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.

This week’s episode of the Back to Work podcast with Dan Benjamin and Merlin Mann really struck a chord with me. In Scream, Poop, and Run they have a long discussion about an article by Jad Abumrad called The Terrors & Occasional Virtues of Not Knowing What You’re Doing. There is one part in particular, where Merlin talks about not listening to people who tell you what you can’t do, that I keep replaying in my head:

There are so many voices that you are going to hear — some of them actually outside your head — so many voices that you are going to hear about what you should be doing differently, what you’re doing wrong, what you’ll never be capable of, what you’ll always suck at, and you’ve got to not listen to those voices.

The people who constantly tell you what you shouldn’t do are typically really good at not doing things. And that is a virus they are very happy to spread. They are people who just don’t make stuff, they are people who don’t do stuff, and they are more than happy to try to pull the entire world down to their level of not making and not doing. And that’s something to watch out for. Because if you listen too much to all those other voices, they’ll eventually become your voice. And that’s the voice that’s going to be with you all the time.

That’s the voice you’ll go to sleep with, and it’s the voice you’ll wake up with, and if you listen to it too much, it’s going to drown out the tiny voices. And the tiny voices are like the little Will O’ the Wisps in Brave, these little blue lights, saying, “Try this way. Come this way. Come this way.” And those little blue lights — or the tiny voices — you’re only going to hear that if you’re not being drowned out by all the things that say that you’re not even worthy of having your own Wisps.

Those are very loud voices — especially if you make stuff for the Internet. It’s just always there — it’s a constant din of people telling you what you should be beside yourself. And that’s the worst advice in the world.

The whole episode is great. Have a listen.

Here is a good example that shows how we still have some work to do before we’ll be able to settle on a standard set of mobile design patterns. In the Facebook iPad app, a drawer slides out if you want to see comments on a status. But once that happens, two existing iOS patterns collide.

I always try to swipe the drawer away to get back to where I was. But, of course, iOS also has a “slide to delete” pattern, so instead of the drawer disappearing, the “Delete” button comes up on swipe. The way to dismiss the drawer is to tap in the greyed-out area.

This is certainly a tough problem to solve, so I’m not trying to beat up on Facebook. It’s just an example to show that we’ll have to work through a bunch of these types of colliding patterns before we can comfortably design for mobile using established guidelines.