“There is nothing in her appearance but perfect rest. You would suppose her quietly asleep.”
— Charles Dickens in a letter to his wife, Catherine, breaking the news gently about their 8-month old daughter’s death.
Read the entire letter. One of the most painful letters anyone would have ever had to write.
“The vessels we create often determine the things that contain them. Also, changing the vessel can change our perception and our experience and what we place in them.”
— Patrick Rhone in Vessels, Names, and Frames
If you are the messenger, remember: the medium is as important as the message.
“People who know what they are talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”
— Steve Jobs quoted in Walter Isaacson’s memoir Steve Jobs.
This quote has become fairly popular after it was featured in a post by PresentationZen. If you think there is reason enough to ban slide decks altogether, I’d say no.
I too, like most white-collared workers, have been subjected to one too many sleep-inducing presentations with wordy slide decks that never seemed to end. But are we right in blaming PowerPoint? Isn’t it just a tool that is harmful when it falls into the wrong hands? Shouldn’t we be blaming poor presenters instead?
The hypocrisy of Steve’s statement is evident when you realize that he loved using slides:
“We had one rule that really bothered him: We never allowed slides, which were his main presentation tool.
One year, about an hour before his appearance, I was informed that he was backstage preparing dozens of slides, even though I had reminded him a week earlier of the no-slides policy. I asked two of his top aides to tell him he couldn’t use the slides, but they each said they couldn’t do it, that I had to. So, I went backstage and told him the slides were out. Famously prickly, he could have stormed out, refused to go on. And he did try to argue with me.”
— Walt Mossberg in The Steve Jobs I Knew
Yes, the very same person who appears to be blaming slide decks was irritated when he was not allowed to use them.
Of course, there is a difference between Steve’s slide deck and the common office meeting slide deck. Steve’s were always beautiful and often narrated a story. A successful presentation is nothing but a story well told. And slides can help you in the storytelling process if you use it right.
By blaming “PowerPoint”, Steve is just poking fun at a product developed by Apple’s competitor, Microsoft. He could just as well have mentioned Keynote (or simply ‘slides’) but he didn’t. He phrased his words in a way that people would identify with and, at the same time, show Apple’s competitors in a poor light.
That was the genius of Steve Jobs. And everyone fell for it.
The wall is an equalizer. It doesn’t matter how long you spent or how hard you tried. What’s on the wall is all there is. When we publish, we open a line of engagement where criticism is an option, so we must learn to not only receive the feedback of others, but learn to give it in a civil, articulate, and helpful way.
— Frank Chimero in The Wall
Before we slit each other’s throats in debates while insulting others’ personal choices and tastes, let’s pause—take a deep breath—and think really hard about how we speak or write.
Joe Fox: It wasn’t… personal.
Kathleen Kelly: What is that supposed to mean? I am so sick of that. All that means is that it wasn’t personal to you. But it was personal to me. It’s *personal* to a lot of people. And what’s so wrong with being personal, anyway?
Joe Fox: Uh, nothing.
Kathleen Kelly: Whatever else anything is, it ought to begin by being personal.— scene from You’ve Got Mail.
Something at office yesterday reminded me of this movie. When I saw it for the first time, I paid no attention to the business and ideology part of the story. Now I do and I find it fascinating.
Through Nick’s drug addiction, I learned that parents can bear almost anything. Every time we reach a point where we feel as if we can’t bear any more, we do.
– David Sheff in My Addicted Son
It’s easy to feel trapped in your own life. Circumstances can sometimes feel as if they form a jail around you. But there’s almost nothing you can’t learn your way out of. If you don’t like who you are, you have the option of learning until you become someone else. Life is like a jail with an unlocked, heavy door. You’re free the minute you realize the door will open if you simply lean into it.
— Scott Adams in Who Are You?
This goes up on my wall.
Don’t see this list if you are on an empty — or even half-empty — stomach right now. My favourites are 13 and 15 in the list. Not that I’ve had them but if I did, I wouldn’t be skipping breakfasts. EVER.
One of the most important things for me about gReader is that it balances the two primary uses of the internet: information and communication. Discussion that follows the sharing of information – blog posts, news items, opinion pieces, editorial images, book reviews, pictures of Zoe Saldana, etc – is more meaningful, directed, and interesting to me than post after post of people talking about themselves. I like that the primary verb of gReader is “share” – but not about you; about content that’s meaningful to you. I like that I have to click on a specific tab in order to get the little window that allows me to post only about myself. I like that gReader provides a single interface to both read content on the internet AND discuss that content with my friends.
– Courtney Stanton in Wherein I try to explain why Google Reader is the best social network created so far
Google Reader is the place on the web that I spend most of my time. It’s a haven for voracious readers like me and I’m quite worried that changes to it might break it. Even before the main competitor Bloglines almost went bust, Google Reader has had a monopoly on the online feed reader market. Nothing else came close. It was a monopoly that nobody could truly disrupt till now. There are companies like feedly and Reeder who built their products around Google Reader instead of trying to compete with it.
I hope Google understands the implications of any changes and don’t stray too far away from the original product. But it doesn’t help much when they warn you by saying, “If you don’t like it, take your data and leave.” I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
How A Pirate Was Born
When a film student (capt_wink_martindale on reddit) tried to make a movie based on Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot around the time the Will Smith-starrer of the same name came out:
This is how creativity is encouraged. This is what happens to aspiring small-time film-makers whose paths cross with the big studios.
/via @nimbupani
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Posted in Commentary
Tagged movies