Power Saves, Short Cuts, and Followers

There is an ongoing argument between my two sons. Jack (14) swears by cheat codes, action replays, and power saves to advance his levels in various video games. Henry (11) thinks that's cheating and insists that the only way to gain levels is through honest play. I can see both their perspectives.

I love applications, lifehacks, and other short cuts. My statistics professor use to brag that smart students were lazy students. They always found the short cuts to solving problems. And I sure wouldn't mind having a power save for doing the dishes or a cheat code for mowing the lawn.

But on the other hand, some of life's greatest accomplishments come from the labor of achieving them. When I bought my BBQ smoker last year, a friend of mine who is a real BBQ enthusiast, offered to come over on the weekend and show me how to use it - a real life power save. But I said, "No thanks." It was a journey I felt I needed to complete on my own. No doubt filled with mistakes and failures along the way, but that's part of what I wanted to experience. And when the first pork butt finally came out just right, it was mine. I did it.

As I find my way on Twitter, I read all kinds of articles about power saves and ways to gain a large audience fast. I think this is another area where the journey is more important than the destination, so I'll keep reviewing profiles before I automatically accept and be picky about who I follow so that I can read most of their posts. Of course, that's only until I realize I can't read them all anyway and I start to check my twitter grade daily, then I'll download a power save and jump ahead.

Twitter helps Practice being Brief

Whenever we asked my sophomore English teacher how long he expected our writing assignments to be, he would respond by saying, "Like a woman's dress: long enough to cover every thing, but short enough to be interesting." I think he would have liked how Twitter's limit of 140 characters forces you to say what you want in a very concise manner. One Forty or Less fully embraces this with the motto "the complexities of life in brevity." I'm finding the practice is starting to rub off in other areas. My emails are shorter, my PowerPoint slides have less words, and the other day in a long meeting I started playing a Twitter game in my mind, keeping track of who could "tweet" their points in brief sound bites that influenced others.

Being brief has always been preferred as stated in one of my favorite quotes from Franklin D. Roosevelt.

So on top of all the other great benefits you've heard about tweeting, now you can add it helps you practice the fine art of concise communication.

Provoke Instead of Influence

In a interview with the Wall Street Journal, Malcolm Gladwell said this about his new book Outliers:

"These books are playful in the sense that they regard ideas as things to experiment with. I'm happy if somebody reads my books and reaches a conclusion that is different from mine, as long as the ideas in the book cause them to think. You have to be willing to put pressure on theories, to push the envelope. That's the fun part, the exciting part. If you are writing an intellectual adventure story, why play it safe? I'm not out to convert people. I want to inspire and provoke them."

This philosophy approaches influence from a different angle. Perhaps not a full 180 degrees, but at least a good 45. Sounds to me like he's taking the easy way out. I don't have to actually influence anyone, all I have to do is provoke them. While provoking is fun, and sometimes dangerous, I enjoy the finer skill of actual persuasion.

Although, I was glad to see that Gladwell did manage to provoke Marlin Mann. The beauty of striving to provoke instead of influence is that you know longer care what others think. In fact if they disagree with you strongly that's better than if they agree with you mildly.

The other benefit for us who like to persuade, it that the provokers give us good material to help make our case even when we disagree with them.

Here is Gladwell speaking at the TED conference on spaghetti sauce.

I don't know if that talk provokes me, but I do know it makes me hungry.