Menu

Sanspoint.

Essays on Technology and Culture

Beyond Obsession Times Voice

I’ve found myself thinking back to the Gruber-Mann Theorem of Obsession Times Voice (see also Gruber’s essay), and my work. For those unfamiliar, the Gruber-Mann Theorem of Obsession Times Voice is a strategy towards creating good, and successful content on the Web, and elsewhere. Find your obsession, find your voice, and combine the two in whatever you make. Don’t worry about the money—worry about making something good. The money situation will sort itself out, assuming the stars align in the right way.

This is valuable and true advice. I don’t disagree with it in the slightest. I’m thinking about the Gruber-Mann Theorem, and how it relates to my work, in a different way. After ten-plus years of making stuff for the Web, I’ve found a voice, but I’ve come no closer to determining exactly what my “obsession” is. Over the decade, this site has gone from a personal blog, to writing about books and literature, to a focus on “technology and culture”—which is to say not a focus at all. I do have obsessions, the band DEVO being one, but I’ll need to get in line behind Michael Pilmer there.

In the SXSW talk that defined the Gruber-Mann Theorem, Merlin suggests not just starting “a blog about Star Wars,” but a blog about “the third Jawa from the left.” It’s obviously tongue-in-cheek advice. The’s only so much you can say about one Jawa in one scene. Though you don’t need to give consideration to reaching the widest audience, you need to give consideration to whether you’ll have enough steam with your theoretical obsession to make a go of it in the long-term. Part of why the lit-blogging period of SansPoint ended when it did was that I just ran out of steam. I didn’t have much else to say about books, writing, or literary analysis. There’s certainly people out there who have that covered, though. More power to ’em.

How many of us have a driving obsession that we can continue to make stuff about, day-in, and day-out? I don’t know if it’s that many. I think about Patrick Rhone, as an example. He’s a man of multiple passions: technology, theater, and handwriting and notebooks, and splits his online presence among a couple of silos for these obsessions. The silo approach works for him, but I’m not sure it works for me. I care a lot about technology, but only in certain sense. I care a lot about culture, but only certain forms of it. I could split my writing and thoughts on both between two silos, but I don’t like the idea of spreading myself out that thin—it’s part of why I cancelled Crush On Radio. For those of us with multiple things we can claim as our “obsessions,” we need some other theorem.

“Obsession Times Voice” is just one strategy towards creating great work and building an audience, but it is not the only one. We can ask ourselves questions about an ideal audience, though all-too-often, audience is bogged down in “monetization,” which leads to clickbait and viewing your audience as mere vehicles to clicks. It’s nice to be like Myke Hurley and not care about the numbers, but when you’re out there trying to put your name, face, and your thing in front of people—and when you’re trying to find the right people to put it in front of, the numbers are going to matter. Even if you’re not trying to necessarily make money. Just the satisfaction of knowing you’re reaching people, and that they’re coming back for you, goes a long way. And, yes, it can help you make money if you want to. (I do, but not by compromising what I want to write about, which is a tricky balance to find.)

There’s other things we can consider instead of just “obsession.” “Purpose,” for example, and to Ben Broeckx. It’s one thing to write about technology, and even if you have a distinct voice, the space is crowded enough that a voice alone is not enough if you’re just writing about the same five topics the big sites and big names are covering. If you’re trying to change how people think about technology, on the other hand, you may have a chance to be spotted. There’s “experience” or “knowledge,” which is a big part of the value add of both a Dr. Drang, and a Ben Thompson. People come to you to learn something. Perhaps there’s more, and these are all multipliers to Obsession on top of Voice. I’m going to keep thinking about this in the back of my mind, and try to find, if not the Obsession, Purpose, or Experience that I can multiply with my voice, I’ll find the other noun that fits the equation.

Cooking and the Advanced Beginner

It always amazes me when I meet someone who claims they don’t cook—especially those who don’t cook because they “don’t know how.” This is alien to me. Food was a part of my life from the earliest. I had a little kids cookbook growing up that my parents and I would cook out of some weekends. On Saturdays, my Mom would watch the cooking shows on WHYY. I grew up on The Frugal Gourmet and Yan Can Cook. Later, I would watch the Food Network, and develop a fondness for the brilliance of Alton Brown. I understand that not everyone was lucky enough to have parents who had time to cook, or care enough about what their family ate, or any of a host of things… but to not have the simple appreciation for food that you want to make your own just confuses me.

But, when you think about it, cooking is actually difficult. You have to measure things, and time things. Add too much of one spice, and that’s all you taste. Don’t cook your chicken long enough, and you’re vomiting and moaning in pain. There are sharp things that you can cut yourself on. There’s fire. Then there’s washing the dishes—cooking is a pain in the ass. But when it comes together, it feels so good. Even if you’re just following a recipe, cutting into a roast chicken (an intimidating, but actually quite easy thing to make), or stabbing a forkful of scrambled eggs… it feels great. Even when it doesn’t come out perfect.

Cooking is one of those skills where you get (almost) instant feedback. You know if your risotto is undercooked, or if your pasta is overcooked. You can even save a recipe that’s going off the rails if you realize your mistake quick enough. If only everything had that level of obvious feedback. With almost every other skill, it’s easy to get stuck in advanced beginner mode for life where all you know is what you know, and what you don’t know is how little you truly know. I don’t want to steal Merlin Mann’s thunder here. His latest talk, “Advanced Tricycling,” hits all the salient points, and then some.

Advanced Beginner For Lyfe

It’s easy to lull yourself into complacency with the lies of “I already know enough about $thing,” or “I don’t need to know $thing.” Learning more is always a good thing. A more insidious problem is identifying what you need to learn next. The Internet pulls us in so many different directions. There’s a shiny new thing you can discover with every tap you make on your portable computing device. With Internet-Enabled ADHD keeping us from plopping our butts in our chairs and banging our heads against the keyboard until we climb up to the next level of the Dreyfus Model, we’ll hit Advanced Beginner and stay there while we try to become an Advanced Beginner at the next thing. And if you stay at Advanced Beginner on the first thing, you’re lucky. Skills atrophy with disuse. I tried to make an omelette for the first time in about two years last week. It was edible, it was tasty, and nobody died, but it was not an omelette.

Combine Internet-Enabled ADHD with all the silly talk about following your passions, and doing what you love, and all that crap, and it’s no wonder the forae of the Internet are chock full of fellow Advanced Beginners, blissful in their ignorance of their own ignorance, and keeping the vicious cycle alive. It sucks. It especially sucks if you’re in that spot where you know you need to know something, but you don’t know what you need to know. But, to quote Merlin again, “It’s hard to know what you’ll need to know in order to know what you’ll need to know.” Advanced Beginner-ism is so infectious that it infects trying to solve the problem of being an Advanced Beginner. Just ask anyone who’s tried to “do” productivity instead of being productive. (See also, this relevant Merlin Tweet.)

The only way out is through.

It’s not much of an answer, but it’s something. The real symptom of the Advanced Beginner is a focus on outcome over process. It must look like the ideal thing in your head, or at the very least, like the design brief someone in the Art Department dropped on your chair while you got coffee. You’re not going to get the chance to execute on this during your day job. It’s more a guideline to avoid living life like an Advanced Beginner applying the same limited set of tools to an ever evolving set of problems. Sometimes you just need to pick something crazy and new—or something you did before and failed at—and just try it. Then whiff, fail, and try to do it again a different way. Open your cookbook to a new page, and try cooking something else.

More Than Half a Life Making Stuff for the Internet

I’ve been making stuff on the Internet for more than half my life, in one way or another. As soon as I got online in seventh grade, I picked up a copy of HTML for Dummies: Quick Reference, and taught myself how to make a web page. My first web site was a fan page for Mystery Science Theater 3000, an early example of what Merlin Mann and John Gruber later defined as Obsession Times Voice. This was 1997, and I had no pretensions that my goofy fan site, with its Animated GIFs, embedded MIDI files, and hosted for free, would accomplish much of anything.

Over my teenage years, I dropped the MST3k site, and established a series of more general personal sites on a friend’s private server. Somewhere in there, I also started a web comic that was terrible enough to warrant notice by Something Awful. By the time I graduated high school, blogging was in vogue, and for my graduation present—and with my friend’s server offline—I asked my parents to pay for a domain and a year of web hosting. I set up GreyMatter, and Sanspoint.com was born. This was 2002. Twelve years ago. For the absolutely curious, you can find a lot of the old content from pre–2010 through archive.org. I don’t recommend it. For the most part, the first six years of Sanspoint are little more than an anti-social LiveJournal.

I decided to take my writing seriously in 2010, which is when the current incarnation of Sanspoint.com begins. Though I didn’t pick up steam for another three years, those years were spent both trying to find my obsession and voice as a writer. I feel as though I’ve found my voice, and have a good lead on an obsession, or at least a group of obsessions that I can put in one place without it seeming too disparate. Between 2010 and now, I also started other projects, some of which limped along like Crush On Radio, others that never took off, like Above The Runway. That’s not even counting the ones that never left the “scrawled on a note card” stage.

At age 30—almost 31—I’ve now spent more than half my life making and putting stuff on the Internet, largely out of love. It can’t be for money, because I’ve made a net profit from all my online endeavors of an estimated negative $2,000. That’s factoring in twelve-plus years of hosting, domain registration, and buying a nice microphone for Crush On Radio. Pocket change, when you think about it. What I’ve gained from my years of putting stuff, more so in recent years, are connections to smart, funny, and supportive Internet friends. And a job. If I couldn’t point to my years of writing, web design, social media, podcasting, and the like, I would never have landed the startup job that gave me at least a sense of direction.

So, it’s not been a waste. I’d keep churning out multiple paragraphs of too-turgid prose about technology, creative work, culture, and all those other crazy things I think way too much about, even if I didn’t get the occasional backpat from people I admire. I wish things had moved faster—it was hard enough making time to make the clackity noise when I worked a 52-hour week, and it’s still pretty hard with a 40-hour one. It’s certainly doable. If Myke Hurley can run a podcast network while working 9–5, I can manage a blog. It would be amazing if I could turn making the clackity noise into my job. At this point, I’d settle for breaking even and a little bit of beer money. As great as the last couple years have been in terms of the stuff I put out, and the reception, I have a ways to go. Patrick Rhone has been doing it longer, (though my site is older), and he didn’t make any money until 2011. [1]

If I’m going to make a go at breaking even—writing off that two grand from the last twelve years—I’ll need to focus on the main thing as much as I can. Part of why Sanspoint as an endeavor has been so long, and so spotty, has been the difficulty of making the time commitment. Various side projects, like Crush On Radio, aren’t helping. (The situation around Crush On Radio deserves its own post, but I’ll fall on my own sword for the bulk of it.) Instead of splitting my ideas and obsessions into different silos, better I bring them under one banner, and focus on making the best entity called Sanspoint there is. One that reflects my obsession and my voice, while giving my small audience reason to keep being involved and supporting me. In time, maybe that audience will grow, and I can make Sanspoint my career. If not, that’s the breaks. I’ve already earned plenty in less tangible currency.


  1. Buy the eBook version of that post, by the way. It’s been very helpful to me.  ↩

Falling Off The Notebook Wagon

I have a confession to make. About a month ago, I fell off the wagon. Sure, I’ve had good days where I’ve kept it together and tried to do what’s right, but I just lapse again.

For the last month, I’ve failed to keep a notebook—at least a systemized one.

Whether Bullet Journal, Dash/Plus, or any of the other various analog systems for making and organizing the various bits of data we collect during the day, I’ve failed to keep it up. Though, I will say that my system of Bullet Journal combined with a dash of Dash/Plus has helped this last batch of notebook use last a lot longer than previous attempts.

So, it’s time to diagnose exactly how, and why I let this happen. The first problem, I suspect, was when I decided to switch to a Multi-Notebook system. Instead of cramming a thick, pocket Moleskine journal into my pants every day, I would switch to a thin pocket notebook (in a leather cover) for daily carry and capture. At the end of the day, I’d unload anything into my large Moleskine, which I would also use at my desk for work and long-form notes and writing.

The first point of failure was when I found myself just not using my pocket notebook for much. Out and about, it’s much easier to capture stuff on my phone and shunt it where it needs to go through Drafts. At my desk at work, I could just drop stuff into the day’s page without having to worry about recopying it later. Even when something did end up in my pocket notebook, it never got recopied into the “main” notebook. I don’t know why I thought I would recopy stuff out of one notebook into the other. I hate repeating work, and copying stuff out of one notebook into another falls under that criteria.

The next point of failure was that I never found much of a use for the notebook beyond mere capture. I tried using my notebook for day-to-day task tracking, but so much of my day-to-day work is stuff I can just do. In GTD, there’s the “two-minute rule,” which states that if you have a task you can do in two minutes or less, instead of capturing it, you should just do it. For me, it’s more a “five-minute rule,” but the principle stands. Instead of writing down that a certain task is going to have to be done today, better to just do it when it comes in.

Without tracking tasks and events, what do I use it for? There’s book notes, but I’ve never been much of a note taker, try as I might. There’s sitting and writing stuff for Sanspoint and elsewhere, which I’ve done in both my main notebook at work, and my pocket notebook when out to lunch/dinner/drinks. It’s great to just whip out a pen and start scratching down parts of an essay, instead of trying to write it all on a phone keyboard. This piece started in my pocket notebook, after all. I still have to retype it to get it into WordPress, but that’s an opportunity to revise, so it’s not repeated work per se.

What I need to do is find those places where a notebook is the best tool for the job, and for me. So far, that’s writing stuff on the go, and capturing stuff when my phone would be harder, or at least socially imprudent. (One thing I learned about carrying a notebook, is that when you write down a person’s information, they’re impressed.) Then, of course, I have to make time to open the notebook up again and process all the stuff I’ve written down. Something I should incorporate into my Weekly Review process. If my notebook usage steps up, I can even make it a daily task. I’ll worry about a system later.

Sometimes There Isn’t An Easier Way

“There has to be a better way.”

It’s the sentence that’s inspired countless inventors, entrepreneurs, and shysters alike. The lifehack is, in it’s ideal form, an better way to do something that’s a pain in our lives. Better in what way? Maybe it’s faster, more reliable, more consistent, cheaper, or just plain easier than the alternative.

It’s the sort of thing that, in an era when efficiency and productivity are valued over all other things, people will latch onto. So we find those better ways, force them into our lives. We iterate our workflows, automate repetitive tasks on our devices, and buy books that promise us ways to turbocharge our professional and personal lives. We do more, and we do it faster—maybe not always better, but at least faster. And so we have more time to do… what, exactly?

Often, it seems like we’re just freeing up time to do more of what we’ve been trying to do better. Get your work done in half the time? Do twice as much work. Found a better exercise routine? Do it at lunch, and get back to your desk for more work. Or do it twice. Or both. If “efficiency” is the hammer, you’ll never run out of things that look like nails.

But not everything can be lifehacked, refactored, streamlined, and automated into efficiency. It’s a lesson I’m seeing as I try to get in better shape. No matter what promises your training regimen makes or how “efficient” it is, from the Seven Minute Workout to
Couch-to–5K, you can’t make your body improve faster. At least not without dumping more time into it, and that’s exactly the sort of thing we’re trying to avoid, right?

You can take a crash course in a new skill, or join a programming boot camp. The syntax for some programming languages you can learn in an afternoon. Sure it’s fast, but it’s an easy way to get stuck as an advanced beginner, unaware of what you don’t know, overconfident in what you do.

Some things in life are going to take time. The process is doomed by it’s nature to be inefficient, slow, tedious, and frustrating. That’s the whole point. When you rush through it to get to the goal, overlooking the things you’re doing wrong from either ignorance or carelessness, you sell your endeavor short. Efficiency isn’t the end-all and be-all of our lives. Slow it down.