of these according to the contributing importance to what drives you. This and other techniques help someone understand what is important, but not why. What in the absence of why is dangerous. Deriving insight from the what is certainly possible, in fact powerful. Investigating why someone feels a certain way can be even more transformative.
Incentives are a common method of influencing behavior. The most powerful of which communicate social or professional status – titles or black credit cards. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be an executive with a fancy title, but the meaning of such a label has power within the organization and possibly with other groups that identify with similar notions. Everyone else, especially an indigenous tribe in a far away land, has no idea what it means. Creative workplaces often poke fun at organizational structures encouraging titles to be fun – Guru of Internet happiness. It is easy to not realize why what you desire is fabricated. Ensuring the “why” of “what” comes from you and not someone else is the key to freedom.
Breaking free from your organization makes you a more effective contributor. It is impossible for your relationship with an organization not to contribute to your identity. The longer you groove over the same mental and physical paths the more efficient traversing these passageways become. Realizing any path is possible often means breaking some of the psychological and physiological habits associated with the current context – the more deep the groove the more resistance and pain involved in changing. This can be an emotional break up where the individual is reorganizing and reestablishing the relationship with the organization. People tend to change organizations instead of changing their conception of the organization – guaranteed to repeat the pattern. Your organization defines you, but you can define the organization and leave and define something else somewhere else if need be. The terms of your contract are not to be a hamster in a running wheel. That is just what happens when people accept things as they are.
Last month I finished authoring a chapter submission on how social artifacts mediate the deluge of content a social network consumes and how diversity of participation is an imperative to keep us from French inhaling our tweets. We are living in a time of content explosion – this was news back in 2003 when a UC Berkeley study summarizes the prior year’s information detonation:
1. Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks.
2. We estimate that the amount of new information stored on paper, film, magnetic, and optical media has about doubled in the last three years [1999-2001].
3. Information flows through electronic channels — telephone, radio, TV, and the Internet – contained almost 18 exabytes of new information in 2002, three and a half times more than is recorded in storage media. Ninety eight percent of this total is the information sent and received in telephone calls – including both voice and data on both fixed lines and wireless.
All of which is insanely outdated considering YouTube alone was only founded in 2005 and yet the community produces and views more content than all the commercial production houses – consider in 2008 10 hours of video per minute were uploaded to the site. Since the 2003 study of 2002’s information explosion, we can safely say it has only grown in magnitude since. The eruption of information could easily bee seen as an individual’s need to communicate, which brings us to the modern day where a considerable amount of content is being created, vetted and spread by social networks.
Britons now spend approximately 50 minutes a day interacting socially with other people (ONS, 2003). Couples now spend less time in one another’s company and more time at work, commuting, or in the same house but in separate rooms using different electronic media devices.
The Office for National Statistics has just reported that “over the last two decades the proportion of people living alone doubled”, a trend now highly pronounced in the 25-44 age group.
A study by the Children’s Society recently found that television alone is displacing the parental role, eclipsing “by a factor of five or ten the time parents spend actively engaging with children”. Another ongoing study reports that 25% of British five-year olds own a computer or laptop of their own. In particular, the study noted an enormous increase in ‘social networking’ among younger children which “has overtaken fun (online games) as the main reason to use the Internet”.
All of this is shown to affect health and for that matter society. Family is a historically critical element of survival. It is the embedded network that should be active for life. Yet, we see that even among married couples there is less interaction even when sharing the same physical spaces. Consider that population of 25-44 year olds that are living alone and likely having less long-term intimacy and as such fewer babies. One could see this as an expression of independence. Either way, it is an alarming trait. We are expressing more than ever, constructing our identity, in some cases identities, and yet are physically more alone than ever. The Internet equals social equals the primary content of our youth, bypassing the parental input that has developed generations prior.
One-third said they have posted or sent racy images of themselves, and almost half have received them.
It is not surprising that teens would use their devices to express their sexual curiosity and interests. The porn industry paved the way for almost all commercial transactions, streaming video technology and collaboration tools. Scary, but true. Mobile devices make it easy for our pervy teens to be more out there than ever. If you can see it on FaceBook, you know the real material is floating over the mobile network. One might conclude that this level of openness is part of a generation change and thus a societal shift. There are likely others hoping our virtual fetish means teens are not having sex, clearly not the case. Sigman (the guy who write the article for the Biologist) was making a point, that it is not common for a physician to advise on a patients sex life, and yet he feels that is exactly what needs to happen. As we grow further apart, we lose some of what keeps us healthy (sexual intimacy being part of that). Teens sext, teens have sex and yet as a society we have less meaningful relationships. What exactly would Sigman have to say about this? Maybe we need to do a study on our youth, as they are the future of the world, we just get to help avoid self-destruction a while longer.
The information explosion and social networking storm are replacing the therapeutic and developmental tools of the past. Instead of parents and therapists, people are in a constant creation and editing of their identities through new media. If the online world is the safe place to explore one’s self, then why has it become a destination to a better reality? What is fascinating is that our growing immersion into a hyper-virtual-reality, where we mentally masturbate around all things “me”, is removing us from our social reality where our developed selves act and all the while, evolving into a sexually explicit twittified frenzy. Forgive me, I missed the sexting revolution, I was too busy typing on my BlackBerry, what was that?
