book review: making ideas happen – overcoming the obstacles between vision & reality

by Scott Belsky

Mr. Belsky, of www.behance.net, does a great job explaining to artists, photographers, and writers how to go about organizing their work flows to maximize their output. I read the book over the last few weeks and have already seen the results. My boss mentioned I was getting a lot of stuff done and asked if I felt overwhelmed with work. Cute.

The book is organized broadly into three areas: Organization and Execution, Community, and Leadership Capability.

So his organizational system goes something like this:

Get a notebook or note cards, whichever you chose, but make sure that it is on paper you like. (You are creative and so find fine paper to be important, so much so that you have a lot of it lying around and don’t really know what to do with all of it.) In the alternative, Behance sells books that are set up to work with the action method.

On the cards/in the book, set up a page for each project you are working on. For each project, write out action steps to take to complete the project and the date that you wrote down the step. The idea is to help you stay on task. Then set up a section for backburner projects that you don’t want to forget, but are not yet working on. These projects might eventually move to the front burner.

I have found that outside of work I can only have two other projects, max, to spend my time on. That said, I set up my system for both work and home. My projects currently are:
* memoir
* photography business
* screenplay (halfway on the backburner)
* personal to do's (dr appointments, etc.)
* section 2 of report
* section 4 of report
* backburner projects/ideas (my fiction book is on this list)

I have started carrying these cards with me everywhere, so I can jot down action steps to do, new projects for the back burner, or other stuff.

Mr. Belsky makes the point that people take a lot of notes, and then files them away. He wants you to stop saving all of these notes and other items. Filing everything away is taking too much time. In my case, I end up with piles of stuff to organize all of the time. Instead of working on my projects, I often decide to get organized first, letting my projects further languish. So, I bought a box with a lid, and put everything from my desk into the box. Now, I just sort through the box once a month while watching crime shows.

The author also spends a lot of time explaining how projects don’t get done without help. Without the support of your community, you are unlikely to get very far with your creative endeavors. He lists out a few websites to find like-minded people.

Finally, he talks about leadership and the qualities of a good leader. This chapter and the others are peppered with stories that have had success in their lives from their personal projects.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. I think he makes some excellent points about how to get your work done when you are your own boss. The book does slow down a bit at the end, but I suppose that always happens with these kinds of books. On a strange note, the book jacket feels funny. I mean the paper itself.

4th of July pics

We watched the fireworks this year from Brent's office. We had the best view in the city. It was just amazing. We also stood in line to get ice cream with the chairman of the board! Super fun.

I started playing around with Lightroom Presets. These are photo processing tools which you can then apply to photos. I put a few pictures both untouched and then re-touched with the presets in my smugmug pictures so everyone can see the difference. It was a ton of fun to use these. Let me know what you think by clicking this sentence to see more pictures from the 4th!

idaho fly does websites too!

A few years ago my good friend Patrick set up my website: www.nicoleharkin.com. He did a super job. I am now getting ready to get a little more serious about the photography business, so my brother John, of www.idahofly.com is freshening up the site for me. I am going to send out emails to everyone nearby when it is all done, to help drum up business. I really appreciate all of John's work. Good brother.

physical exam

How many times have you left the doctor's office only to remember the one other thing you wanted to talk to them about?

I recently ran across the "History and Physical Exam" pocketcard on Amazon. I bought it because it was cheap ($3.95) and I wanted to see what it said. The pocketcard, near as I can tell, is for medical students, to ensure that they are asking the patients the correct questions about their medical history.

The great part of the card is that you could use it to fill out your own history and then take this to the doctor when you go. I think this will be especially useful as we move toward having people shop around more for their health care. What better way to succinctly explain your history than to have thought it through before meeting the doctor?

The card covers things from social history to your neurological system to all of your other bodies parts...some you try not to think about! I would recommend picking one of these up if you have kids as well to plan ahead before doctor's visits, etc.

i think i am addicted

I need to stop using the email so much. My yahoo email is not working and I just can't stop trying to make it work.

What was it I posted a few weeks ago about an internet Sabbath?

bringing the world together

This week's, To The Best of Our Knowledge, is about travel. Rick Steve's talks about his new book on travel, Travel as a Political Act. The article I really liked was about a guy who went around the world recording people singing Stand By Me and other songs on the street.

Listen to the show by clicking this sentence. If you have itunes you can also download the show weekly automatically as podcast.

Watch a video of the music here:

another great GAO report

Nanotechnology: Nanomaterials Are Widely Used in Commerce, but EPA Faces Challenges in Regulating Risk.
GAO-10-549, May 25.

Highlights

sad story: raising awareness

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Early Onset Alzheimers affects people starting as young as 40 years old. This touching video was on CBS Sunday Morning this weekend.

I remain thankful that life is not a burden for us.

mean people

I have had some up and down days. I am working on revamping my photography website and posted on Craigslist that I am in the market for clients.

I got a call! A guy wanted me to take some pictures of his daughter. Fun. Nothing planned yet, but he was super nice.

Then this morning I get not one but two emails from mean people about how crappy my pictures are and how they can't believe I would charge people for them.

Really? Why would they go out of their way to be mean?

Trying to let it roll off.

chicago...design...

My friend Tania had her wedding invitations done by this great little press called Orange Beautiful in Lincoln Square, Chicago. We dropped by the other day and I took this shot. If you are in the area, make sure to go by. They are open early and late!

olive tree

For some time now, Brent and I have only been using olive oil for cooking. We use it anywhere a fat is called for. Today I just ran a cross a website where you can adopt an olive tree! You get all of the olive oil from the tree sent directly to you! I am so excited about it. The total cost, including shipping, was $139. The trees are all in Italy.

"Nudo is an olive grove. And part of it can be yours.

Adopt one of its trees for a year and you'll receive all the produce from your tree. Imagine dunking your bread in your own oil from your own tree thousands of miles away on a hillside in Italy.

It's delicious, it's good for the world and you get to show off to your friends.

Hang the consequences. Adopt an olive tree."

Click here to adopt your own tree!

book review: hamlet's blackberry

From Brent's blog:
I tend to read a fair amount of news, and I pretty regularly read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. I've noticed that, after a decent interval, one of those newspapers will run a story that the other has already run. They're never completely the same, but they're pretty close. And I don't mean run-of-the-mill daily news, I mean the kind of feature stories that one would think ought to be unique.

I bring that up because this weekend the Journal ripped off a feature from Wired magazine. Both features offer a sort of debate between about whether the Internet is making us smarter (WSJ, Wired) or dumber (WSJ Wired). Nicolas Carr, whose new book is about how the Internet is making us shallow thinkers, is on the "dumber" side. For example, he says that studies show that the mere presence of links in an article degrades our ability to retain information--even if we don't actually click the links--because our brain is distracted by the need decide whether or not to click them (so, sorry about those links up there). On the "smarter" side is Clay Shirky (in the Wired article he's joined by Dan Pink) who's noticed that we spend a lot of time watching TV (surprise!). That TV time might be more productively spent, say, adding information to Wikipedia. For example, Shirky's Journal article cites a statistic that the total number of hours people have spent editing Wikipedia is about equal to the number of hours Americans spend watching TV ads over a weekend. (Makes the Wiki-geeks seem less geeky doesn't it?)

I bring these news stories up because they demonstrate a large theoretically debate going on about the promises and perils of the Internet and I recommend either feature, although the Journal articles are not free. But those article don't do what William Powers' Hamlet's Blackberry does: offer some practical thoughts about how we are all living today with interruptive technology. I wish everyone would read the book, especially the people who won't like it. For many of us, the constant mind-candy and threat of being always reachable is degrading our lives. Work never leaves us and we can develop the feelings of a "hunted mind." But we cannot blame just our employers, we spend our free time scratching at our smart-phones like crack(berry) addicts. I am, after all, typing this on my shiny new iPad.

Powers' book is great and simple but not simplistic. He reviews 7 philosophers from Plato to Seneca to Ben Franklin to Thoreau who lived in times of fast-paced technological change, and he pulls out practical wisdom from each. At the end of the book he details his family's habit of having an Internet Sabbath each weekend. No in-home Net access; they must walk to the library if they must get online. Powers finds this liberating and good for family togetherness. We plan to try it.

So I highly recommend that people read the book and spend some time thinking about how well we are integrating technology into our lives (and letting our employers have more of our time than we'd often like). What's funny is that I heard about this book in an interview on the Monocle weekly podcast (#59). And a few weeks later the interviewer (and founder of the Monocle) Tyler Brûlé wrote a column in the Financial Times about how he can't stand people who have out-of-office replies on their email. He thinks they must only do that because they hate their jobs and so they should quit and be entrepreneurs like him. (And he thinks they're the sort of people who wear sweatpants.). But not everyone wants to be connected all the time and I really wish that Mr. Brûlé would spend some more time pondering William Powers' excellent book.

book review: one day

One Day
by David Nicholls

When did you read the last book that made you stay up long past your bedtime to find out what happens? Do you know that feeling, where you just need to find out? You can’t keep the characters there in limbo? One Day is that kind of book. It is to be published in the US on June 15, but is already, according to the proof a “huge bestseller in England.”

The book chronicles a friendship between two people, Dexter and Emma. They meet on July 15th, the night before graduating from college. They almost miss becoming best friends. We follow the two as their lives develop. But the reader is given only one day per year of their lives to fill in the blanks with. For example, one day we are told that Dexter’s mom has something important to tell him but she decides to wait. We are forced to fill in the holes when we get to the next year; we must piece together what has happened.

Naturally, it is a love story, with a completely unexpected ending. Which was quite cruel considering I finished the book at 2 am on a Tuesday, or was it Wednesday? No matter. I hope the book is a great success here because it really is a wonderful book.

I loved this idea about how to live life:

“Better by far to simply try and be good and outrageous and bold and to make a difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you. Go out there with your passion and your electric typewriter and work hard at...something. Change lives through art maybe. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance.”

white sticky note*

physiologically
- a few down
- chemo not helping
- bump Not Lung
head & neck tongue to lungs
nasal flomegona
6 months outside
organ to organ

* written while on the phone
listening to the doctor on the
tell me about my mom’s cancer.

gram and storycorp

A few months ago I posted those questions from StoryCorp that everyone should ask their family members. I spent a lot of time with Gram and finally got around to asking her and recording the conversation. The video above is about 11 minutes long. You get to hear about Gram's earliest memory, the day I was born, and other fun stuff. (Ed and Kate you should listen to the end.) I am sorry the sound quality is kind of bad. It was a fun little project. I really urge everyone to do this kind of thing before it is too late.

(Past post about StoryCorp, click here.)

pictures from denver and vail

We had such a great time last weekend, lazying around, chatting, catching up, celebrating our lives and friendships. I have wonderful friends.

See pictures from Denver by clicking this sentence.

book review: little bee

I hated this book. I am angry at the publishers and the writer. I borrowed the book because the back of the book said there was a secret in the book, and asked you not to tell you friends about the secret once you finished the book.

The secret: everyone dies. Yep. At the end of the book, all of the characters you care about are killed.

The book is a political thriller, I suppose, based on the Nigerian oil conflicts currently on going. Women are raped, killed, mutilated. They are then held in detention centers in the UK, and then sent back to their homes, to be raped, mutilated, and killed.

The book lied to me. It was not a happy secret. I thought it was something like that movie: The Sixth Sense. No. It was not. The secret, again in case you missed it, is that everyone dies in Little Bee, including Little Bee.

I am not even posting a picture of the book, so you don't get confused at the book store or library and think this a book you want to read because I recommended it. I am not recommending it. I hated it.

very cool...in a really geeky way

the garden keeps growing

Spent the weekend in Denver. Pictures to come.

the garden is growing

if you want smart kids...

keep a lot of books around:

Click here to see the original article.

Whether rich or poor, residents of the United States or China, illiterate or college graduates, parents who have books in the home increase the level of education their children will attain, according to a 20-year study led by Mariah Evans, University of Nevada, Reno associate professor of sociology and resource economics.

For years, educators have thought the strongest predictor of attaining high levels of education was having parents who were highly educated. But, strikingly, this massive study showed that the difference between being raised in a bookless home compared to being raised in a home with a 500-book library has as great an effect on the level of education a child will attain as having parents who are barely literate (3 years of education) compared to having parents who have a university education (15 or 16 years of education). Both factors, having a 500-book library or having university-educated parents, propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average.

Being a sociologist, Evans was particularly interested to find that children of lesser-educated parents benefit the most from having books in the home. She has been looking for ways to help Nevada’s rural communities, in terms of economic development and education.

“What kinds of investments should we be making to help these kids get ahead?” she asked. “The results of this study indicate that getting some books into their homes is an inexpensive way that we can help these children succeed.”

Evans said, “Even a little bit goes a long way,” in terms of the number of books in a home. Having as few as 20 books in the home still has a significant impact on propelling a child to a higher level of education, and the more books you add, the greater the benefit.

“You get a lot of ‘bang for your book’,” she said. “It’s quite a good return-on-investment in a time of scarce resources.”

In some countries, such as China, having 500 or more books in the home propels children 6.6 years further in their education. In the United States, the effect is less, 2.4 years, than the 3.2-year average advantage experienced across all 27 countries in the study. But, Evans points out that 2.4 years is still a significant advantage in terms of educational attainment.

For example, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, Americans who have some college or an associate’s degree, but not a bachelor’s degree, earn an average of $7,213 more annually than those with just a high school education. Those who attain a bachelor’s degree earn $21,185 more each year, on average, than those with just high school diplomas.

The study by Evans and her colleagues at Nevada, UCLA and Australian National University is one of the largest and most comprehensive studies ever conducted on what influences the level of education a child will attain.

The researchers were struck by the strong effect having books in the home had on children’s educational attainment even above and beyond such factors as education level of the parents, the country’s GDP, the father’s occupation or the political system of the country.

Having books in the home is twice as important as the father’s education level, and more important than whether a child was reared in China or the United States. Surprisingly, the difference in educational attainment for children born in the United States and children born in China was just 2 years, less than two-thirds the effect that having 500 or more books in the home had on children (3.2 years).

The study, “Family scholarly culture and educational success: Books and schooling in 27 nations,” was published in the journal, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility (online at www.sciencedirect.com).

hearts

Driving back from my work picnic today, I heard this story on NPR about Homeboys Industries. It is a group out in LA working to help get gang members working, because if you have a job, you have hope. And hope makes people leave gangs.

They just ran out of money.

Check out their website by clicking here. Consider donating a few bucks to them too.

Click here to listen to the story.

book review: The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the Era of Personalized Medicine

By Thomas Goetz

Boingboing.net featured this book the day it came out and it seemed so interesting that I went right out an ordered it. I know, the year of making do, what was I thinking?

Summary of the Book
The book looks at technology, and reasons that with doctors too busy to take care of you, you need to start taking control of your health. You have become the informed consumer. But what’s a girl to do? Go to medical school? The idea is to make medical decisions more systematic, make information more accessible and understandable, allow technology to help us rather than confuse us, and give people the tools to make changes to people’s lifestyles easier.

For example, if you wanted to quit smoking, then you would have two options, systematically speaking: cold turkey or nicotine replacement. If you chose cold turkey, then you would need to examine the effectiveness of this method. Once you learned that it is not effective then you might change your choice. Then you would need to choose the type of nicotine replacement therapy.

Mr. Goetz provides the reader an updated drug label which shows: who is to take the drug, why you are taking it, who should not take it, the type of testing needed by someone taking the drug, and other considerations. Below that he gives the patient the findings of the study that lead to the FDA approving the drug, and historical information about the drug. The label he has it clearly too big for a drug bottle, but is still a great idea.

A technological help he profiled was the Nike+. This little fob tracks your speed, in concert with our ipod, while you run. Then you synch it with your computer and it tells you how far you ran, and compares it to your other runs. Fun. I got one from Erica, but have had technical difficulties using it with my Vibram Fivefingers, and need to figure out what to do about that. Needless to say, seeing the data motivates me to run more.

One of the problems with reading the book is similar to the problem many medical students encounter: they start thinking that they have the diseases they are studying. I kept thinking my blood pressure was going up or that I was getting diabetes. Great motivator that book.

Finally, he explains genetic testing, why you might consider getting it, and how it works. I will not be doing any genetic testing in the near term.

Tidbits of Info from the Book
One super interesting point made in the book is that acetaminophen is the most common case of liver failure in the US. 50 percent of cases of liver failure are due to acetaminophen, which is also used in Vicoden and Percocet. The medical establishment now believes that this toxicity is not caused by taking too much of the drug but from a genetic problem which causes as many as 1/3 of all people taking acetaminophen to have raised blood levels of alanine transferease.

Criticisms of the Book
There are a few problems with his book, or rather with his examples. First, because he is using the examples to explain high-level ideas, he may not have done the research necessary to check out his high level understanding of the medical facts (a problem all of us face...). One example he uses is of the recent study that came out showing that Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) might be causing heart attacks in women. I have subsequently read that it might have been the type of HRT studied (the kind that uses horses urine to create the therapy) which caused the problems, not the therapy itself. A second example, is Weight Watchers. He holds it up as a successful example of a weight loss program. That it is not. Of all weight loss programs, it has the highest success rate, but most people who do Weight Watchers are going to remain heavy.

Finally, the book is really far ranging, from decision trees to Alzheimer’s to genetics. I suppose the point is we all need to know more about these conditions, but I will wait to learn more on a ‘need to know basis.’

And I remain a little annoyed that Mr. Goetz did not have a spare minute to respond to my email. If you want to read the book, I'll send it to you for free.

this morning's coffee

brent's hobby is coffee. I lucked out there.

weekend

Here it is, the end of a lovely weekend. We spent time with friends, checked out the doener kabob spot in Leesburg, VA, went for a run, had brunch on our deck, and planted our little container garden. Oh and cleaned the house.

Pictures of Ryan, Pam, and Mark can be found by clicking this sentence.