Not having time is a choice
Mitch Joel writes about people who complain that there is nothing new here.
These are the people who take the time to express their opinion, in public, that a particular book has no new content in it, or that someone’s blog post is just a rehash of old ideas.
There are various reasons for taking the time to damn something with faint praise, including: self-promotion; attacking an enemy; or truly altruistic reasons for wanting someone to avoid spending their time material that’s better covered elsewhere. Let’s look at the altruistic motive.
Mitch offers the following argument:
… you can learn something new from anyone at any time. The trick is in leaving yourself open to this experience. The trick is in always being a student.
This is a very good point! You never know where you’re going to find a good story, a new technique, or inspiration, pure and simple. It doesn’t seem to matter if you are a novice, a master, or anywhere in between. The danger to us is when we get stuck in execution mode or when we suffer from tunnel vision.
- In execution mode, we are focused on getting certain things done within a certain timeframe.
- When we have tunnel vision, we only look in a certain direction. We don’t think to look in different places for new ideas in order to improve ourselves.
It doesn’t help that most organizations generally don’t encourage looking outward. They encourage, or force, most employees to maintain an inward focus on repeatable execution for predictable results. There’s no carrot or no pot of gold at the rainbow for you in these places if you stray into the outliers.
Sometimes this same tunnel vision occurs outside of a formal organization. Peer pressure, or “common wisdom”, influence our behavior as well, don’t they? If your friends, colleagues, or family tell you not to waste our time on something, you’ll often do what they say. This is a concern that I have as we seem to move towards more of a recommendation mindset instead of an exploratory mindset.
Our (seeming) lack of free time motivates us to efficiently use the spare hours and minutes. I read a lot of content that talks about respecting the reader’s valuable time. This type of respect is a key success factor for many content creators.
By placing your trust in a content creator (or curator), you are choosing the recommendation path. You are letting someone else choose for you, just as if you were following along the suggestions that Amazon.com offers when you place an order, or if you follow the related posts generated by a tool like Zemanta. You trust them to make good choices for you to use within your scarce free moments of time.
You sacrifice freedom and serendipity when you come to rely on recommendation. True, there’s a lot of content out there, so you could waste a lot of time, or go insane, by trying to discover everything yourself. It’s perfectly logical to follow the recommendations of a trusted advisor. But it’s also good for you to explore on your own and find something new to share with your community.
It doesn’t have to be something completely new, either. You can still find value in common knowledge that’s presented in a fresh and exciting way. One person’s common knowledge could be your Next Big Thing.
I’m not saying that it’s wrong to review something and give an honest opinion. It might be presumptuous, however, to say that something’s a waste of time even if it seems to be too basic. We all have to make choices about how to use our time, and thinking that we don’t have time to do something, like exploring or refreshing ourselves on the basics, is ultimately a choice.
What do you think? Is there good stuff to be found even in basic information? Or should we be trying to shield people from mediocrity?
Image by Daisuke Shirako
writelife:
When I took a quick look at that post (”nothing new here”) the first thing I thought of was Shakespeare, especially the play “The Tempest.” At the end, Prospero's daughter Miranda says, “O brave new world, That has such people in't!” And Prospero says, “'Tis new to thee.”
When we say, “There's nothing new here,” we're saying there's nothing new to US. It may be ALL new to someone else. The self-focus is a misleading one since it sees only from one perspective, our own.
I think of Shakespeare in another sense too: people often forget that with the possible exception of The Tempest, nothing he wrote was original. They are all based on histories and folk tales that had been told over and over. What was new and original was HOW he told them. So when we say, “nothing new,” maybe we just aren't looking close enough.
As for recommendations … that's one of my worries about Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. algorithms deciding what I'll find interesting. Often, I don't know what I'll find interesting until I see it. Sometimes I like going through a hodge podge because I never know what I'll find. As helpful as algorithms are, they also constrain us and our worldview.
Maybe that's an option all these tools should incorporate, as in safe, moderate etc. searches. We could include an on/off option for algorithms.
11 November 2009, 6:35 amMark Dykeman:
Great points, Bill. I like the idea of making recommendations “opt in”.
11 November 2009, 8:28 am