Call Me What You Want's List: History

• • Five years ago, Dweck did a study at the University of Hong Kong, where all classes are conducted in English. She and her colleagues approached a large group of social-sciences students, told them their English-proficiency scores, and asked them if they wanted to take a course to improve their language skills. One would expect all those who scored poorly to sign up for the remedial course. The University of Hong Kong is a demanding institution, and it is hard to do well in the social sciences without strong English skills. Curiously, however, only the ones who believed in malleable intelligence expressed interest in the class. The students who believed that their intelligence was a fixed trait were so concerned about appearing to be deficient that they preferred to stay home. “Students who hold a fixed view of their intelligence care so much about looking smart that they act dumb,” Dweck writes, “for what could be dumber than giving up a chance to learn something that is essential for your own success?”
    
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• In a similar experiment, Dweck gave a class of preadolescent students a test filled with challenging problems. After they were finished, one group was praised for its effort and another group was praised for its intelligence. Those praised for their intelligence were reluctant to tackle difficult tasks, and their performance on subsequent tests soon began to suffer. Then Dweck asked the children to write a letter to students at another school, describing their experience in the study. She discovered something remarkable: forty per cent of those students who were praised for their intelligence lied about how they had scored on the test, adjusting their grade upward. They weren’t naturally deceptive people, and they weren’t any less intelligent or self-confident than anyone else. They simply did what people do when they are immersed in an environment that celebrates them solely for their innate “talent.” They begin to define themselves by that description, and when times get tough and that self-image is threatened they have difficulty with the consequences. They will not take the remedial course. They will not stand up to investors and the public and admit that they were wrong. They’d sooner lie.
• The broader failing of McKinsey and its acolytes at Enron is their assumption that an organization’s intelligence is simply a function of the intelligence of its employees. They believe in stars, because they don’t believe in systems. In a way, that’s understandable, because our lives are so obviously enriched by individual brilliance. Groups don’t write great novels, and a committee didn’t come up with the theory of relativity. But companies work by different rules. They don’t just create; they execute and compete and coördinate the efforts of many different people, and the organizations that are most successful at that task are the ones where the system is the star.

• There is a wonderful example of this in the story of the so-called Eastern Pearl Harbor, of the Second World War. During the first nine months of 1942, the United States Navy suffered a catastrophe. German U-boats, operating just off the Atlantic coast and in the Caribbean, were sinking our merchant ships almost at will. U-boat captains marvelled at their good fortune. “Before this sea of light, against this footlight glare of a carefree new world were passing the silhouettes of ships recognizable in every detail and sharp as the outlines in a sales catalogue,” one U-boat commander wrote. “All we had to do was press the button.”

   

  What made this such a puzzle is that, on the other side of the Atlantic, the British had much less trouble defending their ships against U-boat attacks. The British, furthermore, eagerly passed on to the Americans everything they knew about sonar and depth-charge throwers and the construction of destroyers. And still the Germans managed to paralyze America’s coastal zones.
• You can imagine what the consultants at McKinsey would have concluded: they would have said that the Navy did not have a talent mind-set, that President Roosevelt needed to recruit and promote top performers into key positions in the Atlantic command. In fact, he had already done that. At the beginning of the war, he had pushed out the solid and unspectacular Admiral Harold R. Stark as Chief of Naval Operations and replaced him with the legendary Ernest Joseph King. “He was a supreme realist with the arrogance of genius,” Ladislas Farago writes in “The Tenth Fleet,” a history of the Navy’s U-boat battles in the Second World War. “He had unbounded faith in himself, in his vast knowledge of naval matters and in the soundness of his ideas. Unlike Stark, who tolerated incompetence all around him, King had no patience with fools.”
• The Navy had plenty of talent at the top, in other words. What it didn’t have was the right kind of organization. As Eliot A. Cohen, a scholar of military strategy at Johns Hopkins, writes in his brilliant book “Military Misfortunes in the Atlantic”:
• To wage the antisubmarine war well, analysts had to bring together fragments of information, direction-finding fixes, visual sightings, decrypts, and the “flaming datum” of a U-boat attack—for use by a commander to coordinate the efforts of warships, aircraft, and convoy commanders. Such synthesis had to occur in near “real time”—within hours, even minutes in some cases.
   
   

  The British excelled at the task because they had a centralized operational system. The controllers moved the British ships around the Atlantic like chess pieces, in order to outsmart U-boat “wolf packs.”
• By contrast, Admiral King believed strongly in a decentralized management structure: he held that managers should never tell their subordinates “ ‘how’ as well as what to ‘do.’ “ In today’s jargon, we would say he was a believer in “loose-tight” management, of the kind celebrated by the McKinsey consultants Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman in their 1982 best-seller, “In Search of Excellence.” But “loose-tight” doesn’t help you find U-boats. Throughout most of 1942, the Navy kept trying to act smart by relying on technical know-how, and stubbornly refused to take operational lessons from the British. The Navy also lacked the organizational structure necessary to apply the technical knowledge it did have to the field. Only when the Navy set up the Tenth Fleet—a single unit to coördinate all anti-submarine warfare in the Atlantic—did the situation change. In the year and a half before the Tenth Fleet was formed, in May of 1943, the Navy sank thirty-six U-boats. In the six months afterward, it sank seventy-five. “The creation of the Tenth Fleet did not bring more talented individuals into the field of ASW”—anti-submarine warfare—”than had previous organizations,” Cohen writes. “What Tenth Fleet did allow, by virtue of its organization and mandate, was for these individuals to become far more effective than previously.” The talent myth assumes that people make organizations smart. More often than not, it’s the other way around.

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• For those of you who haven’t heard of Richard Branson before, he is an exceptional entrepreneur and the founder of the Virgin group of companies. Business life for Richard Branson started at the age of 17 when he started to publish a magazine Student. He aimed high: he chased down Mick Jagger, John Lennon and the likes to get interviews, he phoned major companies to sell advertisements, and he targeted a nationwide audience. It took a year or so to take off, but he succeeded. Student magazine eventually lead to a music record mail ordering business, music shops, a studio and eventually the Virgin Music record label.

   

  Richard did not stop there, Virgin Music has reinvented itself over and over. At first is was a record label with a hippy image (Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells was the big breakthrough), but after signing the Sex Pistols this image changed. After this Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, Sting, Janet Jackson, The Rolling Stones and many many others were signed by Virgin. In the meantime though Richard got a bit “bored” as he lost the challenge in the game of contracting another pop group. So he started an airline to compete against British Airways. To cut a long story short, he succeeded in running it successful, despite the dirty tricks from BA and despite the fact that he “lost” Virgin Music in the process. Nowadays, Virgin has a wide variety of companies, and they target markets where customers are getting a raw deal, or where there is a market dominance by one or two players.

   

  Last week I finished his autobiography Losing My Virginity. It’s a recommended read, his story is a remarkable one, that I find very inspirational. In his book Richard tells about his life from the very start, including the successes, the screw-ups, the record attempts, his marriages, having children, losing a child, buying an island, battling BA and banks and so on.
• Richard repeats several times that his life’s motto is to “Live life to the full”. Somewhere in the book, when he describes an argument between some of the key people at Virgin he states the following: “My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.”. This is true for him from a business perspective (starting in a business and competing heads-on with BA or Coca Cola definitely comply to that), but also from a personal perspective (doing several record attempts at crossing the Atlantic by boat and balloon).
• The record attempts are dangerous, and several times Richard thought he was going to die in the attempt. Becoming a father did not stop him in doing these record attempts, however he started writing goodbye notes to his wife and children as if he was about to die.
• Thinking you are about to die, or preparing yourself for the possibility are very emotional experiences. They make you focus on what’s important, and to what legacy you want to leave. As an exercise this is very powerful, and you don’t need the record attempts to do the exercise. Visualizing your funeral, or writing your will or writing a goodbye note to your spouse and children will focus you on what’s important.
• If you read the book, you’ll find that Richard Branson works a lot! You can just imagine him being at the phone for hours and hours, no matter what location he is in. Apparently he misses out on lots of fun activities while he does that. However in the book there’s a passage where he describes his feelings about work. This is just after he sold Virgin Music to EMI:
   “Times had changed and we had 500 million pounds in the bank. But I didn’t believe in leaving it there. At this point I could of course have retired and concentrated my energies on learning how to paint water colours or how to beat my mum at golf. People asked me: ‘Why don’t you have some fun now?’ but they were missing the point. As far as I was concerned, this was fun. Fun is at the core of the way I like to do business and it has been key to everything I’ve done from the outset. More than any other element, fun is the secret of Virgin’s success.”
• if you can indulge in your passion, life will be far more interesting than if you’re just working. You’ll work harder at it, and you’ll know more about it, but first you must go out and educate yourself on whatever it is that you’ve decided to do, know more about kite surfing than anyone else. That’s where the work comes in, but if you’re doing things you’re passionate about, that will come naturally.”

• Lists, lists and some more lists

   

  Running a single company is a challenge, running a group of companies might look like an unachievable challenge (remember: Richard likes it that way). To get through the day, you got to have a productivity system, right? As with most successful systems, Richard Branson’s system is simple. He takes notes in a standard notebook, and writes everything down. He states that he worked his way through a bookcase full of them. And there’s this quote in his book as well:
   “I have always lived my life by making lists: lists of people to call, lists of ideas, lists of companies to start, lists of people who can make things happen. Each day I work through these lists and it is that sequence of calls that propels me forward.”

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• These days, most in-the-know folks would sooner eat glass than carry a Motorola phone. The company has shredded its reputation by failing to address basic interface design issues: freeze-prone software, head-scratching menus, keys that demand Herculean strength. It's baffling that such a venerable company could build such frustrating phones, considering the zillions presumably spent on development. How did Motorola make such a bollocks of its wireless division? Now that the company has annointed new wireless division chief Sanjay Jha, we surveyed former staffers for the inside scoop, as well as their advice on how to right the ship.
• Insiders always start by attacking Motorola's corporate culture, formed decades ago when radio was the company's bread-and-butter. Motorola made its bones building end-to-end systems—not just hardware, but the infrastructure that supports it. That, in turn, has led to a culture in which engineers reign supreme, and are allowed to sneer at their more right-brain-inclined colleagues. Marketers? Designers who focus on usability as opposed to circuitry? At Motorola, they're peons.
• "There's this amazing wealth of engineering talent, but there's no system for harnessing that talent for the good of the consumer," says one former Motorola executive. The men in the R&D labs are permitted to indulge their flights of fancy, many of which center on fine-tuning antennas to optimize reception. Meanwhile, no one pays much attention to more prosaic fundamentals such as reliable software.

• Another Motorola departee told Gizmodo that the company group charged with consumer research has been marginalized by the engineers, who dismiss its concerns—and, to a large extent, its very existence—as inconsequential. "With the engineers," he said, "there's this attitude of, "I create—what do you do? You pick out colors?'"

   

  The engineers could theoretically be kept in check by corporate managers, but few suits are bold enough to act. A Motorola insider noted that long-serving managers have "deity status" at the company—no matter how many of their products flop, they never suffer repercussions.
• he RAZR, a design victory as much as an engineering one, only came about due to the gumption of chief marketing office Geoffrey Frost. Following the RAZR's overnight success, Moto commissioned an in-house team to research the company's next step. Countless hours were spent pulling together focus-group studies and carrier feedback, but it was all for naught—the research was simply ignored by Motorola's top brass. "They have this attitude of, 'Well, I've built phones for 20 years, I know what I'm doing," says a frustrated member of that team, who noted that once Frost died in 2005, there was no one left with the chops and political capital to route around Moto's stick-in-the-mud managers.
• Motorola's managerial bumbling has resulted in severe cultural malaise—a condition made worse by the mobile unit's location in the deep Chicago suburbs, hardly a place awash in creative energy. (Few 22-year-old design wunderkinds are willing to forego the Bay Area in favor of Libertyville.)

• Keep in mind, too, that Motorola was the birthplace of Six Sigma, a methodology meant to eliminate product defects. But Six Sigma was created in 1986, well before the era of ubiquitous cellphones; its focus is engineering, not end-user experience. The methodology is therefore unequipped to address many of the shortcomings that have irked so many customers.

   

  Take, for example, the navigation joystick on the ill-fated first-gen ROKR. It looked cool and worked as intended, but not without minor headaches: The joystick was a hair too sensitive, making it too easy to scroll past your music selection. Or take the Q—relatively powerful, but why in heaven's name didn't it auto-capitalize address book names, or allow for copy-and-paste? Sure these may strike you as minor details, but minor details make the difference in a competitive handset market. And Motorola's aging quality-control program wasn't designed to catch such annoying foibles.
• Six Sigma and its companion product-development methodology, dubbed "M-Gates," both stress caution in the name of quality. But when it comes to innovation, there's certainly such a thing as too much wariness. In planning its software path after the RAZR's smashing success, Motorola knew (to its credit) that its Synergy OS was antiquated. But instead of developing a worthy successor, the company decided to wait around for Windows Mobile, ostensibly because it was a sure thing. Big mistake, as we all now know. Motorola next turned to Linux, which has never lived up to expectations. That's left the company scrambling for replacements, a panic that has led to the striking of numerous deals with potential software partners—"throwing darts at a board," as one former Motorola employee put it. It's also meant that different generations of the same phone end up running completely different software—the RAZR2 3G, for example, runs on the old P2K OS, while the 2.5G variant uses Linux. Both are painfully slow.

• Ex-employees are nearly unanimous in stating that bringing on Sanjay Jha as co-CEO (and designated handset-division savior) is a reasonable gamble. It's been clear for months now that CEO Greg Brown is in way over his head. "He has no idea how to run a consumer electronics business," grumbles one critic, adding that Brown's previous job was at an enterprise software company. While Jha is well regarded for his operational prowess and sheer intelligence, it's worth noting that he's fresh off a 14-year run at Qualcomm. Did chipmaking really prepare Jha to address the needs of Joe Sixpack consumers?

   

  Our contacts contend that Jha's rescue plan needs to focus on two important areas—one technical, the other cultural. First, the company needs to streamline its wireless development, so that phone models are designed in conjunction with one another—thereby ending the lunacy of different generations featuring different (and inadequate) software. Second, there needs to be a reconciliation between the engineering heroes and the consumer research folks, who are currently out in the wilderness.
• that is exactly what happened to us at Aldus. By the end the engineers had locked themselves on the top floor of the building with a card key system that only let engineers on. They called the shots. We had a photo editing program half done in conjunction with the design group that killed Photoshop today. The engineers came back with a product steering committee that said a photo editing tool will never sell. The irony is that Adobe bought us with proceeds from Photoshop.
• Engineers make things happen. Designers make them pretty, ergonomic and work with customer feedback. Marketing people sell the stuff and do the PR bullshit.
  When any of them tries do each others work the product they make is crap, works like crap and smells like crap.

• "Or take the Q-relatively powerful, but why in heaven's name didn't it auto-capitalize address book names, or allow for copy-and-paste"

   

  Thats not Motorola's fault, the phone runs windows mobile so they can't really fix that, have you ever tried to get Microsoft to fix an issue like that, want to talk about the "I've been doing this for years" attitude, Microsoft is the worst.

   

  "Motorola next turned to Linux, which has never lived up to expectations" Linux has far exceed anyones expecations. Its a free OS that people develop in their spare time as a hobby which rivals OS's that cost millions of $ and require thousands of developers from companies like Microsft and Apple.

   

  It appears a certain columnist doesn't know the tect industry very well.

• @enine: Umm. No offense but that doesn't fly. When you put stuff in your product, people attribute it to you. It is up to you to make sure your product works correctly and to your customer's expectations.

   

  You're putting linux in your phone? You better make sure you make it work (It's open source for gods sake- modify it to do what you want it to do).

   

  You're using WinMo? Bully Microsoft into making it do what you want it to, or take your business elsewhere.

   

  In the end, it's your name on the product.
• This is the fundamental difference between a company like Moto and Apple. Apple focuses on the design first. The user is first. That focus comes from the designers, not the engineers. It's like a broken record seeing this sort of thing go on and amazing that in spite of all the history people have to reference, they still can't get it.
• @soulfinger: Motorola does focus on RF first. That is why their products will outperform apple in terms of signal every time. If apple had a few better RF people for iPhone and MacBooks their products would be significantly better.

• A leader cannot be an expert in everything ( design, development, production or marketing) but also cannot isolate himself from any of these.Organizations need leaders with vision, management skills, guts to stand against political pressure, smart enough to know what s/he doesn't know, confident enough to delegate.

   

  Steve Jobs for example: He doesn't design, code or develop brand and marketing but he has certain skills in all of them. He is a strategic thinker, he has vision and achieves his vision with people.
• Seems like bad managers as opposed to bad engineers. Aren't the managers paid to manage the people?

• @soulfinger: "Apple focuses on the design first. The user is first."

   

  Close. Steve is first. If user tastes align with him, everything is swell. 

• Many of you forget that Motorola is NOT a consumer electronics company. That's just where they make their capital for other interests. They do so much other *cough* more important *cough* stuff out of the public eye, most people don't even know. The real issue is two-fold.

   

  1) Motorola is a big company prone to the pains of being in a big company. They are bigger now than they were in the 80's, thus more bureaucratic problems. Deal with it.

   

  2) The economy has changed. Back when they got popular, they had cutting edge stuff. They have not adjusted to the economic climate sticking to what they know, and have fallen behind the pack. Bad move by the big heads here, and if they were a smaller company, they would surely have gone belly-up by now. This is a common problem in post-bubble tech companies, just the good ones reacted when they knew they had to without much hesitation.

   

  Is it too late? No, but that's only because their name is good enough to keep them afloat. They need to catch-up, diversify, or move out of the way. 

• @m4ximusprim3:

   

  Sure Motorola could have picked a better os, but the same issue applies to the Palm 700w since it runs WinMo or the phones by samsung, etc so its not a fault of just Motorola phones.
  You can't just bully MS into fixing issues or take your business elsewhere as long as corportate America uses Microsoft your stuck with it if you want to sell to that market.
• @enine: My WinMo phone (HTC Excalibur / T-Mobile Dash) auto-capitalizes names in the phone book and sentences. Since it's not a touch screen, there isn't a dedicated copy / paste, but there was on my old PocketPC that ran WinMo 2003.
• I have an iPhone. My wife has a Motorola Z9. I'm a geek and love my phone. My wife just makes calls and could care less about the internet/applications/multimedia. I gotta say, for doing the traditional job of a mobile phone, Motorola does a great job, sound quality is amazing. I've played with the Z9, although not eye candy, it is pretty intuitive and easy to navigate. Perfect for those how really use their phone as a phone (imagine that!).

• I think this is more the case that the accountants took control... not the engineers. Ed Zander was focused solely on numbers and profits margins. This is the typical case for most publicly traded companies. It is a short-term solution (which is all he cared about).

   

  Yes, I used to work for Motorola. I quit after the Galvin family lost control. 

• @Norcross:

   

  I didn't say it didn't the wirter of the article did. my Winmo phone capitalizes as well. Since the writer said the motorola Q and not the Q9h/m/c its probably a bug/feature of winmo 5 which was on the original q.
  Mine converts letters to numbers even, I can dial 1800byteme and it converts them for me.
• I've been using a Motorola RAZR since it came out and I haven't had any problems with it. I've actually been thinking about getting the Z9 with navigation. I only use my phone for phone calls, and as far as that type of phone I think Motorola's reception is one of the best.

• "I create-what do you do? You pick out colors?"

   

  this isn't just at moto. But the article is right - the attitude is one thing, but allowing the actions is another. 
• Guess many companies have similar problems, Philips springs to mind: stellar tech, moronic marketing. Many companies are capable of creating great technical feats, only a few are able to make technical feats that are actually usable (Apple, of course, Nokia ...err... there must be more)

• The IPhone has massive 3g problems. My girlfriend's iphone gets 49k/s in Manhattan. You still can't replace the battery without the jaws of life. The first phone they even soldered in the battery.

   

  In my book, Motorola puts too much emphasis on engineering and Apple (much like microsoft) too much on the marketing.

   

  Ironically, Motorola made the CPUs for Apple's PC's for years. Too bad Apple didn't partner up with Motorola on the Iphone.

   

  I'm a happy HTC customer (Mogul on Sprint). Before that I was a Treo user (300/600/650). I'll probably get the Touch Pro on Sprint when it comes out.

• @enine: "Linux has far exceed anyones expecations."

   

  I don't think the article meant Linux in general, just Motorola's Linux Java platform, which has been a sinkhole of time and effort that will never recoup the costs put into it.

   

  And yes, the general thrust of this story is absolutely correct. The company has kept itself mired in the engineering-only mindset, and has suffered for it. I work in the group that does UI and human factors for mobile devices, and believe me: there are a lot of smart and creative people here who *know* what consumers want and *want* to produce it, but the gap between low-level creative management and the upper echelons has just been much too large. I hope that spinning off Mobile Devices will help this. I hope the damage done and the loss of creative capital -- really, who *wants* to do user experience work for Motorola any more? -- isn't too great to recover from.
   I suppose time will tell.

   

  And yes, Libertyville sucks royally.

   

  (Although it should be noted that a good chunk of the designers in my group work out of Chicago proper, not the L'ville campus.) 

• @soulfinger: Seriously? :)

   

  Come on - Apple focuses on UI, but they certainly don't listen to their customers. They make products according to what Jobs thinks should be in them, and so far he's done a remarkable job, because he's an absolute visionary. But after he's gone...they'll be left with no direction, and terrible customer service. 
• People don't get that design is not decoration.

• I happen to think that the modern engineer should be able to design also.

   

  I'm a software engineer, but I happen to think I have a pretty good design sense. There have been plenty of times where suggestions I have made in user interface design have made it into products. I'm always brought into design meetings and give my input in design and engineering matters.

   

  The way I see it the modern engineer can be a designer with engineering being the tool of the trade. Think of it like a painter, they know all the technicals of color mixing, lighting, etc. yet they paint wonderful things. In my case engineering is my brush and paints.

   

  Motorola was just full of old school engineers, engineers that became engineers because they had little or no creativity in them. I became an engineer because I wanted to design and create cool stuff and had many ideas I wanted to see come to life. 

• In phones, industrial design is critical. That's a discipline in itself. Software design is functional, user experience design is a combination of both.

   

  To converge there needs to be one strong visionary leader like at Apple or so much market momentum (from the past) like at Nokia that you can try anything and see what sticks (n-gauge....).

   

  What's tricky for Motorola is that they are in neither position to do this.

   

  The new CEO comes from the semi-conductor industry. They need to complement with that visionary leadership. But where and how do you find it?

• I love this kind of articles, that bring some in-depth insight into corporations who make the gadgets we love or hate.

   

  Two good examples are the articles from Wired about making the iPhone, and BusinessWeek's "Building the perfect laptop" about the Lenovo X300.

   

  Make more of those pls k thx bye.

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• I will admit that I admire skeptics. I look up to guys like Robert Shiller, who first pointed out the tech bubble, then for an encore pointed out the real estate bubble. Despite all of the pundits who talked about structural changes in the economy, how things are different, Dow 36000, stocks as less risky investments, etc, Shiller held his ground. From my perspective though, it doesn't seem like anyone decided to start listening to him after 2000. Warren Buffett was the same way - lambasted in the late 1990s as too old school, even though he turned out to be right. He's simultaneously worshiped as one of the world's greatest investors, and despised for being a value, buy and hold kind of guy in an age when quants rule wall street. It's sort of paradoxical.
• It has just been my experience that when I get to the core of any idea, person, company, or organization, I almost always find that it has been overhyped. As a result, skepticism is my natural starting position.

• In the early days of the web, I was always the guy responding to chain emails with links to Snopes or Urban Legends. And now, with this blog, I've been critical of "wisdom of crowds," of Google's strategy and stock price, the book "Good to Great," and lots of other things people on the web seem to love. Sometimes I turn out to be right, and intellectually it always feels good, but it's always a pretty lonely vindication. The next time I turn negative on something, no one says "better listen to Rob…"

   

  You see, people really prefer positive people. People need hope, and that is why it sucks to poke holes in the stuff they believe. Our delusions are very dear to us. We want to believe that there is at least the small possibility that Bill Gates really will send us $1000 for every person we forward an email to, and we don't like it when someone tells us it isn't true.
• So I find myself in a perpetually uncomfortable position. I feel compelled by the virtue of intellectual honesty to say what I think, even if I disagree, yet I know that people don't want to hear disagreement. And, I know that if I turn out to be right (obviously, I'm not always right, but I do have a very good batting average), it will probably cause bitterness more than anything else. So what's a businesspundit to do? That's why I prefer to keep to myself as much as possible. The less time I spend around people, the less they ask me what I think.
• The point of it all, I guess, is that sometimes I just wish I could turn off the skepticism. But on the flip side, I feel like I've avoided many of the problems that I've seen others experience because I am skeptical. As a result, I have this simultaneous pride and disgust for my skeptical leanings. It's weird. What I really want is just to do something day to day where that aspect of my personality can come through and be an asset. I just don't what that is.
• Skeptics who go against the popular theories and are right belong in financial markets. Go work for a hedge fund. Be a trader. If skepticism is that much of you, the entrepreneurial route may not be enough to satisfy.
• Your skepticism is probably best characterized as “critical thinking” in other circles, a unique and immutable skill that has and will continue to bring you success. Keep it up.
• I think that you miss the point with your comment that “people like positive people.” While that may be true; it’s tangential. The important point is that nothing happens if people always say no. It’s the person who says yes who gets things done; and generally they are saying yes in the face of nay-sayers.
• I further assert that the final score in life is not how many times someone was “correct” but rather how much they accomplished. In the end, it’s not about being “right”. It’s about making things happen. I’d rather be right on a “yes, lets do it” 1 time out of 10 than right on a “no, lets not do it” 9 of 10 times.

• Now that’s not to say that every idea is a good idea or that there is not a place for healthy skepticism. But it is to say that a skeptical mindset can really get in the way of accomplishing things.

   

  As a final comment, my personal advice to everyone is to know your bent and then “go for the no.” That is, if you are naturally a “no” person, you should consciously spend time looking for the “yes” reasons. If you are naturally a “yes” person, spend time looking for the “no.”
• The tough thing is while no is usually the right answer, it is the question that is usually wrong. One has to search for the correct question which can be answered affirmatively. Entrepreneurs often end up stumbling over it when they pursue their misguided objectives, which is why yes can be correct even when it is wrong.

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• The failure of SuperMemo to transform learning uncannily repeats the earlier failures of cognitive psychology to influence teachers and students. Our capacity to learn is amazingly large. But optimal learning demands a kind of rational control over ourselves that does not come easily. Even the basic demand for regularity can be daunting. If you skip a few days, the spacing effect, with its steady march of sealing knowledge in memory, begins to lose its force. Progress limps. When it comes to increasing intelligence, our brain is up to the task and our technology is up to the task. The problem lies in our temperament.
• Wozniak's days are blocked into distinct periods: a creative period, a reading and studying period, an exercise period, an eating period, a resting period, and then a second creative period. He doesn't get up at a regular hour and is passionate against alarm clocks. If excitement over his research leads him to work into the night, he simply shifts to sleeping in the day. When he sits down for a session of incremental reading, he attends to whatever automatically appears on his computer screen, stopping the instant his mind begins to drift or his comprehension falls too low and then moving on to the next item in the queue. SuperMemo graphs a distribution of priorities that he can adjust as he goes. When he encounters a passage that he thinks he'll need to remember, he marks it; then it goes into a pattern of spaced repetition, and the information it contains will stay in his brain indefinitely.
• "Once you get the snippets you need," Wozniak says, "your books disappear. They gradually evaporate. They have been translated into knowledge."
• As a science fiction fan, I had always assumed that when computers supplemented our intelligence, it would be because we outsourced some of our memory to them. We would ask questions, and our machines would give oracular — or supremely practical — replies. Wozniak has discovered a different route. When he entrusts his mental life to a machine, it is not to throw off the burden of thought but to make his mind more swift. Extreme knowledge is not something for which he programs a computer but for which his computer is programming him.

• "So you believe in trying things for yourself?" he asks.

     

  "Yes."

     

  This provides his opening. "In that case, let's go swimming."

     

  At the edge of the sea, I become afraid. I'm a strong swimmer, but there's something about standing on the beach in the type of minuscule bathing suit you get at the gift shop of a discount resort in Eastern Europe, and watching people stride past in their down parkas, that smacks of danger.

     

  "I'm already happy with anticipation," Wozniak says.

     

  "Will I have a heart attack?"

     

  "There is less risk than on your drive here," he answers.

     

  I realize he must be correct. Poland has few freeways, and in the rural north, lines of cars jockey behind communist-era farm machinery until they defy the odds and try to pass. There are spectacular wrecks. Wozniak gives close attention to the qualitative estimate of fatal risks. By graphing the acquisition of knowledge in SuperMemo, he has realized that in a single lifetime one can acquire only a few million new items. This is the absolute limit on intellectual achievement defined by death. So he guards his health. He rarely gets in a car. The Germans on the beach are staring at me. I dive in.
• Climbing out of the sea and onto the windy beach, my skin purple and my mind in a reverie provoked by shock, I find myself thinking of a checklist Wozniak wrote a few years ago describing how to become a genius. His advice was straightforward yet strangely terrible: You must clarify your goals, gain knowledge through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired. This should lead to radically improved intelligence and creativity. The only cost: turning your back on every convention of social life. It is a severe prescription. And yet now, as I grin broadly and wave to the gawkers, it occurs to me that the cold rationality of his approach may be only a surface feature and that, when linked to genuine rewards, even the chilliest of systems can have a certain visceral appeal. By projecting the achievement of extreme memory back along the forgetting curve, by provably linking the distant future — when we will know so much — to the few minutes we devote to studying today, Wozniak has found a way to condition his temperament along with his memory. He is making the future noticeable. He is trying not just to learn many things but to warm the process of learning itself with a draft of utopian ecstasy.

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• By the mid-'90s, with SuperMemo growing more and more popular, Wozniak felt that his ability to rationally control his life was slipping away. "There were 80 phone calls per day to handle. There was no time for learning, no time for programming, no time for sleep," he recalls. In 1994, he disappeared for two weeks, leaving no information about where he was. The next year he was gone for 100 days. Each year, he has increased his time away. He doesn't own a phone. He ignores his email for months at a time. And though he holds a PhD and has published in academic journals, he never attends conferences or scientific meetings.

• Instead, Wozniak has ridden SuperMemo into uncharted regions of self-experimentation. In 1999, he started making a detailed record of his hours of sleep, and now he's working to correlate that data with his daily performance on study repetitions. Psychologists have long believed there's a correlation between sleep and memory, but no mathematical law has been discovered. Wozniak has also invented a way to apply his learning system to his intake of unstructured information from books and articles, winnowing written material down to the type of discrete chunks that can be memorized, and then scheduling them for efficient learning. He selects a short section of what he's reading and copies it into the SuperMemo application, which predicts when he'll want to read it again so it sticks in his mind. He cuts and pastes completely unread material into the system, assigning it a priority. SuperMemo shuffles all his potential knowledge into a queue and presents it to him on a study screen when the time is right. Wozniak can look at a graph of what he's got lined up to learn and adjust the priority rankings if his goals change.

     

  These techniques are designed to overcome steep learning curves through automated steps, like stairs on a hill. He calls it incremental reading, and it has come to dominate his intellectual life. Wozniak no longer wastes time worrying that he hasn't gotten to some article he wants to read; once it's loaded into the system, he trusts his algorithm to apportion it to his consciousness at the appropriate time.
• The appropriate time, that is, for him. Having turned over his mental life to a computerized system, he refuses to be pushed around by random inputs and requests. Naturally, this can be annoying to people whose messages tend to sift to the bottom. "After four months," Biedalak says sadly, "you sometimes get a reply to some sentence in an email that has been scrambled in his incremental reading process."
• For Wozniak, these misfires were less a product of scrambling than of an inevitable clash of goals. A person who understands the exact relationship between learning and time is forced to measure out his hours with a certain care. SuperMemo was like a genie that granted Wozniak a wish: unprecedented power to remember. But the value of what he remembered depended crucially on what he studied, and what he studied depended on his goals, and the selection of his goals rested upon the efficient acquisition of knowledge, in a regressive function that propelled him relentlessly along the path he had chosen. The guarantee that he would not forget what he learned was both a gift and a demand, requiring him to sacrifice every extraneous thing.

• From the business side of SuperMemo, Wozniak's priorities can sometimes look selfish. Janusz Murakowski, one of Wozniak's friends who worked as a manager at the company during its infancy, thinks that Wozniak's focus on his own learning has stunted the development of his invention. "Piotr writes this software for himself," says Murakowski, now a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Delaware. "The interface is just impossible." This is perhaps a bit unfair. SuperMemo comes in eight flavors, some of which were coded by licensees: SuperMemo for Windows, for Palm devices, for several cell phones, even an Internet version. It's true that Wozniak is no Steve Jobs, and his software has none of the viral friendliness of a casual game like Brain Age for Nintendo DS. Still, it can hardly be described as the world's most difficult program. After all, photographers can learn to produce the most arcane effects in Photoshop. Why shouldn't more people be able to master SuperMemo?

     

  "It was never a feel-good product," Murakowski says, and here he may be getting closer to the true conflict that lies at the heart of the struggle to optimize intelligence, a conflict that transcends design and touches on some curious facts about human nature. We are used to the idea that normal humans can perform challenging feats of athleticism. We all know someone who has run a marathon or ridden a bike cross-country. But getting significantly smarter — that seems to be different. We associate intelligence with pure talent, and academic learning with educational experiences dating far back in life. To master a difficult language, to become expert in a technical field, to make a scientific contribution in a new area — these seem like rare things. And so they are, but perhaps not for the reason we assume.

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• The most popular learning systems sold today — for instance, foreign language software like Rosetta Stone — cheerfully defy every one of the psychologists' warnings. With its constant feedback and easily accessible clues, Rosetta Stone brilliantly creates a sensation of progress. "Go to Amazon and look at the reviews," says Greg Keim, Rosetta Stone's CTO, when I ask him what evidence he has that people are really remembering what they learn. "That is as objective as you can get in terms of a user's sense of achievement." The sole problem here, from the psychologists' perspective, is that the user's sense of achievement is exactly what we should most distrust.

• The battle between lab-tested techniques and conventional pedagogy went on for decades, and it's fair to say that the psychologists lost. All those studies of human memory in the lab — using nonsense syllables, random numbers, pictures, maps, foreign vocabulary, scattered dots — had so little influence on actual practice that eventually their irrelevance provoked a revolt. In the late '70s, Ulric Neisser, the pioneering researcher who coined the term cognitive psychology, launched a broad attack on the approach of Ebbinghaus and his scientific kin.

     

  "We have established firm empirical generalizations, but most of them are so obvious that every 10-year-old knows them anyway," Neisser complained. "We have an intellectually impressive group of theories, but history offers little confidence that they will provide any meaningful insight into natural behavior." Neisser encouraged psychologists to leave their labs and study memory in its natural environment, in the style of ecologists. He didn't doubt that the laboratory theories were correct in their limited way, but he wanted results that had power to change the world.

• Many psychologists followed Neisser. But others stuck to their laboratory methods. The spacing effect was one of the proudest lab-derived discoveries, and it was interesting precisely because it was not obvious, even to professional teachers. The same year that Neisser revolted, Robert Bjork, working with Thomas Landauer of Bell Labs, published the results of two experiments involving nearly 700 undergraduate students. Landauer and Bjork were looking for the optimal moment to rehearse something so that it would later be remembered. Their results were impressive: The best time to study something is at the moment you are about to forget it. And yet — as Neisser might have predicted — that insight was useless in the real world. Determining the precise moment of forgetting is essentially impossible in day-to-day life.

     

  Obviously, computers were the answer, and the idea of using them was occasionally suggested, starting in the 1960s. But except for experimental software, nothing was built. The psychologists were interested mainly in theories and models. The teachers were interested in immediate signs of success. The students were cramming to pass their exams. The payoff for genuine progress was somehow too abstract, too delayed, to feed back into the system in a useful way. What was needed was not an academic psychologist but a tinkerer, somebody with a lot of time on his hands, a talent for mathematics, and a strangely literal temperament that made him think he should actually recall the things he learned.

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• The problem of forgetting might not torment us so much if we could only convince ourselves that remembering isn't important. Perhaps the things we learn — words, dates, formulas, historical and biographical details — don't really matter. Facts can be looked up. That's what the Internet is for. When it comes to learning, what really matters is how things fit together. We master the stories, the schemas, the frameworks, the paradigms; we rehearse the lingo; we swim in the episteme.

     

  The disadvantage of this comforting notion is that it's false. "The people who criticize memorization — how happy would they be to spell out every letter of every word they read?" asks Robert Bjork, chair of UCLA's psychology department and one of the most eminent memory researchers. After all, Bjork notes, children learn to read whole words through intense practice, and every time we enter a new field we become children again. "You can't escape memorization," he says. "There is an initial process of learning the names of things. That's a stage we all go through. It's all the more important to go through it rapidly." The human brain is a marvel of associative processing, but in order to make associations, data must be loaded into memory.
• Once we drop the excuse that memorization is pointless, we're left with an interesting mystery. Much of the information does remain in our memory, though we cannot recall it. "To this day," Bjork says, "most people think about forgetting as decay, that memories are like footprints in the sand that gradually fade away. But that has been disproved by a lot of research. The memory appears to be gone because you can't recall it, but we can prove that it's still there. For instance, you can still recognize a 'forgotten' item in a group. Yes, without continued use, things become inaccessible. But they are not gone."
• Long-term memory, the Bjorks said, can be characterized by two components, which they named retrieval strength and storage strength. Retrieval strength measures how likely you are to recall something right now, how close it is to the surface of your mind. Storage strength measures how deeply the memory is rooted. Some memories may have high storage strength but low retrieval strength. Take an old address or phone number. Try to think of it; you may feel that it's gone. But a single reminder could be enough to restore it for months or years. Conversely, some memories have high retrieval strength but low storage strength. Perhaps you've recently been told the names of the children of a new acquaintance. At this moment they may be easily accessible, but they are likely to be utterly forgotten in a few days, and a single repetition a month from now won't do much to strengthen them at all.
• One of the problems is that the amount of storage strength you gain from practice is inversely correlated with the current retrieval strength. In other words, the harder you have to work to get the right answer, the more the answer is sealed in memory. Precisely those things that seem to signal we're learning well — easy performance on drills, fluency during a lesson, even the subjective feeling that we know something — are misleading when it comes to predicting whether we will remember it in the future. "The most motivated and innovative teachers, to the extent they take current performance as their guide, are going to do the wrong things," Robert Bjork says. "It's almost sinister."

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• In the late 1800s, a German scientist named Hermann Ebbinghaus made up lists of nonsense syllables and measured how long it took to forget and then relearn them. (Here is an example of the type of list he used: bes dek fel gup huf jeik mek meun pon daus dor gim ke4k be4p bCn hes.) In experiments of breathtaking rigor and tedium, Ebbinghaus practiced and recited from memory 2.5 nonsense syllables a second, then rested for a bit and started again. Maintaining a pace of rote mental athleticism that all students of foreign verb conjugation will regard with awe, Ebbinghaus trained this way for more than a year. Then, to show that the results he was getting weren't an accident, he repeated the entire set of experiments three years later. Finally, in 1885, he published a monograph called Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. The book became the founding classic of a new discipline.

• Ebbinghaus discovered many lawlike regularities of mental life. He was the first to draw a learning curve. Among his original observations was an account of a strange phenomenon that would drive his successors half batty for the next century: the spacing effect.

     

  Ebbinghaus showed that it's possible to dramatically improve learning by correctly spacing practice sessions. On one level, this finding is trivial; all students have been warned not to cram. But the efficiencies created by precise spacing are so large, and the improvement in performance so predictable, that from nearly the moment Ebbinghaus described the spacing effect, psychologists have been urging educators to use it to accelerate human progress. After all, there is a tremendous amount of material we might want to know. Time is short.
• How Supermemo Works
   SuperMemo is a program that keeps track of discrete bits of information you've learned and want to retain.  For example, say you're studying Spanish. Your chance of recalling a given word when you need it declines over  time according to a predictable pattern. SuperMemo tracks this so-called forgetting curve and reminds you to rehearse your knowledge when your chance of recalling it has dropped to, say, 90 percent. When you first learn  a new vocabulary word, your chance of recalling it will drop quickly. But after SuperMemo reminds you of the word,  the rate of forgetting levels out. The program tracks this new decline and waits longer to quiz you the next time.
• 
• However, this technique never caught on. The spacing effect is "one of the most remarkable phenomena to emerge from laboratory research on learning," the psychologist Frank Dempster wrote in 1988, at the beginning of a typically sad encomium published in American Psychologist under the title "The Spacing Effect: A Case Study in the Failure to Apply the Results of Psychological Research." The sorrrowful tone is not hard to understand. How would computer scientists feel if people continued to use slide rules for engineering calculations? What if, centuries after the invention of spectacles, people still dealt with nearsightedness by holding things closer to their eyes? Psychologists who studied the spacing effect thought they possessed a solution to a problem that had frustrated humankind since before written language: how to remember what's been learned. But instead, the spacing effect became a reminder of the impotence of laboratory psychology.
• As a student at the Poznan University of Technology in western Poland in the 1980s, Wozniak was overwhelmed by the sheer number of things he was expected to learn. But that wasn't his most troubling problem. He wasn't just trying to pass his exams; he was trying to learn. He couldn't help noticing that within a few months of completing a class, only a fraction of the knowledge he had so painfully acquired remained in his mind. Wozniak knew nothing of the spacing effect, but he knew that the methods at hand didn't work.
• The most important challenge was English. Wozniak refused to be satisfied with the broken, half-learned English that so many otherwise smart students were stuck with. So he created an analog database, with each entry consisting of a question and answer on a piece of paper. Every time he reviewed a word, phrase, or fact, he meticulously noted the date and marked whether he had forgotten it. At the end of the session, he tallied the number of remembered and forgotten items. By 1984, a century after Ebbinghaus finished his second series of experiments on nonsense syllables, Wozniak's database contained 3,000 English words and phrases and 1,400 facts culled from biology, each with a complete repetition history. He was now prepared to ask himself an important question: How long would it take him to master the things he wanted to know?

• The answer: too long. In fact, the answer was worse than too long. According to Wozniak's first calculations, success was impossible. The problem wasn't learning the material; it was retaining it. He found that 40 percent of his English vocabulary vanished over time. Sixty percent of his biology answers evaporated. Using some simple calculations, he figured out that with his normal method of study, it would require two hours of practice every day to learn and retain a modest English vocabulary of 15,000 words. For 30,000 words, Wozniak would need twice that time. This was impractical.

     

  Wozniak's discouraging numbers were roughly consistent with the results that Ebbinghaus had recorded in his own experiments and that have been confirmed by other psychologists in the decades since.
• If students nonetheless manage to become expert in a few of the things they study,      it's not because they retain the material from their lessons but because they specialize in a relatively narrow subfield where intense practice keeps their memory fresh. When it comes to language, the received wisdom is that immersion — usually amounting to actual immigration — is necessary to achieve fluency. On one hand, this is helpful advice. On the other hand, it's an awful commentary on the value of countless classroom hours. Learning things is easy. But remembering them — this is where a certain hopelessness sets in.
• As Wozniak later wrote in describing the failure of his early learning system: "The process of increasing the size of my databases gradually progressed at the cost of knowledge retention." In other words, as his list grew, so did his forgetting. He was climbing a mountain of loose gravel and making less and less progress at each step.

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• The winter sun sets in mid-afternoon in Kolobrzeg, Poland, but the early twilight does not deter people from taking their regular outdoor promenade. Bundled up in parkas with fur-trimmed hoods, strolling hand in mittened hand along the edge of the Baltic Sea, off-season tourists from Germany stop openmouthed when they see a tall, well-built, nearly naked man running up and down the sand.

     

  "Kalt? Kalt?" one of them calls out. The man gives a polite but vague answer, then turns and dives into the waves. After swimming back and forth in the 40-degree water for a few minutes, he emerges from the surf and jogs briefly along the shore. The wind is strong, but the man makes no move to get dressed. Passersby continue to comment and stare. "This is one of the reasons I prefer anonymity," he tells me in English. "You do something even slightly out of the ordinary and it causes a sensation."
• Piotr Wozniak's quest for anonymity has been successful. Nobody along this string of little beach resorts recognizes him as the inventor of a technique to turn people into geniuses. A portion of this technique, embodied in a software program called SuperMemo, has enthusiastic users around the world. They apply it mainly to learning languages, and it's popular among people for whom fluency is a necessity — students from Poland or other poor countries aiming to score well enough on English-language exams to study abroad. A substantial number of them do not pay for it, and pirated copies are ubiquitous on software bulletin boards in China, where it competes with knockoffs like SugarMemo.
• SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you've learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you've forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you're about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?
• The reason the inventor of SuperMemo pursues extreme anonymity, asking me to conceal his exact location and shunning even casual recognition by users of his software, is not because he's paranoid or a misanthrope but because he wants to avoid random interruptions to a long-running experiment he's conducting on himself. Wozniak is a kind of algorithmic man. He's exploring what it's like to live in strict obedience to reason. On first encounter, he appears to be one of the happiest people I've ever met.

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• During the last few minutes of Game 6 of Boston's second-round series with Cleveland, poor Kevin Garnett looked like Forrest Gump right after Jenny pulled her top down in her dorm room. On one play, the ball swung to KG at the foul line; no Cav was within 10 feet of him. Strangely, he panicked, thinking about shooting an open J before realizing, Wait, I'm seven feet tall, that would be dumb, and barreling toward the basket to rush a clumsy jump hook. For a former MVP who makes $22 million a year, it was an astoundingly incompetent sequence. 
    
   It also wasn't a surprise.
• Garnett's crunch-time woes have been the dirty little secret of this storybook Celtics season. Sure, he saved the franchise and made the C's relevant again. He's also the reason they might not win the 2008 championship. Put simply, Garnett shrinks from pressure more times than he comes through. The NBA is a simple league to figure out: In a playoff series, the best player prevails unless his supporting cast is significantly inferior to the other team's. So when Boston's best player can't dominate close games against a quality opponent … um, that's a problem.
• The intriguing wrinkle with Garnett is he plays differently down the stretch by not playing differently. Selfless and passionate for 48 minutes a game, eight months a year, he can't raise his game because it's already raised. Like Nigel Tufnel's guitar, he's already up to 11.
• Sometimes, when Garnett's adrenaline kicks in during crunch time it's like watching a diabetic in the midst of a sugar rush. His body can't handle it. When he succeeds, he loses his mind, pounding his chest, belting out profanities and hollering at the crowd like a crazy person. When he fails (and it's happened a few times this season), his mistakes are unbelievably amateurish—intentional fouls when the team doesn't need them, taking too many steps on his signature fall-away, that kind of stuff. The pressure gets to him. You can see it. In Game 4 of the first-round series with Atlanta, after a near-altercation with Zaza Pachulia, the camera found KG on the bench and he was practically hyperventilating.
• Now, Garnett isn't the only NBA star who has struggled in big moments. Wilt was famous for it. The Mailman choked so many times I once wrote, "You know you're watching ESPN Classic if it's 2 a.m. and Karl Malone looks like he's about to throw up." David Robinson was an extremely nice guy who played like one in big games. 
    
   C-Webb passed the basketball like it was a hand grenade in the clutch. Clyde Drexler always seemed like he'd just downed too much caffeine. Even one of my favorite Celtics, Kevin McHale, got the yips. In Game 2 of the 1984 Finals, his legs shook after he missed that free throw before Gerald Henderson's famous steal. 
    
   The list of guys who came up short is as endless as the one of those who repeatedly came through in the clutch (Michael Jordan, Sam Jones, Reggie Miller, Dennis Johnson, Robert Horry, Larry Legend … ). The question is, how do you end up on one list or the other? What makes for clutch? Is it part of your DNA, or something that's honed through experience and repetition?
• Here's my answer: It's both. One of the most fascinating things about Jordan's career wasn't that he nailed the title-winning shot against Georgetown as a freshman, but that Dean Smith called the play for him. If someone is born with ice water in his veins, you know it. Smith knew it. Then again, get enough reps with anything in life, and you're more likely to succeed. Trying not to sound nervous when I started to do TV and radio a few years ago, I'd overthink and make myself nervous, battling a rush of adrenaline right before my segment started. I've learned to channel that energy now—I can speak in front of large crowds and everything. Why? Because I got my reps.
• How far can experience actually get you in matters of clutchness? After Garnett jumped from high school to the NBA, he played eight years without ever getting past the first round. Fellow high schooler Kobe Bryant landed on a talented Lakers team, failing famously as a rookie (remember his hideous air balls that ended the series against the Jazz in 1997?), then getting swept by the '98 Jazz and '99 Spurs. Name me one memorable Kobe moment from his first three springs. You can't. But 28 meaningful playoff games provided him with valuable pressurized situations. By the time the 2000 postseason rolled around, Kobe was asserting himself, capping it off with an MJ moment in Game 4 of the Finals for a championship team.
• By contrast, poor Garnett was trapped on lousy and half-decent teams until 2004, when he carried the Timberwolves to the Western Conference finals, submitting an ESPN Classic game of his own against the Kings (32 points, 21 rebounds in Game 7) in the second round. But just when it seemed as if he was getting the hang of clutch, Minnesota imploded, missing the playoffs in its next three seasons with KG. Now he's slightly past his prime. Can you blame him for not being clutch when he never got those reps in his formative years? Probably not. Think of his career like a video game: Spend a ton of time playing Grand Theft Auto, and you're much more likely to complete a mission than some guy who doesn't own a PS3, right?
• Fair or unfair, Garnett will always be measured against Tim Duncan, who has already carried the Spurs to four titles. It's easy to forget now that TD had his own blips and stumbles along the way, or that he played in 71 playoff games before famously demolishing the Nets with a 21/20/10 line in the clincher of the 2003 Finals. Wired very much like Garnett—completely selfless, phenomenally competitive, thoughtful as a teammate—Duncan learned to channel his intensity, saving peak performances for when they mattered most. He figured out that there was a crucial difference between a ho-hum January game in Atlanta and a must-win playoff game in LA. He's clearly developed a reliable mental alert: All right, unless I grab 20 rebounds tonight, we're going to lose. Or: If I don't take over this game right now and score every time down the floor, we're cooked. 
    
   Bill Russell had that switch. So did MJ, Bird and Magic.

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• Isn't it interesting how many people dream of writing a book? It's sweet, and it's (mostly) harmless, and I guess I once semi-shared that dream, and I guess one or two brain cells still make room for the possibility that I will someday write a book (fat chance). But, but, but ... Then I followed the book-publishing industry for 15 years.

    

• Fact #1: Millions of people are working on books, or believe that they could write a book, or are planning to write a book.

    

• And I'll bet that for many of them a part of that fantasy is the making - a - living-as-a-freelancer -doing-something-interesting-rather- than-working-as-a- flunky-in-a-boring- job element. But how many people in the country actually manage to make a living writing books? A couple of hundred.

    

  Millions would like to do it. A couple of hundred actually manage it.
• In other words, your chances of making a living writing books are perhaps better than are your chances of ever playing in the NBA. But not all that much better.
• Technical pause here: there's an important-to-understand distinction that needs to be made between "book publishing" generally and "trade book publishing," which is what most of us think of when we think of book publishing -- ie., the biz that creates the books that fill up the local bookstore. Book publishing generally is a fairly substantial industry, and most of the money in the field -- 2/3, if I remember right -- doesn't come from "trade book" publishing. It's generated by the sales of products many of us almost never think of as books: medical reference books, atlases, textbooks. This end of the biz operates in the semi-rational way many businesses do, with similar profit margins and incentive structures. There's real money to be made here, other words. You can get rich writing and/or publishing textbooks, for instance, even if it's a very competitive industry.
• Fact #2: Most people who write "serious" trade nonfiction actually lose money on their projects.
• Biographies? Serious travel books? Moneylosers for most of their authors. How so? Well, say you're lucky and your agent nails a $100,000 contract for you for a biography you're dying to write. Sounds good, huh? But run the math: First, subtract the agent's fee (10-15%), and then subtract taxes. You've got to write the book on the, say, $55,000ish that remains. Keep in mind that almost all books take longer to write and publish than expected. But, heck, you're a fast worker -- it'll only take you 3 years. That means you'll be living on $17,000 a year. And wait: you've gotta do some research -- what's a biography without research? Visiting some archives, interviewing whoever's still alive ... Guess where the money for these travels and adventures comes from? Your own pocket.

• As a consequence of these sorts of realities, most serious-nonfiction writers either hold down fulltime day jobs (healthcare!) and do their writing during the evening and on weekends (whoops, there goes the private life!), or spend a lot of the time that they'd like to spend writing chasing down grants, fellowships, and stretches at writer's colonies instead. (This bunch is usually very worried about health care. See my posting on health care and the arts here.)

    

  Not long ago, I ran into a woman acquaintance I hadn't seen in years, during which time she'd written a first-class biography of a famous man. We bumped into each other shortly after her book had been released, and I assumed she was basking in the good reviews, and exultant about the way her publisher was promoting the book. "This must give you a great feeling, as well as a great platform into your next book, no?" I said.

    

  She rolled her eyes and told me emphatically that she was never going to write another book. "What I'm looking for now is a nice little not-too-demanding job with an office, regular hours, a health plan, and a regular paycheck," she said.
• Fact #3: The people in trade-book publishing who make the money generally aren't the authors.
• Fact #4: Writing a book isn't fun.

• So why do people do write books? I come up with these possible explanations:

  
   
  • Some hope to hit the jackpot despite the odds.
     
  • Some have a dream about being an author, or taking part in "literature."
     
  • Some are obsessed lunatics -- ie., they feel they just gotta.
     
  • Some don't know better (these usually never write a second book).
     
  • Some have other ambitions, and writing a book is a step along the way.
     
  • A handful are determined to be trade-book authors as a career, and know what the game consists of, and have (or think they have) the tenacity, toughness, talent, luck and energy to succeed.

• All of which leads me to a Blowhardish musing. It's such a pain to write books, it's such a bother to go through the publishing process -- what kind of person is willing to put him/herself through this? Answer: a very narrow demographic -- the obsessed and the ambitious. Exceptions allowed for (hi Hugo!), this would seem to mean that most of the books we've interacted with over the years have been written by people who are nuts. Let's grant that a few of these nutcases have talent and brains -- still: funny, no?

    

  And this is a big part of why I generally celebrate digital media -- because the new tools give people from the non-nuts range of humanity a better chance to contribute and take part in the conversation that is "culture." How many such "normal" voices have really been heard in this conversation before? But these days, if you write and publish a blog, for example, the publishing part of blogging is trivial, at least once you've set the blog up (or in the especially inept case of the Blowhards, paid a good webteam to do the hard stuff). You can say what you have to say, press a button -- and what you have to say flies right out there and becomes part of the ongoing culture-thing. Never before in the history of blah blah blah. Very cool, in any case, and I'm going to follow how this affects the tone of the culture-conversation with interest. Blogs have already had quite an impact on journalism. What kind of impact will they have on the cultural world? (Huge, I hope.)

• Over the years, a few people have asked me for advice about writing books -- fools! Still, I tell 'em what I really believe: Since you probably won't make money on your project anyway, why not do it in a way that minimizes your trouble and results in something that pleases you? How to do this? Publish your book yourself. (Self-publishing is a growing and happening thing.)

    

  But why turn your urge to create into "writing a book" in the first place? You say you've got a story to tell? Well, why does it have to be a book? You'll burden your life with a tedious project for a couple of years, you'll probably overstretch your material, and then no one will read the results. Why not realize your project in a manageable and pleasureable way instead? Put in a month of writing, keep it to a compact length, and post it to the Web. (There really aren't many stories that need more than 50 pages.) It's certainly true that no one may pay attention to your work despite its being out there on the Web. But at least you'll have told your story, enjoyed the process, made your work available -- and you won't have ruined your life, or broken your heart.

    

  No one listens to me, of course, and it's probably better that way. I confess that The Wife berates me (lovingly and charmingly, of course) when I go on like this. She says I'm being a killjoy. Lots of people dream of writing books. What a harmless dream -- why kill it? And she's certainly got a point. I, on the other hand, feel that my point isn't to crush anyone's dreams. Why not make this basic information available? But maybe The Wife is right. It's certainly true that, after 15 years of following the book publishing world, I do sometimes wish people would be a bit more realistic in their thinking and talking about books. But is that an awful wish? Where books and publishing are concerned, maybe it is, I don't really know for sure.

    

  Best,

    

  Michael
• UPDATE: Please be sure to read the comments thread on this posting, which is full of lively thinking and reacting. Aaron Haspel adds a lot to the conversation in his new posting on the subject here.

  • One should never write a book with the goal in mind of writing a book.
    
    The book is only a means to communicate heart-felt ideas. If you don’t really care about the ideas, hey! go ski and/or play golf.
    
    I speak from experience. I wrote a book; I didn’t really want to. But I didn’t think anyone else would do it. So I had to.

  • Will: I think what von Mises was getting at is that real artistic geniuses are always unsatisfied, though they may be fluent. That’s where the agony comes in. Writing is hell for me, and I’m no genius either.
  • 4 more sticky notes...

  • • Hmm. So, according to Ludwig von Mises, if I enjoy writing and it comes fairly easily, I must not be a genius. Gosh, and there I was, beginning to wonder.

    • The productivity of labor has become so high in this country that most anyone who has bothered to acquire some marketable skills and is not grimly devoted to his job is awash in leisure. Trollope, who produced 40-odd novels by arising at 4 AM daily and writing for two hours before his day job at the post office, would envy us. The Marxist fantasy of a people milking cows in the morning and practicing drama criticism at night has nearly come to pass, though not in the way that Marx intended. You want to make money and write in your spare time, be my guest. You want to make money writing, write romance novels or technical texts. You want to make money writing serious books about your cherished passions, go whine to someone else.

    • The activities of [artistic geniuses] cannot be fully subsumed under the praxeological concept of labor. They are not labor because they are for the genius not means, but ends in themselves. He lives in creating and inventing. For him there is not leisure, only intermissions of temporary sterility and frustration. His incentive is not the desire to bring about a result, but the act of producing it. The accomplishment gratifies him neither mediately nor immediately. It does not gratify him mediately because his fellow men at best are unconcerned about it, more often even greet it with taunts, sneers, and persecution. Many a genius could have used his gifts to render his life agreeable and joyful; he did not even consider such a possibility and chose the thorny path without hesitation…
      
      Neither does the genius derive immediate gratification from his creative activities. Creating is for him agony and torment, a ceaseless excruciating struggle against internal and external obstacles; it consumes and crushes him…
      
      The creative accomplishment of the genius is an ultimate fact of praxeology. It comes to pass in history as a free gift of destiny. It is by no means the result of production in the sense in which economics uses this term.

    • It is to obsessed lunatics that we owe the greater part of the world’s permanent literature. For most of history authors not only didn’t make money from their work, but often risked their lives by publishing it.
  Add Sticky Note
• There are enough books in the world. You want to write the ones that are good. The minute you write books because you need the income not because you think you have a good subject you should just stop. There are 60000 books published in this country every year and most of them are crap. You are making someone make a serious commitment, not the money but the time, to sit down with a book and enter this world. You want it to be good. You want the book to be special and they are not always going to be special but at least you want that to be the ambition.
• In my own (ex-)line of business, I see some parallels. Professional (performing) classical music offers a reasonable living to a small number of people in the world. In order to get good enough, and compete with the small handful of world-class players, a musician will have to spend many thousands, often hundreds of thousands of dollars achieving that goal. A starting spot in a major orchestra, is currently about $60,000 a year. Starting spots in the average minor orchestra is about $15,000 - $20,000 a year. Professional grade (string) instruments start at about $15,000. The instruments are merely the competitive edge. First class players have probably been paying for instruction and instruments (some of them) since they were five or six. Most practice (without pay) for many hours a day. Conservatories in the US turn out some 10,000 to 20,000 excellent players a year. There are 6 top grade symphonies in the country (in the SF Symphony class). Each orchestra has some 100+ players, who will probably remain with the orchestra for at least a couple of decades. What sort of person goes into the professional classical music performance industry, expecting to make a reasonable living? Sounds like the same sort of person that sets out to make a living as an author... Of course, unlike authors, it is very hard to convince an orchestra to hire you, if you are an untalented player.

• Hey Alexis, You' ve got good instincts, and The Wife would agree with you about the "relish" thing, although I remain convinced (deludedly, apparently) that I'm just performing a public service. But glad to see you doubting my motives ....

    

  Anyway, the "couple of hundred" figure was given to me by the guy who runs one of the big authors' organizations, so the figure's trustworthy even if I'm not. I can't imagine anymore more quaified to make a decent guesstimate than he.

    

  I said to the guy, How many people in this country make a living from writing books? He said, Do you want to include all kinds of books? I said, No, just bookstore-type books. No textbooks, and let's not include people who write computer-instruction books. And he said, Oh, in the low couple of hundreds.

    

  So yeah, the figure would include sci-fi writers, mystery authors, self-help authors, literary people, etc. The authors of all the stuff at the local Barnes & Noble, minus the computer section.

    

  As I say, one of the surprises of the field is how many even very big names can't and don't get by on what they make from their books.

    

  Can anyone think of a similar industry -- where the people who produce the product don't generally make a living doing so? I can't, but maybe I'm overlooking something obvious...
• Actually, I can think of one right off the bat.
   Child care workers. I know this because I am currently doing a child care survey analysis on wages and benefits in Dane County, WI. The average salary for an inhome child care worker is roughly 15k--that's gross. She will work 13-15 hours a day, have no benefits (healthcare!), and getno paid vacations. And the corker is that it doesnt matter if you have a Masters in Early chidhood or are Mrs Joeblow off the street with only a high school education. Workers who care for kids in centers have it only marginally better--they may get paid holidays. Still no healthcare etc. And unlike authors or musicians, these are the folks who are taking care of the majority of the children in this country.

• Another industry: acting.

    

  Only about 1 in 20 professional actors support themselves entirely by acting. This at first occasions rather sad but heartfelt discussions as people struggle to make sense of the idea that they are "really" actors even if they can't support themselves acting.

    

  I wonder if Wallace Stevens worried that he wasn't "really" a poet since he made no money at it.
• Over the years, I've hung out in the furthermost reaches of publishing and talked now and then with writers who are rather more in the thick of things. So I've wanted to comment knowledgeably on Michael Blowhard's initial posting, and even made a couple of attempts that I ended up deleting. I think MB said it all pretty well the first time. Even so...maybe I can add a few odds and ends after all...
• Felicity said something above that may have put a finger on a major factor. That people read at all any more. It seems as though more people want to write a book than actually read books. The perception endures of the successful writer as the wealthy fellow who stays at home all day and makes lots of money by sharing his imagination with his legions of adoring fans. The fans are actually watching TV and the writer is in competition for a share of the declining audience that still reads for pleasure with a lot of other would-be writers who want in on this sweet deal, too. Did something like this happen to poetry, another field where there seem to be more people who want to write it than to read it?
• At least in the science-fiction field, the theory used to be that success was cumulative. You'd write part-time in addition to your day job for some years, building up a following of loyal readers as well as a backlog of novels in print. Eventually, the continuing royalties from your previously published novels added to increasing advances for your latest works would add up to enough of a steady income that you could quit the day job and write full time. As I understand it, there have been changes in how publishers do business that have undermined this model for all but the most successful writers: books aren't kept in print as long, books aren't allowed to sit on booksellers' shelves as long, and as a result there's been a virtual elimination of what used to be called the "mid-list" -- the slow but steady selling titles that were an author's bread and butter. It seems to be getting more to the point of "Best-Seller or Die" for any given book. A working writer could probably explain all this better than I can.

• Are there other industries that have a ratio of paid creators to paid sellers comparable to book publishing? Yes, several that I have worked in:

    

  Game design - Thousands of designers, perhaps as many as a few dozen who make a living (this neglects role-playing game designers, of which more later.) There are thousands of stores in the US alone that sell games, each of which has at least a few employees. There are more hundreds of people employed in printing, assembling, and distributing games. As for the designers, a distributor of my acquaintance used to tell prospective game designers: "Take $50,000 in cash and put it in a suitcase. Go to the middle of the highest bridge you can find and throw that suitcase as hard as you can. At the end of this process, you will not be worse off financially, you won't have a garage full of unsalable games, you won't have suffered the pains of trying to sell your game, and you'll be done years earlier."

    

  Role-playing game design - Again, a few dozen people making a living, hundreds of others spending nights and weekends (or retirement funds) trying to make a living. Very similar to book publishing in the amount of hard work required, but there are many more self-published authors.

    

  Hobby accessories - Whether model railroad scenery, after-market RC car pieces, or doll-house furniture, this is another garage industry (or set of industries).

    

  The unifying theme seems to be that the people doing this are trying to find a way to have their fun and eat it too. 8-)

    

  From an economic point of view, I'd guess that the combination of expected monetary reward (in the long term) plus the nonmonetary reward of working with your hobby (more illusory than real) result in people entering these industries with wildly inflated opinions of their own prospective success.

• There is so much to read and to look at online, it's like being in a vast storehouse full of treasures - literally acres and acres full of gold, jewels, and valuable artifacts - and you can only take as much as you can carry in your hands. You don't know what to choose so you just keep looking, briefly examining and laying aside one piece of treasure and then the next and the next and the next. The Internet is like that for me. I find many sites where I want to spend more time reading but instead I just keep on surfing and finding other interesting sites. I always plan to come back to them... "later." ...

    

  I might actually be reading more now; it's only the routine that has changed. Maybe the availability of so much reading matter makes it seem like I'm not reading as much as I should. It has never occurred to me that I should try to read every book and magazine in the public library, but for some reason with the world's biggest library right here in the corner of my dining room I feel guilty about passing over anything I'm the least bit interested in. I feel I have to read it all.

• One alternative to job versus starvation may be to live somewhere off the beaten track that is very cheap. I have lived for 22 years in a small New Mexico village 75 miles by air from the nearest city, and in a determinedly un-chic part of the state.
   I live in a 100 year old stone house with 4 main rooms ( a nice piece of "Alexandrian" vernacular architecture) that cost me less than a cheap new car does today. My newest car is 13. My wife currently works part- time in the local post office. At times she has worked full- time, and often had no job at all. Our main expenses are books and travel.

    

  And travel itself can help pay the bills. We have in the last decade spent time in London, France, Zimbabwe, traveled twice to Mongolia, and are heading for Kazakhstan in the fall. All trips were at least work-related, and the last 3 paid for up front. What other life would give me freedom to do what I like and write about it? A job that paid for a month here and there would take all my time...expensive!

    

  Isolation was more of a problem 20 years ago. Now, with blogs, e-mail, and internet it's not even a factor. I "talk" every week with people in England, New York, Latvia, Finland, Russian, Kazakhstan and more. There is more info a click away than you could have had in, say, Victorian London.

    
• I would agree with the "50 page" theory. I never read books because I don't think there are many subjects out there that deserve book treatment, and I don't have time for somebody to cover their ass and stuff all the facts in a book. I always skim what I read anyway, so why not just chop it down and turn it into a little pamphlet or magazine article?
• By the way, another real economic setback as well as a lot of work in the off hours (goodbye, private life) is having children. If you're into watching TV and saving cash, don't write a novel and don't have kids. Man, the kids really get ya.

• Unfortunately, there are vast numbers of individuals who believe that taxes and the huge government that results from it are good for us. How many authors would be able to suppport themselves if they didn't have to support millions of nonproductive government workers at the same time? How many government workers read? How many of them are so bored with their jobs at the IRS or the CIA that they're writing a novel in the hopes of escaping from their boredom? How many of the government thrillers are competing with other "art" to be published? Think of all the tax accountants and attorneys who make their living by pushing tax-related papers, who never produce any books, cars, houses or products that add any enjoyment to life?

    

  The huge cut that the government sucks out of the markeplace at every level, the author's advance, the agent's salary, the bookstore's income, is money that creative people can no longer use to support creativity. It's time they don't have to write and it's money that they no longer have to buy the books that add value and enjoyment to their lives.

    

  Yes, the money ends up in the hands of others and they will spend it. But what will the recipients of those tax dollars spend it on? Baseball? A wide-screen TV for watching football games? Will they spend it on great stories about the nature of existence and survival when their own survival is guaranteed by the money they can take at the point of a gun from those who produce and sell art?

    

  Nobel Prize-winning ecomonist Milton Friedman noted in FREE TO CHOOSE that taxes distort markets. Once taxed, it is impossible to determine what real value is anymore because the price of something (the price paid to an author for his work or a bookstore for a book) is no longer an accurate measure of its real value to individual consumers. Markets become glutted with useless trash and real value falls by the wayside. Sounds like the book market that you described!
• Leave the lunatics alone...we need writers. Moby Dick sold only 3000 copies in the USA, and the critics were scornful of it. Jack Kerouac was rejected by every publisher on the east coast when he wrote On The Road...it took five years to find a publisher, and he was forced to make humiliating changes to it.(the ms has recently sold for two million.)But boy am I glad those guys stuck to their writing.
• I would also like to note, the low rate of pay for both writers and childcare workers is based on the notion that people think these are easy, low-skill jobs.

• Responding to the point way above about childcare:
   When I lived in San Francisco, it seemed as if every waiter and half the carpenters were 'really' artists of some kind - painters, actors, writers - or on a spiritual quest of some sort.

    

  I was a carpenter/writer, and when our son was born we found a pregnant artist who wanted to run a small daycare to pay her way. Not being the kind to do things by halves, Sterret Smith had got a degree in child-something-or-other, and instead of actually living off her daycare income, it seemed as if she plowed it all back into toys and improvements (I built her a child-sized play loft, thus circulating our dollars nicely). I loved her paintings but was much more impressed by her childcare. She was truly a master in the art of starting children off in their lives. These kids had their imaginations stimulated every day, and learned how to resolve disputes without an adult's intervention (or with a minimal one) to a degree that still shows in my son's mid-teen years.

    

  I began to wonder why there were so many young people waitressing or hammering so they could occasionally act or write, but few if any doing the same so they could be daycare providers. The latter seemed much more worth doing, or at least as worth doing, but we had all somehow absorbed the notion that it is an unromantic boring slog. For me, it probably would be, just as for some writing is pain and agony (whereas I have had months of ecstasy at the best points in novel writing) but for Sterrett it wasn't. Of course, she had endless dirty diapers, and the money wasn't good, and she depended to some extent I suppose on her husband, except that he was a freelance writer himself...

    

  I wish childcare could be seen as more of an exciting area to work, money or not. Maybe there could be some way of starting an upward creativity spiral inb the field... Or maybe Sterrett should write a book about it... and suffer further penury.
• Every once in a while I get an e-mail from some person who has read a poem or work of fiction of mine, written maybe 30 or so years ago, telling me my words have touched them and moved them enough to contact me. Nothing can replace the feeling that comes from receiving that message. The magic of the well written word cannot be denied.

• You said "Hey, my English profs didn't tell me about this!". Right on! There is a lot more they didn't tell you..

    

  LIKE -- universities are totally geared and set-up to make money and are businesses,not benevolent institutions designed to see you succeed.

    

  LIKE -- when you decide to become a writer (or English student)make sure you do not ignore the fact there is competition in every field and though it seems unfair, others will succeed,
   and no matter how much you love it,
   you can fail consistently.

    

  LIKE -- those who do succeed were destined to succeed through
   their "success gene", that little sting of DNA that makes them blind to failure and are driven to success like a moth to a campsite lantern, even if they
   studied plumbing they would end up owning a string of shops.

    

  LIKE -- higher education is a brainwashing and re-programming process designed to produce worker-bees on various levels, it is NOT a process designed to make you rich or successful, the sooner you realize this, the more successful you become, they are there to sell seats.

    

  LIKE -- people don't buy creative writing to entertain someone else's ego, they buy creative writing to be entertained.

    

  
   The list goes on what universities don't tell their students. What they DO is sell dreams and a "product" which is a program designed to align your thinking with an agenda. What YOU have to do is figure out what that agenda is. Once you have done that you will have as much money as you can possibly stand.

• Popular Rock and Pop bands don't make millions and zillions of dollars producing beautiful tracks of symphonic
   masterpieces, they were intelligent business people who sell well produced songs about the money making themes like SEX, DRUGS, MURDER, WAR all of which the Beatles were a prime example of in the new commercialization of popular culture.

    

  Most of outrageously successful and popular rapper groups have management who know it is not a matter of selling a new rhythm thousands of times for a large price, it is a matter of selling
   an old rhythm millions and millions of times for a small price.

    

  The frustration that you are feeling, the melancholy emotions, come with the sad realization people don't want to pay you for what is GOOD and what YOU want to believe in. But they will pay you for what they have been programmed to believe in.

    

  A few tricks are writing new twists and imaginative new versions on; the masses are entertained by raunchy murder themes, they are entertained by raunchy horror themes, they are entertained by raunchy sex scenes, they are entertained by raunchy drug themes, they are entertained by raunchy sad sad scenes.

    

  I can understand your frustration with writing for a planet of people who are
   destined for failure by their core obsession with other peoples misfortunes
   and their lust for sex, drugs and violence. But that is all that entertains them now that the "shock value" bar has been raised so high.
• Sure its a sad commentary on the state of our civilization but you brought up the subject of how (or how not) to succeed in book publishing. Simple, write for self-destructing audience. Just how sick is our world? With 80 million copies sold, 65 titles and 37 languages, Chicken Soup for the Soul� made international publishing history.They were rejected by 140 publishers.

• I will say that I detest the traditional publishers. They lie. They cheat. They never tell you how many books are out there, not to say, it's some big KGB secret re: how many really sold. They do deals with other big pubs, and get behind mediocre books due to big names, or friendships. All the chains get paid to show certain books up front in the stores. It's all a big money raquet, in which we lowly writers rarely get to partake. So, question:

    

  Is there something in between traditional publishing and blogging/ self-publishing. ONe hopes yes. This one doesn't have a clue. Best, Louise

• I think a thread that ties the books, movies, TV, and music industries together (and these are the most frequently cited ones in our postings above). They're all big money entertainment industries, geared toward creating bland, middle-of-the-road stuff that everyone will buy. It's largely because of the consolidation of media ownership, and the high stakes of the industries, that this is happening. If it wasn't the case that a huge proportion of books were sold in chain stores, which do big-money deals with the publishers, for example, there'd be a greater variety of books.

    

  As Michael said, it's the proliferation of middlemen (agent, publisher, layout/designer, editor, bookstore owner) all of whom DO make a living that sucks up the money.

    

  Another thing that has cracked me up about practically all the books I've worked on is the way the actual writing is viewed as a small detail by the middlemen. I'm in music journalism, and often write entries in music guides. many of them are good books and pay decently, but their approach has always amused me. They have a concept, it's sold, it's put into production, it's designed in many cases, and then they call me (along with twenty other writers) and say "we need 20,000 words in three weeks." If they don't get it in three weeks, the production schedule is thrown off! Im currently writing an encyclopedia, and it's the same thing; the publisher, a well-respected textbook press, had the whole thing put into production before word one was written. Now I have to compromise quality to get it done on time!

• And a quick note of appreciation to those who say, Yeah, but writing books isn't the only way to get by from writing: Well, of course you're right, and many thanks for reminding us, and for giving examples of such. I will point out, though, that this posting wasn't intended as a comprehensive survey of how people get by from writing.

    

  It wasn't intended as a pro-books-writing or anti-books-writing piece of cheerleading either. People can and will write books no matter what my opinion is, which is as it should be. Instead, I simply wanted to confront people's fantasies about writing books for a living with a few of the actual facts of the field. People who fantasize about writing books for a living aren't daydreaming about scraping by on reprint rights, stays at writers colonies, writing freelance travel articles, chasing down fellowships and teaching gigs, and pulling together encyclopedia entries on ridiculous schedules, which is what the professional book-writer's life often consists of. They're daydreaming instead about getting paid a decent living for writing the books they'd love to write. And the general books press isn't letting them know what the field really consists of. Hence this blog posting.
• I see a lot of comments by writers--published, unpublished, manque, parkay. What I don't see are comments by writers and publishers saying, "You damn fools! Send me your stuff. I'll take an honest, fair look at it. If within three pages I can tell it sucks, I will send you a letter saying it sucks. If it's as good as you say it is I will try to get it published." Don't agents and publishers troll the Internet and the blogs hunting for innovation and talent?
• One profession which, I believe, is even more poorly treated than that of the novelist is the screenwriter. Because they are so expensive to produce, the ratio of written screenplays to produced films is even lower than that of written to published novels. The cost also makes it prohibitive for most people to produce their own. Despite this, everybody thinks screenwriting is easy and thousands upon thousands of screenplays get written that will never see the light of day. Furthermore, although well paid by many standards, screenwriters are poorly paid by film standards, with a small handful of writers making anything near what a mid-level actor or director can expect to make. But, the killer for me is that writers have no respect in Hollywood, where they can slave on a project for years only to have it be taken away from them and given to somebody else. (I have never heard of this happening to a novelist!)

• It took me 8 years to write my first novel, (a piece of crap), 3 years for my second (moderately awful, on the same level as Clancy and his ilk - you know, cardboard characters and boring plot), and two years for my third (which, read the reviews, really is damn fine).

    

  And when I got the third one published, I discovered that if you're not published by one of the 'BIG 6' publishers, *nobody will review your novel*!

    

  It's as if there's some kind of conspiracy going on. And if nobody reviews it, no bookstores will stock it. And it certainly won't appear in any chains, like hotels, airports and so on, because ALL those outlets buy only pulp paperbacks from the New York Times (yech) 'best seller' list - and all those are chosen arbitrarily from the BIG 6 publishers.
• Out of date farming methods are contributing to the erosion of the top soil. The solution, no till farming, currently is not being embraced due to the cost of re-equipping farms. The longer the nations of the world keep from practicing no till farming, the greater amount of the worlds farming top soil will be eroded, leaving less farmable land over time.
   Further complicating matters, this huge world population is tearing through the rainforests of the world recklessly. The world is currently experiencing a mass extinction rate comparable to the fabled asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs. The casualties of our resource use and pollution policies are not limited to the land, but the world�s oceans as well. Though there are people who are working to save the environment, the combined effects seem only to slightly slow the inevitable. With the onset of the pacific region reaching new levels of industrialization, unchecked pollution emissions are contributing to global warming. Complicate this further with a thinning ozone layer and years of past industrial pollution and we have our current state of environmental problems.
   The 6 billion people or more who walk the earth contribute to the potential of a highly communicable disease spreading through out the world. Modern travel by airplane now makes it possible for a particularly nasty airborne germ to make its way around the world in three days. Many people, even in the most industrialized and modern of countries, can�t afford medical care. However, tens of billions of dollars are spent every year for entertainment. Among the highest paid are the few artists, directors, actors, authors, and professional sports people. The point has been made that we pay the people who take care of our children, our future, maybe 15K a year for a 13 to 15 hour day. However we will pay entertainers tens of millions.

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