Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
In a world of Facebook/Twitter/WhatsApp/constant notifications/etc. knowing yourself is not high on people’s priority list. Partly, because it requires introspection sans distractions and partly because it is hard work and often uncomfortable. That said, it also provides the highest ROI of any action you may take.
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
I’ve always found all the talk about how to learn to be a leader amusing. That’s because all the book learnin’ doesn’t mean squat unless it accurately translates to actions. Even studying real life leaders only takes you so far, since they approach situations based on who they are and their life experiences and you aren’t them and never will be.
That’s why no matter the expert or their success you still need to at least tweak their solutions to fit your situation and your MAP.
And be sure to read the comment’s at both Steve’s site and mine.
Today Steve Roesler wrote a terrific post briefly recapping a Peter Drucker article in the Harvard Business Review called “Managing Oneself” (Steve included a link to the full article).
A part of that article is The Act of Noticing and it really resonated with me.
“While everyone is blogging, Twittering or tweeting, linking in, booking their faces, and coming up with other digital ways to “connect”, it would be good to ask: “Am I too busy to notice?”
I bookmarked an article last week that included solid research about the bulk of the population preferring to buy goods and services through face-to-face contact. Now I can’t find it because I was so darned connected online I didn’t actually pay attention to the title or where I filed it.
This leads into the video below. I was reminded of Emotional Intelligence pioneer Daniel Goleman’s TED talk a couple of years ago. If you want to know the connectedness between emotions, business, and “noticing”, this will be time very well spent. Close your door. Now. Tell you’re boss you are doing professional development. You are.”
I recently wrote that“No one is expecting you to solve the problems, but you can reach out and touch just one life. If everyone over 21 did that we would be well on the way to change.”
All I can add is that we better start noticing before all the lights are turned off for good.
Now go see your friends and tell them; have a ‘noticing’ contest together with a ‘doing’ contest.
I wrote a piece last week on the idea of embracing the rush of our lives and how it’s a human condition. While to some degree I do think it’s a sign of our times and not altogether negative, I do see the impact it has made.
In school I read about the effects of coffee on the industrial revolution. The idea was that the widespread use of the stimulant allowed shift workers to operate all hours of the day and night.
Of course, we, in the modern day, have benefited on the backs of their labor; however, we have also learned from the negative aspects of that society. At least in this country, we no longer employ children, we have tougher safety laws, and regulation.
Back to my point of embracing rushing, I was wrong to take it on from a single standpoint. Through this past week I have searched out resources to learn more about the effects of our gadget driven world and what it has gotten us.
I titled this post “Start with why” and it’s a rip off from a great book of the same name by Simon Sinek.
That book focuses on sales and challenges sales people to start by asking why someone would want to buy their product/service and then shape a solution around that.
However, he also speaks about the current state of our society and it’s character.
If we could sum up the modern First World in one word it would be addiction and not just to drugs.
Many in my generation are addicted to our phones, our streaming services and our reliance on same day delivery. We can order anything, watch any show and contact any person in the world. In an odd twist of fate I can get live tweets from our current president and tweet him back.
As a current digital addict I tend to look at others and see it as normal.
When I am at the park I tend to not use my phone and see that others are. As a result I figure I must be balanced.
However, first thing in the morning I check my phone and look at my notifications. If you were to follow me on a social network you would see that I don’t post a ton. In reality I tend to not think I have much to say that is important for the world to know and I limit my posts for food recommendations while in new cities.
However, I check all the networks multiple times a day. I get updated on the latest coffee from the person I had 10th grade English with and also get to see the latest from our President.
It’s an odd time to be alive.
Why do we do this?
One reason is dopamine. It is the same drug that opiates release and it’s triggered naturally when we see activities or people responding to our posts. That’s why we look to see the comments, the likes and the re-shares.
It’s also why we tend to get worse over time with our usage. We need more and more dopamine to feel good.
I wrote all of this to say one thing.
Maybe we shouldn’t always embrace the rushing and start with the why.
Why are we doing this; who do we care about; why are we not happy.
During the dark ages of the 1970s, 80s and into the 90s people who refrained from drinking soda, living on fast food and cooked for themselves, instead of relying on the convenience of processed foods, were disparaged.
I know, because I was one of them. We were called “health food nuts.”
That changed with the advent of research into sugar, the value of veggies and a more general understanding that health wasn’t an accident, but a personal responsibility based on your own choices.
In the 1980s the World Wide Web became ubiquitous and existing bulletin board systems, such as AOL, migrated to the web. The dot com boom saw the birth and growth of social media communities that were free — and everybody loves free.
The contemporary internet was built on a bargain: Show us who you really are and the digital world will be free to search or share.
People detailed their interests and obsessions on Facebook and Google, generating a river of data that could be collected and harnessed for advertising. The companies became very rich. Users seemed happy. Privacy was deemed obsolete, like bloodletting and milkmen.
That bargain led to a new kind of nut.
“Privacy nuts;” I’m one of those, too.
As with health food nuts, privacy nuts were pooh-poohed as Luddites, anti-progressive, alarmist party-poopers.
But as they say, that was then and this is now.
Most people, no matter how they access their news, are aware of the stunning breaches in Facebook’s security, especially the current Cambridge Analytica fiasco.
That also seemed to wake people up to what the privacy nuts have been warning about all along.
The power of the company’s ad platform comes from the ability it gives politicians, brands, real estate agents, nonprofits and others to precisely target people on its social networks.
And while Congress runs hearings and the public freaks out Zuck, as he is called, still seems to believe that it’s not Facebook’s fault and what happened should be excused because the his vision is for it to be a force for good.
After two days of questioning by American lawmakers, Facebook’s share price rose more than 5%—mostly on the first day of Zuckerberg’s testimony—boosting the tech company’s market value by more than $24 billion.
Finally, NEWYORKMAG.COM provided commentary from people who are far closer to both Zukerberg and Facebook. The interviews are a real wakeup call (if you still need one).
A Propaganda Engine ‘Unlike Any in History’: Q&A With Early Facebook Investor
A conversation with early Facebook investor Roger McNamee on propaganda, early warning signs, and why outrage is so addictive.
Have you ever been to a post-holiday potluck? As the name implies, it’s held within two days of any holiday that involves food, with a capital F, such as Thanksgiving, Christmas and, of course, Easter. Our group has only three rules, the food must be leftovers, conversation must be interesting and phones must be turned off. They are always great parties, with amazing food, and Monday’s was no exception.
The unexpected happened when a few of them came down on me for a recent post terming Mark Zukerberg a hypocrite. They said that it wasn’t Facebook’s or Google’s fault a few bad actors were abusing the sites and causing problems. They went on to say that the companies were doing their best and that I should cut them some slack.
Rather than arguing my personal opinions I said I would provide some third party info that I couldn’t quote off the top of my head and then whoever was interested could get together and argue the subject over a bottle or two of wine.
I did ask them to think about one item that stuck in my mind.
How quickly would they provide the location and routine of their kids to the world at large and the perverts who inhabit it? That’s exactly what GPS-tagged photos do.
I thought the info would be of interest to other readers, so I’m sharing it here.
The Berlin conference was hosted by an online forum called Stack That Money, but a newcomer could be forgiven for wondering if it was somehow sponsored by Facebook Inc. Saleswomen from the company held court onstage, introducing speakers and moderating panel discussions. After the show, Facebook representatives flew to Ibiza on a plane rented by Stack That Money to party with some of the top affiliates.
Granted anonymity, affiliates were happy to detail their tricks. They told me that Facebook had revolutionized scamming. The company built tools with its trove of user data (…) Affiliates hijacked them. Facebook’s targeting algorithm is so powerful, they said, they don’t need to identify suckers themselves—Facebook does it automatically. And they boasted that Russia’s dezinformatsiya agents were using tactics their community had pioneered.
Android owners were displeased to discover that Facebook had been scraping their text-message and phone-call metadata, in some cases for years, an operation hidden in the fine print of a user agreement clause until Ars Technica reported. Facebook was quick to defend the practice as entirely aboveboard—small comfort to those who are beginning to realize that, because Facebook is a free service, they and their data are by necessity the products.
I’m not just picking on Facebook, Amazon and Google are right there with it.
Amazon and Google, the leading sellers of such devices, say the assistants record and process audio only after users trigger them by pushing a button or uttering a phrase like “Hey, Alexa” or “O.K., Google.” But each company has filed patent applications, many of them still under consideration, that outline an array of possibilities for how devices like these could monitor more of what users say and do. That information could then be used to identify a person’s desires or interests, which could be mined for ads and product recommendations. (…) Facebook, in fact, had planned to unveil its new internet-connected home products at a developer conference in May, according to Bloomberg News, which reported that the company had scuttled that idea partly in response to the recent fallout.
Zuckerberg, positioning himself as the benevolent ruler of a state-like entity, counters that everything is going to be fine—because ultimately he controls Facebook.
There are dozens more, but you can use search as well as I.
I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry when I see ads for stuff that responds to voice command, especially when it is for stuff like changing the TV channel. I guess that using the remote takes either too much energy or too much intelligence to work it.
Everything today is about convenience, a trend I’ve been suspicious, although I wasn’t sure why.
However, after reading an op-ed piece by Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia and the author of “The Attention Merchants: The Epic Struggle to Get Inside Our Heads,” called The Tyranny of Convenience I’m starting to understand what about it makes me itch.
In the developed nations of the 21st century, convenience — that is, more efficient and easier ways of doing personal tasks — has emerged as perhaps the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our economies.
Granted I’m known as a digital dinosaur, but there are some conveniences — washing machines, telephones, cars, email, and Skype chat, among them — I’m all for.
However, I have no cell phone, avoid any app, service, etc., provided by Google, clean my own house, wash my own clothes, shop for my own food, and do my own cooking just as I’ve done since I was 18.
I search using ixquick.com, no ads, no tracking and my life functions just fine without always being connected. I’m not on social media and don’t suffer from FOMA; I meet friends for meals and fun and we talk on the phone in-between.
I suppose that all sounds very inconvenient these days, but I’m never bored and enjoy the feelings of accomplishment that come with doing stuff yourself, as well as figuring out better ways to do it — it’s called ingenuity.
I’ve seen many “convenient” items come to market years after I came up with a similar approach to use for myself.
Americans say they prize competition, a proliferation of choices, the little guy. Yet our taste for convenience begets more convenience, through a combination of the economics of scale and the power of habit. The easier it is to use Amazon, the more powerful Amazon becomes — and thus the easier it becomes to use Amazon. Convenience and monopoly seem to be natural bedfellows (emphasis mine).
Professor WU (or someone) needs to do a follow-up article entitled, “How Convenience Killed Creativity and Strangled Entrepreneurship.
I’ve been ranting for years about the negative effects of social media and how it lends itself to insecurity, FOMA, jealously, etc., how it enables trolls, kills empathy and, worse, its unmitigated, conscious focus on addicting its users in exactly the same way heroin addicts.
Of course, I’m not the only one; psychiatrists and psychologists, educators, parents, and a host of pundits have weighed in.
This in spite of giving millions in cash and product to enable schools to embrace tech.
Since it’s proven that screens kill empathy, not to mention engagement, their actions will give their own kids a major advantage in adulthood, since empathy and critical thinking will be at a premium.
If the hypocrisy doesn’t encourage you to seriously limit screen time, no matter the howls of outrage, perhaps the new voices condemning the addiction and warning of the dangers will carry far more weight.
“The largest supercomputers in the world are inside of two companies — Google and Facebook — and where are we pointing them?” Mr. Harris said. “We’re pointing them at people’s brains, at children.”
The new Center for Humane Technology includes an unprecedented alliance of former employees of some of today’s biggest tech companies. Apart from Mr. Harris, the center includes Sandy Parakilas, a former Facebook operations manager; Lynn Fox, a former Apple and Google communications executive; Dave Morin, a former Facebook executive; Justin Rosenstein, who created Facebook’s Like button and is a co-founder of Asana; Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook; and Renée DiResta, a technologist who studies bots, and Chamath Palihapitiya, a venture capitalist who was an early employee at Facebook, said in November that the social network was “ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”
Read the article and then decide whose side you are on — the hypocrites or the social angels.
Way back in the early 1980s, when companies were far more sensitive, not to mention controlling about appearance, “Roy” asked me if it was a good idea to shave the beard he’d had for 15 years for an interview.
I said sure, as long as he didn’t intend to grow it back. He responded that his wife loved the beard would probably divorce him if he didn’t re-grow it. I told that Roy shouldn’t shave.
Back then, hair was cut, grooming polished up and tattoos covered when interviewing.
If you think things have changed, think again.
People are still jumping, just though different hoops.
These days they’re rushing to clean up their social media history.
Brand Yourself’s reputation tool, introduced last month, is a logical outgrowth of its business, said CEO Patrick Ambron. While the company launched in 2009 to help business and users massage their search results, Ambron says it now focuses on helping job seekers find and repair embarrassing blunders in their online past. Employers are increasingly screening job candidates’ social media history for red flags, and it’s incumbent upon job seekers to scrub their posts of any blemishes, he said. Simply tightening the privacy restrictions may not help when some companies are demanding social media passwords from applicants.
For the heck of it I registered to see how it works. It gave me a list of places I was identified, short, since I’m not on Twitter, Facebook, etc. At each one I had to say it was positive, negative or “not me.”
There were three “questionable” items and when I checked them I was left guessing why they were potentially damaging.
One wasn’t me, one an article from 1999 that appeared in the SF Chronicle, and one post from the Leadership Turn blog that I used to write and is archived here. There was nothing any algorithm could have taken exception to unless you could the work “sex” in a comment on the post, so I marked both “positive.”
If the word “sex” was what got flagged you have to wonder if it rates the same as the f-bomb and if WTF counts the same. If you’re interested my score was 700 (whatever that means).
I digress. The point of all this is that no matter how well you scrub the profile and social media under your control it won’t remove all the places to which it has migrated.
More importantly, no matter how you scrub your past you are still you.
Moreover, if a company is dumb enough to pass on candidates for the stupid stuff they did in college or even the more recent past, then perhaps you should see it as having dodged a bullet, as opposed to missing an opportunity.
Notice I said “stupid stuff.” Bragging about knocking your partner or kid around, etc. shouldn’t get a free pass.
Although it was not that long ago when people’s private lives were actually private.
A month ago KG shared an article about how Facebook rummages through your life in pursuit of profit using and algorithm called People You May Know. The results are beyond creepy (emphasis mine).
A woman whose father left her family when she was six years old—and saw his then-mistress suggested to her as a Facebook friend 40 years later.
An attorney who wrote: “I deleted Facebook after it recommended as PYMK a man who was defense counsel on one of my cases. We had only communicated through my work email, which is not connected to my Facebook, which convinced me Facebook was scanning my work email.”
Still creepier, but great for profit, are Facebook’s shadow profiles.
… built from the inboxes and smartphones of other Facebook users. Contact information you’ve never given the network gets associated with your account, making it easier for Facebook to more completely map your social connections. (…) Because shadow-profile connections happen inside Facebook’s algorithmic black box, people can’t see how deep the data-mining of their lives truly is, until an uncanny recommendation pops up.
Many people realize that smartphones track their locations. But what if you actively turn off location services, haven’t used any apps, and haven’t even inserted a carrier SIM card?
Even if you take all of those precautions, phones running Android software gather data about your location and send it back to Google when they’re connected to the internet…”
Chamath Palihapitiya, Founder and CEO Social Capital, who worked at Facebook for seven years and became vice president for user growth, is the most recent social media veteran to publicly apologize, “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”
“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” he said, referring to online interactions driven by “hearts, likes, thumbs-up.” “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”
Palihapitiya’s isn’t the only one feeling guilty.
Palihapitiya’s remarks follow similar statements of contrition from others who helped build Facebook into the powerful corporation it is today. In November, early investor Sean Parker said he has become a “conscientious objector” to social media, and that Facebook and others had succeeded by “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” A former product manager at the company, Antonio Garcia-Martinez, has said Facebook lies about its ability to influence individuals based on the data it collects on them, and wrote a book, Chaos Monkeys, about his work at the firm.
The forces at work behind social media are also money-driven.
In his talk, Palihapitiya criticized not only Facebook, but Silicon Valley’s entire system of venture capital funding. He said that investors pump money into “shitty, useless, idiotic companies,” rather than addressing real problems like climate change and disease. Palihapitiya currently runs his own VC firm, Social Capital, which focuses on funding companies in sectors like healthcare and education.
I doubt any of this is going to change your social media consumption.
But never forget that these companies are not your friend. Their primary purpose is not to make you or anyone else happy.
Their purpose is to make money.
Period.
Anything else that happens is plain old serendipity.
I write posts one day in advance, so this one was written yesterday (Tuesday) and is not the one I planned to write.
I live in Washougal, a small town on the Washington State side of the Columbia River about 20 miles from Portland, Oregon; a town that calls itself “the gateway to the Gorge.”
In spite of its proximity to both Portland and Vancouver, WA, it’s a very rural area.
I woke today to a gray sky, the smell of smoke and everything covered with a mix of fine wood particles and ash.
“Even though that kid threw the firecracker, all of those kids he was with are complicit. All of them watched, all of them did nothing. They all were a part of it. One filmed it,” she said. “When I came upon them, and the guy threw the firecracker, I’m pretty sure I heard a couple of them giggle. The guy was filming it like it was another thing to film, no big deal. The whole complacency of that group, I find it so disturbing.”
They did this in an area that has seen no real rain in months; an area under fire prohibitions.
That was the start of the Eagle Creek Fire.
Then, for the first time since 1902, the fire jumped the Columbia, caught and started the Archer Mountain Fire.
As I write this, that fire is less than six miles from my friend’s house and only 15 miles from mine.
The air, inside and out, is smokey.
Hopefully, the winds won’t start up and neither of us will have to evacuate.
There is so much I don’t like about today’s world that it’s hard to choose the worst.
However, I reserve a top spot for people, no matter their age, who don’t think about / don’t care how much damage they do so long as they get their 5 seconds of social media fame, along with those who stand by and watch.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
