Category: Writing

Posted on

Equality, Popularity And Control – Some Thoughts

megaphone.png

Tuesday, 5.52am

Sheffield, U.K.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. – George Orwell, Animal Farm

What would a world look like where a few people can shout, their voices amplified with a megaphone, while the rest of us can only whisper? We don’t need to imagine that kind of world, it’s the one we have now. But is that fair or is it just the way thing are and always have been? Do we just need to accept the world as it is or is there something we can do about it, or do we just need to get better at engaging with the world on the terms we are offered rather than the terms we might prefer?

There are options but I think you have to decide what kind of approach you are going to take when thinking about them and it takes time to get to grips with the complexity of it all. It will always be easier to do the easy thing and, as long as you go for that option, the what’s possible will stay invisible.

As I work on the content for this Community book project I have to say it’s quite hard. It takes longer to think through what’s going on and write words than if I took a faster and less involved approach.

For example, if I look at my social media feeds, the business related ones anyway, there’s a lot of stuff out there. Is it worth trying to think about what it is, whether there are categories of material or do you just take what’s there as it is. Why would you engage with a piece of content? Well, because it interests you, it’s newsworthy or useful. Or you were sucked into clicking on it because it seemed interesting but when you looked at the detail it was simply clickbait. Or its content that you want to share with others who you think might find it interesting.

Do we think that there are real communities building on social media or are we seeing something artificial, something that looks like the real thing but that is in fact carefully manipulated to give us an impression of togetherness? For example, I hadn’t quite realized that the main social media platforms regularly refresh the content you see on your feed. You could argue that this means you get more content put in front of you. At the same time it makes you feel like the platform is active and new content is being put out there all the time so if you aren’t checking it you’re missing out.

I’ve recently joined an alternative social media platform called Fosstodon, my handle is @ksuresh if you want to connect. This article is an introduction to how it works and it’s the one that pointed out the value of just having stuff ordered chronologically. This means you can look at what’s new and then get on with whatever you’re doing rather than constantly refreshing your screen to see if anything new has turned up when in fact it’s just the algorithm faking it to make it seem that way.

What this seems to lead into is the concept of socialization. You aren’t born knowing what a community is and how to function in there. Your community teaches you what normal looks like and you accept it. In fact, you never really ask questions about it because you don’t have to, it’s like fish wondering about water. We take it for granted that there’s a way to be, a way to search the Internet, a way be social and we take the easy routes, the ones that pop up. So most people will use Google to search and Facebook to keep track of their friends, and Twitter for whatever Twitter does and WhatsApp for private group discussions and YouTube for media and that’s that. That’s what we’ve been socialized into doing just by dint of the fact that these are the biggest, wealthiest, noisiest platforms around and if we’re not on there we feel like we’re missing out and when we get in there we find that there isn’t much space left for us.

Of course, that isn’t the case. There’s always room for you as long as you have resources or a plan and really want to get famous. For example Derek Sivers came up with a set of directives and one of them had to do with getting rich, because it’s much easier to become famous when you’re already rich. His argument is that people only value stuff that they pay for and so you might as well make money because if you’re making money] then that’s proof that you’re being useful.

Now, there’s a lot packed into those statements and I need to unpick some elements. If you’re doing something useful then people will be willing to pay for it. Enough people at least to make it viable. You might have a whole lot of users and only a small percentage may find what you’re doing useful enough to sponsor your work but ideally your project should at least break even. If it doesn’t, if you’re losing money on the idea then it’s destroying value and that’s a bad thing. Your time is worth something and if you’re spending all of it for free reading other people’s marketing material then you should be getting paid or getting value of some kind.

Ideally, whatever you’re doing should make a lot of money. I recently read that the Raspberry PI Foundation, which has just come up with a brilliant Christmas present, is the fastest growing computer company in the UK. It’s also a charity. Red Hat Linux was bought by IBM for 34 billion. The privacy focused search engine DuckDuckGo has gone from nothing to 2 billion searches a month, nothing compared to the big competitor that does over 100 million searches. And then when the money you’ve made exceeds what you need to run the business and pay people well you’d use the rest to make things better. And that’s what some of these businesses do.

All this is of course very marginal, really on the edges of the huge business that is business. What you see are ultra-wealthy individuals on social media, the new billionaires with hundreds of millions of followers who promote products and get paid for doing so – they are the ones with the megaphones. That’s business all right but when it comes down to it what exactly are you looking at when you see products being promoted in an entertaining way? It’s marketing, it’s entertainment. Is it community?

What differentiates marketing content that aims to build a community from any other kind of community? Are you not being brought together by your shared love for the thing that’s being promoted? If you had an actor or a singer who had a wide fan base because of their work, then wouldn’t you call that group a community? How different is that kind of system where you have one person who is the figurehead, the center of attention, from a religions community?

It’s hard to tell a “real” community from a “fake” one by just looking at what they look like. From the outside they share the root elements, the thing in common, the shared passion. So perhaps we have to look at outcomes. Social media platforms can be seen as spaces for communities to form, not as moderators or supporters of one community over any other. Of course, their rules help communities live or die, grow or vanish because they control visibility, the algorithms control what is seen and visibility is oxygen for communities. That’s no different from the responsibilities of a government, that has to decide what kind of rules its citizens want to live with. The platforms are not neutral even though they would like to be and that means they will increasingly be forced to behave in ways where they use their power to set rules responsibly. And they may need to balance the need to be fair with what is popular. If the last few years have taught us anything it is that if you allow people to lie without challenge then people will believe them and the world will be a worse place for it.

We can perhaps only tell what a good community is by the things that it does. Network marketing businesses, for example, are really in the business of growing members not selling products. That model is a sham, a few people make all the money, not from what they sell but from all the membership sales they make to new members who will never see the kinds of returns that are being promised. And there are other models branded as “community” that are based on coercion and control – many political movements among them.

So where are we with this so far?

I have to admit that I’m a little daunted taking on this project. Sivers writes about his experiment with daily writing and found he didn’t like it. It meant he was publishing stuff that wasn’t ready to be read. He felt he had promised to only put material out there that was worth reading. On the other hand I have been writing daily (apart from holidays) for 915 days and much of this material is not worth you reading all the way through, it’s work in progress, research notes, the kind of material that I can draw on to eventually make sense of something.

I don’t think the community point is as easy as saying do X, Y and Z on these platforms and you will end up rich and famous. It’s more complex than that, more nuanced. And I don’t think it’s going to be in a form where I have clear conclusions in each post. In fact, each post may be a confused mix of angst and second guessing as I work out what I think about this topic. Somewhere in all this material may be a nugget of something that is useful

Fair warning then, these posts may not be worth your time. I’m still going to keep writing them, however, because they’re worth mine.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Posted on

Does Your Community Have The Ability To Communicate?

anyone-out-there.png

Monday, 5.38am

Sheffield, U.K.

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. – Carl Gustav Jung

I am working on a book project on Community and thought I would take the opportunity to explore what life would look like without Google, without the big search engines that make life so easy, helping us find information, media or directions. Where would you begin and would we be able to function at all? Do we still remember things? Do you have any phone numbers committed to memory? When was the last time you used a paper map? And where would you turn to find anything at all?

Asking a friend

It’s so easy to find information now that it’s a little hard to picture what you would do without being able to search. You’d probably start by calling someone you knew who might know something about the matter. Or, before that picking up a book on the topic.

I thought I’d approach this first from a technical point of view, as there are topics on which I need to find information that are quite specific and have been around for a while. For example, if you want to use free/libre software there are certain patterns you will see about the way a community is formed around those topics.

Take GNU troff (groff), for example. Many people will never have heard of the idea of typesetting. We’re used to working in a word processor or using an office app that shows us what our final document will look like at the same time as we edit the content. The typesetting process is very different with formatting codes interspersed to tell the software how to put together the final output for display or print. An example of this that everyone is familiar with is a web page, where the source for the page is written with formatting codes that tell the browser what a heading is and what a paragraph is and then the browser displays the page using bigger fonts and layouts as appropriate.

If you look at the groff webpage you will see that there is an introduction, a document that explains the mission of the project and information on where you can download the software. What’s also really important is the documentation, which you can get installed with the software or find online. The last two key elements are the mailing list and the bug reports tracker.

If you couldn’t search for exactly what you wanted these pages give you an entry point into a world of information about this topic. The mailing list archives are especially important because they let you ask questions. There is an etiquette around the use of these tools. You’re expected to read the manuals and then check the archives to see if your question has been answered. Then you can ask your own questions. You can answer questions if you think you know the answer, engage in conversations and even have long disagreements on points that you feel are important.

It’s no different from real life, except that it’s captured using technology so you can look back over time and learn from what’s there as well. These communities that form around a piece of software, something they use and have a common interest in, are the ones that sustain and develop and improve the tool itself, first for themselves, but then as a result for the rest of us as well.

The technology has changed over time

Web pages and mailing lists are the features of a particular kind of approach to community building, one that emerged in the early days of the web, when email was the new killer app. What’s interesting is that those systems have survived for decades now and will most likely carry on for as long as there is interest in the tools that the members use and as long as there are ways in which new users can enter the conversation and there is a way to share responsibility and develop a succession of users who will help to maintain the project and the community.

It might seem like these groups are part of history now, but it’s quite possible that they will outlast many newer groups. For example, how many communities online have you joined in the last decade? Social networking sites, for example, allow you to join in many interest groups, administered by the people who set them up. On LinkedIn, for example, I have joined over 50 groups, most of which have very little activity. At first glance this seems to be because much of what is on there is either people introducing or promoting themselves or that the conversations that are started aren’t really all that interesting. Or perhaps they are, but it’s just that they are in the wrong medium.

For example, if you just want to have a chat, a natter, pass the time, then some networks are going to be better than others. Instant messaging is a better choice if you can’t meet face to face, whether it’s using a text message or an app that allows group messaging. The ancestor of these systems was Internet Relay Chat (IRC), which is hard to use and is falling out of fashion although there will always be adherents. Over the last couple of decades we’ve moved from group emails to seeing the emergence of Facebook and Twitter and then increasing fatigue and distrust as these platforms are hijacked by advertisers or manipulated by people who want to influence how you think about things.

In recent years people have begun to miss the experience of face to face contact and so meetup websites have sprung up that, in the midst of a pandemic, have let to a number of video conferencing sessions, where you can meet people as you would at a social event. The fact is that the need for connection is deep and real within people and technology facilitates that in different ways.

What seems to happen is that communities build around a shared interest and they use processes and technology to connect and stay in contact. In some cases they are sustained and grow. In other cases they wither for lack of interest and fade away. At intervals, the technology moves on, and some communities make the shift to a new mode of communication while others stick with the tried and trusted.

What’s the purpose?

What we need to do is explore the connection between our need to communicate and the medium we use to communicate in a little more detail. I’m starting to see these words connecting together as I write and think about this topic. Community is about having something in *comm*on, but its also about *comm*unication and about being *comm*itted. Maybe there’s a model that will emerge from this exercise and there’s a reason why those words have all emerged around this structure.

I was going to talk about how a community might develop in this post, but I think there is an alleyway here that I should explore. What is it about conversations that work or don’t work on platforms? There’s usually a power law in play, where some things get all the attention and others get hardly any at all. So perhaps we’ll explore that tomorrow, what kind of conversations are happening and are there any patterns to what we can see.

Until then,

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Posted on

Is It Possible To Take Back Control Of Our Own Minds?

corporation-vs-peers.png

Sunday, 7.06am

Sheffield, U.K.

It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored. – David Levithan, Every Day

I am starting to realize that for a decade or more I have steadily given away control of my own mind, surrendered my ability to think to a host of corporations that have skillfully made it easier and easier for me to retain nothing and depend on them for everything. I’d like to end that dependence, wean myself off, extract myself from their cloying embrace. But how can I do it, is it even possible and where do I start?

For most people this would be impossible. The technology we use has turned us into cyborgs, with smartphones grafted to our palms that connect us to the greater network, the organizations that feed us all we know. And it feels like a lot, it is a lot, because our brains have a limited capacity to process incoming information and the more bandwidth these organizations use up the less we have to think for ourselves until we eventually just give up.

Think I’m making too much of this? Well, for starters, do you still regularly bookmark web pages? Do you record interesting content in your own files with a reference to where you found it. Do you still keep any version of a commonplace book? I feel like I’ve done less and less of that as the years have gone on. I’ve abandoned the practice of having a memory and relied instead on being able to search and find what I want. And it has worked, but is it good?

What makes you viable?

This talk by Lara Boyd, which you can skim with the transcript here tells us that the brain lays down chemical tracks over time, as you build your memory, building and reinforcing the network that holds what you know. The Internet has a similar feel to it, with individuals creating pages and those pages being read and linked to and built on, until you have a corpus of material that is ever increasing but also decreasing as sites come to the end of their lives and fall away. Imagine for a minute, that network as a universe of shimmering strands, lit up, twinkling in the darkness of the night sky, like a galaxy slowly turning, everything you know and have learned over the decades of your lifetime.

Look at it again now, through the lens of a search engine, your access to that network moderated through a small box in a web page. Everything you see is not filtered and funneled through that box. The lights aren’t there any more, you have no idea of what exists. You just know that when you want you will be directed to the portion of the network that is deemed to be best for you. It will be convenient, it will be easy, it will almost always be right. But you will no longer be able to see the full picture, the night sky will, for you, be entirely dark.

When someone has their hands around your neck they control whether you get air or not, whether you live or die and the search engines that we use are making decisions on which people and organizations live or die, because they provide the traffic and visibility that is oxygen to a digital network. And it doesn’t take long to realize that isn’t a viable way to be. But is there any other way, what else can you do?

An experiment in liberation

It feels to me that having a choice is an important thing. There’s no point just giving up and seeing the world as it is. What can we do to take back some control – over our own lives and our thoughts. How do we break free from the embrace of the godlike creatures that have taken over our world?

It starts with community. You can’t do it on your own, you need others who think like you, who have the ability and competence to help and guide you, who build the tools to set you free so that you can continue to help to create a place to be. And let’s start with search, because the first thing you need to get started in the darkness is a light.

Imagine, for a minute, that you’re stood in a great city. The roads are full of people, the buildings are vast and high and gleaming. Everyone looks happy and healthy and content and are rushing about doing whatever they need to do. Looking down, you spot a grate and tug it open. You see an opening below and drop into the darkness. You’re under the city now, in the catacombs, and you don’t know where to go. Where can you find a light?

Peer to peer search engines

As I explore this world I’m going to avoid using the big search engines, the ones you all know. Instead, let’s start with a little help from our friends. YaCy is a search engine with a difference. Instead of a centralized search engine like the ones you are used to this is a peer-to-peer search engine, where your computer joins others in indexing and retrieving web pages. You can download and install it and then start to use it for searches. You won’t get the same results are you will using Google; as the documentation explains “YaCy will provide different and better results than Google, since it can be adapted to the user’s own preferences and is not influenced by commercial aspects.” I don’t know about the better, that’s probably not true and won’t be for a while. But it is different and it based around your preferences and it won’t sell to you.

Think of it as a match that you light in the darkness. It’s not the powerful torch that the commercial search engines are, but it works, it’s in your pocket and you can get started with it.

Finding shelter

The next thing you will do as you wander through the dark corridors, illuminated just by your flickering match, is come across rooms, some of which have people and perhaps even have light and warmth. These spaces have life and conversation and laughter, a place where you can stop and talk to others and see if you get on.

Let’s look at the website of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). What are the things that jump out at you? The FSF has a mission, to defend the rights of all software users. It uses only free software to do its work. It sponsors the GNU project, which provides free software. And then they have the LibrePlanet community, a space for you to join and engage with other individuals.

All this is made possible through the use of technology, some of which you may have forgotten existed. For example, in the days before the search engines there were things like forums and internet relay chat. I remember using them in 1998/99, which is a long time ago now. They still exist, you can join them now. Of course, if you don’t want to go through the bother of that and prefer social networking sites, those exist too. For example Fosstodon is an alternative social media platform that has an open license.

So, we have shelter and chat. This is a little like Maslow’s hierarchy for community building. Perhaps that’s a model worth building on as we explore what it takes to form a community, whether it’s offline or online. What are the equivalents for a group that are trying to come together. I did a similar analysis for businesses some time back so perhaps in the next post I build on this idea and see where it takes us.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Posted on

Introduction To A Community That Protects Your Freedom To Use Computers

free-as-in-freedom.png

Saturday, 6.24am

Sheffield, U.K.

The free software movement is one of the most successful social movements to arise from computing culture, driven by a worldwide community of ethical programmers dedicated to the cause of freedom and sharing. But the ultimate success of the free software movement depends upon teaching our friends, neighbors and work colleagues about the danger of not having software freedom, about the danger of a society losing control over its computing. – Free Software Foundation

I’m trying to remember when I first tried out free software. Did I do it because it was free, as in it cost nothing? Was that all there was to it? Or was there something deeper, a pull that went beyond the basic issues of a computer and convenience to the core of what it means to be able to be free rather than have free stuff.

For many people these issues may seem irrelevant. After all, think about every computing service you use. It’s all free, isn’t it? Yes you pay for hardware, your laptop, your phone, your tablet, but then pretty much everything you use costs nothing or it’s a subscription, something you pay as long as you use that service. It’s free, it’s easy and that’s all there is to it surely? Or is it?

The Right to Read

In 1997 Richard Stallman published a fictional article called “The Right to Read”. It projected a future where you weren’t allowed to read anything unless you agreed to be monitored and followed the rules set by those in power, typically governments, corporations and institutions.

Think about this for a minute. It seems farfetched. Is there anything you do today that doesn’t require you to agree to be monitored? For example, I wanted to use the word “dystopian” to describe Stallman’s article. But I wasn’t sure about the meaning. Now, quick, how would you check what it meant?

Perhaps you are one of those people that still have a physical dictionary on your desk. I do have one, but it’s currently in the loft, behind piles of things that need sorting out. So, no help there. How would you check the meaning of that word without agreeing to be monitored in one way or another? Google it? Of course you could, but you’re going to be tracked and you’ve had to sign up to an agreement to use their site anyway. If you don’t use Google, perhaps there is a different search engine, like DuckDuckGo, which protects your privacy, that will lead you to an online dictionary, one that will have its own conditions that you have to agree to in order to access its content.

Well, you argue, that’s no bad thing. At the end of the day you can find out the meaning of the word you’re looking for and having to agree to follow the rules is a small price to pay for the ease and convenience of being able to search for something and find it instantly. It’s easy and convenient and like air and light and electricity you only notice how important it is when you haven’t got access to it any more.

Now, that won’t happen, will it? But if you imagine the worst possible situation that could happen, well, that’s dystopian. And I found out what that means by installing a piece of software called dico that asked a dictionary server what it meant. I still had to agree to the terms of the software before using it but the one difference is that the terms are ones that protect my freedoms, not terms that take it away. There is a community out there, founded by Richard Stallman, that operates with a set of principles that will protect your freedom to use computers and read, a community called the Free Software Foundation. One that supports almost all of the tools I use for my own work, and one that I should probably do a lot more to support. But why?

The pen and the sword

As you know I’m trying to work through a book project here, and I’m finding this one a lot harder already than the first two, mainly because it’s hard to work out what you can and can’t do, what’s right and wrong and if it’s right or wrong.

For example, I am writing these words in a text editor on a Linux computer. I can keep doing what I do if the Internet is turned off, I don’t need to sign into Microsoft or Google or Apple or any of the other big corporations that provide computing services to the vast majority of people. I’m writing in plain text, a format that will last as long as computers last. I’m also using a terminal, a command line. It’s black and white, no mouse involved. The technological experience is decades old, not that far removed from a typewriter with a few improvements. So, why do I use this approach to create text, why not just use a word processor, an online tool, something easy and convenient?

There are two reasons for this. The first is practical, the tools I use are better for a whole host of reasons. They don’t try and tell me what to do, correct grammar or spelling or suggest different ways of doing things. They let me get on with my work. The second is more important, and has to do with my freedom to write and say what I think because in this world of ours your ability to document your thoughts is the way in which you protect your freedoms.

The United States is perhaps the preeminent example of this, a nation state founded on a document, a Constitution. Of course, you can point to the Magna Carta as the ancestor of it all. I would also argue that the Indian constitution, which gave 300 million people their freedom, had the largest impact of any single document in history. These political documents mattered, they were a contract that set out the rights of people and those rights still need defending even today.

How do you defend your rights? With words, of course. And so the tools you use to write your words are just as important as any other tools you use to defend your freedom. Once upon a time you would have reached for a weapon; in many parts of the world that’s still a first recourse. But for more and more of us these days you reach for your computer and start writing your message of hope. History teaches us that words have power and if someone has power over your ability to create words then they have power over you.

I have a deep, visceral need to be free to write and the Free Software Foundation’s mission is one that I can sign up to. It’s a community with which I share values and ideals. So, while I might use non-free software if I am working for others on their systems I will use free software to do the things that matters to me.

Exploring the model

Now that I’ve got that out of the way, hopefully you understand that people can have points of view about things that you didn’t even realize were an issue. And before you write me off for that, what you should notice is that you and the people around you will their own causes, the things that they find important and that they want to defend, whether it’s the right to bear arms or their religions beliefs or an activist movement looking to stop climate change.

What I’d like to do tomorrow is carry on with the Free Software Foundation. Today has been about its mission and why I think it’s important. Tomorrow, let’s look at how it operates in practice and see if there are elements there that we can identify and see how the various parts are working.

Posted on

What Is It That Makes A Community A Community?

noahs-ark.png

Friday, 6.36am

Sheffield, U.K.

There is but one Church in which men find salvation, just as outside the ark of Noah it was not possible for anyone to be saved. – Thomas Aquinas

If you had to build an ark and save all that was important, but only had a certain amount of space, who and what would you take with you?

Your immediate family is probably an easy choice. Your parents? Grandchildren? Animals? If you were required to. How about extended family? Neighbors? People from further down the street? From the next village?

Noah’s ark is an apt image for the rushed construction of a community, a bringing together of people and creatures that would not normally be together. The have to live together for a while, follow rules and try and survive the flood that washes over them. And when it’s all done they disperse across the world when released from the walls of their boat.

The single, overriding characteristic of the ark metaphor is that there are two places to be inside the ark or outside it. If you’re inside, you’re safe. If you’re outside, you don’t matter.

inside-outside.png

The origin of the word community lies in the concept of having something in common with others, where you are, perhaps, what you have, what you care about, or how you think about things. You can be born into a community or join it, with or without a choice in the matter. You experience can be good or bad, pleasurable or horrifying. There is nothing that says a community has to be good or right or fair. All that needs to happen for a community to exist is that its members have something in common with each other.

But what we’re interested in is precisely those value judgments that help us understand what good community is and what bad community is and how to tell the difference. There are communities everywhere we look, thriving ones and struggling ones. You have communities that have endured over centuries and others that come together for an evening. What is it that makes communities viable and productive and how do you tell the difference between one that looks wealthy and prosperous on the outside but is rotting away on the inside and one that is struggling to survive but that contains the essential elements that will help it live, if it can just survive the flood washing over it right now.

The thing about community, then, is that its essential quality is dynamism, renewal and rebirth. It is alive. Unless it’s not, in which case it’s no longer a community. It’s a memory, consigned to history. It’s difficult not to think about a community as an organism, as a living thing. And living things can be vital and healthy or sick and diseased. At the same time, if one that looks at communities from a social point of view rather than a biological or economic one, which makes no judgment other than suggesting the fittest survive, then should we try and ensure all communities survive, even “bad” ones?

So far, all we have are questions and perhaps we need to set some ground rules before we explore too much further. The purpose of this book is to help us engage with the world around us in a way that is “good”. But what does that mean? It’s very hard to define good. Sometimes it’s easier to start with what we think of as bad. But it always comes down to a point of view. For example, is an influencer who reaches millions of people and tells them how to live doing a good thing or a bad thing? It depends on your point of view, and some people will see what’s going on as empowering and others will see the same thing as degrading or controlling. When you look at the world out there what should you aspire to be? What are the images most of us see, how does that influence the aspirations we have and what is the reality we are likely to face? Are there fundamental principles that can help explain what goes on in the situations we see out there.

As someone who runs a business or is a creative professional do you have a right to a living wage or do you have to fit into the way the world works? Is there room for individual freedom and self expression or do you have to comply with the prevailing view or be punished for stepping out? After all, you can’t always rely on a god to come along and help you. Sometimes you have to help yourself. But how should you go about doing that?

It’s not easy finding a place to stand and start thinking about these things. Should we look at the research and try and understand what academics mean when they use big words and design research studies and write papers hidden behind paywalls? Or should we look at the material that’s out there. Should we look at specific examples of how people did what they did or is that a waste of time. After all, you hear about someone because they’re famous. But are they famous for being well known or is there something they did that, if you do it too, you can also be famous? Every time. Or should we create models of how things might work and test them on our own lives?

I think perhaps we need to start with ourselves. We all know how we live, what we’ve experienced and how we approach the world. We’re less aware of how others do this and it’s easy to make the mistake of thinking that it’s all down to them. We often excuse our mistakes because we see all the factors that led to the decisions we made but with others it’s very tempting to see it as down to individual choices.

And maybe what I do need to do is start with an example, a community without which I wouldn’t be able to do anything that I do right now. A community with which I should really engage a lot more because of all that I have received from it. A community that is perhaps the exact opposite of the ark, where the purpose is not to save those who deserve to, or who can afford to be saved but to give each person the freedom they ought to have. One that follows a model that looks a little more like this.

inside-outside-permeable.png

But, to be fair, you could argue it either way, as always.

But I’ll start with that tomorrow.

Cheers, Karthik Suresh

Posted on

Introduction To My Third Book Project – Community

shared-community.png

Thursday, 6.57am

Sheffield, U.K.

The future of every community lies in capturing the passion, imagination, and resources of its people. – Ernesto Sirolli

Yesterday I wrapped up my last book project, Listen, and today I start a new one.

Over the next sixty to ninety days I will work on the draft of a book a blog post at a time, following a rough outline but also feeling free to follow trails wherever they may lead.

Before we begin

I want to make life a little easier for myself – the one thing I am not a fan of is hard work. Or, more precisely, unnecessary rework.

For example, I have written several blog posts in the way that I thought they ought to be written – a sentence at a time. I’m not sure where that rule came from or whether it actually makes it easier for you to read. It might make it easier to write in a conversational style but easy writing does not necessarily make for easy reading. Where it causes a problem for me is that these disconnected sentences eventually need to be pulled together into paragraphs – a repetitive and unpleasant task. Maybe a task that should have been done right the first time?

So, I’m going to try an experiment with this set of posts. Instead of standalone lines which I then need to sort into paragraphs, I’ll try writing in paragraphs from the start. I’ll also work on sectioning and structure as I go along. All of which means, hopefully, that editing will be easier and I won’t need to do major structural work and can focus on finish and snagging instead.

But I’ll save my one sentence bits for the inevitable angst and introspection that accompanies work like this – but using a method of literate writing I can comment them out later and you won’t see them in the final draft.

But enough of this, let’s introduce the project.

Community

In my first project I explored the idea of getting started, which I think I will eventually title “Start”, and then, in the second project, the idea of listening in “Listen”. Both projects are loosely anchored in the practical world of business and personal development, aiming to help you work through making something of yourself and become a useful, productive force. The first book helps you work out who you are and what you have to offer. The second book helps you listen to the world around you and understand what they need.

My third book project is going to be called “Community” and, in these posts, I am going to explore the idea of what it means to engage with the world around you. Think of it as part marketing and part anthropology; I’m going to borrow models from management, social science and biology and take a critical look at some of the prevailing ideas, beliefs and fads around us today. In the same vein as my first two projects I’m not aiming to find “truth” in an objective, scientific way. Instead, I’m trying to develop conceptual models, making ways of thinking visible, so that you can see the argument for yourself and work out what you think, whether you like it or not and how you can try it out for yourself.

Why do we need a book like this?

We live in a world where we swim in information, with chattering voices chattering away telling us how they think we should think. In such a world you have structures, hierarchies, networks, communities – features of the landscape being created in our collective minds. If you look at this collective landscape you’ll see every shade of opinion, from people who differ on questions of politics, of social justice, on the environment. People are different and they believe in different things.

So what brings them together? Is it a shared belief in something, do they have a common passion, something at the centre that they all share? Do they coalesce around a charismatic leader, the “cult of personality”? Or is it about shared institutions, social spaces they once occupied and the virtual spaces now being created to house everyone in their own safe space?

I’d like to explore these ideas and see what kind of models explain the world out there and how we can fit into it. How do we create our own communities or join existing ones. Is the idea of community changing? How do our jobs and allegiances to employers work in this new world? Is there a difference if you own a business that does knowledge work and one that is in the traditional businesses that create wealth? I don’t know where this is going to go but I know I want to find out because I need to know if we live in a world that is going to be worth engaging and participating in, one where we can make a difference, or whether we should just find a quiet corner and get on with the knitting.

The structure of the book

I don’t quite have a structure yet but I suppose it will need to have a beginning, a middle and an end.

In the beginning I should look at what we think about when we look at the word “Community” and explore its origins and the forms in which we see it. We should also try and look at the underlying structures that support community and make each one viable or unstable.

Then I think we should look at how we engage with communities, what it means to participate and contribute and how we can do that in a way that is balanced, where we give and get. Or perhaps it needs to be unbalanced, perhaps you first need to give without any requirement to get, and eventually it will all work out. I don’t know, let’s see where that takes us.

Then we should close by looking at how to create a community, what we must do to build and secure a group of individuals who want to make a difference in whatever way they see best. We should probably look at what happens when groups go bad, and what you can do in that situation. Do you keep your head down and try to survive or do you speak up and risk everything? What does bad look like, what does good look like, and what does right look like, for you.

And we’re off

I should point out that I am not an expert writing from the point of view of an expert. These are subjects that I have thought about but I still have everything to learn and these writing projects are as much about teaching myself as presenting the ideas to you. As a result, if you take the trouble to read this and find there are ideas that are wrong or believe there are ideas that are better please let me know and I will consider them. I’m not writing to a market or for a publisher or for money. I’m writing because it’s what I want to do and I know that the only way to get better is to write. And read, and think, and revise, and all the other things that go into any project.

I hope you find some of these ideas interesting and perhaps even useful.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Posted on

Learning From My Second Book Project

listen-retrospective.png

Wednesday, 6.36am

Sheffield, U.K.

The first draft is just you telling yourself the story. – Terry Pratchett

Let me tell you a little bit about myself and what I am doing with this blog.

I have always wanted to write and I think if I were given the choice again I would choose to do something that involved writing and history and drawing as early as possible.

As it turned out I studied engineering instead and, while I learned little to nothing in school, I suppose I learned enough about computers to be useful and entered the world of work and made a living and learned about business and picked up some useful skills.

But there’s always been this hole, this thing nagging at me saying that I’m not really doing something that I want to do.

My first response to that was to go back to school to study business – and what I ended up being really interested in was how the theory I was learning in class could be used to explain the experiences I had during my first decade of working.

You see, most of the time we think that what we learn at university is going to help us do something in the future.

But there are two kinds of learning at least.

The first is learning how to do something – change a tap washer, use an application, make the bed.

The second type of learning is why we do something – why washers exist, who needs the application, what’s the difference between a blanket and a duvet.

In a sense, you can only do the second type of learning after you have spent some time doing the first.

It’s like going across a land with a guide or a group.

Initially, you look at what’s around you and start to pick up knowledge about the terrain and what look like easier ways to go.

Eventually, once you’ve done the entire route and then perhaps done a few other routes you come across a map of the land or perhaps draw your own.

That’s what going back to school did for me – the theory I learned was like a map that helped explain the experiences I had – the “aha” moments where I realized that a situation panned out the way it did because of these factors.

All this can be summed up in Kierkegaard’s pithy line “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

20 years after I left school, more or less, I decided that I wanted to write again.

But I also knew I wasn’t ready, I hadn’t done the apprenticeship necessary and really was starting from the beginning, going back a score of years.

I figured it would take ten years and I would need to write a million words before I started to do anything that was any good.

So I started.

After all, the best time to start is ten years ago.

The second best time is now.

And you know, time does go by and things happen if you do them one day at a time.

Let’s look at the statistics.

The first post on this blog was on 26 December 2016 and I thought I would write about my professional work.

From December 2016 to June 2017 I wrote sporadically, a few posts a month.

Then, in June 2017 I thought about setting the 10 year, 1 million word targets and decided to try and write every day.

Now, what counts as a million words?

I write in a two stage process.

First, I do a little freewriting, a few paragraphs of warming up just to get my fingers moving and the initial crud out of my brain.

And then I write about the topic – with a vague idea in mind and then starting at the first sentence and seeing where things go.

Let’s say that the words that count are the ones that are published, the ones that make their way onto the blog.

That total stands at 909 posts and 642,554 words.

So, three and a half years later I’m nearly two-thirds of the way there.

A point I think I’d make from this is that there are no shortcuts to skill, you have to take the time to do the work.

When I first started writing I was stiff, pedantic, trying to lecture and appear knowledgeable.

It took time just writing to relax and start to find a voice, get to a point where I could speak without feeling that I was trying to prove something or had to meet certain standards.

And that took years, not days, not months.

You can’t go to a course and learn how to do this, you have to do the work and then the work will change who you are.

After several hundred posts on individual topics I finally started, earlier this year, to try and focus on a subject at a time and try to build up content that might work as a book.

You find me now in the middle of that experiment – just finishing off the second book draft.

In 49 posts I have written just under 60,000 words.

My writing rate has crept up from under 500 words a post in 2017 to nearly 1,000 words a post now – which is a lot to read and I apologize to anyone who would like to read this stuff and finds it too long.

A friend once suggested that I should keep things short and another friend’s eyes just bounced off this wall of text and the look of polite boredom he gave me was interesting.

But here’s the thing – I’m not writing for anyone else.

I’m writing because I want to write, I need to write, and if what I write is useful to you then that’s a huge bonus but it doesn’t really matter whether anyone reads any of this or not – because it’s about the practice, about the work, about the experience of doing something that is, for me, worth doing.

So, about this book then.

Here’s how I write. I’m going to go over this briefly just to work through the process myself and perhaps I’ll be able to explain it better later if anyone wants more detail.

I spent some time cutting up used A4 sheets into A6, creating a pile of slips of paper with a blank side – a little like index cards.

When I start a book project, I begin with a title idea and start scribbling down questions and content ideas, one to a slip.

In an hour or so I can come up with 20-40 slips.

Then I take a break.

Then, I take the slips and sort them into three piles, ones that look like they should be in the beginning, the middle and the end.

A three part model – I’m going to try a five part with the next project actually.

Then I take the smaller stack in each pile and go through the slips, comparing each one with the others and putting them in an order that seems to flow.

When I’m finished I have an outline, something that can guide the next 40-60 days of posts – and I know now from the first two projects that I will end up with 45,000 to 70,000 words, ideally closer to 70,000 which I can then cut back to a book length.

Each evening I look at a slip and think about the kind of image that will capture the essence of what I’m trying to say and draw that.

In the morning I aim to get up at 5am and write until 6.30, doing any research that’s necessary to write the post.

Because I’ve now done this eight hundred and eighty two times so far I know that I can do it again today and tomorrow and the day after.

As an aside, I do all my writing in a text editor, ed for normal writing, emacs for the blog post because it has org2blog and that makes it much easier to send stuff to WordPress.

Write. Publish. Done.

Except I’m not.

I have to edit the stuff, the tens of thousands of words that I’ve created the first time around.

And that’s hard, very hard.

And I don’t like hard, I like to make things easy for myself – and so I have been trying to work through how to do that.

One thing is to write some small programs that help me reduce the complexity – if there is any interest in this I’ll write about it in more detail another day.

But it effectively lets me do the kinds of things I suppose you would use apps like Scrivener to do but in a console using an approach that was cutting edge forty years ago.

But it’s fast and works for me and will work for the next forty years without needing a subscription or upgrade, so that’s that.

Editing is @!%&$ hard and it’s because you need to think about the big picture and the detailed words as you go along, see if the bits fit together and if they work.

I haven’t solved this problem yet but I have a few ideas that come from my programming experience.

The first issue is that when you write a blog post, you tend to write in sentences, in bursts of words.

But you have to join these together in a book in paragraphs or it doesn’t look right – what works in a web browser looks rubbish in a book.

So I have to glue the sentences together and make them work in that larger chunk.

Then I have to glue the paragraphs together so they make sense in sections and chapters and so on.

And around each chunk is the meta-stuff – why is something here and why isn’t it there.

Now, one way around that is to use a literate programming approach where you weave comments and code into the same file.

In the case of a book you’d weave the editing comments and the book content together, something like this. 

@
Write about a bear in this section.

@c
A bear is different from a fish
in more ways than I can explain.

And then I’d extract just the book part for the publication – which is pretty trivial to do if you know your way around a terminal and some basic scripting.

Not that easy if you use Microsoft or an app or anything like that though, so it’s not for everyone.

I’m getting a little ahead of myself now, going past where I am with the writing to what happens next – which is fine and something I can do but let’s talk about that when I’ve done it.

Coming back to now.

The thing with doing anything is that you have to do it first before you can do it better.

A little more planning does help – my slips and piles of paper have helped me go from thinking about a post on a day to day basis to thinking of a collection of posts that could go into a book.

It makes the writing harder because you are constantly referring to the previous and next one and it probably makes reading it more confusing as well on the blog, which is not a good thing.

So, perhaps one improvement is to try and still write in self-contained post packets but keep in mind that you have to glue them together later.

Inside a post, however, rather than writing a sentence at a time it’s worth thinking about how each sentence relates to the one before and after – planning for the paragraphing that’s going to happen later.

If you’ve made it this far then here are some suggestions – as much for me as for you.

The planning at the beginning helps.

Keep it loose, the nice thing about slips of paper is that you can add new bits and rearrange as you go along if you need to.

Think in terms of structure and break up your piles of slips – it’s much easier to compare 10 slips that all look like they’re in the beginning than 30 slips that make up the whole book.

Now… I could talk about research and how I’m doing that but I won’t because this is long enough and I should start on my next project – the next book, which I’ll talk about tomorrow and get myself motivated to edit the first two before they overwhelm me.

But here’s the thing.

I’m still learning and practicing – working towards the million and all this is just what needs to be done on the way to keep moving forward.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Posted on

Do You Know Why You Are Doing What You’re Doing?

quick-sketch.png

Tuesday, 6.08am

Sheffield, U.K.

The whole point is to live life and be – to use all the colors in the crayon box. – RuPaul

Many years ago, in another life, I used to teach dance.

You wouldn’t think it to look at me now but I was young and it seemed like something that I should learn – and I found that I was very bad so I kept trying and eventually I learned it and then I could dance it and teach it and then when I was done I left it all behind and moved on.

But during those years there was always one thing that puzzled me, one thing that still puzzles me about the way people approach things.

Getting serious about the thing

Why do you think people learn a social dance like Salsa?

If you look at dancers in a club you would be forgiven for thinking that the point is to go into the floor with a partner and then do your thing – break into some fancy moves and really show everyone else how good you are.

That’s what most people did – became really serious about how good they were at the moves.

They got good but they also missed the point of the whole activity.

The point of a social dance is to be social – to have a chat in an environment that allows you to talk to a range of other people.

It’s a place where you can meet a girl or a boy and have a dance and get to know each other – see if you get along.

And who knows where that will lead to?

But you can’t jump straight from not knowing how to do anything to being able to lead or follow around a floor while also talking about your favorite books.

You first need to get good.

Getting good at the thing

For the first six months you’ll be stepping on other people, looking down at your feet, trying to work out what to do with all the seemingly uncontrollable parts of your body.

And then, one day, you’ll start to get it – if you have a good teacher and access to resources and spend time practicing.

All that boring, basic stuff that you have to do to get to the point where you can participate in the first place.

At the same time, if you find it boring and basic then maybe you aren’t doing the right thing – you need something driving you.

Sometimes it’s easier to stick to things you find hard to do than those that are easy but which need you to spend time doing if you want to get better.

I think that’s the price of entry, being able to do something to a certain standard – to the point where you are pretty good at what you do.

And I think you know you’re there when you reach a point where you start to become serious about the thing – and that’s where you need to catch yourself and see if you’re still centered, if you still have a soul.

Why do you do this?

Over the last 47 posts I’ve been working through the content of my Listen book project and I thought I was at the end yesterday.

I’d talked about why listen, how to listen, how to make sense – there is material in there that I can work with and shape.

But I think there is a little bit that I still need to explore – and it has to do with the point of developing listening skills – skills of any kind really.

For example, if you’ve read this blog for a while, you’ll notice that I draw an image to start the post – it’s something that tries to capture the idea I want to get across in the text that comes later.

When it comes to drawing you have many options.

There is the direction of fine art – and I think art is perhaps something that someone presents as an object in itself – something that is an end.

It’s easy to see that with a painting or a drawing – you get that painting and hang it on your wall and it makes you happy.

Somewhere before that are the sketches, the preparatory work, the rough lines, the research.

And before that is the practice, the training, the learning.

Somewhere on the track that connects the rough stuff and the finished art is a branch line that leads away to a place where the stuff I draw helps me do something else.

For example, if you have come across sketchnotes you’ll know that there are some fabulous examples of sketchnote art – where people make really nice looking notes.

But if you really want to learn what those notes show you’ll probably need to create your own – and you can do that with a ball point pen.

You can draw images and create a scene and make something memorable with a few scratched lines – just as memorable as the really arty ones.

Watch children at work – they really get this.

I have one behind me right now, drawing away, seeing through the scratchy lines to the reality behind.

Their reality.

So why do you do what you do?

Making a difference

Somewhere along your journey you’ll realize that what you do makes a difference.

It first makes a difference to you – you get better, more confident, you’re able to produce something of value with the skills you have.

Reading and writing and math and drawing have helped me personally and professionally in ways I could never have imagined in the tedium of the classroom.

I use them in a particular way now – to explore situations with other people and figure out what to do.

And I watch other people do the same in their own way – I try and learn from them and I also try and avoid going down paths that don’t seem right for me.

The path that works for me is the one where what I do makes a difference to other people – where what I am doing is seen as a good thing to do, something that is helpful and valued.

I think the real end to my book project on Listening is to point out that the reason why you listen to someone else is to understand, and the reason you try to understand them is so you can help make a difference.

You can make a difference to one person or to many.

You can make a difference in a community.

And I think understanding community is going to be the next book I start to work on, after perhaps a wind up tomorrow.

Until then,

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Posted on

The Difference Between Talking And Writing And Why It Matters

body-types.png

Monday, 5.38am

Sheffield, U.K.

If you were all alone in the universe with no one to talk to, no one with which to share the beauty of the stars, to laugh with, to touch, what would be your purpose in life? It is other life; it is love, which gives your life meaning. This is harmony. We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge, the joy of growth. – Mitsugi Saotome

I am pretty much at the end of this Listen book project, nearly 60,000 words in the draft to work with.

I’ve also taken ten days off from writing, so I’m coming back to it with a few thoughts, and I need to get those out of the way before moving on.

So, this is part retrospective, part ending, and, in general, inconclusive.

But here goes.

This project has meandered along a little differently from the first project, Getting Started.

I started with a basic structure, a pile of slips of paper, with elements that I thought should go into the draft.

Then, I wrote day by day, picking up a slip and writing and then, some days, following a trail suggested by what came up in that day’s writing.

In that way the draft maps the territory of thought, illuminating spaces as I go along.

There is still uncharted land or water out there but you don’t know what you don’t know until you do.

Now I have a pile of words, the bricks of a structure represented by those slips of paper and I’m not sure what to do next, how to enter the editing process.

And maybe this is because writing has changed and there is something about what we do now that is worth recognizing for what it is.

I recently finished Glut: Mastering information through the ages by Alex Wright and there a few points in there that are relevant for this book project.

The technology we use mediates how we express ourselves

The way you communicate will depend on the technology you use.

Without technology of any kind, what you can do is talk to each other – that’s the essential quality of being human.

Once you start using technology – from the pigments used for cave paintings to what we have today – what you say and how you say it starts to change.

And there have been three great stages in the technology of talking – and by extension, thinking.

The first is writing, which developed from drawing images to represent what we saw to drawing images that represented sounds.

That, it turns out, was an invention of the Phoenicians, from whom we get the concept of the phonetic alphabet, which was enthusiastically developed by the Greeks and led to the way we write today, with characters that represent sounds.

When we wrote in scrolls and books we drew and wrote, with the freedom that comes from being able to wield a pen.

Then came the age of printing and the ascendancy of the printed word.

Images were harder to create in print and so people did what was easy and did everything using words, which became more complex and flowery as they tried to capture word images of what was going on.

And we learned that this was the right way to do things, to write in prose – that was what you got with a classical education and learned arguments were made in print.

And then the Internet and computers came along and we are starting to enter a world where you can use all kinds of media to express yourself, with the freedom of a pen with the mass production of print and the ability to use text and images and audio and video and augmented reality and virtual reality.

But what has all this enabled us to do?

Well, it’s actually brought us closer to being able to talk to each other even if we are far away.

And that is important – it marks a shift from fixed knowledge, fixed in print, to something more dynamic, discovered, co-created, re-created knowledge.

So what we’re increasingly doing is talking to each other through these technologies and that starts to affect how and what we write.

For example, we tend to think of books in that sort of fixed way, as containers of truth.

But, as the amount of information out there increases, no book can capture everything and their function changes from being containers for truth to being containers of useful material culled from the vast mass of stuff around us being produced every day.

And if you want to take things one step further the Internet seems to organise information in much the same way that our brains might do.

Instead of fixed, unchanging information the web has links to information, links that can break and links that build, where you get accretions and build up around some ideas and decay and disuse around others and where the more people think about things the more content they create and, just like a brain laying down chemicals in the brain, we develop a global memory and local communities.

The retrieval system is based around Google and the only problem is that it works on the basis of popularity at the moment – that will probably adapt and change to become more useful over time.

What this means for my projects and the editing process is that the technology I use, this way of writing blog posts to explore a space and then seeing if the content that I create can be encapsulated in a useful book form, is going to mediate the product that emerges and comparing it with existing print based approaches may not be the best way to think about what I’m creating.

Instead, each book is a collection of useful ideas explored with drawings and discussion, presented for the reader’s critical review and considered adoption.

It’s part of the picture, and the test it needs to pass is whether it is useful or not.

Is this useful?

And that brings us to a second line of thinking I’ve discovered in the last ten days.

Much of my writing is about understanding the big picture, the whole system, the requisite variety.

But it turns out that the whole is not necessarily all there is.

There are terms that capture the idea that a part of something can represent the whole of it.

Metonymy is when something is used to represent a related thing, and synecdoche is when a part of something is used to represent the whole of it.

For example, the image above shows the ways in which I have drawn representations of humans in this blog.

Some figures have fewer lines, others more.

Some are static, others dynamic.

None of them are exact representations, but they may be enough to get a point across, to make sense of something.

And that’s the same thing with listening to someone – trying to capture everything they say, record it exactly, does not mean that you’ve understood what they’ve said.

Making sense of things means being able to capture it with a minimum of lines – as much as you need and no more than necessary.

I could spend a lot more time trying to draw realistic figures without creating any more insight than can be found with a stick figure.

And when it comes to listening, the equivalent is capturing the stories people tell you at a level of detail that is sufficient.

All this is imprecise for a reason – the minute you start setting targets for what needs to be done then people focus on hitting the target and miss the point.

When you listen to someone the tools you use are there to help, and the point is for you to see how the person you are talking to sees the world.

In Glut, Wright refers to the work of linguist Walter. J. Ong who looked at the difference between oral and literate cultures – talking to each other versus writing to each other.

When you talk to each other and listen closely what you are doing is building on each other’s thoughts, empathizing with the other’s perspective and diving into the situation and context.

When writing you are stepping back, becoming more analytic and abstract and distancing yourself from the situation to look at the big picture.

And clearly it’s not a choice between one approach and the other.

You have to do both.

And you won’t get better by reading about how to do it.

You need to get some paper and a pen and get busy listening.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Posted on

What Do You Do When You’ve Made Your Best Argument And They Still Don’t Listen?

horse-to-water.png

Thursday, 5.39am

Sheffield, U.K.

A man convinced against his will Is of the same opinion still – Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

You know the old saying about how you can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink?

Most people don’t need what you’re selling.

So, you have to ask yourself two questions.

  1. Are you selling the right thing?
  2. Are you selling the right way?

You can only get the answers to these questions if your prospect is doing most of the talking and you’re doing most of the listening.

And that’s the main point of this Listen book project – to step away from the idea that you need to be a super-extroverted, loud-talking, flashy salesperson to get results.

They might make good characters in films but I have yet to see a flashy salesperson that has actually delivered a worthwhile project.

In my experience, the best closers have been the professionals, the people who know what needs to be done to solve a client’s problem.

Then again, salespeople are also professionals, so that’s a little unfair.

Instead, let’s think of it as two extremes on a line.

At one end, you have someone who is entirely client focused – that’s the salesperson.

At the other end you have the person that is entirely focused on the work.

Salespeople who don’t really know how the work is done tend to be poor performers – they think their job is all about getting the client to the table and that’s it.

After that someone else takes over and does the boring stuff.

People who focus just on the work seem to end up spending a lot of time solving problems that aren’t really all that important.

And they get fussy if you ask them to do anything different.

Being a professional is about stepping away from these extremes.

It’s not necessarily about being in the middle either – about maintaining a balance between being client focused and work focused.

Instead, it’s probably about being able to switch from one mindset to the other.

You need to be able to listen to the prospect, to ask questions, to clarify what their problems are and what they’re trying to do and who is involved and how they do stuff and how they make decisions.

All this takes time – you have to switch off the part of your brain that’s jumping to solve the problem and take the time to really explore your prospect’s world view, their perspective on the situation.

If that horse doesn’t want water – well, that’s because it has something else on its mind.

Perhaps it’s wondering about that patch of grass, or looking longingly at a clump of nettles.

Or perhaps there’s a puddle of water on the track that’s reflecting the light and horses seem to get spooked by stuff like that.

It’s difficult and frustrating when people don’t do what you want.

And it takes effort and discipline to force yourself to calm down and ask “Why?” without judgment and follow the answers to where they go.

We do this all the time with family, with the ones closest to us.

When someone doesn’t respond in the way we want – when someone close to us says “No.”, our immediate response is one of aggression.

The word “Why?”, in that context, is more like “How do you dare to try and stop me?”

We don’t usually do that in a business context although I have had calls where the salesperson has become aggressive when I’ve said I’m not interested in what they’re selling.

Rejection is hard, but wouldn’t you rather talk to someone who said “No.” quickly than someone who strung you along for months only to then tell you that there is no opportunity here?

One of the benefits of spending more time listening than talking is that your prospect has fewer points at which they can say “No.” to you.

After all, they’re talking about themselves and what their situation is – and everything that comes up is important to them in some way.

Then again, is it important enough to take action – is the pain great enough to take some medicine?

Some people love to talk expansively and go off in all directions and pull in lots of related ideas and information.

And that’s fine – let them talk.

Some people will focus, get to the point and tell you what they think.

Which is actually less fine – get them to open up and talk around the issue in more detail.

The first thing you want to do is open up the conversation.

For example, I know that I will often say that this is what I want – put down a clear specification for someone quite early on.

A good salesperson will try and draw me out, ask for more detail on what’s happening, what I’m trying to do, what I’ve tried before, whether that worked or not?

It’s about getting the balance right – too little information and you might be heading in the wrong direction.

Too much information and you might be lost in the complexity.

In both cases you’re trying to get the right strategy to emerge from the conversation – understand what direction is the right one.

You might have a conversation that is rich and expansive and touches lots of areas but where the prospect gets skittish and nervous as you talk about specifics and what needs to be done and whether there is a budget for the work.

Or you can have conversations that start off with a very clear scope but as you ask questions the prospect starts to realize that perhaps it’s not as clear cut and they need to consider a few more options.

In both cases you’re looking for the tipping point, the point at which it makes sense to do something.

Sometimes you can’t reach that and you have to walk away and that’s okay – you shouldn’t expect to make every sale.

What’s important is that when you reach that tipping point you’re able to get the deal done.

That means you need to be flexible as well – you’ve managed to get the prospect to talk about and realize what they need and what they’re willing to pay for – and it might not be something you already have in your product stable.

If you only think of yourself as someone that sells what’s in the box then you’re going to be stuck.

As a professional, however, you should be able to work out whether you can make what the prospect needs – do you have the ability to create products in addition to selling them?

I started this post with two questions – about selling the right thing and selling the right way.

If you develop the ability to listen to your prospect then those two questions will evaporate away.

If you listen, you won’t have to think about selling.

The prospect will work out what they need as they talk through their situation with you – and then, at the point when they realize that they know what they want, you’re in front of them, showing them how they can get that thing in a way that works for them.

As Zig Ziglar said, “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.”

That’s what you will become great at doing if you just take the time to master the art of listening.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh