Learning is Change

Question 77 of 365: How can we make the new seem normal?

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Very few objects are special to me. They exist in my life because they are of use, but they are replaceable in a huge way. Even my cross pen, the kind that I have had for over 10 years in my right pocket, get’s used to open boxes, pick things out of window sills and kill spiders (you wouldn’t think it would work, but it is quite effective once they are in a corner). It is another tool, utilitarian in nature, even if it does have sentimental value to me. Even if I love it because my wife gave it to me, it is still just a pen.

And that is all normal. It is normal that I am not overly attached to my shoes or my movies or my phone. While I would probably care if they were gone, they are the everyday stuff that my life is filled with. I encounter them each day and I don’t think anything of it. I do not contemplate their existence because they are a reliable part of my own. They will be there when I need them, and that is reassuring.

Yet, all of my new stuff isn’t that yet. New gadgets that I buy aren’t normal yet. New software that I use, isn’t normal yet. New ideas, too. All of these things aren’t utilitarian in their existence for me; they are novel and unique in my everyday life.

And yet, new is pretty much all that I want other people to do.

I introduce them to new software, new gadgets and new ideas on a regular basis. I gather new information and talk about new tools daily. None of this is normal. It is not ordinary. It is not useful in the way that my pen is. It cannot be relied on for everything. It is just too new.

Things that have crossed over from new to normal for a good portion of the population:

Things that are just new:

I’m not saying there is anything wrong with New. What I am saying, is that no one using the things I have labeled in the latter category to skill spiders. The things in the New category must be thought about during every use. The things in the Normal category are just a fact of life.

So, how do we take things from the non-spider-killing category, and get them to exist within the spider-killing-category?

By framing them that way of course. In order for FourSquare to become a household name, it must start telling stories of how to kill spiders. It must be framed by images, video and experience that show it to be one of the places that has such a utilitarian use that it seems unfathomable that it didn’t previously exist. Google has attained this status. We can’t imagine not being able to search the world’s information. It kills our spiders on a regular basis.

So it must be with Open Spokes. It must become the way that we ask our questions of our family members and friends. Not as a poll or a quick form, but rather it must be the way in which we think to send out a request for feedback on an idea. It must become the way in which people record their thoughts online and develop them over time. And at the risk of restating the obvious, it must kill people’s spiders. It must squish all of the doubt out of a decision and allow people to take a sure-footed step into the unknown.

If people can send an e-vite without thinking or do a google search on the fly, they should be able to ask an Open Spokes question with that cerebral instinct.

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Question 76 of 365: How can we demonstrate progress?

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Time Machine
Image via Wikipedia

My daughter has decided to start screaming every time she goes into her room for a nap or bedtime. It isn’t that she doesn’t want to be there, it is just that it wasn’t completely on her terms. And, doing things on her terms is everything. As any parent of a three year old knows, control is the name of the game (every game).

And yet, we are making progress. I know that she understands just how much she can push before Time Out happens. I know that she is slowly starting to figure out the expectations that my wife and I have for her. Even if it is sometimes hard to see, the progress is there. She is an older, wiser, more interesting person every single day. She has good days and bad in terms of what she needs to control, but more often than not, I feel a progression is in effect. We are heading toward figuring everything out, toward co-pilot status.

Anyone on the outside, however, would probably not see the progress. Anyone who observes us out at a restaurant would see that snapshot in time and consider my daughter to be unruly at any given moment. I have become frustrated when I too can no longer see the progression. When I lose sight of the trajectory toward better behavior, I get angry with her. When she says my name for the 40th time when I am trying to put her back to bed, I use a voice that is much louder than it should be and I say “WHAT?” as if I don’t really care what she needs. This frustration shows my lack of understanding in those moments that progress is being made.

And that is the way I feel about many big projects I work on (non-child related). I get so wrapped up in them and so frustrated in the minutiae that I can’t see that we are making progress. I get so caught up in what other people are seeing as progress that I can’t take stock of what conversations are actually going to lead me to success.

I think that the biggest problem is in not being able to lay out a progression for others, not being able to take concrete enough snap shots so that I can always get a glimpse of where I have been and where I am headed. I want something that will allow me to not only chronicle everything that has been done as I would in saving documents or creating a great wiki of all of my ideas. I would like something that does a full on save state of my brain (or of my daughter’s mood and disposition toward authority) so that I can explore each part of it and see how each idea and part of the project developed. I want the ability to do a Apple Time Machine effect for my projects, where I get to go back to that moment in time and figure out just what made it so successful.

Which is, I guess what I am trying to do with Open Spokes. I’m trying to give people the ability to record videos of their ideas as they occur and then iterate off of them. I guess I am working to create a platform for exposing progression and learning. I’m designing the space for progress to become concrete.

And in that sense, I want to take what is great about blogs: regular posting with the ability to see what has come before, hyperlinking, and creating new ideas.

I want to take what is great about podcasts and vlogs: Reflection, ease of use, and conversations had in natural voice.

I want to take what is great about wikis: Collection of knowledge, editing and revision, branching off into new areas as you uncover them.

But, I want it all to be seamless. I want everyone to be able to participate without needing to know how to collaborate. I want Open Spokes to be the place where I could actually brainstorm solutions with my three year old daughter about her defiance over time. I want it to be the place that my projects can get answers for why they seem stalled or uninspired. I want to see progress, always.

And I think that is where we are headed.

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Question 75 of 365: What are the new Triple Dog Dares?

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Ralphie
Image by abbey*christine via Flickr

I’m sure that A Christmas Story has been formative for many just as it was for me. I’m also sure that many have thought about the Triple Dog Dares that they have subsequently faced as a result of that iconic line of dialogue. But, I think most people stop thinking of the things they are doing because of “dares” at some point. There comes a time when they start believing that they do not have to worry about the Schwartz’s of the world.

And yet, I would like to make the case that we are all being Triple Dog Dared on a regular basis. I would like to state for the record that we can never get away from our own personal Schwartz’s. In fact, I believe that we are responsible for more tongues stuck to flagpoles at this moment than at any other in history.

Here are the dares that I believe we are faced with every day.

  • I Triple Dog Dare you to comment or respond.
  • I Triple Dog Dare you to hire/fire me.
  • I Triple Dog Dare you to learn something new.

We are daring one another to participate, to answer our e-mails or respond to our tweets. Our dares arise as we recycle each e-mail through our inboxes, constantly sending out more and more dares for response. We put tiny stresses on one another with these tiny little Triple Dog Dares. The flagpole we get stuck to in this dare is when the e-mails and tweets just sit there, when they fester in our inboxes and Tweetdecks. Our tongues are so attached to them that after months of putting off the most inopportune e-mail responses, we can’t really even communicate about the issues that are important to us.

We dare our superiors to fire us on a daily basis. While we may not actively want to get fired, we work really hard at pushing those around us to find out what we are doing that is not in the best interests of our business, district, or entity. We spend time distracted, dispassionate, or deluded into thinking that our work always reflects upon us well. We also dare our superiors to hire us each day as well. We work hard, apply ourselves and show off our daily accomplishments. We are constantly reapplying for our jobs in this case, even as we are trying to weasel out of them and find something else that is more to our liking. The frozen flagpole in this dare is the actual job we have. We get frozen into this pattern of fired and hired habits, forcing other people to write us off entirely as both incredibly useful and utterly useless for daily work and collaboration.

The last dare I feel on a daily basis is one that involves the persistent need for learning new things. It is an ever-present dare I feel from others, to become more knowledgeable about the things that they themselves need to know. The dare compounds until I have to dedicate time to becoming an expert on an assigned topic or anticipating the next thing that someone will ask of me. The pole I get stuck to is when I get so focused on learning for others and in anticipation of my later needs that I can’t completely focus on what it is that I’m supposed to be doing right now. Because the dare is to learn something new, I get stuck not resolving what I already know and applying it to what can be created with that knowledge.

Christmas Story or not, these Triple Dog Dares are very real for me. I have become my own worst Schwartz, as have the people around me. And I would like that to change.

I would like to not feel the stress of e-mail dares. I would like to let go of the need to be fired or learn new things just for the sake of learning them. I would like to be able to make my own (or at least manage my) stress and dare myself to be better than simply placing my tongue to a flagpole. I think that at some point I may be able to do that, but right now, I will live with my Triple Dog Dares.

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Question 74 of 365: What do we do with another notch in the belt?

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Accomplishment #1
Image by Flyinace2000 via Flickr

I turn one year older today.

And as my brother’s fiance kept telling me, all of the special birthdays are gone. All of the ones that mean something in and of themselves. No bar mitzvahs,quinceaneras, driving privileges, voting abilities, or drinking allowances left (not that I had all of those). Each year only serves as another notch on the belt. And I am okay with that.

Just as it has been for a number of years, I have resorted to thinking about my age in my own terms rather than the ones prescribed to me. I no longer rest on my age to progress me through life. I no longer count on society to push me into being an adult. I choose my own milestones, and I celebrate them as frequently as possible.

And the notches aren’t the same anymore either. I believe in the power for a single event to change my life, for a single decision to set in motion the rest of a year or longer with both intended and unintended consequences. The notches I make now aren’t the small notches that time makes. They are big and unmistakable. They are ones that speak to where I have been and what I have done. I burn my notches as if I were branding or I cut them deeply, with precision, knowing that I can never take them back.

So, this year, I am working on a few notches that will set in motion the next few years of my life. And no longer being bound to measure my life in years, that feels pretty good.

As I look back on what I wrote about my intended notches in 2006 I notice a few things:

1. I will have a child. (Two, now)
2. I will have a master’s degree. (Nope)
3. I will have a book published. (Working on it. As I type, in fact.)
4. I will have a salary that makes my family’s life comfortable. (I hope so.)
5. I will have a cd pressed. (Totally fallen off the radar.)

And that is the funny thing about notches. Until you actually make them, they aren’t worth a whole bunch. They are the same goals that everyone else is making. They are the same aspirations that drive millions of people to go after more experience. Yet, until you have them accomplished, until the strange and finite events have transpired, they don’t really exist. They aren’t really yours.

So, while it may be a small notch today in getting one year older, know that much bigger notches are coming. And when they do happen, I will be taking the careful time to make them known through the careful process of scraping off the top layer of leather and watching the shavings fall to the ground, then digging in deeper and making exacting cuts against the well-worn grain until I can see through to the light of day, my knife having done an admirable act in connecting me with the other side.

Oh, and I’ll probably write about it too.

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Question 73 of 365: What is the magic of a barcode?

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"Wikipedia" encoded in Code 128
Image via Wikipedia

The barcode is back.

While many are looking forward to Augmented Reality and to RFID chips as the way in which we will start tagging things and seeing everything as once big canvass for us to attach images, videos, and text; I believe that the barcode is a significantly interesting subject to consider the future of our physical world.

To paraphrase one of my favorite Breakfast Club quotes, we see the world as it is, in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. While we can attach sentimental value or recall memories based upon what we see, smell, taste and touch; we are the only ones that can see those associations. We have not barcoded our red t-shirts to produce any universally held metaphors or culturally significant symbols.

And yet, that is one of the things that we are desperate to do. We are looking forward to decoding the messages that are displayed through everything we see. We want to stop being confused. We want to stop lacking the context to make sense of the world around us.

Now, ideally, we would just be able to look at the things we wanted to know more about and then figure out their significance in relation to everything else we know, but I think that there is a certain kind of magic to putting a sticker onto something and allowing people (only if they want) to engage in figuring out what someone intended for them to know.

All of this is to say that I like the idea of http://stickybits.com/ a whole bunch. I like it more than I like AR and RFID because it introduces the idea of choice into our hyper-connected world. It allows us to decide if we want to find out what else has been attached to an object. We can print out and attach our own barcodes to the world to tell a story about the objects we choose to give significance to.

It is the new graffiti. It is a way of making old objects live again.

And yet, we can also leave the objects as they are. We can observe the painting and not have to scan its user-created barcode with a video mashup of other art. We can experience the food without seeing the way in which it was cooked tagged directly on top. We can take part in the process of tagging the world, and then when we don’t want to see that part of the world, we can turn it off. Or we can just turn off part of it.

I am engaged by the idea of my objects recommending to read, watch or experience. I think that I crave that much connection to the people that have held similar experiences that I can’t wait to decode what they have placed there for me to find.

And I think that is why the barcode is back, because I want an easy way to unencrypted other’s intentions for me. I want to stop guessing what is going on their head. While this is an intriguing game, and some would say an essential part of human nature, I am willing to give it up (at least some times) in order to more fully step into their shoes and know what they know. If I can see the connections that they are making then I can more fully know the people that I love or am interested in.

(I am not sure how yet, but I think there will come a day when we will be able to barcode  a conversation or an idea. While that may sound scary, I think that it will be really interesting to make the non-physical into something physical. It won’t have to stop with a traditional barcode. We can start creating art that is our barcodes, each one unique and full of meaning. I am still interested in tagging the world, and perhaps we need to start with thin and thick black lines.”

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Question 72 of 365: Who is special?

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My first elementary school principal would tell us once a day (and expect us to yell it out with her) that “You are Special.” It was a kind of mantra for her, and I think she believed it too. She wanted us to believe it anyway. But, even when we were in 3rd grade, we knew that being special wasn’t something that everyone could possibly be. Sure, we could all be unique, but special? We reserved the word special for things that couldn’t be done by everyone. We wanted special to be something we could do out on the playground that no one else could. We wanted it to be special for doing more than just existing.

I come back to this now because I think there is a kind of “special” that is being created online that is far more dangerous than the kind we tell our kids. This special refers to anyone that blogs or tweets. It refers to anyone with an opinion on anything, anyone willing to raise their hand and vote. We are starting to attribute the same across-the-board specialness to anyone with a profile.

We have long believed that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but only recently have we been able to read everyone’s opinion ad nauseam. Only in the past few years have the opinions been plastered for us, challenging us to respect all of them.

We trick out our Twitter backgrounds and write tons of biographical information, aiming for being special to anyone who comes across our presence. We seek the comfort of our own spaces online as being the one true harbinger of everything that we are, the sum of our photos, videos, thoughts, beliefs, and connections. This should make us special, right?

And yet, special isn’t a state of being. It is a badge of honor, a judgement pronounced by others. No amount of self-proclamation, promotion, or posturing is going to stand in the place of “special”. It isn’t your information that makes you special, it is how valuable you are to another person. It isn’t your social capital (the connections you amass) that makes you special, its your challenge of those connections.

You are special only if you have made yourself special to others.

You should be indispensable.

Your regrets and biases and flaws are a part of this too. Those elements of our profiles that stay hidden to everyone but those we trust most. That ability to vulnerable and completely open, that is where special is found. Only when we get past our promotional facades of our online profiles will we be special to someone. Our bios won’t do it. Our @ symbol conversation aren’t good enough.

We can’t all be special, at least not to everyone. So, let’s stop trying.

Question 71 of 365: What is a better organizing force, passion or values?

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DadLabs Logo
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I have created my communities wrong. Or at least, I have done it while ignoring a huge element of what makes a great community stick together: its values. On the one hand, I have been running away as far and fast as possible from any kind of value-based community, afraid that whatever I create would turn into a “Tea Party” kind of organization that really can’t stand on anything except for the values that the members share.

And so I have pursued people specifically because of what they are passionate about. I have pursued tech people and education people and startup people because they are the ones that I can have a conversation with. They share the same interests as I do and we can speak without fear of leaving someone behind. We are the same brand of geek.

I kind of took it for granted that we would all value the same things too. I took it for granted that we would all value married life and children and balance. I took it for granted that we would value getting things done and reading a whole bunch. I thought we would all respect women and respect our environment and respect love, truth, and inquiry above all else.

But as much as these values are ones that I find in my communities, this is not what my communities are based upon. While a great many of the people that I gravitate towards are capable of being both passionate about my passions and valuing the things I value, there are many people who are simply in it for the passion.

And this has caused some of my communities to fall apart or languish. When I look at many of them, I see nothing but a series of individuals and individual interests. There isn’t a cohesion that comes from a mix of passion and values. I think the main reason for this is that passions are much more in-flux than values. While I have not always been interested in starting a company, I have always valued truth. While I have not always been a blogger, I have always valued the creative process.

One of the things that value-based communities get right is that their values bind them closer together than any set of interests ever could. In that sense, they are incredibly accepting of differences. So long as you value the same things, your background and approach doesn’t matter.

So, I guess I am advocating for building communities that do not ignore our values. I am looking for communities that see the whole me. I am a husband, a dad, a musician, a writer, a geek, an optimist, a truth-seeker, and a hand-holder. I value those things, and I want those things to be a part of the conversation just as much as term sheets, VC funding, EdTech, Collaboration, or Learning.

In fact, I want to be able to search based upon those values and not just the passions or topics that people have going around in their heads all day. I want to be able to find those other individuals who believe. If for no other reason than I feel as though I will be able to take that kind of a community with me wherever I go. No matter what I become passionate about, so long as the people I have with me value the same things, they can come too.

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Question 70 of 365: How far will serious take us?

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Many designers of Rube Goldberg machines parti...
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When I look at what goes viral, what memes consist of, or even what I happen to click on within my twitter stream; there is always an element of humor found within. Not all of them are laugh out loud funny, but in the way that they tickle my brain or make me think differently, they are funny. They are novel and different, incongruent with the rest of my day. That is why I am drawn to them on a regular basis.

That is why OKGO’s new video has seen 7 million views.

It is the reason why the word FAIL has come to prominence.

It is why Four Square is starting to matter for a great number of people.

All of these things have a huge element of play in them, and even though I am not a meme or virality expert, I can still spot something that will “blow up” quite easily (or at least has the capacity to do so). If something is humorous, novel, memorable, and doesn’t require a lot of effort to consume it will have the power to be passed around at length by the horde of folks trolling the internet for such things (which is a great many of us).

The problem I am having is that on the whole, I am a pretty serious person. The work that I do is pretty serious. It may be novel to some, but it certainly follows a tradition and isn’t really breaking with others’ daily existence enough to warrant being “passed on.” While some may remember what I do, if I stopped blogging or working on my own projects, there would be very few who would morn the loss of my voice in the conversation. And, in general, many of the things I do take a good deal of time to understand or grapple with. Not by design, but because I don’t have the time to continue drafting on each idea to make it palatable to everyone.

I have no doubt that these questions will not be the next meme. And yet, I am serious and methodical about how I do them. I think them through and get great joy from the act of asking and answering big questions.

Yet, how far will that take me? How far will these ideas reach if I can’t put them together into a package that allows for 7 million views?

And even more pessimistically, how far will being serious and complex take our values and our ideas about business, about education, and about networks? If we cannot do our work in such a way that garners mass support, how do we hope to get leaders elected or get skeptics to even come into the conversation. I think that it may be time for people who are not as serious, and who can design works of pop art or novel systems that cause people to jump on bandwagons to reengineer the ideas we grapple with on a daily basis.

Where are the education designers (real design, with an eye for virality)?

Where are the agile business practice advocates (ones who can set up mobile systems for engagement that are better than discussion forums)?

Where are those that can break through the filters that everyone has for their everyday life?

And to a certain extent, the answers are that we are them or we must become them. We must at least try to make our ideas work on a larger scale. We must design objects that can be passed around outside of our small communities. We must be humorous and novel in our approach. And if that is too much to ask, a certain cleverness will suffice.

And I do realize that this will take a lot of time and that there is a place for being serious and academic and driven by the community of thinkers rather than an external community. But, if we believe that even one of our ideas is needed to make the world a better place, we owe it to the idea to provide a package that makes sense to everyone else. We owe it to ourselves to not let ego and esoteric discourse get in the way. We owe it to one another to make sure that what goes viral has some of what we are thinking about embedded into it.

At least at this very moment, I think so.

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Question 69 of 365: Why is action such a surprise?

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I have had a number of conversations recently that have resulted in someone saying that they were surprised that things were getting done. They were surprised at action. While I was somewhat baffled by the reaction, it made me think about what the root of this surprise might be.

Getting things done has traditionally been hard. It has required labor, huge amounts of time, or many people who were highly skilled in the areas that needed attention. Action has required a level of organization and planning that almost insurmountable considering everything else that needs to go on. It also has necessitated permission to actually “do” something. Meetings must be had, protocols must be followed, the chain of command had to remain intact.

In fact, we had so much protocol, there is even an entire mystique and formula for who you should cc or bcc on an e-mail. We have created a space that requires little action in any given day. We have set up systems to look like getting things done: Things like conference calls with the vast majority of participants muted, like conferences without the time to implement what you learn, like tracking systems for time/milage/payment that are removed from the ideas and the tasks that generated them.

Action has become foreign to many. Because we don’t produce any products, we don’t have things to show for our work at the end of the day. We have become inbox cleaners and document hounds. We wait, in a bad way, for people to finish their part of the problem for us to start on ours. Action is a surprise when we find it.

I am a firm believer in creating at least one thing every single day of my life, and I believe that this is my humble (or not so humble if I keep talking about it, I suppose) way to make action unsurprising in my life. The things that I create (Blog posts, trackable conversations, online courses, companies, learning objects, and collaborative spaces) may not look like much in the face of people who create real objects, but I believe that in my own way, I am trying to stave off the starvation of ideas. I am trying to figure out how to solve the problems, and then actually solve them. I am trying to answer my e-mail, not pass it around to someone else. I am trying to engage those who are unengaged in the process. I am trying to solicit others as directly as I can to act on their own behalf.

Because action should not be a surprise. It should be a regular part of our day, something that we celebrate and see in everything that we do. We should see the change we create. We should see the products, even if they take some time. We should see the spaces that we inhabit as malleable, because getting things done isn’t hard anymore.

It stopped being hard when we could create virtual goods and services. It stopped being hard when we could create things on our own and solicit help from people outside of our organization. It stopped being hard when organization became as easy as a hashtag.

So, start a school. Start a business. Start a project that requires something important of you. Be deliberate in engaging others in conversation. Intentionally break protocols in your organization so that you can get things done. Not haphazardly. Not unreasonably. Purposefully and with a huge amount of hope: Act. Do things. Now.

Question 68 of 365: What does it mean to be a breadwinner?

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a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, top slice ...
Image via Wikipedia

While I do not particularly like the designation or the baggage that goes along with it, being a breadwinner is something that is very important to me. I am not interested in being the sole breadwinner or someone who does only that, but there is most definitely a part of me that has to bring an income into my family and provide the things that we need and want. While this need is definite, it needs to be redefined.

In fact, I think that bread needs to be redefined. If it is the staple that sustains us over all others (carbohydrates in general, I would argue), then the bread that I win must do more than fill my family’s bellies. I would like to make the case that I have to win our bread doing something that my children and wife can understand, respect, and rely on.

I want my bread to be something I am proud of, something with my own signature texture. I want my bread to be complex and sophisticated, but also work well with what my kids love (peanut butter and jelly in the physical bread’s case). I want my bread to be plentiful, but for everyone to always know that it took work to create. I want my bread to rise, always.

I guess if I am to win this kind of bread, I had better start making some choices as to what I will and wont do for it.

What I would be willing do:

  • Work with people I wouldn’t associate with otherwise.
  • Do tech support
  • Push buttons (as long as I can design the buttons)
  • Work on other people’s projects

What I won’t do:

  • Stop blogging, tweeting, or working on my own projects
  • Regurgitate what other people have said or done
  • Work in isolation
  • Travel multiple times a month.

The reason why I choose to focus on these matters now is that as I continue to figure out where my career path is headed, I need to know what it is that I am striving for. I need to figure out just what I’m willing to sacrifice and what I’m not. I need to be able to see the learning curve on all of it, too.

Should I put out this want ad, and see if someone will take me up on it? Should I go into every situation and state my assumptions? Are these biases enough to get me through?

I can honestly say that I am a breadwinner, and that all of the baggage that the word gives me is okay, so long as I can pack up the really important stuff and take it with me wherever I go.

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