Creative Work

Mud Rooms, Red Letters, and Real Priorities

Merlin — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 07:28:18 -0400

Thanks to my funny, literary pal, Jason B. Jones, today, I’m visiting lovely, warm Connecticut to do some talks and whatnot at CCSU. I mention it because I’d started typing this little post mid-way through the long eastbound ﬂight that delivered me here from three fun (but very long) days doing a comedy thing with You Look Nice Today and Jordan, Jesse, Go! over on that other, top-left, edge of our nation.

So, I was tired. Really tired. The kind of tired where your wallet hurts your butt, and coffee tastes weird, and you try super-hard to sleep, but – well – you’re just too tired to sleep. And, I was ﬁne with all that. Who can complain about being sleepy from hanging out with Adam and Scott? Exactly.

Except. The lady in the seat directly behind me was having grave problems with her “mud room.” Big mud room problems. I know this because she talked about it for several hours in excruciating detail.

I’ll spare you the nuts and bolts of the numerous and surprising ways that the room in which wealthy persons remove their shoes might contribute to causing a carefully-coiffed, 60-year-old woman to come unglued over “priorities.” Sufﬁce to say, ﬁxing this problem was a “high priority” for her. So, she said, repeatedly, as I shifted my wallet, let my coffee go cold, and balled the little blue pillow under my neck.

“Priority! Mud room!” I audibly mumbled, just loud enough to be heard exactly one row back.

Priority. Man, that’s a tough word. Because, depending on who you talk to, most people say “prioritizing” is either a giant problem, an underused skill, or a “Get out of Jail Free” card.

Me? I think priorities are simple to understand precisely because their inﬂuence is so staggeringly clear and unavoidable to behold, then act upon. Ready for this one?

A priority is observed, not manufactured or assigned. Otherwise, it’s necessarily not a priority.

Got that? You can’t “prioritize” a list of 20 tasks any more than you can “uniqueify” 20 objects by “uniqueness,” or “pregnantitze” 20 women by “pregnantness.” Each of those words means something.

An item is either unique or it is not. A woman is either pregnant or she is not. An item is either the priority or it is not. One-bit. Mutually exclusive. One ring to rule them all.

Why all the fussiness, Mr. Fussy?

When most people say, “prioritize,” I think they really mean to say, “force-rank” – to assign n items one and only one position between “1” and “n.” Right? So, yes, there’s one “#1” and one “#7,” et cetera. But that’s not “priority,” and that’s why you probably have at least one task on your version of a to-do list that has been “HIGH PRIORITY!!!” for more than a month.

Kind of unique. Sort of pregnant. “High” priority.

This is why I say priorities can only be observed. In my book, a priority is not simply a good idea; it’s a condition of reality that, when observed, causes you to reject every other thing in the universe – real, imagined, or prospective – in order to ensure that things related to the priority stay alive.

Even though their inﬂuence informs every decision we make on the most tactical level, thinking about priorities happens at a strategic, “why am I here?” level. Right? Maybe? Disagree? Pretty sure you can make priorities like biscuits or shufﬂe them around like Monopoly pieces?

Got news for you, Jack: if it moves, it’s not a priority. It’s just a thing you haven’t done yet.

Making something a BIG RED TOP TOP BIG HIGHEST #1 PRIORITY changes nothing but text styling. If it were really important, it’d already be done. Period. Think about it.

Example. When my daughter falls down and screams, I don’t ask her to wait while I grab a list to determine which of seven notional levels of “priority” I should assign to her need for instantaneous care and affection. Everything stops, and she gets taken care of. Conversely – and this is really the important part – everything else in the universe can wait.

Related example. You ever had a loved one – especially a very young relative – pass away unexpectedly? Brutal. What did you do when you found out? Did you “re-prioritize” your day and move a few things around? Or did you drop everything and join his or her loved ones in taking care of what needed to be taken care of? You just saw what needed to be done and likely had no compunction about telling everybody at work they’d either have to wait or move on without you.

And, let’s be clear: this is not all about “urgency.” Yes, an injured child and a grieving family need help now in a way that an M&A discussion or a CPR class may not. But, again. It’s not a question of order or shufﬂing. It’s a question of brutally honest decision-making and constantly saying, “No, I have another thing to take care of.”

Day One Buddhism.

Because, once you see what’s really there – once you know about an idea or a thing or a person or whatever that you’d reject 10,000 other things to protect and nurture – you’ve found your priority. And, consequently, you’ve discovered a bunch of other things that aren’t allowed to be priorities any more. Even in spirit.

Because, if you aren’t rejecting or dumping things every single day, you don’t know your priority. You’re making things up. If you think you have 35 priorities, then yes: you also think you have 35 arms. Is it any wonder you’re feeling awkward and unsure?

Maybe a mud room is a priority. I think more likely it was this lady’s emotional obsession. If I were the sort of person who coached people on these things, I’d ask her what piece of information she needed to get moving on the “mud room” project, then get it, do it, and move on. That said, dozens of thousands of feet in the air seems like a crummy place to realize a mud room is your “priority,” but I’m not here to judge. Much.

What I will tell you is that these ideas about scarcity and mutual exclusivity ﬂy in the face of most “productivity” and “effectiveness” nonsense, and frankly, they make most people bristle. Big time. When I tell someone who’s making 10 times the salary I’ll ever make that it’s literally impossible to have seven priorities, they look at me like I’m the biggest, dumbest hippie in the world. Sheesh, right?

For the Cult of Priority folks, two things:

First, ask yourself why any “high priority” item has remained unresolved in your life for more than 60 seconds. Why isn’t it done completely? Have you ever “re-assigned” “priority” to some task? Really? Because that sounds more like procrastination than management, let alone “effective” action and decisive execution. Sounds more to me like getting paid $10,000,000 a year to re-arrange your spice rack – then wondering why your company, marriage, and back porch are all crumbling under your “prioritization.” Sounds like maybe you’re just feeling crummy about not understanding your job and your life. Once you know a tree is falling on you, you don’t take a meeting to drill down on strategies viz. arboreal exit strategies. You just run.

Also, number two – and this is a biggie – I’m staggered whenever a Director-level or higher executive claims they have 3, 5, 7, or 27 “priorities.” Because, at that level, your entire career is deﬁned by the unbelievably great ideas that you reject. Painfully giant, wonderful, terriﬁc opportunities that you simply don’t have the capacity to address without screwing up the real priority.

No, no, no, no, sorry, later, nope, forget it, later, no, no, no.

Because only babies and crazy people get to pretend that reality actually changes when you close your eyes and hum. And, reality is the thing that priorities hang on. If you think you can change it by taxonomies and meetings, you still have only two arms, only now you’re also screwed.

So, if a mud room, or a crying toddler, or a CPR class, or even a short note from an old friend turns up on your radar screen today, don’t ask yourself whether it’s a “priority.” Ask yourself what you must not do in order to make sure it gets taken care of.

Once you see and accept real priorities, the rest just turns on the mechanics of fearless completion.

”Mud Rooms, Red Letters, and Real Priorities” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on April 28, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Free as in "Me"

Merlin — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 09:29:33 -0400

This unbelievably long article is related to (but not necessarily about) a discussion that I and several other people have been participating in online over the past few days. It’s about (and not about) the increasingly popular practice of re-publishing someone’s online work on another site without the attribution, formatting, and linking that many bloggers regard as standard, ethical, and fair.

It’s admittedly a polemic (which is what people who think they’re clever call, “a rambling rant”), but what may seem to many to be a childish and ungrateful pout about trivial status and self-esteem beefs turns out to be a kitchen table issue for me. Because, how people decide to reuse and attribute my work directly affects my career, my livelihood, and my ability to thrive based mostly on giving things away for free. I know. Paradoxical, right? Believe me, I know.

Anyhow. To get up to speed, please read these in order: Matt said something, Josh said something, I said something, Andy wrote this awesome post, Jason responded, then, Anil responded. For extra credit, and to get you in the mood, go back and re-listen to Gruber’s and my talk from this year’s SxSW.

I will wait here. Please read them all. This will take a while, and you should only continue if you’re okay with that. As ever, it’s kind of the whole point.

[Time passes, and then:]

Privileges, Fiat, and the Consequence of Guessing Wrong

Weird thing you eventually realize is the extent to which we all rely upon a certain amount of guessing about other people’s motivations. Call it a heuristic or a shortcut or whatever, but in order to make scalable sense of a very strange world, we each have to apply existential algorithms and SWAGs to help us turn a lot of unrelated crap into a sensible story that we can live with.

But. It is important to remember that it is just a story. And the truth behind our assumptions is often not only different than we thought or hoped, but can even be really difﬁcult to understand, summarize, or ﬁt back into our original story.

Eventually, you also learn that it’s sketchy to blame the truth instead of a broken story.

Which is why I said what I said about how All Things D’s Voices section obtains and presents the work of writers who do not actually write for them. It’s why I’m uncomfortable letting other people decide, by ﬁat, that their insight into my own motivations gives them permission to reuse my work however (and, importantly, wherever) they please while unilaterally setting the licensing and compensation to terms they’ve decided are appropriate.

In the case here, for Matt and Josh, that compensation was “a link” and – what? – I guess the opportunity to pretend that you write for a giant for-proﬁt corporation. And because, as the story goes, every blogger writes primarily (or even exclusively) in order to generate page views that bolster his site’s advertising revenue, they/we/I should all be grateful for the largesse of our True Fourth Estate. Even if a giant for-proﬁt corporation’s re-use of that work actually undermines the real motivations, it would be uncivil, ungrateful, and untoward for us to not thank them for helping us out with our little projects. Right?

Well. In my own case, anyone who guessed that motivation has guessed amazingly wrong. And, it’s not the kind of wrong without consequences. So, before I take up the rest of your morning, I’ll try to say this well and mostly once:

Nobody but me is allowed to decide why I make things. And – if and when I choose to give away the things that I make – nobody but me is allowed to deﬁne how or where I’ll do it. I am independent.

But, let’s start at the beginning. With a series of computer networks that were designed to help scientists keep talking after a nuclear holocaust. The network, of course, is the internet, and its oldest and best-known profession is advertising.1

Days We Were and Weren’t Working for Mad Men

As giant, popular websites have begun to struggle with a years-old decision to hang every nickel of their fortunes on CPM ads (and, consequently, on constantly increasing the volume of page views that make those ads theoretically proﬁtable), readers, fans, and independent makers of content have been forced to watch, ﬁdget, and, wince at their increasingly awkward tarantellas.

Because, as my friend, John Gruber, and I have grown fond of saying, page views and CPM ads can become a corrupting inﬂuence on whatever thing you really want to do – on the stories you hope to tell, and, cardinally, on the long-term success of reaching the niche audience who totally gets whatever unbelievably odd thing you’re uniquely capable of producing. Yes. Even if that thing involves not “just being a blogger”,2 maybe a few of us have the temerity to eventually crave something alongside or way beyond toiling in this noble, grinding, and often ghettoized occupation.

But. If your motivation is solely to be a blogger with a site that runs ads, it will necessarily mean thinking a lot about how you’re going to generate page views. Because without ads, most blogs would be lucky to generate bus fare.

When your sole metric is the number of times that pages on your site are loaded (and, that those delicious and life-sustaining ads are served along with them), it becomes unbelievably tempting to start doing things that you know are total bullshit. God knows I’ve done it. Probably dozens of times. Few of us haven’t followed that siren’s song in one way or another, but hopefully you evolve. Sometimes, you don’t.

The Lumpen Metrics of Page View Addiction

And, that is where things start turning to shit.

You “page” your articles to the point of hostile unreadability. You disguise or bury links to source articles in a way that makes your article seem a little more canonical than the real thing. You encourage unmoderated comment threads in which cheering an uncivil race to the bottom of the Port-O-Let means triple page views. You may even compel your indentured “writers” to hew to a stiﬂing regimen of post volume, pointless stock art inclusion, and even compulsory word count – simply because the cargo cult of statistics whispers which coconuts make the best headphones. You conspire to trick, deceive, annoy, and badger your audience up to precisely that moment when they say, “Screw it,” and just never come back.

You ruin the fun for surprisingly little money and eventually discover, to your surprise, that whatever shred of credibility you originally brought to your enterprise has disintegrated into a light dusting on some backﬁll banners.

Also, “links.” Wow. Links used to really mean something different. When I ﬁrst started enjoying blogs (maybe 11 years ago), links represented a semantic, curated map of the places where one writer’s attention tended to go.

Today, links have been converted into a wildly inﬂated currency – farthings that get hoarded and begged, then pushed around, re-counted, and stacked in ways that make you seem a lot less Charles Dickens than Ebenezer Scrooge.

Then, Presently, the Dark Night of the Soul

When page views run your life, you eventually start ﬁbbing about what you really care about. You start pandering to an audience whose depressing lust for new pellets keeps them pecking at a feeder bar for every waking hour. And, yeah, these pigeons eventually become the sole leverage behind your going concern; lose the pigeons and there’s no point pushing pellets, right? Why else would you bother tending the coop?

And, ﬁnally, as this weird darkness metastasizes, you may unintentionally abandon those ﬁnicky but inﬂuential creators of culture and content upon whose work and authority your whole rag and bone racket ultimately depends. Because, let’s be honest: people who make things tend to recognize bullshit the second it plops into the domain where they have expertise. So, a smart blogger knows horeseshit page games like a veteran carpenter can tell you which chair’s made out of masking tape and balsa scraps. (“Dude! No! Don’t sit there!”)

Thing is: the silence or indifference of the readers and fans you lose will never register in SiteMeter, or Mint, or Google Analytics. There’s no overt trace to warn you when things have gone awry. So, you may never know when someone awesome has decided you’re a charlatan.

Because, friends, when page views run your life, you get dumb. Fast. And you start making terrible decisions.

The Ingratitude. The Temerity.

So, where does some small-potatoes nobody like me (or, in this instance, my pal, Matt Haughey and Delicious.com founder, Joshua Schachter) get off? Some giant for-proﬁt publication (whose most evergreen topic, like my own, seems to be “How Everyone on the Internet Keeps Doing It Wrong”) shows the largesse to republish some digital peasant’s scribblings in their esteemed forum – and they complain? The very idea. Guys, this is a GIANT compliment, right? Because it “drives trafﬁc!”

Hey, trafﬁc. Right. I guess I’ll need that for all those page views, right? Well. Only kinda.

See, links and trafﬁc are great. Seriously. Especially when you’re getting started and when they come from a site run by people you respect and admire as much as I admire Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher (this beef aside, those two are the real deal). Links and trafﬁc are, as I said, the coin of the realm in some sense. They build awareness about what a person does, and they expose a person’s work to a large enough audience that one even hopes a few “ideal readers” might end up landing somewhere in the mix.

But, what if you’re trying to do something really different? What if the page views only really matter to you when they’re happening in front of a face you admire? What if your game is not primarily ads? What if – as I said in that email to Andy – what if you’re selling yourself? Or, even better put, what if you’re not really selling anything but the idea that you do interesting things? What if everyone’s best guesses about your motivation are wrong, cynical, and lead to decisions that actually harm rather than compliment? What if.

So, Who Died and Made You So Fancy, Mr. Fancy?

Anyone with the patience to read or hear anything I’ve had to say over the last year knows that saying what I have to say in the way I want to say it is orders of magnitude more important to me than driving a lot of pointless page views from people I never cared about reaching anyway. No offense, internet, but right now, I need links like Chasen’s needs chili.3

And, to clarify why I include myself in this particular discussion, even though ATD did not boost my own articles for their site, this kind of unilateral and dodgy “repurposing” of my work has happened to me many times. Even setting aside the truly black hat scraping that happens dozens of times a day, I’ve received this kind of left-handed compliment numerous times over the past 4 years.

The example that, for a variety of reasons, sticks out most prominently in my mind happened in May of 2007, when I awoke one morning to discover that the much-more-giant-and-ﬁnancially-lucrative site, Lifehacker, had suddenly started republishing my entire feed on their ad-crazy home page without even bothering to inform me, let alone ask if I was cool with it. Hey. Wow. Just look at all that honor. Lucky me.

I immediately complained about the nonsense to now-emeritus Lifehacker editor (and long-standing Top 10 human) Gina Trapani, and she was kind enough to remove me from the mix with all haste (thanks, Gina).

But, should I have had to ask? As I said in an email to Gina at the time:

I wonder how [Lifehacker’s hilariously Dickensian publisher, Nick Denton] would feel if a site like Engadget started automatically reposting every article from Gizmodo w/o permission or compensation – but wrapped it in Engadget’s ads. Maybe he’d love it. Who knows?

Personally, I think it’s always nice to be asked about this kind of thing ﬁrst.

Was it about “the money?” Was it because I think Nick consistently sets, funds, and promotes many of the most execrable examples in the history of publishing? “Not really,” and “kinda,” respectively.

This was about taking something I did and putting it someplace that wasn’t mine, and then acting like we’d both agreed it was a good deal. Like snatching the card off the gift-wrapped toaster I brought, scribbling your name above mine on the card, then handing the whole thing to the bride with a kiss. “Yay! Presents! Thanks, Nick!”

Money is only an issue inasmuch as the prospect of making it without effort or agency governs someone’s decision to stick their dick in my mashed potatoes and call it a birthday cake.

There’s Also No “I” in “We.” Not Until I Say So.

Here’s something like my point: there’s exactly one person on this marble who gets to choose what I give away, to whom I give it away, and under what conditions I give it away. It’s not folks who have decided via tarot or Ouija why I do anything that I do. And it’s damned sure not the esteemed employees of Rupert Murdoch or Nick Denton. It’s me, gang. Merlin is Merlin’s sole free-stuff decider. Full stop. Punto.

If it matters (and it certainly may not), my goal and motivation is to wake up early every day, drink coffee, play with my daughter, kiss my beautiful wife, and then spend double-digit hours trying to create things that will make people happy, productive, entertained, inspired, and even a little more awesome – and, on those rarest and most joyful of days, maybe I’ll even make something that combines all of those qualities.

But, all these ideas start and end with me. All the execution goes through me. If it sucks, it’s because of me. But it always has my name and my dorky icon on it, so you know where to either ﬁnd more or simply try to steer clear.

And, whether people love, despise, or feel indifferent about things I’ve made, it all comes down to me and my weird independent occupation. This is not simply a job; it’s an anxious daily adventure in fucking reinventing myself. While, I’ll note, paying my own way to keep every dinghy in this little ﬂotilla aﬂoat and barnacle-free. And while it’s undeniably the richest of ﬁrst-world problems, funding your own independence is the most insanely costly and addictive project you’ll ever love.

Okay, Shakespeare: WHY Do I Care?

What makes all this melodrama so interesting today, is that we are all in the midst of an unprecedented and unavoidable global re-thinking of what a lot of things really “mean.” Economy. Home. Family. Security. Entertainment. Identity. You name it. There are a shit-ton of grenades still rolling around on the ﬂoor right now, and I’m one of those crazy fringe types who publicly, ardently hopes that at least one of them blows out a few load-bearing walls inside industries that are in overdue need of a bottom-up redesign. No matter what.

And, even in the face of change that will be gut-wrenching for literally everyone, I pray that for each person whose occupation relied on a 100- to 900-year-old business model, maybe one or two might get to ﬁgure out something they can make and vend in a way that does not require the intermediation of the people who are currently steaming their unsinkable vessels into some surprisingly pointy and resolute chunks of ice.

Again: There are Many Like It, But This One is Mine

This is just my opinion and I speak for no one but myself. But, when somebody moves my work onto their shelf without asking me like an adult, one of the last things on my mind is stealing or piracy. Seriously. I know. Crazy.

Steal my stuff? Sure. Go nuts. Grab it. Read it. “Pirate it.” Put it on a Kindle. Put it in a torrent. Make it into LaTeX (whatever that is). But, man. Don’t sell it without asking me. Don’t be a dick about pretending I made it for your project. And, don’t try to shortchange me on copper pipe, then call it a special discount. None of that’s your call, chief.

I can make words and videos and pretty much anything to replace or augment the ones people consume; but I absolutely can’t do it if you rub my name and address off of the label. And, here’s the funny part: when people like me quit making stuff, guess what? Your shovelblog fodder and pigeon pellets start drying up. You’d have nothing left to churn. So, it actually beneﬁts all of us to take this stuff seriously.

The Niche Shall Set You “Free”

And, ﬁnally, as far as motivations go? If you’re married to page views, never assume that I am. If you’re angling for 1,000,000 Twitter followers whom you pretend to read, never assume that I am. And, if your project is based on generating compulsory year-over-year growth vis-a-vis market domination and ﬁduciary responsibility, never assume that I am.

The niche is the thing, friends. It’s the future, and it’s here. Things like this little rhubarb are just the earliest Braxton Hicks contractions of a change that will be getting way, way weirder than most people think.

But, if we each have the arrogance to demand the credit that we’re due, an astonishing number of opportunities begin to unfold. We learn who really made what we love; not just who put it someplace where lots of people can see it. We discover whom we admire and we make decisions about who to collaborate with.

And, if we do the right thing, we can each merge into an insane new caravan of makers who look out for each other, focus on doing great work, and who try to promote things because it made a connection with us. Not because it beneﬁts someone who pays us by the compliment.

But, the anecdote that’s on my mind today comes straight out of the warm and countless Wednesday night potlucks my family attended in the Fellowship Hall at White Oak Christian Church on Blue Rock Road in Cincinnati, Ohio. Where, even if you arrived empty-handed and unable to contribute on a given night, you were welcomed and encouraged to eat all you liked. But, when you ﬁnished, you wiped your mouth, straightened your tie, and personally acknowledged every single cook who’d just fed you. Yes. Even all those amateurs who ﬁlled your belly for “free.”

I have and will continue to run ads on some of my sites, including 43 Folders. It will be left to the reader whether this is wise, well-done, or simply hypocritical, so I’ll just simply stipulate that, in my opinion, ads alone are not the problem; they’re an easy revenue stream that can be removed with trivial ease. But. Making a career out of executing work exclusively to generate page views that support those ads? That is where this gets thorny. I don’t do that (at least now I don’t), but judge away. ↩
Not that there’s anything wrong with that; some of my best friends are “just a blogger.” ↩
Yeah. Totally stole that from Robert Evans. ↩

”Free as in "Me"” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on April 10, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

43f Podcast: John Gruber & Merlin Mann's Blogging Panel at SxSW

Merlin — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:33:08 -0400

SxSW ’09 - Gruber & Mann - HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility! (audio mp3, free on iTunes)

My pal, John Gruber (from daringﬁreball.net), and I presented a talk at South by Southwest Interactive on Saturday, March 14th. We talked about building a blog you can be proud of, trying to improve the quality of your work, reaching the people you admire, and maybe even making a buck (in a way that doesn’t blow your deal). Here’s what we had to say:

This text will be replaced

N.B.: Awesome drawing by Dave Gray. Here’s more.

Selected Notes

”43f Podcast: John Gruber & Merlin Mann's Blogging Panel at SxSW” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on March 25, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Matt Jones: "Get Excited and Make Things"

Merlin — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 12:38:06 -0400

Don’t keep calm and carry on. by moleitau

Apart from noting that I adore Matt and want to acknowledge his inspiration for this, I have nothing to add.

This, my friends, is the thing.

”Matt Jones: "Get Excited and Make Things"” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on March 18, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Kutiman, Big Media, and the Future of Creative Entrepreneurship

Merlin — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 11:51:00 -0400

So amazing, so illegal. What are we going to do with you, future?

That’s my pal, Jonathan Coulton, remarking on the disruptively talented Kutiman, who has made an astounding series of YouTube video remixes that’s lighting up the web and (one imagines) generating a lot of wood amongst our nation’s libidinous entertainment litigators.

Here’s Kutiman’s “The Mother of All Funk Chords” (link includes credits for each video):

Unsolicited tip for media company c-levels: if your reaction to this crate of magic is “Hm. I wonder how we’d go about suing someone who ‘did this’ with our IP?” instead of, “Holy crap, clearly, this is the freaking future of entertainment,” it’s probably time to put some ramen on your Visa and start making stuff up for your LinkedIn page.

Because, this is what your new Elvis looks like, gang. And, eventually somebody will ﬁgure out (and publicly admit) that Kutiman, and any number of his peers on the “To-Sue” list, should be passed from Legal down to A&R.

Everybody knows the business has moved from legal to binary ﬁles. The question now is how much more lead time old media companies and other IP-obsessives can afford to burn by pretending it’s otherwise.

In the mean time, though, you have to wonder how much artists like Kutiman (or, for that matter, Jonathan), really need the mixed basket of theoretical beneﬁts that big companies with big distribution can provide. For a long-lived career, does a boot-strapping indie artist with giant niche appeal gain enough from a big-company relationship to offset the loss in agility, equity, and ﬂexibility? I guess we’ll ﬁnd out soon enough.

Because, even in the face of bullying, obfuscating, and throat-clearing from corporations with a homemade timetable for evolution, more and more folks like Kutiman will just keep making and releasing stuff. Cool stuff, “illegal” stuff, niche stuff, and stuff that doesn’t require the benediction of a middle-aged executive in order to reach its precise audience with almost zero friction or overhead.

And, that prospect should buoy and energize anybody with a scintilla of artistic entrepreneurship or the drive to just try making and offering their own stuff in their own way.

Man. What an exciting time this is. Seriously. We may not each have Kutiman-level talent and vision, but there’s absolutely never been a better time to at least give it a throw.

Remember: the only person who can sit on your ass is you.

”Kutiman, Big Media, and the Future of Creative Entrepreneurship” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on March 11, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

43f Podcast: Gangs, Constraints, and Courageous Blocks

Merlin — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 10:57:36 -0500

iTunes: “Gangs, Constraints, and Courageous Blocks”

Learn how ganging and constraints can help you create the blocks of time you need to devote 100% of your attention to making your best work. (10:32)

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Thanks for your patience, everybody. Nice to be back.

”43f Podcast: Gangs, Constraints, and Courageous Blocks” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on February 03, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Celtx: Powerful Free App for Script Writing, Pre-Production, and Collaboration

Merlin — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 13:27:10 -0500

celtx - Integrated Media Pre-Production

QPR - CryingStore - “Cold Tulips” by merlinmann (Celtx - Project Central)

I’ve recently returned to using the Open Source (MPL-based CePL license) Celtx app for all the script-ish stuff I write. But it does a lot more than just collect and format drafts (which, unlike a text ﬁle or MS Word, Celtx does in a way that lets you focus solely on writing, rather than ﬁddly formatting). It’s also an amazingly ﬂexible and robust app for managing all the pre-production materials for screenplays, comics, audio plays, or what have you. And, again: it’s totally free.

Celtx reminds me favorably of Scrivener, in that it takes into account that there may be much more to a very large writing project than just typing; that your ﬁnal draft only serves as the jumping-off point for another, more giant thing that you will need to make out of all your words.

To this end, you can choose to let Celtx handle as little or as much of the process as you need — anything from storyboarding and conceptualization through shooting schedules, prop management – even animal handling! (Memo to self: write more things that require animal handling.)

One neat feature I’ve just barely started playing with is the app’s ability to seamlessly share versioned drafts of your script via Celtx’s web-based Project Central. Looks like you can ﬂip a bit to make it public v. private v. members-only. And, I still haven’t touched the coolest online feature of all, which allows you to solicit criticism and notes from other users and even collaborate with colleagues, co-writers, and production staff – kinda like “SVN for Screenplays,” I’ll dub it, in a way that will probably infuriate everyone who uses either of those.

Anyhow, here’s the script for my recent public radio “CryingStore” parody as an example. Powerful app, and very ﬂexible and fun to use. And at $200+ less than the commercial gorilla, FinalDraft, it’s most deﬁnitely worth the free-as-in-everything download.

Celtx - FREE - Open Source - Application for Script Writing and “Integrated Media Pre-Production”

Celtx Links:

celtx - #1 choice for media pre-production. (Overview/Intro)
celtx - Screen Shots
Celtx Features: The Feature Tour
celtx - FAQ
Main Page - CeltxWiki
celtx - Download Version 1.0 (Dang, man: 4 platforms and up to 23 languages. Nice)

”Celtx: Powerful Free App for Script Writing, Pre-Production, and Collaboration” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on February 01, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Video: Merlin's Talk, "Toward Patterns for Creativity"

Merlin — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 18:27:38 -0500

Merlin Mann - “Toward Patterns for Creativity” - Macworld PULSE

Here’s a video of my presentation, “Toward Patterns for Creativity,” from earlier this month at Macworld, here in SF.

My slides were kind of a mess thanks to a bonehead technical problem on my part, but you can follow along ﬁne below.

As I said, I’m very interested in seeing where a topic like this could go. Because I truly believe it’s an idea that could help push a lot of people to the next level.

Related: if you’re interested in where my head was as I prepped for this, be sure and catch the previous post, The Problem with “Feeling Creative”.

Also, if you haven’t done so already, do yourself a favor, and pick up the book I highlight in this talk: The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharpe.

Addendum: 2009-01-28 06:42:03

It should not go without mentioning ﬁve (5) John Gruber-related things:

Seriously. I really did like John’s talk, and I think he’s totally onto something with the Auteur thing. (cf.)
John very kindly let me borrow his laptop after my learning that my own was un-dongle-able.
The slide problem stemmed from my preparing the presentation on a newer version of Keynote than John had installed.
I’m pretty sure John did have Helvetica Neue installed. Because he’s a giant type nerd.
John invented Markdown. In which I write everything. Including this.

Which is just to say that John is a friend as well as my favorite person in the Apple universe. So, upon watching this a second time, I realize I’d hate to leave you with the impression that I feel anything other than embarrassingly abundant aloha for him.

Thanks, John.

[video via: Macworld Pulse: Merlin Mann | Macworld]

Like the Talk?

A big part of what I do these days is delivering talks like this and others all around the US and beyond. If you’d enjoy having me visit with you to present at your company, event, or conference, drop a line and my ninja assistant, Erica, will be happy to take your details and check for availability.

”Video: Merlin's Talk, "Toward Patterns for Creativity"” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 27, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

The Problem with “Feeling Creative”

Merlin — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 13:47:26 -0500

If your mall’s bookstores look anything like mine (and it’s probably safe to assume that they do), you’ll ﬁnd numerous sections devoted to helping writers, painters, musicians, and other aspiring artists to become successful in one way or another. There are books chock full of tips on ﬁnding an agent, on painting like the masters, and on composing and selling a hit song.

There are also dozens of books on “creativity” itself. Guides that are meant to help you access and unlock the artist within and to see the world in more creative ways. How to “be” creative, how to generate ideas, and how to learn to think “laterally.”

Some of these books are just terriﬁc, many are atrocious, and, at least in my anecdotal experience, only a handful challenge their readers with a fundamentally unmarketable premise:

Creative work only seems like a magic trick to people who don’t understand that it’s ultimately still work.

Bad for Business

But, let’s be honest. This is a tough idea to sell to folks with “real jobs” who are just looking for a diverting bit of creative tourism or who ﬁnd themselves yearning for a nostalgic amble past a mostly-abandoned adolescent arts hobby. People who want to learn how to feel creative. To feel successful. To feel like an artist. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

My sense, though, is that for most people who repeatedly do (and sell) creative work, this all seems a bit like wanting to feel like a world-class athlete. Because “feeling creative” produces great work in approximately the same way that “feeling like a doctor” makes you a gifted thoracic surgeon.

Let’s Talk About My Feelings

The athlete got good not by reading reviews of headbands, but by waking up early, lacing shoes in the dark, and hitting the track to train hard. While the surgeon got good not by watching reruns of Trapper John, M.D., but by slogging through medical school, residencies, and hundreds of hours of face time with patients, colleagues, and mentors. “Feeling” had nothing to do with it.

But is it fair to compare creative work with physical and mental achievement? Having strong legs and support from a young age helped the athlete, and any aspiring doctor who couldn’t pass 10th grade Biology is likely headed for a career outside the surgical theater. But, what about artistic “gifts?” And “talent?”

The Labored Metaphor About Mineral Mining

Even (or especially) for people with a notional gift for their chosen ﬁeld, talent — like luck, rich parents, and unmined gold — is just a raw material. It’s not the one-bit switch that determines artistic success. And, any “talent” one theoretically possesses is likely to stay stuck under a layer of river rock unless and until its claim-holder learns to repeatedly pan, sluice, or dredge it into something that can be reﬁned, polished, and, in most cases, vended. Fancy ladies buy gold jewelry; not drawings of mining equipment.

Still, unlike metaphorical mining, it’s rare for any artist who “strikes it rich” once to simply stop working. That’s not how the temperament operates. You slake a thirst for creating by ﬁnishing projects, then ﬁnding new ones. Again and again.

It’s this ability to create a long-lived career in creative ﬁelds that’s gotten me wondering about design patterns. And, it’s also apparently the topic I’ll be standing in front of a bunch of people, trying to ﬁgure out, next Friday at my Macworld PULSE session. Oh, yeah. That’s right. I’m doing a presentation in seven days, aren’t I? Hm.

Right. Macworld Presentation. Check.

Anyhoo, I’m working on the talk right now (and for poor Paul Kent’s sake, let’s agree that it’s “mostly done”). I expect I’ll report back soon as the talk develops (or, for poor Paul Kent’s sake, as it “gets one ﬁnal bit of polish”). I haven’t decided whether the whole thing is just a terrible idea to begin with, but I guess we’ll ﬁnd out in a few days.

Here’s what the proposal looked like late last summer:

Toward Design Patterns for Creativity

“Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem in such a way that you could use this solution a million times over without doing it the same way twice.” – Christopher Alexander, 1977.

For over 30 years, “Design Patterns” have been been used by architects, designers, and software engineers to share useful ways in which the recurring problems of their ﬁelds can be identiﬁed and solved. By documenting and categorizing the things that “tend to work” within a given context (and within a given set of constraints), individual patterns can provide the basis for a pattern language that encourages ﬂexible problem-solving that discourages the costly and time-consuming tendency to reinvent the wheel.

This presentation addresses the opportunities and challenges around developing design patterns for creativity. Is creativity simply an innate ability that one either has or lacks? Or, are there demonstrated habits, practices, and approaches to one’s work that tend to help produce more consistent output (along with a more healthy and long-lived career for the creator)? Are there environmental and cognitive changes that can improve the quality of our work? Ultimately, could patterns for creativity help us learn to stop relying on an unreliable muse to inspire (and complete) the work that matters to us?

We’ll look at the common myths of creativity and talk about ways in which the hard work of making anything might be improved by the application of patterns that have been shown to work for artists, writers, and makers of all sorts. We’ll also address some of the ways in which OS X applications might be used to apply and support patterns for creativity at the point of implementation.

Wow. That’s pretty ambitious for a 20-minute talk about a topic I don’t really understand, isn’t it?

All Downhill from Here

Well. If you’re going to Macworld, do stop by and say hi. I’ll be at PULSE and in a few other places that I’ll announce soon, but I should be pretty easy to spot. I look like this and am easy to recognize as the middle-aged man with the amazingly polished presentation about design patterns. And a giant tote bag full of unintentional irony. As usual.

Yep. Pretty much just dotting i’s and crossing t’s at this point, Paul.

”The Problem with “Feeling Creative”” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 02, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"