Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers defined an amount of time needed to become an expert in any task: 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. Not 10,000 hours of simply performing a task, but 10,000 hours of practice, which is work that tests skills, finds and breaks limits, and helps improve your craft. Don’t confuse the two. Gladwell’s 10,000 hour figure’s been tossed around a bit, including in So Good They Can’t Ignore You, which is why it’s fresh in my mind.

Elsewhere in the book, Cal Newport writes about venture capitalist Mike Jackson, who tracks how he spends his day with an Excel spreadsheet, allocating the time he spends on the various aspects of his job. The intent of the spreadsheet is so Mike could “become more ‘intentional’ about how his workday unfolds,” and it caught my attention. How many of us know exactly how much time we spend on our work, each day? Freelancers with excellent time tracking and invoicing software need not answer. [1] I immediately thought of the Quantified Self movement, whose adherents wear sensors and use gizmos to track nearly everything about their body, and often beyond. While there’s plenty of valid criticism of what the Quantified Self movement will do to the lives of its adherents, there’s plenty of practical applications for QS technologies to improve our work.

In my own life, working for a startup company with no set hours and the ability to define my own workday do a large degree has resulted in me being more than a bit unanchored. Building some structural scaffolding to my day would help me greatly. At the very least, it would keep me from crawling out of bed at 10 AM, and getting to work around “lunch time”. I’ve been increasingly eyeing some Quantified Self technology, but what I want to quantify most is how much time I spend doing what I need to do, and how much time I spend doing… something else. There’s plenty of tools out there, high-tech and low-tech, to assist, ranging from RescueTime to “The Unschedule” of assigning yourself defined periods of free time.

Data is relentless. The mantra at any web-based startup is “test, track and quantify.” It’s important to see what works, what doesn’t, and iterate mercilessly to improve what does. This takes time, data, and analysis. Can we not apply this to our lives too? The tools we use and their endless potential to distract us with alerts, status updates, text messages, and more also hold within them the potential to help us improve ourselves. Let’s quantify not ourselves, but our time, so we know what we should be focusing on, and what we should not. The answers to those are going to vary for each of us, but if we know that, for example, we’re blowing an hour a day checking for status updates on social networking services at work, we might be able to stop that, and leave work an hour early without guilt. Alternatively, it’s an hour we’ve reclaimed to use towards working to become an expert. We have the tools. Let’s use them.

It was a little over two years ago when I stepped on a stage at Johnny Brenda’s, clad in a white Tyvek jumpsuit with red duct tape accents, and a red flower pot like hat on my head. I stood in front of a crowd of drunken onlookers, raised my right arm, and proceeded to flail my arms like a madman to a sixty second clip of “Be Stiff” from DEVO’s 1981 live EP. It was my first air guitar competition. Yes, this is a thing. I’ve competed three times since, once more in Philadelphia in 2012, and twice this year in New York. Each time, I’ve made failed to make it past the first round. [1]

The best I ever did was my second year, performing DEVO’s “Girl U Want”. I scored a 5.7, 5.7, and 5.0—one judge claimed my track was a “keyboard based song” and docked me (in)appropriately. After a dalliance with changing my stage persona and performing some David Bowie, I tried to replicate my success by doing “Girl U Want” again, only to end up with the same middling scores I had earned a week before. Even while I was up there, going through the motions, I felt something was off. Perhaps it was the lack of rehearsal—it had been just over a week since the previous competition—or perhaps it was too many beers and not enough to eat. Either way, I knew I could and have done better.

As it stands right now, I’m a weekend warrior. There’s folks in the US Air Guitar scene who have been competing for years, and consistently kill. It’s not about the song, or the crazy costumes—though costumes help with stage presence—it’s about impressing the judges and nailing your routine. It’s about melting faces off. It’s about being really good, and being entertaining to watch. This is why the best judges for air guitar competitions are other air guitarists. They know what they like when they see it, and they can express it properly. It may be couched in a bit of verbal abuse, but that’s part of the show.

This came into perspective as I started diving into the book So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport at the behest of Merlin Mann on his recent solo episode of Back To Work. The book’s premise is twofold. First, the idea of “following your passion” to find the career that’s right for you is bullshit. Second, by developing rare, valuable skills—what Cal refers to as the “Craftsman Mindset”—you can parlay those into a career that you will enjoy—you just have to put the time in for it. One of the first people Cal talks about to illustrate his point is Jordan Tice, a twenty-one year old bluegrass guitarist of some renown.

Music is one of those things that people pursue out of passion, but there’s more to Tice’s success than simply loving bluegrass guitar. It’s his dedication to the craft of playing guitar, reaching the outer limits of his skill, and banging away at a difficult lick until he can play it as fast as possible with no mistakes… then trying to do it again, even faster. It takes Hours upon hours of dedication and practice. It’s a tactic that appears time, and time again in the book, from Steve Martin’s ten years honing his act to the outer limits of stand up comedy (and forty years practicing banjo), to Ruby programmer Giles Bowkett stretching the limits of the programming language to create an application that generates dance music, and Cal Newport’s own practice with understanding difficult Computer Science proofs.

What does this have to do with playing air guitar? Quite a lot. Focusing on skill acquisition, practice, and relentless improvement in any sort of field where you’re up against other people certainly can’t hurt your chances. Air guitar competitions are only a small, and somewhat absurd example. I don’t see myself making air guitar my life’s work, but my recent experiences, along with Cal’s book have inspired me to take the endeavor with a bit more seriousness for 2014’s competition season. It’s also had me thinking about how I approach all the other endeavors in my life, personal and professional. Being willing to bust my ass at my craft, be it what you see on this page, my role as a Community Lead with Trusted Insight, or just playing air guitar in my bedroom, it’s all building career capital that will serve me in the future, one way or another.

I recently came across a piece by David Lowery, of Camper Van Beethoven fame. The title summarizes the entire thing, so pull quotes aren’t really necessary: “My Song Got Played On Pandora 1 Million Times and All I Got Was $16.89, Less Than What I Make From a Single T-Shirt Sale!” This sort of thing isn’t a new cause for David, he’s on about this before, and though the post on Spotify is new, talk about Spotify’s low payouts to artists is not. It was even discussed on the second episode of Crush On Radio.

This serves an odd counterpoint to the growing emphasis placed on building “content” and making money online. People have access to more media now, than at any point in history. There’s also more media now, than at any point in history, but it’s increasingly easier to get ahold of it, and that’s where things get interesting. It’s a truism that the Internet provided a low cost, low overhead means of content distribution before it provided any good means of paying for said content. Though now we have a payment infrastructure in place, and people are buying music again, file sharing and torrents are still a thing. [1] We have so much stuff out there, begging for our attention, that we have an oversupply situation on our hands.

Basic economics tells us that the value of something is determined by supply and demand. If there is a limited supply, and a high demand for a good, then the price should be high. Conversely, if there is a huge supply and minimal demand, the price should be lower. This isn’t so much ECON 101 as it is ECON 081. In the case of online media and content, it seems we have the problem of there being constant demand, but an extreme oversupply of content, combined with distribution and revenue models that come from the days when the media a lot of this stuff shipped on was fragile, expensive, and difficult to produce.

In the case of streaming services, a chunk of the blame must be laid at the feet of the recording industry, charging ridiculous licensing fees, insisting on restrictions to prevent users from recording the stream [2], and keeping a disproportionate share of the pie for themselves by any measure. Also, too, is that the streaming services still have to compete with free. Sure, you can listen to Pandora, or Spotify for free, but you have to put up with advertisements and song limits. Meanwhile, you can queue up a playlist of songs from YouTube—yes, YouTube—and listen to music forever.

With so many musicians out there competing for the attention and cash from a fickle audience who can get the latest release by even the indiest of indie bands for free, no wonder it’s getting harder and harder to make an honest living with your music. But this problem extends far beyond music. If you produce any sort of media that can be reproduced digitally, the music world is the proverbial canary in the coal mine. There’s so much stuff out there, so little time, and audiences so very fickle, that it’s beyond difficult to gain traction, and make any money, let alone a living. It’s certainly possible. Jonathan Coulton made a cool half-million dollars in 2010, but his story is far from typical. Yet, whenever a discussion of paying for media online comes up, and fingers get pointed, a certain group will always pipe up and point to those who “made it” by giving stuff away for free.

The survivorship bias colors our thinking. We don’t hear about the failures much, and when we do, we dismiss their arguments as sour grapes. When someone new to the game tries to emulate what worked for someone successful, fails, and goes “That’s fine for Radiohead! They have a huge fan base,” we so often miss the point. If having 1000 true fans is what you need to succeed, how do you survive long enough to get that number? There’s the safe bet of keeping your work a side project while holding down a day job, but that makes it harder to do the work. Or, you could throw yourself into the work, and risk losing everything. Are the only people left who can become full-time creators going to be those who have a safety net of wealth, and a sinecure waiting with their father’s firm should their artistic endeavors fail?

It’s a question worth asking: how does one make content and make a living in a world where content is devalued? Even if you’re so good they can’t ignore you, they might not even get to you because of the glut. If you, the reader, take anything away from this piece, take away this: there is no simple solution, and anyone who proposes one is either naïve or trying to exploit someone else. Too many free-culture wonks fail to account for how an artist is supposed to feed themselves, and too many industry wonks are either desperate dinosaurs who want to charge $19.99 for a piece of plastic again, or middle-men who see an opportunity to pick a two pockets at once. Whatever the answer is, I don’t have it. We’re all going to have to bang our heads together on this one.

On Wired, Clive Thompson writes about the need for a “fixer movement”, in contrast to the recent rise of the Maker Movement.

This would be a huge cultural shift. In the 20th century, U.S. firms aggressively promoted planned obsolescence, designing things to break. Buying new was our patriotic duty…

I’m unsure how well the Maker Movement has caught on outside of the geekier of circles. It’s a concept that intrigues me, coming from an adolescence as part of the Boy Scouts, [1] and envy of people who know how to do stuff with their hands. Like any good larval geek, I played with electronics kits, took apart alarm clocks that I couldn’t reassemble, and generally wondered how the heck all this crap we use works. I’m from a generation that could fix or upgrade computers when they grew aged. Of the various personal computers I owned, it was my first, a 486, that saw the longest time in action, lasting almost seven years before the RAM sockets broke. [2]

A fixer movement has the potential to change our relationship with technology. The level of agency we can get from learning how to add life to the gadgets we own and not throwing them away is beneficial to a greater understanding of technology’s role in our Thompson mentions in the article. Things start to fall down for me, just a bit, when I read his description of a “Fixer’s Collective” in Brooklyn: “A few feet away, a trio of people are elbow-deep in a vintage VCR, and there’s another team performing surgery on a lava lamp… As I watch for three hours, the fixers get everything up and running (except the lava lamp).”

While the article starts by depicting someone trying to fix a toaster oven, the articles Thompson chooses to mention make me think of the “Fixer’s Collective” as more kooky Brooklynite kitsch than passion for understanding gear. Precious few of us have need to fix a VCR in 2013, unless you’re really into grainy, low-res, pan-and-scan movies. It’s the sort of preciousness that also infects the Maker movement, with videos about hand-carved spoons on Boing Boing being the public depiction of something that is much bigger and more compelling. Thankfully, the “Fixer’s Collective” experience emboldened Thompson to tackle repairing a five-year old Dell laptop. It’s a story drives the potential of the fixer movement home.

If only everything were as serviceable. There’s a (valid) crack against Apple products, with their unwillingness to provide service manuals, and fetish for thinner and increasingly closed hardware summed up best in one quote. “Just to get an iPad open, Wiens [of iFixIt] had to make a rice-filled pillow that he could heat up and lay on top of the tablet to gently loosen the adhesive.” Considering that I’m writing this up on an iPad, that quote really hits home. Apple products have the benefit of longer usable lifespans than comparable hardware offerings, and a network of retail stores to provide fixes, but we shouldn’t need to rely on that. Considering that in 2005 I managed to replace the battery on my 3rd generation iPod (twice) with a guitar pick and some patience, it’s not a long shot to think we’re moving the wrong way.

The are two obstacles that a fixer movement needs to overcome. The is the fear ordinary people have of diving into the guts of their gadgets. The second is the sense that their time and effort are worth more than the cost of a replacement product. I expect that we’ll get most of the way to the latter by doing the former. Even the hardcore geeks I know swear by online guides like iFixIt for stuff as simple as RAM upgrades and iPhone screen replacements. I can also see this as an adjunct to Patrick Rhone’s no-grade. Squeezing all the lifespan we can out of our expensive gadgets, learning how to use them better, and learning how to fix problems ourselves—these all put control of our technology back into our hands, where it belongs. Start learning now.

My snarky post from yesterday was just a toss off in lieu of more grounded thoughts on the new iOS, or the thoughts other have on the new iOS. It was John Gruber on The Talk Show who noted “All the leaks are wrong” and that the new iOS design would be “polarizing”, which seems almost like an understatement now. When you have a technology commentator complaining/writing click-bait that iOS has become too “girly,” [1] I think polarizing doesn’t quite cut it.

If familiarity breeds contempt, so too does novelty bring antipathy. People have been clamoring for a visual refresh of iOS since the run up to iOS 6, but the critics have been more vocal in the last year. Apple’s UIs were too “skeuomorphic” with their reliance on textures and replicating real interaction behaviors. [2] iOS looked dated next to Windows Phone 7 and Android 4.0. The company that lead the charge of GUIs, invented the modern smartphone and tablet, and kickstarted an industry had “fallen behind.” And, seeing as the last major proponent of the texture and physicality-rich UI had been drummed out of the firm, plenty of folks at Apple were gunning for change, too.

And outside of Apple, enough people wanted a change that skilled designers spent ages mocking up UI concepts and creating YouTube videos simulating new interaction designs. I don’t fault them for doing it. It’s good practice for a designer, a way to get your name out there, and maybe get a new client or two. However, the proliferation of iOS 7 concept shots and videos permeated the mindset of fans, bloggers, critics, and journalists alike. It was clear that, though Apple probably wouldn’t mess too much with the fundamental interaction design of iOS, whatever Ive and his team of professional designers came up with would be very different than what had been going around. Clearly then, because Jony and Apple didn’t just rip off your preferred rumoriffic mockup, Apple is “doing it wrong.” Though what people who say that really mean is that “They didn’t do it the way I would.”

Jony Ive inherited the role of overseeing software UI and UX at Apple only seven months ago. Now, we’re seeing the first fruits of his labors. Whether Ive brought Apple’s marketing team to do the icons, or painstakingly drew every icon and overlay in Illustrator, seven months is not a lot of time. There’s room for improvement, and even the people who like the new UI for iOS will admit that. [3] Apple needs two things to improve iOS: user feedback, and time. With their unwillingness to do “focus groups” and internal user testing, the Developer Preview is the best way to get feedback.

Note these words: “Developer Preview.” This is software that, though shown to the world, is not ready for the world. Maybe the idea of a “beta” has been watered down by companies slapping it on hundreds of functional-enough consumer services and apps. [4] iOS 7 in the state it is at the time of writing is neither feature complete or design complete. By way of example, the current version is missing the “Voice Memos” application. If we assume a September release of iOS 7, this gives Apple three and a half months of time to tweak, add, and remove things. By then, who knows what Apple will change. This is something a lot of the more vocal complainers of iOS 7’s new look are forgetting: it’s not done.