The public is never wrong. When people don’t respond to what you do, they’re telling you something loud and clear. You’re just not listening.
—50 Cent

(Ed. note: Neil wrote me a little email recently, which you should read if you want the following response to make any sense. The plan is to do a public back and forth of as-yet-indeterminable direction and length in preparation for November’s Dirt Conference. This is, of course, all in good jest, as Neil and are fast friends.)

Aw, C’MON, you lead with Miss Teen South Carolina and her everywhere-like-such-as-maps? Keep the gloves up, sailor. Too easy. You’re better than that. (And as far as states go, The SC hovers around 50th in education and literacy every year. You should be happy anyone from this state can even speak. I communicated in rudimentary grunts for the first 20 years of my life.)

Which brings us to you, opening this electronic mail shindig with talk of the naming of things. Your Repository of Holy Trademarks™ money making scheme is too rich for my blood, but the idea brought some interesting friends, and we should spend time with them. You mention cliché and you imply reaping/sowing.

Clichés get a bad rap, which is odd considering they’re the most successful iteration of what we’re trying to do. A cliché is the natural outworking of an idea communicated so well that it spreads. And then it sticks. It is the peanut butter of ideas. Of course it eventually goes too far and loses meaning along the way, but don’t forget, right before your phrase/idea/expression crosses over to cliché, everyone is using it. Wouldn’t most of us love to see something we create become so widely known/used that it becomes cliché? Every bit of life wrung out of it by the usage of the masses? We should be so lucky to be the proud parents of a cliché.

But we take words too lightly. The phrasings chosen. The titles taken on. We sow cleverness, we reap confusion. Sure, we can call the auditorium the Wow Room if we want to. (Actually, don’t do that. That’s ridiculous. It sounds like a topless bar. (Hypothetically.)) But if we do, there will be consequences. It’s not a trite decision. We sow the cool new name, we reap endless explaining. “Oh, it’s just what we call the auditorium” we say, ad nauseum, every time someone greets us with that head-tilted-at-slight-25°-angle look of bewilderment. Or we could just invoking common sense simplicity and call the thing what it is.

I’m all for creativity, I just hate it when no one else is in on the joke.

Your move Big Casa,
Joshua

For the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.
—Henri Cartier-Bresson

It’s a simple question, but it will inform every interaction you have this week. Every project. Every meeting. It will show in each mark you make and detail you ignore. And both states of being are highly infectious for everyone around you.

If you’re upbeat, congratulations. Translate it into action. If you’re beat up, take a break. If you come back and you’re still bruised, go find somewhere else to put in your time.

Either way, do something today. Act. Move. Go.

The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, button-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did.—Tim Keller

I wonder if Keller would include his own church in the same category? (That’s not a cheap shot, it’s an honest question. I wonder if anyone is getting this right?)

Be sincere, be brief, be seated.
—Franklin D. Roosevelt

Amazon.com currently shows 357,308 book results for “leadership.” If you’re in the workplace world, you likely get frequent leadership book recommendations from your co-workers and contemporaries. If you want lessons on leadership, there is no shortage of expert written advice. You’re only a few chapters away from the corner office, right?

Statistically speaking, the odds of you actually becoming The Leader are exceptionally slim. You will not be the next great CEO of the next great company. Your business card will not read The One In Charge Of Everything. No one will buy your tell-all book detailing your rise to the top.

Of course, we all lead something or someone, even if only for a short season. But most of us are far more likely to become followers, middle managers, and support staff. We will be in the trenches. We will get our hands dirty carrying out the vision of exceptional leaders. And while it is decidedly non-sexy to say so, I firmly believe that there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Because it takes a team full of all sorts of roles to pull off extraordinary work. And leaders aren’t actually leaders if no one is following.

So the question is, where are the 357,308 books on being an amazing support employee?

Each of us to varying degrees is a hypocrite…You love it when Jesus rebukes the Pharisees, but you don’t think you are on their team.
—Mark Driscoll, Christ, Controversy, and Cutting Words

I often see this quoted, typically justifying inspiration, plagiarism, lack of planning, or laziness:

“Good artists copy; great artists steal.”
— Pablo Picasso

You know what the problem with this quote is? Picasso was a childhood prodigy so talented that his art professor father vowed to give up painting when Pablo’s technique surpassed his own—Picasso was 13 at the time. Picasso created more than 1,800 paintings and 12,000 drawings in his lifetime. He was also an accomplished sculptor, potter, and occasional architect. And by the time this quote was attributed to Picasso, he had mastered (not just dabbled in) every existing painting style and moved on to help create new ones. So when Picasso says, “great artists steal” he has an extremely different definition of “great artist” than you and I do.

When this quote is used to justify how there aren’t any new ideas so you borrowed someone else’s, or how you’re getting started and still learning so you ripped off someone’s website and called it your own, you’re not a great artist. You’re missing the point.

The poet T.S. Eliot, in the quote that likely inspired Picasso’s more famous quip, says:

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.”
—T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1922)

Better. Utterly different. Unique. Let’s aim for those first, then we can quote Picasso.

“I hire people, not portfolios. The world needs people with attitude.”
— Erik Spiekermann

Portfolios are typically a solid gauge of talent, drive, and proficiency. But they only show you what a person has done, not what they will do. Not what they’re capable of. Portfolios are monuments to the past (and if the candidate is really on top of it, maybe hints of the present).

But portfolios don’t forecast the future. And if the interview process goes well, the future is the timeframe the candidate will start working for you.

A portfolio gets someone in the door. It’s the audition; it’s not the performance. What can they bring to the table? Where can they grow? What can they be? Use your imagination. Try to articulate their future, because it could be part of your future.

The best ideas for moving your company, organization, or team forward might be in the people that aren’t a part of it. Yet.

I’ve been using Tumblr for the last week to upload my mobile photos. I’m 90% pleased. My only critiques: it’s occasionally slow/down, the iPhone app won’t let me set a link on a photo or toggle whether to send to Twitter, and it auto-inserts “Photo: “ to each tweet, using 7 characters I could better use myself. P.S. 90% awesome is amazing for a free service.

You know that raise you talk about getting next year, as if it’s already reality? Or the bonus you’re sure will find its way to you this winter? And all the things you’re going to do with the newfound windfall, the things that you’re already becoming emotionally attached to?

Stop it. Don’t have workplace expectations that you are owed more than your salary. Basing your present on an uncertain future is a surefire way to get disappointed and disillusioned. Unmet expectations are cruel alarm clocks. And the workplace rifts that follow are hard to mend.

Work hard. Plan well. But don’t depend on the not-yet-deposited.

My exceptionally-talented designer friend Matthew Wahl has a snazzy 60s-inspired display font called Second Wave that just went up for sale on YouWorkForThem.

It’s been enjoyable to watch this face taking shape in the materials for the Next Conference on Matt’s Flickr account, and now see it available for the masses.

And it’s only $24.95, friends!

General Duties of a Student: Pull everything out of your teacher. Pull everything out of your fellow students.
— Sister Mary Corita Kent

1. “Passion sounds like a fancy word. I like what I do.” — Cormac McCarthy
2. “You can nail your 95 theses to the door once you own one.” — Matt Chandler
3. “[Just] because you signed up to a non-profit doesn’t give you a license to be lazy and uninteresting.” — Jack Welch
4. “Design mimics the bureaucracy it was created in.” — Edward Tufte
5. “If you can be yourself on stage nobody else can be you and you have the law of supply and demand covered.” — Bill Hicks

I’ve been slightly obsessing over genealogy lately. It was set off by finding a gorgeously-illustrated four-generation-deep family tree from my mom’s mom’s side of the family. What followed was 48 hours of intensive Googling (try names you know in quotes, it helps narrow the search), adding people to Geni.com, scribbling down random names and dates on pieces of paper, searching through old land and court documents in Google Books, and essentially trying to connect anyone I could. It’s amazing what you can find.

I got back to the early 1600s on both sides of the family, including the English and Irish immigrants who came to America and settled on the Southern East Coast that most of my family stills call home 400 years later. But what’s even more interesting than the lineages themselves are the little personal life details I’m uncovering along the way.

This is the first item in the last will and testament of my Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Uncle (pretty heavy, theologically-sound words from a simple Virginia farmer):

First I give and bequeath my soul to God that gave it in hope of his exceptance thereof through the merits of Christ my Savior and my body to the earth from whence it was taken to be buried by the discresion of my executor.”
—Ralph Blankenship, September 20, 1754

And while it’s amazing to think the majority of my pedigree have held to deep-rooted Christian faith for centuries, there’s another aspect that connects with me almost as much. My first English ancestors (then “Blenkinsopp”) were known in the Northern end of the country as “a right ancient and generous family.” I found documents from the early colonies talking about how hard working and well-respected they were. They had farms, worked lands, ran stores. They made LOTS of babies. They did not get divorced. They lived long, full lives and watched their children do the same. In short, they DID SOMETHING.

So, here’s to my gigantic extended family. The more I find out about them, the more I want to live, love, work, and finish well.

When I carried a Palm Treo, I gave the mobile photo thing a try with a homebrew moblog, but it was too cumbersome to update. And Treo photos are terrible. Now the iPhone Tumblr app makes the process a breeze, thus Blankenship à Go-Go. If you’re in to that.

I’m a sucker for a good one-take video, especially when it accompanies a catchy pop tune. Semi-related philosophical question: is it a behind the scenes when it’s technically only one scene?

A man who suffers or stresses before it is necessary, [often] suffers more than necessary.
— Seneca

I normally don’t dig the “acoustic cover of a rock song” genre, but this quite reserved version of Kings of Leon’s Use Somebody by Paramore is nicely done. Here’s the original for some hot YouTube-on-YouTube comparison action.

Some stuff my team currently working on: a complete frontend/backend site redesign for NewSpring, an internal web/design work order tracking app (with the goal to build, test, and then give away), an event registration app, and potentially switching our streaming media provider, which includes porting 3+ years of weekly video archives over and replacing a slew of embeds and bad code. All of this is on top of our very daily work (oh, the tyranny of urgent.)

What’s the common thread? Daily work aside, none of these projects are sprints. They will not be completed in the space of a single work week. Actually, we can’t even accomplish the initial thoughts about how to tackle some of these in the space of a single work week. We are in marathon territory. 6 month project paths, long term planning. Slow, steady, methodical, intentional. Like a bunch of semi-sweaty tortoises with low heart rates. This kind of work, and the pacing it requires to make it happen well, demands that everyone on the team is sharp, alert, and passionate. And that means we all need to be rested.

You have a threshold you hit when you need a break. A vacation, a day off, some kind of unplugging from the workplace grind. It’s different for everyone, but once you get near it, it’s time to go sit on the beach somewhere with a fruity umbrella drink in your hand (hypothetically—or whatever it is that equals vacation for you.) If you cross over that threshold and keep working, you’re not passionate about the work, your judgement is impaired, and you make bad decisions. Then your bad decisions force the project into debt (either time, technical, or financial). If you still don’t take a break, you’re pulling all nighters to fix your screw–ups, which is essentially an admission of failure to plan. If you finally do take some vacation, as soon as you return you’re not innovating or tackling something new, you’re working to pay off that debt you created when you should have been resting.

Workaholics will eventually kill long term team productivity. Lone wolf heroes on the permanent all-nighter schedule are toxic. Find your threshold. Go somewhere sunny. Or just go home for the day. Don’t pull your team down because you refuse to take a break.