Know When To Paint, And When To Cut Off Your Ear

Posted on March 24, 2011 by AJ Kessler

Your parents probably fawned over your finger paintings, or craft projects, or clay pots, or whatever crappy thing you created when you were four.  There’s an audience for everything.  Sometimes that audience is enormous, and sometimes, like with crappy children’s art, it’s tiny.  Having a tiny audience is fine.  But know who that audience is. Nobody on the street would give a flying fuck about your kid’s crappy artwork because it’s crappy.  They aren’t invested in your kid.  They’re not his audience.

Figure out who your audience is, and serve those people.  Not the throngs of people on the street.  Chances are, if you’re doing something big and bold, they’ll never accept you anyway.  And that’s ok, you don’t need them to.  All you need is the support of your own little audience.

This doesn’t just apply to you new age future-cubist-retro-dadaists.  Listen to Pat Putnam’s wonderful description of the audience for Sugar Ray Leonard and Roberto Duran’s Super Fight, which took place in 1989, a time when boxing was still phenomenally popular in this country:

“Still, the fans didn’t like it; Leonard gave them artistic perfection when they wanted heated battle, and they booed lustily. Most fight fans would not spend a dime to watch Van Gogh paint Sunflowers, but they would fill Yankee Stadiumto see him cut off his ear.”

Know your audience.

Read more about the Leonard/Duran fight at Sports Illustrated

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Real Artists Tell The Truth When They Lie

Posted on March 23, 2011 by AJ Kessler

Reality

Never before has the public been more skeptical of what they see every day.  A massive section of the web has been dedicated to outing fakes, spotting goofs, and pointing out flaws in everything from political arguments to celebrities’ stories.  This is understandable in an era where anyone can pay $12 to see an entire continent convincingly crumble under John Cusack’s fleeing feet.  When Will Smith stomps through a vacant and overgrown New York City that actually looks like the world had abandoned it for 50 years, it gets tough to take any sort of visual imagery without a grain of salt.  Questioning if what we’re presented with is real becomes the status quo.

The world of photography has not escaped unscathed.  If you try to sell your work, you will inevitably be asked some variation of “Is it real?”  I don’t blame people for asking this.  The real answer is “Of course not”, but many may find it difficult to say this to a potential buyer.  A photograph is, by definition, not a real or true exposition of what is displayed in the photograph.  It’s at best an approximation, a portrayal, a depiction, if for no other reason than a photograph is, for now, a two dimensional representation of a three dimensional world.  Reality has depth, not to mention sounds and smells and tastes and feelings; a photograph is just a bunch of dots on a piece of paper.

Perception

Of course, a photograph that anyone would pay for is much more than just dots on paper.  The image itself is only some small part of a larger scene, all of which the photographer chose to exclude because it didn’t belong in the image.  Is that real?  Not really.  My eyes see something like 160 degrees on the horizontal axis and 130 degrees on the vertical axis.  That’s a huge field of view, one that even a panoramic camera with a serious wide-angle lens would have trouble capturing.  Even if you did capture an image with such a field of view, it would probably look like crap.  I’ve never found a scene that just envelops you in beauty and is still orderly enough to look good in a print.  The main job of any artist is to eliminate all of the extraneous stuff that doesn’t make the work any stronger.  Altering reality and changing perception, which is what you do when you compose an image in the viewfinder, is the first thing a photographer needs to learn.

Once the image is composed, you face more choices: shutter speed, aperture, ISO, and film type.  If you use a longer shutter speed and any motion is captured as a blur in the final image, this certainly isn’t representation of what your eyes saw.  Likewise, if you use a very fast shutter speed to freeze action, you can’t call this an accurate representation of what you saw either: the whole reason we have the slow-mo replays is because we can’t see those fine details in real time.  Your eyes also have a very shallow depth of field, so if you stop way down to make your landscape image sharp from foreground to infinity, this is absolutely not how you saw the scene.  Your eyes also have cones and rods, not film grain or digital noise, and you certainly don’t have the ability to resolve detail in the dark like today’s cameras do.  Your eyes certainly don’t see colors like Fuji’s Velvia slide film does, or Kodak’s black and white T-Max film.

When it gets right down to it, it’s pretty silly to even compare the eyes to how a camera captures an image.  The comparison also disregards what your other four senses experienced as you fired that shutter.  While it’s nice to fantasize that our brains are powerful enough to fully separate each sense, that’s just not how things work.

So, if photos don’t, and can’t, depict reality, what do they depict?  The photographer’s perception of the scene.  The question that buyers should be asking isn’t “Is it real?” but instead “Is this how you felt?”

Art

Sometimes a photographer’s job is to capture an image that represents a scene as accurately as possible.  If you’re reporting the news or reproducing some other piece of art, we don’t want any evidence of the photographer’s interference.  In documentary photographs, we want to believe that the story told in the image itself is what’s powerful, not any technical or artistic decision the photographer made.  But this is bullshit too: I could stand next to a veteran photojournalist like Joe McNally and I would come away with boring photos while he came away with evocative, maybe iconic, shots.  But, because we think that photojournalists should capture “only what’s there”, we’ve convinced ourselves that we don’t want any after-the-fact manipulation of the image.  This obviously overlooks all of the manipulation that goes into creating an image before the shutter is ever fired.

So is it all art then?  Can we manipulate as much as we want?  Can we add skies or birds or people or buildings, or take away twigs or power lines or whole towns?  The answer is yes.  Every good photo is art, because every good photo is “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination.” We want to see the artist when we look at his work; if we can’t, it’s often considered empty.

The Reason I Take Photos

I don’t take photos with the intent of creating “art”.  I don’t even have a definition of what art is or should be (the definition in the last paragraph is from the dictionary).  I don’t really care.  I take photos because mostly because I love to be outside, in awesome locations, experiencing awesome light and seeing awesome things.  I’ve been lucky enough to see some of the most incredible sights on the planet, and I feel that it would be a bit of a waste to squander those moments, so I try to take them with me.  That’s all I’m trying to do: convey what it was like to be able to stand there and experience the show going on in front of me.

Sometimes the images I capture don’t reflect that experience at all.  Most of those go in the recycle bin.  Sometimes the images I capture reflect that experience, but there’s things in the image itself that I couldn’t see or didn’t notice when I was standing there shooting.  Those things usually get cloned out immediately.  I make huge prints of my photos, and often really small stuff that you can’t notice when you’re shooting gets displayed, sometimes glaringly, in the final image.  That telephone pole on the far ridge that I couldn’t see when I was taking the shot now sticks out like a sore thumb.  Guess what?  It’s gone now.  Is that cheating?  Not for me.  That wasn’t part of the experience I had when I was standing there shooting.

Hypocrite: the man who murdered both his parents and pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan. ~Abraham Lincoln

There are few things that America hates more than hypocrites.  Catching them has become a sport for all levels of media covering all aspects of life.  When it turns out that the politician campaigning against gay rights gets pulled over leaving a gay bar with an “unidentified male companion” in the passenger seat, that story doesn’t get buried on page 2.  When celebrities who espouse “going green” get caught living in mansions with carbon footprints the size of small towns, we excoriate them with extra exuberance.  When photographers claim that their images are “exactly as they saw them” or “straight out of the camera” they too should be lambasted if they’re not being honest.

Why would anyone consider a photo shot on Velvia or T-Max to be “real” but a digital photo that’s had it’s saturation increased or decreased to be “fake”?  I have no idea, but this view is perpetuated by gallery owners and salesmen the world over.  Not only is this terribly misleading, photographers that “refuse” to use Photoshop are stupid.  Why wouldn’t you want to take advantage of the latest tools to make your vision come to life?  Almost everything you can do in Photoshop can be done in a traditional dark room; it just takes 100 times as long, is far less precise, and the results aren’t as good.  Why bother?  Do you still use a slide rule and a carrier pigeon to pay your bills?  To remove the “LP” off the side of a hill in Lone Pine, Ansel Adams had to painstakingly scratch it off the original slide film with a razor blade, and since this wasn’t good enough, still had to paint over it in each print he made.  That’s authentic, but digital manipulation (which would have taken about 30 seconds to accomplish the same thing) isn’t?  Give me a break.

Ansel was up front about what he did.  If you ever get a chance to see his originals, you’ll realize that his prints, “the performance” as he called them, looked nothing like the original slides, which he called “the score”.  But he didn’t pretend, as many photographers do today, that his prints were anything but his vision.  He wasn’t trying to document the scene as accurately as possible.  He was trying to evoke emotion from anyone and everyone who viewed his prints.  He definitely succeeded.

So clone away.  Replace skies.  Give the elephant four trunks.  I don’t care.  Just be interesting.  Convey emotion.  But stop pretending that what’s fake is real, that what you’ve added was really there, or that the final print is “really how it looked”.

 

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If You’re Gonna Be Opaque, You Better Over-Deliver

Posted on March 22, 2011 by AJ Kessler

This article, a fantastic rant by auto writer Chris Harris, is a great example of how zealously trying to control your brand’s message can backfire.  Harris skewers Ferrari for things like heavily modifying journalists’ test cars to specific tracks so they perform better than any production car you could buy at a Ferrari dealership.  In fact, Ferrari tries to prohibit journalist who review their cars from driving other, production Ferraris.

http://jalopnik.com/#!5760248/how-ferrari-spins

Excerpt:

What Ferrari plainly cannot see is that its strategy to win every test at any cost is completely counter-productive. First, it completely undermines the amazing work of its own engineers. What does it say about a 458 if the only way its maker is willing to loan it to a magazine is if a laptop can be plugged in after every journey and a dedicated team needs to spend several days at the chosen test track to set-up the car? It says they’re completely nuts –- behavior that looks even worse when rival brands just hand over their car with nothing more than a polite suggestion that you should avoid crashing it too heavily, and then return a week later.

It’s the level of control that’s so profoundly irritating and I think damaging to the brand. Once you know that it takes a full support crew and two 458s to supply those amazing stats, it then takes the shine off the car. The simple message from Ferrari is that unless you play exactly by the laws they lay down, you’re off the list.

Harris also rightly points out why this kind of behavior can be so damaging:

Point two: the internet is good for three things: free porn, Jalopnik and spreading information. Fifteen years ago, if your 355 wasn’t as fast as the maker claimed you could give the supplying dealer a headache, whine at the local owners club and not much besides. Nowadays you spray your message around the globe and every bugger knows about it in minutes. So, when we used an owner’s 430 Scud because Ferrari wouldn’t lend us the test car, it was obliterated in a straight line by a GT2 and a Lambo LP 560-4, despite all the “official” road test figures suggesting it was faster than Halley’s Comet. The forums went nuts and some Scud owners rightly felt they hadn’t been delivered the car they’d read about in all the buff books. Talk about karma slapping you in the face.

 

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Strip-Club-Bathroom Psychology

Posted on March 21, 2011 by AJ Kessler

You ever walk into the bathroom at a nice restaurant, or, so I’ve been told, at a strip club, and been startled when you’re greeted by an older gentleman in an ill-fitting tuxedo with a tray full of hair product, cologne and other defunkification equipment?  You ever notice that every single one of them has a little dish full of mints or candies?  It’s not so that poor geriatric who has to listen to you dispose of 39 hotwings and 9 beers can keep his own breath minty fresh.  The reason those mints are there is actually downright diabolical.

The need to reciprocate is a powerful psychological driver in human beings.  If you pass a random guy who smiles and says “hi” to you, you naturally smile and say “hi” back.  If you just ignore them and continue walking, people think you’re an asshole.  This seems simple and obvious, but it’s a powerful weapon that can be used to persuade people.

The Boy Scouts have mastered this.  At one time, to raise money for their troops, Scouts would try to sell raffle tickets door to door.  It turned out that raffle tickets were hard to sell.  Even if people wanted to help out some precocious kids, the idea of paying for some piece of paper that might be worth something at some point in the future, if you don’t forget about it, isn’t very appealing.  But, the Scouts soon discovered that offering the raffle tickets for $5, waiting for the almost assured rejection, and then offering candy bars for $1, was like printing money.  People seemed to buy the candy bars even if they didn’t want them.

Robert Cialdini, in his book The Psychology of Persuasion, cites this as an example of reciprocity.  After the Scout has conceded on the issue of whether to sell the raffle ticket, people feel the need to hold up their end of the bargain as well, even though they haven’t really entered into any bargain at all, so they buy the $1 candy bar.  That’s how powerful the need to reciprocate is.  Even if the concession the other side has made is so small that it isn’t really a concession at all, people feel the need to make a concession of their own, even if their only opportunity to do so requires much more effort than the effort expended by the other side.

So when you take a fingerfull of some American Crew, or a hit of Axe to the chest, you drop a dollar or two in the bathroom attendant’s jar.  Even though the product only cost him a nickel, your need to reciprocate compels you to hand over some bills.  For those of us who don’t find the need to have erect hair or smell like a Jersey Shore character, the attendant puts out the candy, tempting us to take one, then grossly overpay out of a sense of obligation.  After all, nobody brings change to a strip club.  Which is why the best move is to keep your eyes on the floor and get in and out of that bathroom as quickly as possible.

Posted in Food For Thought, Persuasion, Rationality, Self-Improvement | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Missing the Shot

Posted on March 20, 2011 by AJ Kessler

If you’re into photography on any level, you’ve missed the shot before.  That one, fleeting moment that slipped by before you could trip the shutter.  That perfect facial expression on your subject, or the ray of light that sneaks through a hole in the clouds, or the once in a lifetime shot of a rare big cat in action.

So what do you do?  The only thing you really can do: keep giving yourself opportunities.  Continue to get out there and shoot.  If it makes you feel any better, even the very best blow it too:

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Kill Yourself

Posted on March 19, 2011 by AJ Kessler

I love being unproductive.  I could sit on the couch and watch football all day long.  I could play video games 12 hours a day.  I could surf and hang out at the beach for a week straight.

Sometimes, we need to do these things.  It’s important for your own sanity to get your mind off things every once in a while.  It also produces better results if you have time to recharge, then come back and look at the work you’ve done with fresh eyes and a clear mind.  Right now, I need about a day a week, or a day every two weeks of just nothing.  Total withdrawal and relaxation.  I get burnt out pretty quickly on the stuff I’m working on.

But it’s terrifying how quickly an allotted half day of relaxation turns into a full day, and then two days, and then a long weekend, and then a week.

If relaxing, or some form of mindless entertainment isn’t your vice, I would bet something else is.  Maybe it’s running errands.  Or web surfing.  Or celebrity news.  Or politics.  Maybe its involvement in some club you don’t really care about.  Maybe it’s an exercise routine that doesn’t really produce results.  We all use something to procrastinate.  Whatever yours is, it’s easy to get knocked off track, to get consumed with stuff that doesn’t matter and to lose focus on your real goals.

Thinking about my massively unproductive last two days, I thought about killing myself.  What would my tombstone read?  “Here lies A.J. Kessler.  He started doing a lot of interesting stuff, and even got halfway through some of it.  Too bad he loved football and video games so much.”

Similarly, what if you were diagnosed with some terminal disease and had six months to live?  Would you instantly regret how you’d spent most of your life?  Would you regret all the things that you allowed to knock yourself off track, to impede you from accomplishing your real goals?  I know I’d instantly regret all those half-productive Sundays spent on my couch watching football or the late nights playing video games.  Those days didn’t add anything to my life or help me add anything to anyone else’s life.  So why do I continue to do them?

I’ve often kept in mind the fact that I’m going to die someday.  In fact, it’s the number one reminder on my daily time tracking template.  But that’s still hard to digest.  Everyone knows it, but even when I remind myself on a daily basis, it’s easy to lose sight of what that really means.  I think the eulogy/6-month diagnosis does a better job.

So instead of just reminding yourself that you’re going to die, ask yourself: “If I had six months to live, would I be doing this?  If I had six months to live, would I regret all the time I’ve spent doing this?  If I were dead tomorrow, would I be satisfied with what I was able to accomplish in the time I had?  If not, what can I do in the next six months that would be truly fulfilling?”

Posted in Advice, Food For Thought, Inspiration, Self-Improvement | 3 Comments

You’re Probably Not Interesting

Posted on March 18, 2011 by AJ Kessler

But you could be. The most interesting people I know, in order:

  1. Those who create
  2. Those who discover
  3. Those who do
  4. Those who read about those who create, discover, and do
  5. Those who consume

It’s easy for most people to get stuck in category five or four.  But it’s just as easy to move into category three.  After all, everyone needs to do something to put food on the table.  Make it something that’s not mindless, that contributes to the world.  The most interesting people do it by either discovering or creating something the rest of us can use.

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Don’t Try to be a Renaissance Man, Yet

Posted on March 17, 2011 by AJ Kessler

I wish I had heard this advice when I was 18, but it’s still just as applicable today.

Derek Silver’s commencement speech

Learn a skill.  Then master that skill.  Then exploit that skill to its fullest potential.  Then, become a Renaissance man.

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Doubt

Posted on March 16, 2011 by AJ Kessler

Roger Federer, perhaps the best tennis player of all time, had easily handled Andy Murray, the gifted shot-maker and #3 player in the world, 6-4, 6-4 in the first two sets of the Championship Match of the 2010 Australian Open. In the third set, Murray had elevated his game and fought his way into a tiebreak.  Federer, with only one point needed to win the match, hit a beautiful drop shot, which Murray, standing on the baseline, was able to chase down.  He struck a brilliant passing shot up the line to level the tiebreak. After the match, recalling what was going through his mind, Federer said:

“Oh my god, I’m going to see myself in the 5th set, not winning the title . . . He just grabbed the trophy out of my hands.”

Even the best of the best have moments of crushing doubt and glimpses of defeat. The difference between these men and ordinary men is that they push through these glimpses and cast aside that doubt.  Only 4 points later, Federer clinched the match for his 4th Australian Open title and record 16th Grand Slam title.

Doubt doesn’t just creep in when you need to perform.  It’s much more sinister than that.  Anybody who does anything creative for a living will tell you, they always fear that one day their well will run dry.  They won’t be able to write another good song or story.  They won’t be able to come up with another great idea.  Doubt can make you question yourself, your abilities, your choices, and your future.

The Edge, renowned guitarist of U2 and ranked by Rolling Stone magazine as the 24th Greatest Guitarist of All Time, has been a musician his entire life and written some of the most familiar and iconic songs of the last 30 years. Despite this, thoughts of doubt and insecurity still creep in. He explains, of his days spent writing and playing:

“Jumping off into the unknown, hope and have faith that the next chord or the next few notes will come to you. On occasions you get nothing and you come out feeling like a complete idiot, and that don’t know anything, and you can’t play guitar, and you can’t write songs.”

Luminaries of every field and giants from every walk of life have the same doubts and insecurities we all share. The difference isn’t their genius, or their talents, although these certainly contribute to their success, but their ability to persevere, to push past the doubt, that allows them to continue to succeed.

The easiest way I’ve found to push past doubt is to ask myself “What’s the worst that could happen?”  Most things we deal with end up not being that big a deal.  If its a bad day, maybe you lose a client.  End of the world?  Hardly.  Even if that client is your only client, what’s the worst that could happen?  Lose your car?  Your house?  Your savings?  Even if that’s the case, you’re still alive.  You’ve still got your faculties, your experience, and your education.  Is losing that stuff really that bad?  Probably not.  You can always start over, and doing it the second time is always easier than doing it the first.

Realistically, most of the situations we let overwhelm us are meaningless.  So get over your doubt.  Ask yourself, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

 

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Successful People Work For Free

Posted on March 15, 2011 by AJ Kessler

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.  Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”       ~ George Bernard Shaw

I’ve worked for free for most of my life.  I’ve also had friends tell me what a sucker I was for going to some office for 10 hours a day without getting a paycheck.  But every single successful person I’ve ever met does a ton of work for free.  I’m not just talking about pro bono or volunteer work.  Whether its organizing conferences or networking events, or attending conventions, or pitching ideas, or building things or content on spec, or meeting new clients, or just getting your foot in the door, working for free is required.

As Shaw says, progress depends on the unreasonable man.  Success comes to those unreasonable men who accomplish their unreasonable goals.  The problem is, it’s pretty damn hard to get somebody to pay you to do something they think is unreasonable.  Even if you work for Google, they’ll only pay you to work on something unreasonable one day a week.  So unless you work for Google, and unless you can not only innovate, but also execute, in 20% of your paid time, you’ve got to do it for free.

Getting a Foot in the Door

This work-for-free principle applies to everybody, all the time, but its particularly valuable for people just starting out.  It’s tough even for highly qualified people to land a job these days.  Many businesses are reluctant to hire when they’re financially shaky and pessimistic about the future.  Add in the fact that it’s expensive to hire someone, both in terms of salary/benefits and in terms of transaction costs, and many companies won’t hire until the workload absolutely demands it.  If you’re just starting out, this makes it tough just to get your foot in the door.

Assuming your dad isn’t the CEO, a friend of the CEO, or a big donor, working for free is the easiest way to get in.  “Mr. Bossman, [after doing my research] I know your company needs help doing X, and I kick ass at X.  Don’t believe me?  I’ll prove it to you.  I’ll do X for you for 2 weeks, and if I suck, don’t pay me.  After I prove myself, you can hire me at my prevailing wage.”  You could also say something like “I’ll solve problem Y for you in 2 weeks.  If I don’t, it’s free.”  This works just as well for jobs, like becoming a lawyer, where the real learning doesn’t begin until after you’ve got your foot in the door (i.e. those jobs where you don’t actually know shit from shinola).  In those cases “I’m smart and work hard.  I can handle whatever you throw at me.  I’ll prove it in 2 weeks.  If I can’t hang, don’t pay me.”  I’ve done this countless times.  Almost nobody says “no” to someone who can make their headache go away for free.  Why do you think every reputable company offers a money-back guarantee?

Ramit Sethi, of I Will Teach You To Be Rich Fame, has an interview tactic he calls The Briefcase Technique. This technique involves presenting your potential new employer, during the interview, with a list of problems you’ve already identified and various options you’ve come up with to solve them.  This obviously requires you to do a ton of work for free, but its a fantastic way to get your foot in the door.  Employers or clients go apeshit over competent people who can actually deliver.  And again, what better way to prove you can deliver than by actually delivering?  This is why proof of a portfolio beats the promise of a resume every time.

Movin’ On Up

You’ve now established yourself.  You’ve landed a job, or a roster of clients, and you’re making money.  That’s great.  But to continue to provide value to your employer or your clients, you’re going to have to continue learning and acquiring skills.  That’s just to maintain.  If you want to grow, acquire new clients or get that promotion, you’re definitely going to need new skills.  The problem is, the only people who routinely get paid for not knowing things are lawyers.  Everybody else gets to learn on their own time.  Whether it’s adding PHP skills to your web design toolkit, or Illustrator to your graphic arts repertoire, or learning new sales techniques, or boning up on the latest developments in your field, this type of life-long learning is integral to becoming successful.  It’s why all successful people do it.

If increasing your value is the first prong of the work-for-free principle, marketing yourself is the second.  If you’re a freelancer, you may not only do marketing work for free, it may actually cost you money up front.  Buying ads takes money.  Beyond that, marketing yourself includes things like taking interesting people to lunch, speaking to clubs, groups, or at events, reaching out to people you think you can help, and actually helping those people. All of these require a good deal of work, both on the front and back end.  Helping people sounds easy, and sometimes it’s extraordinarily easy, but it can be challenging.  The good news is, when it’s the most challenging its often the most rewarding.  When you really help people out of a jam, expecting nothing in return, they’ll never forget it, and you’ll be paid back ten times over.

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Pay Enough or Don’t Pay At All

Posted on March 13, 2011 by AJ Kessler

Why might you get worse performance out of someone you’re paying than out of someone who’s doing the job for free?  If you put on your economist’s hat, you’d say this is plainly irrational.  If someone is willing to do a job for free, certainly they’d be willing to do a little better job for a little bit of money.  After all, some money, no matter how small, is better than no money, right?

This is the question Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini asked, and the answer appears to be no.  In a variety of different experiments, Gneezy and Rustichini showed that small performance based incentives actually have detrimental effects on production.  In one study, 160 students were paid $60 to show up to take an IQ test.  The students were then divided into four groups: group one got no additional money, group two got an additional 10 cents per correct answer, group three got $1, and group four got $3.  Surprisingly, the group that was paid 10 additional cents per correct answer got far fewer questions right than those who were paid nothing extra at all.  There wasn’t much difference between the $1 and $3 groups: both scored higher than the group that received no extra money, and of course the group that received 10 cents per answer.

In a second experiment, a group of Israeli high school students went door to door, asking for donations for a charity, which is an annual event in Israel.  The first group was promised no part of the donations they collected, the second group received 1% of the donations collected, and the third group received 10%.  As we would expect, the group receiving 10% collected more than the group only receiving 1%.  But shockingly, both groups received less than the group who didn’t get anything.

This phenomenon seems to work the other way too.  A day-care center was having problems with late parents picking up their children after closing time.  At the beginning of the experiment, the day-care center implemented a $10 fine for a delay of 10 minutes or more.  The number of late parents suddenly shot up.  After the day-care center stopped issuing fines, the number of late parents went up even more, plateauing and remaining constant at a rate far higher than the control group that never had a fine implemented.

Huh?

Gneezy and Rustichini present an interesting explanation for why this sort of irrational behavior occurs.  They posit that once you enter into an initial agreement, you form an idea about your side of the bargain.  Once you agree to pocket $60 in exchange for showing up to take the IQ test, your job is to answer the questions on the IQ test.  But, if you are subsequently promised some rate for answering questions correctly, you correlate that rate with the amount of effort expected from you.  If the rate is low, the amount of effort you’re willing to put forth is low.  As the day-care center experiment indicates, once that change in perception is realized, it’s very hard to reverse.

So, Who Cares?

You should.  Whether you’re trying to figure out how to pay your employees, how to collect the most donations for your charity, or just trying to get your buddy to help you move, understanding incentives is key.  If you need help moving, and you call up a friend, you’re far better off just asking him to do it as a favor rather than offering to pay him $10.  First off, the $10 is really easy to turn down.  Once you turn that situation into a job offer, it becomes easy for your friend to decide that half a movie ticket isn’t worth sweating through his shirt all day and coming home with sore knees.  Plus, even if you do get your friend to help, you’ve changed his perception of the effort you expect him to put in.  Whereas he might have helped you schlep your boxes full of Japanese cartoons all day long if you asked him to do it as a favor, offering to pay him a measly $10 might net you a half hour of real help and six hours of standing around, drinking beers, and yelling at you to lift with your knees.

Gneezy and Rustichini’s full paper is available HERE.

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Confinement v. Fear

Posted on March 10, 2011 by AJ Kessler

Many people hate the process of going to their job, putting in their time, and coming home every day.  They think being self-employed would be the ultimate freedom.  “If I didn’t have a schedule, if I could work when I wanted to, I’d be so much happier.” There’s a ton of security in knowing when your next paycheck is going to come and how big it’s going to be, but with that security comes some confinement.  When someone else is paying the bills, you show up when he tells you to.

Many self-employed people, even those who have already “made it”, are constantly fearful of losing it.  “If I just knew where my next mortgage payment was coming from, I’d be so much less stressed.”  When one bad decision can undo years of hard work, there’s just a tiny bit of stress in your life.  There’s a ton of freedom in knowing you can take off whenever you want, without having to report to anyone, but that freedom also means you’re on your own.  If you don’t produce, no one is going to cover your bills that month.

These are important things to think about before deciding to strike out on your own.  Not everyone can handle being self-employed, and not everyone can handle being employed.

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How to Build a Habit

Posted on March 8, 2011 by AJ Kessler

I’ve taken vitamins every single night for years.  One day I just decided to start doing it, and I have rarely missed a day.  Contrast that with my time tracking endeavor: I found I was very consistent at doing it at the end of the day, but almost always forgot to do it at the beginning of the day.  What gives?

The Association

I’ve come to think that the most easily formed habits are the ones that we associate with something else.  For example, I read that taking vitamins with food was the best way to do it, so I started taking them with dinner.  After one day, it was already a habit.  I’d sit down for dinner and I’d take my vitamins, without really having to think about it.  Even if I went out for dinner, taking my vitamins was the first thing I’d do when I got home.  It’s by far the easiest habit I’ve ever built, and I’m fairly certain its because I strongly associated dinner with taking vitamins.

Likewise, I quickly associated my shutdown routine with my daily time tracking.  Every night before bed, I would open up my spreadsheet and record my day’s data.  But, more than half the time, I still forget to do this when I get up.  My startup habit is shower, then make food, then leave.  I don’t associate time tracking with waking up, or eating, or anything else.  I just don’t think about it most mornings, and I don’t allot myself the time to do it.

Frequency Matters

Daily habits are definitely easier to forge than weekly or monthly habits.  It’s just harder to forget something you do every single day.  It’s not too hard to remember something you do once a week, but it’s pretty difficult to remember to do something at the same time each month, particularly if its something that’s tough to associate to some other activity, like vitamins and dinner, or something that’s easy to blow off, like going for a run on Saturday morning.   Training yourself to consistently do something every couple of months, or every year, is pretty much impossible without help.

Use Technology

A calendaring system can certainly help you build a habit, and using digital calendaring tools can make this pretty easy.  I would definitely recommend this, especially if you’re already using a calendar system. Next time you’re doing something that you need to remember to do again, or want to make a habit of, simply make a calendar entry for every time you need to do it in the future.

I don’t always check my calendar though, so that doesn’t work that well for me.  But, I do check my time tracking spreadsheet every day.  If I have a new activity I’m trying to habituate, I just add a line to my sheet.  There’s still a line there that says “Vitamins?” that I put a “yes” next to every day.  This works well for me, but definitely has a downside: if I forget to do something one day, I’m not getting that reminder until that night when I review my time.

To solve this problem, there are a couple tools I’d recommend.  First is this great little tool called HabitForge.  This little web app will email you every day for 21 days, which is the time they presume it takes you to build a habit, with a reminder and some encouragement.  You can even have it remind you why you’re building that habit.  I like this tool, but it’s limited as to time and intervals.  If you’re looking to build weekly, monthly, or even less frequent habits, you can use the same idea and set up automatic emails to yourself.  Using Google’s free Google Calendars tool, you can create events, and then have Google email or even text you you reminders about those events.  This makes it super easy to set weekly, monthly or yearly reminders.

Conclusion

  • Use association to easily build habits
  • If that fails, try calendaring or time tracking
  • If that fails, or isn’t feasible, use technology like HabitForge or Google Calendars to automatically email or text you reminders at specific times
Posted in Advice, Food For Thought, Inspiration, Productivity, Self-Improvement | Tagged | 3 Comments

99 Percent of the Work is Never Seen

Posted on March 8, 2011 by AJ Kessler

I was talking to a little kid the other day.  “What do you want to do when you grow up?” I asked.  “I want to be a singer!” she immediately exclaimed.  “Oh? Why is that?”  “I want to be on TV and Radio and play concerts!” she replied, hugging her father, whose grimly smiling face betrayed his fear that he had unwittingly spawned the next Britney Spears.

Hilariously uncomfortable as it was, this little exchange nicely summed up something that had been simmering in my head for a while.

When most people dream about wanting to do something, they hardly ever examine what it takes to get there.  This little girl wanted to sing and dance on stage, have her song played on the radio, and perform on TV.  But, and I’ll let it slide because she was only 8, she didn’t have any iead what it would take to do that.  Before she’d ever get to hear her three minute song on the radio, she’d likely have to invest 2 MILLION times that amount of time: she’d have to learn an instrument or take vocal lessons, write songs, get feedback on those songs, write more songs, play some live shows, get more feedback, write more songs, scrape together money to record a demo of those songs, pitch record executives and talent scouts, and if she’s extraordinarily lucky enough to catch one of those executives attention, she gets to rewrite or rerecord those songs until those executives like them enough to pay someone at a radio station to play them.  If she’s not that lucky, she’s got to do that promotion herself.  That’s literally going to take years, if she’s talented and lucky.  All just to get her 3 minutes of airtime.

Almost all of the work it takes to accomplish something never gets seen by the public.  I think we know this intuitively, but it’s healthy to think about.  It can take 6-8 months to make a movie, and that’s after the script has already been written.  6-8 months of planning, shooting, editing, post work, distributing, promoting, etc. etc. until a 90 minute product is released.  The prolific Malcolm Gladwell typically spends weeks or months researching a topic he wants to write about, then writes 5-6 drafts of the piece, then has his “army of high-IQ fact checkers and editors and copywriters” work with him to get a final draft.  That’s a serious amount of man hours to produce just a few thousand words.

To produce one of my large photographic prints, it takes days of schedule planning before hand, days of travel to get to the location, hours of preparation and location scouting once I’m there, anywhere from a few minutes to a few days to actually set up and wait for the right light before I can get the shot (IF I get the shot), and then hours and hours of post work before making test prints, more adjustments, then final prints.  All for just one big piece of paper to hang on the wall.

Good News

In some of the examples we’ve looked at, maybe 99% of the work is never seen.  In others, it might be 99.99%.  Of all the hours it took to produce the Bourne Identity, the audience will only see 119 minutes of it.  This makes sense: we don’t want to watch the scenes that weren’t good enough to make it into the final cut.  We don’t want to watch the stunts that didn’t work, or the lines that were flubbed.  We certainly don’t want to watch the rewrite process, or the guys in the edit bay, or the press tours.  This is also good news: this means you can screw up royally during the creation phase and no one will ever know or care.

Minimize Screw Ups by Planning Ahead

But the flip side of that coin is that you can continue to screw up without anyone knowing, driving that 99% up to 99.99999%.  The more time you spend screwing up is less time you have to create something else.

Screw ups are inevitable, but the biggest screw ups, like wasting time on something unnecessary, can usually be avoided by adequate planning.  If that 8 year old girl really wanted to be on radio and TV and stage someday, she needs a plan.

The easiest way to design a plan, especially for something as ambitious as her goal, is to copy someone’s who has already done it.  I’d tell her to look at Justin Bieber: he knew what he wanted when he was 5 years old.  He developed his talent, promoted himself on Youtube, and finally got an agent.  Turns out that wasn’t enough, because labels weren’t interested and radio stations just wouldn’t play his music.  Instead of admitting defeat, he traveled around the country in a bus, meeting every DJ he could, and charmed them into playing his stuff.  He targeted a very specific audience and relied on a grass roots campaign to realize his dream at 15.  Only after he had already succeeded did the labels jump on board.

If I were that 8 year old girl, I’d skip the traditional route altogether, and just do what Bieber did.  This is some of the most valuable advice I’ve ever received.  Someone has been there before.  Ask them how they did it.  Every successful person loves to talk about how they did it, and really, loves to help other people succeed.

Even if you’re Mark Zuckerberg, blazing a new trail, someone has been there before.  Bill Gates was there.  Steve Jobs was there at least three times.  On a smaller scale, thousands of people have blazed a new trail in their little niche.  Finding someone who has faced the same challenges you are facing, or will face, is one of the most valuable things you can do to make sure that 99% doesn’t grow into 99.99999%.

Conclusion

  • The world won’t ever see 99% of what it took to create your product
  • Create a step by step plan detailing how you’ll accomplish your goal
  • Seek the advice of those who have succeeded before to help you from making mistakes that balloon that 99% to 99.99999%
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smArtHistory

Posted on March 3, 2011 by AJ Kessler

One of the best things you can do to improve your photography is to deconstruct what makes a good photograph.  It’s a bit of a catch-22 when you’re starting out though.  Even if you’re able to spot a really great photograph, you may have difficulty describing just what makes it so good.

Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of great resources that really break down photographs and explain their elements, why they work, why they don’t, and how they could be improved.  But, there are textbooks full of critiques and deconstructions about classic and modern art.

Enter, http://smarthistory.org/

This is one of the coolest websites I’ve run across in a while.  Some very knowledgeable people have put together some very interesting videos about some very famous works of art.  There’s only about 300 videos online at the moment, but they’re seeking donations to expand.  There’s a ton of great information in there.

Posted in Aesthetics, Art, Creativity, Inspiration, Photography | Leave a comment