Kevin Vogelsang

I’m working on a book right now.  It’s fairly short, but it’s taking much longer than I had anticipated. Most of the content is there, but as usual, the devil is in the details.  Good writing is crisp, clear, and compelling;  there’s always something to tighten up and improve.    (It’s currently over 11,000 words.  No wonder longer works take years to write.)

But the Truth is, any work of art, any thing we create , is very personal–it represents us.  And it’s never perfect, and we could spend an infinite amount of time on it.  I didn’t fully realize this until my first startup expedition.

For this reason, Ayn Rand, as well as other authors, considered using a pseudonym for her books.  She knew it would always have shortcomings.  She wrote some of the most epic novels of the century.

The strategy most product-related artists take is to push the work out the door as soon as possible and fix it later.  This strategy puts pressure on the artist to improve it as soon as possible (you don’t want something subpar out there) and allows you to start getting thoughts and feedback to improve (or to learn from in your next work.)

Anyone out there that makes stuff have any thoughts on getting a creation out the door?  or deciding when it’s finished?

-Kevin
12.29.2009

There’s a problem with digital content right now, incentives exist for creating crappy content: content is defined  by SEO (Search Engine Optimization, creating content that will rank highly in Google) and “realtime” (breaking stories quickly).

As for SEO-driven content, Content Creators play the game of mass-producing content for niche-based searches (What are people searching for?  Let’s pay someone $10 to write an article on it.  Rinse and repeat thousands of times per day.)  Michael Arrington wrote a good post on this topic “The End of Handcrafted Content.”

The increased incentive to be “realtime” and break stories quickly over services like Twitter also lead to poor content.  Take for instance, the “Black Screen of Death” Episode.  PC World essentially spread a completely unfounded rumor about a technical problem on Windows.  PC World’s editor’s justification: “We were chasing the story in realtime.”  (Give me a break.  Just say you fucked up.)

Ed Bott at ZDnet had a good write-up about the representative fiasco here: “What the Black Screen of Death  story says about Tech Journalism.”

Then of course, there’s the problem of content creators ripping off quality stories from real journalists and doing sub-par writeups to catch the story.  This only adds to the crud littering the web, burying quality content.

ReadWriteWeb has a good synopsis of the issues facing content here: “Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs and Google should be worried.”

The incentive to churn out poor content dilutes the value of the information on the web, as well as throws in misinformation.  It’s difficult to tell the difference.  How much time do you really want to spend sifting through content? And still, how do you tell if it’s good information, particularly if its an area outside your expertise?

The internet can provide easily accessible information and should be the ultimate educational/informational resource.  Allowing people to easily become well-informed is vital.  And while there is plenty of quality content that can be found, if you’re adept at it, it needs to be much better.  (I still largely rely on word of mouth to find good sources.  Best way to find good content: ask someone knowledgeable on the topic what they read.  What if you don’t have access to such people?)

It will get solved.  In a way, I’m working on this problem.  I hope others are as well.

-Kevin
12.28.09

Imitation is often frowned upon.  We seem to equate imitation to being unoriginal.  This is an immature frame of thought–imitation is a vital tool.

We study the masters of a craft to learn what they know.  By making use of actions/techniques/strategies/behaviors that resemble another’s, we aren’t being unoriginal, we’re making use of a Truth they’ve already discovered. And so long as we do this in a way that adds value, we should aim to imitate the masters: we should stand on the shoulders of giants.

This is progress.  Imitation is a part of learning and is often a precursor to innovation.

By masters I don’t mean only dead men you’ll find  in history books, these are masters that happen to be documented.  A master could be anyone that knows more about something than anyone. And with billions of skills and nuances to be mastered, we encounter masters every day.

Reaching for perfection is a perpetual process; we can only asymptotically approach an ideal.

Reaching for progress is also an evolutionary process.

With this in mind, if you’re really good at something, we should find shards of others skilled in the art–traces of past progress that persist, that is, until the next paradigm is reached.

-Kevin
12.27.09

Fear of failure is a powerful motivator, and it shouldn’t be underestimated, otherwise we run the risk of not harnessing it, or worse, letting it paralyze us.

It’s surprising how many successful people were so worried about “not being good enough”.  This feeling of inadequacy drove them to work harder than everyone else and pushed them to the front of the pack and beyond.

Charles Schwab suffered from dyslexia, a learning disability that causes difficulty with reading and writing.  Although he was unaware he had the disorder until he was 40, supposedly, his difficulties caused him to work relentlessly to overcome it.

When we put our name on something, and publicly engage in some task, we can’t let ourselves fail.  We’ve proclaimed it to the world.  This creates accountability to our own pride and others we don’t want to let down.

The danger is that fear of failure stops us from trying.

When taking up a new endeavor, we might be tempted to not tell anyone.  We actually help ourselves by telling everyone we can.  Not only will this motivate us to work harder, we also give others the opportunity to help us.

-Kevin
12.13.2009

A few weeks ago, way back before Thanksgiving, I had the chance to meet Eric Ries, founder of IMVU and author of Startup Lessons Learned.

Eric has some good insights about startups, but I think it all comes back to two basic principles that are broadly applicable:

1) Be careful how you measure progress. You manage what you measure.  If you measure the wrong things, you’ll manage poorly.  Additionally, Eric brought up a good point, “Don’t assume advancing the plan is equivalent to progress.  What if the plan is flawed?” Particularly in startups, but in any context, you need to be adaptive.

2) If a mistake is made, spend an amount of time, proportional to the magnitude of the mistake, implementing systems for preventing that class of mistakes. Don’t make the same mistake twice.  Prevent that class of mistakes by incrementally developing prevention systems.

-Kevin
12.2.09