Detractors
When you're working on a project over time, you never know for sure if you're on the track. Most people in that situation, looking for feedback, look for the stark raving fans that sing praise of their idea. Me, I think you know you're on the right track when you start getting noisy detractors. Not trolls, but people who make passionate statements about why what you're doing is wrong, or why it won't work, or...
Start With Gratitude
Recently, I offered to help a local non-profit organization with an overhaul of their website. I find pro-bono work to be a decent way of getting experience dealing with people. I think of them as practice runs for situations in which I'll be acting as a technical consultant. When I first went into their office a few months ago, I met with four people in the organization, who politely introduced themselves to me. When my...
Devil Among Us
In the movie The Devil's Advocate, Keanu Reeves is recruited to work at for Al Pacino. Both of them are practicing trial lawyers. Towards the end, when Pacino's character's true identity has been revealed as that of Satan incarnate, Reeves asks him regarding their chosen profession, "Why the law?" Pacino replies, "Because the law, my boy, puts us into everything. It's the ultimate backstage pass, it's the new priesthood, baby." In this case, the devil...
Ray Bradbury Is Wrong
I can say that about him on here, because he hates the Internet (he once called it a "bunch of noise"), so I'm pretty sure he'll never read this. The author of the dystopian Fahrenheit 451 once stood up to discuss the book in an auditorium full of students. He tried to explain to them that the main theme of his book was about the evils of television. The students insisted, repeatedly, that the book...
The Loyal Consumer
And so begins the holiday season, which brings Santa to town, eggnog spiked with too much rum, and a festive new slew of advertisements. This is the time of year when people tend to stop shopping for themselves and begin shopping for others, but it still seems like the right time of year for a little experiment. The way ads and TV commercials run, it seems a lot of marketers believe that human beings are...
Finding Excuses
I hear this stuff all the time. "Of course he's happy...he's rich. If I were rich, I'd be happy too." "Of course she's happy...she found the perfect husband. If I were married to that guy, I'd be happy too." "Of course he's happy...he's got the best job in the company. If I had that job, I'd be on easy street." Strangely, if you challenge people in these kinds of statements, they'll get defensive. They'll start...
Pay It Forward
Last year, I posted the following on my Facebook page on the day before Thanksgiving: "My employer offered me the afternoon off. Four hours for which I'm getting paid but doing nothing. Taking my wages for that time to the grocery store, buying that much food, and dropping it off at the local food bank. Namaste." At the time, it seemed like an interesting thing to do, and I posted that I was doing it...
Measurement
I was listening to a friend talk to me about the school systems in the state of California which, he insisted, were getting worse. He pointed at this at one example of how life has gotten worse for the middle class over the past fifty years. I responded to this by asking him, "Do you think it's possible to look at the last fifty years and conclude that life has gotten better for the middle...
Staying Positive
It's been established, time and time again, that people who keep a positive mental attitude outperform those with negative mental attitudes in almost every endeavor. Which begs the obvious question: why do so many intelligent people cling so tightly to a gloom-and-doom view on life? I think one of the primary reasons is that negativity fits better in a social context, for a couple of reasons. It's very easy to rally people around commiseration, because...
Meta-Awareness
My friend Jina shared this quote with me: "When people ask me: 'Norm, how do you feel about stem cell research?' I say: 'Why don't I just go to the University of Science for 10 years and then come back to this very spot and tell you what those three words mean. Because I don't know.'" - Norm MacDonald Norm points out a very common human weakness: that we tend to assume we know more...