Five Lessons Learned Blogging

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What I’ve occasionally written in the past still holds—even though my readership continues to grow, it is relatively small. That’s not easy to pull off, the secret is to start with a really small readership. There are millions of bloggers in better position than me to teach others how to build a readership. Instead of a roadmap to the blog big-time, these are the modest reflections of a small-time blogger after five years and 712 posts.

1. Visuals matter. Clutter hurts, interesting high resolution pictures help. I don’t apply this insight. When it comes to “visuals”, I’d assign PressingPause a “D”. A “C” for the “WordPress in a box” template and an “F” for pictures. For pete’s sake, I’m using a default WordPress picture of a pinecone in my header. Every “D” student excels in excuses. Mine? I gave someone in my family my camera and I’ve been real slow to replace it. I’ll try to do better.

2. Good content matters even more. Ask big-time bloggers the key to their success and they’ll almost always say good content. Which means lesson one isn’t a panacea. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your layout is if your content sucks. And vice-versa, some bloggers, like John Gruber, provide such great content that excellent visuals are unnecessary. Same with Bill McBride. Minimalist templates, few if any pictures, and millions of visitors monthly.

3. Sex sells. I learned this when I included a picture of two bikini-clad snowboarders in a post that became my all-time most read. I’ve since deleted the post because it was skewing my statistics. Although the Huffington Post isn’t a blog, it’s an online newspaper that mostly rebundles hard news from traditional papers, it knows this lesson especially well. A large part of its success can be found halfway down the righthand column. It unapologetically applies the “sex sells” lesson. Here are some of the righthand column headlines from Wednesday, February 13, 2012.

  • What I have Risked for the Best Sex of My Life.
  • Listen: Graphic Jodi Arias Sex Tape Played to Jury.
  • ‘Naughty’ Librarian.
  • Beckham’s Bum.
  • Beyonce Tries the ‘Boob Window Thing.
  • Eva’s Biggest Turn On.

This stuff works! Right now I’m wondering if Eva’s biggest turn on is Beckham’s bum or Beyonce’s boob window. The use of ‘boob window’ is a significant turning point in HuffPost’s short history. To this point they’ve used “side boob” almost exclusively. “Under boob” headlines are also starting to appear. “Over boob” can’t be too far behind.

4. Passion matters. In writing as in sports, the arts, teaching, damn near everything. I was reminded of this watching Mumford and Sons on the Grammy’s. Give this example from a Colorado “Red Rocks” concert a listen. Total effort. Mesmerizing.

People appear more interested in what I have to say when I’m fired up. Angry even. But the anger can’t be finessed, it has to be authentic. And remember my recent post about being tired? These days it takes a lot more to get me to throw a punch. I would like to write angry more often, but it can’t be forced. I can’t get angry twice a week, or even weekly. So that’s a challenge.

Related to this, my most widely read, most opinionated pieces are the result of my subconscience working overtime. An acquaintance of mine, a very successful writer, once shared a memorable writing insight with me. He said if your writing project isn’t the first thing you think about when you wake up it’s not working hard enough. Ironically, my most widely read posts are ones that I pound out more quickly than average. Because I’ve been writing them for days, weeks, or months in my head.

5. Vulnerability matters. Maybe not if you’re writing exclusively about technology (Gruber), or real estate (McBride) or Economics (Cowen). Two positive examples of this are Penelope Trunk (extreme at times) and Mr. Money Mustache. This is another insight I haven’t figured out how to apply. The reason being, I don’t know how to be more vulnerable without compromising my family’s and friends’ privacy. That takes precedence. Maybe someday I’ll spill my guts in a semi-autobiographical novel.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

p.s. Be sure to return early next week for a post featuring vulnerability, sex (well, at least allusions to it), and pictures, oh my.

The Link Between Walking or Biking to School and Concentration

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My seventeen year-old supper nanny of a daughter babysits for a Mormon family up the street. They have six children, the oldest in fifth grade. When she got home from their house Saturday night, she excitedly announced that number seven is on the way. The coolest thing about this constantly expanding brood is that they walk, or scoot, or cycle to school during the week and walk to church on Sundays. Whatever the Pacific Northwest weather. They’re quite a spectacle, all dressed up, scattered up and down the sidewalk. School is two miles round-trip, church almost four. Early elementary children walking four miles to and from church, someone call Social Services.

Probably without knowing it, our Mormon neighbors are onto something. Sarah Goodyear recently reported on the results of a 2012 Danish study that found that kids who cycled or walked to school, rather than traveling by car or public transportation, performed measurably better on tasks demanding concentration, such as solving puzzles, and that the effects lasted for up to four hours after they got to school.

The study was part of a Danish project that looked at the links between concentration, diet, and exercise. Researchers were surprised that the effect of exercise was greater than that of diet. According to one:

“The results showed that having breakfast and lunch has an impact, but not very much compared to having exercised. As a third-grade pupil, if you exercise and bike to school, your ability to concentrate increases to the equivalent of someone half a year further in their studies.”

Goodyear writes the process of getting yourself from point A to point B has cognitive effects that researchers do not yet fully understand.

Another research conclusion jives with my experience:

“We learn through our head and by moving. Something happens within the body when we move, and this allows us to be better equipped afterwards to work on the cognitive side.”

Here’s the problem though. Goodyear:

“Nationally, as of 2009, only 13 percent of kids in the United States walked or biked to school, down from 50 percent in 1969.”

Her related questions:

“But if more parents realized that packing the kids into the back seat actually affects their ability to learn, would they change their ways? Advocate for building schools in more walkable locations? Demand improved bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure? Or simply make the time and effort required to get to the kids to school under their own steam, accompanying them if need be?”

And the excellent concluding paragraph:

“Many parents pay for test prep and after-school enrichment programs to make their kids more academically competitive, and go to great lengths to schedule time for those activities. Imagine if they invested those resources instead in something as simple as helping their children to travel safely from home to school on foot or by bike, arriving ready to learn.”

Public policy questions always involve challenging trade-offs. This particular one seems like a rare exception. School transportation costs make it difficult for districts to commit adequate resources to teachers’ professional development, students with special needs, better curriculum materials, and building improvements. If schools districts started requiring students that live within a mile or two of their school to walk or cycle, the savings could be used for those other priorities, teachers would accomplish even more as a result of increased student concentration, students would be healthier (and their adult chaperones), roads would be less congested, and the environmental impact of school travel would be greatly reduced.

Win. Win. Win. Win. Win.

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If Only Schools Were More Like Businesses

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Every once in awhile, it’s important to inflict pain on yourself. Builds character. Run a marathon. Fast for a day. Do your taxes. Watch a Wayne LaPierre press conference. Or most painful of all, listen to politicians and business people talk about what we need to do to reform education in the United States.

Their message—breakdown the government monopoly on schools by infusing them with business principles. Most importantly, competition. Between teachers, schools, and districts. Highest standardized test scores win. Their unquestioned premise is that the business community has its shit together. The pro-business propaganda is so steady we start to believe it.

Yeah, if only schools were more like businesses.

Lots of schools would close every year. But I guess we could just tell the affected families that “creative destruction” is just a natural, even healthy part of the business cycle. They’ll understand. Yeah, if only schools were more like businesses.

And teachers would start relating to students the way my local bankers and insurance agents routinely do, from behind websites, and sometimes via the telephone. Last week I received birthday cards from my bank and my insurance agent. I recycled both cards without opening them. No one at my bank or insurance agency would know me if I walked into their offices. We have no personal relationship, only an economic one. The best teachers know their students individually, and something about their families, their interests, their hopes for the future. But maybe all that effort to connect with students is misguided. Maybe teachers should be more like my banker and insurance agent. Just design some websites where students can get assignments and submit their work and mail out computer generated birthday cards once a year. Yeah, if only schools were more like businesses.

And every school would ace every state assessment whatever the form. Because that’s the way my car dealership works. When I take my car in, I’m told they have to get perfect scores on the evaluation they mail to me afterwards. Heaven for bid if they get any “9’s”. It seems like gaming the system to me, but I guess it’s just an advanced form of assessment thinking, everyone getting perfect scores all the time. Yeah, if only schools were more like businesses.

Most importantly, the best thing about business people is they’re always accountable for their performance. Regular performance reviews ensure it. That’s what teachers need most of all, more business-like accountability! Or maybe not. Here’s Nassim Taleb blowing that fallacy apart:

Those who have the upside are not necessarily those who incur the downside. For example, bankers and corporate managers get bonuses for “performance,” but not reverse bonuses for negative performance, and they have an incentive to bury risks in the tails of the distribution – in other words, to delay blowups.

Read the history of Wall Street from 2007-2008 for sordid example after example. Five years later, in the U.S., there’s a sure-fire way for business people to avoid accountability. Climb the corporate ladder as high as possible. Yeah, if only schools were more like businesses.

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A Minimalist Life

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I’m easily distracted. In church on Sunday, I couldn’t help but think about minimalism. As one part of “Scout Sunday” the pastor asked past and present scouts to recite the scouts’ values. They did okay until about the ninth value. Twelve?! That’s about nine too many. And when I should have been concentrating on the sermon, I was thinking about this quote from a minimalist Londoner who just built a home.

People do comment on our tidiness, but I find it fascinating that they find it fascinating. If you have a thing of beauty, like a piece of architecture, and then you fill it up with things, then you somehow diminish it and you cannot really appreciate the space you live in. We have exposed the things we really love, like the photography and the books.

One group unnecessarily complicating things, one homeowner purposely and thoughtfully stripping things down to their bare minimum.

People associate minimalism with life simplifying projects, whether recycling old clothes, shredding unnecessary office papers, or decluttering a garage, but it can be a helpful organizing principle for all of one’s life.

Minimalism is about embracing limits that others mostly ignore. The starting point is the ultimate limit, one’s mortality. Minimalists are more mindful than most that their time is limited; as a result, they tend to be more interested in the quality of their life experiences than accumulating lots of money and possessions.

Minimalists believe stripping things down is liberating—whether electronic data, personal commitments, and friendships. Consider each.

Electronic minimalism. This one’s tough because digital clutter can be neatly contained within a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or desktop computer. If you’re like one of my offspring, your desktop may be proof of that. To practice electronic minimalism, create folders for loose documents, and use folders within folders. But first, delete as many unnecessary, out-of-date documents, bookmarks, and email messages as possible. I DIG that electronic wadding up and shredding of paper sound my MacBook Pro makes whenever I empty the trash. Like a Pavlov dog, I’m motivated to trash things just to hear the sound.

“Zero email inbox” is a futile, overly perfectionist goal, but if you typically have more than 20-40 messages in your inbox, delete more often and create and use more folders. Same with website bookmarks. Delete those you haven’t used in a long time and put the the remaining ones into folders. This makes it easier to avoid mindless web surfing. Same with applications. Some people have over a hundred apps. I find that odd because the fewer you use, the easier it is to quickly and easily access them. Maybe some mega app users would say they use folders and don’t have a problem, but most people probably use 10% of their apps 90% of the time. Why not just remove most of the 90%?

Electronic minimalism is based on the premise that fewer docs, email messages, website bookmarks, and applications makes it easier to find things, get one’s work done, and then enjoy life off-line.

Scheduling minimalism. As an introvert, and often to the GalPal’s regret, this one comes relatively easily for me. This is the countercultural practice of not committing to many activities—whether one’s own, or a partner’s, or one’s children’s. It’s saying to oneself, “I’d like to attend that event, participate in that weekly activity, or go on that trip, but I’m okay missing out on that fun because the busyness trade-off isn’t worth it.” Obviously, “too busy” is a subjective concept. The key is to know your particular physical and social limits and to intentionally err on the side of underscheduling.

Interpersonal minimalism. This is the related, countercultural practice of purposely focusing on a limited number of close friendships. I’ve written about the quality versus quantity of friendships conundrum before here. Young people’s embrace of social media has made this type of minimalism especially rare. Many high school and college aged young adults have a thousand plus Facebook “friends”. Interpersonal minimalism means focusing most of your friendship activity on people who you interact with face-to-face on a weekly basis.

Stripping down activities creates momentum which leads to additional ideas for simplifying not just one’s garage, but one’s life. In what other aspects of your life has less proven more?

[My favorite book on minimalism—Francine Jay’s The Joy of Less, A Minimalist Living Guide]

January 2013 Awards

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Tweet of the month. “Of course I’d be willing to let the Postal Service continue to dope if it would speed up mail delivery.” Nikolas Kristof

Sports stat of the month. Bench Points—Clips 41.7, Lakes 26.5. Bench Rebounds— Clips 20.4, Lakes 13.4. Bench Assists—Clips 8.7, Lakes 5.4. Bench Steals—Clips 3.8, Lakes, 2.0. Bench Blocks—Clips 3.6, Lakes 1.1.

Unanswered question of the month. Did Beyonce lip sync her National Anthem performance?

Sports loose-end of the month. The likelihood that the Sacramento Kings will move 619 miles north before the start of next season.

Bush league sports move of the month. Azarenka’s “injury” timeout against Sloane Stephens in their Australian Open semifinal match.

Worst losses of the month. Gold—Seahawks 28-Falcons 30. Silver—Butler 64-GonZAGa 63.

Gracious loser of the month. Sloane Stephens.

Best basketball quote of the month. “If you have to bounce the ball three times and flip it and twist your arm before a free-throw, it probably means you can’t shoot ’em. Wynton Marsalis’ youth basketball coach.

Anti-swoosh event of the month. The European Tour’s Abu Dhabi golf tournament where Swoosh Senior (Tiger Woods) and Swoosh Junior (Rory Mcllroy) missed the cut.

Multibillionaire quote of the month. “I like today what I liked fifty years ago. . . I was happy when I was in my twenties, and I don’t see a reason to change things.” Warren Buffet

Parenting essay of the month. Coming Home: Returning to parenting after 16 months on the campaign trail. John Dickerson, Slate Magazine.

Book release of the month. Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright

Television shows of the month. Gold, Portlandia Season 3. Silver, Downton Abbey Season 3. Bronze, 30 Rock.

Movie of the month. Tie. Silver Lining Playbook and Zero Dark Thirty.

Word of the month. Tradecraft.

EXPLICIT cold ass honkey music vid of the year month. Thriftshop by Maclemore & Ryan Lewis.

Insight of the month. Michael Apted, documentary filmmaker on 56 Up. “That was a very important lesson I learned throughout the decades on the film, that I can’t project my version of happiness or success or ambition onto other people.”

Unappreciated health danger of the month.

Tired

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I used to be more like Bill Gates, my sister, Jon Kitna, and my wife. I wanted to help people improve their lives. Volunteer time in my community. Change the world for the better.

Now, Stoic sensibilities make it unlikely you’ll see me in a street protest near you. When I read essays like Gates’ recent one titled “My Plan to Fix the World’s Biggest Problems,” I marvel at his ambition. Twenty years ago I could have written a decent essay with that same title, but not now.

Saving any subset of the world requires endless teaming with others. Which makes me wonder. Or makes me worry. Being an introvert, and having taught for three decades, am I bumping up against my optimal number of lifetime interpersonal interactions?

Just because my gray-bearded self is less activist than my younger self, it doesn’t necessarily mean I’m more selfish. I still care about teaching well. And I’ve enjoyed helping other teachers refine their craft this academic year. And I hope this blog occasionally entertains, informs, or enlightens. And I vote (in most elections), try to encourage my family and friends, help old ladies across the street, and never litter.

I don’t begrudge the World Changers anything, I just don’t feel as much camaraderie with them as in the past. This isn’t flattering to write at all, but compared to the past, I’m more accepting of many of my community’s, country’s, or world’s long-standing problems. More content to study and try to understand the root causes of problems. When I try to tap some sense of righteous indignation, all I get is Buddhist detachment. More honest and authentic. Less a role model.

No, I was not the male lead in Silver Lining Playbook, but I can understand your confusion.

No, I was not the male lead in Silver Lining Playbook, but I can understand your confusion.

Why I’m Not Selling Apple

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A friend, who has made it a point to resist Apple’s takeover of the personal tech world, emailed yesterday. The subject heading was “Time to Sell”. There was a link to an “Apple’s in decline” article and a follow up with an ominous excerpt. Full disclosure: this post doesn’t relate closely enough to the blog’s stated purpose, but I have to do something to stem the tide of anti-Apple email gloating.

Apple investors have to expect blowback when the stock slides. It just comes with the territory. Anti-Apples get more and more annoyed with every $100 rise in its share price. There’s probably just a touch of envy involved.

Late summer Apple hit $705, today it closed at $450. So the haters are slapping themselves on their backs in glee.

My email “friend” got his Masters in Business Administration at the University of Washington, not the Anderson School, so some remediation is in order.

Principle 1) Buy low and sell high. Apple’s on sale. Compared to the recent high, $255 off per share. In the next year or two, is it more likely to fall another $250 to $200 or rise $250 to $700? I’m betting on the later.

Principle 2) Never invest more than 5% of your total portfolio in a single stock. Apple’s sell-off hasn’t bothered me as much as UCLA’s inability to rebound the basketball because it’s 1/20th of the pie. Imagine having 20 children, one who goes off the rails. By the time you notice, she’d be halfway back to the straight and narrow (especially if she produced a less expensive iPhone for China).

Principle 3) When it comes to equities, be sure to take a medium or long-term perspective. If, for any reason, you might need to cash in your stock investments in a few months or years, avoid stocks, especially those of individual companies. I’m not selling because I don’t need to. I can wait on that 5% of my portfolio. Indefinitely really. That’s why I rolled a portion of my AAPL investment into a family charitable fund mid-summer. When it comes to our equity investments, VTI is the apple pie, VEU is the scoop of vanilla ice cream, and AAPL is the whip cream.

Principle 4) Have realistic expectations. In other words, don’t be ahistorical. Understand the “law of large numbers” and don’t get overly excited on run-ups. What did a lot of investors do in Las Vegas, California, and Florida when real estate prices exploded in the early 2000’s? They extrapolated. “Oh, I can easily earn 20% next year too.” After yesterday’s sell-off of $63, Apple is up 8.13% over twelve months. That’s only disappointing if you assumed it would return 30% annually. Maybe it’s turning into a single’s hitter. Which is fine for me because I’m a Mariners fan.

 

 

The Limits of Obama’s Liberalism

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Post Inaugural Address, Slate Magazine trumpeted, “A Liberal Love Letter”. The tease read, “Obama’s partisan speech was a pledge to gays, women, immigrants, and the working class.

So forget all that January 2009 naivete about bipartisanship. The plan is to put the activist government pedal to the metal for the next 16-18 months.

Except when it comes to teachers and education. Obama’s education policy is nearly indistinguishable from George W. Bush’s whose reform proposals were nearly indistinguishable from Bill Clinton’s, whose policies were nearly indistinguishable from George Bush Sr’s. Pre-Senior, the education policy pendulum swang about every ten years between traditional schooling practices and progressive reforms. About twenty years ago the pendulum got seriously stuck. Wedged in wet cement that then dried when Bill Clinton adopted Senior’s narrow, uninspiring, national education goals.

Granted, President Obama jammed a lot into his inaugural address and inaugural addresses are more about vision and guiding principles than specific policies. Given that, here’s what President Obama should do before (#1) and during (#s 2-5) his State of the Union Address on Tuesday, February 12th, to extend his “liberal love letter” to education.

1). Thank Secretary of Education Arne Duncan for his service and appoint someone with real life K-12 teaching experience. A woman with credibility. Someone less inclined to use international test scores to criticize teachers. Someone less likely to mindlessly preach the math/science “economic engine” gospel.

2) Repeat this weekly. “We must learn to think about students as future citizens first, not consumers or employees.” And also, “We’ve erred in thinking about schools like businesses and only emphasizing math and science education. For the sake of our democracy, we must pay much more attention to the arts, the humanities, and social studies education.”

3) Empower teacher leaders—not Governors or other politicians, business people, or education bureaucrats—to design rigorous teacher evaluation systems. Acknowledge that the curriculum grew frighteningly narrow over the last twenty years in part because education bureaucrats have insisted on tying together students’ standardized test scores, teachers’ evaluations, and teachers’ compensation.

4) Acknowledge that appeals to economic competitiveness and national greatness don’t inspire teacher or students. Stop asking teachers and students to work harder for the sake of the country. Remind everyone that academic achievement results when students have inspiring teachers; positive peer pressure; and most importantly, caring adults in their lives who combine high expectations with tireless support and encouragement.

And since I’m in “pie in the sky” territory. . .

5.) Start a “MaD” program or “Mothball a Drone” and use the Defense Department savings to A) fund scholarships for especially capable, culturally diverse, college students pursuing teaching certificates and B) to boost teacher compensation more generally.

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I hereby swear to continue the education policies of George W. Bush (whereever he might be).

Aaron Schwartz—What Made Me Different From the Other Kids

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Via Ronaldo Lemos in Brazil.

When I was a kid, I thought a lot about what made me different from the other kids. I don’t think I was smarter than them and I certainly wasn’t more talented. And I definitely can’t claim I was a harder worker — I’ve never worked particularly hard, I’ve always just tried doing things I find fun. Instead, what I concluded was that I was more curious — but not because I had been born that way. If you watch little kids, they are intensely curious, always exploring and trying to figure out how things work. The problem is that school drives all that curiosity out. Instead of letting you explore things for yourself, it tells you that you have to read these particular books and answer these particular questions. And if you try to do something else instead, you’ll get in trouble. Very few people’s curiosity can survive that. But, due to some accident, mine did. . . . Curiosity builds on itself — each new thing you learn about has all sorts of different parts and connections, which you then want to learn more about. Pretty soon you’re interested in more and more and more, until almost everything seems interesting. . . . I feel like the only thing I’ve really done is followed my curiosity wherever it led. This isn’t easy. . . but it’s always worked for me.

Richardson, Schmidt, and North Korean Naivete—Making Matters Worse

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It’s Bradley K. Martin’s fault. A decade ago, his outstanding history of contemporary North Korea, “Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty” sparked my deep-seated curiosity about life in North Korea.

Next I read Barbara Demick’s harrowing “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.” Then Adam Johnson’s brilliant “The Orphan Master’s Son: A Novel.” Last week, Blaine Harden’s riveting “Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West.” Next in the queue, “Escape from North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia’s Underground Railroad,” by Melanie Kirkpatrick.

If you’re more a viewer than a reader, watch “Inside North Korea” and “Camp 14: Total Control Zone.”

One can’t read those books and watch those films and not be alternately repulsed, saddened, horrified, angered, and ultimately, changed.

I believe most people are rational, well intentioned, and deserving of respect. From the time my daughters first started talking, I took time to explain to them my expectations, decisions, and actions. In turn, I tried to defuse conflicts by listening to them. I believe in non-violent social change. Like Gandhi, I believe that “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” I believe diplomacy always holds more promise for international conflict resolution than military action.

And so why did former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson’s and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt’s trip to North Korea anger me so much last week? Because my North Korea self-study has challenged much of what I believe to be true about global politics. I’m not sure anything I wrote in the previous paragraph applies to North Korea. The leadership is not rational and the regime isn’t just evil in the context of contemporary world politics, but in the course of human history. I have absolutely no faith that diplomacy will bring about any meaningful change. I’m not sure of the best course of action, but I know Richardson and “Rock Star” Schmidt are making matters worse by helping delude the outside world that North Korea is changing for the better.

It’s reprehensible for Richardson to say, “the naming of a new U.S. secretary of state could also help reset dialogue”. Yeah right, North Korea is the way it is because of Hilary Clinton. That’s an embarrassingly stupid statement for someone with Richardson’s credentials to make. And when a CNN television anchor interviewed Richardson, all she was concerned about was 44 year-old Kenneth Bae, an American being held in North Korea. No concern for the 23 million ordinary North Koreans whose lives are the most hellish on the planet.

Blaine Harden and Suzanne Scholte explain the problem this way.

“In a media culture that feeds on celebrity, no movie star, no pop idol, no Nobel Prize winner stepped forward to demand that outsiders invest emotionally in a distant issue that lacks good video. Tibetans have the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere, Burmese have Aung San Suu Kyi, Darfurians have Mia Farrow and George Clooney. North Koreans have no one like that.”

In part, that’s why I resolve to use this humble blog from time to time to inform others about North Korea, to agitate on behalf of impoverished and imprisoned North Koreans, and to criticize naive, misguided public figures.

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