The Thoughts From series of interviews are simple: I ask someone ten questions and they respond. It works very well and I hope that you’ll learn some new things from the people featured in these interviews.

Hugh MacLeod runs the incomparable GapingVoid.com website.  Hugh’s succinct and pithy cartoons are all over the Internet.  He’s written a book called Ignore Everybody; blogs in copious quantities; talks about evil plans; creates cube grenades; and is CEO of Stormhoek USA.  He is a creative instigator, striking fear into slow, rigid, arrogant bureaucracies everywhere.  Here are Hugh’s thoughts about ten questions that he graciously agreed to answer for our readers.

Do you follow the work of any political cartoonists or other comic strips like, say, Doonesbury (Garry Trudeau) or Dilbert (Scott Adams)?  If so, have they had any impact on your work?

Doonesbury hasn’t been interesting in over 20 years, though his early stuff- circa 1970-75- was REALLY good. I love Dilbert. But no, I never really connected with the political cartoonists. I always dug the stuff that was about the universal human condition. People like Steadman or Steinberg.

What is one thing that virtually everyone does wrong with blogging and other creative work?

They confuse blogging and Twittering and Facebooking with their actual business. I’m guilty of that, constantly.

On the comedy side, are there any comedians of any stripe that you enjoy and who may have influenced your work, either in writing or in drawing/cartooning?

I’ve never been much into stand-up. I always liked ensemble stuff, like Monty Python or Saturday Night Live. Traditional sitcoms have always left me a bit flat, with the exception of Andy Griffith.

A couple of years ago you abandoned Twitter temporarily.  What made you change your mind about it and come back?  Do you see yourself using that service for the long term?

I acted rashly. I was freaking out that the damn thing was sucking too much of my time. But then I was soon missing the people on Twitter I was talking to- many of whom I was doing business with. I’m better balanced about it, now.

Is there any significant difference between the content in Ignore Everybody and your earlier essay “How To Be Creative”?  If so, could you elaborate?

“Ignore Everybody” has forty chapters. “How To Be Creative” has twenty six. The former has more cartoons, and is more edited/polished. It also is printed on paper, which alters the experience, somewhat.

What do you think of the ending of The Prisoner (the original ITV series, not the recent remake)?  Was Patrick McGoohan taking too many drugs, was he running out of time, or was there a clear point to what he was doing?

I never saw The Prisoner. I watched the first half of Episode One when I was about sixteen, but soon lost interest when my girlfriend showed up.

What’s one advantage that Britain has over the USA (and vice versa?)

A nice glass of real ale by a real burning fire in an old country pub. After that it’s all downhill for you Limeys. I can’t speak for the entire USA, but the thing I really like about living in Texas, is how much MORE the small entrepreneur is respected, appreciated, and looked after, compared to Europe (and a lot of the USA). It’s pretty much off the scale compared to what the Brits are used to.

Why do you think Americans have a fascination with British culture?  The accent(s)?  The attitude?  The tea?  Ingrained racial memories of the Beatles and the British Invasion?

They don’t, for the most part. That’s a British myth. Sure, there may be a few Anglophiles out there- especially on the North East Coast, but they’re no more numerous than, say, Battlestar Galactica fans.

Pretend that the Internet is completely destroyed overnight.  What do you do when you wake up the next day?

Same as I was doing before the internet. Drinking beer, hanging out with my friends, and drawing cartoons. I’d probably have to go out and find a real job somewhere, which would suck, but nothing I couldn’t handle.

Any final thoughts for our readers?

This is it. Fight like hell.

Here’s some link goodness from the past week:

Random rules for ideas worth spreading – the man behind Unleashing the Ideavirus, Seth Godin, provides a list of ideas about… how to work with ideas.

The Dowager Shadow – Ian M Rountree and Leila Evans have started to publish a new web novel, in installments.  Looks like it’ll be full of mages, adventures, and other fine things.  This link takes you to a teaser page leading up to the start of the novel.  Keep clicking through to read the prologues, Chapter 1, and more as it’s published.  Worth checking out if you’re a fan of swords and sorcery, fantasy fiction, and all that magical stuff.

How To Break A Social Network – on his own blog, Ian M Rountree provides some interesting insights about his use of social networks, including an encounter which makes you wonder about how some people use them.

Would You Sacrifice Love For Greatness – Tara Hunt writes another moving personal anecdote about pursuing not just career success, but a life purpose and the sacrifices that you make when you do that.  Read the comments section, too – Kathy Sierra weighs in with some great thoughts.

How To Write a Blog That Matters – Justin Kownacki gives five reasons why your work probably sucks and three reasons why your blog should matter.  Plus, five ways to ensure that your blog matters.  Check it out, bloggers!

gapingvoid’s thoughts on blogging, 2010 – Hugh MacLeod serves up a dish of analysis with ten observations about blogging (he’s been doing this for years).  Bonus:  you might also want to check out Remember Who You Are.  (By the way, we’ve got ten thoughts from Hugh coming up here on Monday, so please check that out!)

Tell me, what have you found that made good reading this week?

This is a book review of Business Relationships That Last by Ed Wallace.

How I got the book:

Electronic review copy was sent to me on behalf of the publisher (sorry it took me so long to write this, Greenleaf Group Book Press).

Background:

Ed Wallace is the Chief Relationship Officer of  The Relationship Capital Group.  He has many years of experience in sales and business development.

Business Relationships That Last – 5 Steps to Transform Contacts into High Performing Relationships is quite a timely book in this age of social media, networking, trust agents, and generally behaving like a decent human being.

This book focuses on a key concept called relationship capital, which resembles the concepts of the emotional bank account (as per Stephen Covey) or the Whuffie Factor (as per Tara Hunt via Cory Doctorow).

This book is divided into three main parts:

• Part I: What is Relationship Capital?
• Part II: The 5 Steps to Transform Contacts into High-Performing Relationships
• Part III: Action Planning

The strengths:

This is a decent, but somewhat narrowly focused, book.  Wallace uses the character of Max, a taxi cab driver who is much more than he seems, as a means to illustrate the power of relationship capital.  There’s a good section on relational blockers, which are reasons why you might not be developing good business relationships.  The Relational Ladder, a diagram used throughout the book, emphasizes the importance of soft and hard skills.  It also shows the stages of building a business relationship where, believe or not, the sign of a highest level performing relationship is your ability (and comfort) with asking your customer for help.  There’s also a section on a Relationship Quotient and some exercises that help you figure that out and apply it to your business relationships.

There’s no question that this is important stuff – it’s getting easier to do things on your own on the Web, but it’s getting harder to do them in an excellent or remarkable way without developing relationships with other talented folks.  Chris Brogan and Julien Smith talked about the power of relationships within Trust Agents and this book focuses on that piece of the puzzle in much more detail, although slanted towards sales.

The areas for improvement:

The main suggestion that I have for improvement is that this book would have been more useful by looking beyond relationships with the ulterior motive of making your monthly sales quota.  I think the concepts beyond this book should go beyond filling your month end sales order form:  maybe  that’s an idea for a follow-up book.

Also, I was turned off by the Action Planning section.  I felt I like I was getting account management training which, while it’s not a bad thing in and of itself, was a bit too focused on that kind of thing.  Might be great if you sell widgets, but that’s not my interest.

Finally, there was a very overt plug for the author’s company, website and services.  I think the first hit is free, so to speak, but I’m sure that this book is a “funnel” to bring in additional business.  And that’s fair game, no question:  every author has their own reasons for publishing a book.  From my vantage point, however, it soured the book for me.

Other points of interest:

I really do enjoy the character of Max, the Jedi Master cab driver.  Well, he’s not really a Jedi.  But still…

Verdict (out of 10): 7 (worth getting from the library; good ideas about how to build better professional relationships, but seems to be focused towards the widget salesperson.)

My methodology for book reviews and affiliate links: I’ll provide an Amazon.com affiliate link (or other related affiliate link) for content if I think it’s worth buying and reading. If I don’t, I won’t provide an affiliate link. The affiliate link helps fund my content creation activities.

If you would like me to review YOUR eBook, book, or other content, please send me an E-Mail at markdykeman@gmail.com to get instructions on how to send your book or content to me. You’ll get my honest opinion about your book, either publically or privately.

There is a river that runs by my office building, as it has for hundreds of thousands of years.

It’s not running right now, at least not along its surface.  It was running, even through the winter, until yesterday, when temperatures of -25 degrees Celsius finally caused ice to form on the top of the water, bringing its movement to a halt.

I don’t know about you, but the idea of that much water stopping, frozen, is pretty amazing when you think about it.

But what’s really happening when a river freezes?

• Is it that the energy that tends to hold objects at rest becomes stronger than the energy that keeps them moving?
• Or is it that the energy that tends to keep objects moving becomes weaker than the energy that keeps them at rest?

Physics will give us one answer:  that as it grows colder, the energy to keep molecules moving dissipates the colder it gets.  Molecules move more slowly as temperatures drop until you reach a point where the objects that formerly appeared to be moving now seem to be at a standstill, moving from liquid to solid form.

However, there’s a few things to consider here:

• Even though the top layer of a river freezes, the water beneath the top layer of ice can continue to move, sometimes quite rapidly.  It takes a long time and a lot of cold to make something freeze completely solid.
• Frozen matter (i.e. ice) is not completely still unless it’s much colder than it normally gets on this planet.  Molecules can still be moving in “frozen” matter, just extremely slowly.
• Does the river seem to stop flowing because of a loss of energy or an increase in resistance?
• Is the natural state of all things to be frozen (at temperatures around absolute zero) or is motion the norm?
• Note as well that even when you apply heat to something that’s frozen, it can take a long time for it to fully resume its liquid or gaseous state.

A river is often used as a metaphor for life in fiction.  Could it also be a metaphor for the following things when temperature is applied:

• Will
• Resistance
• Determination
• Creativity
• Fear

Image by EclecticBlogs

EDIT (Feb. 3, 2010) – oddly enough, the ice broke up and the river started flowing again today.  Weird.

As I cleaned my glasses for the three millionth time this morning it occurred to me – again –  that I think differently than other people do.  In the case of eyewear and vision, I prefer to wear eyeglasses rather than wear contact lenses.

I’ve been wearing glasses full time for over 20 years and wearing them part-time since I was in high school.  I think I can honestly say that working with computers (back in the Wordperfect/Lotus 1-2-3/DOS days on PCs without hard drives) probably hastened a decline in my vision but it was inevitable – I’ve got the genetics to need to wear glasses and I’m sure that my children will eventually as well.

I have tried wearing contact lenses in the past, especially in university.  I can wear them but after a couple of years of trying, I didn’t bother keeping it up.

Here are the reasons why I continue to wear eyeglasses instead of contact lenses:

1.  Adequate vision – I see just fine with glasses and I’m not bothered by the slight loss of vision around the glasses frame.

2.  Cosmetic – I look just fine in glasses.  In fact, I’d almost argue that I look better with glasses than without.

3.  Cost – in the long run, contact lenses can cost more, especially if they aren’t covered by a health plan.

4.  Glasses are easier to put on in the morning and get going with than contacts.

EDIT  5.  Contacts never really felt that comfortable to me and just got worse as the day went on.  No fun for long distances, classrooms, or in the evening.

These are just my thoughts.  As I mentioned before, I think differently than some people.

Do you have a preference for contacts?  Do you prefer eyeglasses?  What do you think?

The Thoughts From series of interviews are simple: I ask someone ten questions and they respond. It works very well and I hope that you’ll learn some new things from the people featured in these interviews.

Julien Smith is an author, consultant, and speaker who has been involved in online communities for over 15 years– from early BBSes and flashmobs to the social web as we know it today.  He writes at inoveryourhead.net.  He is also the co-author of the book Trust Agents with Chris Brogan.

Can you give us an example of one of the biggest surprises that you encountered when co-writing Trust Agents with Chris Brogan?

I discovered that the process of writing things down really helped me develop my own thoughts about something. I was really verbal at first– that’s why I thought podcasting was “for me” where as blogging was not. But it works for writing too.

So I read a book every week as you mention below. At the time it was usually related to the subjects of Trust Agents, so I spit out my own thoughts everyday on the subject after reading, and then turned that into the half I wrote.
Basically I created a process whereby I’m always having new thoughts on a subject through a consistent exposure to new ideas. I’m pretty sure that’s important to anyone on the web today that’s trying to build a presence.

You’ve mentioned previously that you have a goal of reading a book a week. If you could fit in more than one book a week, would you? In other words, is there enough interesting stuff out there in print (or in eBook versions of printed books) to warrant reading more than one book per week?

I do fit in more than a book a week, really. I read sections of other books to keep me interested. So in the past week I started Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, finished Pam Slim’s Escape From Cubicle Nation, and started The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton.

Marshall McLuhan said that the advent of the printing press made any human that wanted to the equivalent of any genius in history (that has written a book), so the value is obvious. And there’s of course tons of stuff to read and learn from all the time, so I doubt I’ll ever run out. I’ll read a few bad books along the way, of course, but I’m ok with that.

Given the dominance of Amazon.com and its country divisions (aka Amazon.ca), what can the online versions of Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Indigo/Chapters offer as a distinguishing, yet significant advantage in their online presence to make us choose them over Amazon.xxx?

Jesus, what a question. Amazon offers everything but immediacy, and even then you can get that in America if you are willing to go Prime. So basically retailers trim the fat from those whose nostalgia or impatience makes them hold onto the old way of doing things, which I’m not in favour of really.

There is something to be said for the experience I guess. But the experience is not worth paying 30% more for a book, even with immediacy added in, so I would say they’re screwed.

How would you describe the perfect blog post? What are its characteristics?

Connection to the audience… a strong editorial viewpoint that is different from what the blogosphere is regurgitating right now… a call to action at the end… good timing… a way to excite readers at the beginning… and an easy sound-bite way to understand it so that people can spread it via social tools. Sorry, I’m just thinking this out as I write it.

Some people say that you can’t make a piece of content go viral: the best you can do is spread combustible materials around, light lots of matches, and just hope that the whole thing will catch fire. Do you agree with this position? Why or why not?

I agree you cannot MAKE it go viral, but anyone that says that just isn’t very good at designing content, sorry. Don’t believe me? Look at TheOatmeal.com — I know it’s designed to go viral and I still can’t help myself from upvoting it on Reddit.

Is it feasible (not possible, feasible) to have a strong online presence without a strong offline presence?

Of course it’s feasible. Not all brands are personal brands– and when something has a strong enough online presence, through either a ton of frictionless spreading or lots of advertising or something, it doesn’t need an offline presence at all.

The reason offline is important is because it can provide leverage to get you past competition– being there in person is a Dip (a la Godin) that can get you past your competitors. That’s important for mindshare in a personal brand, but not so much for the other kinds– websites, companies, etc.

In your opinion, how important is it to be bilingual (French and English) as a Canadian citizen?

Not very important actually, but it is enriching. It also offsets senility to know more than 1 language so, you know.

Guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, vocals – which one would you play and why?

I’d have to say I’m a vocals guy. That’s so sad because they’re always the attention whores and the ones who end up on drugs, but what the hell.

Pretend that the Internet is completely destroyed overnight. What do you do when you wake up the next day?

I open a barbershop. People will always need to have places to gather where they feel comfortable, talk plainly, and get taken care of.

Any final thoughts for our readers?

Go big or go home.