I was wrong. I got another, more personal email a week later.

And another – right after Nokia announced they were dropping MeeGo for Windows Phone 7. This was more than I could take. With that vote of no confidence, who would be crazy enough to invest in Intel’s non-existent platform? I responded:

I know you’re doing your job, but it’s not going to happen. Intel lost in mobile. Sorry. Putting my money behind horses who have a real chance. Thanks and good luck.

I put it out of my mind. Later that day, though, my persistent friend gave me one last push:

…If history repeats itself, it will be open architecture systems and industries that will eventually dominate. It’s only a question of when. ( I think soon.) Think of where the PC market was in the early days when there was still multiple proprietary solutions competing for the market space of the home computer user.  The IBM standard eventually dominated the larger market.

Even if I bought into this (I don’t), wouldn’t Android be the horse to bet on? It’s open. It’s actually in shipping products. It actually has users, right now, today.

I believe that history will repeat itself.

So, this guy, and by extension, Intel, believes that fate will grant Intel perpetual reign over all things computing, despite the fact that they can’t produce a mobile processor anyone wants to use in best-selling products? Despite the fact that they’re late to the party with their self-serving OS?  Despite the fact that MeeGo, by all accounts, kind of sucks?

Okay, I guess history is just going to repeat itself. Because they want it to. It’s like they’ve been reading The Secret or something.

This is a ground floor opportunity akin to purchasing a stock just before it goes up in value.

As if my bullshit detector weren’t already burying the needle.

Keep idly watching this space (open architecture mobile computing) and you will miss the train. Intel is leveraging all it’s 30 years of OEM relationships. The number of distribution channels contained in this network is going to be staggering. It’s not one store or one manufacturer.  This is the democratization of mobile computing.

I think the only one who has missed the train here is Intel. They’ve been idly watching mobile while ARM quietly cleans their clock.

Moreover, even Google has struggled to nail down successful, paid distribution. Intel thinks it can succeed by encouraging the creation of several channels? It’s like they don’t even bother studying what works and why. Apple is ruling the day by getting 100 million accounts all in one database and giving the keys for one-click buying to anyone who wants to come over. Several fragmented channels is not the way to match their power.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Translated: Intel is delusional and they’re paying me to repeat their fever dreams.

The mobile computer market is nearing a similar democratizing event horizon as the PC market did 25 years ago.  Throughout 2011 Intel chips will turn up in 35 tablets from 15 brands!

How many units are going to be sold of all these many tablets? 15 brands and 35 tablets? Really? Why not just two, really, really good ones? Sounds like a recipe for an instantly fragmented market from a hardware perspective, too.

He ended by encouraging me to hop on the phone with a program manager to learn more. I haven’t taken him up on it.

Now, many of us have been in an room listening to marketing spin a tale of bullshit (“narrative”) to share with outsiders. Maybe Intel knows it’s full of it, right? I’m not so sure. I think decades of being the Processor King has genuinely convinced them that their success is inevitable.

I think they’re wrong. The game has changed. They haven’t.

We’re profitable, and we’re looking to hire a smart all-around programmer as our first hire. It’s a cliche, but we want people who like tackling complicated problems.

…

Depending on the task, we program in Ruby (on Rails), Javascript (a lot of this), PHP, Python, Objective-C (iPhone), and Java (Android). Flexibility is a plus.

…we like people who don’t put themselves in a box. You should be comfortable thinking about the product as a whole, and how changes are going to impact the hundreds of thousands of people who use it regularly.

…

We’re profitable, make the lives of hundreds of thousands of people better every month, have a rapidly expanding user base, and napping is an encouraged part of our corporate culture.

…

Basically, you’ll get to be the first employee of a small successful startup, while getting a paycheck and equity, and feeling good about the impact you’re having on the world.

It’s so clear. I know what kind of person they’re looking for, I know what’s special about their company, I can start to picture what it would be like to work there. Without having to say much about their people or product, I can tell one thing right away: these are not bozos.

There are no buzzwords, no vague claims about the company, nothing unclear about the kind of person they’re looking for. These are the kind of people you would feel comfortable working with because they’re direct and human.

And hey, did you notice they’re profitable?

It’s a good pitch because within the confines of their stealth approach, it tells you everything you’d want to know without handwaving or hyperbole. For respecting your intelligence, it stands out. It builds confidence.

This is a rarity in tech companies. Other job postings are not so clear. Try this one:

The Front-End Architect will be a senior and leading member of the [Product name] development team and will be responsible for driving innovative consumer applications. The FE Architect will help make technology decisions, lead, design/architect, implement and mentor.

I just picked this one at random off of craigslist. It was the first one I clicked. How can you be both senior and leading? What does it mean to drive an innovative consumer app? What makes it innovative? What will they lead, what will they architect? Of course, it wouldn’t be a bullshit job posting without some poor bastard having to “implement” something.

These people have no idea what problem their hiring is supposed to solve.

Job postings are a great window into a company. They show you just how much clear thinking is demanded  along with how well people communicate. Those are two important factors for working with other people. What about more consciously public communications?

Let’s turn to the granddaddy of software development:

Windows Phone 7: A Fresh Start for the Smartphone

The Phone Delivers a New User Experience by Integrating the Things Users Really Want to Do, Creating a Balance Between Getting Work Done and Having Fun

That’s a headline and sub-head from a press release. (Thanks, DF)

What the hell does any of it mean? What do users really want to do? Absent Robbie Bach and J. Allard, I don’t trust the word “fun” anywhere in a new product announcement from Microsoft, either. They probably mean an optional Comic Sans UI.

Maybe they’re going to clarify in the first paragraph. I’m just being a dick with their opener, I’m sure.

The goal for Microsoft’s latest smartphone is an ambitious one: to deliver a phone that truly integrates the things people really want to do, puts those things right in front of them, and either lets them get finished quickly or immerses them in the experience they were seeking.

I’m missing the ambition here. It sounds like their goal is to create a hierarchical mobile user experience optimized for short bursts of interaction.

Which is what everyone else does.

They haven’t described anything that sounds even remotely like a “fresh start for the smartphone.” What they’ve got is a fresh start for Windows Mobile that brings it up to par with the last three years of mobile OS evolution. By all accounts, they’ve succeeded.

Also, what the hell have they actually built?

The much more interesting story here would be owning the fact that they fell behind, then dug in deep, then, wonder of wonders, finally met a ship date. I’m sure it wasn’t a small undertaking. But they want to convince me they, unique among all companies, have rebooted the smartphone concept.

Contrast that with Google, who, the other day, genuinely unveiled a chunk of the future:

We have developed technology for cars that can drive themselves.

Damn. Really?

Our automated cars use video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to “see” other traffic, as well as detailed maps (which we collect using manually driven vehicles) to navigate the road ahead.

Nothing vague about that. It sounds like something out of science fiction. You could call your mom, read that to her, and she’d understand exactly what’s going on, maybe even share your excitement.

Who inspires more confidence: the bullshitters or the straight-talkers? The problem with bullshitters is that they start convincing themselves that this is genuinely how people talk. They bullshit themselves. They lose the ability to communicate with any sort of clarity, making up for it in volume of words.

The best people respond to authentic communication. The best conversations form around genuine excitement from concrete performance. Clarity inspires confidence.

The big, suit-choked, sales-oriented, PR spinmonkey companies are a lost cause. There’s no reaching them. But you and me, we have a shot. Resist the siren song of saying words that mean nothing.

Look how much more powerful it is to be a real person.

And I guess it’s true. I mean, consider:

There’s Blockbuster. Keeping a broad inventory is a lot of work and expense. It’s easier, and more favorable to revenue, to stock only the most popular stuff. Also, you can definitely make a ton of money by charging late fees.

Hmm. The only problem there is that Blockbuster just filed for bankruptcy.

Okay, okay, that’s fine. How about Comcast? Having installers permanently on the payroll is a pain in the ass – paid time off, benefits, training costs, ugh. Outsource that action, let someone else do the worrying instead. Sure, these techs won’t care about the company culture (such as it is), and since they get paid by the installation, they won’t care about conducting business in a way that leads to a long-term positive opinion of Comcast. There will be less oversight, so they might screw up in ways that are embarrassing. Time management could be challenging for these local outfits and people might be late for appointments… But – revenue!

I guess the wrinkle is that kind of thinking tarnished Comcast’s brand so severely, they had to change the name of their consumer service. Maybe customer perception had nothing to do with it – rebranding is fun and it can’t cost much, right? Any long-established brand would want to do it, eh? Maybe not so much.

Fine, how about Yahoo? They made a really great play – push the portal angle really hard, don’t focus too much on search. I mean, if search works too well, people won’t stay in the portal and then how can you monetize all these millions of eyeballs? Nah, display ads. That’s where it’s at. Sell banners by the boatload. Bulk up that ad sales team!

That only worked until the dot-com bust, though. Now Yahoo’s market capitalization is a tenth of its biggest competitor, Google.

So maybe dicking your users isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, assuming you want prosperity to continue more than the next few quarters.

What about being good to users? How does providing an outstanding user experience change things?

Turns out the iPad is the fastest-selling non-phone product. Despite the fact that, as shipped, the iPad couldn’t print, can’t use Flash, and doesn’t have a camera, people are buying it in droves. 4.5 million units sold in the first quarter it was available. Maybe “being hip” is suddenly important to the broad cross-section of consumers who are buying it, and they have been convinced that upwards of $500 is a fair price for the privilege. More likely, though, is that a focused, task-oriented, touch-based interaction scheme where no one nags you about software updates is more enjoyable and intuitive than a netbook.

Apple is one of the largest companies in the world. Their focus on the user is not limited to the iPad.

Then there’s Zappos. Their values include being good to everyone – customers, employees and vendors alike. Their website has been consistently great for exploring their inventory and making informed decisions about shoes before buying. High quality images, easy to use filtering, detail-packed user reviews, all of it conspires to make purchasing easy. When you get on the phone with their customer service folks, you’ll find people empowered to help without rushing you back off the phone. They’ve long refused to outsource any activity that’s core to their business, including customer service and their fulfillment operations. They want to make sure these user-facing elements of their business are air-tight. This isn’t cheap.

Neither is the billion dollars Amazon spent to buy Zappos last year.

Then there’s Google. Say what you want about their creepy ways, Google revolutionized search. They made it work extraordinarily well, made it focused and made it fast. They’ve invested huge amounts of money on infrastructure to make sure their service is as snappy as possible. Instead of display ads, which would have been the easy but user hostile approach to making money from their traffic, Google borrowed Overture’s Pay-Per-Click advertising model. Paid search ads are perhaps the only form of genuinely useful ads for the user. They can actually solve the problem of your search.

At their IPO, Google shares could be had for around $85, already a respectable price. Today, they fetch over $500.

Creating a good user experience is important. It builds goodwill between your company and your users, yes. But much more importantly, it compels you to make a better product. Constantly re-evaluating your product for the benefit of its users future proofs your business. Look at Netflix, busy obsoleting itself by pioneering living room streaming. When you care about doing things well, your business moves at pace that’s very difficult to overtake. You’re a moving target and your products become much harder to compete with.

So can you dick over your users to goose your revenues? Absolutely. There’s a lot of short term juice in alienating the people you need most. Unfortunately, money is an addicting, distracting force. Before you know it, you’ll be dependent on the cash your user hostile approach to product requires. Ask Yahoo.

Anyone playing the long term game should approach the problem differently. Do it right and you’ve got the potential for a billion dollar business. Even if you never get there, gushing praise from your users is a lot more fun, and profitable, than simmering rage.

They really, truly give a damn about something.

It’s important to calibrate what I mean about this. Being a stickler about Star Trek trivia, parts of speech or state capitals doesn’t count. Affinity for political knee-jerk doesn’t qualify, either.

Giving a damn is about sacrifice and investment. It’s paying with something precious in the service of something you really, truly value.

My favorite leaders, consistently, gave a damn about good leadership. Years ago, during my college internship, I’d stroll into my boss’s office, politely interrupt whatever the hell it was he was doing, and have a conversation. This guy was the director of the department, working on a Master’s degree on the side, and was the busiest guy I’d ever met. But as long as nothing was on fire, he’d give me half an hour to answer my questions about anything. I figured out much later that the reason he did this was that he gave a damn about leadership and helping people grow.

This isn’t something you can half ass. Either you really, trully give a damn about leadership – or you’re just another one of those bosses.

Leadership is a universal one, but this works with anything. I’d rather hire someone green who truly gives a damn about the work than someone with both experience and apathy. Many things can be taught – giving a damn is not one of them.

It goes beyond picking your team or picking your boss, though. The very best companies, large and small prove that they give a damn, too.

In Delivering Happiness, Tony Hsieh explains that Zappos treats their customer service as a marketing expense to be padded instead of an operational expense to be reduced. It’s a very Keanu “whoa” moment when you ponder that. It flips everything around in your head – while being so entirely correct, you can’t imagine anything different. Organizationally, Zappos gives a damn about doing the right thing for people and backs this up with a significant investment.

Down the road from where I live, an immigrant family owns the best damned Chinese restaurant on earth. The food is consistently delicious, but it doesn’t end there. I’m greeted warmly, my picky custom orders are delivered with fastidious accuracy, and every meal is accompanied by a free appetizer or some on-the-house ice cream. These guys truly give a damn about creating an enjoyable restaurant.

If being a good boss is giving a damn about leadership and running a great business is giving a damn about customer service, what about great software?

Great software boils down to giving a damn about user experience. Take a look at your browser history. How much horseshit do you have going on in your digital life? Web applications take the cake for shameless apathy. When an exception turns up – when someone, miraculously, gives a damn about making their software work well, it’s a special moment.

Hipmunk is just such a miracle. Look at this homepage:

The text fields are huge, meaty, clearly-labeled things. Easy to find and click on. Instead of being relegated to a forgotten sidebar, the search activity itself is the focal point of the page. There are no distracting promotions or other crap you don’t care about. “You’re here to search for your flight, so let’s make it happen!” cries Hipmunk, grabbing you by the cheeks and shoving you into search land. Want to leave tomorrow? Type “tomorrow” into the date field.

For reference, let’s compare to another site.

Look at that shit!

From the two examples, which app gives more of a damn about helping you find your flight?

Travelocity can’t even be bothered to make their time of day dropdown fit the default selection.

Meanwhile: Hipmunk’s outstanding search results interface.

There is a sort option called agony. It’s the default. Hipmunk’s creators thought a moment and realized that lengthy flights and layovers are an important detail to make clear from the beginning. The layout lets you see a timeline for your flight date, letting you quickly understand when you’re leaving and when you’re arriving in local time. It’s also a great way to visually compare the lengths of multiple flights. These guys… well, you know what I’m going to say.

No matter what you’re doing, giving a damn matters. The things you do that you don’t give a damn about, I guarantee you’re doing poorly. You can’t give a damn about everything, but please, I beg you, find at least one thing.

And if you do give a damn: I cannot wait to meet you, work with you, be your customer or use your software.

I’ve hated Flash for the better part of five years, a bigotry mostly inspired by how poorly it has worked for me as an end-user. It’s even worse for people who need to maintain web sites in Flash, as I later learned professionally. An essential tool for any computer I use more than five minutes is Flashblock for Firefox or the outstanding ClickToFlash plugin for Safari.

Then it dawned on me: If I hate it this much, surely Adobe, who is responsible for maintaining it, must hate it even more. Surely no amount of money is worth this much pain, right? There must be another reason Adobe prolongs this shared internet misery.

Drawing equal parts inspiration from 2001, Terminator 2 and Babylon 5, I present to you: Flash is My Keeper.

For years I’ve been saying this:

Only two things have made flying safer [since 9/11]: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.

This week, the second one worked over Detroit. Security succeeded.

EDITED TO ADD (12/26): Only one carry on? No electronics for the first hour of flight? I wish that, just once, some terrorist would try something that you can only foil by upgrading the passengers to first class and giving them free drinks.

Bruce is referring, of course, to the new, rumored security procedures said to be rumbling their way out of the TSA’s nightmare bureaucracy and onto your next airline flight.

In a nutshell: planes must disable their seat-back in-flight entertainment, passengers can’t use electronics, get up or access their bags during the last part of a flight. Oh, and you can’t have anything in your lap.

Keep in mind, this is in response to a dim-witted “terrorist” who snuck a weak explosive onto a plane… inside of his pants.

Remember when shoe bomber Richard Reid tried to blow up his Reeboks? That resulted in a limit of one carry on bag per passenger, despite the fact that Reid’s plan had nothing to do with carry on bags. Then there’s the whole liquid limit for carry on bags, which also makes no sense given the simple reality that liquid re-combines very easily, even if you do happen to carry it aboard in small containers instead of big ones.

So the recent rumors of new policy, while wildly stupid, are just stupid enough. They carry enough non sequitur authenticity to be utterly believable. I was ready to believe them. Then a source contacted me. He’s inside the TSA and was desperate to leak the internal memo that brought the new rules into existence. Now it all makes sense: the non sequiturs, the absurdity, the utterly incomprehensible creation, amendment and abandonment of these policies.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that in a few places, it would seem the TSA exercised forbearance when it seemed like, even by their standards, they’d crossed the line. Here’s the document, reproduced without further comment:

Let’s start with this: I’m an idiot. I’m 24 years old and I don’t know anywhere near as much as I need to. I convince myself otherwise because without the strength of thinking I know at least something, I could never get much done.

That said, I do know this: there are only a few people who you should take advice from. I mean life advice: advice on how to be who you are, how to manage your world, how to grow as a person.

1. People who have demonstrated an interest in your success and years of loyalty. You’ll be lucky if you get one of these. I hit the lottery, and I have two. You’ll know them with this test: If they asked you to drop everything and save their ass (business, product, family, life) for a month, you’d do it without hesitation.
2. Your significant other. This is someone who spends a lot of time with you and sees all that you struggle with, all that makes you happy. You’ve been through good and bad and get wistful recalling both. My luck continues: my girlfriend is the wisest counselor I could ever ask for.
3. Yourself: If you cut the crap and take a long walk alone, you can ask yourself anything and usually get the right answer. Make the time to know your own thoughts: you might be surprised how much is waiting in your own brain.

That’s all. Here are people who should not be trusted for advice:

1. Some dick with a blog (even me). If you’ve ever read a top-ten post on a blog, you know the content is cranked out to drive pageviews. The author probably slapped the content together in the space of two hours to benefit an audience of thousands. Like with drive-by legal or medical advice, you’re a fool to assume you can get something directly applicable to your case from a one-size-fits-all post.
2. Parents. Your mileage may vary but parents are often too invested in your safety and security to be able to weigh the benefits of those risky life decisions with huge payoffs and incredible experiences. If your parents are batshit insane (thankfully not my case, but I have seen this) that investment may yield terrifyingly bad advice. Even if the advice you get is reasonable, there’s plenty we don’t need to tell our own parents.
3. Your social circle. Excluding a choice best friend or two, your social circle can’t tell you anything useful about how to run your life. Groups breed conformity and breaking from that might be consciously or even subconsciously discouraged.
4. Penelope Trunk. (cf. #1)

Penelope Trunk wants to tell you how to run your career. She presumes to be an expert on this subject. She’s not.

Once upon a time, as a young man desperate for growth and success, a blog specifically like hers, geared toward shameless career ambition, seemed like crack. Loyal readership taught me otherwise. Penelope Trunk is someone barely in control of her own life. That she is honest and open about her flaws is endearing but doesn’t change the fact that she cannot provide viable career advice based on personal experience. She’s proudly a trainwreck and while that may be great for her blog’s readership, would you trust a fitness trainer who doesn’t exercise and can’t stick to a healthy diet? Mental health counseling from a patient in a psychiatric ward? Computer advice from someone who uses Windows 98? Come on. I may be an idiot but at least my bullshit detector works.

Only when Penelope Trunk is viewed as a cautionary tale will you find viable lessons for your own career. I would never claim to be qualified to advise you on how to run your life. Nonetheless, if you take the things Trunk has done with her life and imagine the opposite, you may find valuable guidance.

Read on for these lessons.

Bullying is Okay

Earlier this year, Trunk was complaining about her kids. I don’t blame her — parenting doesn’t seem like a lot of fun at times and blowing off steam via Twitter is cheap, easy relief. Things got complicated when our thin-skinned heroine was sassed by some jackass in flyover country. What did Trunk do? For most people who aspire to the public eye, ignoring this would be right move. Maybe using Twitter’s block feature, if you’re an especially petty kind of douche, would have been called for. In any case, it’s hardly worth more than a few seconds of thought. I guess Trunk wasn’t busy enough with her family and leading her startup because instead of doing the grownup thing, she called his place of employment and saved their number with the intent of “ruin[ing] his life there if [she] ever felt like he needed to be taught a lesson.”

(I’m not sure crazy internet lady calling out of the blue and whining about 140 characters of abuse is something technically capable of ruining anyone’s life. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine what her true plan really was.)

Next, she called his wife. From the blog: “There was no answer. Maybe by then he had alerted his wife that he is being pursued by a psycho who maybe will kill her kids or maybe will kill him. Maybe they will never answer their phone again.“

(My emphasis.)

This is professional? This is what we do with our careers? There’s a word for this: unhinged. Self-revelatory stuff, right there.

Finally, Trunk penned a seething, rage-soaked blog post naming names and even the guy’s home town. She was impressed with herself, though, for having the maturity to not post his home phone number. Trunk was happy enough to ruin his Google mojo forever. She is, in fact, proud of that post to this day. (Notwithstanding the flurry of posts that came next, lasting just long enough to push the hatefest off her front page.)

Anti-Lesson: When you build a blog readership and a meager Twitter following, you should use these tools to bully the hell out of those who dare disagree with you. Anyone who tells you your behavior is unacceptable just doesn’t get it. It’s worthwhile to spend a significant amount of time and effort persecuting a grudge. You can use bad behavior to impress other people by appealing to the worst within them.

The real lesson: Self-control is important. In your life, especially as you become more successful, more and more jackasses will come out of the woodwork. How you respond to the least courteous of those around you speaks volumes about your true character. You can spend a lot of time getting vengeance against those who piss you off but the payoff is rarely worth it. If you want to make yourself seem smaller than you are, the best way to do it is to give attention to someone who doesn’t deserve it.

“Online Stars” Are Important

We’ve all been in this predicament before:

“So, D, who is really attentive and normal—two traits I have never had in a boyfriend, ever—is scary to me because I’m giving up the chance to enhance my brand by dating an online star.“

Yeah, I guess maybe not so much. Trunk is still in high school — approval of the internet cool kids is so important to her that not dating one who can improve her standing is a quandary worth blogging about. She has since resolved the quandary by electing to marry a farmer. He must be the retired co-founder of Skype or something.

Speaking of quandaries and farmers, the internet cool kids caused a conflict there, too. After accepting a reconciliation date from this then-estranged farmer fellow, Trunk realized she was double booked!

When I came out of my giddy stupor from his email, I realized that [the date] was the same weekend as maybe the biggest schmoozing event of my life: Guy Kawasaki invited me to spend a weekend on the USS Nimitz with Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble and others.

I said yes to the weekend, of course. Because how can hanging out with these guys not be great for me? It’s probably what I’ve been working up to my whole career: a weekend like that.

Guy Kawasaki is apparently a friend of hers, so we’ll skip him, but wow, Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble! Connected guys? Sure. But you know what? They’re also douchebags. 40-something Scoble, for example, sees no problem getting touchy-feely with 17-year-old female entrepreneurs. Arrington is just a pompous weiner who can’t handle other people’s low opinions of his douchery. Trunk ultimately did what anyone with healthy priorities would do: she spent the weekend with someone who loves her instead of with a self-important group of perpetual children whose only interest in Trunk is how she’s able to further their own interests.

Invitation to dine with the Obamas? With Steve Jobs? With the late Norman Borlaug? Yeah, the farmer could take a hike. But these guys on the Nimitz? No one will know who they are in 20 years. There is no conflict. These guys were a group of assclowns who have never made any meaningful contributions to humanity. They’re worth skipping for someone who cares about you. If you’ve spent your whole career working toward a weekend with them, you need a new career.

Anti-lesson: People who have convinced the internet they are cool deserve our time, reverence and attention. If you’re going to waste your time with people who aren’t internet cool kids, there had better be a good reason. You should spend your whole career getting to the point where you can possibly one day hang out with these cool kids.

The real lesson: Often with little meaningful or useful accomplishment, people can convince the internet they are cool. Maybe they truly are. Just as often, these flavors of the minute will be forgotten within a decade. Either way, they’re just people. You have your own people. You should measure the value of your people by what they contribute to your life rather than their Twitter follow count. If your career is itself focused on convincing other people you’re cooler than you are, you should switch to a career where you’re actually doing meaningful work.

You Kind of Suck and Can’t Be Incredible

Penelope Trunk wants you to know: “[Dooce] is a marvel. And you are not.”

Dooce is, in fact, a marvel: a blog that pays her bills, millions of Twitter followers and a self-directed life right from the comfort of her home. Without even meeting you, though, Trunk dispenses the above defeatist advice: you’ll never be that, even if you want to be. Dooce is not an overnight success by any stretch: she has been writing her blog for eight years. While she is certainly talented in relating her thoughts, one of the greatest contributors to her success is her simple willingness to keep showing up, year after year. Woody Allen will tell us: 90% of success is just showing up. He should know — a large swath of the population finds his self-indulgent New Yorgies unwatchable. (I am on the fence.)

Anyone with a modicum of interest in an activity and a willingness to keep showing up over and over again will become a marvel. Malcolm Gladwell calls this the 10,000 hour rule.

Imagine if Penelope Trunk had given Dooce that advice, before she became a marvel? Imagine if she had told a young Heather Armstrong she’s not much of anything and should stick to doing jobs she doesn’t much like. Imagine if Dooce had believed it. (Not that it seems she would — by all accounts, Dooce is someone who does whatever it is she wants.)

Dooce is exceptional because she chose to be, not because a supernatural event anointed her with that status.

While the overall advice of Trunk’s post is so blindingly obvious as not to need saying (blogs won’t immediately make you money), the evidence used is part of an overall theme of her blog: Penelope Trunk thinks you kind of suck and you should just quit trying to build your career if the path you’ve chosen isn’t immediately marketable. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Anti-Lesson: Things that are hard aren’t worth doing. Other people are better than you. You shouldn’t even bother trying. You kind of suck.

The real lesson: You’re in control of how great you are (or aren’t). You decide how quickly you reach 10,000 hours of anything. You’ll become incredible only if you choose to be: by doing the near-impossibly difficult work necessary to get there. Just like everyone else who ever chose to be incredible.

Unethical Behavior is Just Fine

If a company pays you to say something about them, Trunk says, there’s no real reason to disclose that. That’s for newspapers. You should just trust that she’s making money from smart companies, and that makes it all okay.

The trust of her readership is for sale to highest, smartest bidder.

The FTC, unfortunately, doesn’t agree that this is acceptable behavior. They’ll be going after companies who pay bloggers to endorse their products without disclosure.

Is it unethical? Of course it is. There’s a big difference between caring about a product or company for its own sake and caring about it because you’ve been paid to. Penelope may dance around this by saying she only picks good companies but that doesn’t change the fact that she failed to disclose a paid relationship. Her estimation of a post’s value after the fact doesn’t excuse the lapse, either. This kind of ends-justify-the-means rationalization is the hallmark of a crook.

It doesn’t matter if the conversation is between a newspaper and its readers, a blog and its subscribers or a friend and a friend. When one party is giving advice that could be influenced by an outside force, it is essential that the influence be announced openly. Anything less is simple dishonesty.

Anti-lesson: It’s fine to build a loyal readership and then sell their attention without disclosure. The rules of ethical behavior only apply to old media. You make your own rules — honesty is less important than cash money.

The real lesson: Don’t build trust and then quietly sell it for money.

Don’t Do What You Love — Do What is Easy Based on Your Existing Resume

“One of the worst pieces of career advice that I bet each of you has not only gotten but given is to ‘do what you love.’”

Yeah, she said that. Supporting evidence: “I am a writer, but I love sex more than I love writing. And I am not getting paid for sex.”

Trunk even had a talent for combining these things, writing “the best sex scenes” her writing professor had ever read. She gave up on her erotic literature career, though, because she believed it wasn’t important enough work.

“So if you are overwhelmed with the task of ‘doing what you love’ you should recognize that you are totally normal, and maybe you should just forget it. Just do something that caters to your strengths. Do anything.”

Hmm. So because Penelope can’t do it, there must not be any way at all to find a way to build a life and career around what you love, huh? Because you can’t immediately find a way to make your work impressive to other people, it must be impossible to find greatness in it?

Bye, Adam Savage. You love scifi, building things and using your imagination. Can’t think of any way you can parlay that into an enormous, satisfying career. Be a bricklayer.

Bye, John Gruber. You love details, design, Apple, and writing. There’s no way those things can possibly come together as a lucrative blog that lets you be your own boss. Go scrub toilets.

Bye, Phil Tan. You love music? What do you think you’re going to do with that? Go buy some CDs or something.

Bye, even, to my mother. Someone who didn’t even have the benefit of a complete high school education somehow found a way to turn her love of animals into a career that let her be her own boss while keeping me fed, clothed and housed my whole childhood. Seriously: there is not a thing this woman loves more than animals, as her past ownership even of ostriches will clearly demonstrate. The result of that and years of hard work is that she’s the best pet groomer in whatever city she’s in, bar none. She can do that because she cares about her clients’ animals in ways that other groomers, just paying the bills, never could.

I guess she should have just gotten a retail job and stuck with that, right, Penelope? Hey, you said do anything.

Anti-Lesson: Don’t do what you love. It’s hard! Since Penelope Trunk never figured out how, you shouldn’t bother, either. Instead of dedicating yourself to something you’re great at doing, absolutely love doing, become the founder of an also-ran social network for young people that provides none of the value of its competitors while alienating the sort of older, more accomplished professionals those young people need to meet.

The real lesson: Your passions give you deep, generous, unique insight into specific problems. With some luck, a little imagination and a ton of hard work, you can focus your career around the things you care about. There’s a significant chance that career will matter a whole lot more to you than just “doing anything.” You’ve got a better chance at finding happiness in work you find meaningful rather than trying to fit into roles that other, faceless people will deem great.

Does Penelope have a strong writing style and a compelling blog? Absolutely. Does she have a gripping sense of honesty and transparency? Sure. But let’s be clear: as a vendor of career advice, she is a charlatan. If a career of settling for second-best, letting other people decide the value of your passions and giving up on your dreams is what you seek, then you seek Penelope. If you want your self-worth to be short-changed, then get yourself over to Trunk. If you want to improve your brand image by writing psychotic screeds against nobodies in Ohio, then boy, do I have the role model for you!

In the final equation, the case of Penelope Trunk is a sad one. By letting other people decide what matters, what’s important, she took her passions out of the driver’s seat of her career too many times. By worrying constantly about other people’s estimation of her potential greatness, she condemned herself to a life of mediocrity. Her blog and its continual churn of the latest misery, the most recent stress, is a chronicle of the results of those decisions. I don’t want that to be me.

Trunk needs to do everyone a favor, herself included, and cut the career advice crap. She is at her best when she writes about herself. The drama queen schtick all on its own is more than enough to build content around. Her sycophantic hoards of hysterically, irrationally loyal commenter fans are evidence enough of that. While her bad choices make for poisonous, self-defeating career advice and a needlessly stressful life, they nonetheless make for entertaining, instructive, even inspiring reading. That’s a great focus and the best part is that it doesn’t presume to be qualified to tell other people how to manage their lives.

I have met men and women who have done incredible things. I have found role models in people who came from nothing, who had nothing but passion on their side, and who now spend their days being paid to do incredible things they absolutely love. It’s real. It’s possible. But I, for one, will never find that place by listening to someone who says I can’t. Who comforts herself by telling you that you’re not good enough. That’s poison. That’s quitting before you start. That’s being someone else’s person, fitting into someone else’s expectations, living someone else’s shortcomings, instead of being who you yearn to be.

My advice? Don’t listen to me. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you things online. Make your own decisions based on your own values, your own passions, your own drives, your own strengths. If you must, get advice for managing your life’s direction from people who know you, who care about you, who you can trust. Most of all, get it from people whose lives and careers approach a level of sanity and stability you’d like to emulate. If you must get advice on running your career from the internet, this is the only source I’ve seen with viable information:

Merlin Mann and John Gruber at SxSW ’09. They’re talking about blogs but their advice is broadly applicable to any career where you choose to do what you want to do.

Final advice, which you also should not take just because I’m saying it: Instead of writing comments on someone else’s blog when they piss you off, write your own post. Your content is yours — don’t fuel someone else’s blog with it. That’s their job. Also, don’t wait years to write that post. You’ll be stuck writing a long-ass screed like me.

See the little movement lines, there on the left? They suggest the weird little dollar coin is moving from left to right. In western cultures (to whom the ad was targeted) left to right progression is associated with forward motion, while right to left progression signals backward motion. This something you’ll see in movies and comic strips if you’re looking for it. Here’s an example we all know and love:

The stylized arrow beside the word “Back” is pointing, appropriately, back, via a right-to-left perspective, while all of the letters in that word are also skewed right-to-left. The word “future,” conversely, is skewed left-to-right. It’s an instantly recognizable logo that succeeds by embodying its idea without whacking you over the head with it.

So look again:

Bing is talking about getting cash back, but illustrating their point by showing cash flowing away. This isn’t the economy to be talking about cash flowing away. I’m not sure that the dissonance this creates registers for most people but when it’s already unlikely that people will engage with your ad unit, the last thing you do is add subconscious resistance.

Yeah, it’s tiny, but the tiny things pile up into the enormous sand dunes that dog every last Microsoft endeavor with needless, unnecessary friction born of poor taste and obliviousness.

For more on this, enjoy a deconstruction of the hideous Bing logo.

Unfortunately, HARO, as it is called, is an awful product. It makes the fatal mistake that many fast-scaling services make: screwing the most important customer.

Three Customers

HARO has three customers: journalists, who need leads, sponsors, who pay for placement, and subscribers, who consume sponsored content and respond to journalist queries.

Subscribers are the most important customer as they are required for both sponsors and journalists to even bother with the product. Without subscribers, there’s no one for sponsors to influence. Without subscribers, the journalists get no responses.

A typical HARO email goes something like this:

1. Lengthy sponsored message
2. Cutesy personal update from the mailing list administrator, Peter Shankman
3. An absurdly long list of journalist queries

The practical result of this is that a subscriber will have to scroll an entire page before they even get to what they care about. Even better, HARO is sent out as often as three times a day.

Now, I disclaimed that as typical. What’s more interesting to my point are atypical HARO messages. These don’t happen often, but happened often enough to piss me off. HARO has particular rules about how subscribers should interact with journalists. It’s pretty obvious stuff, if you’re not five years old, but boils down to please don’t spam the reporters. Sometimes a HARO subscriber would go off the reservation, do something naughty, piss off a reporter and end up in Shankman’s bad graces.

It’s a closed system – a mailing list, after all. The solution seems pretty simple. When applicable, speak to the individual’s boss, if their wrongdoing was in the service of a larger organization. Then, kick the person off the list.

That’s it. Problem solved.

In Shankman’s defense, it seems he does do this. Then he takes it a step further, by venting his frustration into the next HARO email and scolding the entire subscriber base at large. Here’s a sample:

READ THIS: This morning, while being given a behind the scenes tour
at Busch Gardens, I had to spend a portion of the tour on my mobile
phone, calming a reporter from a major publication. Seems someone
at a major agency took it upon themselves to form an opinion on
what kind of story the reporter was writing, simply from the query
alone.  Long story short, this was a situation that should not have happened.

This isn’t brain surgery here, guys: If you can answer a query, do
it. If you know someone who can answer a query, send it to them. Do
not post them on the web, in blogs, or on message boards, and do
not email the reporter saying “You should do it this way.” Had I
not gotten an EXTREMELY sincere apology from a top-level person at
the agency, I’d be outing the person who caused the mess in the
first place, as well as outing the agency. Instead, he’s just banned
from HARO.

Five rules of HARO here: READ THEM.
http://shankman.com/the-five-rules-of-haro/

I can only speak for myself, but as a former subscriber, it’s worth listing all the things in this message I don’t give even a tiny fraction of a fuck about:

• Shankman’s very special behind the scenes tour
• The frustration of said tour’s interruption
• The existence of an over-sensitive, irate reporter who doesn’t know how to use the delete button on her keyboard
• A rehash of common sense HARO rules I already know
• Shankman’s super-duper ballbusting phone call to top-level Tommy
• The ban of another subscriber
• The power of passive aggressive ALL-CAPS text

The Precious Commodity

HARO exists thanks to a simple reality: time is a precious, ever-dwindling commodity. If reporters weren’t in a hurry, they’d spend weeks on just one story, finding the perfect source for their piece. They don’t have that luxury. HARO to the rescue. Similarly, subscribers don’t have time to build a publicity campaign, research publications or spend weeks pitching themselves. They often don’t even have time to learn how. Again, HARO to the rescue.

The issue is that HARO does not give any reverence to the time of its subscribers. Quite the opposite: not only do we have paragraphs of crap no one cares about at the top of each message, there’s this occasional business of Shankman feeling empowered to command the entire list to spend time reading a rant about the misbehaviors of a single participant.

This doesn’t even begin to take into account the amount of time it takes to scour the actual list of queries. Taken in aggregate, it’s shocking. Let’s not forget, it’s a thrice-daily proposition.

The reason it happens is that while subscribers are the most crucial part of Shankman’s business, they’re also the most plentiful – the most easy to replace. Sponsors are magic unicorns, treasured and protected. Journalists are golden geese, continually laying the eggs that make each HARO message. Subscribers? There are tens of thousands of those.

So HARO gets away with it. For now.

Complacency Breeds Contempt

I just checked my calendar. It’s 2009. A mailing list? Hell, let’s move the whole thing over to Usenet. Infinitely more retro chic and you don’t need to bottleneck the queries through a single guy.

The problem with HARO not caring about its subscribers’ time is that it completely erodes loyalty, trading every ounce of goodwill for an ounce of contempt with each message. When something better comes along, they’ll have no problem switching. Ask Blockbuster how that works.

Fine, so you’re saying if I’m going to be a douche and trash this guy’s hard work, I should have a better idea, right? Glad you asked.

Let’s Do It Better

Build a website.

That’s it. A problem actually solvable with a website. Could have been huge during the dot-com bubble, but I bet it’s enough to at least keep Shankman fed. Here’s what you do:

1. Persistent accounts that store basic bios and feedback ratings. Elevate the stars, demote those who don’t play by the rules, make it clear who’s making the best contributions
2. Categorized, post-moderated, RSS-enabled members-only query threads that let reporters post their queries whenever they want or need. Only postable by verified reporter accounts to keep the bozos at bay
3. Tagged queries: instead of having to parse a tedious headline that’s different for each query, provide the option for easy-to-scan tags
4. User-configured search agents to send email alerts any time a query seems of interest
5. Daily sponsorship opportunities, to keep Shankman in Busch Gardens tickets

That’s it. I bet you could accomplish most of it with Ning, without having to spend a dime. If you wanted to take it to the next level, you could impose a monetary bozo filter for new accounts.

Will it happen? Eventually, I’m sure it has to. Linking journalists with sources is an important job. Just because HARO’s implementation is completely hamfisted doesn’t mean someone else’s won’t eventually hit the mark. Will Shankman do it?

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Upton Sinclair, via Daring Fireball

So who knows. In the meantime, I’m off to half-heartedly find some other way to get journalists to talk about me.

I know you have a lot on your mind lately, what with your bank purchases and the whole of the finance industry falling apart. Still, I’d like to inspire your engineers to embark upon a simple, fun skunkworks project.

You may remember cashing in the iPhone App Store craze with your free BofA app this summer. You did promise to make it less ugly. You haven’t followed through yet.

Now, we’re all busy and I sympathize. Making a nice app is hard. So I did the hard part and designed a UI for you. It’s a gift. Repay me by implementing it and sparing us all the hideous orgy of Times New Roman that is your existing iPhone UI.

Remember, I’ve done the heavy lifting. This isn’t hard. You don’t even need to do it in Cocoa. You can keep using the WebKit display your app currently uses and implement my design in John Gruber’s “shit sandwich.”

Now, the existing home screen is okay.

It’s when we actually want to get down to some banking that things go downhill:

Wow. That’s a lot of Times. Ugly, small, hard to read. Fix it like this:

Next, let’s get logged in:

Blegh. Let’s get a tab bar going. Not just because tab bars are handy, which they are, but because making the user tap an area as tiny as those menu links is just cruel to iPhone users:

There we are. The tab buttons are much easier to strike with a fingertip — less time wasted by hitting the wrong selection. We’ll start the user at the accounts breakdown, since your balance is almost always the info you want first. Next, let’s check out account detail:

Painful. Let’s better group the transaction information and use some visual cues to explain individual entries:

Not so hard. You already use those icons for desktop online banking. Now let’s transfer funds:

Making the user step through multiple screens for a single task sucks, especially in 2008. Let’s streamline this:

Better! The user doesn’t lose track of what’s going on.

Nothing crazy, here, just some simple suggestions based on existing iPhone UI conventions. I hope this helps you guys.

I built these mockups using the excellent iPhone UI PSD file. The payroll information above is speculative. I do not work for Apple. Yet.