Bobulate, for Intentional Organization

Scott Berkun on banning the i-word:

Einstein, Ford, Picasso and Edison rarely said the word innovation and neither should you.

Because:

Ask people who say innovation what they mean. If ever anyone says the word in a meeting, ask “Can you give an example of what you mean by innovative?” If they can’t, you’ve just saved everyone in the room hours of time. Using the i-word is often a cop-out for clear thinking. They are trying to signify creativity, without actually being creative.

A-men.

Seth Godin on clichés:

In printing, a cliché was a printing plate cast from movable type. This is also called a stereotype. When letters were set one at a time, it made sense to cast a phrase used repeatedly as a single slug of metal. “Cliché” came to mean such a ready-made phrase. The French word “cliché” comes from the sound made when the matrix is dropped into molten metal to make a printing plate.

His secret weapon on how to use clichés:

The effective way to use a cliché is to point to it and then do precisely the opposite. Juxtapose the cliché with the unexpected truth of what you have to offer. …. I often use the Encyclopedia of Clichés to find clichés that then inspire opposites.

Hear the sound of stereotypes, a 1949 Number Four VanderCook Proof Printing Press in particular.

Scott Berkun on the word “secret”:

The word secret makes the boring sound fun. Doing laundry is pretty boring, but secret laundry almost sounds interesting. The word secret promises short-cuts, tricks, or things people don’t want us to know, which all connote ways to get one up on others. This little semantic trick works well on newbies, since they know so little, anything can seem like a secret.

But according to Scott, the real secret is:

To invent or create is to take a bet against the unknown. No matter what you do, you are still betting you can do well in the face of many things that are out of your control. Don’t like that? Don’t want uncertainty? Then do something else. Comfort with risk and uncertainty is the real secret name of the game. Anyone who wants to create something new is placing a bet, that their view of the future is better than everyone elses’, or at least their competitors.

On the solar eclipse analemma:

If you went outside at exactly the same time every day and took a picture that included the Sun, how would the Sun appear to move? With great planning and effort, such a series of images can be taken. The figure-8 path the Sun follows over the course of a year is called an analemma. This coming Tuesday, the Winter Solstice day in Earth’s northern hemisphere, the Sun will be at the bottom of the analemma. Analemmas created from different latitudes would appear at least slightly different, as well as analemmas created at a different time each day. With even greater planning and effort, the series can include a total eclipse of the Sun as one of the images. Pictured is such a total solar eclipse analemma or Tutulemma — a term coined by the photographers based on the Turkish word for eclipse.

Consistency takes planning and effort.

A thank you note by David Bowie in reply to his first American fan letter:

When I called in this, my manager’s office, a few moments ago I was handed my very first American fan letter - and it was from you. I was so pleased that I had to sit down and type an immediate reply, even though Ken is shouting at me to get on with a script he badly needs. That can wiat (wi-at? That’s a new English word which means wait).

For anyone who launches a product, who bravely publishes that first book, who records music, who stands up for ideas of any kind — for anyone who performs for an audience without trackable means for people’s happiness — he or she knows the importance of receiving feedback. And a fan letter, invaluable.

The fan of note was Sandra Dodd, so moved, that she started a fan club on Bowie’s behalf. I find it charming that a 20-year-old Bowie turned around a thank you note immediately.

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Brian Eno, cybernetics, and systems thinking:

Cybernetics is one of the most widely misunderstood concepts. The word itself seems sinister and futuristic, but the term has ancient roots — the Greek word kybernetes, meaning steersman. Cybernetics was famously defined in more recent times by Norbert Wiener in 1948, as the science of “control and communication, in the animal and the machine.” Words like “control” may seem to have creepy overtones, but at its heart, cybernetics is simply the study of systems. “Cybernetics is the discipline of whole systems thinking…a whole system is a living system is a learning system,” as Stewart Brand put it in 1980.

Tyler Cowen on the human mind becoming more, rather than less powerful, and on a “change that is filling our daily lives with beauty, suspense, and learning:”

The word for this process is multitasking, but that makes it sound as if we’re all over the place. There is a deep coherence to how each of us pulls out a steady stream of information from disparate sources to feed our long-term interests. No matter how varied your topics of interest may appear to an outside observer, you’ll tailor an information stream related to the continuing “stories” you want in your life—say, Sichuan cooking, health care reform, Michael Jackson, and the stock market. With the help of the Web, you build broader intellectual narratives about the world. The apparent disorder of the information stream reflects not your incoherence but rather your depth and originality as an individual.

He ends his otherwise lengthy article with a tweetable version: “Smart people are doing wonderful things.”

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Michael Chabon reading from a piece titled “The Amateur Family:”

Perhaps there is no perfect word for the kind of people I have raised my children to be: a word that encompasses obsessive scholarship, passionate curiosity, curatorial tenderness, and an irrepressible desire to join in the game, to inhabit in some manner—through writing, drawing, dressing up, or endless conversational riffing and Talmudic debate—the world of the endlessly inviting, endlessly inhabitable work of popular art. The closest I have ever come for myself is amateur, in all the best senses of the word: a lover; a devotee; a person driven by passion and obsession to do it—to explore the imaginary world—oneself. And if we must accept the inevitable connotation of hopeless ineptitude that amateur carries, then at least let us stipulate that we shall be hopeless and inept like Max Fischer, the hero of Wes Anderson’s Rushmore: in the most passionate, heedless, and whole-hearted way.

Jeremy Denk regarding the Goldberg Variations:

If “cadence” were a word in the dictionary (OK, it is, but you know what I mean), Bach in the Goldberg Theme has found one of its less-often-used meanings; one of the fun ones; and he locates this meaning with the help of the “words” that he uses to lead into it … through their implications … This paradoxical hinging of the cadence (return) on the back end of the arch (departure) gives a sense of motion and transcendence to the conclusion: it puts wings under earth.

Anthony Bourdain in a candid chat on how traveling for No Reservations has changed his perspective:

The more you travel, the less you realize you know. …. When you travel it changes the definitions of words that you thought you understood. You thought you knew what the word “work” meant. You didn’t know if you’re from the West until you’ve seen a rice farming community, for instance.

A much different voice from his Kitchen Confidential days, he goes on to talk about an increased sense of humility, open-mindedness, and putting things into perspective that result from travel.