A lot of the books I've read recently are not quite business books, but they are hugely applicable to issues that business face in creating innovative products, getting them to market, and selling them successfully. For example, Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath will not only help you understand how ideas or products become sticky, but give you tools for making your ideas sticky. Likewise, their bookSwitchprovides guidance on helping organizations and individuals achieve change, even in situations where previous change efforts might have failed.
On the other hand, if you want to understand why things seem so strange lately in our world, where people seem to act against their own interest, the CEOs of the recently bailed out financial companies feel they deserve raises, and Donald Trump believes he should be president, you can't go wrong with readingThe Invisible Gorilla, by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. The authors debunk five persistent beliefs that people have about ourselves, including that we pay attention well, that our memories are accurate, that confidence implies competence, and that we know as much as we think we do. The insights are incredibly useful in day to day decision-making, since they help us understand how our perceptions can lead us so easily to making the wrong decisions, and how to mitigate the bad influence of our perceptions to make better decisions.
Starting in late January, I spent some time getting addicted to World of Warcraft. I finally had to quit - and completely delete the game from my computer - in March, since it was taking up a lot of time I wanted to spend doing other things, like working and sleeping. (I always managed to eat.)
But this wasn't an idle idyll - there was a bit of a method behind my madness of installing WoW in the first place. For the past year I've been researching, as a kind of sideline, the opportunities to improve my product by bringing in concepts from gaming to make it more engaging, compelling, and valuable. Given the hegemony - and addictiveness - of WoW, I thought I might be able to learn something I could apply.
The outcome of that research will comprise a lot of other posts, but for the time being, I can say that the results were mixed. In particular, I was looking for some guidance on the mechanics (not necessarily game mechanics) of collaboration, and it turns out that WoW, on a day-to-day basis, doesn't have much collaboration. There are certain activities - dungeons - that can only be tackled by teams of five, ten, or 25 players, depending on the dungeon, but these are, like most of WoW, about killing a lot of stuff, and not about creating anything. And the creating areas - the so-called professions - are all solo all the time.
I'll explore all this more in future posts, but for now, the proximate cause of this post is that I was turned onto World of Warcraft by several podcasts and online talks I listened to over the past year, in particular those by Jane McGonigal of the Institute For The Future. As long time readers know - and you'd have to be a long time reader to have ready any of this before, since it came out more than a year ago - I am an addicted podcast listener. I get to hear around 45 minutes to 1 hour of audio programming every day on my commutes to and from work, and it's my favorite time. The amount of fascinating, education, and inspiring stuff that goes into my head in a week is astonishing.
Since this last week I heard another really good talk by McGonigal, from the 2008 Ideas Festival in Louisville Kentucky, I thought I'd post a couple of great talks that I've heard recently, including McGonigal's on gaming, and another great talk by another great game theorist, Jesse Schell.
Jane McGonigal (, ) on "Serious Play" at the Idea Festival in Louisville in 2008 (, ) - she says "reality is broken," proves it, and tells how to fix it
A good follow up to Jane's talk is at the Long Now Foundation's Seminars About Long-Term Thinking
I love to share my recent podcast finds. I hope people find them as useful and edifying (and often entertaining) as I do. I'd love to hear what podcasts you are listening to and recommend.
Make. What was the last thing you made? What materials did you use? Is there something you want to make, but you need to clear some time for it?
A wooden pen
Pen made of Amboyna Burl by Nils
The last thing I made was a wooden pen, I have a picture of it to the right. Making pens is my main "making" activity nowadays. I've probably made about 35 of them so far, mostly to give away as gifts, but I also have some for sale on my Etsy shop, . I have always considered myself a "maker" - but until pens came along, I didn't make all that much - the occasional woodworking project, and a stint of sewing about 15 years ago. I have a small woodshop that I do additional work in besides making the pens, but it's quite low-end and can't support, for example, cabinetmaking.
My ultimate goal as a maker is to have a hot glass shop and make blown glass pieces - it's something I got a taste of while in high school and haven't been able to let go since. I've only done a tiny bit of glassblowing, including one class as an adult, but every time I've loved it - it's hot and noisy and heavy and sweaty, and you can end up with beautiful delicate iridescent objects of wonder, like the amazing Jack-In-The-Pulpit vase from Louis Comfort Tiffany's Favrile studio at the turn of the century (I'll never be able to make one of these!).
A Jack-In-The-Pulpit vase from Tiffany's Favrile studio (picture by Maia C, CC licensed)
I'm participating in the project this year - an annual event and online initiative to reflect on my year and manifest what’s next. "Use the end of your year as an opportunity to reflect on what's happened, and to send out reverberations for the year ahead. With Reverb 10 - and the 31 prompts our authors have created for you - you'll have support on your journey."
The prompt for today, December 5, is
Let Go. What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why?
As I look over the last year, I don't think of it as letting go of things precisely, more as grasping on to some specific things, and therefore as a result letting other things dropped away. And in fact, now that I think about it, some of this dropping away items were conscious, and other were just an acceptance of my limits.
For example, I had wanted to do National Novel Writing Month () this year - write a 50k word first draft of a novel during November. I've been writing a lot on (over 200k words this year, about 1,000 words per day on average) and I thought NaNoWriMo would be a really good way to put more structure around that, since it seemed I have at least the manual dexterity to do the writing.
But so many things came up, both for work and home, in November, that I realized that not only would I not be able to make it, but I also would be in a terrible mood, and kind of going backwards from where I wanted to be.
I intend to get back to NaNoWriMo, hopefully as soon as next year, and I've let go of some other things temporarily as well - with the idea that I will come back to them in the middle future. These include playing guitar, glassblowing, and a lot of woodworking (I'm still making pens, though! But with no pressure on how many I make or if I sell them).
I'm also trying to let go of things I never actually had. I'm not good with time - "next week" means about the same thing to me as "next month." Until recently I'd always considered that a character flaw, something I needed to hold on to and fix. But now I recognize this "time illiteracy" as one of my characteristics, no longer a condition to be fixed, and so I use tools and strategies to mitigate the lack, and I don't blame myself for not being able to do it better.
Current photovoltaic cells are not too good at capturing the sun's energy - on average less than 20% efficient, and maxing out at about 40%. A new design hits 47% efficiency under certain conditions, by capturing the heat in sunlight, rather than the light.
The cell combines a photovoltaic process that turns light into electricity with another that converts heat; combined, they beat the current record for solar energy efficiency, as well as the theoretical efficiency limit of a cell of this design. (Emphasis added.)
"Theoretical efficiency" is calculated based on a set of assumptions about things like the geometry of the cell, the wavelengths the cell can capture (i.e., visible light), the reflectiveness, etc. When your actual physical devices doesn't actually match the assumptions (i.e., also sucks up infrared), you can get better than theoretical efficiency.
