Something different for a change of pace:  a video showing the evolution of the design of the Airbus A380-800 aircraft, all in drawings:

In a world of one draft blog posts, it’s quite intriguing to see something go through so many design changes.

According to Wikipedia.org, this airplane has 530 km (330 miles) of wiring in each aircraft.

Can you imagine how freaking complex and hard it is to make one of these airplanes?

Maybe we should all reflect on this the next time we’re struggling with a website or a blog post.

As you can see in the picture to the left, Lt. Commander Data (in a scene from Star Trek:  First Contact) is loaded and ready for bear, as they say.  But just a few minutes earlier, he was almost ready to collapse into a puddle of trembling jelly, full of fear.  While talking with his captain, Data expressed his feelings of fear of impending battle with the Borg.  This feeling was a “gift” newly available to him from an emotion chip that he had recently found.

As we know, Data is an android, a machine full of information and devoid of emotion.  The chip changed that.  However, he also had to deal with negative, paralyzing feelings while the emotion chip was active.  So, naturally, when Data expressed his fear, Captain Picard very logically suggested that Data turn off the chip.  So he did and he calmed down.  In the next breath, Picard expressed his envy of Data in that moment, when the android could just turn off his emotions like you would turn off a lamp.

Haven’t we all felt that way at one time?

Emotional fuel (or fire)

Our emotions are powerful motivators.  Joy, love, anger, envy, and fear:  they make us want to do things.  Or keep us from doing things.

Unlike Data, we really can’t shut off our emotions.  We can train ourselves to ignore them, we can accept them, and we can use chemicals to temporarily deaden them, but they don’t go away.  Feelings don’t have on and off switches.

Fear is one of the strongest feelings, at least it is in my experience.  How many things have I kept myself from doing because of fear?  (Note:  I don’t claim that the fear stopped me; I let the fear stop me.)  Perhaps you’ve had the same experience?

No matter how you feel about privacy, there’s no doubt that having a social media presence using your real name is a test of fear and bravery.  After all, people can Google you and find out what you’re saying.  They can judge you, for good or evil.  You can be made fun of.  Hell, your boss might read your blog and decide that what you’re doing isn’t in her best interest, or that of your employer.  And so on.

Fear of exposure

I’ve done it both ways:  I’ve used aliases and I’ve used my own name.  Every now and then it’s very tempting to create a new identity so you can write and rant about your more extreme views without fear of reprisal.  The possibility of telling the unembellished truth is seductive and perversely empowering when you can do so without connecting the words back to your true identity.

To borrow one of the most famous analogies of our times, I consider that to be the Dark Side.  Power without responsibility, without remorse, without accountability – that is both the lure and the damnation of the anonymous blogger.  Better to keep your name and face in the light, to add power to your thoughts.

However, that doesn’t mean that you need to share everything.  Despite any trends in technology and society, we all have a right to some privacy.  We don’t need to continually bear our souls, we don’t need to expose all of the secrets.

Authenticity is worth pushing through the fear

But if you want to say something with power, it sure helps to have your real name and face behind it.  It may be scary and you may wish for your own emotion chip to deactivate your fear, but fear can be mastered and that energy can be used.   One of my favorite super-heroes is focused on willpower and mastery of fear.  It can be done and you can use your courage to do great things.

If you have something reasonable to say the world, please don’t be afraid to say it using your own real face and voice.  It could be the best thing that you ever do.

Data, Picard, Star Trek are all properties of Paramount.  Please don’t sue, guys.  Kthksbai.

Michael Bungay Stanier is the founder and Senior Partner of Box of Crayons, a company that “works with organizations around the world to help them do less Good Work and more Great Work.”  In addition to his Box of Crayons work, Michael blogs regularly and he has created an excellent series of podcast interviews with interesting and creative achievers called the Great Work Interview series (here is an example).  He has recently published Do More Great Work, a book to help people achieve their own great work.  We at Broadcasting Brain are great fans of Michael’s work, so it’s a pleasure to do a Thoughts From interview with him.

Let’s start with a two-part question about your own series of interviews. What prompted you to start a podcast series of interviews with people about their own great work? Second, how do you select the various individuals that you’ll be interviewing?
I’m not quite sure what prompted me to start this series. It’s been about two years now. I think it was simply because I was curious and wanted to chat to people. And I have a pretty simple criteria: I’m looking for people who make me think and/or make me laugh and that have something interesting to say. I’m also conscious that a number of these good people are also influencers within their worlds – and that’s an added bonus for me.

Does any interview material wind up on the “cutting room floor” i.e. are there any unused bits that don’t appear in the podcast?
Actually, no. In part that’s because I’m lazy and don’t want to spend a lot of time editing and polishing the interviews. In part it’s because I like the organic flow of the conversation. Probably equal parts of both…

Which fictional character would you most enjoy interviewing to ask them about their great work? Why?
Gosh – that’s hard to narrow down to one. It would most likely be a person from the world of literature, because I’ve got a BA and an M.Phil in literature. Maybe someone like Sherlock Holmes. Or David Malouf’s Ovid (from the book, An Imaginary Life.)

Which deceased individual would you most enjoy interviewing to ask them about their great work? Why?
Mmm… another tough question. Probably one of the big scientists like Marie Curie or Crick. I do admire their pursuit of the unknown – it requires both imagination and discipline, not to mention resilience.

What part of your work gives you the most joy? Why?
There’s not one single part. I really enjoy creating and shaping new material, love performing in front of a group, love seeing something finished like a short movie or a book appear. I heard the term ‘portfolio career’ a number of years ago, and really liked it – building up a ‘portfolio’ of different tasks that all fulfil you in different ways

What part of your work gives you the least joy? Why?
I’m much less excited about travel than I used to be, particularly crossing from Canada to the United States. It’s misery crossing the border.

What was the biggest surprise for you when you wrote your first book (i.e. something that you didn’t expect at all)?
In truth, the joy of holding something beautiful in my hands that I’d largely shaped. I wasn’t expecting to feel so happy about it all.

What simple tip would you recommend that could help anyone to do better work today?
Figure out what you want to say No to. Once you’re clear on that, the Yes’s – the really important Yes’s – will be more obvious.

Pretend the Internet is destroyed over night. What do you do when you wake up the next morning?
Go “woo hoo!” – no more email to check. Then, take a big big breath, and start re-imagining ways to reconnect with people.

Any final thoughts for our readers?
Time’s a ticking. I’ve figured out my “death date”: Sept 15 2043. When’s yours? And what do you want to do, who do you want to be between then and now?

A couple of my posts are featured in the March 5, 2010 edition of the Just Write Blog Carnival at Incurable Disease of Writing:

• Thoughts from Seth Godin
• The struggles of writing and publishing using the Free Model

You should check out the other great posts at Just Write Blog Carnival: March 5, 2010 Edition.  There’s some interesting stuff there for fiction and non-fiction writers.

For more information about the Just Write Blog Carnival, click on this link.

For more information about the main Blog Carnival website, which is a way to get some links and traffic back to your posts, click on this link.

Have a great day!

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I’ve created a new resource for bloggers.  It’s pretty simple, but I hope it helps.

For several years I have literally kept three or four binders of printed copies of the blog posts that I have found to be helpful, useful, and inspiring to my work as a blogger and a writer.  I regularly refer back to them for ideas.  They are my most important resource.  I wanted easy Web access to them, though.

If these resources were valuable to me, they might be valuable to other people.

I thought about publishing a blog post on Broadcasting Brain with the links to this information.  That’s great as a one time project, but in order to have lasting value, this should be a dynamic resource that can be added to, changed, and reorganized as needed.   I decided to use Squidoo.  This allows me to create and maintain that list within a lens, which is a type of web page.  There are two main reasons why I choose Squidoo:

1. I’ve used the tool before and I’m comfortable with it.
2. Squidoo allows the lens creator to receive royalty payments based on traffic to the lens and activity on the page like ad clicks.    You can donate your royalties to a charity.  In my case, I like the idea of Room to Read – I think illiteracy is a horrible setback to anyone’s quality of life and this is a way to help more people learn how to read.  Disclosure:  I maintain a few lenses which make enough income to buy a bag of potato chips during a good month.

So, yes, it’s a Squidoo lens.  And… 100% of the royalties from this lens will go to Room to Read.  Why not do some good while providing information to bloggers?

Go check out The Blogging Lens.  I want it to be the best central resource out there with links to the best content about blogging.  And remember, you can help raise money for Room to Read by visiting and supporting The Blogging Lens.

If you have any links that you think should be added to The Blogging Lens, let me know and I’ll include the best, top notch content on the lens.  It should contain all of the good information about blogging that we all would want to refer to.

Thanks for your support!

The image in this post was created by John Cox & Allen Forkum. See the original: http://www.coxandforkum.com/archives/000478.html

Image by johndal

Thought wrestling (different from the action that you see above, yet oddly similar) is one of the skills that you can develop as a blogger.  Here are some thoughts on that.

Yesterday’s question was why do you blog if not for money?  More than a dozen readers responded with their reasons for blogging and there were a few common themes in the responses.  I want to focus on one of those themes today:   developing your thoughts via writing.

Here are some examples of what some of you wrote concerning creating and refining ideas (or wrestling them into shape):

Susan Murphy (Suzemuse)

I started blogging in 2006 because I was interested in improving my writing. I thought that putting my thoughts online would be a good way to do this…  I blog mostly because I love to write. I am the type of person that will wake up in the morning with an idea in my head, sit down at the computer and crank out 1000 barely-edited words in 20 minutes, and hit Publish before I have a chance to think about it too much…  Blogging helps me sort things out in my head.

Rob Diana (Regular Geek)

I started blogging as a way to get things off my chest and to get some thoughts on “paper”…  Another side of this is that I have found the blog being a way for me to explore ideas. I always thought I would give opinions on tech news, but that quickly gets boring. For example, when everyone was writing about the (Google Buzz) launch I waited until I had a good feel for what it was. I realized that it felt incomplete, like it was meant for something bigger. So, almost two weeks after the launch I finally wrote something that was not a review or comparison to Twitter and Friendfeed, but more of a “why did Google release this” and “where is Buzz really going”.

Rob Patrob (Robert Paterson’s Weblog):

I blog because I think best aloud. It is a way of working out ideas – like an artist’s sketch book.

Ian M Rountree

But part of why I blog is to leave a permanent record… having a record of how my thoughts progress from one month to the next really helps me make sure I’m going the direction I want to be going.

Bill Wren (he linked to one of his own posts and I’m posting an excerpt of that here):

A friend of mine asks, Why should I blog? For me the quick and easy answer is because I like it. More specifically, I like writing. And if I look at everything I’ve posted on this blog and my other blog (Piddleville) I realize that what I’m really doing is thinking out loud online. I tend to work out ideas on my blogs.

AnneMieke (Mindstructures)

But if you would ask why I love to (blog), then I could not answer that so easy. The closest I could say, is that it is a way to get my thoughts in some form that is understandable…  Going straight to words is not possible for me, so writing is not an option. But with blogging I can (easily) use graphics that I can adjust all the time to make myself clear.

Ilinap

Blogging is therapy, but a whole lot cheaper… Blogging forces me to dig deeper than I would otherwise let myself go. I come face to face with some buried emotions and experiences. I reflect on my own brand DNA, my shortcomings of motherhood, my worries, my celebrations, my fears. Some things I’ve seen crop up in my head are still too painful or controversial to manifest into words. But thanks to blogging, they’re there, off the so called back burner and poised for capture and introspection.

These comments suggest to me that people are getting value from describing things that matter to them.  The blog becomes a tool to develop ideas, to gather thoughts and force them into sentences and paragraphs of meaning.

One of my first posts of 2010 was a collaboration with a lot of smart people who were giving tips on how to do better work.  Seth Godin chimed in with the following tip:

#1 thing: start a blog and write every day.

I wasn’t sure what to make of that tip, but after reviewing it in light of the comments above, I think I have a better understand of what Seth was trying to communicate with his tip.  He was talking about developing ideas.

The practice of regular writing and sorting through the thousands of pieces of information that we process daily helps us to get better at analyzing and using information.  Putting structure around data and wrestling thoughts into order helps us to exercise our reasoning and creative thinking muscles.  This is a critical skill that anyone can use to do better work.  The other comments that I’ve quoted in this post also support this concept.

What do you think?  Is blogging really thought wrestling, the new king of mental sports?

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