As it turns out, even the fastest thing in the universe is prone to slowing down in cool clouds. In this case, a Bose-Einstein condensate (a gas of superslow bosons cooled to a few billions of a degree above absolute zero). Oh lord, don’t run! Yes, it is science, but it can be scintillating. And no-one tells a science story with more creative genius than Radiolab.

If you’d normally steer hastily in the other direction, to you, I lay the dare: step over your taste threshold, download the show below and listen (preferably while your body is doing something active but mundane, so your head can venture safely).

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better. –Ralph Waldo Emerson

1. Listen

Radiolab: Speed (about an hour of mesmerising listening, brace yourself)
http://www.radiolab.org/2013/feb/05/

The whole show is superb, but it’s the last segment that you want to hang in there for. By far, one of the most fascinating conversations I have ever heard.

2. Watch

Okay, so once you’ve listened: watch the video to get a handle on the process in Dr Hau’s lab, and those molecule-torturing lasers. Really, I mean it. Do not watch the video until you have the podcast populating your memory banks. Trust me, it will be so much richer with the context.

Lene Verstergaard Hau’s work is not just a knock-out in the realms of pure physics, but makes the practical cross-over to applied physics. It is not pootling about in the theoretical space. Among a host of handy applications, it impacts information transfer in the weird lands of quantum information processing and -cryptography – where our computing is moving, with mindbending speed (ah yes, and the steps up the odds of the singularity).

Harvard’s Provost Steven Hyman on Prof Hau: “..her work is path-breaking. Her research blurs the boundaries between basic and applied science, draws on the talent and people of two Schools and several departments, and provides a literally glowing example of how taking daring intellectual risks leads to profound rewards.” 

oh and… since I’ve outted myself as a Trekkie, I can take special delight in celebrating that this work just brought the transporter a little closer to reality (warning: do not visit this link until you’ve listened to the episode. Go to lend your ears).
BTW if you haven’t seen, the tricorder is already upon us, can the holodeck be far behind?

3. Learn+

REFRESH YOUR PHYSICS:
Should you be feeling the odd compulsion to expand the edges of your curiosity; swing your brain to the 21st Century Physics – Manipulating Light unit put together by Lene Hau, (for those of us who only move at neuronal speed. Also a very handy resource for teachers).

QUANTUM COMPUTING:
1. Qubit.org have multilevel entry points for introduction, depending on your comfort: http://www.qubit.org/tutorials.html
2. …or watch the vid and get up to speed in 5 minutes (granted, it’s nerdy, but if you’ve made it this far, I’ll warrant you’re not squeamish).

3. I really recommend tracking David Deutsch‘s work if this proved intriguing. I read the Fabric of Reality back in the day, and suggest you have a peek at his new book, The Beginning of Infinity.  It’s a grand scale perspective across the evolution of culture and creativity, and the inevitable asteroid smack-down the Earth is due. Especially given the spectacular meteor close-shave in Russia, it’s worth getting an intelligent view on why creative scientific progress matters to the survival of our unusual species.

If you count Feynman and Turing among your pantheon of geek gods, you may also get a bit of a head-crush on Deutsch.

[...]in reality, scientific theories are not ‘derived’ from anything. We do not read them in nature, nor does nature write them into us. They are guesses — bold conjectures. – David Deutsch (The Beginning of Infinity)

Bold, ambitious creativity is the hallmark of pioneering scientists. Yet, we so often underestimate the surprising power of mashing up science and art/culture. Nothing refreshes creativity like spending time in a discipline other than the one you feel at home in, even if it’s awkward at first. We urgently need more intelligent people who can travel between multiple worlds with ease, and tinker across the borders for unexpected solutions. Pure logic alone is insufficient. Dear reader, have found your focus increasingly optimised to your own speciality and the known? Tear down this wall!

Break out your polymath tendencies. This is the kind of many worlds theory that might well save our collective asses.

[the personal PS]

Apart from the sheer joy of the conversation on that podcast, the metaphor of light trapped in the icy cloud, and then popping out, and hurtling right back up to speed; quantifies how I’ve slowly been feeling for a few years.

My propulsion has returned! I f i n a l l y realised, I was the self-imposed force. Squishing into work, that didn’t quite work. It is possible to learn, practice, and do your 10 000 hours in a craft and meet success. Yes, get the skills to pay the bills.

But eventually, if it doesn’t fit the shape of your passions, you can only ever expect to achieve average size. Unless, like many an arranged marriage, you somehow learn to fall in love with your career along the way. If not, the dams of your joy get silted up, and output eventually slows to an uninspired trickle. And stop.

The denial of just how dorky/eccentric my interests are, and keeping them under wraps, because it doesn’t match the profile of business education, is a punkass “ought”. The kind that sucks the light out of too many bright people. 

Let it be said: I love teaching; thoroughly appreciate knowing the arcane code of business; seriously grateful for paying attention to how marketing works; but by heaven, it shall henceforth be mashed up with science, art, history, maths, all the pleasures of nerdery. There’s no sensible plan, no big “monetizing” in that mix. Cool it is not. Widely popular, it is unlikely to be. But stay bound in the slow fog, I shall not.

[Gratitudes to my brilliant, hilarious and wise brother for encouraging this mutiny, even though it may put a big ding in our business model]. 

The International Space Station is the ninth that astronauts have lived in, since Salyut back in the ’70s. Circling the planet in an environment that leeches strength from bones and bathes them in radiation, space is hard even the fittest body.

How long can our bodies – and sanity – survive beyond the comforting tug of Earth? Thousands of research projects, like the Tomatosphere, are finding how to stretch more than just our own genes beyond their current evolutionary bounds.

Cranking the limits beyond that is The 100 Year Starship, a jointly funded project of DARPA (the good folks who birthed the Internet) and NASA. It’s a call to our collective ingenuity and utterly bonkers audacity. Interstellar flight.
A global collaborative will endeavour to make it so.

Taking up the task ignites not only our imagination, but the undeniable human need to push ourselves to accomplishments greater than any single individual.

Image: NASA.gov

For the record, I’m more Star Trek, than Star Wars. An INTP on the Myers-Briggs spectrum (I keep re-taking the test every few years in the hopes that I’d morphed into something cooler. Alas). A Quantified Selfer. So living in a country where intellectualism is actively scorned by its leaders; where the nation’s children scores in the lowest rungs for maths and science literacy; but where the top-ranked downloads in the app stores, jostle between religion or sex apps; is mind-bendingly uncomfortable. Like being caught in a temporal warp between centuries, in a dreadful time machine (ahem, transporter) blunder. The atmosphere is not conducive to intelligent life.
So we’re not producing rocket-scientists here at the bottom of Africa. Who cares?

What part of ourselves becomes brittle if we don’t turn on the lights for the nerdier ones to shine from unexpected corners. 

In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. – Martin Luther King Jr

The science, creativity and global collaboration required to fulfill the for-now-impossible dream of getting to travel among the stars, can only be realised by making our home planet better. Though it is hard, there is very little quite as satisfying to the human spirit as doing something difficult and dangerous, with a diverse bunch of people you trust and respect. We need to find the intelligent life, around us first.

I’m re-entering the noise and gravity to hunt out the bright ones. And bring back a little of the sexy (and fun) in being smart. It may just help us live long and prosper.

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PS. Captain of the the 100 Year Starship project is Dr Mae Jemison, first African American woman in space. And Star Trek fan cast member.

I want to make sure we use all our talent, not just 25 percent. Don’t let anyone rob you of your imagination, your creativity, or your curiosity. It’s your place in the world; it’s your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live. – Dr Mae Jemison 

Image: NASA.gov

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SPACE CADETS, nerd it up:

• Spot the Station: get alerts when the International Space Station is visible on your side of the world! http://spotthestation.nasa.gov/
• Fascinated by daily life in space, NASA breaks it down: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/living/index.html
• The Myers-Briggs Test, for a little self-boxing: http://myersbriggs.org
• Quantified Self: http://quantifiedself.org
• South Africa’s heart-breaking education brain-strain: http://www.economist.com/node/16248661
• The 100 Year Starship: http://100yss.org/mission.htm
• Are you Star Trek or Star Wars (or laugh into your sleeve at the ridiculousness): http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2009/08/great-geek-debates-star-trek-vs-star-wars/

No post would be complete without a podcast recommendation! Listen to Dr Mae on Wait Wait
Don’t Tell Me http://www.wbur.org/npr/170879582/astronaut-mae-jemison-plays-not-my-job

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“People who believe in the power of talent tend not to fulfill their potential because they’re so concerned with looking smart and not making mistakes. But people who believe that talent can be developed are the ones who really push, stretch, confront their own mistakes and learn from them.” – Carol Dweck (Stanford Psychology professor, whose research is readable and useful).

In helping a client I love select their next innovation class from a vast pool of talented employees; I realised how ingrained our reflexes are in selecting our leaders from the extrovert camp. As an introvert, I’m always delighted to weight the scales gently toward the lesser-noticed gems within organisations. Through the years of executive education, we’ve had students ranging from board members, senior leadership, all through the ranks. But by far, some of our best students by application of learning, have been the quiet, unusual ones without obvious prominence.

Refresh your filters here.

When the glib win, we all lose. – a Kathy Sierra classic
(Click through, read the piece. Seriously, go.)

Growth vs Fixed Mindsets (how to spot the difference)

RULE #1

Fixed mindset: Look clever at all costs. (“The main thing I want when I do my school work is to show how good I am at it.”)

Growth mindset: Learn, learn, learn. (“It is much more important for me to learn things in my classes than it is to get the best grades.”)

RULE #2

Fixed mindset: It should come naturally. (“To tell you the truth, when I work hard at my school work it makes me fee like I’m not very smart.”)

Growth mindset: Work hard, effort is key. (“The harder you work at something, the better you’ll be at it.”)

RULE #3

Fixed mindset: Hide your mistakes and conceal your deficiencies. (After a disappointing exam score, “I’d spend less time on this subject from now on. I’d try not to take this subject ever again, and I would try to cheat on the next test.”)

Growth mindset: Capitalize on your mistakes and confront your deficiencies. (After a disappointing exam score, “I’d work harder in this class and spend more time studying for the tests.”)

[Extracted from  http://www.danpink.com/2010/11/the-3-rules-of-mindsets (check out his new book, To Sell is Human while you're there, fresh thinking on a topic generally horrifying to introverts. We have the edge there too, who knew?)]

There are all manner of cognitive biases that skew our decisions. To err is human, but installing a robust filter is a good safety net to avoid too many slips. Far better to heed the detours around potholes of those who walked in mapless and hapless before you.

“I think you should profit from the mistakes of others. You don’t live long enough to make them all yourself.” — Lowell Ferguson (or Eleanor Roosevelt)

You may not be in a position to have to decide who to send on expensive learning journeys, but it may prove handy in how we see ourselves as pioneers and leaders, if you’re not one of the usual shiny suspects.

8 great traits that produce innovative (and resourceful) learners/leaders
(note: this is not a manager development list – different strengths matter there)

1. Growth not Fixed Mindset (the latter often being the smart, opinionated, talented ones that win – see why it’s easy to choose them by instinct?)
2. Personal courage counts (not in a grand heroic fashion, but someone who will dare to defy the crowd-consensus)
3. Determination, the people who keep trying different approaches until they crack the puzzle
4. Cool to look a bit daft initially (learning new stuff = not elegant. Ditto for suggesting new ideas that others think are foolish)
5. Helps others win! BIG sign
6. Energetic
7. oddly. Neurotic (not the super-anxious, but some of the best creative and/or analytical ones have at least a mild case of the fidgets)
8. Humour (not stand-up comedians, but the people with a good sense of humour. Often a sign of some higher level observational thinking. Handy).

PS. If you over-analyse your decisions too. Kvetch over the what-if’s. And find you still make an embarrassing number of mis-calls (welcome human). Take heart and pre-order the sensible, yet amusing Heath brother’s new book, Decisive. (Snippets from Chapter 1)

An American Bar Association survey found that 44% of lawyers would recommend that a young person not pursue a career in law. A study of 20,000 executive searches found that 40 percent of senior-level hires “are pushed out, fail or quit within 18 months.”… 60% of doctors had considered getting out of medicine because of low morale.

Oops.

Disturbing, but also strangely comforting somehow.

It’s well worth knowing your rights as a creative entrepreneur. Astonishing advantage is gathering on the side of the artists who understand how to do more interesting things with their intellectual property than could have been achieved 7 years ago. Come discover a little more about the amazing things you can do if you get know the rules (and where to bend them):

“Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.” – John F. Kennedy

Negotiation is shunned by far too many people as high arts of manipulation employed by masterful dealmakers and diplomats. Forgetting that children are some of the toughest negotiators out there. Cute little girl versions, some of its most dangerous operators.

I’ve recommended improv as a must-have future-proofing skill, of which negotiation is one of its most practical subsets. And one that’s rewardingly simple (and surprisingly fun) to put into profitable practice, immediately.  Like any skill worth refining, it can scale up into all manner of subtle behavioural frameworks (see Resources below), but in the end, the most effective negotiators really appreciate that just a few powerfully soft skills triumph.

Hard-ball negotiators can win the smash&grab, but for those who want to grow a trusted reputation as a great negotiator, bullying and greed is a limited strategy. This counts as much for work, everyday purchases and relationships as it does to politics and corporate-buy-outs. If you’re good at listening closely, curious observation, and relationship-building, you’re a good part of the way there. Creativity, humour and a modicum of generosity are the power-tools of persuasion.

“You must never try to make all the money that’s in a deal. Let the other fellow make some money too, because if you have a reputation for always making all the money, you won’t have many deals.” – J. Paul Getty

The big 5 of Persuasive Engagement:

1. be very clear about HOW you want people to behave, specifically. (to buy, subscribe, surrender, eat broccoli ..you get the idea)
2. be very clear (for yourself) about WHY you actually want that behaviour.
3. make it EASY for them to take the action!
4. offer motivation (start with feeling, then give an intellectual reason to substantiate if needed)
5. be prepared to try many different angles until you get to the point where getting the behaviour is simply a “no-brainer” to the other side. Congratulations you have arrived at win/win!

Realising that very few things in life are truly non-negotiable (gravity probably counts here), take new delight as a grown-up in tinkering the seemingly fixed “rules”. Pricing is certainly not fixed, but choosing to negotiate with someone with little power or influence in how that price was set is exhausting. The closer you can get to the source of where a price was decided, the better your odds are of unfastening it, and moving it your way.

There is almost always a way for the creative person to find a way to be an active maker, rather than passive consumer of life. If you haven’t revisited the childhood delight of negotiating reality lately, put on a fresh set of eyes this week, be bold in the face of seeming certainty, ask “but, why?” ..and make life a counter-offer.

“People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” – Einstein

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WANT RESOURCES? START HERE:

[podcasts] Get the Slate Negotiation Academy into your ears this week. Load them up, everything from raising your salary, closing a deal on a property, physical hacks for persausion, to dealing with jerks and liars effectively.

Harvard’s Program on Negotiation have a superb set of downloads to dig into (more advanced)

[Open Courseware] Art of Negotiation. AcademicEarth have the Stanford University (CreativeCommons licensed) lectures from Stan Christensen and Steve Young for you to dive into. Highly recommended! ________________________________________________________________________________________________

Thank you to my quietly brilliant friend, innovator Dean Carlson, for his great story and the valuable reminder.

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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