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Author Archives: Steve Mays
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
“The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it.” — Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (pg 31; 1992)
“The business is a simple one. Hiro gets information. It may be gossip, videotape, audiotape, a fragment of a computer disk, a xerox of a document. It can even be a joke based on the latest highly publicized disaster.
He uploads it to the CIC database — the Library, formerly the Library of Congress, but no one calls it that anymore. Most people are not entirely clear on what the word “congress” means. And even the word “library is getting hazy. It used to be a place full of books, mostly old one.
Then they began to include videotapes, records, and magazines. Then all of the information got converted into machine-readable form, which is to say, ones and zeros. And as the number of media grew, the material became more up to date, and the methods for searching the Library became more and more sophisticated, it approached the point where there was no substantive difference between the Library of Congress and the Central Intelligence Agency. Fortuitously, this happened just as the government was falling apart anyway. So they merged and kicked out a big fat stock offering.
Millions of other CIC stringers are uploading millions of other fragments at the same time. CIC’s clients, mostly large corporations and Sovereigns, rifle through the Library looking for useful information, and if they find a use for something that Hiro put into it, Hiro gets paid.”
“The people of America, who live in the world’s most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto. Follow the loglo outward, to where the growth is enfolded into the valleys and canyons, and you find the land of the refugees. They have fled from the true America, the America of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip-hop, chaos theory, cement overshoes, snake handlers, spree killers, space walks, buffalo jumps, drive-bys, cruise missiles, Sherman’s March, gridlock, motorcycle gangs and bungee jumping. They have parallel-parked their bimbo boxes in identical computer-designed Burbclave street patterns and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrock shitholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks, vast house farms out in the loglo wilderness, a culture medium for a medium culture.”
“All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they’d grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, fourwheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain’t what it used to be. The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers.”
Christ’s gospel is a new nam-shub, an attempt to take religion out of the temple, out of the hands of the priesthood, and bring the Kingdom of God to everyone. That is the message explicitly spelled out by his sermons, and it is the message symbolically embodied in the empty tomb. After the crucifixion, the apostles went to his tomb hoping to find his body and instead found nothing. The message was clear enough: We are not to idolize Jesus, because his ideas stand alone, his church is no longer centralized in one person but dispersed among all the people.
People who were used to the rigid theocracy of the Phansees couldn’t handle the idea of a popular, nonhierarchical church. They wanted popes and bishops and priests. And so the myth of the Resurrection was added onto the gospels. The message was changed to a form of idolatry. In this new version of the gospels, Jesus came back to earth and organized a church which later became the Church of the Eastern and Western Roman Empire—another rigid, brutal, and irrational theocracy.
2013: First year of retirement
Lucy and Hattie: Morning Play
Linchpin: Are You Indispensable
By Seth Godin
“Our world is filled with factories. Factories that make widgets and insurance and Web sites, factories that make movies and take care of sick people and answer the telephone. These factories need workers.
“If you learn how to be one of these workers, if you pay attention in school, follow instructions, show up on time, and try hard, we will take care of you. You won’t have to be brilliant or creative or take big risks.
“We will pay you a lot of money, give you health insurance, and offer you job security. We will cherish you, or at the very least, take care of you.”
“It was always easier for management to replace labor than it was for labor to find a new factory. Today, the means of production = a laptop computer with Internet connectivity. Three thousand dollars buy a work an entire factory.”
“If you want a job where it’s okay to follow the rules, don’t be surprised if you get a job where following the rules is all you get to do. If you want a job where the people who work for you do exactly what they’re told, don’t be surprised if your boss expects precisely the same thing from you.
“We’ve bought into a model that taught us to embrace the system, to spend for pleasure, and to separate ourselves from our work.”
“It was always easier for management to replace labor than it was for labor to find a new factory. Today, the means of production = a laptop computer with Internet connectivity. Three thousand dollars buys a work an entire factory. pg 24
“If you want a job where the people who work for you do exactly what they’re told, don’t be surprised if your boss expects precisely the same thing from you. pg 29
“We’ve bought into a model that taught us to embrace the system, to spend for pleasure, and to separate ourselves from our work. pg 39
“A factory is “an organization that has figure it out, a place where people go to do what they’re told and earn a paycheck.” pg 40
“The launch of universal (public and free) education was a profound change in the way our society works, and it was a deliberate attempt to transform our culture. And it worked. We trained millions of factory workers. pg 41
“The essential thing measured by school is whether or not you are good at school. pg 47
“The law of linchpin leverage: The More value you create in your job, the fewer clock minutes of labor you actually spend creating that value. pg 51
“Finding security in mediocrity is an exhausting process. You’re always looking over your shoulder, always trying to be a little less mediocre than the guy next to you. pg 54
“If you can’t be remarkable, perhaps you should consider doing nothing until you can. pg 70
“If you’re remarkable, amazing, or just plain spectacular, you probably shouldn’t have a resume at all. A resume gives the employer everything she needs to reject you. pg 71
“Projects are the new resumes. pg 73
“You are not your resume. You are your work. pg 74
“It’s okay to have someone you work for, someone who watches over you, someone who pays you. But the moment you treat that person like a boss, like someone in charge of your movements and your output, you are a cog, not an artist. pg 95
“The future of your organization depends on motivated human beings selflessly contributing unasked-for gifts of emotional labor. And worse yet, the harder you work to quantify and manipulate this process,the more poorly it will work. The easier it is to quantify, the less it’s worth. pg 96
The Job Versus Your Art
“The job is what you do when you are told what to do. The job is showing up at the factory, following instructions, meeting spec, and being managed. Someone can always do your job a little better or faster or cheaper than you can. The job might be difficult, it might require skill, but it’s a job.
“Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people. I call the process of doing your art “the work.” It’s possible to have a job and do the work, too. In fact that’s how you become a linchpin. The job is not the work. pg 97
“Most believe that what they do is so intrinsically good and that they should be compensated to do it even if it doesn’t produce revenue.” — Media economist Robert Picard pg 120
“Our economy has reached a logical conclusion. The race to make average stuff for average people in huge quantities is almost over. Improvements in price are now so small they’re hardly worth making. pg 123
It’s not an accident that successful people read more books. pg 126
There are plenty of bosses who fear the idea of indispensable employees and would instead encourage you to focus on teamwork. “Teamwork” is the word bosses and coaches and teachers use when they actually mean, “Do what I say.” pg 153
For the last five hundred years, the best way to succeed has been to treat everyone as a stranger you could do business with. pg 157
If you are working only for the person you report to according to the org chart, you may be sacrificing your future. pg 193
People aren’t going to follow you because you order them to. Linchpins don’t need authority. It’s not part of the deal. Authority matters only in the factory, not in your world. pg 201
For many of us, the happiest future is one that’s precisely like the past, except a little better. pg 203
Life, Inc: The Gruen Transfer
“Follow-up researchers, using video cameras to capture shoppers’ faces, discovered something even more interesting: shortly after entering a mall, a person’s expression went blank. The jaw dropped, the eyes glazed over, and the shopper’s path through the mall became less directed. This phenomenon, named the Gruen Transfer, was defined as the moment when a person changes from a customer with a particular product in mind to an undirected impulse buyer.”
“Retail architects developed a subspecialty called “atmospherics,” the science of manipulating shopper’s senses to make them buy more. They discovered that obscuring the time of day led customers to spend more time in the mall. Forcing people to make three turns when walking from the parking lot into the mall led them to forget in which direction they had parked the car (and you thought it was just you). Without this sense of an anchor, customers walked around more aimlessly. The floors in the corridors were made of harder materials than the floors in the stores, subtly encouraging tired shoppers inside. Studies on smell led corporations to concoct trademarked scents for each of their store brands. Muzak’s research teams developed soundtracks capable of making people chew food faster, try on more clothes and spend more money.”
“By the 1990′s retailers were exploiting more than just the five sense, and moving on to a higher order of behavioral manipulation. Stores for teenagers were all put in on section of the mall, so that kids could be more easily isolated from their parents and targeted without adult interference. Companies with names such as Envirosell used security camera tapes to analyze many kinds of consumer behavior. Bigger sales counters make people feel self-conscious about purchasing only one small item; if a women is accidentally “butt-brushed” by another shopper while stoop over to inspect an item, she won’t buy the item; people tend to move to the right when entering a store rather than to the left. These studies led to theories about how to sell more stuff to more people in less time.”
From Life, Inc. by Douglas Rushkoff
Ruthlessly
Do you have any marketable skills?
If you asked 100 people “Do you consider yourself a success?”, I’d expect 90 of them to answer one of two ways: a) Yes b) Depends on how you define success. (Which sounds like “no” to me)
During my working years (I never thought in terms of ‘career’) I don’t recall thinking in terms of success. My defining question was “Am I enjoying what I’m doing?” Yes. I did, I am. Did I have a system? I would have said, no, I was just lucky.
Reading Scott Adams’ How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big got me thinking about success.
“The best way to increase your odds of success — in a way that might look like luck to others — is to systematically become good, but not amazing, at the types of skills that work well together and are highly useful for just about any job.”
Adams provides a list of skills in which he thinks every adult should gain a working knowledge.
- Public speaking
- Psychology
- Business Writing
- Accounting
- Design (the basics)
- Conversation
- Overcoming shyness
- Second language
- Golf
- Proper grammar
- Persuasion
- Technology (hobby level)
- Proper voice technique
In the book he makes his case for each of these skills. As I read, I evaluated my own knowledge of these skills.
- Public speaking – Got my BA in Speech and Theater, taking lots of public speaking course along the way
- Psychology – a course or two
- Business writing – several books and some courses
- Accounting – almost zero knowledge
- Design – Yeah. Spent the last 10 or 15 years creating and websites for the company and clients
- Conversation – co-hosted daily radio show for a dozen years. Hundreds of interviews
- Overcoming shyness – college and community theater; 10,000 hours of airtime on the radio
- Second language – nope
- Golf – nope
- Proper grammar – writing courses, public speaking, radio, all contributed
- Persuasion – a couple of course in college; wrote countless radio commercials
- Technology – geek wannabe. Got the computer/internet bug early and never lost it
- Proper voice technique – see above
Turns out I had a pretty good handle on 9 of the 13 skills in Adams’ list. Not by design, mind you, just luck. Looking back, however, I can see how these skills combined and overlapped to make me well-suited to the work I wound up doing.
I can here all those zippers coming down, ready to piss on any idea that has Scott Adams’ name on it but I’d challenge you to read his book first. This little bit is just one idea in a couple of hundred pages.
I read a butt-load of management books during the first half of my working life but stopped after reading The Dilbert Principle and seeing myself lampooned on every page. Never read another management or self-help book, until this one.
How to Fail at Almost Everything
The full title of Scott Adams’ book is: How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. Kind of the Story of My Life. (Too long to fit in the headline space above.) Easily one of the better “how to succeed” books I’ve read. And I’ve read a bunch of them. I won’t try to explain how Mr. Adams’ approach differs from the others. As always, the best I can do is share a few excerpts that spoke to me.
Consider the people who routinely disagree with you. See how confident they look while being dead wrong? That’s exactly how you look to them.
In our messy, flawed lives, the nearest we can get to truth is consistency.
Sometimes the only real difference between crazy people and artists is that artists write down what they imagine seeing.
My optimism is like an old cat that likes to disappear for days, but I always expect it to return.
Things that will someday work out well start out well. Things that will never work start out bad and stay that way.
If no one is excited about your art/product/idea in the beginning, they never will be. Don’t be fooled by the opinions of friends and family. They’re all liars.
Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success.
Everything you learn becomes a shortcut for understanding something else.
I don’t read the news to find truth, as that would be a foolish waste of time. I read the news to broaden my exposure to new topics and patterns that make my brain more efficient in general and to enjoy myself, because learning interesting things increases my energy and makes me feel optimistic. Don’t think of news as information. Think of it as a source of energy.
Skills in which every adult should gain a working knowledge:
* Public speaking
* Psychology
* Business Writing
* Accounting
* Design (the basics)
* Conversation
* Overcoming shyness
* Second language
* Golf
* Proper grammar
* Persuasion
* Technology (hobby level)
* Proper voice technique
When politicians tell lies, they know the press will call them out. They also know it doesn’t matter. Politicians understand that reason will never have much of a role in voting decisions. A lie that makes a voter feel good is more effective than a hundred rational arguments. That’s even true when the voter knows the lie is a lie.
The point of conversation is to make the other person feel good.
People who enjoy humor are simply more attractive than people who don’t. If you don’t have funny friends, find some.
Escape from my cell, free the other inmates, shoot the warden, and burn down the prison.
HAPPINESS
(Happiness is) a feeling you get when your body chemistry is producing pleasant sensations in your mind.
We’re all born with a limited range of happiness, and the circumstances of life can only jiggle us around within the range.
The single biggest trick for manipulating your happiness chemistry is being able to do what you want, when you want. […] A person with a flexible schedule and average resources will be happier than a rich person who has everything except a flexible schedule. Work toward having control of your schedule.
Happiness has more to do with where you’re heading than where you are.
Pessimism is often a failure of imagination. If you can’t even imagine an improved future, you won’t be happy no matter how well your life is going right now.
Dying at age eighty isn’t worse than dying at a hundred. If you meat diet is a bomb with a long enough fuse, it might kill you at just about the time you’d want it to.