50 Ways to Expose Yourself to Randomness

Posted inPhilosophy19 Comments on 50 Ways to Expose Yourself to Randomness

Cal Newport’s three step way to become interesting:

1. Do fewer structured activities.
2. Spend more time exploring, thinking, and exposing yourself to potentially interesting things.
3. If something catches your attention, use the abundant free time generated by rule 1 to quickly follow up.

Below are 50 ideas for step 2. They are all direct quotes from Tom Peters. I bolded the numbers of the best.

1. Go to the nearest magazine shop. Now. Spend 20 minutes. Pick up 20 — twenty! — magazines. None should be ones you normally read. Spend the better part of a day perusing them. Tear stuff out. Make notes. Create files. Goal: Stretch! Repeat . . . monthly . . . or at least bi-monthly.

2. Go to the Web. Now. Relax. Follow your bliss! Visit at least 15 sites you haven’t visited before. Follow any chain that is even a little intriguing. Bookmark a few of the best. Repeat . . . at least once a week.

3. Take off this Wednesday afternoon. Wander the closest mall . . . for two hours. Note the stuff you like. (And hate.) Products, merchandising, whatever. Repeat . . . bimonthly.

4. Buy a packet of 3 x 5-inch notecards. Carry them around with you. Always. Record cool stuff. Awful stuff. Daily. Review your card pack every Sunday. (Obsess on this!)

5. Going the same place for vacation next year? Why not someplace new? Why not one of those university-sponsored 12-day trips to explore some weird phenomenon?

6. Project stuck in a rut? Look through your Rolodex. Who’s the oddest duck in there? Call her/him. Invite her/him to lunch. Pick her/his brain for a couple of hours about your project.

7. Create a new habit: Visit your Rolodex. Once a month. Pick a name of someone interesting you’ve lost touch with. Take her/him to lunch . . . next week.

8. New habit: You’re in a meeting. Someone you don’t know makes an interesting contribution. Invite him/her to lunch . . . in the next two weeks.

9. You run across somebody interesting. As a matter of course, ask her (him) what’s the best thing she/he’s read in the last 90 days. Order it from Amazon.com . . . this afternoon.

10. Take tomorrow afternoon off. Rain or shine. Wander a corner of the city you’ve never explored before.

11. Go to the local Rite Aid. Buy a $2 notebook. Title it Observations I. Start recording. Now. Anything and everything. (Now = Now.)

12. Going out this Saturday night? Go some place new.

13. Having a dinner party next Sunday? Invite somebody — interesting — you’ve never invited before. (Odds are, he/she won’t accept. So what? Go for it. It’s just like selling encyclopedias. No ring doorbell = No sale.)

14. Go past a kiosk advertising local Community College courses for this fall. (Or one of the Learning Annex catalogues.) Grab a copy. Look it over this evening. Pick a couple of interesting courses and topics you’ve always wanted to know more about. Call the professor (with a little detective work, you can find her). If you’re intrigued, sign up and . . . at least . . . go to the orientation session.

15. Read a provocative article in a business journal. Triggers a thought? E-mail the author. So what if you never hear back? (The odds are actually pretty high that you will. Trust me.)

16. At church this Sunday, the pastor announces a new fund drive. Sure you’re busy. (Who isn’t?) Go to the organizing meeting after services. Sign up!

17. You’re working with your 13-year-old on his science project. You find you’re having fun. Go to school with him tomorrow . . . and volunteer to talk to the class about the topic.

18. A crummy little assignment comes along. But it would give you a chance to work with a group of people you’ve never worked with before. Take the assignment.

19. You’re really pissed off at what’s going on in your kid’s school. So run for the school board.

20. You aren’t really interested in changing jobs. But there’s a neat job fair in the next town this weekend. Go.

21. An old college pal of yours invites you to go on a long weekend by the lake. You never do things like that. Go.

22. A really cool job opening overseas comes up. It fits your skill set. You couldn’t possibly consider it. You’ve got a nine-year-old and your husband is content with his job. At least call someone . . . and find out more about it.

23. You’re on the fast track. But a fascinating job opens up . . . far away. It looks like a detour. But you could learn something really new. Really cool. Go talk to the guy/gal about it. (Now.)

24. The eighth grade teacher is looking for chaperones for the trip to the natural history museum. You’re a law firm partner, for God’s sake, making $350,000 a year. Volunteer.

25. You love taking pictures. You pick up a brochure advertising a four-day photography workshop in Maine next summer. Go to the workshop.

26. A friend of yours, a small-business owner, is go-ing to Thailand on a sourcing trip. She invites you to join her. Go.

27. There’s a great ball game on ESPN in an hour. Forget it. Go on that walk you love . . . that you haven’t taken for a year.

28. I’m not much on planning. But how about sitting down with your spouse/significant other and making a list of three or four things you’ve “been meaning to do” that are novel . . . then coming up with a scheme for doing at least one of them in the next nine months?

29. You’ve a-l-w-a-y-s wanted to go to the Yucatan. So at least call a travel agent . . . this week. (How about right now?)

30. You know “the action is at the front line.” Spend a month (two days a week) on a self-styled training program that rotates you through all the front-line jobs in the hotel/distribution center/whatever.

31. Ask a first-line supervisor who the most motivated clerk in the store is. Take him/her to lunch . . . in the next three weeks.

32. You spot a Cool Article in the division newsletter. Call the person involved. Take her/him to lunch. Tomorrow. Learn more. (Repeat.) (Regularly.)

33. You and your spouse go to a great play this Saturday. On Monday, call the director and ask him/her if you can come by and chat some time in the next two weeks. (If the chat goes well, ask her/him to come in to address your 18 colleagues in the Accounting Dept. at a Brown Bag Lunch Session later this month.)

34. Institute a monthly Brown Bag Lunch Session. Encourage all your colleagues to nominate interesting people to be invited. Criterion: “I wouldn’t have expected us to invite — — .”

35. Volunteer to take charge of recruiting for the next year/six months. Seek out input/applications from places the unit has never approached before.

36. Consider a . . . four-month sabbatical.

37. Get up from your desk. Now. Take a two-hour walk on the beach. In the hills. Whatever. Repeat . . . once every couple of weeks. (Weekly?)

38. Seriously consider approaching your boss about working a day a week at home.

39. Take the door off your office.

40. You’ve got a couple of pals who are readers. Start a Reading Group that gets together every third Thursday. Include stuff that’s pretty far out. (Invite a noteworthy local author to talk to your group now and again.)

41. Join Toastmasters. (I know it’s a repeat. It’s important!)

42. Pen an article for the division newsletter.

43. In the quarterly alumni magazine, you read about a pal who’s chosen to do something offbeat with her life. Call her. Tomorrow. (Or today.)

44. Buy that surprisingly colorful outfit you saw yesterday. Wear it to work. Tomorrow.

45. Develop a set of probing questions to use at meetings. “Will this really make a difference?” “Will anybody remember what we’re doing here two years from now?” “Can we brag to our spouse/kids about this project?”

46. Assess every project you propose by the “WOW!”/ “Is it Worth Doing?” criteria.

47. Call the Principal Client for your last project. Ask her to lunch. Within the next two weeks. Conduct a no-holds-barred debriefing on how you and your team did . . . and might have done. Now.

48. Call the wisest person you know. (A fabulous professor you had 15 years ago?) Ask her/him to lunch. Ask her/him if he or she would be willing to sit with you for a couple of hours every quarter to talk about what you’ve done/where you’re going. (Try it. It can’t hurt.)

49. Become a Cub Scout/Brownie troop leader. Or direct your kid’s play at school. The idea: spend more time around children . . . they’re fascinating . . . spontaneous . . . and wise.

50. Build a great sandcastle!

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What MJ Had That LeBron Does Not

Posted inSports5 Comments on What MJ Had That LeBron Does Not

Killer instinct.

Enter Bill Simmons:

Jordan was a ruthless motherfucker. Jordan was a killer. Jordan didn't care if his teammates despised him. Jordan never, ever, not in a million years, would have allowed his team to quit in the final two minutes of Thursday night's game the way LeBron did. His teammates feared him, loathed him, revered him and played accordingly. Bird had that same quality. In the second half of his career, so did Magic. Winning meant so much to those guys that their teammates almost didn't have a choice; they had to follow suit. Or else.

Partly, LeBron has never had a good coach.

To illustrate what he could have, Simmons relays this story of Pat Riley, coach of the Miami Heat, who in Game 6 of the 2006 NBA Finals, at halftime threw away the playbook and the X's and O's and took a different tack:

He screamed at his guys like a boxing trainer. You're tougher than them! YOU'RE TOUGHER THAN THEM! Don't let up! They are ready to quit! They are ready to fold! Keep attacking them! Keep getting to the rim! Keep knocking their asses down! No layups! No dunks! Stay together! YOU ARE TOUGHER THAN THEM! YOU ARE TOUGHER THAN THEM! That's what he did for the entire second half. Eventually, his players believed him.

Here's my post on the components of killer instinct. See Chris Yeh's comment about most great men and women of history being bastards. Here's Brad Feld's 45 second advice video to a portfolio company.

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Some years ago I watched LeBron play as a high school athlete at the Adidas Big Time tournament in Las Vegas. The gym was full of NBA scouts and media. LeBron was playing for the Oakland Soldiers (he played on two AAU teams then — the Soldiers and his Cleveland club). After watching LeBron play no defense, score almost no points, and seem oddly detached from the game, I remember telling someone there that he would go down as "severely overrated."

It remains my greatest mis-assessment of talent ever.

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Career Lessons from Elena Kagan vs. Richard Posner

Posted inCareers, Current Affairs21 Comments on Career Lessons from Elena Kagan vs. Richard Posner

Consider the career paths and attitudes of two of the most prominent legal scholars in America.

Kaganhead Elena Kagan, recently nominated to the Supreme Court, according to profiles has been carefully plotting a career since, well, forever. Her youthful dream was to be a Supreme Court justice. At 17 she posed for her high school yearbook in a judge’s robe with a gavel and a quotation from Felix Frankfurter. She relentlessly worked toward this goal in her adult life, knowing what she would have to do to get there. "She was one of the most strategic people I’ve ever met, and that’s true across lots of aspects of her life. She is very effective at playing her cards in every setting I’ve seen," said John Palfrey, a law professor at Harvard. She published rarely; she did not speak out on controversial issues; she has been "extraordinarily — almost artistically — careful. I don’t know anyone who has had a conversation with her in which she expressed a personal conviction on a question of constitutional law in the past decade." Thus: she stands a good chance at enduring Senate confirmation hearings because she has given her opposition little ammunition. David Brooks called this willingness to suppress her mind for her career "kind of disturbing." Andrew Sullivan called her pure careerism "depressing."

Posnerhead Richard Posner, an appellate judge and Univ of Chicago law professor, may have been similarly ambitious when young (I'm not sure), but based on how he's lived his adult life it's clear that he values the pursuit of truth over a carefully cultivated resume. Posner is someone people agree is bright enough to be a Supreme Court justice but too eccentric so as to never pass a confirmation hearing. With jaw-dropping productivity he's shared his thoughts on nearly every topic under the sun. He applies his considerable intellectual heft to timely public debates. He's come out in support of legalizing marijuana, gay marriage, and other rational (if unpopular) ideas. In addition to his court opinions, where are the most cited in the land, he churns out a book a year and a blog post a week. With all this output, he inevitably gets some stuff wrong (sometimes a lot of stuff wrong), offends everyone at least once, and makes himself impossible to pin down. But what an inspiring mind and life!

The career results for each: Kagan will likely assume the top judicial position in the land. Posner will stay put at a close-to-the-top judicial position. The pure careerist achieves her goal. But at what cost?

I'd rather be close to the top and be able to live honestly and with the freedom to take risks than live a neutered life for 35 years in order to rise to the very top. I'd rather be myself than be a shallow, approval-seeking imitation of what is supposedly required to advance to the next level.

Bottom Line: In many professions it seems the sacrifices to go from A- to A+, from 2nd place to 1st place, are just not worth it.

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Who Are the Masters in Your Field and How Do You Learn from Them?

Posted inCareers7 Comments on Who Are the Masters in Your Field and How Do You Learn from Them?

When contemplating your own field, ask yourself: are you the wannabe screenwriter reading how-to guides on the subway, or are you, like Thomas, throwing yourself among the masters, and proclaiming: I know nothing, but you do, and I’m not going anywhere until I do too?

That's Cal Newport in his latest entry on building a remarkable life. He rightly emphasizes that if you want to get good at something you should immerse yourself in an environment where people are good, deconstruct their keys to success, and learn from them. Modern craftsmanship: "Learning crafts takes not only time, but exposure to master craftsman." Perhaps another question you could then ask of someone is, "Who are the masters in your field and how do you learn from them?"

The other day Slate did a summary of the new theories of success which focus on the importance of hard work.

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Excellent Stratfor analysis of the crisis in Europe and European identity.  Self-identified progressives do not understand economics. Mickey Kaus op/ed about the outdated union system.

DaveJ comments on yesterday's post about mood and creativity: "You are talking about mere mood variation, and it makes sense that mood cycles enhance creativity, because they shift context and stimulate novel patterns of activity in your brain. I suspect that it is not the middle of the emotional continuum that produces creativity but the variation itself."

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Grumpily Subdued Emotional State Sparks Creativity

Posted inWriting11 Comments on Grumpily Subdued Emotional State Sparks Creativity

This afternoon I had a fleeting thought: “Where the hell is my Great American Travel Writing 2009 book?”

I had been reading it in Atacama. In the book I had written lots of to-dos and ideas about various topics, using the blank pages as all-purpose jotting space while baking in the desert sun by the hotel pool. Also, I wanted to blog about sentences, paragraphs, and essays in the main text itself.

I rose from my desk chair and searched and searched my apartment. No luck. I emailed two friends who may have borrowed it. Nope.

After 30 minutes of searching, I declared the book lost. I was pissed. Unusually pissed. That lost to-do list. Those lost ideas. My previously good day: sullied.

I sat back down at my computer and stared at some new emails that had arrived in the intervening minutes. About each I felt negativity and was tempted to testily reply. I knew better. Then I tried to write a new blog post, but as the cursor blinked menacingly for a minute with no words appearing, I decided it wasn’t going to happen.

So I lay on the couch and began reading a book. 30 minutes into the reading session, I felt my mood shift from “irrationally very pissed” to “irritatingly annoyed” to “grumpily subdued.” Then I noticed my mind sharpen. I enjoyed heightened focus on the text. And I generated a stream of new ideas about a project I’m working on. In other words: I entered a creative flow.

Jonah Lehrer writes about this phenomenon in his article Depression’s Upside:

The new research on negative moods… suggests that sadness comes with its own set of benefits and that even our most unpleasant feelings serve an important purpose. Joe Forgas, a social psychologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia, has repeatedly demonstrated in experiments that negative moods lead to better decisions in complex situations. The reason, Forgas suggests, is rooted in the intertwined nature of mood and cognition: sadness promotes “information-processing strategies best suited to dealing with more-demanding situations.”

I have long noticed that when I am most joyous and happy I tend to get little real work done. Similarly, when I’m enraged or feeling depressed about something, I spin my wheels. The productivity sweet spot lies somewhere in the middle of that emotional continuum.

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