Facebook turned 10 years old last month. I bet that you either have a Facebook account or know someone who does. I don’t think that Mark Zuckerburg (Facebook’s main founder) could have imagined in 2004 that Facebook would be an online social media colossus that would obliterate all other social networking sites such as Myspace, Hi5, Friendster, etc. I do believe that one of the reasons for Facebook’s success was the fact that its early growth was incremental rather than exponential.
“Break the rules, change the game” is the marketing slogan for the Mazda 3 car advert. Check out the Youtube video of the advert at the end of this blog post. This ad features Dick Fosbury, the American high jumper, who invented the back-first Fosbury Flop technique in the mid 1960’s which revolutionised the sport.
I have procrastinated doing a blog post on ‘the curse of knowledge’ for a long time. This topic was mentioned in a session I attended at the University last week and I knew it was finally time to do a post on this topic. I encountered the ‘curse of knowledge’ in a fabulous book by Chip and Dan Heath called ‘Made to Stick‘. If you are interested in how to become an effective communicator, get this book.
There are a number of famous school dropouts mainly from the tech industry. These high profile individuals are usually American men. Some examples include Mark Zuckerberg who dropped out Harvard to start Facebook, Bill Gates who also dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft, Steve Jobs who dropped out of Reed College to start Apple and Michael Dell who dropped out of University of Texas to start Dell. Dropping out of school or quitting a job to start a business could be a calculated risk or a dangerous gamble.
Jonathan Harris wrote a manifesto for Transom called “Navigating Stuckness” which I would recommend that you read this week if you have some spare time. It is an autobiographical account of his career so far. He had a great quote on the importance of owning your attention which is worth thinking about.
“We have these brief lives, and our only real choice is how we will fill them. Your attention is precious. Don’t squander it. Don’t throw it away. Don’t let companies and products steal it from you. Don’t let advertisers trick you into lusting after things you don’t need. Don’t let the media convince you to covet the lives of celebrities. Own your attention — it’s all you really have.”
I am a big fan of the Longform podcast and would recommend this podcast if you are interested in longform writing. Every week a writer and/or editor is interviewed about their career and their writing process. They had Elizabeth Wurtzel on the show last October and she said something about writing which I have not forgotten since I heard it.
This year is slipping away like grains of sand through the palm of my hand. We are already in the third week of 2014. My goal was to do certain things everyday and I am already playing catch up. I started so well but now I am struggling to keep up. Each missed day of targets feels like wasted opportunities.
I recently came across Frank Chimero’s blog post on public speaking suggestions which I would recommend you check out. One of his suggestions was for speakers to ‘go in loops’. He said that
“It’s nice to come back to a thread that you dropped. Use recurring themes in your examples. Develop a thought to a question, say “I’m going to leave that question hanging for a bit,” then start somewhere else, and eventually link the new place to the hanging question’s answer. I’m sure you can think of a bunch of other ways to do this. Leaving loops open creates anticipation. Resolving them creates closure. Both are necessary for a good talk.”
The creators of successful TV shows such as House, Dexter, Lost, Mad Men, Homeland, Prison Break, Ray Donovan, Game of Thrones etc employ the technique of nested loops advocated by Frank Chimero to keep us glued and addicted to their shows.
Since most New Year resolutions are usually behavioural actions – things we want to accomplish in 2014. This means that we focus on the ‘doing’ aspect of our goals and we forget the ‘being’ aspect. There is the tendency to overlook this question when setting New Year goals: who do I need to ‘become’ (inwardly) in order for me to accomplish my 2014 targets?
Last Thursday, I got an email from Pocket, a web/mobile application which allows you to save your personal list of online articles that you want to read at a later date. I use the iOS version of this app a lot. The Pocket email stated that I made it to the top 1% of readers in Pocket for 2013. A breakdown of my stats revealed that I had read 2,441,513 words in Pocket this year so far. I was shocked that I read these many words via my mobile devices in 2013.