Try it. And tell me how it goes.

The past couple days I’ve been struck by calls and emails from people asking me for advice on matters business and personal, asking me for my thoughts, advice and counsel.

I mean, who am I?

But seriously, it’s meant a lot to me.

Thus, Friday morning I asked:

Why? To try to fix a couple things. Like: what happens when the markets and metrics for attention, value and impact break down? And: how can we figure out the impact we have if the traditional markets fail us, if we don’t get feedback, if nobody tells us?

The simple goal: to tell people they matter, to help give them the verve and confidence necessary to push uphill, to help them fight through the dips, to help them keep moving forward.

The much-larger goal: to help make meaning “pay”.

Clicks, page views, followers, these are the metrics we see everyday, but they aren’t enough.

That’s why I like what Jen and Frank are doing with thankfulfor; that’s why I care about supporting people living lives “too meaningful to ignore” *; that’s why I proposed an idea a couple weeks ago:

Let’s take the idea one step forward. Pick out one person “living a life too cool to ignore”, and tell them. Reach out to one person that you follow online everyday but have never said hello to. And share with me the results, privately or publicly. I’m sincerely interested in what happens.

Try it. And tell me how it goes.

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* Yes, I’m switching from saying “too cool to ignore” to “too meaningful to ignore”. Just seems more powerful.

Illuminating, Rila Monastery, Bulgaria

Returning to my comment on A Freemium Life, a bit that has been running through my thoughts a lot lately…

1) The great potential in giving away our knowledge, value and time is to create connections and opportunities that we had not considered, or targeted, or comprehended. Connections and networks have always been and will always be the most valuable way of finding people to answer questions and solve problems (i.e. create value), but what is changing is how the connections and networks work.

We’re still learning the ropes we’ve created for ourselves; cultural changes lag technological changes.

The greatest opportunities (and future payoffs) are for those who recognize where our culture is going in regards to how we find, value and exchange value.

2) Value is determined by the receiver, not the sender; by the buyer, not the seller.

Leading to: value is created through execution, not ideas; by what someone does with the knowledge and ideas, not by the idea or the knowledge itself.

Resulting in: “premium” and “free” are determined by buyers, not sellers.

3) The real difficulty in my mind is how do we justify opaque knowledge? How does the opaqueness of knowledge transfer hinder the transfer from even occurring?

The Heisenberg Uncertainty principle at work.

There’s an inherent information asymmetry that is difficult to overcome. That’s why we have degrees, certifications, job titles, resumes; but they don’t eliminate the information asymmetry, they only help justify it.

Instead of justifying the opaqueness, I’m interested in finding ways to eliminate it.

Increasing the surface area of a conversation, tracking through thoughts about valuing, measuring and delivering knowledge.

Tom Martin, How much is knowledge worth?:

All of this to say, I’ve been thinking what is knowledge worth? Both in terms of acquisition of knowledge but maybe more importantly in the selling of knowledge, which is kind of what many of us do. And I guess along those lines, once you figure out how much your knowledge is worth, then how do you go about charging for that?

My first comment:

Newspapers, magazines, books, blogs: largely, that’s data and information, not knowledge or wisdom.

Someone else’s knowledge is merely information to us until we’ve spent the time to translate it to our situations, our uses, our lives.

Listening, adapting, refining, customizing our knowledge while we deliver it: that’s how we create real, valuable, actionable knowledge for others. Scaling that, of course, is the issue :)

Tom’s reply:

Agree and disagree. Knowledge and information are synonymous in my mind. Wisdom does, as you note require context, insight, etc., and is surely where the “Value” comes in… in fact, I’ve been working on trying to create a service that does just that..would love to hear your thoughts on it http://www.insightandinformation.com

My second comment:

According to the definitions of information and knowledge, you’re right; I tend to use the terms too loosely.

But the process, challenges, and inefficiencies involved in translating knowledge so that another person can integrate it into their own knowledge set: that’s the real issue :)

As for Insight & Information: the real challenge isn’t in finding the most important bits of information/knowledge, but customizing it to the individual level to reduce the transaction costs of integrating knowledge. That’s the hard part to deliver at scale.

But Beth Harte explained my point of view better in her comment:

… That said, learning only leads to knowledge when you can link everything you’ve learned together in a usable, useful or meaningful manner. Regurgitating what you’ve learned isn’t knowledge unless it’s intellectually questioned and applied. And that takes time that so many people aren’t willing to spend…

So if you are the person that takes the time and does the above…that knowledge has and will continue to become valuable to other people.

Service-oriented organizations know that knowledge is capital and some charge a premium for having access to that knowledge, right?

Tom reframes the discussion:

I really like where this discussion is heading.. the whole idea that knowledge, in and of itself has a base value, the the real modifier of value is when that knowledge leads to actionable insights. Which leads me to the second half of the question… will companies today actually pay for “knowledge”? Will they pay for smart people to simply think and guide them?

Lastly, my reply:

Companies pay for knowledge (including advice without execution) every single day; the issue is not that they don’t pay for knowledge, but are they buying too much or too little? Are they getting value for their money?

The difficulty comes in that knowledge is difficult to value: how can we determine how much to pay for knowledge without being able to really estimate the value of the impact? How can we isolate the true value of the knowledge from everything else that impacts the business?

Perhaps the conversation can be continued at SXSW with this panel idea, Personal APIs: Better Living Through Collaboration?

Thoughts?

Related:

• Standford Encyclopedia of Philospohy, The Value of Knowledge
• Me, Relationship “contracts” need to be based on our inability to predict the future.
• Me, SXSW 2010 Panel Idea: Personal APIs: Better Living Through Collaboration

Edward McNally, a boyhood friend of John Hughes who provided some inspiration for the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, details a couple lessons from Ferris Bueller:

… the Tao of Ferris has its own wisdom. Hughes had Ferris talk directly to the camera. To us. He says, deal with your fear. Believe in yourself. Make sick days count. And: Do you realize that if we played by the rules, right now we’d be in gym?

.. one key lesson from Ferris is his repeated message to his despondent buddy Cameron. Your current situation doesn’t have to be your fate. There’s always another way.

… In high school we gained admission to a sold-out improv performance at Chicago’s Second City by claiming status as an advance crew for Kirk Douglas, then a major star who the papers said was in town filming. Pranking a comedy club seemed fair game. In the legendary scene where he tries to fake two friends into a fully booked restaurant, Ferris neglects to check the well-known name he borrows from the reservations list. “You’re Abe Froman?” the snooty maitre d’ huffs at 18-year-old Ferris. “That’s me,” Ferris insists. “Abe Froman?” scoffs the maitre d’. “The ‘Sausage King of Chicago?’ ”

But Ferris is fearless. Doesn’t back down. And is seated with an apology.

Still my favorite movie.

(What else, you ask? Office Space and Say Anything, of course…)

(via Kottke)

A short note on a deep topic about photography, objectivity and interpretation.

Sliver, St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, England

Jörg Colberg, The inside vs. the outside view:

A recent series of photographs depicting the Polish city of Krakow by Supanit Riansrivilai, who was born in Thailand and lives in France, caused a bit of a kerfuffle over at The Black Snapper. Much to their credit, the Black Snapper folks made this the topic of a post.

The Black Snapper folks elevated the comments into a real discussion, How is Central Europe to be perceived in contemporary photography? From a comment by Kolouker:

She [Supanit] ’saw’ what she expected to see, and overlooked everything that did not fit in her assumed image of Poland. Since one’s cultural background (and language) determines the way one perceives the world, people are often unable to understand what they see when they are among people of different culture, in a different climate etc.

… Another important thing in my opinion is the fact Supanit treats street photography as an objective source of information. This is a very dangerous approach. She uses a number of unconnected street snaps, and shoehorns them into the context of that post communist depression. This is plainly wrong as you can not portray a nation by taking pictures of people in the streets. One could illustrate depression, happiness, etc using street photographs. But whatever the subject is it will show only a partial view.

Back to Jörg:

This is the old problem with insiders seeing other things than outsiders: If you visit a country, your perception of that country will depend on your own cultural background, which could be very different. If you live in that country you will inevitably notice different things – and seeing a foreigner show things that you might consider to be unflattering only adds to your discomfort. So unlike the Black Snapper folks I don’t see the problem necessarily in how Central Europe is perceived (even though this might play a minor role), and I also don’t see it as a question of photographic style. Instead, the main issue seems to be that there simply is no realistic versus an unrealistic or a true versus a false depiction of Central Europe or any other place. A photographer will see things based on his or her background, and while we can disagree with it and claim that “no, that’s not a good depiction of this place”, it still doesn’t automatically mean that that photographer’s view is less valid than ours.

Agreed. But why?

Timothy Carmody in Snarkmarket.com’s New Liberal Arts:

Photography is the art and science of the real, but also of the fake; of the depth and the surface, and the authentic as well as the inauthentic or nonauthentic appearances of the world.

Yes. But how?

Jeff Share, The Camera Always Lies, Breaking the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity:

Photographs are never objective. Think about it. The very nature of photography – the instantaneous capture of images recorded by light reflected onto film – creates the illusion that a photograph is an objective document.

… The belief that “the camera never lies” betrays the fact that someone chose what, when, where, why, and how to photograph. Every step a photographer makes in taking a picture involves subjective choices, from the camera angle (looking up, looking down, eye level) to the framing (what to include and what to leave out) to the moment of exposure (when to shoot and when to wait). A photograph is always a decontextualized representation of reality recorded by a human being who makes conscious and even unconscious choices based on his or her cultural upbringing, experiences and biases. Joan Fontcuberta, editor of the Spanish magazine PhotoVision, insists that the phrase “manipulated photography” is a redundancy, since every photograph is manipulated.

To add to the point, despite what David Hockney has said, photographs have told lies far before digital manipulation was possible; Joel Sternfeld, in a 2004 interview with the Guardian (link via Rob Gardiner):

Photography has always been capable of manipulation… Even more subtle and more invidious is the fact that any time you put a frame to the world, it’s an interpretation.

… No individual photo explains anything. That’s what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium. It is the photographer’s job to get this medium to say what you need it to say. Because photography has a certain verisimilitude, it has gained a currency as truthful – but photographs have always been convincing lies.

Photographs tell lies independent of a photographer’s intent, a function of the disconnect between creation and interpretation, the distance between points of view, aided by information and knowledge asymmetries and the transaction costs of context.

Lies told through slivers of reality; constricted frames of view and snippets of time: the beauty and the beast of photography wrapped up together.

Why?

To start, the inescapable: wherever we go, we always bring ourselves.

Any photographer knows that there is a world outside the frame and the moment; any traveler instinctually understands that a fellow traveler’s perception of a place says more about the traveler than the place; any writer knows that comments and reviews say more about the commenter then the post itself; all of us naturally listen to people with one ear on the message and half a mind on their potential biases.

Bias is inescapable. But despite common wisdom, transparency isn’t the solution; interpretation isn’t easy, creating and delivering context and relevance is expensive and difficult to scale.

How do we move forward?

Embrace lies as slivers of reality, ready to be pieced together to tell cohesive stories.

Fundamentally, this is why we care about how we use the Internet to aggregate, filter, search, rank, validate and distribute content and context on the web, an attempt to re-create the algorithms, stereotypes and heuristics we created to help us structure and understand our offline worlds.

Given time, we’ll develop similar tools and methods for sorting through our online world. Just give it some time.

A short note illustrating how paying attention to the real “numbers behind the numbers” can help you change your life.

Harry Pavlidis of Hardball Times recently discussed how Brian Bannister, a major league baseball pitcher for the Kansas City Royals, analyzes the “numbers behind the numbers” to dig into his performance and refine his pitching approach:

Brian Bannister, a right-handed starter for the Kansas City Royals, revealed the key to his recent success: PITCHf/x. Bannister has studied the data, after a demotion to Triple-A, and found out he already had the tools to succeed, if he put them together the right way.

As Brian explained in an interview (transcribed in this comment):

I know how the numbers work. I know how OBP works. I know all the numbers that will never be printed in the newspaper. They’re slowly working their way on to major league scoreboards. But, how the game really works, it’s not what you see out there, and it’s not about short term emotions in games. It’s numbers behind numbers… it’s how the game works.

I’ve sold out to those numbers, and I’ve finally found a way, and by throwing that cutter 60 times a game to get the hitters to consistently hit the top half of the ball, and its the difference between being a 5.70 ERA guy and a 3.70 ERA guy.

How did Brian do it? As Dave Allen explains, Brian dug deep into his PITCHf/x numbers:

Bannister is a student of sabremetrics. Back in 2007 when he had a great ERA, build largely on a unsustainably low BABIP, he understood what was happening and that his current approach would not work going forward.

Brian knew his success in 2007 was unsustainable. His changed pitching approach for 2008 didn’t work out as planned, but he looked into the data again and devised an alternate approach for 2009 to accomplish the same goals, and this year, it’s working.

Brian understood that ERA was a “thin” measure of value, and that the “thick” measures lie deeper, in the “numbers behind the numbers” that baseball researchers have been developing and refining for the past twenty years.

Open-mindedness, adaptability, forward-thinking: that’s the kind of guy I can root for.

Why do I point this out? Merely to provide an example of how digging into the data behind our lives enables us to change our relationships, careers and lives. And by sharing our methods of inquiry and refinement with others, it can help other people evaluate and refine their own lives. That’s why we’re here, right?

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Yes, deep at heart, I’m still a baseball geek.