-Here's Guy Kawasaki falling prey to a textbook case of the selection bias and using a non-representative sample.

-Here's one of the writers at Wikinomics bragging about Starbucks' successful social media strategy a few days after they reported earnings were down by 97% PERCENT and its shares lost two thirds of their value almost instantly.

-Here's Hugh MacLeod (who this aside is wonderful) self-referencing the "blue monster" for the 400th time, apparently unaware that Microsoft isn't just culturally irrelevant but actively not "changing the world."

-Here's Steve Rubel misunderstanding incentives that some crappy new Mahalo program creates. (Hint: Rewards for searching translate into more worthless searches by people trying to get prizes)

-Here's Michael Arrington (who is the worst) not noticing an incredibly obvious flaw in a textbook rental startup, letting an outlier skew the results by adding TMZ's revenue to an acquisition it wasn't a part of, and finally, projecting a yearly revenue estimate based off 3 weeks of data from an unofficial source in the middle of a financial crisis less than a month after the product launched.

To be fair, it's not really blogs fault so much as it's a product of low-level thinking. Scientists and psychologists do their research in these fields for a reason - to help us think clearer and more accurately. Breathlessly chasing the first lead you find without constantly checking it against the world around you is a dangerous way and unproductive way to think.

If we can deduce anything from the blogs above, it also makes you 1) Sound like an idiot 2) Act like an asshole 3) Always get it wrong

It's not pleasant to root out rationalization and subjectivity. You rob yourself of the right to indignation, an intoxicating position. Every time I dig around, I watch as the boxes I've trapped people in just disappear along with my superiority. The reality is that the smear of low level mediocrity never shines brighter than on a person unknowingly reacting to something inside them. In fact, the truly impressive part of Gladwell's New Yorker piece on artists is not his thesis but the fact that it has nothing to do with him. He transcends his own place in the discussion.

So the bold move when you encounter hypocrites may be ignoring the desire to dismiss them. The real question: would you really want to listen to someone whose moral philosophy was just as easily done as it was said?

Those are just the ones I can remember. For most, I used two or three different books. I do know that I have to buy more bookshelves because I've resorted to piling them on the floor and in the trunk of my car. If anyone can think of people like these, iconic figures that might have a side to them that has gone unnoticed, it'd be amazing if you could email me your ideas.

-Or here's some advice on making money from writing by someone who isn't actually a writer or happen to know anyone who is one.

-This is a chubby weirdo who thinks you have to confront your boss to get vacation.

-Lastly, we have a 'brand manager' who can casually reference the 2 truths, 1 lie icebreaker along with some logical fallacies, unnecessary acronyms and plenty of Arbitrary Capitalization of ordinary Phrases For Emphasis.

If you're a piddly fucking loser who spends their time reading employee handbooks and going to mixers then that's a way to think about life. If at any time during your day or education the concepts of Good Boss, Bad Boss, social media, Gen Y, Gen X, Seven Highly Effective Habits, 'Bulletproofing', Blogging, liveblogging are in anyway significant, you've saddled yourself with the wrong set of priorities. God forbid, if you actually use those words in seriousness, I don't it's possible to truly quantify how far you've removed yourself from the sphere in which people get things done.

The funny thing is that the people who spend time obsessing over these workplace laws are always the absolute worst at following the rules that matter: meeting deadlines, delivering expectations, communicating what they want, being informed, common courtesy. You know, the stuff that makes society work.

So here's what you do when you read things like that: keep your head down and keep thinking. The problems that they pretend to have figured out are far more complex than the 23 year old working at a non-profit in Minnesota will ever be able to articulate via bulletpoints. In almost all cases, the people who put together tip sheets and career advice give it away for one reason - they couldn't manage to make use of it themselves. Let them have the low-hanging fruit they pass off as profound observation and dedicate yourself to chipping away at the actual reality in front of you. You know, turning words into works.

The final irony: the world is indeed a profoundly different place than it was a generation ago, the Brazen Careerist writers though, they are the same small-minded, pontificating idiots that've plagued every recorded age. You don't have to let your ego pull you down that hole. You can pass up attention, the temptation to boil big things down to headlines and giving yourself comically pompous titles and experiences you've yet to earn. It just takes discipline and some goddamn perspective.

Note: I keep reading that Penelope Trunk and Brazen Careerist need venture funding, so if you have a few dollars laying around, maybe they'll make give you an honorary chair in the field of Coachology.

This is the newest addition to my apartment. I put it in the window so the neighbors would see.

In other words, what do I gain by refusing to remove them? Nothing. In fact, it's in my readers' best interest to make it accurate or remove it. Threatening me with Darth Vader-speak like "compel compliance with [our] demand" just pisses people off, and I could have still been a strong proponent of theirs. Too bad -
How Not to Use a Lawyer, by Tim Ferriss

Tim is really a genius at boiling complicated things down to their core and then leveraging that knowledge to do something he wants. What he's saying here about incentives though, I think, is really important. I've been very lucky in that for a long time people have let me shadow them without having the responsibility of having doing what they do.

They'd go Ryan, why is ____ doing that? What makes him act like _____ in meetings? What do you think about _____? And then usually I'd answer incorrectly and they'd explain it from some point of view that I hadn't thought of. Very slowly, I realized they were giving me an eye for incentives. Tim's example is exactly the reason why that's so important.

Cesar Millan does this very well with dogs. First, he wants you to realize that there is no such thing as a dog having a barking problem - dogs bark, you just don't want them to. So then you figure out why the dog is doing it and then decide what you'd rather them do instead and what you have to motivate them to do that. What he does, basically, is take the energy that's causing the first problem and turn it into the means for accomplishing an alternative.

Recently, I've been working on solving a Google Image Search problem - a search for the company/person negatively affects the company's image which in turn trickles down into all aspects of the business profile. Because of problems in the past, the results show bad, outdated photos or worse, ones that are inaccurate. How do you change that?

First, you figure out what's causing the problem. Why are people linking and using bad photos and why does Google favor them? Then, you decide which ones you'd rather show up. Shooting new photos and replacements and a new protocol. Lastly, you create a convincing reason for that new direction. How do you make it easier than using the old photos? And in this case you also have to decide how to get people to change out the old ones, so you start the cycle over again. Why did they choose the photo they did? How can it disappear? How can I make that want to do that?

Yesterday for the first time, a news reporter wrote a negative hack piece about the company, not even knowing that they were using the exact new photo I'd baited them into to taking. Energy, used against itself.

Not understanding incentives is to be worse than Sisyphus. It is a constant steam of failure, of turning blue in the in the face, of extra, unnecessary work. Then you die. When you're trying to accomplish something that is dependent on other people's actions, the only solution is to examine their incentives. Step back and examine what makes them act the way they do. Figure out their self-interest and many times, you won't even need to do anything but explain how what you want is exactly that.

So think about incentives. Always. Your own. Theirs. Ours.

At first, I would get so sucked in that I'd just take for granted that they already happened and be right there alongside him in that hypothetical world. Then, I started to notice it more and got angry, like it was dishonest or maybe delusional. Now, I've realized that it's almost identical to something that I do which is to get a taste of an experience, extrapolate it to its end and then move on to the next lesson. I think that's why I've been able to cram so much inside the last two years. I'm not so upset or judgmental about it anymore because, well now I think I get why I reacted that way.

This is the main tenet of stoicism, ultimately. That if you're going to spend any time thinking about people's actions, maybe you should start with your own.

You know when you read biographies of people long since dead and someone says something like "it's interesting how kind he was to his employees but was so cruel to his relatives" and you think, man I wonder if they ever questioned themselves about that. Or you read memoirs and the person sort of casually mentions how it took them twenty years to realize they were a workaholic or half a decade to figure out that they hated their life and the other half digging themselves out of that impossible hole.

I think a good, but unending job is to endeavor so that no one ever questions something about your life that you haven't already fully turned over in your head from every possible angle. That you should never realize something about yourself in some momentous epiphany because you've institutionalized incremental reflection. The role of a biography is not to work out the problems that you've been living every single day because in fact, that's what every single day is for.

The exercise then is to consider what a stranger would think if the facts were all laid out on the table. What would they question? What have you missed? Finally, what can you do now that would cut off their assumptions--to answer their doubts with actions and avoid the surprise of a cliché?

Hurricane: The Miraculous Journey of Rubin Carter by James Hirsch
Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson (reread)
The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry by Harold Bloom (looks at why poets write the way they do, has a premise that with the exception of Shakespeare, no poet has ever completely surpassed their predecessor)
Black Boy by Richard Wright
Socrates by A.E Taylor (short, very good. was Socrates the wisest because he knew that he knew nothing?)
American Courage by Herbert Warden (inaccurate, basic. might be worth it from the bargain section)
Mark Twain: A Life by Ron Powers (stopped halfway, decent)
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn (good, no reason it had to be so dense though)
The Big Sea: An Autobiography by Langston Hughes (spectacularly simple and well written)
My Life and Battles: By Jack Johnson (the boxer. great book)
American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett by Buddy Levy
Joe Louis, Man and Super-Fighter by Edward Van Every (Louis's strategy in the ring is fantastic)
Commodore: The Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by Edward J. Renehan ('always be an owner, never be a minion' too bad he was also crazy from syphilis)
The Camera My Mother Gave Me by Susanna Kaysen
Joe Louis as a Key Functionary: White Reactions Toward a Black Champion Evans, Art Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Sep., 1985) (great example of an academic completely missing the point)

But now it's transitioned to something different. I often do the same courses as before but they're relaxing, steady and peaceful. A rhythm. I can still do 3 miles in 21 minutes (8, 7, 6mm) but it's not some perversely enjoyed punishment any longer. When I don't bring an ipod, I'll return to realize that I spent 40 minutes without a thought. If I do it in the morning, around midnight, I'll feel like going again. Or I'll head down and jump rope until I get back into the flow.

The thing, I think, about running like that, or doing anything manically for that matter is that it's a mask for a search for purpose. As you start to get closer to finding a reason, things slow down. I didn't find what I was looking for hacking and beating away at the air. It was when I dialed that things started to shift. Instead of trying to get 'back to where it used to be' - an allure that is so tempting because it feels right - the idea is to move on to the next thing. To find where you're flailing wildly elsewhere and approach it with maturity and dispassion.

The biggest property owner in Los Angeles looks for tenets for six story buildings with For Lease signs. Just like I'd sublet my apartment. A company with 5,000 employees still has uses Craigslist to find employees. If you're going to do a $40,000 ad spend online, you email the site and ask how much it's going to cost. This one is a stretch but the notion of greenlighting movies with A-listers, I think, is less about some misguided economic theory and fundamentally about the comfort of having heard of the person you're trusting millions of dollars to.

The things that seem so foreign at the highest levels are subject to the biases and tendencies and limitations that everyone deals with on a daily basis.* I think it's really easy to get impressed by a 40 foot banner advertising a building for rent, so much so that you forget it has exactly the same purpose as a taped flyer. Or you think, 'man, if only I had their resources' when they're constrained by virtually all of the human restrictions that you are. The difference is mostly about one group needing other people to believe that they've got it all figured out. Reality though is that it's scary how limited the capabilities of most things are.

There's not some larger, earth shattering point here. In fact, all I'm saying is that you don't need to wait to learn these things when you get the big leagues because you can intuitively understand them right now. They're simple and basic. They are right there in front of you. But are you cynical enough to notice?

*A great illustration and nice way to feel better about yourself is to look at the photos from events like a expensive charity ball or a political fundraiser. The people you've heard lionized as tyrants or 'shrewd, cunning strategists' look like your fatter versions of your parents. Personally, the photos in Variety of Hollywood executives are my favorite.

There's something very special about this quote. If there was way to train yourself to think a unique or strategic manner this would be it. Because where do you think books and ideas and new concepts come from? Do you think they fly in like epiphanies or are they more like little snags that get caught, kneaded, dressed up and engorged?

Automation is a tempting way to think about things. You pare the important from the unimportant, locate each dependent step and distill it into a system. Whether you ultimately hand it over to a computer or not, it takes a certain kind of ingenuity cut waste and create order.

But I would argue that that is weak and ultimately very replaceable (hello outsourcing). I think you look at it from the right angle, it's simple exploitation. A process of squeezing something dry. Important but not transcendent. What's special is the ability to scrap the process in favor of something different entirely. Solutions not improvements.

I guess what I mean to say is that you can sit around Turning Testing yourself until you've got half your company tricked chatting with your computer. Or, you can really think about what it is that you have in front of you and how you can make it go away by folding it on itself.

Here are some things that have helped me do that, maybe they'll work for you:

Cesar's Way by Cesar Millan (seriously)
Blue Ocean Strategy by Chan Kim (incremental vs exponential)
Take that, 6 Percenters (Jeff Jarvis)
Without Walls: Interview with Leebeus Woods (Bldblog)
Be Bold (Wikipedia)
"Strong Opinions, Weakly Held" (Turning Pro)
"Dismounting a Dead Horse" (Mountain Runner)
The Anxiety of Influence (Wikipedia, Book)

I realized I didn't want to be so angry. I have trouble with empathy and I use being busy as a crutch. I've tried to understand that some of the things I'm dealing with are just over my head. I'm closer to being able to admit that I just may be the source of some of the things I don't like about myself and that happens to disqualify me from being able to handle them alone. So since June, I've had an appointment every two weeks to deal with it.

It allows you to think and talk about things until the words become works. You can make notes doing the week and say "I really don't want to do that anymore." My health insurance covered it at first but I've been paying for it myself now and it's the best thing I could possibly spend my money on.

I'm not saying that this the only path you can take or that it's even the right one for me. But I am saying that there isn't a single part of your life that isn't work - a part of you that in order to improve doesn't take honesty, investment and effort. Only the lazy and the broken believe otherwise. And it's not enough to understand that intellectually. Carrying around baggage isn't proof of strength. There's nothing admirable about being able to articulate where your weaknesses lie if you refuse to actively address them. For me, that meant identifying where my control ended and habit began and taking the steps necessary to wedge in a mediator. It meant doing something about it.