The First Time I Saw the Internet

I remember very distinctively the first time I saw the Internet.

I was ten or eleven years old, in the sixth grade, the year was 1997. These were certainly not the early days; this was two years after the Netscape IPO. Accordingly, the <frame> had been set in the <blink> of an eye. "Internet" was household term and venture capitalists had long since mobilized. Still, at this time, if you went to AltaVista and searched for "Google", you would have gotten zero results. Like myself, the Internet was beginning an explosive phase of awkward growth, which prove to be highly formative, as well as full of embarrassments.

It was at the community college in the town where I grew up. My mother worked there, and my brothers, sisters, and I would go nearly every day after school. One day, the library on the second floor got six public use computers that were connected to the Internet.

My brother Gunnar had at least one inkling of knowledge about the Internet, making him, by comparison, an expert. The first time I saw the Internet, he using it on one of those computers. When I walked up, he was staring at a page of black text on a white background. There was a centered image at top. I was fearful and excited, but remember the exchange of words verbatim.

"Is that the Internet?"

"Yes." He answered pridefully, and highlighted the portion of the text he was currently reading with the mouse to indicate his focus. He still does that to this day.

The highlighting, to me, was of tremendous importance. That was associated with one thing in my mind: the hours I had spent watching my father write letters in WordPerfect 5. On considering the gravity of the erroneous conclusions I made next, my voice quivered when I asked faintly:

"You... can highlight it?"

"Yeah... but it's not like you can edit it." He, too, was disappointed. Having had similar experiences, he correctly guessed what I had assumed.

This shattered a portion of my imagination as quickly as it had been created. I had only seen highlighting in the context of word processors, so to me, it meant I could press a key, and magically replace the current text with my own content.

Just imagine that. In that instance, without know the words for it, I had imagined every page on the Internet was a Wiki. I was heartbroken to learn otherwise, but from that moment on, I still spent innumerable hours in that library on that computer, exploring everything I could find there. It was not until a year or two later that I discovered it was possible for me to create content after all, not just consume it. This is still the one thing that motivates me most: creating something that people all over the world might find useful.

The Hiring Multiplier

One of the great skills of a person who effectively executes an idea is the ability to identify and attract people more skilled than himself. No doubt, many big challenges require significant human resources; and ability to acquire that resource makes the short list of necessary skills for the Executive Übermensch.

In other words, knowing how to get really good people to work on your project is really important.

Getting really good people is done in two steps. You have to find and identify them, and you have to convince and incentivize them to work with you. The better you are or the more you know about the role to be filled, the better you can do all these things.

This is fairly obvious for the identification process. If you do not know the first thing about marketing, for example, you will not be able to tell which person can actually help when you are at the networking event full of social media experts who will all fill your ear with wondrous promises. Unless you are lucky, you will pick up someone worse than useless: someone who will drag you down.

It's only slightly less apparent for convincing them to join you. Past a certain point, monetary incentives lose effectiveness. Smart, good people want to work with people who understand their value, whom they respect, and who have some knowledge or experience to offer in return. The more you show capacity to understand the technical requirements of your project, the more comfortable a technical person will feel working with you. A good developer, for example, will often value the assurance that their concerns will be understood and considered more highly than the specifics of monetary incentives.

This is The Hiring Multiplier, and is one reason why a breadth of knowledge is so beneficial. Know the basics of as many areas of your business as you can, not so you can do them yourself, but so you can get the most out of the multiplier.

Being Concise and the Value of Criticism

Growing up, I never had a need to be concise.

In fact, being concise just meant running out of things to say sooner. Circumstances were such that there was rarely any sort of time limit when it came to communicating ideas.

Then, starting in college, I started to receive criticisms about my tendency to drag on and on. At first, I blamed it on TV culture -- no one seemed to be able to have an attention span to focus on a thought or story that can't be made or told in a 30 second spot.

Even if that were true, it did not really help. What helped was when I started actively trying to change that, to be concise, and I still push to improve every time I sense people's attention begin to drift. I realized that if I could find ways to be clear and concise, I could increase the effectiveness and impact of the things I say tenfold. I could command an audience and have people open their ears to things I say.

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Being concise is great, but I would not realize that value if not for criticism from those around me. The criticisms you receive are the finest gifts you'll ever get. You should treasure and study them, and repeat them to yourself more often than any of the compliments, until you start to improve.

Base your ego and confidence on your ability to adapt and change, not to the specifics of your current status. This way, you'll never have hesitancy in seeking and devouring criticisms of your character, getting at the root of the problem, and fixing it.

Finding The Time

I have seven seeds of blog posts saved in my drafts. They cover solid topics, but I feel like I need to set several hours aside to give the topics their rightfully deserved attention.

Bloggers, and other original content producers, how long do you spend on a quality post? How long is it in draft? How many times do you come by and revise before it feels "right"?

Fine Ink

I've been writing, drawing, and designing a fair amount in the past few weeks. My instruments are these: acid-free Hammermill 20 lb. paper and a Uni-ball Vision Elite black ink pen.

The paper avoids notice, so much so it is ineffective. Like the ball boys in professional tennis, the paper is shy to the point of distraction. The whiteness of this paper does not blend in well.

This is in too harsh a contrast to the ink of the pen, which leaves a trail so pleasing to the eye that I feel compelled to find paper to match. The pen's variance of line thickness is detectable, enough to break the monotony common to high precision instruments, yet too subtle to compromise the accuracy of the curve I had originally wished to depict.

It is a well-made tool. Effective communication between hand and pen is instant, while particulars of the parlance are noted in due time. Then, it's response to pressure, angle, and speed of stroke become second nature. The struggle, the barrier between mental image and physical depiction fades, the pen becomes the constant assistant of hand, the hand becomes the faithful executive of the mind's eye.

The Tall Body: Little Changes that Make a Big Difference

In his 2006 book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, Chris Anderson popularized the notion that some distributions have "long tails". In these distributions, one can focus on the "tails" of the distribution, the less common stuff, benefiting from a large number of low volume things.

However, in many situations, the "long tail" is a vestigial organ. These situations involve distributions that have instead Tall Bodies, and one should instead focus on the huge impact that can result from a very small number of things.

Like the Long Tail, the Tall Body doesn't apply to all things, but understanding when it does and how to build a winning strategy around it will make the difference between success and failure.

As a motivating example, consider this. Election day is coming up, and there is going to be a proposition on the ballot, Prop X, that could enable your business to offer a profitable new service. Voter turn-out will be high because of some other big ticket item on the ballot, but most voters will not have even heard about Prop X when they show up at the polls.

Prop X could add a lot to your bottom line, but reaching any non-trivial percentage of the voters is also incredibly expensive. Is it worth it? How can you make an intelligent business decision about the effectiveness of campaigning for the proposition?

Let's start by supposing there are going to be 100,000 votes on your proposition, all from voters who turned out to vote for other issues, and are essentially voting randomly with equal probability on Prop X. So without any influence, the probability of the proposition passing is 50%. This assumption, that the majority of voters vote randomly on this issue, is the key assumption here.

Now, suppose you and 9 friends would definitely vote for the proposition. How much of a difference could these 10 people make? Can the voice of 10 votes be heard over the noise of 100,000? Put in mathematical terms, what's the new likelihood of the proposition winning?

What if you could reach 0.1% of voters, or 100 people?

What if you could reach 0.5% of voters, or 500 people?

Write down your guesses for each of these three things, and then throw them away because they are wrong.

We can go through the math later, but this is definitely a case where the Tall Body applies. Those first ten voters, who make up 0.01% of the population, increase the chances of winning from 50% to 53%. Not bad, but not great. Another 90 votes and we have 0.1% of the voters, yet our odds have jumped to 74%. By the time we've reach just 500 people out of the 100,000, the case is closed. The proposition has over a 99.9% chance of winning, because of the actions of 0.5% of the population.

As I mentioned, this relies on the assumption that most voters are acting randomly. That's certainly not the case in a lot of elections, but it is for some, and it certainly holds for many other aspects of human behavior. In my forthcoming book, The Tall Body: Little Changes that Make a Big Difference, I'll explore this concept in more detail, and readers will put down the book with an understanding of how to identify, and reason, about these situations. Small and easy changes in your personal and professional life can create new lifestyles, sway million dollar decisions, and create positive social change on a global scale.

Trying Again

I've tried similar things before: keeping a journal, a blog, a regular sleep pattern, or a structured lifestyle. It doesn't work well for me. However, I am giving the whole blog bit another go. My motivation is this: I have become a regular user of Twitter, and find it pretty useful. I like keeping it short and sweet, and I imagine other people do, too. However, once every five to ten posts, I want to write just a bit more.