I like to do a lot of listening.

I love people. Anything they think is cool, I think is cool. I love when people are passionate about things, especially when they’re willing to share that passion with me. One of my favorite things in the world is when someone “geeks out” about something at me. Especially if it’s something I don’t know anything about! There’s a certain kind of exuberance that only comes from sharing your weird, unusual or unique interest with someone who knows nothing about it. I like to give people the opportunity to experience that exuberance as much as possible.

And I’m legitimately interested! I’m not *just* listening in order to boost someone’s mood. I love learning new things, and I love those glimpses into the wide chasm that represents “everything you don’t know you don’t know.” It can be difficult, on your own, to really encounter the unexpected. Everything connects to everything else, so over the course of your day/week/life, you’re likely to start with thing A that you know, which connects to thing B which you sort of know, which connects to thing C which you know even less, and so on. But rarely are you thinking about thing A and then suddenly BAM, think W jumps in front of you and now you’re hearing about that! You can go on Wikipedia and click “random article” (and you should, sometimes!) but in my experience the best way to find all these cool pockets of new knowledge is just listen to people.

Everyone knows something you don’t. Everyone.

So I like to listen. Sometimes I eavesdrop (sorry). When I can, I like to get people to just talk at me about whatever thing they’re thinking about. It doesn’t always work; I’ve found that a lot of times people want to talk about the thing they’re passionate about with OTHER people who are already passionate about that thing. If two such people are talking, that’s usually why I try to eavesdrop – or we can just call it “paying attention.” I always learn a lot.

How do you encourage people to talk to you – I mean *really* talk to you, about their weirdest thoughts, coolest beliefs, most unusual opinions? What’s the best way to let them know that I really am interested, that I might debate but I’ll never judge, that I’ll hear you in the way you intend to be heard to the best of my ability? I want everyone in the world to know that there’s at least one other person out there that definitely wants to hear about that thing you saw, place you went, idea you had. I want a billion perspectives.

The Sunk Cost Fallacy is *real,* y’all.

For so many people – I would even hazard to say most people – the reaction to something in their life not working is to do the same thing, but with more effort.

Yeah, because the problem was you weren’t making your mistakes hard enough. But people double down.

There’s definitely such a thing as quitting too early, but I think people are more prone to quitting too late on a lot of things. People will quit a hard task too early, but they’ll quit “taking the easy path” way too late.

This is why incremental measurement of goals is so important. If you can’t tell whether or not you’re succeeding for six months, you’re going to end up doing a lot of stuff that isn’t working for too long. If you have a one-year goal, figure out what successful progression would look like in two weeks, and measure actual results against that. Then do it again. Break it down to the smallest measurable unit, and just focus on those. The big stuff is made of the small stuff, whether small failures or small successes.

So don’t double down on the bad stuff. I dare you.

My (awesome) co-worker Hannah Frankman had an awesome tweet where she talked about things you read having an actual impact on your life. I replied that I think a lot of knowledge is incremental, and builds you as a person over time rather than all at once. But maybe I’m wrong – maybe we could have more of an impact if we took action immediately on things we thought were valuable. How else will we discover what does and doesn’t have actual value?

So if it’s a book, a tweet, a magazine article, a blog, whatever. If it sounds like a good idea and you find yourself saying “Huh, I should look into that,” or “maybe I’ll consider that,” well…

Why not today?

So I started blogging instead of thinking about blogging. I did ten minutes of high-energy exercise this morning instead of thinking about designing an exercise routine. I sent emails to people I wanted to talk to instead of debating a perfect strategy.

Lots of it won’t work. Some of my blogging will be terrible. My exercise was probably laughably bad. My emails might not get responses. So what? I wouldn’t have accomplished anything if I’d just thought about it. Taking any action, even if it fails, gives me data to make the next attempt better. And even if I decide not to continue with something, there’s a world of difference between “I tried something and it didn’t work” and “I never tried.”

There used to be a really great blog aggregation program called Pulse. Very simple UI, took whatever blogs you wanted to read and lined them up in one place. No bells or whistles. Loved it. Then one day for some crazy reason, LinkedIn bought it and discontinued it. No other blog-aggregator (bloggregator?) filled the void for me.

Turns out, WordPress is actually great for this! The mobile app aggregates all the blogs’ posts in chronological order and makes them easy follow. I wouldn’t have known the answer I wanted existed if I didn’t start blogging.

Man, learning stuff is awesome.

I’m not a prolific blogger. We’re doing this to learn. Jim Varney, one of the greats of comedic cinema, had a schtick he would do when playing Ernest P. Worrell. He would ramble at the camera directly, which was playing the role of his “friend” Vern. Vern never had lines and was never seen, though it was clear from the context that he was annoyed by Ernest’s constant shenanigans. I like the idea of communication that, while consumed by an audience of many, is played out as if it were addressed to just one other person.

I think that’s the model I’m going to go for here. I’m just going to talk to you, friend. You and I, we’re going on this journey together. Thanks for coming along.

I’ve decided to blog.  Sometimes I say insightful, clever or pithy things, and there should be somewhere to capture those gems for posterity.  Sometimes I babble, and I’ll seem less insane if I’m babbling to a theoretical audience than if I’m just talking to myself.  And sometimes I just need a place to focus an uncontrollable urge to communicate.

I don’t have a plan yet.  I’ll figure it out as I go.