Chris Dixon in The default state of a startup is failure — a short, powerful post on human behavior and entrepreneurship:

If you are starting a company and wondering why nothing good seems to happen unless you force it to happen, that’s because the world wants to stay the way it is. Customers, partners, and most of all incumbents don’t want to think hard, try new things, or change in any way. The world is lazy and just wants to keep doing what it’s doing.

He points out that because the world is lazy, no one will care about a new product you launch unless you make them.

Jim Dalrymple in Blogging is not a thing, it’s an attitude:

Readers connect with a blogger. They know things about them, they laugh together and sometimes argue over points in a story. It’s a give and take relationship that not everyone can handle.

Blogging is not about being stiff and rigid in your writing, but being flexible and flowing with ideas. It doesn’t matter if everyone agrees with your thoughts. In fact, that would be really boring “” but you write it anyway.

I completely agree with Jim, and it’s one of the main things I’ve learned in the few months that I’ve been writing more on this site. Conventional blogging wisdom says that you have to pick a topic and stick with it. I read this advice all over the web, so I used to think about it all the time. I worried about the topics I covered, and whether or not I’m “allowed” to publish something if it doesn’t quite fit my One Chosen Topic. Oh, and I worried a great deal about what that One Chosen Topic should be. Writing lost its fun and became stressful.

I no longer believe that this conventional wisdom is true. I think that people follow blogs primarily because they connect with the authors and their views in some way, not because of the specific topics they cover (although of course that does play a part). It’s why I keep coming back to The Loop, Daring Fireball, The Brooks Review, Shawn Blanc, etc. It’s why I don’t mind when Marco Arment reviews LED light bulbs.

I might not always agree with these authors, but I have a genuine affinity for them, and I respect their views. They’re not faceless organizations, but human beings that write about things that interest them. And because they do it well, they get me interested in a much more diverse set of topics (like baseball). They prompt me to think more critically, and that spurs additional thoughts that feed into my own writing.

I also like this quote from Michael Lopp from his article Please Learn to Write:

Your readers are far more critical than the Python interpreter. Not only do they care about syntax, but they also want to learn something, and, perhaps, be entertained while all this learning is going down. Success means they keep coming back – failure is a lonely silence.

I think when it comes down to it, it’s the constant fear of the lonely silence that drives us to become better writers. But that’s a much better fear to have than wondering about what you’re allowed to put on your site. I’m in no position to give writing advice, but I’ll tell you what has made my experience worthwhile.

I feel like writing more has helped me find my voice. And I am becoming more comfortable with raising that voice about a continuously expanding range of topics. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s not so good. But there has been a big pay-off in persisting: a small, growing community of readers that I appreciate and enjoy immensely. They tell me when I’m full of crap, and they tell me when I write something they like. That’s an incredible privilege, and why I love the blog format so much. So if you’re one of those who keep coming back and provide the occasional piece of feedback: thank you.

Ok, this turned out much longer than I planned. I actually just wanted to send you to Jim’s post. So don’t forget to go read it.

A couple of weeks ago I read this quote by John Cage in The Art of Looking Sideways:

I have nothing to say and I’m saying it. Is your mind racing about all the ways that statement applies to life on the Internet? Yeah, me too. In fact, the phrase immediately made me think of a joke I could make on Twitter, which I wrote down right away. But I wanted to get my facts right, so I started reading up on John Cage – as you do when you’re on vacation. This is where I ask you to please stick with me as we go on a brief detour about the nature of criticism.

My rabbit-hole journey into the world of John Cage led me to a great 2004 essay by Joe Dacey called John Cage Defined in the 1950s. It outlines how the phrase “I have nothing to say and I’m saying it” comes from his “Lecture on Nothing”:

In this lecture, he outright tells the listener that the lecture has no point and will go nowhere, “I am here and there is nothing to say. If among you are those who wish to get somewhere, let them leave at any moment”. He implores the audience to enjoy each and every moment of the lecture even though he admits that it is pointless. He advocates that, “Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight (since we do not possess it) and thus need not fear its loss” and “It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else”.

It’s not just you – that is a weird thing to do. What fascinates me most about Cage is that he never bothered to reflect on any criticism of his work. Ever.

Cage mostly ignored criticism he received believing that most people didn’t understand why he composed the music he composed. In fact, he saw society as “one of the greatest impediments an artist can possibly have” to creating good art. After receiving a review for a concert he gave in Seattle that stated the performance was “ridiculous,” Cage’s responded that he had no interest in the review because he “knew perfectly well it wasn’t.”

Knowing when to ignore criticism and when to listen to it is one of the hardest skills to learn, and so easy to get wrong. On the one extreme is the John Cage approach, where you view all criticism as bogus or not worthy of your attention. On the other extreme there are people (and companies) who change course with every little piece of feedback they get, regardless of its merit.

But somewhere in between is a happy medium where you use criticism as a springboard to ask yourself tough questions. If you’re a designer, those questions might be things like, “Why did I put this button here?” or “Why might someone find this interface confusing?”. Those are excellent questions to ask yourself. If you can answer them, and defend the decisions you made, you can move on to the next thing. If your questions lead you to make some changes, well, that’s great too because your end result is going to be a better product.

I like the way The 99 Percent approaches the process of finding this middle ground in their article On Criticism, Cynicism & Sharpening Your Gut Instinct:

Criticism is doubt informed by curiosity and a deep knowledge of a discipline related to your work. Whether the criticism you receive is constructive or not, it comes from knowledge. Informed insights like “I’m not sure someone would ever pay that much” or “you may not want to outsource that given the high-touch required” may cause you to question your approach.

By contrast, cynicism is a form of doubt resulting from ignorance and antiquated ways. Industry experts will often express doubt based on an ingrained muscle memory of past experiences that handicaps their vision for the future. Cynical statements like, “People will never read a book on a computer” or “Why would anyone want to put their rolodex online?” are famous doubts expressed by experts with handicapped vision.

Their advice is simple: Savor criticism, shun cynicism. That seems like a sound approach to me.

Anyway, I mention all of this to ensure you of the accuracy of the joke I ended up making:

“I have nothing to say and I am saying it” – John Cage in his 1949 lecture on posting Foursquare check-ins to Twitter

— Rian van der Merwe (@RianVDM) May 14, 2012

You are, of course, welcome to disagree and send me your criticism.

This story has been passed around quite bit, but in case you haven’t seen it, Mat Honan’s How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet is a fascinating story:

This is the story of a wonderful idea. Something that had never been done before, a moment of change that shaped the Internet we know today. This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.

It’s a well-written and thoughtful account that’s well worth the (long) read. Honan’s core argument on what went wrong is this:

All Yahoo cared about was the database its users had built and tagged. It didn’t care about the community that had created it or (more importantly) continuing to grow that community by introducing new features.

All the wrong decisions that Yahoo made can be traced back to that single issue: that they didn’t understand why people use Flickr. Instead, they made the common and fatal mistake of placing profit before product.

Unrelated, but until I read this article I had no idea that there is an app that adds cats with laser eyes to your photos. That is awesome. And now I’m really going off on a tangent, but there is a certain poetry to this 1-star review of the app:

It only gives you a small amount of cats to choose from and if you want another small amount of cat head stamps it costs 99 cents more. This app needs at least three times the number of cats to make it worthwhile. Don’t buy.

It needs at least three times the number of cats to make it worthwhile!

So, while we’re on a tangent anyway, I’ll indulge myself in posting this picture of the setting I was lucky enough to read this Yahoo article in. Vacation is hard.

There’s an interesting discussion on The Verge entitled Filters vs. failure: Instagram’s perfect messes could spell trouble for creativity. Joshua Kopstein argues that the problem with Instagram and other digital creation tools like Paper is that it removes the ability to make mistakes. It’s virtually impossible to take a bad picture on Instagram, and he believes that this is a problem for creativity in general:

By removing risk we have fundamentally changed the nature of the medium, or technically speaking, switched to an entirely different one. Because the process is now streamlined and offers near-infinite forgiveness, the way we approach a camera has changed drastically from tools defined by limited exposures and semi-predictable chemicals, and the resulting product always reflects that.

Instagram’s foremost blasphemy isn’t that it “ruins” images or misrepresents reality “” it’s that it mines another medium for selective, aesthetic purposes despite being unable to represent the processes and risks that define that medium. The software curates, emulates and packages appropriated qualities that its creators consider desirable, creating a risk-free detour that fast-tracks the creative process.

Kopstein also links to a very interesting article by Derek Holzer called Schematic as Score: Uses and Abuses of the (In)Deterministic Possibilities of Sound Technology. Holzer discusses the move from analog to digital creation in the music industry, and makes a similar point about the absence of risk in the creative process:

I consider it axiomatic that, for any art work to be considered experimental, the possibility of failure must be built into its process. I am not referring to the aestheticized, satisfying glitches and crackles valorized by Kim Cascone, but to the lack of satisfaction produced by a misguided or misstepped procedure in the experiment, whether colossal or banal. These are not errors to be sought out, sampled and celebrated, but the flat-on-your-ass gaffs and embarrassments that would trouble the sleep of all but the most Zen of musicians or composers.

The presence of failure in a musical system represents feedback in the negative, a tipping point into anti-climax, irrelevance, the commonplace, the cliche or even unintended silence. Many artists try to factor out true, catastrophic failure by scripting, scoring, sequencing or programming their work into as many predictable, risk-free quanta as possible ahead of time. But this unwelcome presence also guarantees the vitality of that hotly-contested territory ““ the live electronic music performance.

The resulting compositions from the most “easy” and “simple” software tools are often nothing more than “digital folk” art ““ the endless and endlessly similar permutations which are possible merely from the tweaking of a few basic presets. Perhaps the artistic tragedy of the digital age lies in the social and economic pressure to immediately release “results” which barely get beyond this initiatory phase.

I find these discussions fascinating. Sweeping generalizations are dangerous, of course, but I do agree that taking the risk out of creativity also makes it much harder to make something truly great. I see this in my own creative pursuits as well. I love writing first drafts of pieces. I absolutely hate editing those pieces to become something that’s worth publishing. But it’s in the editing process – which is basically the discovery and correction of failures – that the opportunity for doing good work really presents itself.

If software came along that magically made every first draft look acceptable, writers would lose out on the surprising spurts of creativity that come from the editing process. And I think this is the same for Instagram and electronic music. If we can walk any direction we want and never get a course correction, how will we get where we need to go?

My wife just emailed me this quote on writing. I can’t figure out if she’s encouraging me or insulting me. Ah, the wonderful mysteries of marriage.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

George Orwell, Why I Write

In Designing Ideas Paul Scrivens reminds us that distraction-free writing apps aren’t new – typewriters and pen & paper have been around for a very long time. He then encourages us to look beyond our immediate time and medium for ideas on how to solve design problems:

The problem with designing new ideas is that we are too busy looking at what the people are designing around us to realize that many of the solutions to the problems we are facing have been solved already in a different time.

You will never be first with a new idea. You will be first with a new way to present the idea or a new way to combine that idea with another. Ideas are nothing more than mashups of the past. Once you can embrace that, your imagination opens up a bit more and you start to look elsewhere for inspiration.

This is partly why I’ve spent so much time reading up on architecture. It’s a mature, related craft that can teach us a great deal about web design – arguably more than Dribbble can.

I was reading an article called The Internet’s Battle For Our Digital Souls on Big Think when I stumbled on this sentence:

We get approximately the same type of pleasure from talking about ourselves on social media as we do from having sex.

That just didn’t sit right with me. I’ve posted plenty of updates on Facebook and Twitter, and it definitely didn’t… ok, I’ll stop there. I don’t want this to get awkward. All I’m saying is that this doesn’t feel right. So I decided to trace the statement back to the original study that it’s talking about, to see what’s going on.

The post on Big Think appears to be a rehash of an article in the LA Times called Study helps explain why we over-share on Facebook, Twitter. The first thing I found interesting is that their conclusion about the sex thing is a little more measured:

In a series of experiments, the researchers found that the act of disclosing information about oneself activates the same sensation of pleasure in the brain that we get from eating food, getting money or having sex. It’s all a matter of degrees of course, (talking about yourself isn’t quite as pleasurable as sex for most of us), but the science makes it clear that our brain considers self-disclosure to be a rewarding experience.

The LA Times links back to the original research paper, which has the decidedly less sexy title Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding (PDF link). The paper explains that the study was about whether or not people would give up money to talk about themselves (my emphasis added):

Just as monkeys are willing to forgo juice rewards to view dominant groupmates and college students are willing to give up money to view attractive members of the opposite sex, our participants were willing to forgo money to think and talk about themselves.

The word “sex” appears six times in the 6-page paper, and only once in the context that these other news stories use it. The “Discussion” section starts off as follows (my emphasis added):

Despite the frequency with which humans disclose the contents of their own thoughts, little has been known about the proximate mechanisms that motivate this behavior. Here, we suggest that humans so willingly self-disclose because doing so represents an event with intrinsic value, in the same way as with primary rewards such as food and sex. Intriguingly, findings also suggested that both parts of “self-disclosure” have reward value. Although participants were willing to forgo money merely to introspect about the self and doing so was sufficient to engage brain regions associated with the rewarding outcomes, these effects were magnified by knowledge that on’s thoughts would be communicated to another person, suggesting that individuals find opportunities to disclose their own thoughts to others to be especially rewarding.

Note that they talk about “rewards”, not “pleasure” like in the news stories. The core research hypothesis is that sharing about ourselves has intrinsic value. To quote from a different section (my emphasis added):

Interestingly, a number of earlier researchers have put forward the hypothesis explicitly tested here — that self-disclosure will act as an intrinsic reward; however, despite calls to do so, this notion has not previously been tested empirically. As such, the current study validates a long-standing hypothesis that self-disclosure arises — at least in part — from the subjective value associated with it.

No mention of sex there, whatsoever. It’s also important to know what the phrase “intrinsic value” means in the philosophical sense of the word, because it’s essential to understanding the results of the study:

The intrinsic value of something is said to be the value that that thing has “in itself,” or “for its own sake,” or “as such,” or “in its own right.”

So let’s be very clear about what this research shows. The hypotheses tested (and confirmed) is that people like talking about themselves on social media because it has intrinsic value. In other words, we like sharing because it’s enjoyable for its own sake as a social activity. They make the point (in passing) that this is similar to other activities with intrinsic value such as food and, yes, sex. It’s not that posting on Facebook makes you feel the same way that having sex does. It’s that all these things share a common thread: the subjective, intrinsic value that they possess.

But hey, that message isn’t nearly going to rack up the same number of page views as saying that “We get approximately the same type of pleasure from talking about ourselves on social media as we do from having sex.” I read so many “a new study suggests that…” articles that I just take at face value. Today I decided to read the actual research paper, and realized what kind of distortions happen the further you get from the source of a story. I’ll certainly be a lot more cautious about these kinds of stories going forward. Welcome to the new age of journalism, I guess.