Ben Goertz

How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, Karen Dillon

Read: 10/8/12

Rating: 5/5

My Highlights & Notes:

Last annotated on October 8, 2012

There are no quick fixes for the fundamental problems of life. But I can offer you tools that I’ll call theories in this book, which will help you make good choices, appropriate to the circumstances of your life.Read more at location 152

If I had tried to tell Andy Grove what he should think about the microprocessor business, he would have eviscerated my argument. He’s forgotten more than I will ever know about his business.Read more at location 171

But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think. He then reached a bold decision about what to do, on his own.Read more at location 173

People often think that the best way to predict the future is by collecting as much data as possible before making a decision. But this is like driving a car looking only at the rearview mirror—because data is only available about the past.Read more at location 203

although feathers and wings were correlated with flying, the would-be aviators did not understand the fundamental causal mechanism—what actually causes something to happen—that enabled certain creatures to fly.Read more at location 213

That’s a hallmark of good theory: it dispenses its advice in “if-then” statements.Read more at location 223

The trap many people fall into is to allocate their time to whoever screams loudest, and their talent to whatever offers them the fastest reward. That’s a dangerous way to build a strategy.Read more at location 297

But incentives are not the same as motivation. True motivation is getting people to do something because they want to do it. This type of motivation continues, in good times and in bad.Read more at location 393  

Herzberg’s research: if you instantly improve the hygiene factors of your job, you’re not going to suddenly love it. At best, you just won’t hate it anymore. The opposite of job dissatisfaction isn’t job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction.Read more at location 414

The truth was that having the house wasn’t what really motivated them. It was the building of it, and how they felt about their own contribution, that they found satisfying. I had thought the destination was what was important, but it turned out it was the journey.Read more at location 476

It is hard to overestimate the power of these motivators—the feelings of accomplishment and of learning, of being a key player on a team that is achieving something meaningful.Read more at location 479

I realized that if the theory of motivation applies to me, then I need to be sure that those who work for me have the motivators, too.Read more at location 488

In order to really find happiness, you need to continue looking for opportunities that you believe are meaningful, in which you will be able to learn new things, to succeed, and be given more and more responsibility to shoulder.Read more at location 491

You have to balance the pursuit of aspirations and goals with taking advantage of unanticipated opportunities.Read more at location 517

The unanticipated problems and opportunities then essentially fight the deliberate strategy for the attention, capital, and hearts of the management and employees. The company has to decide whether to stick with the original plan, modify it, or even replace it altogether with one of the alternatives that arises.Read more at location 558

focus can easily cause you to dismiss as a distraction what could actually turn out to be the next big thing.Read more at location 571

If you have found an outlet in your career that provides both the requisite hygiene factors and motivators, then a deliberate approach makes sense. Your aspirations should be clear, and you know from your present experience that they are worth striving for.Read more at location 593

But if you haven’t reached the point of finding a career that does this for you, then, like a new company finding its way, you need to be emergent. This is another way of saying that if you are in these circumstances, experiment in life. As you learn from each experience, adjust. Then iterate quickly. Keep going through this process until your strategy begins to click.Read more at location 596

Ian MacMillan and Rita McGrath, called it “discovery-driven planning,” but it might be easier to think about it as “What has to prove true for this to work?”Read more at location 652

“What are the most important assumptions that have to prove right for these projections to work—and how will we track them?”Read more at location 687

ask the project teams to compile a list of all the assumptions that have been made in those initial projections. Then ask them: “Which of these assumptions need to prove true in order for us to realistically expect that these numbers will materialize?” The assumptions on this list should be rank-ordered by importance and uncertainty. At the top of the list should be the assumptions that are most important and least certain, while the bottom of the list should be those that are least important and most certain. Only after you understand the relative importance of all the underlying assumptions should you green-light the team—but not in the way that most companies tend to do. Instead, find ways to quickly, and with as little expense as possible, test the validity of the most important assumptions.Read more at location 695

In the words of Andy Grove: “To understand a company’s strategy, look at what they actually do rather than what they say they will do.”Read more at location 874

The danger for high-achieving people is that they’ll unconsciously allocate their resources to activities that yield the most immediate, tangible accomplishments. This is often in their careers, as this domain of their life provides the most concrete evidence that they are moving forward.Read more at location 892

A strategy—whether in companies or in life—is created through hundreds of everyday decisions about how you spend your time, energy, and money. With every moment of your time, every decision about how you spend your energy and your money, you are making a statement about what really matters to you. You can talk all you want about having a clear purpose and strategy for your life, but ultimately this means nothing if you are not investing the resources you have in a way that is consistent with your strategy. In the end, a strategy is nothing but good intentions unless it’s effectively implemented.Read more at location 918

I’ve had to force myself to stay aligned with what matters most to me by setting hard stops, barriers, and boundaries in my life—such as leaving the office at six every day so that there is daylight time to play catch with my son, or to take my daughter to a ballet lesson—to keep myself true to what I most value.Read more at location 964   

there is no one-size-fits-all approach that anyone can offer you. The hot water that softens a carrot will harden an egg.Read more at location 978   

By the time serious problems arise in those relationships, it often is too late to repair them. This means, almost paradoxically, that the time when it is most important to invest in building strong families and close friendships is when it appears, at the surface, as if it’s not necessary.Read more at location 999

Professor Amar Bhide showed in his Origin and Evolution of New Business that 93 percent of all companies that ultimately become successful had to abandon their original strategy—because the original plan proved not to be viable.Read more at location 1029

When the winning strategy is not yet clear in the initial stages of a new business, good money from investors needs to be patient for growth but impatient for profit. It demands that a new company figures out a viable strategy as fast as and with as little investment as possible—so that the entrepreneurs don’t spend a lot of money in pursuit of the wrong strategy.Read more at location 1034

capital that seeks growth before profits is bad capital.Read more at location 1040

But the reason why both types of capital appear in the name of the theory is that once a viable strategy has been found, investors need to change what they seek—they should become impatient for growth and patient for profit. Once a profitable and viable way forward has been discovered—success now depends on scaling out this model.Read more at location 1041

The Risk of Sequencing Life Investments One of the most common versions of this mistake that high-potential young professionals make is believing that investments in life can be sequenced. The logic is, for example, “I can invest in my career during the early years when our children are small and parenting isn’t as critical. When our children are a bit older and begin to be interested in things that adults are interested in, then I can lift my foot off my career accelerator. That’s when I’ll focus on my family.” Guess what. By that time the game is already over. An investment in a child needs to have been made long before then, to provide him with the tools he needs to survive life’s challenges—even earlier than you might realize.Read more at location 1121

on average, parents speak 1,500 words per hour to their infant children. “Talkative” (often college-educated) parents spoke 2,100 words to their child, on average. By contrast, parents from less verbal (and often less-educated) backgrounds spoke only 600 per hour, on average. If you add that up over the first thirty months, the child of “talkative” parents heard an estimated 48 million words spoken, compared to the disadvantaged child, who heard only 13 million.Read more at location 1130

The most important time for the children to hear the words, the research suggests, is the first year of life.Read more at location 1133

when parents engaged in face-to-face conversation with the child—speaking in fully adult, sophisticated language as if the child could be part of a chatty, grown-up conversation—the impact on cognitive development was enormous. These richer interactions they called “language dancing.” Language dancing is being chatty, thinking aloud, and commenting on what the child is doing and what the parent is doing or planning to do. “Do you want to wear the blue shirt or the red shirt today?” “Do you think it will rain today?” “Do you remember the time I put your bottle in the oven by mistake?” and so on. Language dancing involves talking to the child about “what if,” and “do you remember,” and “wouldn’t it be nice if”—questions that invite the child to think deeply about what is happening around him. And it has a profound effect long before a parent might actually expect a child to understand what is being asked.Read more at location 1142

What’s more, Risley and Hart’s research suggests that “language dancing” is the key to this cognitive advantage—not income, ethnicity, or parents’ education. “In other words,” summarized Risley and Hart, “some working-poor people talked a lot to their kids and their kids did really well. Some affluent businesspeople talked very little to their kids and their kids did very poorly…. All the variation in outcomes was taken up by the amount of talking, in the family, to the babies before age three.” A child who enters school with a strong vocabulary and strong cognitive abilities is likely to do well in school early on and continues to do well in the longer term.Read more at location 1156

relationships: we go into them thinking about what we want rather than what is important to the other person. Changing your perspective is a powerful way to deepen your relationships.Read more at location 1182

what causes us to buy a product or service is that we actually hire products to do jobs for us.Read more at location 1202

the path to happiness is about finding someone who you want to make happy, someone whose happiness is worth devoting yourself to. If what causes us to fall deeply in love is mutually understanding and then doing each other’s job to be done, then I have observed that what cements that commitment is the extent to which I sacrifice myself to help her succeed and for her to be happy.Read more at location 1390

Given that sacrifice deepens our commitment, it’s important to ensure that what we sacrifice for is worthy of that commitment,Read more at location 1414

Now you might think that, in hindsight, I could have resented what happened. And yet I consider those months to be among the happiest times I ever spent with my dad and my family. As I reflect back on why, it’s because I put my whole life on hold for them.Read more at location 1431

You need to understand what capabilities are, and which of them will be critical to the future, to know which capabilities are important to keep in-house and which matter less.Read more at location 1499

Processes include the ways that products are developed and made, and the methods by which market research, budgeting, employee development, compensation, and resource allocation are accomplished. Unlike resources, which are often easily seen and measured, processes can’t be seen on a balance sheet.Read more at location 1513

If your child has a computer on which to program, and knowledge of how to program an iPad app, he has resources. The way in which he pulls these resources together to create something novel, something that he hasn’t been taught explicitly how to do, to learn as he goes along—these are his processes. And the desire he has to spend his precious free time creating the app, the problem he cares about enough to create the app to solve, the idea of creating something unique, or the fact that he cares that his friends will be impressed—those are the priorities leading him to do it. Resources are what he uses to do it, processes are how he does it, and priorities are why he does it.Read more at location 1578

Has my child developed the skill to develop better skills? The knowledge to develop deeper knowledge? The experience to learn from his experiences?Read more at location 1610

Self-esteem—the sense that “I’m not afraid to confront this problem and I think I can solve it”—doesn’t come from abundant resources. Rather, self-esteem comes from achieving something important when it’s hard to do.Read more at location 1623

I worry that an entire generation has reached adulthood without the capabilities—particularly the processes—that translate into employment. We have outsourced the work from our homes, and we’ve allowed the vacuum to be filled with activities that don’t challenge or engage our kids. By sheltering children from the problems that arise in life, we have inadvertently denied this generation the ability to develop the processes and priorities it needs to succeed.Read more at location 1628  Note: key line for skill honey Edit

I’m not advocating throwing kids straight into the deep end to see whether they can swim. Instead, it’s a case of starting early to find simple problems for them to solve on their own, problems that can help them build their processes—and a healthy self-esteem. As I look back on my own life, I recognize that some of the greatest gifts I received from my parents stemmed not from what they did for me—but rather from what they didn’t do for me.Read more at location 1632

Although in retrospect these were very simple things, they represent a defining point in my life. They helped me to learn that I should solve my own problems whenever possible; they gave me the confidence that I could solve my own problems; and they helped me experience pride in that achievement.Read more at location 1646

I guess the thing to learn from this is that children will learn when they are ready to learn, not when we’re ready to teach them.”Read more at location 1666

times that you picked up something important from your parents that they probably weren’t aware they were sharing. Your parents most likely weren’t thinking consciously about teaching you the right priorities at the time—but simply because they were there with you in those learning moments, those values became your values, too.Read more at location 1670

Children need to do more than learn new skills. The theory of capabilities suggests they need to be challenged. They need to solve hard problems. They need to develop values. When you find yourself providing more and more experiences that are not giving children an opportunity to be deeply engaged, you are not equipping them with the processes they need to succeed in the future. And if you find yourself handing your children over to other people to give them all these experiences—outsourcing—you are, in fact, losing valuable opportunities to help nurture and develop them into the kind of adults you respect and admire. Children will learn when they’re ready to learn, not when you’re ready to teach them; if you are not with them as they encounter challenges in their lives, then you are missing important opportunities to shape their priorities—and their lives.Read more at location 1695

Helping your children learn how to do difficult things is one of the most important roles of a parent. It will be critical to equipping them for all the challenges that life will throw at them down the line.Read more at location 1705

in other words, he had the right processes to do the job. In expressing a preference for the more polished candidate, we biased ourselves toward resources over the processes.Read more at location 1787

But instead of setting out on what most people thought would be the “right,” prestigious stepping-stone jobs to get there, he asked himself: “What are all the experiences and problems that I have to learn about and master so that what comes out at the other end is somebody who is ready and capable of becoming a successful CEO?”Read more at location 1812

The value of giving people experiences before they need them plays out in many fields other than business.Read more at location 1830

As a parent, you can find small opportunities for your child to take important courses early on. You’re doing what Nolan Archibald did, working out what courses your child will need to be successful and then reverse engineering the right experiences. Encourage them to stretch—to aim for lofty goals. If they don’t succeed, make sure you’re there to help them learn the right lesson: that when you aim to achieve great things, it is inevitable that sometimes you’re not going to make it. Urge them to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and try again. Tell them that if they’re not occasionally failing, then they’re not aiming high enough. Everyone knows how to celebrate success, but you should also celebrate failure if it’s as a result of a child striving for an out-of-reach goal.Read more at location 1853

This can be difficult for parents to do. So much of our society’s culture is focused on trying to build self-esteem in children by never letting them lose a game, giving them accolades simply for trying their best, and constantly receiving feedback from teachers or coaches that never requires them to think about whether they can do better. From a very young age, many of our children who participate in sports come to expect medals, trophies, or ribbons at the end of a season—simply for participating. Those medals and awards end up in a pile in a corner of their bedroom over the years and quickly become meaningless to those kids. They haven’t really learned anything from them.Read more at location 1859

think about what course you have just given your child with the decision to bail him out. You’ve given him the Cliffs Notes course; you’ve taken him through the experience of learning how to take shortcuts. He’ll think, My parents will be there to solve hard problems for me. I won’t have to figure it out on my own. Good grades are what matters, much more than doing the work.Read more at location 1882

Our default instincts are so often just to support our children in a difficult moment. But if our children don’t face difficult challenges, and sometimes fail along the way, they will not build the resilience they will need throughout their lives. People who hit their first significant career roadblock after years of nonstop achievement often fall apart.Read more at location 1892

Culture is a way of working together toward common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don’t even think about trying to do things another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful.Read more at location 1957

Those instincts aren’t formed overnight. Rather, they are the result of shared learning—of employees working together to solve problems and figuring out what works.Read more at location 1959

A culture is the unique combination of processes and priorities within an organization.Read more at location 1971

ask a group to figure out how to solve that problem. If they fail, ask them to find a better way to solve it. Once they’ve succeeded, however, the managers need to ask the same team to solve the problem every time it recurs—over and over again. The more often they solve the problem successfully, the more instinctive it becomes to do it in the way that they designed. Culture in any organization is formed through repetition. That way of doing things becomes the group’s culture.Read more at location 2001

parents aspire to raise the kind of children that they know will make the right choices—even when they themselves are not there to supervise. One of the most effective ways to do that is to build the right family culture. It becomes the informal but powerful set of guidelines about how your family behaves.Read more at location 2106

It’s not just about controlling bad behavior; it’s about celebrating the good. What does your family value? Is it creativity? Hard work? Entrepreneurship? Generosity? Humility? What do the kids know they have to do that will get their parents to say, “Well done”?Read more at location 2111

The safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. —C. S. LewisRead more at location 2124

Most of us think that the important ethical decisions in our lives will be delivered with a blinking red neon sign: CAUTION: IMPORTANT DECISION AHEAD. Never mind how busy we are or what the consequences might be. Almost everyone is confident that in those moments of truth, he or she will do the right thing. After all, how many people do you know who believe they do not have integrity? The problem is, life seldom works that way. It comes with no warning signs. Instead, most of us will face a series of small, everyday decisions that rarely seem like they have high stakes attached. But over time, they can play out far more dramatically.Read more at location 2139

Blockbuster followed a principle that is taught in every fundamental course in finance and economics: that in evaluating alternative investments, we should ignore sunk and fixed costs (costs that have already been incurred), and instead base decisions on the marginal costs and marginal revenues (the new costs and revenues) that each alternative entails. But it’s a dangerous way of thinking. Almost always, such analysis shows that the marginal costs are lower, and marginal profits are higher, than the full cost. This doctrine biases companies to leverage what they have put in place to succeed in the past, instead of guiding them to create the capabilities they’ll need in the future. If we knew the future would be exactly the same as the past, that approach would be fine. But if the future’s different—and it almost always is—then it’s the wrong thing to do.Read more at location 2180

“How can we protect our existing business?” Instead, Blockbuster should have been thinking: “If we didn’t have an existing business, how could we best build a new one? What would be the best way for us to serve our customers?” Blockbuster couldn’t bring itself to do it, so Netflix did instead. And when Blockbuster declared bankruptcy in 2010, the existing business that it had been so eager to preserve by using a marginal strategy was lost anyway.Read more at location 2197

Hence, the paradox: Why is it that the big, established companies that have so much capital find these initiatives to be so costly? And why do the small entrants with much less capital find them to be straightforward?Read more at location 2228

The answer is in the theory of marginal versus full costs. Every time an executive in an established company needs to make an investment decision, there are two alternatives on the menu. The first is the full cost of making something completely new. The second is to leverage what already exists, so that you only need to incur the marginal cost and revenue. Almost always, the marginal-cost argument overwhelms the full-cost. For the entrant, in contrast, there is no marginal-cost item on the menu. If it makes sense, then you do the full-cost alternative. Because they are new to the scene, in fact, the full cost is the marginal cost.Read more at location 2230

100 Percent of the Time Is Easier Than 98 Percent of the Time Many of us have convinced ourselves that we are able to break our own personal rules “just this once.” In our minds, we can justify these small choices. None of those things, when they first happen, feels like a life-changing decision. The marginal costs are almost always low. But each of those decisions can roll up into a much bigger picture, turning you into the kind of person you never wanted to be. That instinct to just use the marginal costs hides from us the true cost of our actions.Read more at location 2280

I realize that resisting the temptation of “in this one extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s okay” has proved to be one of the most important decisions of my life. Why? Because life is just one unending stream of extenuating circumstances. Had I crossed the line that one time, I would have done it over and over and over in the years that followed.Read more at location 2302   Note: boom! huge truth. Edit

Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time.Read more at location 2309

Had I instead spent that hour each day learning the latest techniques for mastering the problems of autocorrelation in regression analysis, I would have badly misspent my life. I apply the tools of econometrics a few times a year, but I apply my knowledge of the purpose of my life every day. This is the most valuable, useful piece of knowledge that I have ever gained.Read more at location 2433

I came to understand that while many of us might default to measuring our lives by summary statistics, such as number of people presided over, number of awards, or dollars accumulated in a bank, and so on, the only metrics that will truly matter to my life are the individuals whom I have been able to help, one by one, to become better people. When I have my interview with God, our conversation will focus on the individuals whose self-esteem I was able to strengthen, whose faith I was able to reinforce, and whose discomfort I was able to assuage—a doer of good, regardless of what assignment I had. These are the metrics that matter in measuring my life.Read more at location 2459

If you take the time to figure out your purpose in life, I promise that you will look back on it as the most important thing you will have ever learned.Read more at location 2487

the words of Goethe: “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.”Read more at location 2569

So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport

Read: 10/1/12

Rating: 5/5

I’ve been reading Cal Newport’s blog for a couple years so the theme of the book didn’t surprise me. What’s surprising is that instead of reading a few pages last night before bed, I stayed up until 1am reading the e-book cover to cover! The structure, impeccable logic, and crisp writing make the book an enjoyable journey. I highly recommend it and I’ve already ordered two copies on Amazon to give away!

The book at its core is a collection of anecdotes and case studies researched by the author. Their is a downside of course to building a life philosophy from a couple success stories, which I believe is one of the main critiques Newport makes against the “follow your passion” viewpoint. Instead of directly pointing to the science that would solve this, Newport instead endlessly references popular books from the NY Times bestseller list: Outliers, Drive, Little Bets,… I think a better effort to link his opinions directly to scientific fact would help close the case. I maintain my high recommendation in light of this and see this more as a tasting menu towards further reading.

Buy it. Read it!

My Highlights & Notes:

Thomas had followed his passion to the Zen Mountain Monastery, believing, as many do, that the key to happiness is identifying your true calling and then chasing after it with all the courage you can muster. But as Thomas experienced that late Sunday afternoon in the oak forest, this belief is frighteningly naïve. Fulfilling his dream to become a full-time Zen practitioner did not magically make his life wonderful. location 90

The things that make a great job great, I discovered, are rare and valuable. If you want them in your working life, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return. In other words, you need to be good at something before you can expect a good job. location 128

this main thread of my argument moves beyond the mere acquisition of useful skills and into the subtle art of investing the career capital this generates into the right types of traits in your working life. location 131

As one prominent career counselor told me, “do what you love, and the money will follow” has become the de facto motto of the career-advice field. location 182

Glass continues: “I feel like your problem is that you’re trying to judge all things in the abstract before you do them. That’s your tragic mistake.” location 254

Here’s the CliffsNotes summary of the social science research in this area: There are many complex reasons for workplace satisfaction, but the reductive notion of matching your job to a pre-existing passion is not among them. location 272

less than 4 percent of the total identified passions had any relation to work or education, with the remaining 96 percent describing hobby-style interests such as sports and art. location 283

Amy Wrzesniewski, a professor of organizational behavior at Yale University, has made a career studying how people think about their work. Her breakthrough paper, published in the Journal of Research in Personality while she was still a graduate student, explores the distinction between a job, a career, and a calling. A job, in Wrzesniewski’s formulation, is a way to pay the bills, a career is a path toward increasingly better work, and a calling is work that’s an important part of your life and a vital part of your identity. location 288

it seems that the type of work alone does not necessarily predict how much people enjoy it. location 299

the strongest predictor of an assistant seeing her work as a calling was the number of years spent on the job. location 304

If you have many years’ experience, then you’ve had time to get better at what you do and develop a feeling of efficacy. location 308

“nutriments” required to feel intrinsically motivated for your work: Autonomy: the feeling that you have control over your day, and that your actions are important Competence: the feeling that you are good at what you do Relatedness: the feeling of connection to other people location 318

In other words, working right trumps finding the right work. location 331

And yet, for all of this increased focus on following our passion and holding out for work we love, we aren’t getting any happier. The 2010 Conference Board survey of U.S. job satisfaction found that only 45 percent of Americans describe themselves as satisfied with their jobs. This number has been steadily decreasing from the mark of 61 percent recorded in 1987, the first year of the survey. location 362

passion-centric career planning can be deemed a failure: The more we focused on loving what we do, the less we ended up loving it. location 369

“follow their passion” is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a career riddled with confusion and angst. location 384

I liked that phrase—the tape doesn’t lie—as it sums up nicely what motivates performers such as Jordan, Mark, and Steve Martin. If you’re not focusing on becoming so good they can’t ignore you, you’re going to be left behind. This clarity was refreshing. location 499

Whereas the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you. location 509

First, when you focus only on what your work offers you, it makes you hyperaware of what you don’t like about it, leading to chronic unhappiness. This is especially true for entry-level positions, which, by definition, are not going to be filled with challenging projects and autonomy—these come later. When you enter the working world with the passion mindset, the annoying tasks you’re assigned or the frustrations of corporate bureaucracy can become too much to handle. location 512

Second, and more serious, the deep questions driving the passion mindset—“Who am I?” and “What do I truly love?”—are essentially impossible to confirm. “Is this who I really am?” and “Do I love this?” rarely reduce to clear yes-or-no responses. In other words, the passion mindset is almost guaranteed to keep you perpetually unhappy and confused, which probably explains why Bronson admits, not long into his career-seeker epic What Should I Do With My Life? that “the one feeling everyone in this book has experienced is of missing out on life.”7 location 516

No one owes you a great career, it argues; you need to earn it—and the process won’t be easy. location 526

In other words, forget why Jordan adopted this mindset and notice instead how he deploys it. location 549
Note: it would be easier to counter this notion with an example of a job few people admire or imagine being passionate about.

Basic economic theory tells us that if you want something that’s both rare and valuable, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return—this is Supply and Demand 101. location 578

Glass emphasizes the importance of the hard work required to develop skill. “All of us who do creative work… you get into this thing, and there’s like a ‘gap.’ What you’re making isn’t so good, okay?… It’s trying to be good but… it’s just not that great,” he explained in an interview about his career. “The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that’s the hardest phase,” location 599

THE CAREER CAPITAL THEORY OF GREAT WORK The traits that define great work are rare and valuable. Supply and demand says that if you want these traits you need rare and valuable skills to offer in return. Think of these rare and valuable skills you can offer as your career capital. The craftsman mindset, with its relentless focus on becoming “so good they can’t ignore you,” is a strategy well suited for acquiring career capital. This is why it trumps the passion mindset if your goal is to create work you love. location 620

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” and one traveler chose the path to mastery while the other was called toward passion’s glow. The former ended up celebrated in the industry, in control of his own livelihood, and weekending with his family in a forested retreat. The latter ended up on food stamps. location 694
Note: a little extreme. Edit

THREE DISQUALIFIERS FOR APPLYING THE CRAFTSMAN MINDSET The job presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing relevant skills that are rare and valuable. The job focuses on something you think is useless or perhaps even actively bad for the world. The job forces you to work with people you really dislike. location 715

There’s nothing mysterious about how Alex Berger broke into Hollywood—he simply understood the value, and difficulty, of becoming good. location 844

it was a really fractured market with huge information asymmetry,” location 871
Note: reminds me of the labor market. Edit

There’s a mental strain that accompanies feeling your way though a tune that’s not ingrained in muscle memory, and I hated that feeling. I learned songs reluctantly, then clung to them fiercely once they had become easy for me. I used to get upset when our rhythm guitar player would suggest we try out something new during band practice. He was happy glancing at a chord chart and then jumping in. I wasn’t. Even at that young age I realized that my discomfort with mental discomfort was a liability in the performance world. location 924

lessons focused on picking out the leads from Allman Brothers records. “So he would write out the lead and then you would go memorize them?” I asked. “No, we would just figure them out by ear,” location 929

I played. But he practiced. location 940

German psychologists set out to determine if grand masters had freakish memories. (Interestingly, it turns out they don’t: Though grand masters are fantastically efficient at storing chess positions in their minds, their general recall ability is quite average.) location 961

Hours spent in serious study of the game was not just the most important factor in predicting chess skill, it dominated the other factors. location 992

The researchers discovered that the players who became grand masters spent five times more hours dedicated to serious study than those who plateaued at an intermediate level. The grand masters, on average, dedicated around 5,000 hours out of their 10,000 to serious study. The intermediate players, by contrast, dedicated only around 1,000 to this activity. location 993

They’re both focused on difficult activities, carefully chosen to stretch your abilities where they most need stretching and that provide immediate feedback. At the same time, notice how chess-tournament play sounds a lot like my approach to guitar: It’s enjoyable and exciting, but it’s not necessarily making you better. location 1003

In the early 1990s, Anders Ericsson, a colleague of Neil Charness at Florida State University, coined the term “deliberate practice” to describe this style of serious study, defining it formally as an “activity designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance.” location 1007

“When experts exhibit their superior performance in public their behavior looks so effortless and natural that we are tempted to attribute it to special talents,” Ericsson notes. “However, when scientists began measuring the experts’ supposedly superior powers… no general superiority was found.” location 1017

years of work… is a poor predictor of attained performance.” location 1026
Note: this is a key point for matching with Skill Honey Edit

if you just show up and work hard, you’ll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better. location 1026

people are stuck. This generates an exciting implication. Let’s assume you’re a knowledge worker, which is a field without a clear training philosophy. If you can figure out how to integrate deliberate practice into your own life, you have the possibility of blowing past your peers in your value, as you’ll likely be alone in your dedication to systematically getting better. That is, deliberate practice might provide the key to quickly becoming so good they can’t ignore you. location 1030

There are two types of these markets: winner-take-all and auction. In a winner-take-all market, there is only one type of career capital available, and lots of different people competing for it. Television writing is a winner-take-all market because all that matters is your ability to write good scripts. That is, the only capital type is your script-writing capability. An auction market, by contrast, is less structured: There are many different types of career capital, and each person might generate a unique collection. The cleantech space is an auction market. Mike Jackson’s capital, for example, included expertise in renewable energy markets and entrepreneurship, but there are a variety of other types of relevant skills that also could have led to a job in this field. location 1103

The advantage of open gates is that they get you farther faster, in terms of career capital acquisition, than starting from scratch. It helps to think about skill acquisition like a freight train: Getting it started requires a huge application of effort, but changing its track once it’s moving is easy. In other words, it’s hard to start from scratch in a new field. location 1141

practice] requires good goals.” location 1150

Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands…. Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. That is what makes it “deliberate,” as distinct from the mindless playing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in. location 1158

Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable. location 1164

This is what you should experience in your own pursuit of “good.” If you’re not uncomfortable, then you’re probably stuck at an “acceptable level.” location 1169
Note: Apply this to my own life.

What’s interesting is that Martin redefines the word so that it’s less about paying attention to your main pursuit, and more about your willingness to ignore other pursuits that pop up along the way to distract you. The final step for applying deliberate practice to your working life is to adopt this style of diligence. location 1185

This is why Martin’s diligence is so important: Without this patient willingness to reject shiny new pursuits, you’ll derail your efforts before you acquire the capital you need. location 1189

You have to get good before you can expect good work. location 1270

Cornell followed over three hundred small businesses, half of which focused on giving control to their employees and half of which did not. The control-centric businesses grew at four times the rate of their counterparts. location 1295

Results-Only Work Environment (or, ROWE, for short). In a ROWE company, all that matters is your results. When you show up to work and when you leave, when you take vacations, and how often you check e-mail are all irrelevant. They leave it to the employee to figure out whatever works best for getting the important things done. “No results, no job: It’s that simple,” as ROWE supporters like to say. location 1300

Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfillment. location 1311

it’s dangerous to pursue more control in your working life before you have career capital to offer in exchange. location 1323

Control that’s acquired without career capital is not sustainable. location 1350

once you have enough career capital to acquire more control in your working life, you have become valuable enough to your employer that they will fight your efforts to gain more autonomy. location 1391

This is the irony of control. When no one cares what you do with your working life, you probably don’t have enough career capital to do anything interesting. location 1482

The Second Control Trap The point at which you have acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control over your working life is exactly the point when you’ve become valuable enough to your current employer that they will try to prevent you from making the change. location 1485

The fault of the courage culture, therefore, is not its underlying message that courage is good, but its severe underestimation of the complexity involved in deploying this boldness in a useful way. location 1502

nuanced heuristic, location 1514
Note: great word choice

you should only pursue a bid for more control if you have evidence that it’s something that people are willing to pay you for. location 1518

“Money is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, you’re aiming to be valuable.” location 1556
Note: huge insight!

The Law of Financial Viability When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, seek evidence of whether people are willing to pay for it. If you find this evidence, continue. If not, move on. location 1569

To understand this, notice that the definition of “willing to pay” varies. In some cases, it literally means customers paying you money for a product or a service. But it can also mean getting approved for a loan, receiving an outside investment, or, more commonly, convincing an employer to either hire you or keep writing you paychecks. location 1573

her mission provides her a sense of purpose and energy, traits that have helped her avoid becoming a cynical academic and instead embrace her work with enthusiasm. Her mission is the foundation on which she builds love for what she does, and therefore it’s a career strategy we need to better understand. location 1675

The Power of Mission To have a mission is to have a unifying focus for your career. It’s more general than a specific job and can span multiple positions. It provides an answer to the question, What should I do with my life? Missions are powerful because they focus your energy toward a useful goal, and this in turn maximizes your impact on your world—a crucial factor in loving what you do. People who feel like their careers truly matter are more satisfied with their working lives, and they’re also more resistant to the strain of hard work. location 1677

The Baffling Popularity of Randomized Linear Network Coding location 1727
Note: catchy title Edit

This example of joint discovery surprised me, but it would not have surprised the science writer Steven Johnson. In his engaging 2010 book, Where Good Ideas Come From, Johnson explains that such “multiples” are frequent in the history of science. location 1732

Big ideas, Johnson explained, are almost always discovered in the “adjacent possible,” location 1740

“We take the ideas we’ve inherited or that we’ve stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape,” he explained. The next big ideas in any field are found right beyond the current cutting edge, in the adjacent space that contains the possible new combinations of existing ideas. location 1745
Note: amazing definition Edit

discoveries often happen multiple times, therefore, is that they only become possible once they enter the adjacent possible, at which point anyone surveying this space—that is, those who are the current cutting edge—will notice the same innovations waiting to happen. location 1748

We like to think of innovation as striking us in a stunning eureka moment, where you all at once change the way people see the world, leaping far ahead of our current understanding. I’m arguing that in reality, innovation is more systematic. We grind away to expand the cutting edge, opening up new problems in the adjacent possible to tackle and therefore expand the cutting edge some more, opening up more new problems, and so on. “The truth,” Johnson explains, “is that technological (and scientific) advances rarely break out of the adjacent possible.” location 1761

A good career mission is similar to a scientific breakthrough—it’s an innovation waiting to be discovered in the adjacent possible of your field. location 1771

From her vantage point as a new graduate student, she was much too far from the cutting edge to have any hope of surveying the adjacent possible, and if she can’t see the adjacent possible, she’s not likely to identify a compelling new direction for her work. location 1775

If life-transforming missions could be found with just a little navel-gazing and an optimistic attitude, changing the world would be commonplace. location 1784
Note: boom! Edit

Advancing to the cutting edge in a field is an act of “small” thinking, requiring you to focus on a narrow collection of subjects for a potentially long time. Once you get to the cutting edge, however, and discover a mission in the adjacent possible, you must go after it with zeal: a “big” action. location 1834

Kirk’s path to American Treasures was incremental. He didn’t decide out of nowhere that he wanted to host a television show and then work backward to make that dream a reality. Instead, he worked forward from his original mission—to popularize archaeology—with a series of small, almost tentative steps. location 1953

“Rather than believing they have to start with a big idea or plan out a whole project in advance,” he writes, “they make a methodical series of little bets about what might be a good direction, learning critical information from lots of little failures and from small but significant wins”. This rapid and frequent feedback, Sims argues, “allows them to find unexpected avenues and arrive at extraordinary outcomes.” location 1963

These bets allow you to tentatively explore the specific avenues surrounding your general mission, looking for those with the highest likelihood of leading to outstanding results. location 1992

aleatoric location 2051
Note: cool word Edit

“You’re either remarkable or invisible,” says Seth Godin in his 2002 bestseller, Purple Cow. As he elaborated in a Fast Company manifesto he published on the subject: “The world is full of boring stuff—brown cows—which is why so few people pay attention…. A purple cow… now that would stand out. Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing.” location 2057

if I publish a book that says “follow your passion” is bad advice, (hopefully) this would compel you to spread the word. That is, the book you’re holding was conceived from the very early stages with the hope of being seen as “remarkable.” location 2091
Note: clever Edit

The Law of Remarkability For a mission-driven project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways. First, it must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking. location 2107

We’re a society trained to watch what’s on and then discuss what caught our attention the next day. location 2134

Once you identify a general mission, however, you’re still left with the task of launching specific projects that make it succeed. An effective strategy for accomplishing this task is to try small steps that generate concrete feedback—little bets—and then use this feedback, be it good or bad, to help figure out what to try next. This systematic exploration can help you uncover an exceptional way forward that you might have never otherwise noticed. location 2143

Most knowledge workers avoid the uncomfortable strain of deliberate practice like the plague, a reality emphasized by the typical cubicle dweller’s obsessive e-mail–checking habit—for what is this behavior if not an escape from work that’s more mentally demanding? location 2251

According to popular legend, Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize–winning theoretical physicist, scored only a slightly above-average IQ of 125 when he was tested in high school. In his memoirs, however, we find hints of how he rose from modest intelligence to genius, when he talks about his compulsion to tear down important papers and mathematical concepts until he could understand the concepts from the bottom up. It’s possible, in other words, that his amazing intellect was less about a gift from God and more about a dedication to deliberate practice. location 2269

I actually ended up finding a pair of mistakes in the paper. When I told the authors, it turned out I was only the second person to notice them, and they hadn’t yet published a correction. location 2298

If I had to describe my previous way of thinking, I would probably use the phrase “productivity-centric.” Getting things done was my priority. When you adopt a productivity mindset, however, deliberate practice-inducing tasks are often sidestepped, as the ambiguous path toward their completion, when combined with the discomfort of the mental strain they require, makes them an unpopular choice in scheduling decisions. It’s much easier to redesign your graduate-student Web page than it is to grapple with a mind-melting proof. The result for me was that my career capital stores, initially built up during the forced strain of my early years as a graduate student, were dwindling as time went on. location 2326
Note: huge!

Getting better and better at what I did became what mattered most, and getting better required the strain of deliberate practice. location 2331

a little bet, in the setting of mission exploration, has the following characteristics: It’s a project small enough to be completed in less than a month. It forces you to create new value (e.g., master a new skill and produce new results that didn’t exist before). It produces a concrete result that you can use to gather concrete feedback. location 2442

In other words, the system as a whole is a closed feedback loop—constantly evolving toward a clearer and better supported vision for my work. location 2455

He didn’t need to have a perfect job to find occupational happiness—he needed instead a better approach to the work already available to him. location 2480

Related articles

• Q & A with Cal Newport, author of SO GOOD THEY CAN’T IGNORE YOU
• Don’t Follow Your Passion
• Gen Y needs no slogan but true, authentic information (about work)!
• Do Like Steve Jobs Did: Don’t Follow Your Passion

On Writing by Steven King

Read: 6/18/12

Rating: 4/5

My Highlights & Notes:

In many ways, Eula-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism. After having a two-hundred-pound babysitter fart on your face and yell Pow!, The Village Voice holds few terrors.Read more at location 119

The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories by Frank Rose

Read: 4/21/12

Rating: 5/5

My Highlights & Notes:

“Games are about engaging with the most entertaining thing on the planet, which is other people.” ~ Jordan Weisman – p.17

“If ever the Story of any private Man’s Adventures in the World were worth making Pvblick, and were acceptable when Publish’d, the Editor of this Account thinks this will be so… The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it…; and as such he thinks, without farther Compliment to the World, he does them a great Service in the Publication.” introduction to Robinson Crusoe in the first edition. p.32

“Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art in comparison is near, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing, and emasculate,” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a few months later in response. Life is true; art is a construct. But Defoe was writing long before this particular type of construct became accepted as art. So never mind that every story is by definition a fiction of some sort – what Defoe was saying in his preface was, This is not a novel. - p.33

They weren’t building a game; they were building an experience that was capable of, as he [Elan Lee] put it, “transforming your life into an entertainment venue.” p.34

Interesting points about new mediums trying to mask their new powers by acting like old mediums. p.36-37

[William] Gibson calls cyberspace: “A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, recording.” p.38

…one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web… Passion. Obsession. A yearning to immerse oneself in stories that transpire in a fictional universe. The desire to experience that universe through as many different media as possible. A need to extend and embrace that universe by telling new stories within it. ~ quoting from an essay by William Gibson p.40

Talks about James Cameron creating a full world for Avatar, including hiring Paul Frommer – a linguist from USC – to build a language for Pandora. p.48

“I think the role of this type of film should be to create a kind of fractal-like complexity,” he [James Cameron] went on. “The casual viewer can enjoy it without having to drill down to the secondary and tertiary levels of detail. But for a real fan, you go in an order of magnitude and, boom! There’s a whole set of new patterns. You can step in in powers of 10 as many times as you want, and it still holds up. But you don’t need to know all that stuff to enjoy it – it’s just there if you want it. To me, that’s the best science fiction.” p.49

Entertainment gets defined as “escapism” by Jon Landau – I disagree. I don’t think people are always trying to escape from their boring lives. p.54

“The best stories in video games are the stories the player tells himself,” said Yannis Mallet. “In French we say ‘son propre film’ – the movie in his head.” p.57

“I like the way they think,” [James Cameron] said, still talking about the Marines. “The way they think is, they’re not doing it because it’s easy. They’re doing it because it’s hard. They’re doing it because you can’t.” p.64

… the audience for Star Wars, as for other deep media sagas, takes the form of an inverted pyramid. At the top are the hundreds of millions of people who’ve seen a couple of the movies and know Star Wars as a cultural icon. Just below them are the millions who respond to the story in different media – gamers who play the games, readers who love the books, collectors who obsess over the toys. And at the point of the pyramid are the otaku – the hundreds of thousands of superfans who are most deeply connected to the saga, who contribute to the online forums and belong to the official Hyperspace fan club and help construct the Wookieepedia, the fan-built knowledge base for true Star Wars otaku. p.74

- If the costs of production have fallen massively since the original Star Wars and creators can sell directly to fans or superfans, why are we waiting on studios? You could build an entire digital world through crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding – to a niche market and still make money.

Who controls a story – its creator or its fans? p.75

- We need to invite creatives to build these universes around a common framework. Set up the premise and then see where the creative process takes us.

… there’s nothing inherent in humans that makes them want to be passive consumers of entertainment, or of the advertising that pays for it. The couch potato era, seemingly so significant at the time, turns out to be less an era than a blip – and a blip based on faulty assumptions at that. p.87

People don’t passively ingest a marketing message, or any type of message. They greet it with an emotional response, usually unconscious, that can vary wildly depending on their own experiences and predispositions. They don’t just imbibe a story; they imbue it with meaning. Which means that perceptions of a brand aren’t simply created by marketers; they’re “co-created,” in the words of Gerald Zaltman of Harvard Business School, by marketers and consumers together. p.88

“For me, the deeper aspect is model building,” Will Wright continued. “We’re always building models of the world around us to help us predict what’s going to happen, and play is one of the primary ways in which we build these models. I think storytelling lives alongside play as another mechanism for building models.” p.141

Mystery, [J.J. Abrams] went on to say, is the catalyst for imagination. p.151

“Foraging,” because that’s what looking for information is like. And “sensemaking,” because the need to make sense of the show is why you need to go foraging in the first place. p.153

Great quote from William Gibson’s 2003 novel Pattern Recognition. p.163

Interesting company named Bunchball mentioned. p.176

“Each of us is part of the giant network that we call society,” writes Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a network theorist at Northeastern University in Boston. “Our world is small because society is a very dense web.” p.204

Stripped of all the apparatus of advanced civilization and pecuniary gain – stripped of Hollywood and television and publishing – storytelling is a simple act of sharing. We share information. We share experience. Sometimes we overshare. But why do we share at all?… Because life is a constantly functioning information exchange. p.204

Interesting research by Brian Boyd of the University of Auckland – mentions his book On the Origin of Stories. p.204

The most obvious thing we get is status: telling a story, (almost) any story, gives us an opportunity to claim the attention of people around us. So we compete to tell stories, to fill in the details of other people’s stories, to offer out own comment. And we get a payoff in the form of an ego boost. p.205

It’s interesting this “ego boost” idea seems to be true, it’s strange that the impact on the audience and what they gain seems to hardly ever be talked about.

Talking again about how the brain fires off in similar ways when we watch someone do something – almost as if we’re doing it ourselves. p.208-209

Poignant anecdote about John Moe on twitter. p.216

As Brian Boyd writes:
Signals that evolve through competition tend to be costly, as arms races develop between insistent senders and resistant receivers. Messages become louder, longer, more repetitive, massively redundant, like the roars of red deer stags or Superbowl advertisers. Signals user for cooperative purposes, by contrast – “conspiratorial whispers” – will be energetically cheap and informationally rich.
It’s not enough to just break through the clutter, in other words. And rarely is it worth the effort required to smash through the filter. You need to disarm the filter – and the best way to do that, the most economical and efficient way, is to signal that your signal is nonthreatening. p.236

It’s like Alex Bogusky said: this generation knows you’re trying to sell them something, and you know they know, so let’s drop the pretense and make the whole exercise as much fun as possible. p.240

Cool story about Nick Haley. He did a homemade iPod ad to the song “Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex” by Cansei de Ser Sexy – “My music is where I’d like you to touch.” p.240

By subtly directing brand perceptions while encouraging the consumer to help create those perceptions, Howard maintained, the marketer can help the brand and the consumer to, in effect, become one. “You can’t rely on ads,” she said. “A brand becomes relevant by infusing itself directly into the culture“… “Advertising used to interrupt life’s programming. Now advertising is the programming. And if you’re actually being marketed to successfully, you have no idea.” p.242

Jeff Gomez is big on myth. “We see ourselves as stewards,” he said. In too many cases – Star Wars being an obvious exception – the producers of a movie or a television show or a video game haven’t plumbed their story deeply enough even to identify its message, much less whatever underlying myth it may embody. “So the message changes and the audience becomes frustrated,” he went on. “It’s our job to figure it out. And to do that [you have to find] the core of the story. “That means immersing ourselves in it and figuring out what makes it timeless and relevant. There’s an aha! moment that’s very specific to each property. It’s the moment when I’ve found the true emotional connection.” p.245-246

Wow! Gomez’s group – Starlight Runner – produces a huge 150 page book to develop the “story worlds”… from a platform-neutral perspective… so robust as to furnish hundreds of hours of content. p.246

“Do people like storytelling?” asked Nick Law, R/GA’s chief creative officer for North America, when I saw him at the agency’s New York headquarters. “Of course people like storytelling. But given the choice, they’re probably going to go to HBO.” p.249-250

[TV ads now]… it’s a ballooning of entertainment at the expense of information. It’s a poor man’s Hollywood.” But what civilians actually want, he argued, is information. p.251

Cool chart about system thinkers. p.253

…dopamine has less to do with pleasure itself than with the drive to seek pleasure. p.262

“Addictive drugs hijack the natural reward system,” he continues, “and what we showed was that video games hijack it as well.” At the same time, the experiment also connected gaming to another behavior – one seemingly quite different, yet equally connected with the role of dopamine in the brain’s reward circuitry: learning.
“Learning and addiction are very tightly bound together.” p.264

Fascinating brain science. p.266

“If you measure dopamine while an animal is searching, it’s very high,” LeDoux said later, over lunch at a lower Manhattan cafe. “But when they find something and consume it, dopamine doesn’t register. It’s more in the seeking than in the attainment of the goal.” If anticipation is so often sweeter than success, dopamine would seem to be the reason why. p.268-269

Scientist at Concordia University hypothesized that dopamine servers to heighten the brain’s focus in response to uncertainty, possibly in an attempt to learn how to predict the reward. p.271

This emotional system… makes animals intensely interested in exploring their world and leads them to become excited when they are about to get what they desire. It eventually allows animals to find and eagerly anticipate the things they need for survival, including, of course, food, water, warmth, and their ultimate evolutionary survival need, sex. In other words, when fully aroused, it helps fill the mind with interest and motivates organisms to move… in search of the things they need, crave, and desire. p.272 block quote from Jaak Panksepp

Related articles

• The Internet and the ‘Art of Immersion’ (cnet.com)
• Multichannel customer experience – Q&A: Frank Rose on digital storytelling and media immersion (serve4impact.com)
• Storytelling experiments – Frank Rose: digital technology allows multi-way conversations (nextlevelofnews.com)
• Macroeconomic storytelling (cafehayek.com)
• James Cameron And Getting Trapped Inside Your Most Successful Creation (wnyc.org)
• Received: Frank Rose, The Art of Immersion (datamining.typepad.com)
• Will James Cameron Become the Next George Lucas? (screencrave.com)