Most people think of Michael Jordan as the world’s greatest basketball player who won multiple championships with the Chicago Bulls. I always admired his game and thought of him as more artist than athlete. He was elegant, graceful and driven with a purpose to succeed. Despite all these successes there is another side of Michael Jordan that does not get as much exposure.
It’s a trait he shared with Thomas Edison, Mahatma Gandhi and Leo Burnett. You are probably thinking its inventiveness or creativity. While both of those are true it’s not the specific characteristic that I am thinking about. The trait I refer to is…
FAILURE
While everyone of the folks above has succeeded and become legends in their own right. They also have each shared terrific insights into the failures that helped them to achieve their goals in life. Let’s take a look at what they said.
Thomas Edison
‘Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.’ — Thomas Alva Edison
Edison is getting at a bigger issue of the natural “flight or fright” characteristic. Are natural tendency is to give up before we get to that “a-ha” moment. He is saying to just stick with it one more time and you could find a better solution.
Mahatma Gandhi
‘Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.’ — Mahatma Gandhi
Ghandi is telling us to always remember that freedom is a two-sided coin. We should not take the freedom to make mistakes for granted. It’s as important if not more than always succeeding.
Leo Burnett
‘To swear off making mistakes is very easy. All you have to do is swear off having ideas.’ — Leo Burnett
Burnett is saying essentially that creativity flows from mistakes. To become truly creative you have to be free to let your mind go wherever it may decide. Often it is the mistakes that lead us to the best idea.
Michael Jordan
‘I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.‘ — Michael Jordan
I think that pretty much sums it up! Look for me to fail sometime soon but the only difference is I will enjoy it much more this time.
In the days of BI (Before Internet), poets would scrawl in their notebooks chosen words that would carefully compose a masterpiece of creativity. It was an age-old tradition, and these notebooks are sacred testaments to the accomplishments of man. Their notebooks would wither, rip and turn into relics of a past time; the knowledge passed down to the next generation to inspire in a creative cycle.
Those days are long gone and a new trend is emerging in its place. What is this trend? I am tentatively calling it the Digital Walt Whitman Theory. Its analysis based on my observations as both a creative person and researcher of sorts.
The main gist of the theory is: the creative arts adopt new technologies at a much faster rate than the general public due to above average overlap between technology and art. For example, artists are problem solvers, which leads to experimenting with new technologies as forms of expression. This insistence on experimenting for solutions to creative problems is common in artist and creative folks from all fields.
Furthermore, as society becomes more connected and digital adoption rates amongst artists’ trends higher than the general publics rate of adoption, will we see more artistic folks take leadership roles as inventors? Consumers are savvier then ever and no touch point is safe yet the fine arts remain a beacon of experimentation into these new technologies. While consumers slowly grasp at the new world, artists are experimenting with Twitter, YouTube and other social networks and learning what works and what fails.
A quick post to shout out about Pete Blackshaw’s latest post for ClickZ. In it, he discusses Twitter segments and different classes of individuals on the site. As the micro-blog evolves it will be interesting to see all the different types that join up and further the analysis.
One interesting footnote, Pete actually used Twitter to gather his data by proposing this tweet to this followers, “ok i think im going to write my mkt column about twitter “types” (user segments) send thoughts 03:55 PM May 08, 2008 from web.” The tweet stoked some thoughts in my head. As I have been thinking about that very thing for quite sometime and was happy to help. I added a few segments including: TweetSquatters and Tweetniks.
I wanted to talk about the Tweetniks, or someone who uses Twitter to write 21st Century prose. Listed below are a few examples of these modern day Whitmans.
Society’s becoming more connected and much more digital. Artist are sometimes the first to adopt new technology for purposes of expression. Social platforms provide a natural fit for artist to express themselves and explore new mediums. How will digital change creative endeavors? Tweetniks might be blazing a trail of digital creativity that is a game changer but only time will tell.
What do you think?
FYI - Here is Pete’s website dedicated to the topic. Please visit and leave him some feedback on users you have encountered. Additionally, if you would like to add me to your twitter list feel free to do so @stemato.
I just wanted to say a few words about this past week and how I learned about strength. On Saturday morning, my mother called me to tell me my grandmother had fallen and was rushed to the hospital unconscious. At that point, we did not know anything other than she was in a coma and had a subdural hematoma (I had no idea what it was but its bleeding in the membrane of her brain).
Having spent many of my formative years living with my Grandmother, I did not hesitate to get on the first plane to come down to Savannah and see her. I talk on the phone about every two or three nights to her and could not imagine life without her. I left at 6 PM and arrived at 9:30 PM Saturday. The surgery was successful and removed all the clots in her brain. The doctor told us he could not give any information about how or if ever she would awake from her vegetative state.
The next day I went to the hospital to see her. It was one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life. As I walked into the NICU, I could not imagine this person so close to me lay so helpless in her room. I broke down and started crying immediately.
Words can express many things but for me there are no words to express my feelings at that moment. I spoke to her briefly and said thank you for helping raise me to know the value of humility, humbleness and faith in your life. It took every bit of strength I had to tell her much I missed her and loved her and to keep fighting because I know she is stronger enough to come back. Tears in my eyes, I left the room thinking about her and life without her.
Today as I rode to the hospital, my sister called me to tell me that my grandmother had awaken from the coma. I could not fathom it at first but eventually it sunk in. It was the best news we could have gotten.
When I arrived at the hospital, I walked to the NICU and my spirit was lifted. I saw her open her eyes and glance at my sister and then glance at me. She looked so happy and thrilled to see us. It immediately made me think about how strong she is to come so far in such a short period of time. I said to her, “Hi Nanny, I missed you.” And she looked at me while raising her hand to wave. It is truly nothing short of a miracle that she has awakened so soon.
Strength comes in all shapes and sizes, but my Grandmother, showed me the most amazing feat of strength I have ever seen.
A recent report, from OfCom of the UK, about social-networking shows their prolific growth and deep saturation in the UK. I first read about it in a MSN UK story located here and I found its classification system to oversimplify these users. Surely, we can come up with a more profound classification than: Alpha Socialisers, Attention Seekers, Followers, Faithful and Functionals. It seems to only scratch the surface of what is a much more complex eco-system driven by many different types of users and scenarios.
Lets first take a look at scenarios that could evolve as a result of shifting user profiles and maturation of the space. As my company reported last month, Facebook’s numbers have slowed in recent months but its not endemic of the death of social-networking in the UK. The fact is the numbers were growing at a rate that could not have been endured much longer.
But, have they reached critical mass?
This is an interesting question, but with 23% penetration in a country that has only 30 million people total online, it would seem social-networking is still red-hot in the UK. Certainly with that kind of reach, users would fall into more than a handful of types and morph from one classification to another. In fact, I believe that user intentions on social networks are so varied and amorphous that any attempt to classify must be primarily organic.
Lets take deeper look at my organic classification system.
Instead of a linear zoological approach to classes, it should appear more as a hexagon with overlapping interest and a sliding scale. Something like this:
Using this hexagonal approach, you could then further define user personality traits based on aggregate sentiment analysis. What does this mean? If you could take a predefined number of UK social network users evenly dispersed across the three majors and parse out there profiles into text. Using that text you could then score the sentiment into different buckets (eg. dating, networking, spammer) based on keyword recognition.
Further refining your chart to something like this:
Building out these finite profiles, you get a clearer picture of social networking users and how they interact and relate to one another. The more data ascertained the better the profile. Time of day, age and other demographics can also enhance the map to show more in-depth details of how people engage.
In a very general sense OfCom gets it right, they just leave out a big part of the picture. User interactions and how they effect user profiles. My father said it best when he said “you cannot be, all things to all people.”
What does it take to invent a new tool, product or idea? Ideas are born from somewhere deep down inside of us and can be as simple as Bellsouth’s Caller-ID or as complex as Google’s PageRank algorithm. Both of these inventions have something in common that is much less publicized - failure. That is right, it takes persistence and failure, to make something that improves our lives not some great creative mind.
Humility is most often learned the older you get because when you are young ego rules. I remember as a kid trying to come up with the most original and creative drawing in art classes. Its was the true test of whether you were an artist or just some hack with charcoal. We would debate incessantly classmates with great draftsmanship but poor ability to think in an agile and creative way. The reality of our situation was we were not original either. We did have one thing that set us a part drive. Because as we pontificated about the virtues of original thought we continued to test the boundaries of our own minds without fear of failure. We were free from the constraints of rigid academia to develop ideas, drawings, paintings, websites and more.
With retrospect I learned that age makes you more rigid and less willing to fail. Maybe its the reality of bills. One thing I always tried to keep in my core set of operational values is drive. Because with drive anything is possible. Dreaming big and performing agile is the combination that sets the passionate apart from the rest. I have also never lost the ability to turn my creative fire into well developed originality towards executing a better idea. Because eventually better will become original.
Has anyone noticed the inconsistencies between Google Maps and Google Analytics version of the State of Michigan? I see that Google Maps which parses satellite data is a correct representation of the State whilst Analytics is a poorly outlined version. It looks like they came from different sources. Is Google not leveraging its internal resources to keep the brand consistent across departments? I am not sure what is at play here but it looks like Analytics has some room to improve.
I decided to follow-up last week’s sports buzz theme and pull a buzz chart on players about to enter the NFL draft. As my Dolphins mull what to do with their top draft pick, the buzz seems to suggest Darren McFadden is the man to select. He has major buzz surrounding three of his recent events. Furthermore, the only comparable buzz spike belongs to Glenn Dorsey when he won the National Championship with LSU. McFadden’s spikes are for the Heisman run, his team’s Cotton Bowl loss and finally his blazing combine performance.
Matt Ryan, the great Boston College quarterback, does not seem to command much online buzz but he could end up being the steal of the draft with his great skills and command of the football field. He has one small spike due to his three touchdown performance in his bowl game.
I also did a quick search to see who is doing some paid search advertising on these names. I found out that the only advertiser on Google is the NFL. They are doing a paid search ad on the combine performances of Ryan and McFadden. Additionally, Ebay seems to be advertising on the term “glenn dorsey.”
When I was younger, I worried about the implications of having a Bachelors of Fine Arts degree opposed to a Bachelor of Science might have on my career. Would I be pigeoned-holed into being a designer all my life? Were countless beatings at the hands of mindless AE’s to become par for the course? As strange as those worries seem now they were grounded in the reality of my situation. Partly a combination of time and location, my vision was impeded by colleagues, friends and bosses.
I have been in New York for nearly four years now and have grown beyond even my own ideas. Mostly thanks to my BFA because without it I would have not been able to continuously assess, adapt and adopt to every situation thrown at me.
Assess - In art school, we learned to begin all our projects by using your artistic sensibility to assess the overall picture and begin to visualize different solutions. By taking a creative top-level strategic look at our problems we began to form a different type of thought. In sharp contrast to regular schools where you learn to only focus on one solution to most problems we learned solutions are not limited only by the mind’s capacity to develop them.
Assessing current events and thinking outside the box to offer up an easy solution.(circa 2000)
Adapt - Being made to constantly switch applications and learn to adapt to changing technologies at a sometimes dizzying pace readied me for this new changing economy. HTML to drawing and reading we constantly were honing skills that would help later on in adapting to different situations
This started as a sketch of the Lighthouse and evolved into a full scale rebranding.(circa 1998) Adopt - Sometimes in the name of good design and others not so good design, we were always experimenting with new technologies and adopting it as part of our visual solutions. Being early adopters way back then made it all the easier to learn about influence and changing models of influence on the internet.
Some of my first email blast using HTML emails. (circa 2000)
Almost six years out of school and working now, I can finally say that I made the right choice pursuing my degree in Visual Communications. In the current economy, value is placed on creativity, problem-solving and being able to set oneself apart from a crowded field of normal thinkers.
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