Dmitry Fadeyev reflects on the purpose of writing in Give Sight:

Meaningful writing has a purpose beyond that of simple entertainment or of generating conversation. Its purpose is to improve society, to improve our life, by teaching us certain truths that the author has learned. John Ruskin puts it well in his essay on books, Of Kings’ Treasuries, by saying that good books give us sight. By teaching us what to look for, and the value of those things, we learn to tell apart the good from the bad, to pass better judgements using our sharpened vision. We grow and become wiser. And that is the only sort of writing that ever improves us as people because all the rest, information and entertainment, it just passes by and leaves us in the same state that we are when we first come into contact with it.

I completely agree with this viewpoint, and that results in a constant struggle as I try to weigh the demands of long-form writing with the demands of, you know, having a day job. The compromise that many of us in this situation goes for, to keep the much-needed momentum of writing going (what Alex Charchar calls “act the pro”), is to share links and quick thoughts, interspersed with some long-form writing when inspiration and a brief excess of time collide.

I’m particularly self-conscious about the dangers of this approach after reading Marcelo Somers’s piece The Linkblog Cancer:

Our job as independent writers isn’t to be first or even to get the most pageviews. It’s to answer the question of “so what?”. Taken as a whole, our sites should tell a unique story that no one else can, with storylines that develop over time that help bring order to the chaos of what we cover.

That’s what I want to happen here, but I know I often fall short. I’ll keep doing it though, because I have hope that, taken as a whole, there is a thread running through the links I post and the essays I write, and that when I look back at it in a few years, that thread will spark some new and interesting ideas. We’ll see.

Jim Dalrymple in Apple’s motivation for suing Samsung:

I’m not going to say that Apple doesn’t care at all about keeping its secrets, but this is a case of dealing with the lesser of two evils. Sue Samsung now and show some old prototype photos, but stop them from copying future products; or let them continue copying. […]

Although none us know for sure what [Apple’s future] products are, if they are truly disruptive, like the iPhone and iPad, it’s in Apple’s best interests to stop Samsung now. This will effectively cut off the worst offender of companies copying its products in their tracks.

Jim clearly has a bee in his bonnet about the Apple v Samsung case, and it makes for some excellent writing and analysis. In fact, I think The Loop is by far the best site to stay up to date on what’s happening in this case.

I usually avoid articles called “What [X] can teach us about [Y]”, but despite myself I really enjoyed Maria Konnikova’s What Grown-Ups Can Learn From Kids’ Books. It’s a thoughtful essay that gets to the core of The Little Prince, Alice in Wonderland, and Winnie-the-Pooh:

“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” Piglet asks him as their adventures near an end, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”

“What’s for breakfast?” Pooh answers. “What do you say, Piglet?”

“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” responds Piglet.

Pooh thinks it over. “It’s the same thing,” he says. And as adults, we can at last appreciate just how right he is.

If I were to write an article like this, I would add two books to the list. First, I would mention how Where The Wild Things Are taught me that being king of whatever you’re doing isn’t what life is about:

And Max the king of all the wild things was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all. Then all around from far away across the world he smelled good things to eat so he gave up being king of where the wild things are.

And then I’d talk about Oh, The Places You’ll Go!, and how it probably contains some of the best advice on life and business that you’ll ever read:

And when things start to happen, don’t worry. Don’t stew. Just go right along. You’ll start happening too.

Except when they don’t. Because, sometimes they won’t.

I’m afraid that some times you’ll play lonely games too. Games you can’t win ‘cause you’ll play against you.

But since I didn’t write such an article, you should definitely read Maria’s. It’s really great.

Duncan J. Watts in Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?:

The reason is that when people tend to like what other people like, differences in popularity are subject to what is called “cumulative advantage,” or the “rich get richer” effect. This means that if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors — a phenomenon that is similar in some ways to the famous “butterfly effect” from chaos theory. Thus, if history were to be somehow rerun many times, seemingly identical universes with the same set of competitors and the same overall market tastes would quickly generate different winners: Madonna would have been popular in this world, but in some other version of history, she would be a nobody, and someone we have never heard of would be in her place.

Forget about that Justin — this finally gives us a satisfactory explanation for Bieber fever. Today, the universe makes just a little bit more sense again.

Just as Alex Charchar’s excellent 31-day Exercise in Short & Quick Essays came to an end, one of my other favorite writers, Dmitry Fadeyev, started his own An Essay a Day project. I love these projects, and I wish I had the guts to do something similar. Here’s an excerpt from one of Dmitri’s first posts in the series, called The Road to Hyperborea:

And even when people do break away and achieve what we thought ourselves impossible, we label them “geniuses” and thus once again create an artificial wall between us and them, drawing ever more constraints over our potential. Nietzsche warned us against this by saying that our impulse to label the most productive of us as “geniuses” — and that is what they are, productive individuals who have built up enough experience and have created enough material from which they can select the very best — relieves us of the pressure to compete with them. The label lifts them above our playing field, separates them from us, so that the benchmarks they’ve created no longer apply to us. It’s a declaration of surrender.

That’s a solid kick in the pants to stop limiting our own potential just because there are so many others out there who are better than us. Dmitri is a fantastic writer, so I highly recommend following his month-long essay journey.

Natalie Wolchover asks Why Is Everyone on the Internet So Angry?, and along with the usual anonymity/distance explanations, she makes the following point:

And because comment-section discourses don’t happen in real time, commenters can write lengthy monologues, which tend to entrench them in their extreme viewpoint. “When you’re having a conversation in person, who actually gets to deliver a monologue except people in the movies? Even if you get angry, people are talking back and forth and so eventually you have to calm down and listen so you can have a conversation,” [professor of psychology Art] Markman told Life’s Little Mysteries.

It reminds me of the John Mayer song (sorry!) Belief where he says, “Is there anyone who ever remembers changing their mind from the paint on a sign?” I don’t even know why we think these angry comment-section monologues might change anyone’s mind, but then again, we might not be doing it to convince anyone but ourselves. After all, most angry comments on the web can easily be explained using Paul Ford’s WWIC (“Why Wasn’t I Consulted?”) concept. But I digress.

Right after I read Natalie’s article, I read a post on the 37signals blog called What are questions?, in which Jason Fried paraphrases a discussion he had with Clay Christensen:

Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question – you have to want to know – in order to open up the space for the answer to fit.

If you aren’t curious enough to want to know why, to want to ask questions, then you’re not making the room in your mind for answers. If you stop asking questions, your mind can’t grow.

I think that the main reason why comment-section monologues are so ineffective to change people’s viewpoints, is that it provides answers for questions that no one is asking. Clay is right: if you’re not asking yourself why you believe the things you believe, you’re not going to listen to anyone’s answer telling you that you’re wrong.

Imagine a comment thread where, at the end of every reply, the commenter says something like, “But I might not be right about this… does anyone have any arguments to prove me wrong?” I know what you’re thinking: “LOL, that will never happen.” Of course it won’t. But online discourse would be so different if each of us allowed for the possibility that we might not be right about something. If we made a question-space just big enough for an answer that could change our minds.

We can dream about a such a world, right?

Jason Calacanis believes The Age of Excellence is here, and I agree:

You see, in the old days, it was about distribution, location, marketing spend, celebrity endorsement, traffic buying or the black art of search engine optimization.

Today it’s about getting a positive net-promoter score and making your five-star histogram look like a gun: a lot of five-star reviews coupled with some four-star reviews make the barrel. A dramatic drop-off to three stars, followed by slightly fewer two- and one-star reviews, makes the handle of your gun.

No amount of marketing or gamesmanship is going to flip the upside-down gun over. If your product sucks, it’s over. Transparency is a bitch.

(link via @jonaspersson)

I’ve written before about the importance of using both iteration (progressively solidifying the details of a product) and variation (coming up with ideas that are very different from the current iteration). We now know that Apple does that all the time; but it also recently became clear that they don’t view their unused variations as failures. Kyle Baxter makes a good point about this in Apple’s iPhone Prototypes:

But what’s fascinating to me is that designs rejected during the development process for an earlier version of the product may come back in future versions. That initial first step, where many unique designs are created, becomes the grist for the future of the product, a conceptual mine to return to for ideas. A particular design may have failed during an earlier product development process but could become the basis for development of a new design. Earlier rejected designs became the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS, and others became the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S, perhaps Apple’s most iconic iPhone version yet.

It’s worth remembering: never underestimate the future value of what might seem like a bad idea at the time.