tools for building the future
If my potential…
customer / employer / client / donor / partner / supplier
knew what I know about my…
product / last job / service / organisation / attitude / manners
would they still…
buy it / hire me / use it / give / join me / want my business ?
Would they be eager to do so?
Hat tip: SG
We all know about compound interest in the world of money. Save £100 a month for thirty years at one percent interest** and you’ll have a little under £42,000 by the end of that time (compared to £36,000 at zero-percent).
Make that investment at 5% and suddenly you’ll hit £83,000.
10%*** makes almost £228,000.
It takes time, and the commitment to building something steadily. No tricks, no promises of outrageous returns, a degree of risk – but not when compared to not investing at all.
What if the interest we seek for our work – attention, respect, partnership, remuneration – could compound in the same way? Often it seems that we’re after a flash in the pan (Viral. Now.), or that we’re not building anything consistently at all.
Starting with almost nothing, drop by drip, brick by brick, little by little, we can build a mountain.
** 1% annually, calculated monthly
*** A reasonable return from a stocks-and-shares index fund
My sister (let’s call her Sharky) bought me a book for Christmas.
Sharky lives in Argentina.
She bought the book from a shop in the UK.
I’m on holiday in a remote part of Indonesia.
She bought the book, told me about it, and I was reading it, in less than ten minutes.
This is the new reality – actually, not even that new anymore. Any information product (book, film, music, software, design) can go anywhere, in effectively no time.
The new possible consists of the things that this reality enables – not just instant access to information products, but information to go into products (3d printing designs, specifications) or for the delivery of products and services (your exact requirements or preferences, your real-time location, your purchase history, your credit rating).
What becomes possible in your field when the information is so relevant and so available, when the transaction becomes so fast, so frictionless?
AirBnB, and Uber are cannonical examples of the new possible, to which I’d add the fact that this year, Sharky bought me a Christmas present.
… producing books with ease on Gutenberg’s press did not fully unleash text. Real literacy also required a long list of innovations and techniques that permitted ordinary readers and writers to manipulate text in ways that made it useful. For instance, quotation symbols make it simple to indicate where one has borrowed text from another writer. We don’t have a parallel notation in film yet, but we need one.
Once you have a large text document, you need a table of contents to find your way through it. That requires page numbers. Somebody invented them in the 13th century. Where is the equivalent in video?
Longer texts require an alphabetic index, devised by the Greeks and later developed for libraries of books. Someday soon with AI we’ll have a way to index the full content of a film.
Footnotes, invented in about the 12th century, allow tangential information to be displayed outside the linear argument of the main text. And that would be useful in video as well.
And bibliographic citations (invented in the 13th century) enable scholars and skeptics to systematically consult sources that influence or clarify the content. Imagine a video with citations. These days, of courses we have hyperlinks, which connect one piece of text to another, and tags, which categorise using a selected word or phrase for later viewing.
All these inventions (and more) permit any literate person to cut and paste ideas, annotate them with her own thoughts, link them to related ideas, search through vast libraries of work, browse subjects quickly, resequence texts, refind material, remix ideas, quote experts, and sample bits of beloved artists.
These tools, more than reading, are the foundations of literacy.
There are choices that parents make all the time. They range from enlisting your kid in a team sport that’s based on compliance, instead of encouraging them to engage in an individual sport that’s based on establishing standards and then surpassing them.
Or perhaps it’s about setting a standard about what gets talked about at the dinner table. What tools are in your kids’ hands? Yes, you can afford that eighty-dollar tablet from amazon. Did it end up in your kids’ hands from the time they were two, eating chicken fingers in a restaurant and watching videos ’cause it’s more convenient?
How often are the kids in your family challenging the status quo of ideas and having intelligent conversations with you about what they think and why the think it?
How do we deal with failure?
How do we deal with challenges?
How old should a kid be before she publishes her first poem online?
Homeschooling kids in the afternoon, homeschooling kids at the weekend, doesn’t mean helping them get better at the test …
… we need to be significantly more overt in the culture we seek to create at home, and I don’t think we have to pull our kids out of school to do it. I think we have the chance to recognise they’re in school every time we’re with them.
Seth Godin – Akimbo – Connect the Dots
I think public school is essential. It’s important that we have a common denominator and that we don’t leave people behind simply because we can afford a private school or a homeschool situation, and others can’t.
On the other hand, at the same time, sooner or later, all kids are homeschooled.
They’re homeschooled for five years before they even show up in public school. They’re homeschooled every day, from three in the afternoon ’til eleven at night.
That’s on us. That’s on the parents. What standards are we setting? What is the culture like at home?
Seth Godin – Akimbo – Connect the Dots
The network effect is powerful, and a source of tremendous value, and we need to understand how it works.
Networks depend on standardisation – a consistent, accepted standard for how computers talk to each other, or how all Lego bricks fit together, or how a community works – a shared language and set of expectations that make it easier to collaborate.
We need these norms – they allow us to communicate, to work together better and faster, to make assumptions, even to ignore each other in relative safety. Norms, the middle ground, are the gravity that holds us together, the board from which we spring.
And there’s the tension. Norms that are too numerous or too binding tie us down. Our instinct is to break free, but it’s a dance: without norms and standards (social-cultural, technological), we fall apart. There’s nothing to stand on, push off, be in tension with, break free from.
Without springs and gravity there are no trampolines, and no difference between flying and falling.
Richard Stallman famously wrote the GNU GPL, which is a license based on copy-left, not copyright. His position is the freedom to work with computers and work with software and work with software is hindered by copyright.
That in fact these are useful tools, and there are people who want to make useful tools and remix the useful tools of people who came before. Everything you use in the internet – that website that you visited that’s running on Apache, that email protocol, you’re able to do it because so many other entities were able to share these ideas.
So the way copy-left works is that if you use software that has a GPL license to make your software work better, it infects your software, and you also have to use the GPL license.
So if it works right, it will eat the world. So as the core of software in GNU gets bigger and deeper, it becomes more and more irresistible to use it. But as you use it the software you add to it also becomes part of that corpus.
And if enough people contribute to it, what we’ll end up with is an open, inspectable, improvable base of code that gives us a toolset for weaving together the culture we want to be part of.
Seth Godin – Akimbo, November 21 2018 – Intellectual Property
An open, inspectable, improvable base of code.
For software.
For tools for making software.
How about for educational outcomes? For assessments?
For a set of tools and resources for running an organisation?
Stan Lee was brilliant and prolific.
We know him for Spiderman, the X-men, the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, Black Panther… for being the driving force behind Marvel Comics, now a multi-billion dollar, multi-media juggernaut.
It’s less well known that he started in the comics industry in 1939, aged seventeen, as a general dogsbody, lunch-fetcher and inkwell filler at Timely Comics (which would eventually become Marvel).
Lee must have had something about him – he became editor at 19 – but here’s the thing: he slogged it out writing comics – westerns, crime stories, horror and superhero work – for twenty two years without really hitting the big time. They say he chose Stan Lee as a pen name because he was worried he’d be embarrassed by his work in comics if he ever wrote the Great American Novel.
By the early 60s Lee was fed up, and ready to quit. The Fantastic Four was a last throw of the dice on his wife’s suggestion that he try writing the comics he wanted to write. There was nothing to lose.
He was forty-one years old.
The rest is history.
Some takeaways:
More from Tom Peters – slides copied in with his encouragement to preserve the idiosyncratic formatting.*****
More of these at tompeters.com and excellencenow.com
