Credit: Thomas Hawk on Flickr CreativeCommons licensed NC SA

مولانا جلال الدين محمد بلخى aka Jalal al-Din Rumi

Hey there you praise-singers for failure. You, who can celebrate in the face of your own embarrassing blunders, botched plans, flopping after proclaiming you would own the competition, of being eviscerated publicly for well-meaning naivety, wimping out of your grand quests, disappointing expectations or dead-end determinism. Those of  you who extol how useful and edifying repeated failure is, in the greater scheme of greatness. You Michael Jordan quoters.

I’ve lived most of my life in sheer amazement bewilderment at you.

I get it the rational level, of course. But playing fast and loose with loss, is emotionally repellent for us not gifted with spines of tempered titanium. No matter how sensible the intellectual argument, where’s the logic in eagerly inviting embarrassment?

Would you gleefully begin something big, bold, close to your heart, if you understood that there are banks of critics in the Circus Maximus of the social Web? They’re there. At the ready, connected to the global brain, awaiting fresh content to tear apart, or cheer on as a hero to climb the gladiatorial ladder, to fight another day. That may thrill those titanium-tempered ones, and the ballsy beginners who haven’t a clue, and only see the glistening prize.
But if you’re not insulated by Spartan-like determination, or plucky luck, what the devil do you do?

What’s obvious to most of you (okay, probably not the perfectionists or neurotics) is that loss of face, shame, indignity are not synonyms of failure. Nor yet invisibility, conservatism, cynicism, depression, misdirected aggression. The option of (symbolically) dying, restarting, carrying on without going into therapy because you lost a battle, is a small but significant brain tweak.

Small doses of shame’s soul-corrosion are helpful, surely: say you need a convenient hook for effective social control; to know where one should be in the subtle social hierarchy;  to keeping one’s clothes on in public; to coax on debt-fuelled consumerism? Heaven knows we need to buy stuff to cover our shame. It has measurable economic and social utility, so there’s no chance it’s going away any time soon.

Individually however, shame is an emotional choice to apply, after you’ve bungled. It isn’t a natural consequence of making a mistake, or even several.

Only beginners have the bliss of starting without grasping all the complexity that the experienced see. Too many really brights lose out while they’re working out the grand plan. [It always ends up being a grand plan because the intelligent need to account for all the known hazards, who to ally with, the regulations, the elaborate stages of funding, the politicking necessary].
How bloody burdensome.

I think there’s a way through for those of us who were shipped with the creative|analytic brain configuration. A flexible set of permissions for your emotional property rights. A license to venture in safely if you will (some rights reserved), not using the all closed social-default (where your big idea never sees the light of day, just in case it fails), and not all the way open (where it might benefit society, or be pillaged, pirated and leave you the poorer).

5 POLICIES for those who dare to BEGIN THINGS
(when you aren’t a beginner anymore)

1. Cover your Ass(ets) rather than coveting assets. Having a lot to lose impedes brave moves. Insurance, maintenance, storage – actual stuff sucks vital resources. Could you value access over assets*? How much time/energy could be redeployed, if you didn’t need to worry about hoarding and safeguarding your material goodies. Meet the fear of loss head-on by having less to lose, physically. Get your precious intellectual-wares off your local machine and into the cloud. Trust, but do backups in more than one place.
2. Banish originality. There is happy freedom in not even trying to be a god-kissed genius. Learn improv, work with what you have, the Web is h u g e. Love opensource. Find stuff to build on; why build from scratch? Resourcefulness is a virtue of our age – learn how to search and remix (legally).
3. small (doable) ideas FTW. Admittedly not as sexy for dinner party conversation, but this is about actually starting something, not looking like a genius. Prediction has been overclocked by complexity, just give it up. Spawn and release lightweight prototypes. Too much time/money spent perfecting an infertile idea, makes it punishing to cut your losses and nurture the new.
4. Employ Scientific Method – develop hypotheses, set up experiments, get feedback, tweak the conditions, repeat. Guessing isn’t as useful as knowing. Keeping journals or test logs of data, offers the added bonus of that soothing sense of control that over-thinkers need.
5. Keep good company, because you could too easily lose the plot if you heed the siren song of the cynics [I'm partial to the definition of "cynic" in Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary (1911)]. If what you start, is likely to change the way the world works in some way be aware: the world is only going to get weirder, conservative opposition to change more militant  - which  will require some oldskool toughness. Keep tight with a few trusted people to remind you of exactly why the hell you’re not just staying safely in the background.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
- President Theodore Roosevelt (April 23, 1910, Citizenship In A Republic speech)

Whether we want to get involved or not, the world now demands active citizenship. Globally, laws, business, relationships, human rights are being bent out of shape. How they re-form on the other side of this interregnum is on the shoulders of those of us alive now. What we make, matters. Each one that refuses to get into the fray for (justifiable) fear of failure and reproach, jeopardises our collective freedom. If you are strong on rationality and analysis, it’s easy to logically justify avoiding pain. But worth remembering with me, that failure is a merely another result, not an emotional event, certainly not automatically shame. Emotion actually moves us. Deploy its force with care.

Sometimes there is virtue in overturning the rulings of your head, and let what moves you, be what you do. Whether by starting a business, a social enterprise, a campaign, a film, a movement, music, helping young ones build stuff from opensource rather than just buying finished goods, whatever it be that stirs your heart, begin today.
Safer, messier, smaller, smarter and shared.

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Listen: 1. Finding your Vector of Impact Sukhinder Singh Cassidy at Stanford’s eCorner [podcast 1h or watch the video snips here] 2. Tim Harford on Adapting and Prospering in a Complex World [34min podcast]

Read:  1. Tim Harford: Adapt, Why Success Always Starts with Failure. 2. Steven Johnson: Where Good Ideas Come From

Make! make stuff on the side, with friends, just for fun: realworld or online. New skills + no pressure to succeed

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* clarity: not hippie/communist tendencies. I’m interested in collaborative consumption, for resource efficiency, happiness, and ultimately healthy capitalism. More services, less stuff already.

Learn to love your data! I can’t emphasize enough how powerful and practical your decision-making can become with this layer of clarity applied to your business, health, life.  Women battle the bias of being labelled as making more emotional/irrational decisions. One of the greatest gifts that computing has offered us is overlooked as something for the domain of researchers and analytics dorks. I’m an abiding fan of hunting for evidence, and there are simple, free and easy-to-use tools to track what lies behind your suspicions – even if maths is your kryptonite, you too can learn to love data-tracking. Being clear kills fear.With the strength of bottom-line numbers we gain the confidence to speak into our leadership calls with clarity.

2. Hunt Robust Health

Women have, on average, the blessing of an additional decade of life built in to our physiology. But we’re seeing this erode within a few generations, our rates of heart conditions and lifestyle-related illnesses are coming into parity with our menfolk. Sitting behind a screen for unrelenting hours on end, unconscious snacking and adrenaline-tapping deadline chasing is doing us in. Wired women leaders, take back your health! Go play outside, breathe, eat delectable food. Who wants to follow somebody who’s committing slow suicide from overwork. Remember mens sana in corpore sano: a healthy mind in a healthy body (nothing like a little Latin to give gravitas to the obvious). Love your biological hardware or you’ll persistently be facing software crashes and sludgy speeds.  If you’re a code engineer, caffeine-swilling pizza-fuelled sleep-deprived screen-devotion can squeeze out the marvels, but is a certain death knell for ladies who want to lead long time. A strong, reliably healthy body, by design not default, is one of the greatest treasures we can afford ourselves, an agile mind its prized reward.

3. Hunt Inspiring Company

Genius begets genius. Despite the seductive myth of the lone brainiac, evidence and history tell a very different story (ah, data substantiation). Women are superb natural collaborators, but most of us still have a peculiar superstition that we need to guard our territory and cut down competitors. It may be “normal” business practice, but it certainly isn’t natural for us. There is robust and burgeoning business model for sharing and opensource, not just online, as Public Lead for Creative Commons in South Africa part of my duty is to bring the case-studies to light and illuminate the practical steps to begin to share legally, safely and profitably, 21st century style. Find mentors, gather peers to build something difficult but remarkable together, socialise with the brave and big hearted.

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I’m on a panel for the 6th Annual Women in Leadership conference with 2 women I respect and appreciate having in my world, Maritza van den Heuvel and Monique Ross. Both courageous and fascinating women in quite different ways and well worth following.

The topic is : Wired Women – Wonderful Ways to use collaborative innovation in the Digital Economy
Social media like blogs, facebook and twitter reflect the easy and natural way women form community and share information. Learn more about how becoming a digital citizen can fast-track the achievement of your leadership goals as you make a difference to the world.

Though I’m convinced that taking any kind of binary positions: man/woman, black/white, young/old etc. is no way to move forward with intelligence, it’s good fun to bolster the women who have forgotten the delightful benefits of being a woman + Internet in a democratic, capitalist society with the most compelling opportunities to make a tangible difference as a social entrepreneur/activist/someone who gives a damn.

Quick punt while we’re speaking about this: University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business runs an annual Women in Leadership program in April led by Dr Marjolijn Dijksterhuis. It has been lauded and applauded by delegates. Worth your while if you’re a woman in senior position who would value a deepening of her foundational business skills and those next-level but not-so-obvious clues to confident, calm leadership.

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Picture Credits under Creative Commons Attribution Licenses: (with my gratitude)

http://www.flickr.com/people/seq Seq on Flickr

http://www.flickr.com/photos/frerieke/ (by the way, do go discover more about the lovely architect/humanitarian Frerieke van Bree and her Students for Humanity project. She’s one of those fearless, fun, nature-built-a-winner-with-this-one people)

http://www.flickr.com/people/usarmyafrica US Army Africa on Flickr

http://www.flickr.com/people/stevendepollo Steven De Pollo (feature image)

from heart-rate monitors, biofeedback fingerware, sleep trackers, wearable cameras, oximeters, accelerometers, blood-pressure cuffs, GPS to old-fashioned stopwatches employed to track and map the data their activities generate in time and space, and almost always leading to an inevitable uploading of the activities to spreadsheets and graphs for analysis.

Some do it to observe, others to optimise, others to see how far they can go before they overclock their systems,

Now in the bright dawn of the app, smartphones are luring the unsuspecting into self-tracking. Before long that sleep-monitoring-app-that-must-be-tried converts into harmless productivity logging, the odd location check-in, daily pedometer use, and soon enough you’re surrounded by those hooked on quantifying the daily data their lives have been generating. Ordinary people will be overheard at the next table sharing hacks for their personal genome [okay well maybe that one has a way to go, but not as faraway as you'd think].

Judge this as narcissism or the sport of OCD neurotics in error.
[Bless Twitter for the recency of its mainstream conversion from much-mocked to must-have. Web economics or triumph do not conform to what is intuitive; what looks silly today may command fortunes of the future]. A self-tracker’s numbers and observations may be uploaded for personal interest, but shared with others in a forum or social network could have potential species-wide benefit. Patterns form out of the data sets and occasionally unexpected utility, cures and fast-tracks emerge and this progress is available immediately to all those searching for a solution to try out too, their feedback strengthening or squashing the finding. The rate with which we’re co-evolving with our technology means that nothing as useful as a fork need take centuries to catch on anymore.

We’re grabbing what works, remixing to suit our context, sharing the results outside the sacred circle of state, company and school so it’s fast, damn fast. No waiting about for medical, commercial or political solutions to be implemented at glacial pace and great expense. Citizen-surgery won’t be the next big thing, and doctors won’t be a diminishing species, but they’re probably less likely to be mistaken for gods. Pity the physicians in years to come. Loaded not only with deep-mined info from the Internet, patients will also presenting their personal biometrics, self-diagnoses and realtime search to check on the doctor’s prescription as the script is being written. With a strong personal motivation to find an answer we can track ourselves as we go through life-as-usual: neutralising the weird distortion of examining a subject alone in a lab is a helpful side-effect.

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat. – Douglas Adams

As anyone who’s peered behind their assumptions by doing even rudimentary web-analytics knows, naked feedback data is rarely what we expect. It favours those who have a curious mind and the tenacity to dig deeper with increasingly refined questions. Why the heck do you have most of your referral traffic coming from people searching for pelagic bird-watching tours when your trade is selling woolly cardigans to lumberjacks? The fun is hunting the connections; have you been hacked by a renegade twitcher network? Perhaps your bestselling jumper is named after a rare albatross never yet seen on shore? Maybe someone mis-mapped you as the HQ of Seabird Central?
So too self-trackers use their data to fill the gap between perception and reality. Can’t fathom why you work so damn hard and get so little done? Why do you wake up feeling like a zombie after your allotted 8 hours? You run marathons, so why do you have a body-fat percentage of a baby seal? There’s an app for that ..get tracking and hunting. In the anomalies we often find ingenious or the simple but elusive aha answers.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ..‘that’s funny‘ – Isaac Asimov

If there’s a prediction for 2011 that is worth setting an alert for that has more than twinkly trend in its DNA, it’s this. Self-tracking marries beautifully with game mechanics and non-dorky-looking gadgets to be both fun and commercially interesting for the main market now too. With particularly rewarding applications possible for medical insurance companies and health ministries who have enormous financial interest in keeping their members/citizens well.

Gary Wolf, contributing editor at Wired, who started the Quantified Self blog back in 1997 with the legendary Kevin Kelly, wrote a rich piece on self-measurement for The New York Times last year, The Data-Driven Life that’s well worth the read to get up to speed: [extract]

Trackers focused on their health want to ensure that their medical practitioners don’t miss the particulars of their condition; trackers who record their mental states are often trying to find their own way to personal fulfillment amid the seductions of marketing and the errors of common opinion; fitness trackers are trying to tune their training regimes to their own body types and competitive goals, but they are also looking to understand their strengths and weaknesses, to uncover potential they didn’t know they had. Self-tracking, in this way, is not really a tool of optimization but of discovery, and if tracking regimes that we would once have thought bizarre are becoming normal, one of the most interesting effects may be to make us re-evaluate what “normal” means.

“My girlfriend thinks I’m the weird person when I wear all these devices,” Bo Adler says. “She sees me as an oddity, but I say no, soon everybody is going to be doing this, and you won’t even notice.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t.html

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In the interests of declaring my bias, I need to own up to being a self-tracker/-experimenter/ -researcher /-logger for most of my life. With so much physics, chemistry, history, biology, anthropology and general whatthe-ology to discover about ourselves – and so much hypochondria to allay if you read too much – it never gets dull, but it’s not heretofore been fashionable dinner-party conversation. So I’m looking forward to the excitement building around it. Not to mention the increasing abundance of more awesome gadgets on offer, now in stylish packaging.

This one’s going to be big, as a social-behavioural mod it will have rolling impact into economic and political policy, slowly but certainly. Unlikely you say? Put it on your alerts and watch. Let’s roll together a few Quantified Self meetups, and see if you don’t get a thrill from seeing the superhero rippling under the clark-kent veneer.
It’s so much more than geek-sport.

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Are you a self-tracker? Got a thing for productivity apps, develop funny hypotheses about your training, time, nutrition and test them (on yourself not hapless clients), got a thing for spreadsheets and pedometers? Did you realise your hobby doesn’t relegate you to lone freakery any longer? Self-trackers, shout your barbaric yawp from the rooftops, your time in the sunshine has finally come.

“Don’t ever save anything for a special occasion.
Being alive is the special occasion.“  – Mary Manin Morrissey

There are those whose genius radiates from the heart. Their gift is not an EQ thing, it’s a steady, clear goodness that isn’t saintly or soppy either. It’s strong and funny and easy to be around, but it’s peculiarly rare. I’ve only known 3 who have it, and my world is minus 1 today.

We live in terribly complicated times and it’s so ever so easy to get caught up in our own heads/schedules/urgencies that we defer or forget to love those who are loyal and undemanding.

I didn’t take the chance to pay back one of the bravest, kindest beings who always had my back and didn’t ask for a damn thing in return. And I’ve run out of chances now. Suddenly.

Don’t wait to share your gifts with your tribe, don’t wait to pull them out of harms way, don’t wait to call and check in even if there isn’t big news, don’t wait for better times, a better opportunity or a better you. Life is a’wasting

Waiting for the fish to bite or waiting for wind to fly a kite.  Or waiting around for Friday night or waiting perhaps for their Uncle Jake or a pot to boil or a better break or a string of pearls or a pair of pants or a wig with curls or another chance.  Everyone is just waiting.  – Dr. Seuss

Princess drew fervent fans as a barista and won our hearts as friend. That she had to draw on her resilience tougher than kevlar breaks my heart because she deserved the best. The void that she’s left has filled with the realisation that we need to get cracking, we have a tribe to serve better, and pronto.
Dave and I have had our lives enriched by knowing this characterful woman, and we’ll be ensuring that her spirit blazes on to make others’ lives more hopeful and happy in her wake.

For goodness sake don’t miss the gap with those that you really adore but somehow don’t get around to saying how much they mean to you. Regret slices and stings for a lifetime.

“If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say?  And why are you waiting?“  – Stephen Levine

It was our priviliege to know Ntombekhaya “Princess” Mlonyeni, dear friend, may she rest in peace.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

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What luck for rulers, that men do not think. – Adolph Hitler

The Internet is a copy machine.  At a fundamental distribution level, but also at the human content level. Copying what we see and like, or realise gets results, is one of the keys to how humans have been such a successful species. What is unusual about it is that we will do so at the cost of common sense or logic. Unlikely as it would seem, it is a success strategy. Thinking is biologically expensive, and with 20% of our nutrients and oxygen going to the brain, the more efficient we can make that, the better. Humans are natural born hackers. We spot one of our tribe doing something that yields results and we try out the behaviour ourselves, even if we have no idea of the mechanics or conditionst that led to it. If it works it stays. And others copy us. If we don’t understand why it worked in the first instance, it needn’t be a reason not to use it. So are born a myriad of useful hacks that keep us safe, allow us to build on each others creativity and engineering. So too, rituals and traditions, and beliefs that have long ago shed the essence of the logic or context that made them work – mostly harmless but some of these thinking hacks with sufficient uptake or legacy are mistaken for Truth and can go rogue. Believing is easier than thinking.

The Internet only cranks up the volume, it doesn’t lead to shoddy thinking, it’s merely the best damn distribution system since bacteria hacked airborne transport. We’ve been brain hacking for millenia, there’s no stopping us now. What is critical is that we keep the ratio of thinking to believing and copying in lively balance.

Being close to the source as possible counts because it works like a Chinese telephone game. Like any signal down a line, eventually it erodes into unintelligible fuzz. None of the activating intelligence is left. Sometimes the shell still keeps doing the rounds anyway because its packaged so prettily.

For all the disdain that rains upon bloggers for mindlessness, the critics often fail to recognise that as newspapers burgeoned and the rush to be first, or to stuff content to marry off to advertising grew over the past decades – so too did the quick hack of regurgitating press releases, copying wire feeds and churning empty caloried opinion on their pages. Why slog and blaze the synaptic fires if someone else is willing to do it for you? The behaviour around journalism was hacked a long time ago. Newspapers of record like the New York Times, rich, reliable mags like New Scientist pay their writers to think and interrogate the truth. And then we cut.paste, RT, blog, email, whatever your flavour, to pass on what we believe in. Or reinforces our reality.

Our job is not to make up anybody’s mind, but to open minds and to make the agony of the decision-making so intense you can escape only by thinking. – Fred Friendly

The few on the thinking side have to work harder and burn more cognitive juice. They are the context providers not merely content providers. Their job is not to comfortably reinforce our thinking by mouthing cliches. They’re also least likely to be voted most popular because of that expensive thinking problem. Few of us enjoy the recalibration of our beliefs that thinking often effects, it’s unsteadying; give us emotion yes, intrigue surely, but deep analysis that doesn’t offer a safe answer, eh. It’s like eating broccoli for most of us. Why would you choose veggies when takeaways are tastier, cheaper and quicker?

Like eating fresh food and exercising it takes more time, costs more and often hurts while you’re doing it, but there’s nothing like it for avoiding the fate of a flabby homogenous consumer. Smart is sexy.

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RECOMMENDED :

PS. if you haven’t, you do want to read Kevin Kelly’s piece on Better than Free: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php

AND also do hunt down Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society or watch this clip from Fora.tv at the very least:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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One of the best places to get into a cerebral spin-class is The Daily Maverick, almost a year old now, and beloved by thinkers for not choosing the takeaway-in-pretty-packaging route. In celebration of their brave move from wholly print to wholly online at the beginning of November 2009, they’ll be gathering some of the smartest (also least-likely-to-mouth-cliches) people and some of their ferociously bright, opinionated readers into a room and let them loose on each other for the day.
The Gathering. Brainy bootcamp baby.

It’s not cheap (now up to R3000), it’s a whole day (4th Nov 2010, no work for you) and it’ll be a workout. But I am so looking forward to it!
The synaptic fritzing power of the DM team* is enough to short-circuit most people and send them scurrying to a gossip mag to recover.
But in accompaniment the speakers roll looks like this:

• Zwelinzima Vavi, general-secretary of Cosatu
• Michael Jordaan, CEO of First National Bank
• Lauren Beukes, author of Zoo City and Moxyland
• Khaya Dlanga, prolific blogger and troublemaker
• Richard Mulholland, professional speaker most likely to be confused with a rockstar
• Nic Dawes, editor-in-chief of the Mail & Guardian
• Jovan Regasek, CEO of ITWeb
• Yvonne Johnston, brain-mother to Brand SA and marketer-at-large
• Ivo Vegter, columnist and analyst
• Ray Hartley, Sunday Times editor
• Yusuf Abramjee, head of news and corporate affairs, Primedia
• Terry Annecke, operations director of BlackStone Tek
• Victor Dlamini, chairman of Chillibush
• Stephen Grootes, Eyewitness News reporter
• Mike Ratcliffe, Wine master, Warwick wines
• Toby Shapshak, editor of Stuff magazine.

(and knowing them, there’s likely to be a surprise or two for those who believe).
If you have the fortitude for mental marathons through unfamiliar lands, with a side of good humour -wit a DM signature and is never far away from even the darkest scenario. warning: those dry and serious of demeanour may be startled. It’s going to a riot of the best sort.

Read here and here for more if you need convincing (actually I don’t know if there are still tickets but mail ‘em anyway. If you’re in South Africa on the 4th of Nov, why miss out?)  A little throng of us Capetonians are flying up for it, including Jacques Rousseau, Allan Kent and Dave Duarte. [If you're coming too, please let me know].

* Branko Brkic (editor), Phillip de Wet (deputy), and Kevin Bloom, as well as Stephen Grootes, Sipho Hlongwane, Brooks Spector, Theresa Mallinson and Mandy de Waal. Commit these names to memory for the name tag scan ..and give them that knowing nod. They’re doing their damnedest everyday fending off those fuzzy copies to keep us from floating off into the sea of irrelevance.

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Disclaimer: not only am I a fan, but count members of this brave & bright Daily Maverick clan as friends. I’m not a paid shill. My dharma is to cheer genius when I see it. So be it.
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Marlon was introducing the Reconstructed Living project (RLabs), using that most loved-by-teens|vilified-by-teachers/parents mobile platform, MXit. MXit maven Rafiq Phillips (and one of Marlon’s past students) had shown us that it could be more than just a cheap chat channel, but what ensued from this project astounded everyone.
Lives were saved. Literally not figuratively. Gangsters, drug-dealers, addicts, the suicidal, the abused yanked back from dangling over the abyss by a deceptively simple mobile IM chat platform and some blogging.

Clinton Liederman’s story (From Gangster to Twitter) is just one to share, but gives you a good idea what this is about:

Click here to view the embedded video.

It worked because it used the principles of getting the context right, being in the natural playspace of those who needed it, without interrupting, using the language that is familiar/authentic to that playspace. And more importantly this wasn’t a well-meaning set of social workers on the other end of the IM, the stories were real and rugged and hopeful because they were ex-gangsters, -addicts, -dealers, -abused and had visceral experience of being in a desperate situation – and knew exactly what it takes to get out. The steps not much different from any guidelines NGO’s or government programs may define, but it was infused with life and intelligence because the person delivering the message was the real deal, a makeover, someone who had reconstructed their own lives out of dire/shameful/deadly circumstances. It rang true. and it worked.

Who among us is immune to the charm of the makeover? The before and after pics, the journey through shame and determination, we humans are suckers for these kinds of stories. The thrill of turnaround numbers on a failing business, a doomed economy revitalised into a roaring success by a few tweaks – none can resist the strength of the makeover as social currency, it converts to all markets and lifestyles.

The means of telling those stories changed radically over these last decade. At its core, social media is just a new means of production and distribution. From highly skilled expensive people and equipment and expensive, proprietary distribution, the cost and skills associated to both have dropped to close to zero by comparison.

What is brought on was a great flood of amateurs overrunning the banks of media channels and scared the hell out of the bastions of the Media. It has us all awash in useless, unsubstantiated, surprising, unverified, brilliant, illegal, mashedup, beautiful, horrifying, profound, unstoppable content coursing in from every corner of the world [adds own blog to the flood].

It’s also spawned an egosystem around the “Internet-famous” absorbed in feeding from the bubble of its own coolness. But for all the mockery that it may draw, there are those who have used it to change their fortunes where nothing else could have worked.
The Reconstructed did just that and grabbed the chance to put a surprising twist in to break the expected plot of their lives.

If you live in South Africa, try playing word associations and listen what comes up when you proffer “Cape Flats”. If gangsters, drugs and violence don’t feature, you’re standing before an anomaly, someone who hasn’t seen a TV, read a newspaper or any other traditional media source for perhaps decades. If you come from the Cape Flats (where you’d find RLabs) you have an instant set of archetypes that accompany your journey, a set of prejudices that you probably have to work that much harder to overcome.
We all have our own special set of holographic set that activates when we say what we do, where we’re from, but some are in more intense technicolour than others.

Archetypes and prejudice is a brain evolution that’s helped us become the dominant species on this grand blue ball. We can’t pay attention to everything so we chunk info for efficiency, if we can determine rules for what is good and what is dangerous and tell each other stories to illustrate it rather than each of us discovering afresh that tigers aren’t just big lovable lolcats. If we had to go through a day without our assumptions about how the world (mostly) works, we’d burn throughour brain’s available oxygen and glucose for the day in 13 minutes and pass out from sheer overwhelm. We need shortcodes to make sense of it all.

In more elegant illustration, Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie did a talk at TED that goes right to the heart of how dangerous it is to have one defining story about a place or people ..a special dedication to those who lapse into referring to Africa as a country

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s easier for media to tell the sensational stories, the once-offs, and many still follow “if it bleeds it leads” so they aren’t hot on the trail of the feel-good fluffy ones. Social media is more of a tribal thing, and we want to know the backstory and follow-up and whose connected and why. It offers a place to get your own story heard. How you want to tell it, on your terms and on demand, not with the print run, January issue or particular flighting time.

Telling an amazing makeover story, with friends who have done the same, on video, blogs, mobile platforms, forums, in talks, demo’s, social networks, podcasts, radio, print, games is a surefire way to start interrupting a persistent archetype. [Fighting the urge to say transmedia storytelling in here, but that's for another day]. RLabs is starting to make a dent in the story of their community. Using only mediated traditional media it wouldn’t have happened. For them social media isn’t a vanity sport.

It also isn’t about charity. True to form, RLabs takes an unusual position on stepping away from traditional NGO on intravenous funding. Charity isn’t sexy. It numbs creativity and determination. Doing good and doing good business is enlivening. They’ve started a social media strategy unit (oh stop with the groaning, I know) called the Social Media Factory. But if you think it’ll be like any other social media consultancy, you haven’t been paying attention to this story. These are people who have tasted death, who know the power of social media in the way that few of us do, who come bearing character and can help those who need to get a grip on being truthful, strong and connect to their community in more than words. It’ll be anything but anodyne – guaranteed. [no, I don't need a disclaimer, I haven't taken shares].

PS. my favourite new podcast is one I’ve been recommending wildly, the delicious Kitchen Sisters have a new series on NPR called the Hidden World of Girls (7-10 min stories from all over the world that will do your head in, go check it out).

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I had the honour of doing a training session for the hero corps at RLabs last week and recommend it highly! If you have strengths to share to help them circumvent the tiger-as-kitty traps with tricks, tips, equipment, tools, skills to accelarate the reconstruction of more lives through social media, offer here (Rene Parker is the digital dame to get you in, say Max sent ya).

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Animal rescue groups like African Tails or DARG know the conversion power of painstakingly telling each animal’s story. Habitat for Humanity is so moreish for volunteers because they’re on a mission to build one house at a time for families they’ll meet and can follow up on. [More on trackable giving with the stroke-of-genius Broccoli Project to come].

Unwieldy stats that aren’t contextualized into real-life promote monomyths and unfathomable problems that we have no human-scale connection to. Colouring in the context makes a world of difference. Single stories though can open doorways for surprise and engagement that crunch prejudice faster than any factsheet could ever do.
If you have the time for a little worthwhile distraction (18mins) Chimamanda Adichie’s TEDtalk is beautiful & potent on mythbusting through storytelling:

Click here to view the embedded video.

PS. the Heath Brothers (of Made to Stick) on skilling up to create gripping statistics, data takes on new life and utility when it’s nested in stuff regular human brains can make sense of. If you haven’t read the book at least read this. It’s well worth learning to wrap scary numbers in compelling tales to help others tap a little of their heroic alter-egos occasionally too.

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Life flourishes in a relatively slim band. For our planet, being nestled neatly in the Goldilocks Zone, with just the right tilt, afforded us to neither a fireball nor snowball planet be. It took a few billion years to get to this happy Holocene era, wherein life has blossomed – wildly – for the last 12,000-odd years. Opportunistic as life is to maximize good seasons, we humans cracked the game faster than anything that’s gone before us – bacteria may be more successful, but they’ve been around for longer.

Our rapidly evolving tools have allowed us to tinker with time and space. We bend the physical environment to suit our specific needs or if we’re lucky, simply fly to another part of the world where we’re happier, or take a pill to make it so. The narrow band of temperature, pressure, light, sound that humans can operate in natively hasn’t stopped us from dangling into volcanoes, visiting oceanic abysses, listening to the crackle of radiation from distant galaxies, see in the dark with special goggles, command the fates of animals that would otherwise quickly dispatch of a tool-less human, we even routinely get our children to tinker with hazardous chemicals as part of their education.
Who needs big sharp teeth? We have these super-senses and protections that we can apply at will, without the encumberance of waiting for nature’s slow delicate engineering to select it out for us. As a species our context opportunity band is vast. We even have representatives living off-planet for goodness sake.
It isn’t as easy to insulate our brains from context as we do our bodies though.

“You can’t be a sweet cucumber in a vinegar barrel” – Prof Phil Zimbardo

Activating genius appears to require a narrow band to open within the opportunity spectrum. Intelligence is robust and adaptive to almost any circumstance like a hardy weed, but genius is fragile. Too much money or average and uninteresting problems can leave it dormant – as confused venture capitalists in the dotcom boom or parents of evidently bright but underachieving kids have learned to their frustration. Unless character and tenacity are available to bolster the mind, curiosity and courage are blunted out of social convenience, in grownups as much as in young ones.
As fortunate as it may sound to have a genius around, it’s generally an unwanted intrusion. They require an unusual amount of time and space to devote to seemingly unproductive tinkering, they’re always experimenting, testing their ideas out on the world – most of which will be useless/ugly/odd, the urge to tick the cultural checklist of expected behaviours is often mislaid as they wander into realms the rest of us don’t inhabit yet. And most often they aren’t even recognised – it takes talent to spot ‘em – most people can’t discern genius from weird (don’t believe? check the Joshua Bell/Washington Post experiment at post’s end).
Smart we get, genius eh, it’s generally a little too far away from current measures of celebrity – whether in science or the arts. Until such time we can’t relate to them, their context hasn’t been established in our frame of reference yet.

Being in the right place at the right time looks a lot like luck, and sometimes it is. But there are ways to stack the odds.

RIGHT PLACE:

Genius takes what is available to everyone else in a similar environment, but repurposes common elements to solve a known problem in an elegant and unexpected way. Sometimes it comes from the effort of a single person, but most often it’s a collaborative effort of a cluster of people racing each other to the breakthrough; sometimes one person fits the last piece and snags the accolades. Ask any research scientist.

There’s an awfully good set of reasons for smart people to hang out in the same environment together. Sometimes that’s as big as a city – we’re recognising that some cities crystallize a creative class of pioneers, engineers and the cultural experimenters – sometimes it’s in small gatherings like the Lunar Society or TED. But gather they must. The physical context we find ourselves in shapes us profoundly. Stuff happens in physical proximity that simply misses out in digital contact – which is why online dating is still dominated by local searches with 100km range. Choose your spaces wisely and if you have no choice, gather the finest people and tools to defy stagnant or oppressive contexts with vigour. Genius begets genius as contagiously as evil begets evil.

RIGHT TIME:

Being too far ahead of the recognition – and reward – curve has most often led to the archetype of the starving genius battling their life through, and only generations down the line getting what they were banging on about; consecrating museums, cars and companies to their legacy, buying their creations for millions. Smart and talented is almost invariably better than genius if you care to enjoy success while you are with body. Being ahead of your time sounds like a compliment, but is more often a curse. Short of grand old style patience and fortitude, that may pay off eventually, no other time hackery is surer than education. Educating your audience - through informal/ social learning infused through cultural experiences in particular - can shorten the time between generational changes and hasten the crowd to casting the glad eye your way.

“All truth passes through three stages.
First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.”
- Arthur Schopenhauer

You need to to be in the right context to frame your work appropriately, otherwise most people simply won’t see its value. Place, people, price give cues to how we allocate worth. Messed up, but there it is. Let’s not totter into the sticky debate of absolutism and relativism, save to say that humans have a hard time recognising standalone genius.

Maybe this will make you feel better: (long, but worth the time-out; a little context: it’s a Pulitzer Prize winning piece) >> Pearls before Breakfast : wherein one of the world’s finest musicians + multimillion dollar Stradivarius test whether people have an innate sense of appreciating quality. (Video snippet & spoiler below)

Click here to view the embedded video.

It doesn’t just happen at the subtle world of the arts, the same goes for simple stuff like food, we have no reference for beautiful artisanal coffee (wine, chocolate, pizza..) until we’ve had really bad coffee and have something to weigh it against, and even then, if the packaging & price don’t give us the right clues, we may miss it. Ah, being human. The upshot of all of this is that even if you are most exceedingly brilliant person in your field, if you’re out of context you’re most likely to be undervalued and overlooked.

“For humans, everything is relative. There are no absolute measures. Our judgement becomes swamped by local context. We can only tell you how pleasurable or painful an experience is based on our previous experience of what is painful or pleasurable, hot or cold, slow or fast and so on.” – Nick Chater (Professor of Cognitive and Decision Sciences UCL)

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Contextual Links:

The International Space Station http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html
Phil Zimbardo http://www.zimbardo.com/
The Big Bang’s Echo http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4655517
Lunar Society http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Society_of_Birmingham
Dan Ariely’s Books – must reads if this fascinates you http://danariely.com/the-books/
the Hershey’s Kiss and Pricing Irrationality http://bigthink.com/ideas/15775
Texts without Context writing and the Web (NY Times) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/books/21mash.html
How Supermodels are like Toxic Assets http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/07/how-supermodels-are-like-toxic-assets.html
Pearls before Breakfast http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” – Simone Weil (philosopher, social activist)

Altruism was favoured in genetic selection in humans because co.operation accelerated the advancement of our species – even though it remains a moot point filtered through the crisp logic of classical economists, curmudgeonly philosophers like Hobbes (the life is nasty, brutish & short chap) and a clutch of confounded biologists and geneticists.

Sometimes humans just do good things for each other for the hell of it. Yes there’s that little biochemical flush to reward you with happy emotions; but no discernably useful or selfish motivations to guide us doing good for the commons, for a stranger we’ll never see. One of the biggest live examples is Wikipedia, which did people’s heads in when it didn’t descend into drivel as predicted, but truly lived up to the crazy wager that humans could (mostly) be trusted.
We just need a good excuse to step into our heroic boots every now and then.
Mandela Day, the 18th July (by UN General Assembly decree, not just for South Africans) is just such a day. A day to shake out the cape and tune our supersenses into where we can fix a social injustice ..in 67 minutes.

Nelson Mandela has fought for social justice for 67 years. We’re asking you to start with 67 minutes

Fortunately, unlike the great man whose life we’ll be honouring, our quest is only to make the world suck a little less on July 18; no repressive regimes to bring down, blessedly. To count ourselves lucky and to share a little piece of that luck with someone who could use a little.

No one has ever become poor by giving – Anne Frank

It’s up to us to choose what to do with those 67 minutes. These are some of the suggestions that lit up for me.

The Mandela Institute’s Six Suggestions

Madiba’s work beyond politics and statesmanship has been to change the lot of our little ones, to secure health, happiness and education for all children. And these go a long way to supporting a nurturing environment to grow little brains healthily:
Idea 1: Create safe and cheery schools (please check their Magic Classroom project! it’s joyous)
Idea 2: Make and donate toys
Idea 3: Give fun and interesting books
Idea 4: Read together
Idea 5: Tell a story
Idea 6: Support play

School Libraries Project

We may be reading and doing most of our research online and forgotten about school libraries, but the children who don’t have a computer at school or a laptop at home really need BOOKS as reference. If you’re in Cape Town, The Bookery at 20 Roeland Street is the place to offer up your favourite books, textbooks, beautiful Dorling-Kindersley treasures, whatever you believe will enrich a school library to the School Libraries Project.

Got a Super-Power?

Sharing our wealth of resources (whether time, money, talent or strong arms) is always more satisfying when we’re tapping into what we do best, not just helping out as another pair of hands when you could be using your head. Build a site (yes, it can be done in 67minutes), help develop a marketing plan for a young entrepreneur, get inspired by people like Andy Duncan who helped create order in the last spate of xenophobic attacks by building a database to track & deploy resources, or contribute to that counter-intuitive phenomenon like Heather Ford, post positively like Nic Haralambous.

There’s something to fit any gift. If you’re a gifted plumber consider using 67 minutes to find a Habitat for Humanity house to help on, there’s even something for cosmologists and applied mathematicians at AIMS (spread the NextEinstein quest into more corners of Africa) or AIMSSEC and help make school maths less horrific.

..or change for change?

Or get into some online activism and donate to daring homegrown projects that make good with your money like the Broccoli Project (incentivise someone to take their AIDS test by getting food in their tummy) or Jo’burg ChildWelfare’s 100 Doors of Hope project on GivenGain. easy.

Random Acts of Kindness

[these come with a caveat by the way, though random acts of generosity may be rewarding for the giver, the receiver is often not having such a good time. Our brains don't process random stuff terribly well, and without a reason, even kindness is viewed with suspicion and sometimes rejection (you have been warned)].

Virgin Unite has 67 ideas (Richard Branson shares July 18 as a birthday with Madiba and getting in on the act)
And if you want the motherlode of do-good ideas, try the list at HelpOthers.org

a hero shows you how to solve the problem – yourself. – Jet Li

We got lucky, thank you Nelson Mandela.

Or maybe that’s just a convenient hangover myth from the Industrial Age that we’ve continued to believe even as the world changes around us?

What if doing good business, a roaring trade no less, isn’t about aptitude or “something you’re just born with” but something learnable. A language. A game with a particular set of rules that we just need to be shown so we can get in and play along, rather than feeling unfairly relegated to sideline spectator?

This is the ongoing premise of a 4 year long wager that UCT’s Graduate School of Business Exec.Ed unit director Elaine Rumboll chose to bet on. She believed that artists with the right tools in their hands COULD excel in business. Business Acumen for Artists is about to launch into its 4th year because of that belief.

Learning the rules of the game

The first business school programme of its kind for artists, it’s always oversubscribed because it answers a very pressing need. More of us want to escape the confines of corporate soulsuck, but watched friends step out into the freedom of freelancing or creative entrepreneurship and fall down a chasm, eventually claw their way back to the numbing safety of a grey job, worse off than when they left. The unexpected truth of their fall, is that despite having worked for a big business, they may know nothing about running their own.

For artists ..and recently-escaped company execs too

This holds true not just for creatives. Many are they who come swaggering into a startup with their big swinging CVs and crashland their jetsized egos on the undulating ground of entrepreurship. Business in the buffered realms of a big company and running your own, share enough genetic markers on paper to be alike; but in the realworld, it’s like you and a sightless sea-urchin.

To my utter despair I’ve also watched as people of genius hand the business-end over to experts (read: recently escaped swaggering execs) so that they don’t have to be muddied by marketing, sales, admin and money. Which seems perfectly logical, but almost always ends in tears. We need to be involved in our enterprise on all levels (or at least understand how to check the reports) if it’s to be a success. It’s essential to bring in specialists to do things like our taxes, but to hand over the engine to someone else to remote control isn’t amongst the finest strategic move ascribed in biographies of the greats. But despite eons of creative geniuses handing down their stories, we still fall into the same sticky tarpit generation after generation.

Business can be terrifying, disheartening, overwhelming as a solo venture. But to do it with the fundamentals in place when it all starts shaking, the right people on speed-dial and having built-in back-up plans are all best practises that winning creative entrepreneurs have learned.

Who’s this program a best-fit for?

Business Acumen for Artists goes a long way to getting those elementals in place for:

• those planning an escape
• those bravely out there plying their creative trade but frustrated that they’re not doing as well as they should.
• ..and also as a refresher masterclass for those already successful artists wanting to get a better idea of what opportunities they could be grabbing to strengthen their marketing [Dave Duarte will be leading 2 sessions on marketing with todays new tools! if nothing else, this is makes it worth it] or stretch into a global market [should you go PayPal? use an agent?].

The Essential Details:

• It’s R 4995 for the 13 week programme, including personal mentorship (priceless)
• You also need to be geographically right for this one: you need to be in Cape Town from the 30th Aug – 29th Nov 2010 (Monday eves from 6pm til 9pm – built in for those still with dayjob).
• It’s held at UCT Graduate School of Business (right by the V&A Waterfront) with plenty of safe parking
• The group can only work if the numbers are kept tight [which means that you will be held accountable for your development and working through your OWN business outcome to share at the final wrap celebration]. It’s for the quick and decisive. If you KNOW you need it, grab the opportunity.

If this sounds just right for you, or someone you know who’s a perfect match (and you’re in South Africa) text ART & your email address to 31497 or book online: www.gsb.uct.ac.za/artists. If you prefer human contact give Mario a buzz on 021 406.1268 or mail him: mario.pearce@gsb.uct.ac.za to find out more or grab your place on the journey.

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