kip/bot/blog

I’m starting to look for a piano teacher (my previous teacher has, alas, moved to the west coast. A moment’s homage to her: she was awesome, played my piano beautifully when she walked me through Mozart sonatas and had a fun mix of stern teacher (reflexively pushing my elbows up and straightening my back) and music lover (listening to any vague musical connection I made between a theory assignment and something I was listening to.

So, a teacher I’m looking at has all sorts of things to love, chief among them his professional/academic work around Mahler. But he has a section on his site called Why study music? which highlights some of the benefits of taking a craft seriously and going deep into something. His key reasons, paraphrased below:

Dealing with pressure — the site refers to children learning to deal with pressure, but there’s something impressive for adults to, on a weekly basis, confront a piece of music that doesn’t come easily to them. Knowing that a lesson is coming up is just enough pressure to force you to take a longer view, break the piece down and work on it. It’s also long enough to be rewarding when, by the end of the week, you being to master it.

Responding to Criticism — I’m surprised how many design focused places don’t ‘workshop’ things and how many times we hold back from really working over a piece of work. One of the key, but most frequently overlooked, tenets of design thinking should be/is iteration and revision. While anyone’s first rev should be excellent, it should be understood that further revs will only improve the final product. Even if you come back to the original design, you’ll have a stronger, more confident understanding of it.

Persistence — in my world of marketing and interactive, there’s a borderline obsessive interest in the next thing, newness, novelty and never seen before. Sitting with someone for a while, working on something for longer than a quarter, doing a truly better v2.0 that is continuous with the previous version is not only hard to do, but often scorned. That said, however, there are a lot of creative types in the field who know when to dig in and fight the good fight or keep on pushing to validate an idea.

Multi-leveled focus - inset Steve Jobs quote about zooming in and zooming out and the design trope of ‘rinse and repeat’.

Project management - taking a long view of mastering a craft or something within the craft requires some PM like thinking. For a piano piece, my instructors regularly tell me how to break it down: “start with the left hand until it feels smooth and you find some melody in it, then focus on the melody right hand only, and work on the middle section until it feels clean, then you can add the intro, do dynamics last.”

The bolded names of the benefit are his, the interpretation mine. His page about why we should study music is pretty nice read, highlighting brain age as well as craft/life lesson benefits . . . and, oh yeah, the joy of playing music you love!

Perhaps is because I’m getting old. Perhaps it’s because, having gone through 2.5 career changes and paid my dues/been schooled 2.5 times. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I found this Zen Habits article about
how to become amazingly great at something refreshing. I’ve been to so many places where people are going to “get digital” in 3 months, or pick up a new competency through a couple hires, or “spend a weekend” with something to plumb its depth and master its rhythms. I loved the setup to this article:

Very often you’ll see blog posts or books teaching you to “master” a skill in only 10 days, or 3 days … in fact, it used to be 30 days but the time frame to master something seems to be shrinking rapidly.

I’ve even seen tutorials claiming to teach a skill in just a few hours. Pretty soon we’ll be demanding to know how to do something in seconds.

Instant mastery of skills and knowledge! Hey presto!

Unfortunately, the reality is something a little less magical. Or maybe that’s a fortunate thing.

Briefing a team on interactive is a balance between reductive over-simplification and excessive detailing of requirements. Everyone knows this. It was part of what made planning an art, it’s why agencies struggle with things like channel-neutral briefs. One of the best examples of a project brief comes from the 1993 documentary The War Room. I’ve used it 100 times. Sometimes, it supports the need to go beyond the three word brief (which is important for complex, rich interactive experiences). Sometimes, it supports the idea that anything, no matter how complex, can be simplified.

Back to The War Room. The documentary is about the 1992 Clinton Presidential Campaign. The filmmakers joined up early in the campaign when Clinton was more than a longshot, so they kind of lucked out in that they wound up being on the winning and unconvential team. The War Room of the title is the campaign office in Little Rock where soon-to-be-legends George Stephanopoulus and James Carville were calling key strategic thoughts in the campaign. At the end of the film, Clinton can be heard giving his victory speech on the steps of the Governor’s Mansion. The camera crew is inside the now-empty War Room and lands on a whiteboard (!) at the front of the office:

This was the mantra, or the brief, of the campaign: Change vs more of the same, Health Care for Everyone, It’s the economy, stupid. (It had several versions and I went with the one that was more memorable for me. Interesting to note is that the press simplified this even further to include only “It’s the economy, stupid.”)

The mantra defined what was going to win for them, their true north, the campaign’s compass, the priorities, the decision-making criteria in strategy. Of course, the campaign was going to take on other issues, but these were the themes to which they would return again and again, this was the source of their voice, their media presence, and their style. God help me for the marketer-speak, but these were the things which, if they owned, would put them over the top.

A great use of this mantra is for any team that complains that they can’t possibly formulate a strategy or brief that’s less than 2 pages. Surely, if a presidential campaign can be distilled to this, something as simple as a website, or a game, or an MP3 player can be tamed as well? The alternate use is to combat the notion that anything beyond three words is superfluous, confusing, too hard to work with.

A year ago, I tweeted the following about the election:

Nov 4 AM: “Smiling like an idiot at every polling place I pass.”
Nov 4 Noon: “Scratch that. I’m smiling like an idiot at everything.”
Nov 5 AM: “my face hurts . . . I think I kept smiling in my sleep”

Rmembering, I’m smiling again. (The World Series doesn’t hurt, either.)

Following the reading of The Power of Full Engagement, I picked up How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci which was frequently cited in the first. It’s a little embarassing to read (one of the times when having a Kindle obscure your reading material comes in handy), but whatever, it has some use.

I’ve noticed that, in addition to mentally processing things I might use for work, or quote for other purposes, I semi-consciously evaluate text or look for things that are tweetable. It bothers me, but I do it. So when I was reading the end of the biography material in the da Vinci book, I had a weird thought about da Vinci’s line on mortality: “As a day well spent brings blessed sleep, so a life well lived brings a blessed death.”

Not even a hundred characters! It seems like social media will eventually become a place for that kind of musing.

Just saying, is all.