Broadcasting Brain

This is a book review of Stimulated!  Habits to Spark Your Creative Genius at Work, a business book by Andrew Pek and Jeannine McGlade.

How I got the book:

Review copy (which I’m keeping) sent to me on behalf of the authors

Background:

Andrew Pek and Jeannine McGlade are internationally acclaimed authors and entrepreneurs in the field of creativity and innovation.

Stimulated! is a business book to help people tap into their creative potential at work by describing habits to help find inspiration and using it to create new work, products, services, etc.  The five habits are:

• Scouting
• Cultivating
• Playing
• Venturing
• Harvesting

There are also chapters on awakening, stimulating, and sustaining creativity.

The strengths:

This book is an easy read at 195 pages.  It’s full of lots of colored illustrations, quotes, and comments about creativity and innovation.  The core concepts of stimulating your creative talents are logical and similar to other books.  The scouting concept, for example, reminds me of the artist date concept from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, where the reader is encouraged to occasionally set aside blocks of time to basically go out in the world and do or see things that help engage the imagination and all five senses.  Overall, the authors do a good job of presenting this overview of ways to stimulate your creative side.

The areas for improvement:

Even though this book is less than 200 pages, it still feels a bit too long, like it was drawn out about 20% longer than it needed to be.  It doesn’t bring up a lot of new ideas but it does get the job done.  However, I tend to like more detailed anecdotes, case studies, or exercises in a book like this.  I can appreciate that the authors may have had limited ability to talk about the work they have done for their clients, but a little more meat would have been good.

Other points of interest:

This is the most colorful book that I’ve ever read that wasn’t a comic book or otherwise illustrated book.  It has color on virtually every page.  Did I mention the use of color yet?

Verdict (7 out of 10): (worth checking out; a useful resource for developing creativity and innovation)

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 publicly or privately.

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Our words, images, video, and audio files will be around for a long, long time. To me, it seems very likely that the digital content we create through all forms of social media, Web pages, forms, etc. which are indexed by Google and other search engines will be around for an indefinite period of time.  I can see at least some of this content being available in some form for decades.

Many of us have young children (mine are both under the age of ten) who aren’t as adept with Web functionality as teens and adults.  Many Web users are teens and Gen Y types who haven’t yet started families and have no offspring.

Today your friends, family, colleagues, employers, neighbors, etc. can find out lots of stuff about you, especially if you are active in social media and use your real name.

In the coming years, your children, nieces and nephews, and their friends will be able to check out your Digg, Reddit, and Mixx voting record;  your StumbleUpon likes;  your photos and videos; your movie, TV, and music interests;  your blog posts and comments; and so on.  They’ll get a view of you that they might not see from face-to-face interactions.

Do you ever think about this?  Does it concern you?  Are you ready for this coming scrutiny?  And do you ever think about the impact of your online content on the generation(s) to come?

Think.

Question.

Extrapolate.

Theorize.

Experiment.

Analyze.

Make something new and cool.

And don’t be afraid to ask questions.

Image by videogioco

What would it take to make North Americans yield to the conventional wisdom of most countries and start calling soccer by its more widely used name: football? How do you make a life-long Coca Cola drinker switch to Pepsi? When does a Boston Red Sox fan learn to love the New York Yankees? Can you teach an old dog new tricks? Where is the tipping point at which an influencer can have an impact on our beliefs, tastes, thoughts, and behavior?

The answers to these questions are the equivalents of the Fountain of Youth, the Philosopher’s Stone, and the Midas Touch to marketers everywhere. The ability to influence behavior, as much as some of us despise the thought of being manipulated, is a very valuable thing to people who have products and services to sell.

A tale of two tunesmiths

These thoughts are running through my mind today as I’ve just finished listening to a Fresh Air podcast in which Terry Gross recently interviewed Iggy Pop.

Iggy was one of the early punk rock musicians in the late 1960s (coming to the public eye as the lead singer of the Stooges) and now, in his early 60s, he’s just released a new album Preliminaires, which I awkwardly describe as French-inspired crooning: softer, more melodic, and more subtly seductive than, say, “I Wanna Be Your Dog” or “Real Wild Child”.

Do you think that die hard Stooges fans will flock to Preliminaries in droves? Good question.

A couple of weeks ago I heard yet another Fresh Air podcast where Terry interviewed John Doe, another famous punk rock musician who rose to fame in the Los Angeles band X. Doe has more visibly experimented with different musical genres. He’s joined up with a Canadian band (the Sadies) to create Country Club, a clearly country/western album. Doe sang snippets from several songs on the show.  His musical output since X’s heyday (late 70s, early 80s) has certainly ventured into country-ish music, none of which I’ve heard.

I should mention at this point that I detested country music in my teens and early 20s. In the early 90s there was a small number of country-ish musicians that caught my ear, although they were more rock/pop tinged than others (like, say, Garth Brooks, Dwight Yoakum, and Steve Earle) but I still cringed most of the time whenever I heard pedal-steel guitar or nasal vocals.

Somehow, though, hearing John Doe belt out some country standards blew my mind and made me reevaluate my musical tastes.  He’s got a great voice, for one thing.  However, I think it was the emotion his singing conveyed (I think Terry Gross called it a sense of desolation) that really touched my heart.  So to speak.

What’s the tipping point?

So, at some point, a person’s tastes may seem to change.

Suddenly, twelve year old Suzie tries boiled spinach and decides that it doesn’t taste as bad as she thought.  A beer drinker tries wine and decides it’s palatable - or vice versa.  You finally watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer after your close friend raves about it for years on end… and you decide it rocks, even though vampires and the supernatural always seemed dumb to you in the past.

You finally decide to check out Broadcasting Brain after all the rave reviews and…  OK, seriously now…

I’m not a professional marketer but I have been observing things for awhile.  I think that any kind of influencer is going to have an uphill battle trying to get people to like something unless:

• It meets a need - information, utility, entertainment… any or all of the above.
• It’s similar to something you already like that it’s easily identified and understood - at its core, country music can tap into the same emotional roots as soul or blues music:  normally pain or joy.
• It’s a work of love or art - it sure looks like the people who made or discovered this thing knew what they were doing and did a fine job making it.
• It touches you emotionally - when Terry Gross asked John Doe about his interest in country music he said, (half) jokingly, that all white men like country music.  While that’s not literally true, what Doe meant was that the feelings of pain and joy that country music explores are feelings that most men can relate to in a pure, unvarnished form:  most men go through periods when we feel cheated, worthless, powerless, and heartbroken, believe it or not, and sometimes we get to feel some joy, too.

I’m not saying pity the poor white man here, by the way:  many of us are dickheads at times, too.

The point that I’m trying to make is that these mournful country tunes somehow rang Pavlov’s bell for my musical tastes because they satisfied one or more of the criteria that I mentioned above.

So, how do you turn a PC user into an Apple fanboy?

Yes, I suppose I should address the original question in the post title.

You can take one route, I suppose, and try to recruit an influencer, sneezer, etc. to try to convert a die hard PC user to a hard-core Apple user.  You could get Jeff Goldblum, Louis Gray, or Tiger Woods to promote your product.

However, this will only be successful in the long run, in my opinion, if you can tap into the other four things that I mentioned above:

• Show the PC user that an iMac is not THAT different from a PC
• Show how it can meet needs
• Show how it is a darn good product
• Show how it can evoke that “gosh wow, this is cool feeling”

Otherwise, no one will care.  Or change.

Over to you:  what are your stories?

I’ve told you a story about me, now I’d like to hear something about you.  Please, in the comments section, tell us all a story about how you came to like (or love) something that you never liked before.  How did it happen?  Did any of the criteria that I mentioned above come into play?  Did someone else’s recommendation influence you?

Jay Cruz, a Broadcasting Brain reader and a great blogger in his own right (see Tape Noise Diary), has written a thoughtful and insightful post about why he is drastically scaling back his social media participation in Why I’m Quitting Social Media.

Here’s an excerpt from his post:

Lets not fool ourselves. The web is mostly for entertainment. (Or, The Internet is for Porn) Everyone supposedly knows this, but pinpointing the distraction is actually harder than people are aware of.

When you read a book, watch tv, or consume other type of media, you do it for a purpose. Most of the time the purpose is to entertain yourself. But on the web, specially on so called social media like Twitter, the purpose is constantly being challenged and shifted. It’s a two way, or asynchronous conversation as it has been proselytized, but you still have to manage that expectation. To listen or to talk, to participate or to follow, to write or to read. This is theoretically great, but you will never have that sense of completion I was talking about.  [Jay spent a week without Web access and says he focused a lot on activities which led to conclusive or decisive ends - more purposeful activities?] It’s an open loop that never closes in your head.

That’s one of the biggest reasons why I’m quitting social media services like Twitter and Tumblr. I just can’t do it anymore. I realized that at best social media is entertainment disguised as “useful” information or crowdsourced “knowledge”, and at worst is distraction disguised as entertainment. The later being most of my experience with social networking sites, specially Twitter.  See, when you watch Television to kill time and distract yourself because you’re bored, it is easier to realize it. Most TV junkies are aware that they are TV junkies. But the web is constantly shifting your attention and it makes it harder to realize that you’re distracting yourself.

I started to write a lengthy comment to respond to his post, but I thought I’d turn it into a post here.

#  #  #

Jay:

Oddly enough, I posted a link to this post on Twitter.  

Seriously, though, I can appreciate a lot of what you are saying.  If you’re like me and your day job (e.g. the means by which you exist and support your loves ones) has little to do with social media, communications, marketing, etc. then you’re constantly having to prioritize what you spend your time on.  There are clearly people who choose to devote a lot of time and energy to monitoring, communicating, and evaluating, in addition to building many weak contacts and few, if any, strong ones.  Sometimes that aligns with their jobs, other people just make the time within their own daily schedules for various reasons.

I cannot (and, truthfully, do not want to) spend gobs of time monitoring the social media services, keeping up the weak ties with a wide variety of interesting and smart people that I’ll probably never ever meet in person.  My motivations and focus have changed during the past few months to what I’ll call a more pragmatic approach to social media.  I do find it interesting to develop new weak contacts, “friends”, whatever you want to call them, but at the same time I’m reminded that my mother and other people of her generation used to collect charms and put them on charm bracelets.  Similarly, there’s the Scouting movement and merit badges.  If this seems impersonal, heartless, or at least cynical, well…  take another look at audience building behavior, because some people are collecting things (people instead of badges) in search of some greater reward (attention, reputation, business deals, sales, and so on.)

Is every social media user doing this?  Not at all.  Most probably aren’t:  I think they genuinely want to connect with people they know and possibly get introduced to kindred souls who they don’t yet know.  But, if Twitter is any indicator of social media as a whole,  I see a lot more internet marketers (I’m really not trying to make this sound evil - I really enjoyed some online interactions that I’ve had with people who could be called internet marketers, but I’ve never met any in person nor spoken to them on the phone) who are consciously working the social media tools with the very blatant purpose of building lists of potential sales contacts.  The other force that’s been starting to overwhelm the Twittersphere is the celebrity Twitter user and their entourages/fan bases.  Meanwhile, sometimes it feels like we common folk have to scream louder and louder for even our stronger contacts to hear us in the ever widening sea of noise and traffic.  This punctures the balloon that we think of as online camaraderie.

You bring up another excellent point, too, about the endless, unresolved nature of Web surfing and following social media in particular:   it’s like watching a highly trafficked, occasionally useful, but perpetual stream of data that becomes its own end instead of a series of hunt and gather missions with purpose.  This doesn’t bother me so much, but it can be quite an unproductive time sink.

I don’t begrudge your decision to dial down social media, but I’ll be upset if you stop blogging, Jay.   :)  Very much enjoyed your post.

* * *

A few additional thoughts:

I may get a bit cynical at times about the various aspects of networking, promotion, link blasting, etc. that you experience on sites like Twitter, but I’m not planning to jump ship.  My use of these tools has tapered off over time but I don’t foresee myself leaving any of my main haunts any time soon.

However, I appreciated Jay’s post because it brings a useful perspective to this whole process of maintaining multiple (or consistent) identities across multiple platforms and at least maintaining a facade of camaraderie (which is hopefully genuine most of the time).  If there’s any danger in these services, it’s that they provide enough diverse content and “shiny new things” that their influence can expand exponentially to absorb your free time (aka your cognitive surplus).  Great if you feel you can do that.

The other thing to consider is that I find the social media experience a lot like my university experience:  I met a lot of great, fun people who I socialized with during the time, but over 99% of them have fallen by the wayside.  The same would probably be true if I left Twitter or any other social media service.  The advantage of university, though, is that at least I actually met a lot of people in person and spent at least some time with them.  That’s not likely to happen for me in the social media sphere unless I suddenly start traveling a lot more than I have been during the past two years.  But so it goes.

In my last update I mentioned a health issue that I’m dealing with. Don’t worry, it’s nothing life threatening or anything like that, but it is a bit life-changing. I figure that it’s worth discussing because my experience may be valuable to you.

No this is not an image of me

Image by marvin L

But first a bit of background:

I have had problems with drowsiness for years, probably for longer than I realize. There are certain situations which sometimes, but not always, lead me to start dozing off. Some of these things are relatively benign, like, saying, sitting on the couch. Others would not be so good, like when, say, sitting in a meeting of some kind. Others, like when driving, were not very good at all.

At one point several years ago I did go see a doctor about this falling asleep problem, but the experience wasn’t very helpful. My sleeping habits weren’t always very good so it could have been that I was getting myself overtired at different times. I just decided that these things happened rarely enough that they weren’t worth worrying about. In retrospect, that was a dumb idea.

Things finally came to a head when these “nodding off” experiences were starting to have a negative effect on some important aspects of my life. I finally went to a doctor, explained my symptoms, and got scheduled for some testing.

It took a few weeks, but I finally got a diagnosis. Yes, there was (is) something wrong with me. Most of you have probably figured it out by now. Read the rest of this entry »

Three things:

1.  My pop and chips fast - broken but not forgotten. As I mentioned elsewhere (maybe once here too, but I honestly forget if I did or not), I started to make a couple of health changes by giving up pop (or soda, if you like).  I made it 143 days without pop (Diet Pepsi being my former soft drink of choice) before trying it again this weekend.  I haven’t eaten any potato chips in about 110 days.  That’s not to say that I’ve been eating an extremely healthy diet, but it has been a bit better.  Giving up these two foods was an exercise in developing some will power and in building good habits.  I had Diet Pepsi three days in a row and I can honestly say that it doesn’t hold the same appeal that it used to have.  Back to water.  Thank goodness.

2.  I turned 40 on Saturday, May 30. I was fretting about this.  Then it actually happened and it wasn’t that big of a deal.  I don’t feel any different, nor should anyone really expect to feel much different when one day changes to another.  Life goes on.  Thank goodness.   Onward.

3.  Did I mention a third thing?  Yes, I did.  But I’m going to put off writing it until my next blog post, because it’s a significant development (a health issue) that deserves its own post.  So stay tuned for another update - soon!

Ten things I'm not going to do today

Image by Howdy, I’m H. MichaelKarshis

Here, in no particular order, is a list of ten things that I’m definitely not going to do today:

1. Teach you how to increase your Twitter followers by15000%
2. Play football (or soccer, depending on where you are)
3. Fly down the Death Star trench and fire torpedoes (especially not without the targeting computer!)
4. Throw myself at the ground and miss
5. Place long stemmed flowers in gunbarrels
6. Get adamantium metal bonded to my skeleton
7. Photosynthesize (after all, it isn’t easy being green)
8. Join any causes or cause any joins
9. Clean your room
10. Publish a serious blog post

How about you?  Are there any things that you’ve definitely ruled out for the day?

I have written over 8600 Tweets on Twitter. Let’s say that I’ve averaged 15 words per Tweet. That’s 129,000 words.

If an average book has 250 words per page, then those 8600 Tweets are equal to 516 pages of printed matter. Or, if you like your print squished a bit tighter, at 500 words per page, then that’s 258 pages of material.

You can argue words/page, words/Tweet, and so on, but given the magnitude of activity out there, it seems pretty clear to me:

I’ve written enough Tweets to fill a book.

This is a sobering thought for me.

On one  hand, I’ve connected with a number of interesting people via Twitter (more than 3,150 as of the moment that I’m writing this post.)

On the other hand…  I could have written a book in the same amount of words.

Which course of action would have been better?  I don’t know:  I can see advantages and disadvantages to both paths.  I also know that it’s one thing to string together words 140 characters at a time and quite another thing to write a larger document that’s cohesive, useful, and interesting to read.

The main lesson that I take from this is that it’s quite possible for a lot of small effort over time to amount to something much larger.

What do you think?

A couple of small technical notes:

I finally upgraded to WordPress 2.7.1. I had been on version 2.5 for a long time and resisted upgrading because of a previous botched attempt.  Today, for some reason, I decided to go for it, after consulting with a local guru.  Success!  It worked!  I used the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plug-in, which I’d recommend to anyone.  W00t!

On the (slight) downside, my comment counts aren’t working correctly on the Broadcasting Brain homepage.  They look like they all say 0 comments, which is incorrect.  (I use the DISQUS commenting system on this blog, by the way.)  However, if you click on any of the permalinks for the blog entries, the comments are all there.  Weird.  Anyone got any ideas?

EDIT:  OK, the comment counts appear to be working now.  Go figure.

That’s it for now.