So the Dan Ariely behavioural economics course I did? I got 93.5%, and a statement of accomplishment signed by the master himself. YES!
I did better than I expected, which means I prove one of the experiments I read about during the course, that women undervalue themselves when in a group, which coincidentally was also proved in a recent University of Massachusetts study that I heard about on Wired UK’s podcast that I listened to this morning.
I’m already getting better at this sort of thing 
The house was probably not built for renting out. There’s only one kitchen, a vast hall-like room on the ground floor that has seen cooking on a mass scale once, but now lies mostly unused. The rest of the ground floor is divided between a dining room and a huge and draughty living room where a few very modern sofas, a foosball table and a very large flatscreen TV stand uncomfortably, like jugglers at a funeral.
- From Turbulence by Samit Basu
Jugglers at a funeral. There’s poetry in that phrase.
It’s also a sort of Googlewhackable phrase. Only 2 results if you key it in within quotes. (That will change with this post though…)
I don’t see that very often these days.
But the idea is that companies design products with a short life, like the pretty computers I see these days, with the shiny logos, the biblical half-eaten fruit and so on, pretty objects that are built to self-destruct, so you buy another in a few years, and another and another, and in that way you feed the insect empire, the insects in their insect suits, thinking insect thoughts with their sexed-up insect brains.
- Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis
This excerpt came to mind recently when I read about O2′s Charger out of the Box initiative. O2 are going to offer a micro-USB to USB cable instead of the usual phone-specific charger, to take advantage of the general trend towards standardised connectors. But even the Wired article above caveats that with ‘with the exception of Apple’s proprietary jack.’
That’s one of the things that frustrates me about Apple. Even the iPhone 5′s cable is now different from the rest of the iFamily, and so Apple users are forced to collect chargers rather than get rid of this mess of wires that people want to leave behind them. The EU is forcing Apple to sell an adapter to mitigate this problem, because even they realise how ‘how dumb it is for every smartphone not to use the same cable to charge and sync.’
In the end, I think planning for obsolescence is regressive rather than progressive thinking, and companies who insist on thinking that way aren’t going to win the long game.
Brands like Hiut Denim that plan for longevity have a much more compelling and relevant story for our age. It’s tougher to translate that to electronics I agree, but it’s not impossible.
I was at the Mermaid Theatre in London a couple of days ago to hear Seth Godin speak about his latest book The Icarus Deception.
I’ve been reading his blog for years. I’ll be honest – I’ve had moments of doubt in between when I wasn’t quite sure why I continued to read what he had to say (some of it is proper marketing spiel), but his talk this week yet again put those doubts to rest (I saw him speak a few years ago when he was in London last). He’s sort of like Oprah Winfrey for the creative masses – I scribbled that phrase down as I was listening to him. He’s also very honest, which is why it’s easy to believe him.
I have no map, all I have is a compass.
As he said, he wasn’t telling us anything new, but he was gently guiding us towards what we feel we ought to be doing, just never really say out loud. He says we all have art in us, we’re just conditioned not to act to bring it to live – we’re conditioned to be in a 9-to-5 job right from when we were young. He did a quick experiment to bring this to life – he asked us to raise our hands and all of us did so without really asking why, or at least the majority of us did. And that’s because we’re taught to do that from school whenever we want to say something. We ask for permission to do things when we really ought to just go out there and do it.
One of the excuses we often make about not doing something is that we’re waiting for our ducks to be in a row. Make enough money, buy a house, finish a course, whatever. He challenged us by saying:
What will you do with your ducks when they are all in a row?
Penguin are a really smart publishing company that really gets new media – this was the first Penguin Live event. They gave each of us 2 copies of the book, with a request by Godin to give the extra copy to ‘anyone who would be uncomfortable by it.’ Penguin also built an app which enabled anyone at the event (we each had a unique code at the bottom of the bag we were given the books in), to gift a copy via Twitter to anyone who inspires them. I gave mine to Collyn, who I think is doing very inspiring stuff with Rapha, and who I just heard has been invited to speak at the next Do Lectures. Go C! Penguin should be in touch with you via Twitter to get your address so they can send the book to you.
There was also a letter-pressed bookmark, which Seth Godin asked us to secretly insert in a copy of the book in any bookstore. People who find a bookmark were asked to email a picture of it him – he’s collecting them all here.
To close, we saw 5 people stand up and speak about things they’re doing in their lives that took some courage to get going. Amongst these were Anne McCrossan who spoke about starting Visceral Business and Matthew Stafford who spoke about starting 9others.com. I also learnt of the Positive Deviance Network.
Right, now to to dust those cobwebs off those ideas of mine…
From today’s delanceyplace email, a snippet from a book about America by Jill Lepore, featuring Charles Dickens:
Whenever an extra in a Dickens novel needs to make an escape, he exits stage left, to an unseen America; characters with better billing merely gesture westward, like so many weathercocks. Mr. Monks flees ‘to a distant part of the New World,’ where he meets his end in an American penitentiary. Amy Dorrit wishes her worthless brother Tip would decamp for Canada. Herbert Pocket fancies ‘buying a rifle and going to America, with a general purpose of compelling buffalo to make his fortune.’ Sam Weller’s father proposes sneaking Mr. Pickwick out of Fleet Street prison (‘Me and a cab’net-maker has dewised a plan for gettin him out’), by concealing him in a piece of furniture (‘A pianner, Samivel, a pianner!’), and sending him across the ocean, where all his troubles will be over, because he could ‘come back and write a book about the ‘Merrikas as ‘ll pay his expenses.’ It needed only the piano. …
Dickens apparently was very keen on going to America himself. That was in the 1840′s. Today, we see stories about America’s place in the world being gradually eroded, whether due to the fiscal cliff or the growth of the BRIC nations.
In the book I’m currently reading, Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, in the first few pages of the book (the book itself is situated in a time in the future) America is made out to be the one place few want to go to – there’s even a line about how, apart from a few Albanians, there’s no one else queuing up in the American Embassy in Rome.
An amusing observation, that’s all.
I’ve just finished reading ‘Behind the Beautiful Forevers‘, a compelling work of non-fiction by Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker journalist Katherine Boo that documents the underlying tensions of a modern country tightly welded to a massive, ugly bureaucracy.
Annawadi is a slum on the border of Mumbai’s glossy international airport. Over the course of four years, Katherine Boo trailed its residents, photographed, videoed, and spoke to them to understand what life in poverty is really like in a country that has time and again been touted as one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. Brutally and lyrically, her words simultaneously convey the impact of global events like the 2008 economic crisis in the West on the lives of these people thousands of miles away: all at once it matters and yet doesn’t. Abdul, one of the key characters in the book, is too ‘busy’ being beaten by policemen while in custody for a crime he did not commit, for example, while his mother is running from pillar to post to be able to afford the bribes that multiple government officials demand for what they’d probably call his ‘safety and security’.
Other political events like the terrorist attacks in the city, also in 2008, are a double whammy to the livelihoods of this community (as they would have been to millions of others). Many of the residents of Annawadi have temp jobs in the adjoining five-star hotels such as the Intercontinental and the Hyatt, and are forced to make step changes in their habits. ‘Step-change’ doesn’t mean what you and I think are accustomed to thinking, though. One sentence sums that up perfectly: ‘More Annawadians had to relearn how to digest rats.’
In the clip above, Katherine Boo mentions the ‘last mile problem‘ that I think is something a lot of us could do with thinking about a bit more. It isn’t restricted to countries in Africa and Asia – in fact on a philosophical level it affects the advertising industry a fair bit: this tendency not to engage or complete projects that are almost no-brainers. Where in some parts of the world it’s sheer greed, in other parts it’s lethargy and a risk-averse nature that makes us grapple endlessly with bottlenecks, reflecting a hidden last mile problem.
On reading this paragraph by Boo, I was also reminded of what Rory Sutherland said recently in that talk about big data:
The slumdwellers I’d already come to know in India were neither mythic nor pathetic. They were certainly not passive. Across the country, in communities decidedly short on saviors, they were improvising, often ingeniously, in pursuit of the new economic possibilities of the twenty-first century. Official statistics offered some indication of how such families were faring. But in India, like many places in the world, including my own country, statistics about the poor sometimes have a tenuous relation to lived experience.
Emphasis mine.
I’ve loved Pride & Prejudice ever since I was a kid. I used to have a copy with a lovely red and gold hardcover, which is still at my parents’. When I saw this Indiegogo project about a limited edition letterpress version, I couldn’t resist contributing. Maybe you’ll consider it too?
I’ve been dipping in and out of One on One by Craig Brown for a while now. It’s the kind of book you can do that with – it’s essentially a series of short anecdotes, each of which is linked to the next by one of the (famous) characters it references. It’s good fun – lots of ‘whoa’ moments, some which make you think ‘that is just so weird’. It’s a great example of connecting random dots; I like reading books like this because of the sheer breadth of instances you can use as examples later on. I was motivated to get it because I chanced upon it in a bookstore soon after I went to the James Burke event on connections.
Anyway, one of the themes that features a fair bit is music, because of the number of musicians he writes about. I pulled all the songs mentioned into a playlist. Here it is, with some notes for reference where relevant.
I’ve started writing for 26 Books. It was started 6 years ago by Shane Richmond, James Higgs and Ian Douglas amongst others, and though others have floated in and out of the group since then, they’ve been keeping it going.
My first review is up. It’s of Elif Shafak’s newest book Honour (the UK public launch is next month).
I heard about 826 Valencia, a San Francisco-based charity that helps young school kids write by giving leash to their imagination, when I saw Dave Eggers’ TED talk back in 2008 and it immediately piqued my interest, as a big believer in the power of storytelling. So I was naturally intrigued when I heard of the inception of the Ministry of Stories in London two years ago. Last year, I registered to become a writing mentor, or, as the Ministry says, Senior Minister! It’s been wonderful to see the support that the Ministry gets from events like The Story too – this year Lucy and Ben, the founders, came and presented at the event. Spending time with children as they make things up widens your own imagination, and it’s a really enriching experience for me. I haven’t been able to go as often as I’d like but after my time there last week, I’m buoyed and hope to go more often this year. D&AD have just written a case study about the Ministry of Stories as well.
If you’d like to support the Ministry of Stories and don’t live in London (or even if you do), they have an online store with all manner of exciting things for sale, such as Mortal Terror, Escalating Panic and Fang Floss (I bought myself a box of Zombie Mints on Saturday). You can also donate here, or become a member of the 159 Club.
