Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

No one tells you how hard it is to write content. People think that just because you speak English and type using the home row, you should be able to dash off post upon post without breaking a sweat. Not so. Even if you have something to say, you need to undo years of academic conditioning. University will tell you how to write for the professor and how to make everything “correct”, but says almost nothing about writing honest, human communication.  That kind of writing takes training. When I need training, I head over to 750words.com.

750word.com was started by Buster Benson, a developer living in Seattle, WA. It’s a writing challenge where you sit down and write 750 words of free associative writing, a practice inspired by writing exercises and psychotherapy. Only you can access your words (although you can export them), so you don’t have to worry about taking down bad ideas. It’s a great way to experiment with your writing, and leaves you open to those “happy accidents” that are the soul of true creativity.

The site also takes down statistics about your word use and tries to figure out how you are feeling at the time of your writing. You can learn a lot about yourself by just letting your fingers fly across the keyboard. When I decided to show Sara what I had written, she was surprised learn exactly what was going on in my head. I mostly wrote about the move, getting my business going, and all the stress associated with it. I find it difficult to just talk about this stuff verbally. If I write it down, I don’t have to worry about stuttering or messing the words up. Correction is only a backspace key away. I used to think that writing about yourself was kind of narcissistic. While it’s true that having no filter can make people uncomfortable,  attention is not the only reason to reflect. Your own advice has more power when you write it down.  Your words don’t just stay inside your head. You can catch yourself in a lie, or better yet, you can catch yourself speaking the truth. That truth, once etched in letters, can blossom until your life is changed forever.

Do you ever worry that you’re basing your life decisions on bestseller books?

I’m talking about new, fresh off the presses books where the authors are still alive and doing press junkets on Regis and Kelly. The ones that sitcoms always warned you about following. I know it seems like everyone’s chasing their guru of the week, but lately there have been a lot of good gurus to read. You have Levitt and Dubner telling us why swimming pools are more dangerous in your home than handguns. Malcolm Gladwell says that success in the NHL can be attributed to something as random as a January birth date. Seth Godin has us looking at that resume and wondering if it’s even worth the paper it’s printed on when it comes to landing a job.

Right now I’m reading Nicholas Taleb’s book, “Black Swan”, which talks about the nature of improbable events and that lack of knowledge is just as important as knowledge itself. I’m sure my mind is going to be blown and I’m yet again going to take a hard look at how I make my decisions in life. What does that mean? Why am I willing to make choices based on something that millions have already read? If the ideas in these books are so good, the world should have already changed based on what we’ve learned. Traditional commercial advertising should be dead and buried already. We should know that easy access to birth control methods results in less crime. We should have a comprehensive energy conservation plan already. Yet we don’t. If most of the world can’t do anything with same knowledge that I’m getting from the exact same book they are reading, what chance do I have of doing anything different?

The problem with that world view is that it assumes that everyone has read the same bestseller I have. Most people don’t have the time to read them. The fact that these books are bestsellers has nothing to do with how the knowledge inside them could be used. Reading them is easy, but implementing the ideas in real life is something else entirely. Besides, we’re still in love with the idea that success is something magical, ordained by prophecies and other mumbo-jumbo. No one will laugh if you tell them that the key to your success was found in your local library. Unfortunately, no one will believe you, either. Your confession will end up as one of those quotations,  passed off as one of those trite particles of dime-store wisdom drilled into the heads of school children. It might even be used as a chapter heading in your biography, which by that time will be a bonafide best-seller.

I want you to all ponder this article I found over at Business BC. It says that Vancouver Companies are among the stingiest when it comes to compensation, no matter what the level of employee you are. This ultimately holds back the economy, since businesses either cannot or will not foot the bill for the kind of talent that would make the city a world business hub. Due to the exploitive nature of BC’s, business culture, such a change is unlikely to happen.

This is a very interesting analysis of BC’s economy. Poverty advocates and the NDP often cloud the issue with emotions and violins playing in the background. Here you have people with options and no time to make a fuss actually avoiding BC because wages are tooo low.

The author of the article makes some educated guesses over why Vancouver companies are so stingy. Our economy was built on exploiting the land, and our treatment of labour is just an extension of that thinking. What’s more, companies leverage the province’s gorgeous vistas against actually paying money for work.

I wonder if it is that simple. Do managers really want the cheapest work available, or do workers bid low for the opportunity to live in Lotus land? Does the way companies spend money play into it? If you look around BC’s IT and software industry, you find a lot of branch divisions and not too many head offices. How are you supposed to pay $100k for a programmer when corporate only lets you use $70K?

It’s tough to get inside the heads of BC’s business leaders. Most of them don’t blog, and there is no way you are going to see a manager walking around with a sandwich board saying “Johnson was late 3 times this week. Fair wages for Fair hours!”

If we want to make something of BC’s economy, we need to cut through the rhetoric and ask hard questions about “the way things are” in business. It’s not enough to just say “make a change”. Legislation isn’t going to help either. The low wages are just the end symptom of a series of bad business decisions. If we don’t know what those decisions are, then companies will just keep repeating them.

“Specialize!” You hear that word so often on copyblogger and other blog monetization sites. They tell you to find your focus, your core audience, your tribe, and sponsors will beat a bloody path to your door. Big media has spent so much time trying to be all things to all people that the only thing that sells in this media-saturated wasteland is a qualified case of mono-mania. People even tell me, “James, baby, you’re a great writer, but you got to find your specialty here.” I’d like to cite them my favorite Robert Heinlein quote: “Specialization is for insects.”

Don’t get me wrong. You might have seen google ads on this site at one time or another. I would love to make $10,000 a month putting out 250 words a day. But what would i be doing to keep that money coming? Could I labour over the right metaphor for my conclusion? Could I write about things that interest me rather than sacrifice all my mental energy on the alter of “my passion”?

I admit I have a little bit of intellectual ADD. I graduated university four courses shy of a BA in English along with my full Bachelor of Computer Information Systems. I believe both disciplines inform each other and make me more well-rounded. This obsession with specialization makes us forget that our greatest ideas come from combinations of many ideas, not ivory tower isolation. It robs us of our potential as human beings.

But why am I writing a blog if I am making sure that not many people will read it? They may be few in number, but this blog does have readers. They are my friends and family. People I want to connect and share my ideas with, but whom I don’t want to bother with a 10:30pm phone call to discuss my latest brainstorm. If this blog is to have a focus, let it be this: It is about me, James Strocel, talking to you. Pleased to meet you.

By all accounts I should be too old for Anime conventions. They are crowded, smelly, and noisy. Not a year goes by without some epic account of organizational ineptitude on the part of the managing staff. My total wait time at registration this year was three and a half hours. The hazards of cosplay are many. You can kill yourself trying to meet a con deadline through accidents with sharp objects,  hotglue and paint fumes, not to mention sleep deprivation. Don’t ever forget the sleep deprivation! That bustling photo you see in this post was taken at 10:30pm! Yet still, year after year, my friends and I manage to show up. Why do we do this to ourselves?

I don’t think the answer has anything to do with meeting friends or a slavish devotion to Japanese cartoons. Sometimes you just need an ordeal. No matter where you are in life, no matter what problems you have, there is nothing like a good shunt of self-inflicted stress to make it all go away. When you’re working on a costume, a music video or a drawing, you aren’t thinking about car payments or where your career is going. You just know that when Saturday rolls around, that labor of love needs to be out the door, no matter what state it’s in. When you see the looks of amazement on the faces of passersby, you know you’ve just spun a little bit of fiction into fact.

These conventions retain a kind of purity because of the fact that only the anime creators are allowed to really make money there. You’re not grasping after abstract concepts like meaning or marketability, you’re just having fun taking something that was in your head and making it a reality. That feeling of knowing “hey, I made that” feeds the soul. Once you’ve tasted it, you’ll go through hell and back to experience it again.

Despite all of the government’s TV ads stating the contrary, we are still in the throes of an economic downturn. The provincial government is still in a hiring freeze, businesses still have trouble finding credit, and the Canadian dollar is still at par with the US. Take any market chart you like and the numbers will likely be negative.

It’s easy to get depressed about figures like these, but I find myself more fascinated by so called “Uncommon” economic indicators surveyed by NPR in Washington State (Link). In this survey, they had people fill in the following sentence: Indicators for me that the economy is getting better or worse is when I see or hear ____ (blank). From 1200 responses they came up with things like the weight of container ships in ports, or the length of lines at Starbucks. After doing some thinking, I’ve come up with a couple of indicators of my own.

-Crowds at dollar and thrift stores

-Home depot setting up bleachers to seat all of their applicants (Many of whom are older adults in suits)

-Seeing the same set of commercials on television over and over again

Has anyone else noticed uncommon economic indicators? If you can think of any, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

I found this neat little animation about procrastination at Fast Company. Basically procrastination can be good if you can simply translate into a worthwhile activity. Your hatred of actually doing that urgent work will be your ticket to motivational bliss.

If you think about it, it kind of makes a case for keeping lots of optional projects on the go. Sure, you’ll have more stuff to put off, but eventually that one activity that you’ll hate the least. Come to think of it, my kitchen needs cleaning…

Over the weekend our friends Theo and Tarra allowed us to turn their house into a small-scale Industrial Light and Magic. I won’t say what we were working on, but there are more pics after the jump if you want a sneak preview!

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