If Gina and I saw this live and in person I think our heads would explode right off our necks.
(Neil Young doing an awesome cover of “Day In Life,” joined by Paul for his portion of the song)
off-topics
Good blogs and the opinions I spouted at them.
This post could easily be about how I spent the last two weekends sweating my physical and intellectual butt off to completely reorganize my home office and upgrade CK to WordPress 2.8, but you would be like, “Whatever, it looks the same to me,” or “Um, I’m reading you on my RSS feed, so I don’t really care,” or possibly, “Dude, I haven’t read blogs for two years. Send me a tweet about it.”
Which is fine. I mean, should I also tell you about how I swept the floor? Backstage is backstage for a reason. Props people work hard to keep actors focused on their performance, not for the applause.
(Plus, at CK I’m the prop person and the actor. And the box office manager, the technical director, and the old lady ushering you to your seat. You get the idea. Excelsior…)
In my increasingly uncluttered life I’ve been trying to make some more time not only to read other blogs I admire, but to interact with them. That means reading carefully and responding, which sometimes yields thoughtful comments.
I’m sometimes hesitant to leave my thoughts lying around in other people’s homes when they could possibly lead to interesting content back here at my own homestead, but I’ve arrived at a happy medium – I’ll link to all of said intriguing posts as well as giving you a snippet of my reasoned replies.
Here’s a glimpse at some of the discussions I’ve weighed in on in this past week.
(If you find yourself wanting to do the same, try subscribing to Backtype, a simple monitoring service which will doing all of the the keeping-track for you.) [Read more…] about Good blogs and the opinions I spouted at them.
the corners of my mind
I have a habit of dozing off on the 57 bus in the afternoon on the way home from work. I don’t think it’s because I am so tired. There’s just something about the rhythm of motion and the droning of the motor humming through my body while I listen to my headphones.
The nap is only ever about ten minutes long. It’s not even a nap, really. I’ve never slept through my stop. It’s just an extended hang right on the line between awake and asleep.
I love that line, especially when traveling in that direction rather than the opposite – being tortured by an alarm clock. Heading in to sleep is different. Your brain will rationalize outside stimuli however it sees fit. The world outside of your body takes on an arbitrary – almost hallucinatory – quality.
On the bus my favorite thing to do is turn on my own music – new demos or an Arcati Crisis rehearsal – and then drift off. My brain finds things in the songs I’ve never heard before. Sometimes I have a momentary synesthesia and my own words are painted in color. Others I am enraptured by Gina narrating an epic story, only to realize I’m not listening to her towering “Brother John” but just twenty seconds of refrain of “What’ll I Say.”
Last night when my body was finally ready to settle down my brain refused to go gently into that good night. It was raining hard, a symphony of individual droplets pattering against the roof above my head, and my mind wanted to examine every one.
I hate those nights. I’ve hated them since high school, when every night brought the possibility of seeing the subsequent dawn from the wrong side.
Last night I slipped in my earbuds and suddenly “Small & Lonely and “Gone Baby Gone” were rendered in plastic yellow totems, a wry stop-motion tribute to Yellow Submarine, awash in the white noise of the storm.
It took all of four minutes to fall asleep.
Breaking the tyranny of traditional ROI, or “Why I love my throw-pillows”
Five months after the fact my wedding has taught me a lesson about return on investment – aka ROI – and it has nothing to do with the cost of our appetizers.
I could probably summarize the gist of my epiphany in a bite-sized snippet, but for me the realization was as much about the story as its moral.
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Non-traditional, in every sense of the word
Ever since the wedding, whenever we chat about the big day with our friends they continue to enthuse about the non-traditional elements of the event. I had a pair of co-best-ladies! We didn’t have any flowers!
Invariably, their lists converge on two unique highlights. One is my mother and I having our mother/son dance to Nikka Costa’s funky “Everybody Got Their Something” – not your typical syrupy slow-dance.
The other is Gina’s co-best-lady toast, a bitingly-funny, lovingly-irreverent, truly-unique roast from someone who knows me a little better than I know myself. It started with the story of how we met and wrapped up with how I’ll eventually turn into an old coot rambling around my acreage, laying rat poison and bear traps to decimate any unsuspecting wild-life that dares to interfere with my DIY recording sessions.
However, the part that stuck out to me was about my throw-pillows.
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Are your pillows your most valuable possession?
When E and I moved into our house in 2005 our living room was missing one key feature – pillows. Our couch looked nude without them and we had nothing to rest our heads on.
I spent an entire year looking for the right pillows. I tried every possible physical and online store. Just as I was beginning to despair that my perfect pillows were a figment of my imagination I finally found the right ones – on sale for $15 each.
More than three years later, the amount of time I spend rhapsodizing about the pillows is hard to believe. Any time I lay on them, walk past them, or even think about them I am known to remark, “God, I just love those pillows.” Like, even right now I am appreciating how much I love them.
It would not be a stretch to say that I’ve reflected on my satisfaction more than a thousand times in 36 months. 1000 satisfactions compared to the $30 cost is a whopping 100:3 satisfaction ratio. That means for every $1 spent I’ve been happy with my purchase 33 times over!
That’s a pretty satisfying pillow. It’s a pretty satisfying anything!
Gina told the entire pillow-satisfaction story in her speech. Her point was that since I insist on measuring my pillow-related happiness with such oddball precision it’s no wonder Elise and I are both so unusual and also so absolutely perfect for each other.
Five months later I still think about Gina’s speech almost every day, because she gave a perfect explanation of how I measured the ROI of something that seemed impractical or impossible to measure. And, if I’m valuing ROI by satisfaction, my pillows are worth more than anything else I own – even my entire home recording studio!
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Finding the value of the invaluable
Businesses spend huge swaths of their budget on traditional marketing like newspaper ads, billboards, and television commericals. Why? Not because the ROI is obvious. No, it’s just traditional – tied to familiar, easy-to-capture metrics like brand awareness or sales.
It’s similarly simple to quantify the value of my home recording studio – it has paid for itself many times over when compared to what I would pay to record in a commercial studio. It’s so valuable that I might call it “invaluable,” but its value is actually easy to measure in traditional ways.
My throw-pillows are more like digital or social media marketing – invaluable in that they’re hard to put a value on.
Except, according to Gina, I found a meaningful value – satisfaction. While my pillows aren’t saving me $165 per song, in one year the pillows “pay” for themselves by making my happy 11 times for every $1 spent. No matter if I measure by cost, time spent, or difficulty, it’s hard to find something in my life with a per-unit satisfaction ratio higher than my pillows – except, of course, for my relationship with E.
If I can figure out why my pillows were personally profitable, why is it so hard to convince people that building relationships on Web 2.0 is crucially important to their business – moreso than a $30k billboard or full page ad?
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Prove your profit in an unexpected way
As people and businesses we’re rightly concerned with justifying new expenses, and when pennies are in a pinch that’s often the safest way to make a decision. However, when cost isn’t the biggest factor in our decision that mindset can get in the way. What about when we’re trying to become happier or expand our capabilities?
The answer is that we’re all special experts in deciding how much something is personally worth to us. For Gina, it’s Dunkin Donuts coffee. For my mother it’s a trip to the beach. I just happened to take the time to prove the worth of my pillows in an unexpectedly tangible way.
Gina found a major lesson in my pillow obsession – that it’s important to be the voice that offers to value the invaluable.
When it comes to business, your potential expenditure might not immediately translate to improved brand awareness or increased sales. Just because it doesn’t result in a traditional ROI doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. People’s satisfaction with your existing products might go up. They might view your brand as more savvy, responsive, or trust-worthy. You might reap more feedback – positive or negative – about your products. Customers might become more likely to evangelize on your behalf – non-customers too!
None of those thing are as easy to quantify as my throw-pillows. They might involve competitive analysis, surveys, and focus groups just to establish a baseline. You’ll have to consider how much you would hope to improve, and how much resource time that improvement would be worth.
In proving that unexpected value you might completely redefine what ROI means to you or your company. It’s up to you to find the right measurement to prove your point.
whiling away the hours
(1) A few years ago I saw Malcolm Gladwell deliver a speech at the New Yorker Festival that is largely recapitulated in the second chapter of Outliers, called “The 10,000 Hour Rule.”
In it, Gladwell draws our attention to a data point converged upon by countless studies of experts in a variety of fields. He says, “In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.” He goes on to quote neurologist Daniel Levitin:
In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. … It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.
Gladwell supports the rule using Mozart, Bill Gates, Bill Joy, and the Beatles as his examples. Not to say that their genius and success is purely a result of 10,000 hours of practice – the book as a whole explains other facets – just that it was an essential component of their expertise.
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(2a) 10,000 hours is a long time.
If as a child starting at age five you had piano lessons two times a week (an hour each) and also practiced an hour a day, you would clock nine hours a week. 468 hours a year. 4,680 hours a decade.
If you kept that up until age 26 you’d finally have served your time.
(2b) 10,000 hours can go by before you know it.
Maybe you got into video games at age 11. You played them every night after homework and dinner, let’s say from 7:30 to 11:00 p.m. on most nights, plus extra on the weekend. That’s more than 25 hours a week. 1,300 plus a year.
You’d be a master by the time you started college. Most kids are.
(2c) Time is relative.
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(3) In the car today Gina and I were singing in harmony to the amazing Hezekiah Jones album Hezekiah Says You’re A-OK, on the way to see his band split a bill with the equally fantastic Up the Chain.
“You know, Gina,” I said, breaking from my lead vocal, “I’ve been thinking about this 10,000 hour thing. Not everyone’s an expert at something. I mean, what do most people spend 10,000 hours doing by the time they’re 25? Watching teevee, I suppose.”
“More than likely,” she replied.
“But, think about me. I watched a lot of television, sure. Mostly, though, I read until I was old enough to write, and then I wrote and read. That’s what I spent my 10k on.”
(Perhaps she interjected, “Oh, I remember.”)
“And, you know, is it any surprise that I’m good at communications? I’m not an expert, but no wonder it’s my calling. I spent my whole life practicing for it.”
We sat and sang for a moment, contemplating that.
“What about you?”
Gina paused in her harmony. “Hmm, me?”
“Yeah. What did you spend 10,000 hours doing?”
“This. Listening to music. Singing harmony.”
“Really your whole life, right? Your mother singing, your father playing guitar…”
“Yeah, since I can remember.”
“Right. So, no matter how much I rehearse, you’ll always have the edge. It’ll always come easier to you, until I reach that threshold.”
“I suppose.”
We paused as the song wound down.
“What do you think Hezekiah spent 10,000 hours doing?”
We thought on that for a few moments, and then sang together to “Albert Hash.”
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(4) We’re not all Mozart. I might not ever be Hezekiah Jones. But, we’ve all spent 10,000 hours doing something other than sleeping, and hopefully other than watching television. Maybe something incidental that we do out of necessity or habit. Driving? Social-networking? Cleaning? Taking care of children?
I’ve put in more than my share on communications – reading cereal boxes and trashy fantasy novels, writing stories at eight on my manual typewriter and almost nine years of blogs.
I got an early start on 10,000 hours of being Gina’s best friend, which I keep padding. I’m really good at that. More recently I’ve attained well-in-excess of 10,000 hours of being in love with Elise.
I hope eventually I’ll reach my 10,000th hour of serious focus on music. It’s a large piggy-bank of time to fill.
What about you? What have you spent your life mastering, intentionally or unintentionally?