Archive for the 'People' Category

Six Truths about Time Debt

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on September 14, 2010
in People
. 1 Comment

Debt is a method for transforming money you will earn later into money you can spend today. As such, not only does it reduce the amount of money you will be able to spend later (because you will be busy paying back your debt) but it also restricts your freedom to reduce your spending drastically should a life-changing event happen (losing your job and moving back with your parents).

I won’t go deeper into details – the simple dollar is a great blog that can tell you more about debt and money than I ever will, so just go and read it.

Today, I want to talk about another kind of debt – time debt.

Time debt happens whenever you transform time you have later into time you have now. If you don’t spend the time to pick up your package from the post office today, you’ll have to spend that time in the near future. Accumulating time debt could happen because you waste time on futile things (such as sitting in front of the television watching shows that you don’t really care about), or it could happen for perfectly reasonable reasons: start-up founders are constantly in time debt, because there’s so much they have to do to get their product out to market and find customers that non-profitable activities are often delayed months at a time.

Despite the popular saying, time is not money: there are a few key differences between time debt and money debt that you need to take into account.

1. There is no inflation.
Not only does inflation mean the value of money decreases (you used to buy a Foobar for $1, now you need $1.20) and thus makes money debt easier to pay back, but the revenue of individuals also tends to increase when they get raises or change jobs. In fact, taking on $10,000 in debt to start a new company that earns you $100,000 in the first two years is one of the ways you can leverage debt to improve your revenue and automatically make your debt easier to pay back.

You will have 24 hours to spend every day for the rest of your life, and a lot of that is eaten up by sleep and natural urges. On the long term, having kids and growing older result in less time every day.

The only situation where «I’ll have the time to do it tomorrow» is a valid excuse is when you’re expecting a significant deadline to blow over. If you’re leaving your day job or your children are moving out or your very important paper due on Monday is done, then you can expect to have some free time. But even then, never underestimate your standing debt: all that free time is seldom enough to get all those delayed and postponed things done.

2. There is no refinancing.
Refinancing happens because you just can’t pay $4000 a month on a $3000 paycheck, so a refinancing company comes around and pays those $4000 a month for you, and you pay them $2500 a month for twice as long. That’s because money debt does not have solid deadlines—its deadlines are liquid, because they can be paid for using more debt (which is what refinancing is).

By contrast, you can’t decide to work 40 hours today by using your free time for the entire next week. If you have a deadline that requires 40 hours of work and you only have 24 hours left, you’re in trouble. Your only solution is to move the deadline—the equivalent of missing a payment.

As a consequence, be extremely wary of looming deadlines involving your time debt. Try to get these out of the way as soon as possible (keeping only those actions without a deadline on your to-do list), and when you do delay them, make sure they are small enough items to fit within your time buffer (that amount of time you can use in an emergency by giving up on sleep and leisure), such as paying bills or replying to mail.

3. There’s no price tag.
One of the easiest things about money debt is that there’s an explicit price tag on almost everything you buy. When you shop for a $900 laptop, you know it’s going to cost you exactly $900 (because that’s what the order confirmation page says), so you can accurately fit it into your budget (for instance, you could decide to amortize it over three months by decreasing your daily «free» budget by $10 — or use a credit card and decrease your daily «free» budget by $11, but that’s another story).

There’s no price tag for activities. All you can do is estimate, and that estimation is seldom accurate beyond the ten-minute threshold for simple activities. Do you know long it takes to pick up some groceries? To cash a check? To prepare that cake you promised you’d bring to church on Sunday?

Our inability to accurately estimate the time cost of activities means it’s necessary to keep a safe buffer of time every day, just in case an important activity just bursts.

4. There are dependencies.
With money, there are usually no dependencies or constraints in the order in which you pay for things. If you need to bake a chocolate cake, you can buy flour first or you can buy chocolate first, or you can buy both at the same time. In terms of time, you need to spend time buying flour and chocolate before you can spend time preparing the mix and putting it in the oven.

Quite often, in complex activities, we estimate the time fairly accurately (I need ten minutes to prepare the mix and put it in the oven) but fail to take into account the dependencies because these only surface when you actually start planning the activity in detail. So, your ten-minute baking spree suddenly requires a half-hour grocery trip.

5. There are massive economies of scale
Modern industrialized society has already extracted economies of scale from everything. If you buy twenty packs of soap instead of one pack, your per-unit economies are not very impressive—you probably won’t even get a 50% price reduction.

On the other hand, driving out once to buy twenty packs is significantly shorter than driving out twenty times. As an individual, you cannot benefit from industrial-scale infrastructure: even if you wanted to, there’s no way for you to open one thousand letters to dilute the cost of finding the letter opener because you do not receive that many letters. The best you can do is buffer tasks that benefit from being done together: make a shopping list in advance to optimize the trip to the store and buy gasoline while you’re there, keep your non-critical mail around for a week before you sort through it on Sunday afternoon, cook one meal that lasts a few days…

6. There are no savings
If you don’t spend any money today, it just sticks around. In fact, if you only spend a little, you will accumulate savings that can be used to buy (part of) a house, or a new car, or a computer, or your wedding, or your kid’s college tuition, or whatever.

That hour you spent on the train today? You will never get it back. Every second of your time that you don’t spend doing something is wasted forever. And you only have so much time on this earth.

Unused time lends itself to reuse, especially with modern technology. That hour on the train could be spent eating, sleeping or playing (so that you’ll have more free time when you’re somewhere else), catching up with an old friend over the phone, working on a project (even as small as a blog post) or organizing your calendar…

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What are your considerations when saving time? Do you work with a time budget like you would work with a money budget? Do you have too much free time, or are you constantly running late?

The Five Minds of the Software Designer

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on September 7, 2010
in People
. 3 Comments

The design of software user interfaces requires five different ways of looking at things. Some very amazing people manage to do all five (for instance, Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini, former User Interface Evangelist at Apple). For the rest of us, we need to identify which parts of software design fit our minds and find people with complementary skills.

—

The «Need» lens

A brainstorming expert, easily comes up with new feature ideas, some of which might actually be feasible. Might be a creative genius or simply someone who listens to existing users and potential buyers a lot. This man or woman is the starting point of any software design endeavor: they hold a complete high-level vision of what needs to be achieved, though they do not know the details of how it will be achieved. Without this lens, everyone else will just run around in circles.

The «Architecture» lens

Deeply familiar with the structure of the software, this person can instantly determine the consequences of a butterfly flapping their winds in form A over the thunderstorm in screen B. The architect is your sole line of defense against painting yourself in a corner. Without this lens, teams discover two months into development that they have to display the user’s birthday even though the program never asks for it.

The «Process» lens

Knowledgeable about the day-to-day design of user interfaces, this team member should fill in the details of how the high-level objectives should be achieved: what does the user see? What can they click? What must they fill in or select? What happens when they do thi–oops. A strong ability to identify corner cases is essential so that no design holes are left unchecked. Without this lens, the team can create a list of friends, but they will not make its columns sortable and they will not handle empty lists gracefully.

The «Implementation» lens

Experienced in the art of software development, this veteran sorts suggestions into impossible, hard and easy based on how hard it is to implement them, then proposes cheaper alternatives based on existing technologies and components. This should be someone actively involved in the actual implementation,  skilled in both technical problem-solving and human-to-human communication.  Without this lens, everyone else will think up beautiful designs that take years to complete.

The «Simplification» lens

A perpetually unhappy, lazy person, always eager to complain about how long it takes to perform a task or how difficult it is to understand a certain concept. When everyone else just takes the current design for granted, this team member is not blind to its flaws, and points them out until the others listen. This is the mind behind Amazon’s «one-click checkout» and GMail replacing «Are you sure you want to delete this» with «Deleted. Click here to cancel» Without this lens, the software will work, but will be difficult to manipulate and understand.

—

What about me? I’m excellent when it comes to Architecture and Implementation (due to my technical background) and have an acceptable aptitude for Process and Simplification. I’m downright mediocre when it comes to Need (I guess you could summarize this as AI/PS/N to imitate the Briggs-Myers personality type system). So, I tend to seek out people who are adept at identifying needs and good at imagining processes and simplifying designs.

An interesting observation here is that four of the five lenses don’t require any implementation experience at all, and from my experience, implementation skills are seldom accompanied by an aptitude for Need and Simplification. Could a software design career be good for you?

For those of you who are doing software design: what are your lenses? Do you see anything missing? Would you like to have a self-evaluation poll to help you identify your aptitude with these five lenses?

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How do you Carve an Elephant?

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on September 6, 2010
in People
. 4 Comments

And the answer is:

Look at the stone and remove everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.

This is obviously a joke: such advice is completely useless when applied to elephant carving. Why? Because the hard part about carving an elephant is precisely to determine whether a given inch of stone looks like it’s part of the final statue. Once you get over this difficulty, the act of cutting the stone is a mere implementation detail.

On the other hand, elephant carving is an excellent technique in situations where cutting the stone is hard and finding the elephant is easy. All you have to do is find huge amounts of stone and be willing to remove anything that does not fit.

I went to a wedding this week-end (stranding a lonely @TheGirlPie in the comments section of this blog, sorry girlie!) and took pictures. Hundreds.

What I could have done: upload all the pictures to Facebook, remove the pictures where people who don’t like to be seen making funny faces are making funny faces and finally tag everyone to validate my social existence through the number of Facebook friends I have.

What I did: remove the ugliest half of the photo album, then remove the ugliest half of what remained, and so on until only a handful of pictures remained. Badly framed or blurry pictures died to bring you this information. In fact, all the pictures that weren’t exceptionally well-framed and well-focused were suicided à la Staline. I uploaded those that remained and again removed all those that looked bad when resized by Facebook.

And then, I removed another batch and uploaded the three survivors here:

Keep in mind that I’m a very bad photographer, with no training or experience or talent. I used a cheap point-and-shoot camera that’s designed to make recognizable pictures of people and things, not beautiful pictures. But the odds were on my side: out of hundreds of pictures, a few had to be good.

All I needed was the time to take hundreds of pictures, and the willingness to throw away 99%.

Sounds easy? Sure.

Have you carved out all the unnecessary lines in your resumé, or are you trying to impress the recruiter with the sheer size of it ? (hint : you won’t)

Have you carved out all the boring text and slow passages of your latest article, book or blog post? Or are you afraid of accepting that the time it took you to write them was wasted?

Have you carved out all the arcane options and awkward features from your software? Or are you in love with your work?

When you’re the one making the stone, carving elephants is simply accepting that most of what you did is worthless and should be thrown away. Being outstanding is throwing away everything that isn’t.

And subscribing to this blog.

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Blandness is for Wimps

Published
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Victor Nicollet
on September 1, 2010
in People
. 5 Comments

Oh, what a sad place the world has become! With so many people producing content—books, blogs, videos, ads—you need your content to be outstanding in order to be noticed. As in, standing out of the unwashed masses of uninteresting produce.

Anger

An exceptionally popular blip on the late-1990s radar was a one-man web site by a hateful bile-spewing megalomaniac whose defining characteristic was that he drew genitalia on greeting cards: Maddox (which is surprisingly safe for browsing at work as long as you don’t visit the greeting card page). Maddox was outrageous. He would write short, sweet and unambiguous sentences like «animals are made to be eaten» and string them together to create complete articles that brought up the image of a crazed man frothing at the mouth in front of a computer in a suburban basement. It was something you would show your friends, if only to make fun of the author and publicly denounce his views. For the french equivalent of Maddox, try Odieux Connard.

Anger and fury are old. Even the bile-spewing is passé. These days, if you can’t vomit napalm from your fingertips on demand, you might as well give up and go back to posting financial advice and generic emo poetry.

Euphoria

And then, there’s endorsement. Turns out, being euphorically happy about something works as well as being maniacally angry about it.

Penny Arcade ran a short strip and news post in late 2009 about Torchlight, a Diablo-esque video game. They didn’t say the game was good, or excellent, or must-have, or 9.5/10 or any of that standardized low-power vocabulary. Tycho wrote:

Runic Games is doing the Lord’s work, in an robust and unambiguous fashion.

And I hate him for that with unrelenting passion, because of the many hours I spent playing Torchlight after that. My basic rule for video games is this: if I can level up, then I will be addicted.

There are three benefits to giving outstanding, sincere compliments, as opposed to outstanding insults.

1. Complimenting someone makes you feel better. The experience you get from quality restaurants is heavily influenced by your expectations. If you expect to have a good time, then unless something goes wrong unexpectedly, you will have a good time. And, if you expect to have a bad time, then you will have a bad time.

2. Sincere compliments help build friendships. People are always happy when you compliment them, especially if they felt insecure about that very thing. And if you help people feel better, that’s one less step to go to make friends or «online allies»

3. Outspoken, public compliments send out a message: if you’re great and you need some publicity, make sure I notice you. All publicity is good publicity, they say, but most of us would rather not be on the wrong end of the angry-rant-zooka.

Naomi Dunford

One of the best euphoria-powered blogs I read is Naomi Dunford’s IttyBiz. When she has a good experience with customer support, she doesn’t write a bland ten-word sentence about it:

I have a confession to make. I have a crush on Leo Babauta. Now, disclosing this little juicy morsel in such a public fashion is probably unwise. It shows my hand and significantly lessens the chance that he will ever allow me to guest post on his blog. It might make things awkward, us being in love and all. However, dear readers, I have promised to be honest with you and honest I will be.

Her entire blog is a temple dedicated to the idea that if you’re not outstanding, you don’t exist. Let me say that again: if you want to exist, you have to be outstanding. Does she exist? Well, do you remember René Descartes? He doubted the existence of everything, and through logical reasoning he deduced that two things existed for sure – himself (cogito ergo sum) and Naomi Dunford.

I read many blogs for their content. I read Naomi’s for the experience.

You Might Enjoy

A quick reminder: if you happen to know of people resources, blogs or products that are 1° great and 2° not as popular as they deserve, drop me a line by e-mail or in the comments below.

The Link Pyramid Scheme

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on August 30, 2010
in People
. 1 Comment

Let’s start with a classic idea. Something like an oft-repeated quotation:

A smile costs nothing but gives much. It enriches those who receive without making poorer those who give.

A good starting point. Now, what should we try to collide this with? Let’s try random Wikipedia articles:

A pyramid scheme is a non-sustainable business model that involves the exchange of money primarily for enrolling other people into the scheme, without any product or service being delivered.

So, the thing about a pyramid scheme is that people at the top get a lot of money (they started the scheme), but the people at the bottom lose money when the scheme runs out of steam because they cannot find another layer of people to pay them. But what if the pyramid involved smiles instead of money?

Your new job is to find two people you know and explain to them that you’re running a smile pyramid scheme. They have to smile to you, and to me (you can send emoticons to victor@nicollet.net). Then, they each look for two more people and explain that they’re running the scheme. The four people on the third layer have to smile back to the second-layer person who entered them into the scheme, and they have to smile to you (but not to me, unless they really want to). Instead of two smiles, you get six! A 300% return on your smile investment!

The pyramid propagates this way until people are sick of smiling at everyone. When it finally dies down, no one has lost anything because of the “costs nothing, gives much” theorem above. But a lot of people were enriched by the experience.

I agree, this is silly. What else is great for the receiver and cheap for the sender?

The Backlink Pyramid

Internet links. When I link to someone from this blog, I usually make them happier because they get some additional readers out of it. On the other hand, linking to someone does not cost me anything. Sure, if I keep linking to uninteresting or annoying sites, I’ll get myself a bad reputation. But I can spend weeks linking to good content websites without having to worry.

Your new job is to find two websites or blogs you know and explain to them that you’re running a link pyramid scheme. They have to link back to your blog, and to mine. Then, they each look for two more people and explain that they’re running the scheme, and so on. By asking two people, you get six links.

Are you afraid of asking people for a link to your blog? Right. Try saying that to your “Retweet This” button, your “Google Buzz” button, your “Share on Facebook” button or any number of social bookmarking buttons you have set up on your blog. We actively yearn for people to link to us. We comment and trackback. We write guest posts. We follow on twitter in the hopes of being followed back. Asking for links is nothing new.

The real problem is that there’s no way to make sure the second layer tells the third layer to link back to you. In fact, they might just start a pyramid of their own, ignoring you altogether. People are like that.

The Backlink Pyramid Watches You

The Backlink Pyramid Watches You

Why not add a middleman? Some sort of Backlink Pyramid Scheme service that works like this:

  • Alice uses the service and registers by entering the address of her blog. In return, she gets an url such as linksche.me/mhBx89 that she posts on her blog.
  • Bob reads Alice’s blog and follows the link. There, he finds a registration page that includes a link to Alice’s blog.
  • Bob registers for the service using that page, enters the address of his blog, and gets his own url such as linksche.me/261pFb that he posts on his own blog.
  • Charlie reads Bob’s blog and follows the link. There, he finds a registration page that includes a link to the blogs of both Bob and Alice.
  • Charlie registers for the service. The cycle continues.

To be part of the pyramid, you need to start on someone’s registration page, and the software will automatically add a link to your recruiter on your own registration page. So, as long as the second layer manages to find a third layer, you are guaranteed to get your additional links back.

What the service is saying, basically, is that if you join (for free), you’ll get a registration page that will let you bring other people on board. These people, in turn, will spread around a registration page of their own, and there will be a link to your blog on each and every one of these pages.

Would This Work?

I’m dying to know whether this is yet another flamethrower idea, or if it could actually work. So, I’ve written the software, registered http://linksche.me/, and set up a registration page.

0

Get on there and create yourself a registration page of your own. This might get your blog some publicity. If you don’t have a blog, point to your Facebook page or to your LinkedIn page or your Twitter feed or to the page of a cause you support. I’m sure you’ll find something. Then, start posting links to your registration page on your blog, Facebook, Twitter…

There are basically two ways this could play out.

If we don’t bring enough people on board, then nothing happens. We go home, forget about that silly idea and move on to the next interesting shiny thing like the iPhone 5 or something.

If we manage to get a critical mass in the Pyramid, then people will start hearing about it and will try to jump on the bandwagon before the entire scheme inevitably runs out of steam. The media will notice that there’s a rush to join, buzz will happen, and awareness will increase. This, in turn, will further increase join rates. If things go this way, we’ll be the tip of the pyramid, getting tens of thousands of visits. This could play out like the million dollar home page all over again, except that instead of one person getting all the money, the early joiners will all be getting a lot of web traffic. And I’ll be happy because my idea worked. Hell, I might even get enough ad money out of the traffic rush to pay for the hosting.

Let’s get this ball rolling!

Where Has The Magic Gone?

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on August 13, 2010
in People
. 3 Comments

Last month, Chris “powerpig” McVeigh uploaded this image to his flickr account:
Picture of Darth Vader riding a chipmunk
Yes, this is Darth Vader riding a chipmunk. In the days of yore, one would say that the image was edited, tampered with, or fake. Today, we say that it has been photoshopped (or shopped). This goes a long way to show how iconic Adobe’s software has become. I still remember the early days of Photoshop 6.0, when the splash screen still showing the 33 authors and 14 patents of the software.

Except that this image is not photoshopped. Chris McVeigh uploaded a video a short while later to explain this fact:

I understand that my chipmunk photography can seem unbelievable at times, and I’m used to getting questions such as “How did you do that?” and “Is it all Photoshop?”

As this video will show, it’s all happening right there in front of the camera. I get no satisfaction out of a composited photo—the challenge for me is to capture the chipmunk engaged in a real and rather extraordinary situation.

The challenge. If you’re in my generation, you’ve been in school at a time when only the nerdy computer users ever managed to print the papers they handed in. And other people looked at them and said «wow, this is so cool, you must have used a computer» with a tinge of admiration in their voice—or was that fear? Back in the 90s, using a computer to print documents was surprising for a 14-year-old.

And now, the magic is gone. Kids look at you in disbelief when you suggest they write their paper, then go back to copy-pasting Wikipedia articles.

People used to be amazed when they saw an actual programmer. Software was some kind of magic resource that appeared in the bowels of huge mega-corporations with thousands of engineers and millions of dollars in budget. A few people had heard about shareware, yes, but those were the exception. When you showed people that you could program computers, they would all go «oooh» and «aaaah» and beautiful young girls would ask to have sex with you (or at least, that’s what the pictures in the pop-ups said).

That magic is gone as well, with the rise of the reclusive anti-social geek stereotype.

And yet… A few days ago, I was commuting in the Parisian subway. Next to every subway door, there’s a map like this one:

plan-de-metro-bonne-definition

Sitting next to the door was a young girl with an HTC smartphone I did not recognize. Her head was literally inches from the map on the door, at a perfect reading distance. And yet, she fumbled around the cell phone interface and launched a subway map application that, for all practical purposes, was just an on-screen version of the map next to her. And then, she fingered the screen some more to scroll her current position into view.

Such a reliance on magic technology can only mean one thing — the geeks have won.

Unrelated Posts

Blue Man Group – The Outsider

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on August 9, 2010
in People
. 1 Comment

The Blue Man Group consists in several musical theatre troupes, acting all around the world, that follow the same conventions: three characters designed to be identical (the same size, the same body shape, the same blue latex bald caps and black clothes, and no voices), acting as outsiders to our modern world.

This is a short video of an interview with founders Matt Goldman, Phil Stanton and Chris Wink:

My favorite quote here is from Matt Goldman:

The group of three is the smallest contingent where you can have an outsider.

Find two other people and start discussing something. Could be a topic in the news, what you ate for lunch, a project you’re working, or a new start-up.

Sometimes, one will be talking and the others will listen. He is the outsider.

Sometimes, two will be discussing the topic while the third listens. He is the outsider.

Sometimes, two will agree and the third will disagree. He is the outsider.

Sometimes, one will have the solution when the other two are lost. He is the outsider.

We find the 2vs1 situation inherently remarkable, fun or interesting, because it makes it easier to see what is the norm and who is anormal. The outsider introduces creativity and disruption into the mix, where the two others provide stability and prevent the entire thing from going astray too much. As long as you switch roles often enough, there’s enough energy in a group of three to keep a discussion going forward for a while.

Three people is an entirely different group dynamic from only two people (and of course, the group dynamics of being only one person are different as well).

  • One person is excellent for eliminating communication costs (maximum efficiency when you know what has to be done). If you can do it alone properly, then do it.
  • Two people are good for high-bandwidth information transfer, because there’s no interruption.
  • Three people are good for thinking outside the box, for creative meetings where one acts as the disruption and the other two are stabilizers. Less than two stabilizers leads to a situation that is too unstable. More than two stabilizers prevents things from going forward.

What are you trying to achieve? How many people do you really need in that meeting?

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My Ideas Love Having Sex

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on July 30, 2010
in People
. 0 Comments

They’re like that. Blame them. Actually, blame Matt Ridley, who gave a rather interesting 2010 Ted talk titled When ideas have sex. It’s just over fifteen minutes of pure sexy goodness:

To stand on Matt’s shoulders, I would say that as time passes, we are becoming better at sharing and combining ideas.

We improved how the ideas are packaged: that’s our ability to turn complex systems into black boxes. Almost every single thing we use today is a stack of countless layers of abstraction. In the 300 milliseconds this article took to reach your computer, it was encoded as HTML, sent over the HTTP protocol (which enables you to ask for a piece of data and receive it), which in turn is built on top of the TCP protocol (which enables you to communicate data to someone else). And your TCP uses the underlying IP protocol (which enables you to communicate fixed-size data packets to someone else). And IP is just a protocol used by routers to talk to each other, but the actual transmission involves fiber-optic cables at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, and relays, and error-checking. And there is not a single person on earth who can explain, in detail, what happens at all points during this transmission. Let alone understand the underlying physical properties of the cable and the routers and the processors in the routers and the transistors in those processors.

I know HTML, I kind-of-get HTTP, I understand the basic principles of TCP, I think I heard rumors about IP, and I honestly don’t know how data is actually transmitted over the ocean. Maybe there’s satellites?

We’re not standing on the shoulders of giants anymore. We’ve built a pyramid of midgets, with thousands of layers, and no one has any deep knowledge about more than one or two layers above and below.

And then, we improved how ideas are shared: that’s our ability to hear the ideas of thousands of people within the same week. Homo Erectus didn’t get to meet thousands of people in his entire life. The internet, with the ability for anyone to push their ideas forward for anyone to hear, is helping us.

First, we moved from the “no one talks to strangers” approach to the “one talks to the couple of strangers they meet every month” one when we started trading stuff in early history. Then, missionaries, books, radio and television finally introduced the “a few people speak to a lot of strangers” which, as long as those few people had great and original ideas, was even better. Now, we’re moving to “many people speak to many people“, which is less efficient as a whole for spreading ideas: there are more people talking, but you still only have 24 hours a day to listen to other people, which means the previously well-spread ideas get less audience. Where one church or one radio channel could be heard by everyone, now there are so many sources of information that none can get as many listeners as before.

On the other hand, this many-to-many universe means there’s a lot more potential for two ideas to meet. Instead of having idea A breed with ideas B, C, D; now you have pairings A-B, C-D and E-F. More pairings means more potential for an unexpectedly great outcome. As a society, we don’t need to help good ideas survive—we manage that quite well already. What we need is a way to help more good ideas emerge.

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Fwoosh!

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on July 26, 2010
in People
. 4 Comments

I have a fascination with flamethrowers. I’m lazy and I love fire, so anything that can let me burn things without having to stand up will get two thumbs up from me. One of the nice things about World War II is that they actually used flamethrowers on the battlefield.

Remember, back in the 1940s. Guns were scary because you knew they could kill you. Your brain is telling you that people die because of guns, so you’re scared. Artillery and mines are about the same, except for the russian roulette aspect: you know you can be blown to shreds, but that’s your brain talking.

But a flamethrower? You’re scared because you see that it can kill you. It’s your animal instincts. Animals are not afraid of guns, but they are afraid of flamethrowers. Nothing spells death like a fiery orange cloud.

“Yes, you love flamethrowers. Now get to the point”

The point. Right. What did flamethrowers actually not do in World War II ?

Work.

They didn’t work. They’re big, scary, macho killing machines, shinier than an iPhone 4 on your birthday, and they just didn’t work.

Turns out, they have a shorter range than almost every single gun in existence, and they look like giant flashing “shoot me from a distance” signs whenever you use them.

Has this every happened to you? To have that great idea, the one that looks like a real winner, the one that’s sure to work and make you millions? And a short while later, you find out that reality disagrees with your analysis?

Do you have any tips or techniques to avoid spending too much time on a flamethrower idea? Or how to recycle it once it goes bad, so that all the time you spent on it will not be wasted? Or how to actually distort reality into accepting your idea as the great world-changing concept you believe it should be?

Please tell me.

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I’m Twice the Man I Used to Be

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on July 13, 2010
in People
. 0 Comments

Like so many of us, I spent a lot of my early career suckling (metaphorically) at Joel Spolsky‘s teat. Although he’s stopped writing, the archives are still a gold mine for people who might not know about him yet. For instance, back in the 2001 stone age of computing, he came up with this particular bit of knowledge about multitasking:

On the individual level — have you ever noticed that you can assign one job to one person, and they’ll do a great job, but if you assign two jobs to that person, they won’t really get anything done? They’ll either do one job well and neglect the other, or they’ll do both jobs so slowly you feel like slugs have more zip.

I’m not really into the whole « choose an idol and become a fan » thing, so whenever I read something online that makes sense, I start looking for the special cases: those boundary conditions where it stops making sense. Not only is it fun to nitpick about things written nine years ago, it’s also excellent food for thought.

Multi-tasking is a necessary evil. While a 1991 genius programmer could write a new OS  from scratch for a whole six months, stopping only for brief restroom pauses and keyboard-pillowed naps, he would miss the early stages of Linux and fail to contribute his efforts to a larger project.

pillow-keyboard

Your brain needs a co-pilot. While your main thought process spends all day working on a given task, there should be another smaller thought process that deals with the « why am I doing this? » question. What is important here is that the co-pilot should look at the work being done with a different pair of eyes in order to ask the relevant questions, without being blinded by the assumptions that have not been context-switched out yet or the emotional involvement related to sunk costs. Four eyes are better than two. That’s why there’s an actual co-pilot on most commercial flights.

It helps if you have an outspoken, annoying co-pilot personality. One that isn’t afraid to speak out when something is boring, demeaning or a waste of your time and money. One that can bullwhip you into correcting a nasty situation instead of letting it rot slowly. The kind that you’d love to punch. In the face. With a pineapple.

(And in case you were wondering, the title is a Duke Nukem quote from Balls of Steel).

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