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CatStuff: Why does a cat do that?

So for my last birthday, my friend got me a CD of The Dip. Pretty cool, read by the author. In short, this is about the following two fairly simple concepts.

• Becoming the best in the world.
• Dips and CulDeSacs
• Strategic quitting

Becoming the best in the world may sound a little self-helpish, at first but it comes with some interesting qualifiers. Being the best (x134) means knowing exactly what your niche is. It should be very specific. The ‘in the world‘ part is something you define as well. What ‘world’ are you trying to be ‘the best’ in?

Some examples:
“I want to be the most affordable chiropractor in Los Angeles.”
“I want to make the best custom-made gothic lolita outfits on the internet!”
“I want to offer moving services which allow as short notice as possible in the phone book.”

I guess in some ways it’s a mission statement of sorts. It’s worth mentioning that he brings up the long tail. This concept, in short, is that something like ‘first and second place make the most money by themselves, but places 3 through 10 equal a the same total amount of success.” This concept is best explained by things like amazon or itunes selling really obscure stuff for cheap vs. selling all the popular stuff for ‘expensive.’ The total cheap sales add up. So I bring this up because one might say, “But why be the best in the world? The long tail is proven to work? Why can’t I ‘focus’ on being places 3rd through 10th?” His answer of course is fine, if that is your focus, then make that your ‘best’. I.e. provide people with the widest selection of obscure whatevers ever.

As a side note, you can look at existing ‘bests in the world’ and frame them as such. I.e. World of Warcraft, while it might be ‘the best MMO ever,’ more specifically it can be ‘the most polished mmo with the most gradual learning curve, while still being easy to play if needed.’ or ‘the best and most balanced team-based player vs. player arena experience’ or whatever. He goes on to say if you’re trying to be the best in the world at something that someone already is the best in the world at, I.e. “The most delicious cola drink in the world,” or “best mint toothpaste in the world,’ you see that there’s already people with that title, so barring any crazy circumstances, don’t compete unless you change some paradigms. The awesome example he gave for this was how Microsoft basically has the monopoly on ‘the best word processing and spreadsheeting software in the world,’ but looking at things like Google Docs, they are pretty damn awesome, but changing then to say then google has made ‘the best, free, web-based word processing and spreadsheeting applications on the internet’.

Dips and Cul De Sacs are fairly simple to understand. A dip is a period of work when it stops being fun and starts being work. The part where you stop learning and start having to ’slog through it.’ It’s also, coincidentally, the period when you most want to quit things. Cul De Sacs are basically dips with no end. It’s basically a dead end, where you’re working on stuff with no considerable outcome. Advice is given on how to recognize if your issue is a dip or culdesac, if you can change your culdesac into a dip, and if your dip is worth powering through or quitting. It sounds really corny, I know, but that’s why he wrote the book and I didn’t.

The sections on strategic quitting were basically empowering advice explaining to you that quitting is ok, and how to recognize what needs quitting. The point of quitting something is help consolidate your resources so that you can use that energy to push through other ‘dips’ you’re stuck on. It’s contrary, he points out early, to what most self help-ish stuff advises, OMG NEVER QUIT! but in actuality it has some very good benefits. As he’s talking, my mind of course walked down the lists and lists of projects that I’ve not even started yet for this reason, which was reassuring. I’ve often complained about taking on too many side projects and never finishing any of them, so to use his words, I was in the dips of all of them and quit all of them. It was a cycle. It also has made me critical of any ‘open loops’ and dips I’m currently in and am taking the steps to decide to quit on a few of them. Quitting can also mean shelving, imo. One example being how I recently trashed hundreds of old archived blog posts I was trying to slog through. Having just erased them all made me have that much more time each day of not having to post links, and can now be spent on procrastinating on other things.

I highly recommend reading/listening to it, especially if you’re in any kind of rut. It’s a good perspective-shifter.

“Despite the school system’s best efforts and intentions, and the efforts of overworked parents, the past generations have suffered from lack of suitable education and essential resources required for a successful life,” states co-founder Adisa Banjoko. “We recognize that chess, martial arts and hip-hop unify people from multiple cultural, religious and social backgrounds. These black and white squares do not care what color you are or if you are rich or poor. The only thing they ask is that you come with your strategy, your patience and your skills.”

Kind of a cool concept. Good on them!

The Hip-Hop Chess Federation

Some pretty awesome ideas, I need to play closer to some of these. Emphasis mine:

You can improve your writing (your business writing, your ad writing, your thank you notes and your essays) if you start thinking like a blogger:
1. Use headlines. I use them all the time now. Not just boring ones that announce your purpose (like the one on this post) but interesting or puzzling or engaging headlines. Headlines are perfect for engaging busy readers.
2. Realize that people have choices. With 80 million other blogs to choose from, I know you could leave at any moment (see, there goes someone now). So that makes blog writing shorter and faster and more exciting.
3. Drip, drip, drip. Bloggers don’t have to say everything at once. We can add a new idea every day, piling on a thesis over time.
4. It’s okay if you leave. Bloggers aren’t afraid to include links or distractions in their writing, because we know you’ll come back if what we had to say was interesting.
5. Interactivity is a great shortcut. Your readers care about someone’s opinion even more than yours… their own. So reading your email or your comments or your trackbacks (your choice) makes it easy to stay relevant.
6. Gimmicks aren’t as useful as insight. If you’re going to blog successfully for months or years, sooner or later you need to actually say something. Same goes for your writing.
7. Don’t be afraid of lists. People like lists.
8. Show up. Not writing is not a useful way of expressing your ideas. Waiting for perfect is a lousy strategy.
9. Say it. Don’t hide, don’t embellish.

Seth’s Blog: Write like a blogger

A fantastic article. Admittedly, I’ve devoted a lot of my time to studying and discussion ‘games and gamer culture.’ While this article rings true, especially with the point made about there being no other ‘media cliques’ that were as prominent in history, I would argue that they do exist. “Filmies” certainly do exist, but there’s much less banner waving because I think the demographic is very broad. A lot of what being a “Gamer” is stems from the demographic itself.

The example given about how “Gamers” trampled the womans Amazon book review I think is relevant but not necessarily the rule. I would say this gets a step towards more complex then because Gamer Culture also tends to clique up in itself, and I’m sure certain social and forum groups were responsible for this.

I think my official response would be that while there has never been as big of a ‘movement’ in terms of cliquing under new media, why can’t there be now? Just in the few years we’ve been watching ‘gamer culture’ we’ve seen it grown and transform and multiply. I think that there will always be a gaming culture, afficianados and the hardcore and the ‘elite,’ just like there are with film, but times are changing and so is the social landscape.

The Church of Gamers is not only morally problematic; it also ends up working against innovation in the medium. Imagine, for example, how ridiculous it would be if all television watchers identified as their own “Tubers” subculture. It’s a humorous hypothetical precisely because a vast majority of first-world citizens watch television, from the romantics who tune in for soap operas and sports fans who catch game highlights over breakfast, to the sci-fi fans addicted to the latest Joss Whedon serial and insomniacs who watch old gameshow reruns.

The very notion of the “gamer” implies that games are a niche hobby, only for the sufficiently devoted. This exclusivity is exactly what impedes games from attracting a more diverse player base beyond the white adolescent male stereotype.

Given that more and more people are beginning to embrace games, it’s finally time to dump the anachronistic “gamer” label. We longtime players of games need not feel sad about this change. Opening games to, well, everybody can only result in a wider selection of genres and ideas.

I think many gamers do have their hearts in the right place. Wil Wheaton’s heartfelt keynote at PAX 2007, for instance, touts the importance of sharing the gaming experience with others. The problem is that the gaming community pines for two fundamentally opposing realities – one in which they maintain their sense of community and another in which they spread games to the mainstream.

I therefore cringed when Wheaton made declarations like “Jack Thompson can suck my balls” and “all that matters is that we are gamers.” The rhetoric is certainly catchy, but it is still too divisive. That kind of talk sets up a dangerous dichotomy of “us” versus “them.” As the Jack Thompson skirmishes have shown, such a division only serves to further radicalize each side. Our operating concept must instead be “everybody.”

Gamasutra - Opinion: Ceci N’est Pas Une Gamer