Fire and Knowledge

Reality is all about doing ality over and over again.

—Abraham Piper

I just found a domain naming service called PickyDomains. You pay them $50 and if you like any of the domains, you just register it normally. If you don’t like any of them, they refund the $50. Sounds like a deal to me; I’m going to try it for a new idea of mine.

If you choose to manage a project, it’s pretty safe. As the manager, you report. You report on what’s happening, you chronicle the results, you are the middleman.

If you choose to run a project, on the other hand, you’re on the hook. It’s an active engagement, bending the status quo to your will, ensuring that you ship.

Running a project requires a level of commitment that’s absent from someone who is managing one. Who would you rather hire, a manager or a runner?

—Seth Godin

I’ve been addicted to email for a long time. Only in the last few years have I made a conscious effort to break the addiction and do scheduled email processing — and I only did it out of necessity. Constant email checking is a huge waste of time. It is far more efficient to process in batches, but it doesn’t give the same constant rush.

Tony Schwartz talks about this in his article “Breaking the Email Addiction“:

Out of 1200 respondents, some 60 percent said they spend less than two waking hours a day completely disconnected from email. Twenty percent spend less than a half hour disconnected. Email has become our intravenous feeding tube. [...]

It isn’t overload we’re battling anymore, it’s addiction — to action, and information, and connection, but above all to instant gratification.

In the late 1960s, the psychologist Walter Mischel began conducting his famous “marshmallow” experiment. He placed a marshmallow in front of a succession of four-year-olds. Mischel told them they were free to eat the marshmallow simply by ringing a bell after he’d left the room. However, if they were able to wait untill he returned, he told them they could have two marshmallows.

Seventy percent of the children gave up in less than a minute. Only thirty percent were able to wait 15 minutes.

Mischel termed marshmallows a “hot stimulus” — meaning highly seductive — not unlike the ping of an email, or a text.

We’re pulled to anything that provides instant gratification, even when we know we’d get a bigger reward for delaying. We’re also quick to respond to any excuse to stop working on something that is difficult and requires high concentration.

What Mischel discovered is that the low delayers quickly burned down their limited reservoir of will and discipline by staring directly (and longingly) at the marshmallow.

The high delayers found something else entirely to focus on. They never looked at the marshmallow.

Mischel came to call this skill “strategic allocation of attention.” It’s a capacity many of us have lost when it comes to the Pavlovian pull of email.

I don’t want to be in constant respond mode. I want to focus and concentrate on what’s actually important, not be in bondage to the tyranny of the now.

A haunting quote:

Our new government is founded upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.

—Alexander H. Stephens, Vice President of the Confederate States of America

As a nation we began by declaring “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it that all men are created equal except negroes, foreigners and Catholics. When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

—Abraham Lincoln

Kottke quotes from Wallace’s Infinite Jest on why videophones might die out. Here’s a summary quote:

The answer, in a kind of trivalent nutshell, is: (1) emotional stress, (2) physical vanity, and (3) a certain queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the microeconomics of consumer high-tech.

I think video is a great option to have and I’m sure I will use it (especially with family). But for casual long-distance conversation, audio-only will reign for a while yet.