Learn, unlearn and relearn

About a month ago I received this quote in my inbox from Max Shapiro that I can’t seem to get out of my head.

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”
– Alvin Toffler

I think I’m still young but even I am sometimes overwhelmed by new technologies and get tired at the thought of having to ‘unlearn’ my old habits and ‘relearn’ another new exciting technique. They say you are never too old to learn but you might just get too tired to invest time and energy in learning.

But, as Toffler explains, I need to keep up and persuade myself to keep evolving.

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Is This a Feature OR a Company?

I have often heard people (including myself) say “That isn’t enough to build a company on. That is just a feature”. In theory it is good to think about this. Is your idea or technology something you can build a company on or just something interesting that might be added to another company or product?

But in reality things work differently. Yahoo started as a page with links to websites. Can you imagine that someone said “Yeah that is nice. But it is just a feature. You can’t build a company on a page with links”.

Or take Google. All they had when they started out was a better technology to index pages called ‘BackRub’. They tried to sell this ‘feature’ to a few established search engine companies. These companies weren’t interested so they started their own search engine to show off their technology.

I think it is dangerous to dismiss ideas as only ‘features’ and have decided to stop saying this to people. Great companies are built on simple features. Lets respect that.

Controversial is Good

On monday evening I made soup for 25 people. It contained broccoli, zucchini and other vegetables. To make the soup more special I added a little Truffle oil just before I served the dish. Truffle smells delicious and makes almost any dish special. Brillat-Savarin called the truffle “the diamond of the kitchen”. Other people describe the pungent scent of truffle as similar to the scent of unwashed underwear. It has a sharp acrid scent to it and you either love or hate it.

Michael Arrington* (Techcrunch editor and serial entrepreneur) has been described as arrogant, a hypocrite or just ‘an asshole’. He can be extremely critical about companies, even the ones he invests in or is friends with, and without ever holding back. Despite, or because, of this Techcrunch is THE technology blog in the world with more than 500.000 feed subscription. Both Wired and Forbes have named Arrington one of the most powerful people on the internet. You either love him or hate him. But you can’t ignore him.

Being controversial is good. It means you are different. It means that you will attract fans and enemies but at least you will garner attention. Being bland is boring and won’t make you the subject of the conversation at any dinner table. It also means that you will have to live with people hating or disliking you.

If you find out someone really hates your stuff (project, company, looks, product, girlfriend, car, song) than that might be a good thing.

In fact, if nobody hates it it will be harder to get people to love it. They can love you or hate you but they won’t be able to ignore you.

* = Just so you know: I love Michael Arrington.

Arrogance VS Confidence

Entrepreneurs need to be confident and tenacious.
But not arrogant or stubborn.
There is a fine line dividing both.

It is easy to mistake confidence for arrogance and the same goes for tenacity. Some entrepreneurs think they are tenacious but are simply being stubborn. I think a way to test if someone is being confident or arrogant is too challenge their ideas. A confident human being won’t be easy to convince but he will likely take pleasure in being challenged. An arrogant person will not even allow you to challenge any of his or her ideas.

It is harder to detect whether someone is tenacious or stubborn. I remember being accused of being stubborn and later proving my point. That would mean that I wasn’t stubborn but just tenacious. But how can you test this?

I have been accused of being arrogant in the past (not recently) and stubborn too. I would like to think that these people didn’t see that I wasn’t being arrogant but simply followed my instinct and wouldn’t easily give up. But I know it IS hard to see the difference so I don’t blame anyone.

Or is that an arrogant thing to say?

What Am I?

I studied art from 1990 till 1997. During that time I made a lot of work and started a lot of projects. I still have lots of stuff stacked away at my and my parents house. Officially I’m an artist. That is what I studied.

Sometimes I meet people I studied with and often they ask me, cautiously; ‘So euh, do you do anything with art these days’.

The question always confuses me. What they want to know is whether I paint, make sculptures and hang out in galleries. The typical art stuff. And I don’t so the answer in their minds would be ‘No’. But in my mind my work never really changed. It just evolved. I’m an artist and entrepreneur.

Luckily I don’t really have to make that distinction much. The only time I really think about it is when I have to fill out that form at the US Customs where it says ‘Occupation’ and when I meet old friends who ask me the dreaded ‘Art’ question.

But last week I received a comment here on this blog from one of my readers. It was in Dutch but roughly translated it said:

It has been too long since you had a good idea. Maybe you should stop using the ‘Serial Internet Entrepreneur’ term for yourself

You can still see the original comment here. I could have deleted it but I didn’t because I was just intrigued by it.

For some people, just like with the ‘Art’ question, there apparently are rules about how you can use these kind of titles. Some people think I am not an artist because I don’t paint and my work isn’t for sale in a gallery. Other people think that because I haven’t sold a company in 4 years I shouldn’t call myself a ‘Serial Internet Entrepreneur’ anymore.

For me however being an Serial Internet Entrepreneur isn’t all about selling companies.
It is about being able to try new ideas.
Crazy ideas.
Funny ideas.
And sometimes, yes, bad or maybe even stupid ideas.

Looking back I am just as proud of the companies I started that failed as I am of the projects that succeeded. I am proud and thankful that I got a chance to try these ideas and I am happy that I could exit gracefully when they turned out to be bad ideas.

Being an entrepreneur is not all about success. It is about falling down and getting up again and trying again and enjoying the whole process.

Or, as Winston Churchill said, better than I ever can:

‘Success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm’

So, without hesitation I can say:

My name is Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten and I’m an Serial Internet Entrepreneur, artist and professional juggler.

Connectivity as a Utility and other news

There were two news items that made a huge impression on me this week.

The first was that Apple sales of Leopard exceeded sales of Vista in Japan in October. Apple has been a niche player for decades but this might be a turning point:

In the six days after Leopard’s 26 October launch, combined single-user licence (46 per cent) and family pack (7.9 per cent) sales accounted for 53.9 per cent of the total OS-only market in Japan.

However, at Microsoft, Windows sales fell from 75.3 per cent to 28.7 per cent

The second announcement that made a huge impression was the launch of Amazon’s eBook reader titled AmazonKindle. The gadget allows you to read digital books on digital paper. It costs $399 and you can choose from a library of 88.000 books.

The really impressive things about the Kindle however is the fact that is comes with an always-on wireless internet connection. At no extra cost. Without a subscription. It is just there.

This is incredible to me. A few years ago we still had to dial in. Then came DSL and Cable which meant we were always online. Then came wireless in the form of GPRS, later UMTS, and Wi-Fi. And now we are making the leap to standard, always-on, wireless and free internet.

In the future you will just be connected, always and everywhere and the whole notion of being on- or offline will be gone.

And with the Kindle the future just happened.

Besides that Loïs turned 6 on Friday and we celebrated her birthday, with 9 of her friends, on Saturday. That not only impressed me even more but also turned out to be pretty exhausting.

The Organization Paradox

I’m disorganized.

Yes it is true. I am disorganized and proud of it. As I grow older I tend to get less organized too. When I was younger I tried to get organized. I tried several systems, bought filling cabinets and folders and dreamed of an organized life. Now I know better. A few things changed and I’m going to tell you how I live with disorganization and still manage to move forward.

Email
Managing email is a lot of work so stop doing it. Yep, that is how simple it really is. When I first started working with email I had a subfolder for every person I knew and filters to file each message from and to these people in their own folders. This caused problems when mail came from companies or I sent email to several people at once. I also spent time on setting up folders and rules and browsing through folders of names looking for this one folder with the one message I was looking for. Then I met a guy who showed me his mail application. He only had a few folders and they were titled ‘2001′, ‘2002′ and more. He just had a lot of messages in his inbox and every now and then he selected his whole inbox and filed all the messages into the folder for that year. Simple, elegent and efficient. I adopted this new system right away and that was that.

Appointments
A manager at a big firm once told me he didn’t keep a calendar. Well, he had one but barely looked at it. Once a week he glanced at it and that was it. I asked him if he missed a lot of appointments and he explained that yes, he did forgot about quite a few appointments, but only the unimportant ones. The really important meetings you don’t forget and don’t need an appointment for. It is the unimportant meetings you agree to and then regret when you are there. He said ‘Appointments are taken way to seriously’ and explained to me that he used his memory to make sure that he only did the really important stuff that really mattered in his life. A lot of managers around him resented this because he was so hard to make an appointment with but h DID get all the important stuff done and did very well within his company. I didn’t adopt his way of work but I did become more relaxed about my calendar. Every now and then I forget a meeting and then profusely apologize but also realize that sometimes more important things can come in the way of a meeting.

Documents
I collect a lot of documents, articles and magazines during a normal workweek but don’t always get a chance to read them. Then I read a story in Wired magazine about a guy who threw away his complete library of carefully selected and filed documents which he had collected over 15 years. He found out that the old information he had so carefully filed was generally out of date and that searching for the old information all over would give him more insight and produce more information than just picking one document out of his archive. He started using a new system: read every article you get within 24 hours. If you haven’t read it within 24 hours you never will so throw it away or even better; give it to someone who you think is equally interested in the subject. People will start to appreciate that you are always giving them these interesting things to read and if you are lucky will give you an report about what was so interesting about the article afterwards. You could even tell them this story as you give them the information and suggest they either throw it away or pass it on within 24 hours themselves. Either way, you keep your bags, closets and desk free of paper and people will love you for sharing all this information with them.

So, these are a few tricks I use to keep organized without actually organizing anything.

I also once started reading a book called Getting Things Done. It changed my life. I only read the first chapter and then realized that it is more important to be happy than being good at organizing everything. Right there and then I decided to stop worrying about my disorganization and implementing yet another organization scheme and simply concentrate on what I was good at. I gave away the book and felt very organized, and happy, ever since.

The Information Overload Misconception

This is a quote from ‘Spiritual Disciplines For The Christian Life‘ (which I haven’t read) by Donald S. Whitney:

…the amount of information contained in just one weekday edition of the New York Times contains more information than a man like Jonathan Edwards would have encountered in his entire life.

This quote, and many variations on it, is being used often during presentations about information technology. I recently heard it in San Francisco at Techcrunch40 and again last week during Web2.0 Expo Berlin. It implies that 200 yeas ago there was a lot less information and people could easily focus on their work. No email, newspapers, RSS feeds and certainly no Britney Spears or Paris Hilton gossip to keep up with. Life used to be so simple. No Information overload to worry about.

But information is more than just text. Information is everywhere and in anything. You fill your head with whatever input you receive.

A farmer walking through the fields on his way home from work would be listening to the wind whistling through leaves on trees. He would hear the buzzing of bees and beetles above his freshly plowed fields. He would see the pattern in the flightpath of a bumble bee communicating to its fellow bumble bees where to find food. And he would get distracted by the aggressive, high pitched, tweezing of a swarm of hornets or maybe he would relax at the droning and throbbing buzz of flies around a drop of cow dung. Every sound, smell or sight would mean something to him and would be collected, processed and taken action on.

Either way, where you and I might see nothing but a field of crops the farmer would see more information than would fit in a whole year of New York Times editions.

Like Art, Information is in the eye of the beholder.

I don’t have a working television in my house and I recently realized that I hardly read the newspaper any more. I am aware of some of the major global developments and by talking to a lot of people I get frequent updates on what is really important. I do read a lot about developments in technology and fields that are interesting for my work. But somehow I thought that more general news, gossip or junk was only distracting me from my work. But then I thought about this quote (used before here) from Thomas Edison:

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.

Maybe Britney Spears or Paris Hilton are part of my pile of junk. I need these random bits of information so my imagination can make unexpected connections which will lead to creative solutions for problems I didn’t know I had.

Information Overload is not a problem. I need more information, more junk and more Britney Spears. There is no way to know in advance what information will be useful or trivial. You can never have enough junk in your pile.

So then why do people (Including me) complain about Information Overload?

It is because computers make it all too clear what information you HAVE absorbed and which information you haven’t. The ‘unread’ email’ alerts, new RSS Feeds and ‘to do’ lists demand your attention and won’t go away until you take action. Like a Prickly Poppy these alerts should fade away over time and become more like information in the natural world.

A message in my inbox from 2 months ago which I still haven’t read probably lost its meaning anyway. Why doesn’t it fade it away?

Which brings me to my last quote from an article titled ‘The Computer for the 21st Century‘:

There is more information available at our fingertips during a walk in the woods than in any computer system, yet people find a walk among trees relaxing and computers frustrating. Machines that fit the human environment, instead of forcing humans to enter theirs, will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods.

[Special thanks to Francisco van Jole for helping me find some of these quotes]