by John on February 12, 2010
“I couldn’t put it down.” “A real page-turner.” That’s how you might describe a good novel to take on vacation. But for more serious reading, a good book is one you have to put down. Thoreau put it this way:
A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence to living on its hint.
Some books take a long time to read, not because they are dull, but because they are exciting. You have to put them down frequently to think about what you’ve read before reading more. It may not be the content of the book per se but the thoughts the book sparks that make you have to put it down.
What are some books you had to put down frequently because they stirred your thinking?
Related posts:
C. S. Lewis on reading old books
Why are bad guys so interesting in novels?
Worthless technical books
Tim Bray’s high-tech monastic cell
by John on January 9, 2010
by John on December 26, 2009
Countless articles tell us that multitasking makes us less efficient — we’re not as good at multitasking as we suppose. But here is a new criticism: multitasking makes us shallow.
If you don’t want to sink, you learn to surf; you have to. You learn how to go fast, but smooth, through a huge amount of stuff — at work, at home, in the store, in the street. Multitasking means learning how to double back and reshuffle at the least hint of resistance, it means missing most of what goes on around you but learning not to regret it because nothing is that much more valuable than anything else, it means learning how to coast through meetings on zero information … You are compensated for the loss of buffers and boundaries built into the old real world of separated times and spaces, by an overall muffling of experience in general …
From Mediated by Thomas de Zengotita.
Related posts:
A sort of opposite to Parkinson’s law
Getting to the bottom of things
Rethinking interruptions
Emily Dickinson versus Paris Hilton
by John on December 16, 2009
Charlie Parker was one of the greatest jazz musicians. But unlike most artists, he had a cavalier attitude toward his equipment. He would pawn his saxophone for drug money and show up for a concert without an instrument. He assumed that he could always borrow a saxophone at the last minute. He even used a plastic saxophone for one concert. Parker could take a cheap piece of plastic and make it sound good.
Good equipment helps. I’ve played cheap saxophones and professional quality saxophones, and I much prefer the latter. But a good sax didn’t make me sound like Charlie Parker, nor did a cheap sax make Charlie Parker sound like me. A poor craftsman blames his tools.
For centuries people have searched for the secret of Stradivarius violins. What did Antonio Stradivari do to create his legendary instruments? Was there something special about the wood he used? Something special about the varnish? A new theory says that there was nothing unusual about the materials he used and that he simply did excellent work.
It’s hard to think of a worse programming environment than DOS batch files. But I worked with someone who was able to do amazing things with batch files.
Hugh MacLeod calls it “hiding behind pillars” when you think you must have the best tools before you can work. He summarizes hiding behind pillars this way:
The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on an antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would SERIOUSLY surprise me.
Related posts:
Thomas Edison’s fire
Too much time on their hands?
Redbelt problem solving
by John on December 11, 2009
From Ten Things I Have Learned by Milton Glaser:
Being a child of modernism I have heard this mantra all my life. Less is more. One morning upon awakening I realised that it was total nonsense … If you look at a Persian rug, you cannot say that less is more because you realise that every part of that rug, every change of colour, every shift in form is absolutely essential for its aesthetic success. You cannot prove to me that a solid blue rug is in any way superior. … However, I have an alternative to the proposition that I believe is more appropriate. ‘Just enough is more.’
Related posts:
Simple legacy
Simplicity in old age
The simplest thing that might work
by John on December 3, 2009
by John on November 23, 2009
When Thomas Edison was sixty-seven years old, his factory was destroyed in a fire. This was his response the next morning:
There’s value in disaster. All our mistakes are burned up. Thank God, we can start anew.
Related posts:
Questioning the Hawthorne effect
Innovation I
by John on November 7, 2009
Dan Wineman shared a profound insight on Twitter:
You say “looks like somebody has too much time on their hands” but all I hear is “I’m sad because I don’t know what creativity feels like.”
In place of “creativity” Wineman might have as easily said “persistence.” I found Wineman’s quote in a post by Dan Meyer responding to criticism of his research projects.
I’ve said that someone has too much time on their hands, but not since I read Meyer’s post. I see now that the phrase is often a sour grapes response to creativity. I don’t want to do that anymore.
When we see that someone has spent a thousand hours on a project that we think was a frivolous, it’s easy to say “what a waste of time.” We think how much good could have been done with that same amount of effort. But what was the realistic alternative? If that same person had spent a thousand hours in front of their television instead, no one would ever know and no one would ever criticize them. Instead, they created something.
Tree house photo from Succeed Blog. Full size photo.
by John on October 19, 2009
Parkinson’s Law says that work expands to the time allowed. I’ve seen that law play out over and over. However, I’ve also seen a sort of contraction to Parkinson’s Law. Sometimes work gets done faster when you have more time for it.
Sometimes when I’ve planned a large block of uninterrupted, say going into the office when hardly anyone else is there, I get through my to do list in the first hour of the day. Knowing that I have plenty of time, I think more clearly and end up not needing the extra time. When that happens, I sometimes think “If I’d known this would just take 30 minutes to solve, I would have done it sooner.” But it’s not that simple. Just because it took 30 minutes on a good day doesn’t mean that it could have been done during just any 30-minute time slot earlier.
In his book Symmetry and the Monster, Mark Ronan shares a story along these lines. Ronan tells how John Conway worked on a famous mathematical problem. Conway and his wife agreed that he would carve out Saturdays from noon to midnight and Wednesdays from 6 PM to midnight for working on this challenge. He started one Saturday and cracked the problem that evening. Perhaps Conway would have been able to solve his problem by working on it and hour at a time here and there. But it seems reasonable that having a large block of time, and knowing that other large blocks were scheduled, helped Conway think more clearly.
My guess is that Parkinson’s law applies best to projects involving several people and to one-person projects that are not well defined. But for well-defined projects, especially projects requiring creative problem solving, having more time might lead to not needing so much time.
Related posts:
Work expands to the time allowed
A 3,000 page proof (review of Symmetry and the Monster)
C-State and F-state
by John on September 24, 2009
In his interview on EconTalk, Paul Graham made a distinction between poverty and squalor. He says that most poor people live like rich people, but with cheap imitations. A rich person might have something made of gold and a poor person might have the same thing except made of plastic. But the creative poor, such as the proverbial starving artist, live differently. They live in poverty but not in squalor. They achieve a pleasant lifestyle by not trying to imitate the rich.
For example, the wealthy have large beautiful houses. The poor have small and usually not-so-beautiful houses. The rich have new expensive cars and the poor have old cheap cars. But the starving artist might not have a house or a car. He or she might live in a converted warehouse with a few nice furnishings and ride a bicycle.
The point of his discussion of poverty was to make an analogy for small software companies. It makes no sense for a tiny start-up to try to be a scaled-down version of Microsoft. They need to have an entirely different strategy. They can be poor without living in squalor.
I don’t know what I think of Graham’s assertion that the poor live cheap imitations of the lifestyles of the rich. There’s probably some truth to it, though I’m not sure how much. And I’m not sure how much truth there is in the romantic image of the bohemian starving artist. But I agree that it makes no sense for a small company to be a miniature version of a huge corporation.
Related posts:
Living within chosen limits
Selective use of technology
Organizational scar tissue
Parkinson’s law
How animals scale up and down
by John on September 14, 2009
I was skimming through George Leonard’s little book Mastery the other night and ran across this quote:
… the essence of boredom is to be found in the obsessive search for novelty. Satisfaction lies in … the discovery of endless riches and subtle variations on familiar themes.
This is a theme I’ve written about several times before. For example, see the post Six quotes on digging deep. I often think about one of the quotes in that post. Richard Feynman said that
… nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough …
In the post God is in the details I talk about how that applies to statistics. Rote application of statistics is mind-numbingly dull, but statistics can be quite interesting when you dig down to the foundations.
When I was in new faculty orientation years ago I remember a chemistry professor exhorting us to volunteer to teach freshman courses. Most people want to teach the more advanced courses, but he said that some of his best inspiration came from teaching the most foundational courses.
Focusing on basics is hard work and few people want to do it. George Leonard describes this as America’s “anti-mastery” culture. Seth Godin uses the image of a starving woodpecker in his book The Dip.
A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty thousand times on one tree and get dinner.
Sometimes I feel like the woodpecker tapping on a thousand trees, staying busy but getting nowhere. But then I also think about a line from W. C. Fields:
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.
Related posts:
Three quotes on originality
Getting to the bottom of things
The following quote from Irving Stone describes how Michelangelo worked on his Pietà.
He carved in a fury from first light to dark, then threw himself across his bed, without supper and fully clothed, like a dead man. He awoke around midnight, refreshed, his mind seething with sculptural ideas, craving to get at the marble.
Sitting at a computer changes the way you think. You need to know when to walk away from the computer and when to come back.
I think mind mapping software is a bad idea. Mind maps are supposed to capture free associations. But the very act of sitting down at a computer puts you in an analytical frame of mind. In other words, mind mapping is a right-brain activity, but sitting at a computer encourages left-brain thinking. Mind mapping software might be a good way to digitize a map after you’ve created it on paper, but I don’t think it’s a good way to create a map.
When I need to sort out projects and priorities, I do it on paper. After that I may type up the results. I like to capture ideas on paper or on my voice recorder but then store them online.
When I do math, I scribble on paper, then type up my results in LaTeX. Scribbling helps me generate ideas; LaTeX helps me find errors. I’ve found that fairly short cycles of scribbling and typing work best for me, a few cycles a day.
In the past, we did a lot of things on paper because we had no choice. Today we do a lot of things on computers today just because we can. It’s going to take a while to sift through the new options and decide which ones are worthwhile and which are not.
Recommended books
Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind has a good discussion of left-brain versus right-brain thinking. As he points out, the specialization between the left and right hemispheres of the brain is more complicated than once thought. However, the terms “left-brain” and “right-brain” are still useful metaphors even if they’re not precise neuroscience.
Also, to read more on how computers influence our thinking, see Andy Hunt’s book Pragmatic Thinking and Learning.
Related posts
A stimulating work environment
Living within chosen limits
Tim Bray’s high-tech monastic cell
What’s wrong with paper?
Getting to the bottom of things
Quote from Julian Barnes:
There is something infinitely touching when an artist, in old age, takes on simplicity. The artist is saying: display and bravura are tricks for the young, and yes, showing off is part of ambition; but now that we are old, let us have the confidence to speak simply.
HT: Signal vs. Noise
