Peet's recommends putting it in boiling water for a moment in order to rinse it and then steeping it in a rolling boil for five minutes. They then suggest that you can re-steep it once to make a total of four six-ounce servings.
Or you can do what I do: throw it in your TriniTEA for four minutes at a rolling boil and continue re-steeping pot after pot of 27 ounces at a time. Each successive pot is less earthy but Peet's recommendations are quite wasteful—I'm on my third pot today and it still tastes good (but not great).
]]>If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.
Everyone who achieved something in the past did so without productivity tools, blog entries recounting tips and secrets, or even inspiring TED videos. As Scott Berkun put it in his great book The Myths of Innovation, "Many of them were dropouts or wanderers in the spaces between disciplines and professions. However, what they did do was pick specific problems they were passionate about, and got to work."
Be wary of meta-work, in other words. It's too easy to convince yourself that it's actual work.
]]>I've gotten into the habit of checking and reading email constantly, whether on my desktop or my phone. This is generally a waste of time since either there's nothing new there or there's no expectation of immediate response. It is often disruptive to whatever tasks I'm undertaking so it's a great candidate to disrupt and replace. What I did a week or two ago was start quitting my desktop email client when I was done checking it. I also replaced the default Mail app on the iPhone with an app called Sparrow. These environmental changes meant that I wouldn't get the "ding" indicating that there was a new email and that these programs weren't always running (thus readily available). My goal was to only check for email periodically and, more importantly, intentionally. Now I check and process email when I'm wanting to check email. It's definitely made me more productive in this regard.
Another useful tidbit from Markman's book is the power of self-explanation to further knowledge and make it higher quality. His point is that people often traffic in concepts and ideas that they don't fully understand. Poorly grasped knowledge is barely better than no knowledge at all. His recommendation is to probe when you notice that you might not really know what you think you know and to explain new concepts to yourself after you've learned them. In so doing, you will get a richer understanding then you would have otherwise. For example, my MINI Cooper S is turbo-charged. I have never bothered to figure out what that means beyond "it uses hot exhaust gases to make the engine more powerful." That's true as far as it goes, but I really have no idea how exhaust gases can be re-used for a boost in performance. Markman suggests that I should do some more digging until I am comfortable that I know what's going on.
Where this technique becomes useful in the workplace is to develop the practice in your peers and employees. As Markman says, "the best way to do that is to get people to justify or explain their conclusions in meetings and learning situations." I have started doing this with myself and my team whenever we're confronted with a bug or other problem. Far too often we just listen to people's assertions without delving deeper. In failing to do that, we either allow them to be shallow in their thinking or we are shallow in ours for not fully trying to grok the basis for their ideas. (As a side note, this didactic side effect of challenging people's assertions is a great parenting or educational tool for raising inquiring minds.)
There were many other great tips and techniques in the book, and I'd encourage you to get it for yourself to find them. (And if cognitive science is an interest, you simply must get Daniel Willingham's Why Don't Students Like School. It's my favorite book of the last five years and is rich with pregnant ideas—it took me months to finish it because every page compelled me to ponder its ideas.)
[UPDATE (4/30/2012): Along those lines, Peter Bregman agrees that limiting email processing to three times a day is a great boon to productivity.]
]]>In the past when knowledge work was more rare, companies produced a physical good for sale or use as an input to other products. There was a tangible object that had some sort of utility to someone. The problem of a manufacturing company is distribution: how can I get this product into the hands of paying customers that want it. When organizing the employees of such a company, a rigid hierarchy works well because it generates efficiency. That leads to cost reductions, which translate into profits.
But in a knowledge organization, the fundamental problem is producing something of value. Since the product is intangible, anyone could generate it and you're fighting a human tendency to undervalue non-physical goods and services. There's a constant struggle to get customers to actually pay for your product; distribution has become trivial due to the Internet. Everyone in a knowledge-based company must be tied to value production as there's not much opportunity for cost savings since the inputs are typically mental. Efficiency comes from shedding non-producers.
This has implications for career development that are just starting to come to light. For example, your career needs to be horizontal. No longer must one climb the ladder to build a career. Sidesteps and expansion of responsibility without title changes are just as viable in a modern organization, if value production is the key. This makes you more valuable to the company.
And that's the path to a long, fruitful career.
]]>People don't read substantive articles, these scolds complain. Or books. Or the classics. They surf the Internet looking at cat pictures and their textual equivalents. Why can't they read good things that elevate their minds instead of predigested pablum. (Another variant will complain about what people watch on TV. Still another what they listen to on the radio. I don't think there's anyone griping about what people prefer to smell or touch, but I'm interested if you know of them.)
My general stance, after I roll my eyes, is "to each their own." People eat junk food, but that doesn't have any meaningful consequence to your diet. If people choose to subsist entirely on the intellectual equivalent of that, why are your knickers binding? Your nose is missing no skin. If you find value in high-brow long reads, more power to you, sir! If you like chick lit, so be it.
For this reason, I cannot lament the fact of the Internet. It is an unmitigated wonder and its net effect on the world is exceedingly positive. Never in all of human history has it been easier to learn anything, have better access to experts, or publish your writing. The audience for all of this is global and ubiquitous. The New Yorker and TMZ.com can peacefully co-exist, neither acknowledging the other, with their readerships overlapping to whatever degree they may.
As Gandi said, "be the change you want to see in the world." And the author of that piece, after his ironical lament of linkbait—of which he is one of the pioneers as a former editor of Gizmodo, suggests exactly that and commits to living the life he wants others to. (Though that didn't seem to last long given his author page.)
Don't worry about humanity, worry about yourself. People will read, watch, and listen to whatever they want and your chastising isn't going to change that behavior one whit. Eat your organic, healthy mental food and stow your smugness.
]]>Personally, the public be damned. I study Objectivism for my own self. Every day is Randsday as far as I'm concerned.
]]>Heathkits were really great. Heathkits were these products that you would buy in kit form. You actually paid more money for them than if you just went and bought the finished product if it was available. These Heathkits would come with these detailed manuals about how to put this thing together and all the parts would be laid out in a certain way and color coded. You'd actually build this thing yourself. I would say that this gave one several things. It gave one a understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked because it would include a theory of operation but maybe even more importantly it gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe. These things were not mysteries anymore. I mean you looked at a television set you would think that "I haven't built one of those but I could. There's one of those in the Heathkit catalog and I've built two other Heathkits so I could build that." Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation not these magical things that just appeared in one's environment that one had no knowledge of their interiors. It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one's environment. My childhood was very fortunate in that way.
I used to do little electronic kits when I was a kid—we couldn't afford Heathkits—and I, too, think they had a profound influence. Not only do you realize that there's no magic in everyday things, you discover that they're actually far more amazing.
I think about this every day. I drive to work in a vehicle comprised of thousands and thousands of parts from all over the world, designed by a company in England; assembled in a factory in Germany; powered by decomposed dinosaurs dug up in the Middle East and turned into fuel by Texans; and listening to songs selected randomly from a library of thousands on a device that is several orders of magnitude more powerful than the most powerful computers of my childhood. And all I had to do was go to a couple of stores and plunk down some money, an amount that I considered very reasonable.
I mean, who needs fantasy or science fiction? Harry Potter's wand doesn't hold a candle to the productive wonder of global capitalism and the power of the human mind.
The other reason why this hit home for me is that I have kids and I want to impart this sense of wonder to them. It reminded me of Richard Feynman's father. We watch How It's Made and MythBusters and I patiently answer their "why" questions no matter how trivial. I am careful not to overwhelm them or impose my interests on them; I realize that this parenting thing is a marathon and I'll get to everything I know and love eventually.
]]>Now if only someone had done the same for E.G. Ross' The Objective American. That was an exceptional daily essay on wide-ranging topics written in the 90s that did not outlive its creator.
]]>Furthermore, I'm a programmer and manager by trade. Much of programming and management is routine. The beginning of most work is fascinating: you design a system, lay the groundwork, and build something from nothing. But execution tends to be repetitive and detail-oriented. Once the program is out in the wild, maintenance and expansion are very rarely sexy or exciting.
The ability to keep at a task day after day, month after month, year after year is invaluable. It is often what makes the difference between a decent performer and an excellent one. But if your entire childhood is spent flitting about—leaving when the going gets tough—then you're likely going to continue that pattern as an adult and money will only go so far at motivating you to do the menial work. This will manifest itself as being a prima donna, changing jobs frequently, or general dissatisfaction with work.
One response to my entry attacked something that I never said: that the goal of education was boredom and "getting along with peers." While I did not elaborate the point sufficiently, I did say that tedium was not the purpose of education. Clearly, the purpose of education is to give a child the knowledge necessary for being an employed adult. (Making good choices and learning to be happy are more the purpose of parenting.) But that doesn't mean knowledge is the only thing you can get from it.
Off the top of my head, here are some useful skills that you get alongside an education:
Few of those can be acquired from homeschooling. They are all part and parcel of being an adult employee in a modern workplace. It's best to develop them in a relatively risk-fre setting like school—working on them on the job can easily result in a job loss as one makes missteps. Again, these are not the primary aims of school but their acquisition is vital to adult success.
]]>For me, it's like programming. You write a program using frameworks and libraries. When you're done, you run it and everything seems fine. And maybe it continues to run well until it hits an unusual condition, what we in the business call an "edge case." How you respond to this situation is telling.
Some people, typically amateurs or novices, will immediately jump to the conclusion that there is a bug in the framework or libraries on which their program is built. It's a very tempting leap because then they don't have to confront their own fallibility or lack of forethought.
More seasoned programmers will assume that they've made a mistake somewhere along the line and dig into their code to find it. They know that the underlying libraries and frameworks are widely used, deeply tested, and most of the bugs have been found. They don't assume an infallibility on the part of the framework developers—they just recognize that those creators are more skilled than themselves and less likely to have made a seemingly-obvious mistake.
Sometimes, after all is said and done, there is a bug in the library or framework. But you don't know that until you've actually put forth the effort to rule out your own mistakes and to create test cases to demonstrate the problem. In other words, you don't know that there's a deeper problem until you actually know that there's an issue. You may have been right when you made the initial surmise, but it was baseless until you did the work.
That's kind of how I view Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff. Every time I've ever come across something with which I disagreed, I pored over my thinking on the matter and really dove deep into their reasoning. I assumed that I had made a mistake because, well, they're experts and had done an order of magnitude more thinking on the subject than I had. Blindly accepting their position and capriciously rejecting it are two sides of the same coin: shortcuts of thinking.
If after all of my delving I decided that they had made the error, then I'll formulate my reasons (e.g., on the 2004 election) and decide how essential the disagreement. In every case, we've appeared to disagree over strategy rather than anything fundamental. Presumably, I would reject Peikoff or Rand if I thought their conclusion, reasoning, or premises were unsound or at war with reality. So far, I haven't come across anything along those lines and it's certainly not for lack of exposure.
To put this in terms of Joyce's essay, the "Subjectivist Objectivist" wants his program to be treated as part of the underlying framework or library even though he isn't one of the maintainers and isn't willing to publicly fork the project. When anyone calls him on that, he gets defensive and attacks the whistleblower. Other "Subjectivist Objectivists" rally to the task because there's safety in numbers and their worldview is similarly in peril.
What's most interesting to me is that nearly everyone who fits the characterization of "Subjectivist Objectivist" is a former Kelleyite. I think that's important but I'm still mulling over the implications.
[UPDATE (2/2/2012): Revised a sentence in the third paragraph that was very poorly worded. Thanks for letting me know, Mark!]]]>
Let me put the emphasis where I mean it: school can be boring. So can work. So can life.
I'm not going to say that the purpose of school is to be tedious. But learning and mastery aren't supposed to be effortless. You have to learn things that maybe you don't want to because they're a) foundational and b) important. For a child, it'd be great to stick only to what interests you and skip the math drills. And it's tempting to think that a child-centered education might result in more engagement and thus more learning.
But that's not how life works. You can't only work on the fun projects at your office; someone needs to wipe out the toilets; and there's always paperwork to be filed. There's going to be a boss and he's going to tell you to do things. If you cut and run because man that guy's always droning on about the proper sequence to assemble the widget, then you're not going to be employed for long.
Knowing how to handle being bored and follow directions is a life skill. Finding the value in relationships with people unlike yourself (or maybe even beneath your level of intelligence) will serve you for the rest of your life. School is a great place to acquire and practice those skills. If you indulge your child's self-absorption, you're not doing him any favors and disappointment is going to be a theme throughout his life.
]]>The theme was USA and it was held at Chase Field, where the Arizona Diamondbacks play. The grounds were literally the USA, with different sections themed to different parts of America. In the middle was an enormous Statue of Liberty with hot dog carts around it and an incredible selection of desserts. Around the edges were the following:
During the intermissions between the incredible acts, Bob Parsons would give out money assisted by the Go Daddy Girls. In a welcome change this year, the whole process was significantly more automated. The Go Daddy Girl would press an big red button and a name would randomly appear for Bob to read out and it would also show up on the Jumbotron. He gave out over $1.1 million in prizes in $500, $1000, $2500, $5000, and $10,000 increments with the taxes fully paid.
My bosses' boss Neil and I were talking about how great it is to work for a company that had to build a machine to make cash gift distribution more efficient. "We couldn't give the money out fast enough," said he. "So we built something to make it quicker." It was perhaps the most surreal moment when you stopped to think about it.
In sheer scope and diversity, this party easily topped last year's. Two years ago, they filled the stadium with falling snow. Last year, it was an enormous Ferris wheel in the middle of the stadium. This year, there was a bald eagle, the Statue of Liberty, the bridge replica, the sand sculptures, and three huge entertainment acts. It was a tremendous party and I'm so proud to be a part of Go Daddy!
[The views expressed on this website/weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of GoDaddy.com, Inc.]
]]>The key to success is focus and persistence. In life, you won't achieve anything unless you've defined what you want and then work at it. It's the same in business—perhaps even more so. While an individual can dawdle about in a fog and still get enough to eke out an existence, a business that acted like that would fail much more quickly. The marketplace does not reward complacency or mediocrity, not when there is competition or profit to be had.
I look at Google and see them inexplicably trying to copy Microsoft. Microsoft has two cash cows—Office and Windows—but is desperately paranoid that they're running out of milk. So it does exploratory ventures into console gaming, Internet search, cloud computing, smartphones, tablets, health care, and so on. Similarly, Google has two cash cows—search and advertising—but is easily distracted by sexy, new possibilities. The new shiny for them has included mapping, email, social networking, health care, power metering, bookmarking, photo albums, blogging, browsers, smart phones, video, 3D modeling, telephony, and so much more. Interestingly, both companies have entered these new territories primarily through acquisition.
It's important to note that these two companies are wildly successful and I am a fan and happy consumer of many of the technologies I label as distractions. It's entirely possible that all of these side businesses will turn out to be useful hedges against eventual losses in the core business.
But maybe they'd be more successful if they put all that effort into the core businesses and did their expansion in an aligned fashion. For example, Microsoft has an associated enterprise server business that takes advantage of their Windows operating system work. Google's foray into smartphones provides another vehicle for their advertising business. But even the longest of the long views can't explain space elevators.
It's fashionable to talk about Apple at this point. They are renowned for their focus, cutting products to keep things easy to understand. Further, you can see a progression from the iPod to the iPad and the latter as the fulfilled vision of the former. It takes tremendous dedication to keep plugging away to realize that vision. Along the way, Apple has expanded into adjacent territories and built them into decent side businesses that reinforce the core line. iTunes, the App Store, and iCloud make iPods, iPhones, and Macintoshes more valuable and desirable.
I've heard this business model described as the "stadium" model. You get people into the ballpark and then you provide all the concessions so they don't have to leave to get their needs satisfied. This strikes me as a great way to maintain focus yet still have ample room for growth.
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