Our languages are replete with phrases that unite words evoking a sense of cold with concepts of loneliness, social exclusion or misanthropy. When we speak of icy stares, frosty receptions and cold shoulders, we invoke feelings of isolation and unfriendliness. But cold and solitude are more than just metaphorical bedfellows; a new study shows that social exclusion can literally make people feel cold.

Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey Leonardelli from the University of Toronto recruited 65 students and were asked to recall a situation where they either felt included within a group or left out of it. Afterwards, they asked the students to estimate the temperature in the room under the ruse of providing information for the maintenance staff. The estimates varied wildly but volunteers who had social exclusion on their minds gave an average estimate of 21C, while those who remembered fitting in guessed an average of 24C.

So far, so interesting. But Zhong and Leonardelli were not content with simply bringing social memories to the surface; for their next trick, they created real feelings of exclusion. They recruited 52 more students who were led to a computer cubicle and told that they were taking part in an online game with three anonymous players. The object was simply to throw a virtual ball between the group but unbeknownst to the volunteers, their “partners” were computer-controlled programmes. These avatars either intermittently passed the ball to the real player throughout the game, or left them out after a few cursory passes.

Afterwards, the students completed an apparently unrelated marketing survey where they had to rate their preference for five different foods or drinks. Zhong and Leonardelli found that the behaviour of their virtual peers affected their preferences for foods, depending on their temperature! The “unpopular” students who had been left out of the ball-throwing game showed significantly stronger preferences for hot coffee or hot soup than those who had been allowed to play. On the other hand, both groups showed the same degree of preference for control foods such as Coke, apple or crackers.



So being ostracised, or even the memory of being ostracised, drums up both a literal chill and a desire for warmth. It can work the other way round too; invoking the concept of temperature can alter your opinions of another person. In an as yet unpublished study, graduate students Lawrence Williams and John Bargh asked other students to hold a cup of hot or iced coffee, before talking to another researcher. Afterwards, those who held the hot drink rated the stranger as being warmer and friendlier and were more likely to recommend them for a job.

So to speak

To Zhong and Leonardelli, studies like these are a testament to the power of metaphors. When we first learn to wield them in English lessons, we are taught that they are not meant to be taken literally, and yet psychological experiments show that many metaphors reflect fundamental ties between our social lives and our physical sensations.

Zhong and Leonardelli suggest that this close link between temperature and social closeness may be rooted in our earliest interactions with other people. When our parents held us close to them, we felt the warmth of their bodies and when they kept their distance, they deprived us of that warmth. So from an early age, temperature and distance from another person go hand-in-hand.

Indeed, people seem to have a tendency to describe complex abstract concepts using familiar physical experiences. Positive traits like generosity, friendliness or compassion are associated with warmth, while greed and desire are associated with hunger. So it is with cold and solitude. This link between the physical and the abstract isn’t just a one-way street – the two domains are so closely linked that the abstract can also invoke the physical.

I’ve previously written about another example of this, where psychologists demonstrated the bond between physical and moral cleanliness – the so-called “Lady Macbeth effect“. In that study, people who were asked to recall past misdeeds felt the physical need to clean themselves, gravitating towards cleaning-related words and preferring hygiene products over other items. Once again, clean consciences, dirty traitors and washing away your sins are more than just figurative turns of phrase. Zhong and Leonardelli’s results open a door to a large flurry of follow-up questions. Could experiencing physical warmth help to lessen the hurt of social exclusion? Could a cup of warm chicken soup be more than a metaphorical remedy “for the soul”? Could ambient temperate affect the quality of social relationships, and could manipulating one influence the other? Does social cohesion have its own thermostat? Could the depressive experience of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) stem just as much from the chill of winter as it does from a dearth of sunlight? Are fans of Vanilla Ice destined to a life of loneliness and despair?

Weight affects our perceptions of importance

We often use weight as a metaphor for importance, describing something as a ‘weighty issue’ or dismissing an argument as ‘not holding much weight’ but a new study suggests that this is not just a figure of speech.

A research team found that they could alter people’s judgement of importance just by getting them to answer questions using a heavier clipboard.

In a series of short elegant experiments, a research team led by psychologist Nils Jostmann found that people holding a heavy clipboard would, for example, value foreign currencies more highly than those using a lighter clipboard.

Of course, this might be because of the simple association that larger amounts of money weigh more, so they looked at whether more abstract judgements about value could be affected by weight.

Subsequent studies showed that heavier clipboards led to participants placing more importance on the university listening to student opinions, and that participants were more likely to link their opinion of whether Amsterdam was a great city to the competence of the mayor.

A final study found that visitors who were stopped in the street and asked their opinion on a controversial subway were more confident in their opinion and were more likely to agree with strong arguments for the plan.

The researchers link these findings with the growing field of embodied cognition that suggests that much of our experience of the world is actually mediated through how we interact with it.

Much of this research shows that altering the physical condition of the body affects how we perceive and understand, even for concepts that we think are nothing but metaphors.

A cross-cultural look at our spatial understanding of numbers.
by Steven B. Jackson in Culture Conscious

In a recent post, we discussed how the cognitive processing of numbers may be rooted in the human body. It should come as no surprise then, that the way we think about numbers is deeply spatial. This phenomenon has a snappy title: The Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes, or SNARC, effect.

In the seminal 1993 study that uncovered the SNARC effect, cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene and colleagues conducted a series of experiments on number processing. They were interested in the way we discern and distinguish even and odd numbers. In one experiment, subjects were shown numbers between 0 and 9 on a computer screen. They were asked to determine whether each number was odd or even by pressing one of two response keys, one with the left hand and one with the right.

Subjects reacted faster to small numbers like 1 and 2 when they pushed the button with their left hand. Larger numbers like 8 and 9 elicited faster responses when the right hand was doing the clicking. The researchers hypothesized that this difference has to do with spatial associations we have with numbers. We—in America, at least—orient numbers in space, with smaller integers associated with the left side of space, and larger numbers to the right. As a result, processing speed is faster when numbers are located where they “should” be. That’s the SNARC effect in a nutshell.

So where does the SNARC effect come from? Is it hardwired in all humans? Are numbers inherently spatial? Most experts agree that this is not the case.

A recent study suggests that our cognitive architecture for processing numbers is influenced by language. In 2009, Israeli researcher Samuel Shaki studied the SNARC effect across language groups. Using methodology similar to Dehaene’s 1993 study, Shaki tested the SNARC effect in subjects from three different countries. One group of subjects was Canadian, who read English words and Arabic numbers from left to right. Another group was Palestinian, who read Arabic words right to left, as well as the numbers of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system. The third group was composed of Israelis, who read Hebrew from right to left, but Arabic numbers from left to right.

Canadians showed a typical SNARC effect, with fast left side responses for smaller integers. Palestinians had a reversed SNARC effect, associating smaller numbers with the right side of space and larger numbers with the left side. Israelis, with their conflicting reading directions for letters and numbers, showed the weakest SNARC effect. These results strongly suggest that spatial-numerical associations are influenced by culturally specific reading and writing systems for both letters and numbers.

The SNARC effect may be culturally acquired, but it is also highly flexible. Just one year before Shaki’s cross-cultural study was published, Scottish research Martin Fischer examined the malleability of the SNARC effect. Experimenters asked participants to read cookbook recipes on a computer screen. In one group, the recipes were SNARC-congruent, with smaller numbers on the left side of the line of text and larger numbers on the right. For example: “Take 2 potatoes and fry them for 9 minutes.” In the SNARC-incongruent group, the recipe would instead read, “Take 9 potatoes and fry them for 2 minutes,” with the larger number oriented on the left side of the screen and the smaller number on the right.

After about 40 minutes of exposure to the SNARC-incongruent recipes, subjects showed a significantly diluted SNARC effect. This suggests that our spatial-numerical associations are not fixed, but are sensitive to experiences in the here and now.

To sum up: We tend to conceptualize numbers spatially. Experiments across language groups have shown that the spatial associations we make with numbers are not innate, but appear to be shaped by language. On top of that, these associations can also be influenced by stimuli in the present.

We still have a lot to learn about the SNARC effect. A particularly interesting question is how the effect manifests itself (or doesn’t) in speakers and writers of vertically written languages like Japanese and Chinese. Another question for further research is how fluency in multiple languages may moderate the potency and direction of the SNARC effect. With researchers exploring these and other questions, we may one day have a fuller understanding of our curiously spatial approach to numbers.

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Sources:

Fischer M.H., Mills R.A., & Shaki S. (2010). How to cook a SNARC: number placement in text rapidly changes spatial-numerical associations. Brain and Cognition, 72, 333-336

Shaki S., Fischer M. H., & Petrusic W. M. (2009). Reading habits for both words and numbers contribute to the SNARC effect. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 16, 328–331.

Dehaene, S., Bossini, S., & Giraux, P. (1993). The mental representation of parity and numerical magnitude. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 122, 371–396.

What's the single most valuable lesson you've learned in your professional life?

The fundamental difference between smart people and wise people. Smart people reach answers fast without much consideration of alternatives, and who have amazing ability to justify anything, using their big brains.  Wise people who know they are often wrong, and so can admit and learn from their mistakes, take more time to make decisions when it is not an emergency, and generally come to better solutions if they are not working. Think of the difference between oh so smart Henry Kissinger and Cho En Lai who ran rings around him when Nixon went to China for example, or in business between the ever self justifying Alan Greenspan and Alan Mullaly who actually turned round Boeing and Ford. It is better to be wise than smart. Of course the wise people also have learned the sort of lessons Edmond Lau has posted, who sounds wise and I would only add admit and learn from mistakes as a specific tool to combine with his list.

Edmond Lau, Quora Engineer

 

Focus on high-leverage activities.  Leverage is defined as the amount of output or impact produced per unit of time spent.

This lesson applies regardless of whether you love to spend many waking hours working or whether you're a subscriber of Tim Ferris's 4-Hour Work Week philosophy [1]. At some point, you'll realize that there's more work to be done than you have time available, and you'll need to prioritize what to get done. Leverage should be the central, guiding metric that helps you determine where to focus your time.

Another rule of thumb for thinking about leverage is to consider the commonly mentioned Pareto principle [2] or the 80-20 rule -- the idea that 80% of the contributions or impact come from 20% of the effort.  That 20% of work consists of the highest leverage activities.  The 4-Hour Work Week philosophy requires taking this to the extreme -- assuming a normal 40-hour work week, what's the 10% of effort (4 hours) that you can do to achieve most of the gains?

By definition, your leverage, and hence productivity, can be increased in three ways [3]:

• By reducing the time it takes to complete a certain activity.
• By increasing the impact of a particular activity.
• By shifting to higher leverage activities.

Some examples of professional activities that I engage in to increase leverage include:

• Mentoring new hires.  Mentoring (and really managing) is an extremely high-leverage activity.  Over the course of a year, an employee will spend somewhere between 1880 to 2820 hours working (assuming 47 work-weeks and somewhere between 40-60 hours per week working).  Spending 1 hour every day for a month (20 hours) mentoring or training a new hire may seem like a lot of time, but it represents only about 1% of the total time the new hire will spend working his/her first year and yet can have a significant influence over the productivity and effectiveness on the other 99% of those hours.
  
• Building tools and automating repetitive work.  Coming from a software engineering background, one high-leverage activity that I tend to do is to build tools that reduce manual, repetitive work. I'm a little biased, but I'm a firm believer that everyone would benefit knowing a little bit about coding (see Computer Programming: Should most young people learn to code?), primarily because there are many fields not traditionally associated with computer science where a mindset of automation would have huge efficiency gains.  Don't do what a machine can do for you.
  
• Invest in learning and in continuously improving.  This falls in the bucket of "important and not urgent" tasks that Steven Covey describes in his time management matrix in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People [4, 5].  Learning never seems like an urgent task, and it's easy -- if you don't budget time for it -- to allow unimportant interruptions to dictate your schedule.  However, learning is what lets you improve your work productivity and increase the opportunities available, so it's a big high-leverage activity.
  
• Actively prioritizing tasks based on estimated impact.  I'm currently working on user growth at Quora, and there are probably hundreds of things that I could consider working on at any given time that might move our metrics up and to the right. Deciding what I should work on next that would be the highest impact requires regularly reviewing (I try to do this at least weekly) what needs to get done and having the data to guide the decision-making.
  
• Holding tech talks and writing guides to bring new hires on board.  At Quora, we've recently started having each new hire go through a series of tech talks and also assembled a set of codelabs.  Inspired by Google's training regimen, codelabs are documents that explain core software abstractions and concepts that we use, discuss the rationale for why we designed and used them, walk through the relevant code in the codebase, and provide a set of exercises to solidify understanding.  These took many people on the team many hours to write, but they provide a scalable and reusable resource that allow new hires to start on a consistent foundation and cut down the amount of time that each individual mentor needs to spend teaching the same concepts.
  
• Pushing back on meetings without an agenda or meetings that you don't really need to be a part of.  Poorly run meetings are negative leverage because they waste people's time.  Avoid those.  A corollary to this is defining and setting agendas for meetings that you hold so that you don't waste other people's time.
  
• Spending time on interviews and improving interview processes.  Conducting interviews is a huge amount of work.  Interviews interrupt your workday, and the hours spent talking with candidates, writing up feedback, and debriefing all add up to considerable amounts.  However, making sure that we're hiring the right people, that we have a good process in place,  and that people we hire are people that I would be excited to work with is essential to building a strong team and a strong product.  There have been many weeks where I've interviewed 4 candidates per week, and I think my personal record during the height of the recruiting season was doing 20 interviews in 20 consecutive workdays.
  
• Using open-source tools when they meet your needs.  There's no sense in re-inventing the wheel if someone else has already built what you need.

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[1] http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Par...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/High-Outpu...
[4] https://www.stephencovey.com/7ha...
[5] Tips & Hacks for Everyday Life: What are the top three effectiveness strategies you use?

What The Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast

BY Laura Vanderkam

Mornings are a great time for getting things done. You’re less likely to be interrupted than you are later in the day. Your supply of willpower is fresh after a good night’s sleep. That makes it possible to turn personal priorities like exercise or strategic thinking into reality.

But if you’ve got big goals--and a chaotic a.m. schedule--how can you make over your mornings to make these goals happen?

Because I write about time management frequently, I’ve gotten to see hundreds of calendars and schedules over the years. From studying people’s morning habits, I’ve learned that getting the most out of this time is a five-part process. Follow these steps, though, and you’re on your way to building morning habits that stick.

1. Track Your Time

Part of spending your time better is knowing how you’re spending it now. If you’ve ever tried to lose weight, you know that nutritionists tell you to keep a food journal because it keeps you from eating mindlessly. It’s the same with time. Write down what you’re doing as often as you can. Use my spreadsheet, a Word document, or a pad and pen.

While measuring your mornings, try tracking your whole week. The reason? The solution to morning dilemmas often lies at other times of the day. You may be too tired because you’re staying up late. But if you look at how you’re spending your nights, you’ll notice that you’re not doing anything urgent. The Daily Show can be recorded and watched earlier--possibly while you’re on the treadmill at 6:30 a.m.

As for the mornings themselves, you can be organized but still not be spending them well. Question your assumptions. You may believe that “a man who wants to keep his job gets into the office before his boss” because that’s what your father did, but your boss may be disappointed that he doesn’t get the place to himself for an hour first! If you decide that something is a top priority, do it, but understand that we have to do few things in life.

2. Picture the Perfect Morning

After you know how you’re spending your time, ask yourself what a great morning would look like. For me, it would start with a run, followed by a hearty family breakfast. After getting people out the door, I’d focus on long-term projects like my books. Here are some other ideas for morning enrichment:

For personal growth:
Read through a religious text: Sacred texts can teach us about human nature and history, even if they’re not from a religion you subscribe to. If they are, pray or meditate and get to know your beliefs in a deeper way.
Train for something big: Aiming to complete a half-marathon, a triathlon, or a long bike ride will keep you inspired as you take your fitness to the next level.
Do art projects with your kids:. Mornings don’t have to be a death march out the door. Enjoy your time with your little ones at a time of day when you all have more patience.

For professional growth:
Strategize: In an age of constant connectivity, people complain of having no time to think. Use your mornings to picture what you want your career and organization to look like in the future.
Read articles in professional journals: Benefit from other people’s research and strategic thinking, and gain new insights into your field.
Take an online class: If a job or career change is in your future, a self-paced class can keep your skills sharp.

3. Think Through the Logistics

How could this vision mesh with the life you have? Don’t assume you have to add it on top of the hours you already spend getting ready or that you’ll have to get to work earlier. If you fill the morning hours with important activities you’ll crowd out things that are more time intensive than they need to be. Map out a morning schedule. What time would you have to get up and what time do you need to go to bed to get enough sleep? As for the mornings themselves, what would make your ritual easier? Do you need to set your easel next to your bed? Can you find a more cheerful alarm clock or one you can’t turn off so easily?

It’s easy to believe our own excuses, particularly if they’re good ones. Come up with a plan and assemble what you need, but whatever you do, don’t label this vision as impossible

4. Build the Habit

This is the most important step. Turning a desire into a ritual requires willpower. Use these fives steps to optimize your routine:
Start slowly: Go to bed and wake up fifteen minutes earlier for a few days until this new schedule seems doable.
Monitor your energy: Building a new habit takes effort, so take care of yourself while you’re trying. Eat right, eat enough, and surround yourself with supportive people who want to see you succeed.
Choose one new habit at a time to introduce: If you want to run, pray, and write in a journal, choose one of these and make it a habit before adding another.
Chart your progress: Habits take weeks to establish, so keep track of how you’re doing for at least thirty days. Once skipping a session feels like you forgot something--like forgetting to brush your teeth--you can take your ritual up a notch.
Feel free to use bribery: Eventually habits produce their own motivation, but until then, external motivations like promising yourself concert tickets can keep you moving forward. And keep in mind that your morning rituals shouldn’t be of the self-flagellation variety. Choose things you enjoy: your before-breakfast ritual has the potential to become your favorite part of the day.

5. Tune Up as Necessary

Life changes. Sometimes we have to regroup, but the goal is to replace any rituals that no longer work with new ones that make you feel like every day is full of possibility.

That is ultimately the amazing thing about mornings--they always feel like a new chance to do things right. A win scored then creates a cascade of success. The hopeful hours before most people eat breakfast are too precious to be blown on semiconscious activities. You can do a lot with those hours. Whenever I’m tempted to say I don’t have time for something, I remind myself that if I wanted to get up early, I could. These hours are available to all of us if we choose to use them.

So how would you like to use your mornings? This important question requires careful thinking. But once you decide, small rituals can accomplish great things. When you make over your mornings, you can make over your life. That is what the most successful people know.

How to Develop 5 Critical Thinking Types

Great leaders think strategically.

They can understand and appreciate the current state as well as see possibilities. When dealing with today’s issues, they operate from a broad, long-term perspective rather than focusing only on short-term implications. And they can gather information and make decisions in a timely manner.

Most of all, strategic leaders know how to strike a balance between visualizing what might or could be and an effective day-to-day approach to implementation. They can look into the future to see where the company needs to go and what it will look like once they get there. And they can do this while making sure the right things get done on a daily basis.

This type of strategic leadership requires five different types of thinking. Knowing when and how much to utilize each one is the hallmark of great leaders.

1. Critical thinking is the mental process of objectively analyzing a situation by gathering information from all possible sources, and then evaluating both the tangible and intangible aspects, as well as the implications of any course of action.
2. Implementation thinking is the ability to organize ideas and plans in a way that they will be effectively carried out.
3. Conceptual thinking consists of the ability to find connections or patterns between abstract ideas and then piece them together to form a complete picture.
4. Innovative thinking involves generating new ideas or new ways of approaching things to create possibilities and opportunities.
5. Intuitive thinking is the ability to take what you may sense or perceive to be true and, without knowledge or evidence, appropriately factor it in to the final decision.

Until recently, most leaders could get by with critical and implementation thinking. But in today’s hyper-fast world, conceptual, innovative and intuitive thinking have becoming increasingly important, especially in industries where frenetic change represents the rule rather than the exception.

Business leaders still need to gather and analyze data, make decisions, and implement them well. But now they have to take in vast amounts of data from a more diverse array of sources. They have to make decisions much more quickly. And they have to do it knowing that everything could change overnight.

In such an environment, the ability to ponder possibilities, see patterns and connections that others don’t see, and look at the same data in new and different ways represents a formidable competitive advantage.

Some leaders seem to be born with these intuitive types of thinking skills. But since most of us are not so naturally gifted, here are some suggestions for developing these essential leadership skills.

• Take time to look around. Browse business websites and read related publications to learn how other organizations have implemented various strategies in order to increase their competitive advantage.
• Be willing to change directions and/or pursue new goals when strategic opportunities arise. Think about what is keeping you on the same path and force yourself to ponder whether or not you should shift plans. Consider worst-case scenarios.
• When problems arise, don’t settle for a quick fix. Instead, carefully look at the problem and take the time to analyze all possible solutions. Create a checklist for yourself to trigger thoughts on long-term consequences and possibilities.
• Help others in the organization feel that they are part of the overall mission and strategies by discussing it with them frequently and involving them as much as possible.
• Pause and view your situation from another perspective – that of an employee, customer, supplier, etc.
• Research and analyze your company’s major competitors. Create a detailed profile of each one and share it with your team. Constantly look for first-hand data rather than relying on anecdotal information.
• Engage in “what-if” thinking. For example, “If we do this, how will our competitors respond? What will our customers think? What impact will this have on our suppliers and distributors? What if there is something we have not considered?”
• Expand your data sources to include areas totally outside your business or industry. Analyze other industries to see what they’re doing well and how that could be adapted to your business.

Most of all, get in the habit of stimulating your mind by not thinking about your business. From time to time, go outside your office and take a walk. Turn off your processing and just soak in the sights, sounds, and scents of the environment. Let your mind wander, and allow yourself the luxury of daydreaming. You’ll be amazed at what you can come up with simply by shifting out of the critical/implementation thinking modes from time to time.

The human brain is a powerful leadership tool. It works even better when you use all five thinking types!

No Religion? 7 Types of Non-Believers

Religious labels help shore up identity. So what are some of the things non-believers can call themselves?

Catholic, Born-Again, Reformed, Jew, Muslim, Shiite, Sunni, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist . . . . Religions give people labels. The downside can be tribalism, an assumption that insiders are better than outsiders, that they merit more compassion, integrity and generosity or even that violence toward “infidels” is acceptable. But the upside is that religious or spiritual labels offer a way of defining who we are. They remind adherents that our moral sense and quest for meaning are core parts of what it means to be human. They make it easier to convey a subset of our deepest values to other people, and even to ourselves.

For those who have lost their religion or never had one, finding a label can feel important. It can be part of a healing process or, alternately, a way of declaring resistance to a dominant and oppressive paradigm. Finding the right combination of words can be a challenge though. For a label to fit it needs to resonate personally and also communicate what you want to say to the world. Words have definitions, connotations and history, and how people respond to your label will be affected by all three. What does it mean? What emotions does it evoke? Who are you identifying as your intellectual and spiritual forebears and your community? The differences may be subtle but they are important.

If, one way or another, you’ve left religion behind, and if you’ve been unsure what to call yourself, you might try on one of these:

1. Atheist. The term atheist can be defined literally as lacking a humanoid god concept, but historically it means one of two things. Positive atheism asserts that a personal supreme being does not exist. Negative atheism simply asserts a lack of belief in such a deity. It is possible be a positive atheist about the Christian God, for example, while maintaining a stance of negative atheism or even uncertainty on the question of a more abstract deity like a “prime mover.” In the United States, it is important to know that atheist may be the most reviled label for a godless person. Devout believers use it as a slur and many assume an atheist has no moral core. Until recently calling oneself an atheist was an act of defiance. That appears to be changing. With the rise of the “New Atheists” and the recent atheist visibility movement, the term is losing its edge.

2. Anti-theist. When atheist consistently evoked images of Madeline Murray O’Hare, hostility toward religion was assumed. Now that it may evoke a white-haired grandmother at the Unitarian church or the gay kid on Glee, some people want a term that more clearly conveys their opposition to the whole religious enterprise. The term anti-theist says, “I think religion is harmful.” It also implies some form of activism that goes beyond merely advocating church-state separation or science education. Anti-theism challenges the legitimacy of faith as a moral authority or way of knowing. Anti-theists often work to expose harms caused in the name of God like stonings, gay bating, religious child maltreatment, genital mutilation, unwanted childbearing or black-collar crime. The New Atheist writers including Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins might better be described as anti-theists.

3. Agnostic. Some atheists think of agnostic as a weenie term, because it gets used by people who lack a god-concept but don’t want to offend family members or colleagues. Agnostic doesn’t convey the same sense of confrontation or defiance that atheist can, and so it gets used as a bridge. But in reality, the term agnostic represents a range of intellectual positions that have important substance in their own right and can be independent of atheism. Strong agnosticism views God’s existence as unknowable, permanently and to all people. Weak agnosticism can mean simply “I don’t know if there is a God,” or “We collectively don’t know if there is a God but we might find out in the future.” Alternately, the term agnosticism can be used to describe an approach to knowledge, somewhat like skepticism (which comes next in this list). Philosopher Thomas Huxley illustrates this position:

Agnosticism is not a creed but a method, the essence of which lies in the vigorous application of a single principle... Positively the principle may be expressed as ‘in matters of intellect, do not pretend conclusions are certain that are not demonstrated or demonstrable.’

These three definitions of agnosticism, though different, all focus on what we do or can know, rather than on whether God exists. This means it is possible to be both atheist and agnostic. Author Phillip Pullman has described himself as both.

The question of what term to use is a difficult one, in strict terms I suppose I'm an agnostic because of course the circle of the things I do know is vastly smaller than the things I don't know about out there in the darkness somewhere maybe there is a God. But among all the things I do know in this world I see no evidence of a God whatsoever and everybody who claims to know there is a God seems to use that as an excuse for exercising power over other people, and historically as we know from looking at the history in Europe alone that's involved persecution, massacre, slaughter on an industrial scale, it's a shocking prospect.

4. Skeptic. Traditionally, skeptic has been used to describe a person who doubts received religious dogmas. However, while agnostic focuses on God questions in particular, the term skeptic expresses a broader life approach. Someone who calls him- or herself a skeptic has put critical thinking at the heart of the matter. Well known skeptics, like Michael Shermer, Penn and Teller, or James Randi devote a majority of their effort to debunking pseudoscience, alternative medicine, astrology and so forth. They broadly challenge the human tendency to believe things on insufficient evidence. Australian comic Tim Minchen is an outspoken atheist who earns a living in part by poking fun at religion. But his most beloved and hilarious beat poem, Storm, smacks down homeopathy and hippy woo.

5. Freethinker. Free-thinker is a term that dates to the end of the 17th Century, when it was first used in England to describe those who opposed the Church and literal belief in the Bible. Freethought is an intellectual stance that says that opinions should be based on logic and evidence rather than authorities and traditions. Well known philosophers including John Locke and Voltaire were called freethinkers in their own time, and a magazine, The Freethinker, has been published in Britain continuously from 1881 to the present. The term has gotten popular recently in part because it is affirmative. Unlike atheism, which defines itself in contrast to religion, freethought identifies with a proactive process for deciding what is real and important.

6. Humanist. While terms like atheist or anti-theist focus on a lack of god-belief and agnostic, skeptic and freethinker all focus on ways of knowing—humanist centers in on a set of ethical values. Humanism seeks to promote broad wellbeing by advancing compassion, equality, self-determination, and other values that allow individuals to flourish and to live in community with each other. These values drive not from revelation, but from human experience. As can be seen in two manifestos published in 1933 and 1973 respectively, humanist leaders don’t shy away from concepts like joy and inner peace that have spiritual connotations. In fact, some think that religion itself should be reclaimed by those who have moved beyond supernaturalism but recognize the benefits of spiritual community and ritual. Harvard Chaplain Greg Epstein dreams of incubating a thriving network of secular congregations.

7. Pantheist. As self-described humanists seek to reclaim the ethical and communitarian aspects of religion, pantheistscenter in on the spiritual heart of faith--the experience of humility, wonder, and transcendence. They see human beings as one small part of a vast natural order, with the Cosmos itself made conscious in us. Pantheists reject the idea of a person- god, but believe that the holy is made manifest in all that exists. Consequently, they often have a strong commitment to protecting the sacred web of life in which and from which we have our existence. The writings of Carl Sagan reflect this sentiment and often are quoted by pantheists, for example in a “Symphony of Science” video series which mixes evocative natural world images, atonal music, and the voices of leading scientists, and has received 30 million views.

If none of these fit . . . . Keep looking. Many of the American founding fathers were deists who didn’t believe in miracles or special revelation through sacred texts but thought that the natural world itself revealed a designer who could be discovered through reason and inquiry. Naturalists assume a philosophical position that the laws operating within the natural realm are the only laws governing the universe and no supernatural realm lies beyond. Secularists argue that moral standards and laws should be based on whether they do good or harm in this world and that religion should be kept out of government. Pastafarians playfully claim to worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and their religion is a good-humored spoof on Abrahamic beliefs and rituals.

Recently there has been steep uptick in people who identify as godless and a parallel uptick in atheist and humanist visibility efforts. Many godless people are newly out of religion (or newly out of the closet). Despite the best efforts of, say, the Humanist Community Project or Foundation Beyond Belief, stable communities organized around shared secular values and spiritual practices have yet to emerge. That means our labels are largely individual and sometimes experimental. We may try one on for size, live with it for a while, then try on something else.

As a movement, sexual and gender minorities have faced a similar challenge. LGB started replacing the term “gay community” in the 1980s. It then became LGBT, and then LGBTQ (to acknowledge those who were questioning) or LGBTI (to include intersex people). In India, an H got added to the end for the Hijra subculture. For urban teens, the catch-all termqueer has now replaced the cumbersome acronym. Queer embraces the idea that sexual and gender identity is biologically and psychologically multifaceted. It includes everyone who doesn’t think of themselves as straight. Secular rights activists may eventually evolve a similar catch all, but in the meantime, organizations that want to be inclusive end up with long lists on their ‘About’ pages: atheist, agnostic, humanist, freethinker, pantheist, skeptic and more. So, join the experiment that picking one that fits and wearing it for a while. Or make up your own. I often call myself a “spiritual nontheist.” It’s a mouthful, but it forces people to ask, what is that? and then, rather than having them make assumptions I get to tell them where I’m at: I don’t have any kind of humanoid god concept, and I think that issues of morality and meaning are at the very heart of what it means to be human. Maybe next year I’ll find something that fits even better.

15 Scientific Facts About Creativity

Although creativity keeps human society flourishing, science honestly offers few answers to how the intricate, infinitely complex concept actually works. No matter how much research pours into measuring and grasping the essential phenomenon, it seems as if more questions pop up than receive tangible answers. Theories and findings sometimes conflict with one another as well, meaning every "fact" presented here might very well end up discarded in due time. But that’s par for the course when exploring what seems almost entirely inexplicable.

Stress kills creativity

Just like it kills mental health, the heart, and pretty much everything else. Stress negatively impacts creative expression, particularly when it involves rigid timeframes and criteria. According to psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein, no gene or any other factor predisposes some individuals toward creativity and others not (this perspective is, obviously, disputed). External factors such as stress play a much heavier role in determining innovation than anything intrinsic.

Those considered geniuses describe their creative processes as trancelike

Dr. Nancy Andreasen, who wrote The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius, may not be able to scientifically explain how creativity and genius emerge, but she does know how they inspire and impact the great thinkers. All people experience moments of "ordinary creativity," which permeates daily tasks. But the artist, composers, scientists, writers, and others qualifying as geniuses typically talk of oneiric "flashes" setting off their most notable, iconic works.

A connection between dopamine production and creativity might exist

Because dopamine increases along with positive reinforcement and other rewards, some neurobiologists (like Dr. David Sweatt) believe it easily correlates with creativity, too. Either receiving money or the simple satisfaction of a job well done might stimulate levels of innovation, and dopamine in kind. Such a link still exists as a theory, albeit one that does go a long way in explaining the sometimes inexplicable.

Perception is the first step to nurturing the creative spark

All creative pursuits start when the thinker perceives an external stimulus and processes it in his and/or her mind. More complex than merely seeing, the "engines of our ingenuity" hook up imagery with imagination. Personal differences in this inevitable linkage lead to creative output and adroitly explain why some people end up with the particular results they do and keep society pushing forward.

Creativity might correlate with brain chemistry and structure

Theories regarding creativity’s true origins abound, and some think one’s aptitude may be determined by his or her brain chemistry and structure. University of New Mexico’s Rex Jung believes that if you have less of certain neurological phenomena, you’re better off when it comes to creative pursuits. Specific chemicals froth about in smaller dosages, while white matter sits weaker and the frontal lobe’s cortical regions are thinner. Interestingly enough, brains testing higher on intelligence tests feature the exact opposite composition. Generally speaking, of course.

Creative thinkers have slower nerves

During creative moments, the left frontal cortex experiences comparatively more sluggish activity, which also correlates with the aforementioned decreased white matter and connecting axons. Unlike intelligence, creativity tends to thrive when thinking slows down, although "flashes" of inspiration and insight occur with the speed of flashes. Emotions and some cognitive processes happen in this particular region as well, which scientists such as Dr. Jung believe encourage abstract and novelty thought processes.

"Psychological distance" facilitates creativity

When hitting a creative snag, the best thing thinkers can do for themselves is step away and try to look at everything from a completely different point of view. Studies have shown that the most consistently creative individuals display a willingness to approach their challenges from a wide variety of angles beyond their initial inklings. Putting some space between original perspectives and newer ones encourages abstract thinking, a crucial component in the inventive process.

Early research into creativity divided it up into three separate subsections

Mel Rhodes’ inquiries into the creative mind — which required him to research around 50 takes on the subject — eventually led him to break everything down into the person, process, and environment components. The person element, as you can probably guess, involves one’s unique set of characteristics needed to think and perceive things in an innovative, abstract fashion. Actually understanding and formulating ideas and results is known as process, and environment means the internal and external milieu in which the creative individual works.

Aerobic exercise increases one’s creative potential

When brain fog starts rolling in, try a moderate amount of aerobic exercise to try and clear it up. Rhode Island College scientists noted that the two hours after engaging in such rigorous physical activity proved some of the most mentally fertile in a 2005 study. They used the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking to measure how well the participating thinkers performed with and without exercise.

Creativity might plummet if it becomes a means to a rewarding end

Although from 1987, this study’s findings showcase just how largely unknowable creativity’s true face is these days, as it conflicts with some more contemporary theories despite making just as much sense. Tests conducted on Brandeis University creative writing students noted a dive in their motivation and thoughts regarding their work when receiving rewards for their efforts. They approached poetry with a lessened sense of intrinsic interest, a finding which ended up applying to situations beyond the creative.

Improvisation stimulates the brain’s language centers

fMRIs and improvised jazz form the crux of surgeon Charles Limb’s pioneering maps of the creative process. His TEDxMidAtlantic lecture discussed his fascinating findings regarding the physiology behind musical improvisation, specifically, how it makes the Broca’s Area light up like the Fourth of July. Brain scientists think this part is responsible for language development and cognition, implying that one of the body’s most essential organs might recognize music (and maybe even other expressive pursuits) as akin to speech.

Bilingualism and multilingualism might improve one’s creative skills

Researchers "may not have had [their] EUREKA moment" when it comes to proving a link between bi- and multilingualism, but compelling evidence certainly exists. Individuals capable of speaking more than one language generally display more competent multitasking skills and improved cognition, both usually labeled key ingredients to creative thinking. Most telling, however, is that they seem better able to analyze situations and stimuli from multiple angles, which nearly everyone attempting to define creativity considers essential.

Creative people are more likely to be dishonest

That doesn’t mean all creative folks ought not be trusted, nor that their opposites are always the most honest sorts, of course. But individuals capable of more novel and abstract thoughts — and possessing more flexible moral fibers — "enjoy" a higher risk of less-than-trustworthy behaviors. Multiple studies show that the ability to concoct more solid, viable stories and view scenarios and stimuli from many angles dull the chances of getting caught.

High IQ and creativity might correlate with one another

Harvard, like many other institutions of higher learning, hopes to try and unlock creativity’s beautiful and bizarre secrets. Dr. Shelley Carson, notable for developing a new standard to measure the mysterious phenomenon, wants to try and find a definitive relationship between intelligence and creative thinking. Some of her earlier studies note that both increase together at the 120, 130, and 150 IQ levels, but more research is needed to prove any sort of solid correlation.

So yeah. Creativity and mental illness might very well coincide

Painting all creative types as insane — particularly the influential and genius — always has been and probably always will be a rather tired cliché, albeit a cliché that might actually hold some cachet. Their brains have been proven to open up more to external sources and possess greater memory capacity than others, but such a perk does come burdened with some unfortunate side effects. Overstimulation might very well result, which can pique (or worsen) anxiety and depressive disorders.

How to Procrastinate and Still Get Things Done

I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, a grant proposal to review, drafts of dissertations to read.

I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time.

All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, such as gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they find the time. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because accomplishing these tasks is a way of not doing something more important.

If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him to do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely, and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

To make structured procrastination work for you, begin by establishing a hierarchy of the tasks you have to do, in order of importance from the most urgent to the least important. Even though the most-important tasks are on top, you have worthwhile tasks to perform lower on the list. Doing those tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, you can become a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.

The most perfect situation for structured procrastination that I have encountered occurred when my wife and I served as resident fellows in Soto House, a Stanford University dormitory. In the evening, faced with papers to grade, lectures to prepare, and committee work to do, I would leave our cottage next to the dorm and go over to the lounge and play Ping-Pong with the residents or talk things over with them in their rooms -- or even just sit in the lounge and read the paper. I got a reputation for being a terrific resident fellow, one of the rare profs on campus who spent time with undergraduates and got to know them. What a setup: Play Ping-Pong as a way of not doing more important things, and get a reputation as Mr. Chips.

Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this approach ignores the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be, by definition, the most important. And the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This is the way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being.

At this point you may be asking, "How about the important tasks at the top of the list?" Admittedly, they pose a potential problem.

The second step in the art of structured procrastination is to pick the right sorts of projects for the top of the list. The ideal projects have two characteristics -- they seem to have clear deadlines (but really don't), and they seem awfully important (but really aren't). Luckily, life abounds with such tasks. At universities, the vast majority of tasks fall into those two categories, and I'm sure the same is true for most other institutions.

Take, for example, the item at the top of my list right now -- finishing an essay for a volume on the philosophy of language. It was supposed to be done 11 months ago. I have accomplished an enormous number of important things as a way of not working on it. A couple of months ago, nagged by guilt, I wrote a letter to the editor saying how sorry I was to be so late and expressing my good intentions to get to work. Writing the letter was, of course, a way of not working on the article. It turned out that I really wasn't much further behind schedule than anyone else. And how important is this article, anyway? Not so important that at some point something that I view as more important won't come along. Then I'll get to work on it.

Let me describe how I handled a familiar situation last summer. The book-order forms for a class scheduled for fall were overdue by early June. By July, it was easy to consider this an important task with a pressing deadline. (For procrastinators, deadlines start to press a week or two after they pass.) I got almost daily reminders from the department secretary; students sometimes asked me what we would be reading; and the unfilled order form sat right in the middle of my desk for weeks. This task was near the top of my list; it bothered me -- and motivated me to do other useful, but superficially less important, things. In fact, I knew that the bookstore was already plenty busy with forms filed by non-procrastinators. I knew that I could submit mine in midsummer and things would be fine. I just needed to order popular books from efficient publishers. I accepted another, apparently more important, task in early August, and my psyche finally felt comfortable about filling out the order form as a way of not doing this new task.

At this point, the observant reader may feel that structured procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception, since one is, in effect, constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself. Exactly. One needs to be able to recognize and commit oneself to tasks with inflated importance and unreal deadlines, while making oneself feel that they are important and urgent. This clears the way to accomplish several apparently less urgent, but eminently achievable, tasks. And virtually all procrastinators also have excellent skills at self-deception -- so what could be more noble than using one character flaw to offset the effects of another?

10 Things Science Says Will Make You Happy

Scientists can tell us how to be happy. Really. Here are 10 ways, with the research to prove it.

In the last few years, psychologists and researchers have been digging up hard data on a question previously left to philosophers: What makes us happy? Researchers like the father-son team Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener, Stanford psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, and ethicist Stephen Post have studied people all over the world to find out how things like money, attitude, culture, memory, health, altruism, and our day-to-day habits affect our well-being. The emerging field of positive psychology is bursting with new findings that suggest your actions can have a significant effect on your happiness and satisfaction with life. Here are 10 scientifically proven strategies for getting happy.

1. Savor Everyday Moments
   Pause now and then to smell a rose or watch children at play. Study participants who took time to “savor” ordinary events that they normally hurried through, or to think back on pleasant moments from their day, “showed significant increases in happiness and reductions in depression,” says psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky.
    
2. Avoid Comparisons
   While keeping up with the Joneses is part of American culture, comparing ourselves with others can be damaging to happiness and self-esteem. Instead of comparing ourselves to others, focusing on our own personal achievement leads to greater satisfaction, according to Lyubomirsky.
    
3. Put Money Low on the List
   People who put money high on their priority list are more at risk for depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem, according to researchers Tim Kasser and Richard Ryan. Their findings hold true across nations and cultures. “The more we seek satisfactions in material goods, the less we find them there,” Ryan says. “The satisfaction has a short half-life—it’s very fleeting.” Money-seekers also score lower on tests of vitality and self-actualization.
    
4. Have Meaningful Goals
   “People who strive for something significant, whether it’s learning a new craft or raising moral children, are far happier than those who don’t have strong dreams or aspirations,” say Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener. “As humans, we actually require a sense of meaning to thrive.” Harvard’s resident happiness professor, Tal Ben-Shahar, agrees, “Happiness lies at the intersection between pleasure and meaning. Whether at work or at home, the goal is to engage in activities that are both personally significant and enjoyable.”
     
5. Take Initiative at Work
   How happy you are at work depends in part on how much initiative you take. Researcher Amy Wrzesniewski says that when we express creativity, help others, suggest improvements, or do additional tasks on the job, we make our work more rewarding and feel more in control.
    
6. Make Friends, Treasure Family
   Happier people tend to have good families, friends, and supportive relationships, say Diener and Biswas-Diener. But it’s not enough to be the life of the party if you’re surrounded by shallow acquaintances. “We don’t just need relationships, we need close ones” that involve understanding and caring.
    
7. Smile Even When You Don’t Feel Like It
   It sounds simple, but it works. “Happy people…see possibilities, opportunities, and success. When they think of the future, they are optimistic, and when they review the past, they tend to savor the high points,” say Diener and Biswas-Diener. Even if you weren’t born looking at the glass as half-full, with practice, a positive outlook can become a habit.
    
8. Say Thank You Like You Mean It
   People who keep gratitude journals on a weekly basis are healthier, more optimistic, and more likely to make progress toward achieving personal goals, according to author Robert Emmons. Research by Martin Seligman, founder of positive psychology, revealed that people who write “gratitude letters” to someone who made a difference in their lives score higher on happiness, and lower on depression—and the effect lasts for weeks.
    
9. Get Out and Exercise
   A Duke University study shows that exercise may be just as effective as drugs in treating depression, without all the side effects and expense. Other research shows that in addition to health benefits, regular exercise offers a sense of accomplishment and opportunity for social interaction, releases feel-good endorphins, and boosts self-esteem.
    
10. Give It Away, Give It Away Now!
    Make altruism and giving part of your life, and be purposeful about it. Researcher Stephen Post says helping a neighbor, volunteering, or donating goods and services results in a “helper’s high,” and you get more health benefits than you would from exercise or quitting smoking. Listening to a friend, passing on your skills, celebrating others’ successes, and forgiveness also contribute to happiness, he says. Researcher Elizabeth Dunn found that those who spend money on others reported much greater happiness than those who spend it on themselves.

Common statistical fallacies

by Nathan Yau

I've been reading papers on how people learn statistics (and thoughts on teaching the subject) and came across the frequently-cited work of mathematical psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. In 1972, they studied statistical misconceptions. It doesn't seem much has changed. Joan Garfield (1995) summarizes in How to Learn Statistics [pdf].

Representativeness:

People estimate the likelihood of a sample based on how closely it resembles the population.

You can't always judge how likely or improbable a sample is based on how it compares to a known population. For example, let's say you flip a coin four times and get four tails in a row (TTTT). Then you flip four more times and get HTHT. In the long run, heads and tails are going to be split 50/50, but that doesn't mean the second sequence is more likely.

Similarly, a sequence of ten heads in a row isn't the same as getting a million heads in a row.

Gambler's fallacy:

Use of the representative heuristic leads to the view that chance is a self-correcting process.

The history boards at roulette tables mean nothing. They're just for show. Just because a red hasn't come up in a while doesn't mean the roulette wheel is due for a red soon. Each spin is independent of the spins that came before it.

Base-rate fallacy:

People ignore the relative sizes of population subgroups when judging the likelihood of contingent

events involving the subgroups.

You have to consider the base population for comparison. Maybe a company is comprised of 80 percent men and 20 percent women. If your base is the US population, you might consider that inequality, but what if the applicant breakdown was 90 percent men and 10 percent women? In the latter case, a higher percentage of women than men were actually hired.

Availability:

Strength of association is used as a basis for judging how likely an event will occur.

Just because some percentage of your friends are designers doesn't mean that the same percentage of people are designers elsewhere (obviously). Or the example that Garfield uses: a ten percent divorce rate among people you know isn't necessarily the same nationwide or globally.

Conjunction fallacy:

The conjunction of two correlated events is judged to be more likely than either of the events themselves.

The common example from Tversky and Kahneman:

"Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations." A group of people were asked if it was more probable that Linda was a bank teller or a bank teller active in the feminist movement (a sign of the times this poll was taken).
Eighty-five percent of respondents chose the latter, but the probability of two things happening together is always less than or equal to the events occurring individually.

Notice that there's still not much math involved in these examples. It's logic that plays into thinking like a statistician without the math (with statistical foundations). You can get a lot done just by thinking critically about your data.

How to Think: Managing brain resources in an age of complexity.

When I applied for my faculty job at the MIT Media Lab, I had to write a teaching statement. One of the things I proposed was to teach a class called "How to Think," which would focus on how to be creative, thoughtful, and powerful in a world where problems are extremely complex, targets are continuously moving, and our brains often seem like nodes of enormous networks that constantly reconfigure. In the process of thinking about this, I composed 10 rules, which I sometimes share with students. I've listed them here, followed by some practical advice on implementation.

1. Synthesize new ideas constantly. Never read passively. Annotate, model, think, and synthesize while you read, even when you're reading what you conceive to be introductory stuff. That way, you will always aim towards understanding things at a resolution fine enough for you to be creative.

2. Learn how to learn (rapidly). One of the most important talents for the 21st century is the ability to learn almost anything instantly, so cultivate this talent. Be able to rapidly prototype ideas. Know how your brain works. (I often need a 20-minute power nap after loading a lot into my brain, followed by half a cup of coffee. Knowing how my brain operates enables me to use it well.)

3. Work backward from your goal. Or else you may never get there. If you work forward, you may invent something profound--or you might not. If you work backward, then you have at least directed your efforts at something important to you.

4. Always have a long-term plan. Even if you change it every day. The act of making the plan alone is worth it. And even if you revise it often, you're guaranteed to be learning something.

5. Make contingency maps. Draw all the things you need to do on a big piece of paper, and find out which things depend on other things. Then, find the things that are not dependent on anything but have the most dependents, and finish them first.

6. Collaborate.

7. Make your mistakes quickly. You may mess things up on the first try, but do it fast, and then move on. Document what led to the error so that you learn what to recognize, and then move on. Get the mistakes out of the way. As Shakespeare put it, "Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt."

8. As you develop skills, write up best-practices protocols. That way, when you return to something you've done, you can make it routine. Instinctualize conscious control.

9. Document everything obsessively. If you don't record it, it may never have an impact on the world. Much of creativity is learning how to see things properly. Most profound scientific discoveries are surprises. But if you don't document and digest every observation and learn to trust your eyes, then you will not know when you have seen a surprise.

10. Keep it simple. If it looks like something hard to engineer, it probably is. If you can spend two days thinking of ways to make it 10 times simpler, do it. It will work better, be more reliable, and have a bigger impact on the world. And learn, if only to know what has failed before. Remember the old saying, "Six months in the lab can save an afternoon in the library."

Two practical notes. The first is in the arena of time management. I really like what I call logarithmic time planning, in which events that are close at hand are scheduled with finer resolution than events that are far off. For example, things that happen tomorrow should be scheduled down to the minute, things that happen next week should be scheduled down to the hour, and things that happen next year should be scheduled down to the day. Why do all calendar programs force you to pick the exact minute something happens when you are trying to schedule it a year out? I just use a word processor to schedule all my events, tasks, and commitments, with resolution fading away the farther I look into the future. (It would be nice, though, to have a software tool that would gently help you make the schedule higher-resolution as time passes...)

The second practical note: I find it really useful to write and draw while talking with someone, composing conversation summaries on pieces of paper or pages of notepads. I often use plenty of color annotation to highlight salient points. At the end of the conversation, I digitally photograph the piece of paper so that I capture the entire flow of the conversation and the thoughts that emerged. The person I've conversed with usually gets to keep the original piece of paper, and the digital photograph is uploaded to my computer for keyword tagging and archiving. This way I can call up all the images, sketches, ideas, references, and action items from a brief note that I took during a five-minute meeting at a coffee shop years ago--at a touch, on my laptop. With 10-megapixel cameras costing just over $100, you can easily capture a dozen full pages in a single shot, in just a second.

Types of vagabonds, 1566

1. Rufflers (thieving beggars, apprentice uprightment)
2. Uprightmen (leaders of robber bands)
3. Hookers or anglers (thieves who steal through windows with hooks)
4. Rogues (rank-and-file vagabonds)
5. Wild rogues (those born of rogues)
6. Priggers of prancers (horse thieves)
7. Palliards (male and female beggars, traveling in pairs)
8. Fraters (sham proctors, pretending to beg for hospitals, etc.)
9. Abrams (feined lunatics)
10. Fresh-water mariners or whipjacks (beggars pretending shipwreck)
11. Dummerers (sham deaf-mutes)
12. Drunken tinkers (thieves using the trade as a cover)
13. Swadders or peddlers (thieves pretending to be peddlers)
14. Jarkmen (forgers of licenses) or patricoes (hedge priests)

Of Womenkind:
1. Demanders for glimmer or fire (female beggars pretending loss of fire)
2. Bawdy baskets (female peddlers)
3. Morts (prostitutes and thieves)
4. Autem morts (married harlots)
5. Walking morts (unmarried harlots)
6. Doxies (prostitutes who begin with upright men)
7. Dells (young girls, incipient doxies)
8. Kinchin morts (female beggar children)
9. Kinchin does (male beggar children)

10 commandments for con artists

1. Be a patient listener (it is this, not fast talking, that gets a con-man his coups).
2. Never look bored.
3. Wait for the other person to reveal any political opinions, then agree with them.
4. Let the other person reveal religious views, then have the same ones.
5. Hint at sex talk, but don’t follow it up unless the other fellow shows a strong interest.
6. Never discuss illness, unless some special concern is shown.
7. Never pry into a person’s personal circumstances (they’ll tell you all eventually).
8. Never boast. Just let your importance be quietly obvious.
9. Never be untidy.
10. Never get drunk.

Make Your Thing: 12 Point Program for Absolutely, Positively 1000% No-Fail Guaranteed Success

The commercial world guards its secrets. The game is competitive and money is the prize. The non-profit world, when it is functioning the way it should, upholds a spirit of generosity and common good. The two cultures tend not to mix very well, but Jesse Thorn ("The Sound of Young America," now "Bullseye") has brought to Transom a big-hearted and wise Manifesto in which he tells you how to make good things and, more surprisingly, how to make money at it. He could have kept the secrets to himself. Instead, he wrote "Make Your Thing: 12 Point Program for Absolutely, Positively 1000% No-Fail Guaranteed Success" with fascinating parables from comedy, hip-hop, blogging, cartooning and more. Jesse's own experience stretches across all sorts of independent media and performance. His words are practical and inspirational, and funny. They'll help you do better work. Jesse is donating his secrets in the best non-profit tradition.

Make Your Thing: 12 Point Program for Absolutely, Positively 1000% No-Fail Guaranteed Success

For the past two years or so, I’ve been crisscrossing the country, delivering an award-winning talk called Make Your Thing. (I should note that it has not won any awards, and while I have done it on both sides of the country, and once in Canada, crisscrossing is probably a little strong, too.) It’s an attempt to share a bit of what I’ve learned so far in my career.

When folks started asking me if I was interested in speaking engagements, I started trying to think about what I’m really an expert at, what I could actually offer people insight on from the stage. I think I’m a good interviewer, but that’s a pretty specialized skill. Not a lot of market for speeches on “how to interview people for a public radio show.” I’m also pretty good at dick jokes, but in the high-class world of educational speaking, dick jokes are more of a seasoning than an entree. It took me a while to realize that there is one other thing that I can actually offer some valuable perspective on, and that’s making independent media. Making it, and making it your job.

I started The Sound of Young America (now Bullseye) more than ten years ago. I’m 30 now, and I was 19, then. It was my college radio show – that’s why the old name was so dumb. We wrote comedy bits and eventually, when we figured out how much easier it was to book a guest than to write 30 minutes of comedy, we did interviews. When my co-hosts graduated from school, I kept doing the show. At the time, I was driving from San Francisco (where I grew up and lived after college) to Santa Cruz (where I went to school and where the station was) in my mom’s car. I kept doing the show out of inertia, frankly. I’d been doing it by then for four years, and I wasn’t up to much else. I applied for many jobs in commercial and public radio, and got none of them. I was working part-time as an admin at the tiny NGO my father ran. We were a horrible, horrible team.

In 2004, a year or so after I graduated from school podcasting was invented. I’m not much of a tech guy, but I decided that if I could get more than fifty or so people to listen to the show on their computers, it would be worth figuring out how podcasting worked and doing the extra couple of hours a week of work. Again: I wasn’t up to much. Things grew well – from dozens of listeners to hundreds. Then iTunes launched podcasting support in 2005, and the listenership grew to a few thousand.

At that point, I was committed to the future of my show, but I still assumed that if I managed to make a living at it, it would be on the radio. Sometime around then, a board member of KUSP in Santa Cruz heard my show on the college radio station, and recommended it to the program director, Terry Green. Moving from college radio to a real public radio station didn’t mean any significant money, but it did mean I could send an MP3 to the station, instead of driving down and operating the board myself. By then I had a car, a ’65 Dart, that I sold to a nice dad and his teenage son, and used the money to buy enough equipment (a mic, a mixer and a phone hybrid) to record from my apartment. I kept doing the show – by this point, I was about 26 and had been doing it for seven years. I worked 25 hours a week at a non-profit in San Francisco as a paid intern.

Around that time, I heard from WNYC. Their program director, Chris Bannon, had heard about my show from a guest (John Hodgman, who’s now also my colleague on the Judge John Hodgman podcast). They picked up a couple episodes. PRI’s Mike Arnold heard about the show similarly happenstantially – he saw it in iTunes or something like that. He said they’d be interested in the show (that took an excruciating year, but that’s another story). The end result: I was on WNYC, one of the biggest public radio stations in the country, and I was about to sign up with Public Radio International. At 26, I was the youngest national public radio host in the history of the medium. I was all set. Except that I wasn’t.

WNYC and WHYY in Philadelphia picked up the show right away, as did a few other significant stations. I found out quickly, though, that that would net me about $10,000 a year in revenue. For a weekly, hour-long show, which at the time I was producing, hosting, booking and editing myself. That was less than I’d been making as a part-time paid intern, working in the lucrative field of public parks advocacy.

I loved (and love) public radio, but I realized then that it wasn’t actually going to pay my bills. So I started working on a new plan.

It took a few years, but now I make a good living from my show. I’ve got three full-time employees, and two interns. I also pay thousands of dollars a month to several teams of producer/hosts whose wonderful shows I’ve helped monetize. I’m not rich or anything, but when my wife had a baby a couple of months ago, I didn’t have to be all freaked out about it. Well, I was freaked out about it, but not so much about the money part. My business is stable, and maybe even thriving, despite the reticence of many parts our industry to embrace my show. I still love public radio, and am immensely proud to be part of it, but it’s a great relief not to have to rely on it to pay my bills. (Just ask Luke Burbank, or Faith Salie, or Bob Edwards.)

But here’s where you start asking a very pertinent question: JESSE, HOW DID YOU DO IT?

I achieved all of this through something I like to call my 12 Point Program for Absolutely, Positively 1000% No-Fail Guaranteed Success.

Whether you want to build a show like mine, build your own media empire, or simply re-grow up to 50% of the hair you’ve lost due to male pattern baldness (especially at the temples and crown), my program is for you.

Here it is.

One side note: many of the people I’m about to tell you about are geeks, many are white, and many are male. This is mostly because emerging technology has enabled the techniques they use, and the world of emerging technology is dominated by those demographic categories. If you don’t fit into those categories, though, I hope you won’t assume that demographics disqualify you. In fact, the opposite is true. A lot of the folks I write about in this piece grew their careers in categories that at the time were expanding, but now are mature and stable. In other words: they got in on the ground floor, and that elevator already left.
It’s still entirely possible to build businesses in those categories, but it’s tougher. If you’re a woman, or black, or gay, or older, not only do you enter the marketplace with an already-distinctive offering, you may also have a wide-open landscape in front of you. There are a thousand podcasts for 25-year-old white geeks, but very few for 18-year-old hip-hop fans, for example. You have an opportunity to tear open a new category. Go forth and kick ass.

Anyway…like I said: here it is: My 12 Point Program for Absolutely, Positively 1000% No-Fail Guaranteed Success. Featuring some of the brightest lights in the media-making world. And others who just happen to be friends of mine who came into my head while I was trying to think of examples.

1. Start Now (Kate Beaton)

You will never accomplish anything unless you start making stuff now.

by Kate Beaton

Plans are great, but making stuff is how you build an audience, get better, and most importantly, get closer to making a living.

Kate Beaton grew up in Cape Breton, in Nova Scotia. Despite the fact that she was born in 1983, she didn’t have internet access until she went away to college, and even then, she wasn’t that into it.

She was working at a maritime museum when colleagues noticed that she was doodling in a notebook. One of them was a comic writer, who convinced her to make a concerted effort, build a website,and regularly share them. These things had genuinely never occurred to Kate.

Kate wasn’t a technical person, so she started by making a few jokey comics about history and posting them on Livejournal. People liked them, and she found some help to build a dedicated site. While working at the museum, she started writing and posting the comics more regularly.

In the space of two years, her comic, called “Hark, A Vagrant,” became one of the most popular on the internet, and a full-time career.

It took her some time to find the right tone. She got a sense of what people responded to. She even asked for topic suggestions from her audience on LiveJournal. Most important, though, was that she started. She actually made stuff, regularly. Not just a one-off thing. She started, refined, got better, and made more of what made sense to make more of. And she quit her job at the maritime museum.

I hear from so many people who have a great idea. The difference between the successful ones and the unsuccessful ones is that the successful ones do it, then do it again and again.

2. Make Deadlines (Jonathan Coulton)

You can’t afford to be too precious about your work. Caring is important, but preciousness is the opposite of making stuff. There is no room on the internet for Special Snowflakes who want to procrastinate all day and then drink themselves to sleep and dream about their unwritten novel. To build an audience, you have to be consistently good and often surprising.

Jonathan Coulton

An anecdote: my friend Jonathan Coulton was in his mid-30s. He’d been working at a software company since he graduated from college (with a humanities degree), and he was in charge of a team of programmers. It was a great job, and his wife was pregnant with their first child.

That’s the place in your life where you usually put away your dreams, right? Because stability is more important than blah blah blah. But Jonathan did the opposite. He’s the most thoughtful, reasonable man in the world, but when he thought and reasoned, he decided that if he didn’t at least take a genuine swing at being an artist, he’d be a lousy role model to his daughter. So he quit.

He started a project called Thing A Week. He wrote and recorded a song every week for a year. It was brutally difficult for him. A few times, he recorded dumb covers out of desperation. Jonathan’s a talented guy, none of the songs stunk, but some were slighter than others (one called “Mr. Fancypants” being a prime example of this category). Some, like the beautiful ballad “You Ruined Everything,” about his daughter, are anything but slight.

In the process of putting out this work every week, in a remarkable new way, he found fans. Some of the songs went viral, with the help of fan-made videos. Today, Jonathan earns an income that far outstrips what he earned in his Good Real Job, and despite what some may suggest, it was a brilliant (and in many ways replicable) plan, not a fluke. Jonathan backed himself into a corner, and found that he became a success.

3. Keep Your Legs Moving (Killer Mike)

This being a public radio website, I’m guessing there are might be more fans of The Avett Brothers reading this than “It’s OK.” Even though just typing the names of those things makes me really want to. Anyhoo, let’s talk about Killer Mike.

Killer Mike

Even a casual hip-hop fan might remember the Outkast hit “The Whole World.” It was the single from their greatest hits record, the one that came out right after they went from famous hip-hop group to hip-hop group your parents have heard of. It featured a guest verse from a talented protégé named Killer Mike. I might even say that the young buck outshined his mentors. He ripped it.

It was the perfect time to be Outkast’s protégé: they were the biggest act in hip-hop, and Killer Mike was set up for success. He signed a major label deal and put out a single with a guest verse from Big Boi. A single, which flopped. And an album, which flopped.

And that left Killer Mike at a crossroads. His mentors were set for life. It was well within his power to become what in hip-hop is called a “weed carrier.” This is the guy who acts as a hype man at concerts, maybe gets a couple solo tracks or an opening set, and depending on the ritziness of the situation may literally be in charge of holding the drugs so the stars don’t have to worry about getting busted. It’s a good job. There’s a guy called Spliff Star who’s been doing this for Busta Rhymes for 15 years now – I bet that guy’s house has more bathrooms than my house has rooms, overall.

Instead of doing that, though, Killer Mike essentially doubled down. When he got dropped from his major label deal, he didn’t just sign an indie deal he took his advance money from the major and started a record company. He signed a crew of MCs who weren’t just his boys from the neighborhood – he actually listened to demos and signed the most talented dudes he could find. He named the company (and the crew) Grind Time Rap Gang, because he felt so strongly that the most important thing he could do when faced with adversity was to stay on his grind.

In his music, Mike raps a lot about what he learned from growing up with a mother who was a crack dealer. The essential lesson seems to be that there is no such thing as an insurmountable adversity. When you have children to feed, you have to find a way to feed them.

4. Don’t Confuse Content & Medium (Boing Boing)

As I write this, I’m sitting on an airplane, and across the aisle from me, a passenger is watching Boing Boing TV on their seatback monitor.

If you’re not familiar with Boing Boing, it’s probably best known as a pioneering blog, with the motto “a directory of wonderful things.” It covers a particular kind of openhearted, creative geek culture that I recognize from growing up in San Francisco in the 80s and 90s. It’s the epicenter of old-school blog world, but it was not always so.

In fact, the blog started as a print zine, long before the web. Editor Mark Frauenfelder is a geek, but wasn’t enough of a geek to have registered boingboing.com in the early days of the web, so he had to settle for boingboing.net, and he had a placeholder site there for quite some time before he heard about blogging. The appeal of blogging for Mark was essentially that it was so non-technical – he could write new stuff and publish it without coding. Mark was sharp enough to recognize right at the start that rather than simply putting his zine content online, he should be writing web content that reflected the spirit of his zine content. When he did that, the natural distribution of the web and Mark’s great eye for links made his site a monstrous success.

Once he started blogging, he couldn’t stop, and soon the site was successful enough that he hired co-editors, including a startup refugee named Xeni Jardin. Xeni’s done some public radio work – she was a tech correspondent on Day to Day, and is a regular on the Madeline Brand show on KPCC in LA – and she’s on cable news all the time. She’s been offered big deals to do regular TV work, but she’s deeply committed to the independent, geeky ideal of Boing Boing, so when web video became, you know, a thing, she created Boing Boing TV. BBTV is a sort of video version of the blog – a curated world of cool, geeky, smart, creative stuff.

The story of Boing Boing is about the recognition that in the digital world, it pays to be medium-agnostic. That doesn’t necessarily mean you should pursue every medium – different people have different skills, and different brands are suited to different media. What it does mean is that you shouldn’t think of yourself as a writer or as a radio producer any more than Mark thought of himself as a zine editor or Xeni thought of herself as a blogger. Rather than defining yourself by the medium you create, define yourself by what you offer to your audience. In Mark and Xeni’s case, they are curators of fun, creative geeky stuff.

They have allowed their interests and talents to define their subject matter and their subject matter to define their media – and vice-versa. Xeni’s great on camera, so it’s natural she should curate on-camera. Boing-Boing on the web is about links. In Zine form it was about stories, on camera it’s about sharing videos. The form is different, the content is different, but the brand and the soul are the same.

5. Be Authentic (Andrew WK)

This is another music industry failure turned success story. It turns out that the old record industry model had a few big winners and a lot of big losers. Who knew?

Andrew WK (nee Wilkes-Krier) recorded his first EP, “Girl’s Own Juice,” in his apartment in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was epic, melodic rock with sometimes as many as a hundred guitar tracks on a single song. It was so epic, in fact, that I remember reading a review of it in the AV Club – as I recall they wrote that they weren’t sure whether it was a joke or not, but it was pretty great either way. Andrew moved to New York, and started performing songs from the EP in solo concerts. He would set up a karaoke machine in an art gallery, put in a cassette of his songs, minus the vocals, and then dance and scream until he was literally covered in blood.

Andrew WK

He signed a major label record contract, and while his first single, “Party Hard,” was a hit, it still completely baffled audiences. The cool kids were sure it was some kind of Limp Bizkit lunkhead bullshit, or maybe an ironic joke. The lunkheads didn’t understand why he wasn’t wearing a backwards baseball hat or singing about pussy. The punk rockers liked his intensity, but didn’t understand why he seemed so happy all the time. Also: why was he in that Kit-Kat commercial? (Actual answer: he genuinely loves snacks and snacking.)

After his label couldn’t find another hit, they dropped him. Another one-hit wonder, destined to become an ad executive back in Ann Arbor on the strength of stories about the time Spike Jonze made a video for his song from the soundtrack of Jackass 2.

Except that it didn’t work that way. Because the remarkable thing about Andrew WK is that Andrew WK is the most authentic man in the world. Everything that is absurd about Andrew is a genuine expression of who he is. He really feels about partying the way that a Japanese calligrapher feels about lettering: that it is a human manifestation of the divine, a metaphor for the fulfillingness of life. Which is why after a two-hour show of songs about partying, he will spend three or four hours talking to fans about their lives until the manager of a concert venue literally forces him to stop.

So when Andrew got dropped from his label, he didn’t have to try to decide whether he was “on-brand.” His brand was a real expression of a powerful passion. He just found new ways to express that passion, whether it was an album of piano improvisations or a Japan-only album of Korean pop music covers. Or a monstrously successful nightclub in New York City (He co-owns one – the Santos Party Haus.) Or a motivational speaking tour. Or a job hosting a Cartoon Network kids’ game show called Destroy Build Destroy, in which teams of 11-year-olds explode something with a bomb, then build something out of the wreckage, then explode what they built. (It is awesome.)

Ultimately, where the record label and even the general public only saw a mook-rocker or a punker or a brain-dead party rocker, Andrew knew who he was. When his career took a detour, he just had to follow his passion. Eventually, the money caught up.

6. Follow Your Passion (Chris Hardwick)

My friend Chris Hardwick was at UCLA when he auditioned to be on MTV. I don’t think he expected to actually get on MTV, but as it turned out, he did. And then all of a sudden, he wasn’t a college student any more. All of a sudden he was at the helm of a cultural phenomenon.

Chris is a little more than five years older than me, so when he was in his early 20s, I was in MTV’s prime demographic, and if you’re not exactly my age, you might not even remember how important Singled Out was. But trust me: it was. Jenny McCarthy was the star, but Chris was the host. Of course, MTV has never been known for its generous compensation packages, and Chris couldn’t even afford a studio apartment on his MTV money, so he had to work an overnight radio shift to pay his bills.

Chris Hardwick

When Singled Out ended, Chris got offered the hosting job on a syndicated dating show called Shipmates, which was like that other syndicated dating show Singled Out, but on a boat. He turned it down and turned it down until they offered him so much money that it seemed irresponsible to turn it down, but if you’ve ever seen an E! True Hollywood Story, you know that money doesn’t buy happiness, especially if you’re unexpectedly successful and artistically unfulfilled, so Chris was really a mess. He ended up financially successful, but depressed and drinking too much. If you ever see Shipmates, you can kind of tell.

Doing comedy with his best friend from college Mike Phirman helped get him out of his depression. They were writing funny songs, performing as Hard N Phirm, and doing standup sets at an alternative show in Los Angeles called Comedy Death Ray. The songs they were writing were getting nerdier and nerdier. One week, they wrote an entire stage musical based on the movie Tron. It killed.

Maybe it was when they wrote a love song to pi that Chris realized that at the heart of his discontent was that his work had been, for his whole adult life, defined by others. Because he had blundered into this cultural phenomenon as a 19-year-old, he was tremendously successful in Hollywood terms, but nothing that he’d done, save what he was doing on stage, was in any way an expression of him. He had a great passion for neither ships nor mates.

The reality was that while Chris had defined himself on TV as a handsome wiseacre, he was actually a nerd. In high school, he had been in the chess club, the Latin club *and* the computer club. So he decided to dedicate himself to exploring that, on stage and screen.

If you don’t know, five years later, Chris hosts two television shows, has a million and a half twitter followers, and an entire podcast network build around his Nerdist brand. Because people can tell – that’s who he really is. And because it is passion that drives audiences today. Not something-slightly-above-disinterest, but PASSION.

7. Focus on Great Work (Merlin Mann)

A word of warning: depending on how smart and talented you are, this one may actually make you less successful. Financially. It will undoubtedly make you more successful at not hating yourself and your life, though. And more successful at making the world suck less. I’d make it optional, but since you’re getting the rest of these insights free, and with great power comes great responsibility, I’m making it mandatory.

Merlin Mann

My friend Merlin Mann was an itinerant tech geek when he started his website 43 Folders. The site was initially dedicated to a personal productivity system called Getting Things Done. The system involves writing down what you need to do on index cards, and filing them in folders – one for each day of the month, and one for each month of the year. 43, in total.

Merlin’s a gifted writer, and a very funny man, and his site quickly got huge. Geeks love to look at every problem facing them as an opportunity to find a solution, and the only thing they love more than systems are tips & tricks. Merlin was great at that stuff, and he was a bit of a self-satirist, as well. He advocated getting rid of your gadgets, and just carrying some 3×5 cards held together with a binder clip, which he dubbed “The Hipster PDA.” It was fun, and funny, and self-aware and helpful to a lot of people.

As his site grew in popularity, he found himself throwing more and more coal on the fire. Something started getting distorted. Competitors like Lifehacker (owned by blogging’s Evil Empire, Gawker Media) were ditching the self-satire and the writing and focusing on tips & tricks (“10 Most Productive Pencil-Sharpeners”) and doing huge traffic. Eventually, Merlin started to wonder whether he was feeding the flames of his blog with coal or manure.

Then, he quit.

Not altogether, mind you. But he quit making bullshit.

Merlin decided that if he was going to be a writer, he’d write. Even if that meant writing something every couple weeks rather than every day. Even if it meant hurting the traffic on his site and the advertising revenue that came with that traffic. He decided he’d write a big piece on the blog that would really make a difference once in a while, and do some other stuff with the rest of his time.

Which was gutsy as hell.

These days, Merlin’s finishing his first book, and he speaks regularly for big bucks.

I’m not sure that this was the best career move for Merlin. I know he’s smart enough that he could have kept shoveling cow patties into the furnace and kept cashing ad network checks. I also know that that would have made his life miserable, and his work worse. He might well have flamed out, and if he hadn’t, he’d be like a dry drunk, white-knuckling his way through. And the world is better served by a Merlin who’s focused on doing his best work rather than his most linkable or profitable or traffic-driving work.

Sometimes not doing something shitty is the only way to do something good.

8. Connect with People You Like (You Look Nice Today)

It’s almost impossible to describe You Look Nice Today to someone who hasn’t heard it, so I’ll start by suggesting that you listen. That said, I know you’re trying to learn how to become a self-made billionaire right now, so I’m going to try my best to describe it.

You Look Nice Today is subtitled “A Journal of Emotional Hygiene.” Each episode is three men having an intimate, transgressive conversation. That conversation has only one foot in reality; the other foot is squarely in the realm of nonsense, discomfort and absurdity. A typical exchange involves the premise that they need to do some “blue sky imagineering” to come up with a more sustainable business model for the show. A theme restaurant is decided upon. The restaurant’s theme: awkward social interactions. The doorway will be at one end of a long corridor, and at the other end will be the host stand, and the left side of the walkway will be dads with cameras and on the right side of the walkway will be families posing for photographs. To be seated, you must pass between them. This is by no means an unusual topic on You Look Nice Today.


You Look Nice Today has made very little money in and of itself, but I think all three of its hosts would point to it as an essential part of their careers, and it almost didn’t happen. None of the three hosts has a background in comedy (one of them, in fact, is the aforementioned Merlin Mann, along with Adam Lisagor and Scott Simpson). In fact, when they conceived of the show, they’d never met in real life.

They were early adopters of Twitter, in the era before it was a platform for celebrities to tell us about their sandwiches, and each just thought the others were funny. They started messaging each other, and that turned into emails, and that turned into “let’s be friends,” and that turned into, “let’s make something,” and that turned into “You Look Nice Today: A Journal of Emotional Hygiene.” It was a project that none of them would have attempted without the connection, a project that none of them sought out, but it was also a project that changed the course of their careers and lives.

The creepy thing to call this is networking, but I much prefer to call it connecting with people you like. You don’t have to have an agenda. When you find someone whose work you like, tell them. When you meet someone you think is interesting, meet them again. The internet is built on community and conversation. That is expected. Engage that back-and-forth. Offer someone a hand, and expect nothing in return. Do something cool with someone you think is cool because the thing will end up cool. You never know what you might end up with.

9.Own What You Create (Felicia Day)

Felicia Day was a struggling actress, and when she talked to her advisors, she got the struggling actress’ advice: “Try writing something for yourself!”

Felicia Day photo by Lan Bui

She had been obsessed (like literally millions of Americans) with the online game World of Warcraft, so instead of writing a one-woman show, she wrote a treatment for a sitcom about online gamers called The Guild, and took it out to pitch meetings with network executives. Now: television programmers are basically openly hostile to online gaming, so every network she could get a meeting with passed on the show, but that turned out to be a blessing.

Instead of writing a pilot for G4, she rewrote the show as an online series, and financed the pilot herself. It was a hit, and soon media companies were at her door, offering to buy it from her and finance a season. Instead, she sold sponsorships herself (with the help of a staff she hired) directly to the passionate gamer market she knew well because she was part of it, and made a bundle. She was glad to have kept ownership when Microsoft offered a pile of money to license the show for an exclusive distribution window on the Xbox.

Ultimately, when you own your work, you are always building equity. When you work for hire, you’re building equity for someone else.

The independent podcasters who distribute their shows through my podcasting network own their work. I make no claim upon it. For me, this is a moral issue for creators. When benefits accrue down the road, in whatever unexpected way they might accrue, they should accrue to the person who took the creative risk of making something. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to take advantage of you.

10. Find the Money (Kasper Hauser)

I was talking with one of the founders of the San Francisco Sketchfest once, and she told me a story about the sketch comedy group Kasper Hauser. Kasper Hauser were opening for The Upright Citizens Brigade in San Francisco. They did a set, and walked off stage to a standing ovation. One of the UCB guys – I think it was Ian Roberts – turned to the guy from Sketchfest and said, “Wow. We had a TV show, and these guys don’t?”

Kasper Hauser

I had a similar reaction the first time I saw them perform. They’re genuinely among the most brilliant comedy acts I’ve ever seen. They’re also based in San Francisco, which has virtually no comedy industry, and they all have white-collar jobs – two college professors, an MD and a federal public defender. They were in their 30s, with wives, families and jobs and just didn’t want to move to LA and start at the bottom of the TV industry in the hopes of getting one of the two sketch shows a decade that TV executives hand out. So they were taking a couple weeks off of their real jobs once a year, going to the Edinburgh Fringe and winning awards – as a sort of vacation.

One night at a party, one of them was talking to a woman who turned out to be a book agent, and she’d seen them perform, and thought they were amazing, and asked if they’d ever thought of writing a book. They hadn’t, but they pitched her shortly thereafter, and she pitched publishers, and they got a book deal. That one (called “Skymaul: Happy Crap You Can Buy From A Plane” – buy it, it is amazing) lead to two more. They recently signed a deal for their fourth book.

One of the odd things about the new way of doing business is that the money doesn’t always come where you expect it. Blog advertising might not pan out, but speaker’s fees do. Your notoriety as a podcaster might get you a gig as a television host (it happened to me). One of my best friends owes his entire career not to the iPhone app he created, but to the video he made to promote the iPhone app he created. If you keep your eyes open and do great work, you can find places to make money.

11.Build a Community (Insane Clown Posse)

Now we come to the part of my article where I praise the Insane Clown Posse. If you’re not familiar with the ICP, I’ll give you the bare bones. After realizing they weren’t athletic enough to pursue their true dream of becoming professional wrestlers, two white guys from suburban Detroit decided to take their wrestling outfits (killer clown-themed) and use them in the world of hip-hop. Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope are terrible at rapping, but they’ve built enough of a fan base over their 15 or so years of existence that their annual festival, the Gathering of the Juggalos (Juggalos being the nickname of their fans) draws a five-digit crowd to a shady campground for a weekend of pro wrestling, music, hard drugs and booby-flashing.

Insane Clown Posse

Let me say this: the ICP are not for me. And they are probably not for you.

What they understand, though, is that they are for someone.

No matter how terrible their music is (and it is very terrible), they have always dedicated themselves wholeheartedly to their fan community. They’ve developed strange rituals, like spraying the off-brand citrus soda Faygo on their adherents from the stage. They have a mythology. Their own wrestling league. A whole world of other rappers who wear killer clown makeup. Fans who create their own killer clown characters.

Part of what is important to us about music is music. But if it was just about the music, we’d all listen to Stephen Foster songs and Beethoven, because they pretty much mastered the whole “making pleasing melodies” thing, right?

The other element is identity. Music is an excuse to form a community. The mods don’t just love mod music, they love adding rear view mirrors and headlamps to their Lambrettas and painting bulls-eyes on stuff and wearing military surplus and being friends with other people who love those things. That doesn’t just hold for music, either – do you think people go to Ren Faires because they’ve just gotta get their dose of falconry? Harley fans can ride their hogs anywhere, anytime – why do they go to Bike Week? Identity! Community!

No matter what you make, it will become part of someone’s identity, and if you can help them share that identity with others, that identity will become a community. And connecting with other people is the most important thing we can do. It’s where babies come from! People will gladly pay you for that service.

12. DO A GOOD JOB

Here’s the part where I deliver the bad news: I can’t make you do a good job. If you’re talentless or lazy, none of this will work. If you’re talentless and lazy, you’re particularly out of luck.

I don’t really think that most of what you need is born into you, though. Mostly, you just need to care, and try. You need to make something, and then make it again, a little better. You need to look around for money. You need to reach your hand out to meet someone when it would be easier to keep to yourself. You need to make something for you when it would be easier just do what someone else tells you to. All of these things are hard, but none of them require anything more than gumption. Which I bet you have.

So: make your thing.