I wrote this article several years ago about coaching. However most of what I said applies to other businesses too, and bears repeating.

During the time I have been a coach, I have been regularly astonished by two things. The first is how little some quite well-known coaches are earning after years of being a coach. The second is how quickly some other people start earning large sums of money at coaching.

I have noticed that it is frequently possible to identify the people who are going to “fly” the second they come onto the scene, well before they start being successful.

So here is a list of things I think these people have in common. Not all of them of course will have all these qualities in equal measure, and I am sure there are other factors which I have omitted.

* They see coaching as a business, and take a business attitude to it.

* They are quite clear about what they want to achieve, and work to long-term (3-5 years) rather than short-term goals.

* They know it takes time and effort to build a business, and they start putting that time and effort in straightaway.

* They adequately fund their business.

* They are confident in their own abilities, particularly their business abilities.

* They concentrate more on improving their business than on improving their coaching (though obviously the two go hand-in-hand; it is a matter of emphasis).

* They see marketing as their number one priority.

* They find ways very early on of distinguishing themselves from the common herd.

* And without any exception I can think of, they are excellent public speakers.

It all goes back to what I’ve written before: our profession is coaching; our business is selling coaching services.

“I’ve had trouble justifying my excitement about this intricate visual detail, so I thought it would be good to collect a bunch of examples from over fifty years of information design history, to show it as a powerful visual element in ubicomp situations.

Even though the dashed line has emerged from a designer’s shorthand and from the limitations of monotone printing techniques, it has a clear and simple visual magic, the ability to express something three- or four-dimensional in two dimensions.” (Thanks Stephen!)

How-to web site wikiHow offers a beginner’s crash course to predicting the weather with nothing but your wits and senses. For example:

Take a deep breath. Close your eyes and smell the air.

• Plants release their waste in a low pressure atmosphere, generating a smell like compost and indicating an upcoming rain.
• Swamps will release methane just before a storm because of the lower pressure, which leads to unpleasant smells.
• A proverb says “Flowers smell best just before a rain.” Scents are stronger in moist air, associated with rainy weather.

In all, the post describes 10 different methods for predicting weather by observing smells, animals, the sky, and more using your sharp senses. If you’ve always wanted to pick up some grass, look up at the sky, inhale a full puff of air, and declare in your best down-home country twang: “Looks like there’s a storm a-brewin’, mother,” this guide should give you a good start.

TED | Talks | Jennifer Lin: Magical improv from 14-year-old pianist (video)

This video from the 2004 TED Conference is extraordinary for a few reasons. First, the prepared performances by then-14-year-old composer and pianist Jennifer Lin are lovely and technically very accomplished. And — wow — the improvisation she creates on the spot (16:45) is really something.

But, I also wanted to draw your attention to her thoughts on creativity and flow — discussing how she tries to beat distraction and gain focus in both drawing and composition. Her discussion starts around 13:31, but do stick around after for her improv based upon randomly chosen notes.

[via Metafilter]

, jennifer lin, music, TED conference

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Eerie #54
Eerie #54

Making changes, no matter how big or small, can be difficult. Psychology Today has put together the six principles of change that can help you accomplish what needs to be done.

Summed up, they look like this:

1) The belief that you can change is the key to change. 2) The type of treatment is less critical than the individual’s commitment to change. 3) Brief treatments can change longstanding habits. 4) Life skills can be the key to licking addiction. 5) Repeated efforts are critical to changing. 6) Improvement, without abstinence, counts.

Yes, a wee bit Dr.Phil-ish, but still intriguing. What is your principle of change? Please share in the comments.

It is my mission to correctly re-shelve books to the appropriate section of the bookstore. 

For example, “Darwin’s Black Box”, the famous psuedo-science book by the non-evolutionary non-scientist Michael Behe, should not be in the “Evolutionary Biology” section, but something more appropriate, such as “New Age”, “Religion”, “Christianity”, or even “Fiction”.  You get the idea.

Here is more, and the pointer is from the newlywed Jacqueline Passey.

These are from the new and noteworthy Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier, by Robert Emmons:

1. Keep a Gratitude Journal

2. Remember the Bad

3. Ask Yourself Three Questions (What have I received from…?, What have I given to…?, and What troubles and difficulty have I caused …?

4. Learn prayers of gratitude

5. Come to your senses

6. Use visual reminders

7. Make a vow to practice gratitude

8. Watch your language

9. Go through the motions [of showing gratitude, thanking, smiling, etc.]

10. Think outside the box [TC: this one should have been left out]

I didn’t learn anything from this book, but in terms of both truth and importance it is one of the most significant books you can find.  Ever.  Provided you live enough above subsistence, gratitude is the single most important key to personal happiness.  And how commercial society affects gratitude is one of the great underexplored questions of economic science and sociology.

Ghosts #17
Ghosts #17

Bestselling Comics (2006) #3696
Bestselling Comics (2006) #3696

Angela Booth suggests that experienced writers can use journals as their idea banks:

If you’ve been writing for a few years, your journal acts as your idea bank. It’s best to maintain several journals: one for ideas, another for essays, as well as a journal for a long project like a book.

If you’re writing a novel, for example, your journal will keep you “in” the novel, even if you have to leave the project for a week or two.

An idea bank would be helpful for anyone who works with information and ideas. You don’t have to use a paper journal, because there are lots of desktop or online solutions too. You could use a wiki, a note-taking application, a desktop information manager like DevonThink or PersonalBrain, a password-protected blog (to keep your ideas under wraps while they’re gestating), or text files.

How do you capture your ideas?

Share/E-mail

“The craft of graphic design is replete with ratios, rules of thumb, and math—all an attempt to rationalize decisions that otherwise fall to subjectivity. Finding justification for design decisions is important to me—I want to bring purpose and intent to my work and depend less on taste and opinion. But I often find myself designing on impulse or intuition—pushing pixels around the screen or lines down a sketchpad with no structure, no rationalization— just because it ‘looks right’. That haphazard and experimental process gives me a lot of freedom, but it isn’t really design.

I asked Mark Boulton, Andy Budd, and Jeff Croft, three designers I deeply respect, about designing on impulse versus intention. They each had something different to say, but they each presented a design process far more rationalized and justified than my own…”

Let’s face it– artists love to draw faces. Penetrating eyes, distinctive noses, expressive mouths– these are often an artist’s richest lode.

But when that face turns away and you no longer have facial features with all their emotion and meaning– what does that leave? Just the simple line of a human cheek. What can an artist possibly make of that?

Well, my friends, that depends on the artist.

Look at the knowledge that Alex Raymond conveys with this sensitive drawing. This cheek demonstrates more wisdom than most artists could convey drawing a full face.



Next, Austin Briggs applies a cruder tool and a simpler approach to the same subject, yet still conveys just as much information. I think this is a thrilling piece of draughtsmanship.



In the following illustration by Robert Fawcett, the person drawn from behind was obviously a much tougher artistic challenge than the full faces drawn from the front.



Finally, the great Mort Drucker infuses personality and vitality into a face that is not only viewed from behind, but is also obscured by layers of scuba gear.



Despite the obvious drama of the human face, it can be a far greater challenge to draw the head using just the subtle contour of a cheek. Experienced artists recognize that it is difficult to draw the head from that perspective. For many, the result ends up looking like a dollop of pastry dough.

Sometimes it pays to look for artistic greatness in the simplest places. The philosopher Santayana wrote,

Miracles are so-called because they excite wonder. In unphilosophical minds, rare or unexpected things excite wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also.

Here’s a relatively simple method of gaining insight into problems that face us. Often the reason we can’t solve a problem is that we don’t concentrate on it long enough to look at it from enough different angles or give our brains time to process our ideas subconsciously.

Step One

Take a sheet of paper and write across the top “Questions I could ask myself about this problem include…..”

Then write down as quickly as possible between six and twelve different ways of finishing that sentence. Don’t think too much about what you write — the aim here is quantity not quality.

To take an example (completely fictitious of course!), I have a problem keeping my desk tidy. So I might write:

Questions I could ask myself about this problem….

• why is this problem happening?
• why does it matter?
• how could I overcome it?
• what problems does it cause?
• who could help me overcome it?
• what benefit am I getting out of it?
• why is it so difficult to be tidy?
• and so on…..

Put the sheet of paper away and go through Step One again the following day on a fresh sheet of paper without looking at the first sheet. You will probably find that you can find another six or more endings without duplicating anything you wrote the day before.

Step Two

Take both sheets of paper and extract from them the four or five questions that you feel are most helpful, relevant or useful. Then rewrite them as sentences for completion. So for example I might end up with the following list:

• Reasons this problem is happening might include….
• This problem matters because…..
• One way of overcoming this would be…..
• The benefits I get out of being untidy include….

Then do a similar exercise to Step One but this time use each of the sentences you have just written. Again aim to write between six and twelve endings to each sentence. Then put your sheet of paper away for 24 hours and do the exercise again. You will probably find that your insights have developed overnight.

You can do this for several days running if you have the time and the problem is not too pressing.

Step Three

Examine all the ideas you have written out and decide which ones you are going to put into effect.

Every day Sarah sends me nifty things to read and see on my magic computer screen. Today’s stash included a post at Popgadget describing a plan to sell classic novellas in retro cigarette packs via cigarette vending machines after a U.K smoking ban in enclosed public places goes into effect. At least I think they’re going to (try to?) sell these in actual vending machines. Whatever the case, they’re called Tankbooks, and are being produced by Tank, a think tank, creative agency and publishing outfit. Dunno if this is a P.R. stunt, an art project, an honest effort to sell books in an interesting manner, or all of the above. Nifty-looking packages, whatever the case.

 

 

Web Worker Daily posts a mini-profile of Dayna Bateman, an information architect for Fry Inc. Various education qualifications are listed, and hands-on experience (though education can help out there too). I don't find it a surprise that many shopping and interactive sites get it wrong and need help. Those are big projects and it requires a champion (maybe several) inside the company to push for what may be an expensive overhaul of an existing site. Also, if generals are fighting the last war, then retailers are chasing last year's trends.

What interested me:

• Bateman is working on a master's of science degree in HCI from DePaul ("to formalize what I had learned in the trade"). For someone who's already got deep experience and a reputation in internet retailing, I thought it interesting that she feels the need for a degree. It would be interesting to know whether she wants the degree to provide an academic balance to her resume's real-world experience (she's probably solved problems that haven't occurred to most academics), whether her company encouraged it, or whether she felt she needed a mental change of pace. I'm going at my degree from the opposite direction: I'm hoping to gain some formal knowledge that can help me get experience.
• Very impressed by her commitment to self-education: keeping up with conferences, surfing and shopping to stay on top of new trends and patterns. She soaks herself in her subject.
• She predicts that "transactions will become increasingly simplified" as mobile phone use becomes more prevalent. Using a cell phone frees people from being tethered to their PC in order to shop and buy. (And it is all about shop and buy, isn't it?) I'll keep an eye on whether my coursework in the coming years even touches on mobile technology at all.

I'm all for simplification--spare me from having to create an account at every store I want to buy from. However, as someone who uses a Tracfone and practices one-way cell calls (I can call you, but you can't call me because I leave my phone turned off), I feel like a curmudgeonly grandpa snapping at new-fangled progress.

Have you ever had the experience of reading a book, listening to a presentation or watching a TV programme and discovering at the end that you could hardly remember any of the points made? If someone had asked you to summarise what had been said, you wouldn’t have known where to start.

Well, if that has happened to you it’s nothing to be surprised about … it’s a common enough experience. It’s due to the fact that our brains are excellent filters of incoming information and only let through what is of interest to us. It has to be that way or we would be overwhelmed with information. But it causes a problem when the filter isn’t set quite right and filters out material that we really do need.

So say for example that we have a textbook to read for an exam. How do we set our filter so that the information goes in, rather than getting ejected because our brain thinks it’s dull or uninteresting?

The answer is to ask ourselves questions about it. Before starting to read the textbook, spend a moment or two completing the sentence “Questions I could ask myself about this material include…. ”

Then take the 4 or 5 best questions you have come up with and jot down some answers to them off the top of your head. Don’t worry about whether the answers make sense or not… the important thing is to get your brain engaging with the subject. Only then start reading the text.

Once you have finished reading, you can go through the same procedure quickly again. That will help to fix the material in your mind.

In this way you can engage with the material both before and after you read it. If it’s a really complicated document, like the textbook in my example, you could repeat this procedure before each chapter or section.

There are many other ways that you can use this method…. before a client interview, before taking a test drive on a new car, before visiting a famous tourist site and so on ….. use your imagination!

Fabio

Econlog asks: why are American comics dominated by the super hero genre? Is it simply path dependence from an era when super heroes were popular? I don’t have the definitive answer, but here is some data:

1. Comic books in other countries focus on humor (Condorito/Latin America or Asterix in Europe) or historical drama (e.g., the Lone Wolf and Cub series in Japan).

2. Before the 1950s, there actually was much wider variety. It was not uncommon for kids to read comics about the wild west, war, romance, or crime. Some people claim that the McCarthy era Comics Code Authority encouraged “safe” genres like super heros, rather than political or socially charged genres like war comics or romances.

3. Throughout the post-war era, humor magazines - such as Mad - have been hugely popular and they are essentially comic books. Also, newspapers comics, such as the Far Side are routinely anthologized as larger comic books. These are rarely super hero books and they are even best sellers.

4. Since about 1990, there is a fairly serious genre of high art comics in America, such as Maus or Cerebus. Small market segment, but easily accesible to most people in cities or college towns. Some, like The Watchmen, are super hero, but most aren’t. [You ask, what is my favorite? Alex Robinson’s romantic comedy, Box Office Poison.]

What I gather from this evidence is that super hero dominance is partly a function of definition. If you expanded beyond “picture books sold at the supermarket,” you see that super hero books aren’t quite as dominant, even among youngsters. As you look over the years, you suspect that there’s a natural match between super hero stories, boys, and the visual medium of comic books, but you also realize that many other genres, especially humor and romance, have done very well. It’s also no secret in the comic industry that super hero books, while still the bulk of what’s bought by young American boys, are a declining genre. I’ll chalk this one up to historical contingency, not path dependency.

Bonus Round: Check out PhD comics - the only comic strip just for grad students!!

Windows only: Free utility PDFill can create, update and merge existing PDF files for free. Yesterday we posted Combine PDFs for Mac, and PDFill does the equivalent job on Windows, plus more. PDFill can also split or reorder PDF pages, encrypt/decrypt PDF’s, rotate and crop, add image or text watermarks, and convert images to PDFs and back. The downside is PDFill requires the Java runtime to work - but you still can’t beat the price for pretty advanced PDF manipulation. PDFill is a free download for Windows.

PDFill PDF Editor [via Rule the Web]

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“I started to think that NC-17 movies perhaps shared a common visual string in their marketing materials — dark and provocative… I started with R and pulled up the top five movies’ posters. Less provocative but very dark. I moved on to PG-13’s five. Not provocative at all but dark nonetheless. PG’s five? Much friendlier but, yes, dark. It wasn’t until I got to the five Gs that I started seeing some bright colors in the movie posters.” (Thanks HOW Blog!)

Making the baby girl happy.


Best Use Of My Art Ever

Superman #7
Superman #7

As a reader pointed out recently, the latest issue of Mad contains a three-page article that Sarah and I provided the artwork for. This includes the two-page spread of doom which I’ve mentioned here several times before, and which put my hand in a wrist brace for a period of time after I finished working on it. The biggest problem with the job was not so much my decision to really amp things up (I was asked to take out some business and figures, this was actually a little denser in the pencils/roughs), but with  my choice to draw it on a fairly small scale, certain circumstances led me to draw the spread on a piece of 12" by 19" board. Not as large as I would have liked considering the detail work. So there was a lot of time put in with the Hunt 102 nibs and the .30 rapidograph.

Below is what most of the left-hand side of the spread looks like, without Sarah’s colors or effects on the various monitor screens.





Not the keenest draftsmanship around, but I’m happy with the way things came out. It printed a little dark, color-wise, but Sarah and I got what we were going for; a two-page spread that fries the eyeballs, but keeps them on the page so the reader can find all the Will Elder-style chicken fat background gags. More bang for the buck, as it were.

Anyway, the latest issue is #480 (!), and it shipped to comic shops last week, and, I believe, should now be available on newsstands. Please feel free to check out the issue. The Usual Gang of Idiots this time around includes Tom Richmond, Peter Kuper, Paul Coker, Bob Staake, Herman Mejia, Al Jaffee and the inimitable Sergio Aragones. And us. Crazy! Er, I mean, Sick! Cracked? Forget it. Lame joke.
Mad #480: Meet The G(ig) That Killed Me

Mark Frauenfelder:

The wonderful Mitch O’Connell has designed a set of stitching patterns for Jenny Hart’s Sublime Stitching. They look great! Link (Via Craft)

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Interview with artist Mitch O’Connell

Mark Frauenfelder:

Someone created the obligatory animated GIF based on the photo of Homer Simson and the aroused Pagan deity I posted yesterday. Link (Thanks,
minifig!)