9 ms·

How to win friends and influence people with an iPad in a coffee shop

111 points by timf 15y ago

gojomo 15y ago
Love this pair of observations about how books get judged by their worst parts, but collections of online posts for their best: Another problem with a book is that it's One Big Thing. Very few book reviews say "Chapter two is a gem, buy the book for this and ignore chapter six, the author is confused." Most just say "He's an idiot, chapter six is proof of that." ...versus... Thanks to Twitter and Hacker News and whatever else, if you write a good thing, it gets judged on its own. You can write 99 failures but you are judged by your best work, not your worst. Microcontent (and even decontextualization) for the win.
- jvc26 15y ago
  Its a bit like the paradigm of buying single songs from an iTunes album, rather than being forced to buy the whole album with the rubbish songs too - a step forward!
  - dmerfield 15y ago
    Whilst I agree that there is more chance of having one successful essay on the Internet, I don't buy the notion of decontextualisation. If it takes 99 essays to write one which meets the demands of your audience, you can't help but think they've switched off already.
    - nasmorn 15y ago
      No because your one successful essay is the only one that your audience will ever read. The others are just read by your friends and coworkers or your hardcore fans, if you have any.
jasonshen 15y ago
So good. I've basically pursued this strategy for the last year and it's worked out really well for me. You often have no idea what people are going to find valuable - so produce more and let the people decide.
knowtheory 15y ago
Mm. I agree in principle, but i have always thought that the "just do it" (for whatever value of "it" you choose) is a rather glib assertion. The process of doing isn't sufficient in of itself to improve. The key to improvement is feedback and self-analysis with an eye towards better quality. Raganwald admits as much. Sure doing is a prerequisite to feedback, but the important part is how you learn from yourself and others, and how you go about that process.
- raganwald 15y ago
  Great comment, thanks! My assertion is rather glib, however underlying it is this suggestion: If you have a choice between writing blog post and thinking about a process for handling feedback and self-improvement, I say write the blog post first and work out what to do with teh feedback when you have it. When I started pro to-blogging in 2004 by publishing raw HTML on a web server, I did not have a process. I still don't if you compare me to people like Jeff Atwood who (used to) blog on a schedule and could easily articulate things like his market demographics. I suggest that while it's better to be Jeff than Reg, it's still better to be Reg than Unknown. Of course, we probably agree on this as well.
  - knowtheory 15y ago
    Yep! I agree that it's always better to write something than nothing. But, sometimes it's not much more. You have to have some basic levels of quality and coherence of thought to get picked up to the point where you actually have readers. And until that point, you're out shopping your content around yourself, asking your friends what they think. That's a process i find challenging unless i'm proud (at some level) of what i have written. Perhaps another angle on this is, you see a lot of good writers saying that all that they needed to do is write more. I have to wonder if there's an element of self-selection in such statements. All that said, i need to spend more time writing both code and prose. ;)
  - blasdel 15y ago
    It is not ever better to be Jeff — what poverty of thought! I've enjoyed your blog thoroughly for the last 6 years or so, but I would much rather you be Reg to a smaller audience and Unknown to me than be Jeff to the world.
ChuckFrank 15y ago
Well said, I agree completely. Having lectured on "How to Start" - my thesis is basically "Start small." If you can't start it at a certain size, start smaller, and if you still can't start it a certain size, go smaller still. In fact, it turns out there is nothing too small to start. The act of starting and doing at even the tiniest scale is the key. So if you are a designer, design or redesign the paperclip. If you are a programmer, make something tiny, a single function app, or site. And yes, like Mr. raganwald has discovered, if you are writer, start small. A sentence, a tweet, a poem, or a blog. Start small, take small steps, make small bets, but work long. When your competitors have finished, work on, when your peers have retired, work on, and slowly, piece by piece, amazing things happen. I believe it's the law of making things. And I believe it's almost Newtonian in it's truth.
- kahawe 15y ago
  I think it really boils down to "Start!" and to the fact that what you might see as "so talented" in other people is actually just the result of them having spent much more time on X than you have - meaning that you can do or learn practically anything you set your mind to and put effort into and there are lots of ways to be more efficient about it but ultimately, you will have to "start!".
ntoshev 15y ago
He writes essays on an iPad?
- raganwald 15y ago
  That was written in Mail on an iPad using an Apple bluetooth keyboard, then emailed to posterous.com. This is the reason for the horrible line breaks, but I left things that way deliberately. Certain "simplistic" tools force me to concentrate on writing and not on formatting, and that helps me write more often. I'm a big fan of markdown for this reason, and tools like Github, Byword, or Textastic that embrace markdown are my preference. But I usually write essays using TextMate or Byword on an iMac. I sometimes use Mail on a Mac, but the formatting when it reaches posterous.com is nicer.
colson04 15y ago
I'm torn. I recently started my own site and have been following the 'write every day' protocol. I'm not always in the mood and don't always have special inspiration, but I maintain the schedule. A friend recently resurrected and redesigned (after 2 year hiatus) his site and it looks amazing. His writing is amazing. Problem is that the site is complete and he hasn't written one post because of his perfectionist nature. Is there a right answer here? What is better: continuously writing in the name of honing skills or withholding talent in the pursuit of perfection? Another blogger advised the former, saying that as far as blogs go your mediocre content will simply be forgotten and a really good piece may make HN and go viral. In other words, just do as raganwald suggests and be prolific before all else. There is no real downside to maintaining a schedule and just going for it. For beginners like myself I tend to agree with that statement - practice, hone your skills, develop your methods and thought processes and continue writing every day.
neilc 15y ago
If I was writing a book, I'd do a terrible job, because my nose for what people want is broken. When I write essays, I don't care, I write everything and I let Hacker News and Twitter sort out the wheat from my chaff. Personally I think this is a bad idea, because what is popular on HN rarely correlates with what I consider to be quality writing. If your goal is just to get an article on HN, that can be done pretty easily: give it a provocative title, discuss one of a handful of topics (e.g., node.js, Clojure, Scala, Rails, Apple/iOS, etc.), and make it easily skimmable within 30-45 seconds. If HN popularity was a reliable metric for quality, TechCrunch would deserve a Pulitzer. If you want to write short pieces that attract the interest of a programmer while their code compiles, HN is a decent metric. If you want to write something with lasting meaning or value, it is not. (Obviously, that isn't to say that nothing on HN has lasting meaning or value -- just that the correlation between lasting quality and HN popularity is weak, at best.)
- deleted 15y ago
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  - deleted 15y ago
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- raganwald 15y ago
  Sorry, I deleted another reply. My essay perhaps does a poor job of explaining what I meant when I used the word "quality." I meant quality of exposition, not quality of ideas. So I meant, it's more important to get your ideas out there quickly than to polish, polish, polish, or worse to avoid writing at all because you fear you don't write well. The subject of whether your ideas themselves are good is another kind of quality. If they're your genuine ideas and they genuinely interest you, that's good enough for me. It may not be good enough for HN, but if you're writing "honestly," you have my support and admiration. If someone wants to try "HNO" (Hacker News Optimization) just for the false reputation, well, I can't help them and they probably know more about how to game aggregators than I can even imagine. But if you have genuine ideas that interest you, my discussion of "quality" is strictly about the delivery.
noduerme 15y ago
After his point in paragraph three, I realized this guy's just writing what amounts to highbrow SEO-filler, so I stopped reading. Yes, quality matters. But quality isn't measured by how "polished" an essay is. That is a gross misunderstanding of quality-in-writing... QUALITY REQUIRES HAVING SOMETHING WORTH SAYING, and saying it concisely.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
  - noduerme 15y ago
    SEO filler is content written for the explicit purpose of raising your site's traffic by ranking higher on search engines. In order to be good filler, it has to look informational; but it actually contains no useful information. Your essay spends pages and pages expounding the claim that verbal diarrhea is a good thing. Is it a joke...?
- raganwald 15y ago
  Now that you've explained SEO-filler, I refute the supposition thus: You explain that SEO-filler is written with the intent of attracting search engine referral traffic. I have no such intent, therefore my writing is not SEO-filler or anything else related to SEO. Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by an author's love of reading his own writing.
illumen 15y ago
Write.
- illumen 15y ago
  Delete after "Write", then add full stop to the end.
gaius 15y ago
This is the same advice given by every good photographer. David Bailey once said, the easiest way to double the quality of your portfolio is to throw away half of it. When you see an exhibition by a top photographer, you might be looking at the best 50 out of 50,000 images. But you have to be shooting, all the time, to pull this off.

111 points by timf 15y ago

Love this pair of observations about how books get judged by their worst parts, but collections of online posts for their best: Another problem with a book is that it's One Big Thing. Very few book reviews say "Chapter two is a gem, buy the book for this and ignore chapter six, the author is confused." Most just say "He's an idiot, chapter six is proof of that." ...versus... Thanks to Twitter and Hacker News and whatever else, if you write a good thing, it gets judged on its own. You can write 99 failures but you are judged by your best work, not your worst. Microcontent (and even decontextualization) for the win.

jvc26 15y ago
Its a bit like the paradigm of buying single songs from an iTunes album, rather than being forced to buy the whole album with the rubbish songs too - a step forward!
- dmerfield 15y ago
  Whilst I agree that there is more chance of having one successful essay on the Internet, I don't buy the notion of decontextualisation. If it takes 99 essays to write one which meets the demands of your audience, you can't help but think they've switched off already.
  - nasmorn 15y ago
    No because your one successful essay is the only one that your audience will ever read. The others are just read by your friends and coworkers or your hardcore fans, if you have any.

jasonshen 15y ago

So good. I've basically pursued this strategy for the last year and it's worked out really well for me. You often have no idea what people are going to find valuable - so produce more and let the people decide.

knowtheory 15y ago

Mm. I agree in principle, but i have always thought that the "just do it" (for whatever value of "it" you choose) is a rather glib assertion. The process of doing isn't sufficient in of itself to improve. The key to improvement is feedback and self-analysis with an eye towards better quality. Raganwald admits as much. Sure doing is a prerequisite to feedback, but the important part is how you learn from yourself and others, and how you go about that process.

raganwald 15y ago
Great comment, thanks! My assertion is rather glib, however underlying it is this suggestion: If you have a choice between writing blog post and thinking about a process for handling feedback and self-improvement, I say write the blog post first and work out what to do with teh feedback when you have it. When I started pro to-blogging in 2004 by publishing raw HTML on a web server, I did not have a process. I still don't if you compare me to people like Jeff Atwood who (used to) blog on a schedule and could easily articulate things like his market demographics. I suggest that while it's better to be Jeff than Reg, it's still better to be Reg than Unknown. Of course, we probably agree on this as well.
- knowtheory 15y ago
  Yep! I agree that it's always better to write something than nothing. But, sometimes it's not much more. You have to have some basic levels of quality and coherence of thought to get picked up to the point where you actually have readers. And until that point, you're out shopping your content around yourself, asking your friends what they think. That's a process i find challenging unless i'm proud (at some level) of what i have written. Perhaps another angle on this is, you see a lot of good writers saying that all that they needed to do is write more. I have to wonder if there's an element of self-selection in such statements. All that said, i need to spend more time writing both code and prose. ;)
- blasdel 15y ago
  It is not ever better to be Jeff — what poverty of thought! I've enjoyed your blog thoroughly for the last 6 years or so, but I would much rather you be Reg to a smaller audience and Unknown to me than be Jeff to the world.

ChuckFrank 15y ago

Well said, I agree completely. Having lectured on "How to Start" - my thesis is basically "Start small." If you can't start it at a certain size, start smaller, and if you still can't start it a certain size, go smaller still. In fact, it turns out there is nothing too small to start. The act of starting and doing at even the tiniest scale is the key. So if you are a designer, design or redesign the paperclip. If you are a programmer, make something tiny, a single function app, or site. And yes, like Mr. raganwald has discovered, if you are writer, start small. A sentence, a tweet, a poem, or a blog. Start small, take small steps, make small bets, but work long. When your competitors have finished, work on, when your peers have retired, work on, and slowly, piece by piece, amazing things happen. I believe it's the law of making things. And I believe it's almost Newtonian in it's truth.

kahawe 15y ago
I think it really boils down to "Start!" and to the fact that what you might see as "so talented" in other people is actually just the result of them having spent much more time on X than you have - meaning that you can do or learn practically anything you set your mind to and put effort into and there are lots of ways to be more efficient about it but ultimately, you will have to "start!".

ntoshev 15y ago

He writes essays on an iPad?

raganwald 15y ago
That was written in Mail on an iPad using an Apple bluetooth keyboard, then emailed to posterous.com. This is the reason for the horrible line breaks, but I left things that way deliberately. Certain "simplistic" tools force me to concentrate on writing and not on formatting, and that helps me write more often. I'm a big fan of markdown for this reason, and tools like Github, Byword, or Textastic that embrace markdown are my preference. But I usually write essays using TextMate or Byword on an iMac. I sometimes use Mail on a Mac, but the formatting when it reaches posterous.com is nicer.

colson04 15y ago

I'm torn. I recently started my own site and have been following the 'write every day' protocol. I'm not always in the mood and don't always have special inspiration, but I maintain the schedule. A friend recently resurrected and redesigned (after 2 year hiatus) his site and it looks amazing. His writing is amazing. Problem is that the site is complete and he hasn't written one post because of his perfectionist nature. Is there a right answer here? What is better: continuously writing in the name of honing skills or withholding talent in the pursuit of perfection? Another blogger advised the former, saying that as far as blogs go your mediocre content will simply be forgotten and a really good piece may make HN and go viral. In other words, just do as raganwald suggests and be prolific before all else. There is no real downside to maintaining a schedule and just going for it. For beginners like myself I tend to agree with that statement - practice, hone your skills, develop your methods and thought processes and continue writing every day.

neilc 15y ago

If I was writing a book, I'd do a terrible job, because my nose for what people want is broken. When I write essays, I don't care, I write everything and I let Hacker News and Twitter sort out the wheat from my chaff. Personally I think this is a bad idea, because what is popular on HN rarely correlates with what I consider to be quality writing. If your goal is just to get an article on HN, that can be done pretty easily: give it a provocative title, discuss one of a handful of topics (e.g., node.js, Clojure, Scala, Rails, Apple/iOS, etc.), and make it easily skimmable within 30-45 seconds. If HN popularity was a reliable metric for quality, TechCrunch would deserve a Pulitzer. If you want to write short pieces that attract the interest of a programmer while their code compiles, HN is a decent metric. If you want to write something with lasting meaning or value, it is not. (Obviously, that isn't to say that nothing on HN has lasting meaning or value -- just that the correlation between lasting quality and HN popularity is weak, at best.)

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
raganwald 15y ago
Sorry, I deleted another reply. My essay perhaps does a poor job of explaining what I meant when I used the word "quality." I meant quality of exposition, not quality of ideas. So I meant, it's more important to get your ideas out there quickly than to polish, polish, polish, or worse to avoid writing at all because you fear you don't write well. The subject of whether your ideas themselves are good is another kind of quality. If they're your genuine ideas and they genuinely interest you, that's good enough for me. It may not be good enough for HN, but if you're writing "honestly," you have my support and admiration. If someone wants to try "HNO" (Hacker News Optimization) just for the false reputation, well, I can't help them and they probably know more about how to game aggregators than I can even imagine. But if you have genuine ideas that interest you, my discussion of "quality" is strictly about the delivery.

noduerme 15y ago

After his point in paragraph three, I realized this guy's just writing what amounts to highbrow SEO-filler, so I stopped reading. Yes, quality matters. But quality isn't measured by how "polished" an essay is. That is a gross misunderstanding of quality-in-writing... QUALITY REQUIRES HAVING SOMETHING WORTH SAYING, and saying it concisely.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
- noduerme 15y ago
  SEO filler is content written for the explicit purpose of raising your site's traffic by ranking higher on search engines. In order to be good filler, it has to look informational; but it actually contains no useful information. Your essay spends pages and pages expounding the claim that verbal diarrhea is a good thing. Is it a joke...?
raganwald 15y ago
Now that you've explained SEO-filler, I refute the supposition thus: You explain that SEO-filler is written with the intent of attracting search engine referral traffic. I have no such intent, therefore my writing is not SEO-filler or anything else related to SEO. Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by an author's love of reading his own writing.

illumen 15y ago

Write.

illumen 15y ago
Delete after "Write", then add full stop to the end.

gaius 15y ago

This is the same advice given by every good photographer. David Bailey once said, the easiest way to double the quality of your portfolio is to throw away half of it. When you see an exhibition by a top photographer, you might be looking at the best 50 out of 50,000 images. But you have to be shooting, all the time, to pull this off.