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This is part 5 of my series on the hyperbrain. If you’re just joining us, please have a look at parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 before continuing. If you’re wondering why there was such a gap between parts 1-4 and part 5, try this.

When it comes to immediate distraction, you should do your best to block it by shutting down unnecessary browsers and chat, letting people know that you’re busy, and making an effort to keep focused on the current task. This standard advice applies to everyone, hyperbrain or not. At the same time, you should keep tasks closed so that when you inevitably do get distracted, it won’t cause too much damage.

However, there is a different kind of distraction that works on a much slower cycle. Sometimes it can be mistaken for a general low of energy (and sometimes that’s what it is), but very often, if you’re a hyperbrain, you’ll get progressively bored of a previously enthusing piece of work and basically not feel like working on it anymore for a while.

Confusingly, immediate distractibility will hit hardest at that time too - you’re bored of your main task, so almost anything (even perhaps examining some strange defect on the wall to your right), seems more interesting than what you’re supposed to be doing. Not only that, but because you’re supposed to do that big task and you don’t find the energy to do it, you end up not doing any other useful tasks either (after all, those other tasks are lower priority).

I have a technique to deal with that too, though it’s not so easy to apply consistently. Yet even when applied only part of the time, it is still useful, in my experience.

#4 The butterfly approach

Remember, back in the first technique I said that you should accept and embrace your limitations, while figuring out how to work with them in the best way.

So, you feel like you don’t want to work on your most important task. The natural response, what society tells us is right, is: tough luck. Just take it like a man and soldier on. And if you can’t, you’re a weak-willed loser. That’s the advice that we get throughout our childhood, and somehow it perseveres through adulthood (“when the going gets tough, the tough get going”).

Unfortunately, this approach stinks for hyperbrains. When you’re excited and “into” a task, everything is easy and you can chop through a forest in a few hours. But when you’re not into the work, when you don’t care for it, it will take a disproportionate amount of effort to get even the smallest thing done. What’s more, because you don’t care for it, you won’t do it well - and it will show, to others, but, more importantly, to you. This creates a negative feedback cycle where you feel even less like doing that thing (because you don’t like to do things badly). Feeling less enthusiastic leads to further strenuous efforts to get the smallest thing done, which leads to more fudged work, which leads you to feel even more dispirited, etc.

You have to break that cycle.

Here’s my advice: when you don’t feel like doing something, don’t do it. Do something else. Like a butterfly, when a task has lost its nectar, flit over to another. Keep that up, happily flying away from (closed!) boring tasks onto other ones that you find exciting.

It’s a very rational choice. Option 1 is to spend 10 units of effort to get 1 unit of result in task A (that you’re supposed to do). Option 2 is to switch to task B (the one that’s looking so much more appealing right now), spend 1 unit of effort and get 10 units of result in task B. If you want to maximise results, you have to take option 2.

Of course, if task A is what you committed to do for someone else, this will have negative consequences. And the solution to that is: avoid making hard commitments that will hurt you in that way. We’ll get back to that a little later.

The important practices are that you should be working on several loose “clouds” of tasks (some related, some not) rather than focusing on a single direction, and that you should allow yourself to switch between those things without guilt.

Loose clouds

Notice I said loose clouds, not loose cloud. I used the plural because this won’t work if all your tasks are still sitting under the same umbrella (e.g. “stuff I’m doing to get the next release out”). There need to be vastly different sets of tasks in your available “task-space” - things ranging from writing a blog post to coding some new functionality, from doing a bit of business administration to planning your holidays. If you find yourself dispirited by coding, switching to a different coding task is unlikely to improve your mode.

Those tasks should all be “productive”, in the sense that you should feel like you’ve accomplished something when you get them done. This is important, because this is what will break the negative feedback cycle. If you don’t feel like coding something and instead you spend a few hours playing World of Warcraft, you won’t feel any better about yourself afterwards - you’ll feel worse. This will vary for you, but for me, “worthless” tasks include things like shopping (unless I’m buying something very specific), cooking lunch… interestingly, cleaning my office or the flat doesn’t feel like a worthless task - but rearranging it would be. You’ll have to figure out for yourself which task are productive. Generally, if it falls under the category of “time-fillers” or “busy-work”, it’s not a productive task.

You may not get back to task A for some time. Don’t feel bad about it. So long as you’re doing worthwhile things, that are accumulating value for you and make you feel productive, you will be working to negate the cycle of low energy. At some point, maybe the same day, or maybe a few days later, you’ll feel like working on task A again. Then, you’ll be able to chop through it at your best efficiency, and you’ll probably catch up with where you would have been if you had stuck with task A. But you’ll have the added bonus of having also done tasks B, C, D, E and F in the meantime, instead of agonising over a single task for days.

This, if you play it right, will make you appear fearsomely productive, as if you were working 20 hours a day - because every hour that you do work will be at full efficiency.

Uncommit

To make this work, it’s important to not be too committed to doing tasks by a certain date. You need to influence your environment so that people don’t care when exactly you got something done, just that it was done.

Of course, not all tasks have this flexibility, so you’ll have to make allowances for things which have to happen at a certain time, but those tend to be a minority in careers that are good value accumulators.

For tasks which don’t require you to commit to a deadline, don’t. Be vague if you need to be. If you tend to deliver great stuff, most people will accept some element of vagueness.

Some of your coworkers will really dislike the vagueness and you’ll have to manage them appropriately. The ideal way to do this, in my experience, is to under-promise and over-deliver. If people won’t take “I think I’ll get it done in the next couple of weeks or so” as an answer, give them a clearly defined answer that leaves you plenty of leeway. “I can work on this next week on Thursday, for sure.” But then, try to deliver it this week on Friday instead. If you do this often enough, in my experience, people will stop pressing you for deadlines, because they’ll be happy enough that you seem to get everything done quickly enough for them to be able to rely on you.

Important caveat: put bread on the table

There is a subtle but necessary addendum to this technique: you must keep in mind which of those activities put bread on your table. It’s great to follow your interests and be super-productive every day, but it’s not so good if you end up starving. So when choosing tasks you should always bias yourself towards tasks which are fun and productive and also earn your salary.

This is actually the hardest part of this technique… because it’s easy to turn a bias into an overriding order - and then you fall back into the mode where you feel compelled to slog through the task that you “must” do at the expense of all the others. And yet, at the same time, you have to pay attention to your bread-winner, because otherwise you won’t earn money. I don’t have any specific tips for how to do this - this is something you have to play by ear, I’m afraid.

In conclusion

Beating the cyclical highs and lows is not easy, but you can really help yourself by following this advice:

• Have many unrelated “clouds” of tasks that you can switch to at a moment’s notice
• When you feel like your energy for a specific “cloud” is gone, switch to a different one
• Don’t feel guilty about doing this
• Avoid committing to hard deadlines where possible so that you have maximum flexibility to switch

I hope you find this useful. As always, your comments are welcome.

This is part 4 of my series on the hyperbrain. If you’re just joining us, please have a look at parts 1, 2, and 3, before continuing.

Some jobs are “process jobs”. They consist mostly of taking some sort of input (phone calls, support tickets, orders, sales leads), performing some work on them, and providing some form of output (a satisfied customer, a filled order, a new sale). These jobs exist at all levels and in all kinds of businesses - from a small business support technician to a large business sales director). A lot of people (in fact, most people) have jobs that fit this description, are happy with that work, and do it brilliantly.

If you’re a hyperbrain, however, this kind of job is your worst nightmare. Why? Because it is a job you will always screw up.

Imagine you’re a manager in charge of a process. What do you care most about when hiring people to put in the roles you’ve identified? Predictability. You don’t care if the person handling the support tickets is capable of churning through 200 tickets on a really good day. You want to be sure that, on any given day, they’ll handle the 20 or so tickets that come in on average. Unfortunately, the hyperbrain does not work like that. It can produce exceptional results, but it is lousy at being consistent.

This is a weakness that, once again, can be worked around. Read on for this technique.

#3 The value accumulator

As long as your worth depends on your consistency, you can never win in the long term. You might fool yourself and others into thinking that “this time, it will be different,” but it won’t. In order to win, you need to change those rules. The question is, what do you change them to and how?

First, the “what”. The best way I can come up with to describe what you should be aiming for is a “value accumulator”. You need to engineer your own job so that people focus on what you’ve accomplished rather than what you’re going to accomplish. You need to create a system that accumulates value and then rewards you based on accumulated value.

This can be done both in choosing a career or profession, and in deciding how to perform and evolve your work.

It’s worth noting that there’s another technique hiding in this discussion - how to smooth your output, within any environment - but I won’t be covering it in this article.

Careers that accumulate value

I believe that most smart and capable people benefit from doing work that accumulates value. For the hyperbrain, however, it’s essential, if you want a fulfilling, successful career.

Most human activities “accumulate value” in some respect, since experience is a form of value. Some careers, however, are better at it than others. Let’s look at some examples.

Let’s consider writing as a first example. You can be a writer in many ways: working directly for a newspaper, being a freelance writer, writing a blog, writing books… How do these compare?

While the first two (newspaper and commercial freelance) accumulate value in the shape of experience and contacts, they do little to turn the output of your previous work (your backlist, as Seth Godin calls it) into something you can keep deriving benefit from. Freelancing is sometimes anonymous, and writing a great article today will not keep returning you benefits for the months to come, unless you’re also the publisher. You’ll have to keep writing great articles over and over again.

On the other hand, writing a blog is a pretty good value accumulator. It takes time for the value of a blog to be realised, but, for example, I published my most popular post so far in November last year, and yet it keeps bringing several hundred visitors a day each day, and keeps my PageRank up.

A book is an even better value accumulator. Once written, it can be marketed and sold over and over again for many years, and you keep the credit for “having written a book about X” for your whole life. Of course, book writing is a difficult way to make money, but if you write just one brilliant book that captures people’s imagination, you can keep deriving value out of that even if you did little of value for years after writing that book.

As I touched on in this earlier article, a product business is a great value accumulator. The market doesn’t care how you built your product, through great spurts of inspiration or a long, consistent effort. It only cares about how great your product is. And a product is a natural value accumulator, since work that you’ve done on it remains there pretty much forever.

On the other hand, a services business might not be ideal for a hyperbrain, since clients naturally care about the work you’re doing for them now, rather than the work you did for other clients in the past. So if you’re running a service business, you might want to consider turning it into a product business instead.

Corporate jobs

In most corporate jobs, the high-level equation is not in your favour, since employers usually care more about your future output than your past achievements. However, even there, some jobs at least provide past achievements, whereas others are entirely process-focused.

Consider an IT support job, for instance. By default, it has no past achievements that you can point at. Your performance is mostly measured by the consistency with which you answer tickets. If you stop answering tickets for a week, you’ll take a very serious hit.

A development job, on the other hand, has natural “past achievements” in the form of features built, for example. A one-week lull in productivity won’t make anyone happy about you, but it won’t destroy you either, and if you can keep people focused on what you’ve done rather than what you were supposed to do, you can survive those lulls unscathed.

You should seek a job that naturally lends itself to accumulating past achievements that people care about, but even in the case where it doesn’t, you can still tweak the work in your favour, and slowly transform a process job into a project one. Read on to find out some ways to do that.

Accumulating value within a process job

Within a job, to make up for your inconsistency, you want to create value accumulators and then keep people’s attention firmly on those.

The best device for that is a “project”.

A project is a set of tasks that achieve a definite goal within a definite time. A project can be finished. This is important, because it means that once you’ve finished a project, it remains in your “achievement history” no matter what else you do (or don’t do) afterwards. If you wrote the competitor analysis report, you’ve done it, and no one can take the credit away from you. However, if you processed all the orders reliably for a couple of months and then go through a couple of weeks when you don’t process any, the credit for “processing orders well” will vanish immediately.

For a hyperbrain, it’s useful to structure every bit of work as a project. Even if you’re in a process-oriented environment, find projects to get involved in. If there aren’t any, create them.

You can create projects by looking for improvements that you could make to the process, and implement those improvements as projects. You can also create projects by packaging processes into chunks. If you can ensure that your work on a process has an end-point, it can be completed and put aside.

Find the projects, finish them, and then keep people’s eyes on the projects.

After you finish a project, keep other people aware of it. Blow your own trumpet, so to speak. Every once in a while, perform small additions to projects that you already completed, to give you an excuse to re-release them and keep them fresh in everyone’s mind. Those additions shouldn’t be planned, they should be things you do spontaneously.

As you accumulate more past projects and keep people aware of them, your credit will go up, since everyone will then be aware that you’ve done a lot of things, rather than seeing only the bits where you failed to do what you said.

Conclusion

In any work environment, look for ways that you can create value accumulators. Steer yourself away from work that’s purely process based. Ideally, find a career that allows you to accumulate value for yourself rather than for others.

I’ve been pretty busy this week, so haven’t had the time to write part 5 yet, but there’ll be another hyperbrain article coming next week. Keep your eyes peeled!

This is the third article in my series on the hyperbrain. If you haven’t read them yet, you might want to look at parts 1 and 2 first.

Subjectively, I think the greatest challenge about having a hyperbrain is distractibility. If not handled effectively, it can make you feel really useless. I’ve often sat in front of my computer, knowing that I’m supposed to be getting on with some piece of work that’s half done, and not been able to focus on it (whilst remaining quite capable of focusing on dozens of blogs and other wastes of time). Learning to work with your distractibility can make an order of magnitude of difference in your productivity.

Like a game

Have you ever played a computer game where your character could die at any point? First person shooters (Doom, Quake…) make for an excellent analogy to distractibility. What do you do when you have to complete difficult, complex, sometimes tedious tasks and your progress can be lost at any point?

A long, long time ago, there was nothing you could do. You just played the game until you died. A few palliatives were invented to try and deal with that, and eventually, they culminated into the ideal solution: saved games. Nowadays, if you’re playing a game like Quake, you can save whenever you’ve done something that was hard or lengthy. Then, if you happen to die in the next minute, you can reload from the saved game. If you save every minute, you can minimise the effects of dying to, at most, translating into one minute of lost time.

If you accept the fact that you are easily distracted (and, after years of fighting it, it’s something I’ve come to accept rather than fight), you could consider distraction to be similar to dying in a computer game. Accepting your own distractibility means that whenever you’re doing any work, you have to accept that you might be distracted and start doing something else for two hours, two days, or even two weeks.

So what can you do to mitigate this sword of Damocles? You need some sort of real-world equivalent of saved games.

#2 Keep tasks closed

A task is closed when you can ignore it for an indeterminate amount of time and there will be no direct negative consequences from doing so (other than the fact that this specific task won’t get done), and when it isn’t left in such a state that you will struggle to pick it up again.

A programming task (e.g. a refactoring) is closed when you can commit and push all your changes into the main codebase and not (knowingly) break the application.

A writing task (e.g. writing a book) is closed when you’ve finished a self-contained section or sub-section and can leave it without having to spend 20 minutes to re-immerse yourself in the subject to continue writing.

A managerial task (e.g. setting up a weekly meeting) is closed when no one is expecting anything else from you on that task.

A closed task is in a state of rest. It can be safely ignored while you do something more important. It’s like saving the game after killing all the monsters in the room, but before walking into the next room. An open task is either when you haven’t saved the game recently, or you’ve saved it in the middle of a fight.

Open tasks are risky

There are many risks with abandoning open tasks:

1. They can prevent other people from getting on with their own tasks (which breeds resentment against you even though you’re working hard and enthusiastically);
2. You might have been able to work on the task today on an inspired high, but you might be on the low for the next week. If you leave open a big, complex task, and go do something else, you may be incapable of picking it up productively again for some time;
3. As long as the task is open, it will clutter your mind and your ability to do other things will be diminished. Keeping tasks open uses up your mental capacity and impacts every other task that you’re involved in;
4. By the time you are finally able to complete the task, someone else might have rendered it irrelevant (if you’re working in a fast-moving environment);
5. Say you finally complete the task and have taken five or ten times longer than expected; in hindsight, others may think it wasn’t worth spending that long on it - this will rob you of the praise that you need and expect when you complete something difficult.

And so on.

The key approach to surviving distractibility is to keep almost all tasks closed all the time. Only one task should ever be open at any one time, and it should only ever be open for a short amount of time. How long depends on your work. For programming, I like to make that time fifteen minutes. At least every fifteen minutes, I should be able to save all my changes and commit them to the central repository without any ill effects.

Some people present this advice as “you should not multi-task”, but that phrasing is not so useful to the hyperbrain. The reason is that the definition of a “task” is stretchy. A major restructuring of a codebase could be considered a single task, even though it is really composed of dozens or even hundreds of small tasks.

For the hyperbrain, the definition of single-tasking has to be time-based. You need to set yourself a limit for how long you will work on something before closing it.

If you don’t think you can close the task within that time, don’t do it.

Rethink the task until you can figure out a way to close it within a short time. If you can’t think of a way to do that, don’t start the task. You wouldn’t jump out of a plane before finding the parachute - don’t jump on a task without figuring out how to chip off a small chunk.

“Don’t multi-task” is correct advice, but not useful to the hyperbrain. Instead, think of it as: “Don’t do anything that you can’t close within fifteen minutes”.

This doesn’t mean that you need to break down the whole task into fifteen-minute chunks before starting. Don’t even try doing that, you’ll never finish. Instead, break off one chunk at a time. Ask yourself “what’s the next thing I can do that will help me get this task done, but that can finish in less than fifteen minutes?” Make sure that the next thing you work on can be finished in a short sprint. Each time you finish a sprint, break off another small chunk of the remaining work and do that bit.

Also, don’t feel that it’s a bad thing if it takes much less than fifteen minutes to complete a task. Some of my most productive stretches of work were long collections of 1-minute chunks.

What if you can’t seem to finish it?

What if you start a task that you thought could be finished within fifteen minutes, and you find yourself half an hour into it without any clear endpoint yet? This can easily happen with complex work, such as programming - after all, you don’t really know exactly what you’re going to do until you start doing it.

If that happens, you need to roll back to the previous closed state (discard your changes and reload the latest good version). Take the game metaphor: if you were playing your game and suddenly you find yourself dead? You simply reload. The unfortunate difference between a game like Doom and real work is that work doesn’t make it so clear when you’re dead. You can keep going like a zombie for a long time before you realise that you died three hours ago. And because, as a hyperbrain, you’re fairly optimistic about your own abilities, you keep soldiering on, thinking it will get better soon. Another way to phrase this advice would be: “When you’re in a hole, stop digging!” It won’t get better. You’ll just end up even deeper.

With work, it’s often hard to figure out whether you’ve lost your way and should back out, or whether it’s just a hard problem that you’re on the verge of cracking. Fortunately, there is an absolute, objective measure you can use to determine whether you should back out: time.

This is not a huge effort of discipline. It does take a little mental effort to “give up” on fifteen or thirty minutes of work that you’ve just done, and I’ll grant you that’s sometimes hard to accept. But if you can apply this simple discipline, you will see a several-fold improvement in your productivity (and that will make you happy and drown out any sorrow that you may have experienced when abandoning a small dead chunk of work).

Conclusion

You don’t need to be a super-hero to adapt to distraction, just to follow a handful of simple rules:

1. Reduce the distractions in your environment as much as possible, but accept the fact that you will probably get distracted anyway, and be prepared for it
2. Never leave a task open for more than X minutes (fifteen in my case, for programming tasks)
3. Never open more than one task at a time
4. If you are working on a task and it’s taking longer than your cut-off point, roll it back and try again from a different angle

I hope you’ve found this article helpful. Feedback is, as always most welcome.

Senior Rails Developer (Toronto)

Reply to: jobs@redwirenation.com [?]
Date: 2008-08-26, 9:12PM EDT


Working Role Title: Senior Rails Developer 

Why People Want To Work for Us: RedWire Employees Are Rockstars 


Enabling Entrepreneurs To Connect on a Global Scale 
As far as missions go, ours is pretty cool. How many people get to say their job is to help others be successful? 

Innovating at Warp 9 
We are a small company, but we are driven to change the world. Our reason for being is to help entrepreneurs realize their ambitions. We are innovative, relevant and user-friendly, and we use these qualities to equip business owners with the tools they need for success. 

Fun-zilla 
Working for RedWire means being passionate and creative. We want awesome people to work with who will be contributing members of our team of rockstars. 

The top three reasons why working at RedWire rocks: 

1) You get to do good. People helping people—it’s a beautiful thing. 
2) Brainastics, whiteboards, candy and lots of coffee. Sometimes we have to remind our employees to go home. 
3) Flexible work hours. We don’t do “9 to 5”. 
Nuff said. 

We realize that a start-up environment doesn’t appeal to everybody, but if it works for you, then, please, read on. 


Current Needs: 

¼ Network Engineer 
+ ¼ Electrical Engineer 
+ 3⁄8 Senior Open Source Software Developer 
+ 1⁄8Mathematician 
= 1 RedWire Senior Developer 

We are looking for an in-house doer-thinker-fixer-betterer whose superpower is to fulfill all the functions of an IT Department. We need an autonomous and resourceful guru to join us in our quest and manage all things IT. You must be ridiculously passionate about the web, love the idea of working in a start-up, enjoy variety in your day-to-day and be able to handle the stress of being the go-to resource. 

Role Overview: 

This is a pivotal role for an ambitious, highly enthusiastic developer who’s excited at the thought of working in a fast-paced, high-growth web start-up. 

In this position, you will demonstrate your mental prowess as you coordinate a diverse flow of projects and initiatives. 

You will be responsible for: 

- Web application development 
- Network administration 
- Information storage 
- Network functionality 

In addition, you will also be responsible for helping set up email distribution, as well as any other relevant technically related projects as they arise. 

We are looking for a goal-oriented, naturally eager person who can work effectively and efficiently under tight deadlines and who is able to manage multiple projects at once. 

Qualifications:
• Provable guru status and devoteeism of Ruby on Rails with experience actually deploying applications 
• Strong experience with MySQL, version 5+ and beyond 
• Background in developing and optimizing GNU/Linux, *nix, and *BSD platforms for mission critical production environments 
• Familiar with network infrastructure and design concepts for small networks (25 machines). 
• Proven experience in designing security-hardened web applications, using open cryptographic standards 
• Familiarity with hardware prognostics and normal accident theory 
• Expertise in open-source programs and development 
• Familiarity with content versioning systems (e.g., Hg, SVN, CVS) 
• Experience breaking stuff 
• Experience fixing what you’ve broken 

If you are the personification of our long-winded wish list, then we’d celebrate your email’s alerting us to your existence. Interested potential rockstars should send their résumé to jobs@redwirenation.com. 

This article follows a previous article. It’s part of a series of yet undefined length. If you haven’t read the first instalment yet, it might be worth going back and reading it.

This is addressed mainly to people who recognise themselves in the description of the hyperbrain, although it may be of interest to others. When you count up all the different ways in which your hyperbrain differs from the average, you might be tempted to think you’re not normal. Well, it’s true, you’re not. You’re different from the norm, but that can be a good thing. After all, you can’t be normal and expect abnormal results. The focus of these articles is to make you more aware of how you can deal with those differences, counteract your limitations, and build on your strengths, to achieve what you’re capable of.

So what are you capable of? Well, you can do anything you want (that’s the good news). But in order to do those things, you need to learn to work with your hyperbrain, otherwise you will constantly fail in public and humiliating ways at the worst moments (usually, on the cusp of victory, at least in my experience). And that will hurt you more than the average person, because you are far more sensitive to negative feedback than you’d care to admit. Let’s look at the first practical step to take to improve your chances of success.

The first step to success with a hyperbrain is to both accept your limitations and reject them.

Accept your limitations

You are not built for consistency. Putting yourself in situations which require you to provide a constant output, and which hurt you the moment you fail to do so, is a recipe for disaster for you. Yet you might be tempted to set up just such a system in order to generate motivation. To succeed, however, you need to engineer your environment to focus on what you’ve achieved rather than what you’ve planned to achieve.

Your focus can shift radically in an instant. This means you cannot rely on continued focus in a period of time, so, to succeed, you need to structure your (focused) work in a way that allows you to abandon it at short notice without downside.

You crave validation from yourself. If you can’t feel that you’re doing something really worthwhile, your productivity will shoot down to a hundredth of what it might otherwise be. You need to ensure your work is always presented in a way that makes you feel it’s worthwhile.

You crave validation from from other people, too. Most people like a pat on the back, but without that pat, you can’t go on. Putting yourself in situations where no one really cares about what you’re doing will demoralise you fairly quickly, unless you can come up with elaborate rationalisations for why they don’t care yet (e.g. secret projects). So, paradoxically, to succeed, you actually need to be on the front lines, where it’s most visible and most dangerous to fail, because that’s where you’ll feel most energetic and driven.

When you’re on a high, you feel you can take on the world. And you could - if only you could maintain that high. But you can’t. So, on a high, you actually do take on the world, and then the world chews you up and spits you by the side of the road. To succeed, you need to moderate that eagerness to ensure you don’t set yourself up for failure.

You get involved in too many things. All successful people do that to an extent, but you’re really pushing the boundaries. At any given time, you’re reading 5 books, pursuing 10 pet projects, and working on 15 things - and you constantly shift between them. To succeed, you need to structure your environment to allow you to shift between those things without negative side-effects.

You are extremely sensitive to negative criticism. Most people dislike being told they’re wrong, but the wrong bit of criticism from the wrong person can shut down something that you genuinely cared about permanently. To succeed, you need to develop a healthy scepticism for people’s negative criticisms (if only because success is always, inevitably, accompanied by harsh negative criticism from people who are mean, jealous, in a bad mood, or just simply disagree in overly harsh terms).

You have a strong tendency to martyrdom and self-victimisation. How better can you gain other people’s positive feedback than by sacrificing yourself? If only I had the support I needed, I could do so well! To succeed, continue reading.

#1: Reject your limitations

One of the hyperbrain’s tendencies is self-victimisation. Well, that’s not unique to the hyperbrain. Many people feel misunderstood, although the craving for external validation makes it particularly acute in this type of mind, because the only way to fulfil that craving is to succeed, and you cannot succeed while you feel the odds are stacked against you. This self-victimisation is crippling, though. It’s oh so easy to slip into thinking that you are doomed to fail at everything you try, because you’re just that way, and there’s always some bit of the “support system” that’s missing (tip: it’s a catch-22 - you will only be able to build a full support system when you’ve already succeeded).

If you take only one thing from these articles, take this:

Your limitations are not an excuse for failure.

You should never throw up your hands and accept that you will fail because of your limitations. Analyse past failures in terms of your limitations to see how you can make up for them, but never accept defeat as a given. This advice goes for anyone, really, but it is especially important for hyperbrains because of these self-victimisation tendencies.

Your environment is not an excuse for failure.

You may try to dodge the above advice by saying something along the lines of: “Well, I can deal with my limitations, but my environment just doesn’t work with my personality.” Bullshit. You can succeed in any environment. The match (or mismatch) between your limitations and your environment is just a puzzle to be solved. In later articles, I’m going to drill down into specific techniques for how to counteract those limitations without taking away from your strengths, and you’ll see that almost no environment is incompatible with the hyperbrain, so long as you know how to handle yourself. You are the sole factor in whether you succeed or fail.

You don’t need to sacrifice yourself in order for others to succeed.

People don’t need you as much as you feel they do. How many times have you been in a situation where you thought the project couldn’t run without you, and you got moved somewhere else anyway, and the project still went on? Because of your ability to pick up many different skills, you’re involved in everything, so it’s easy to end up feeling you’re indispensable. Then, you feel that you can’t possibly go and do what you want because everyone is depending on you. It’s easy to turn this into another excuse for not achieving your potential. Don’t let it be so. People don’t need you as much as you think they do, and they will not appreciate your sacrifice at all - so don’t do it.

Unless you accept this key point, that the key to success lies within you, that there is no valid excuse for not realising your potential, then the rest of my advice will be worthless. I’ve started with this high-level “tip”, even though it really applies to everyone (not just hyperbrains) because it is so very important.

In part 3, coming later this week, I’ll present my most important approach for how to deal with distractibility and arrange your work to survive the hyperbrain’s attention deficit without losing out on its ability for extraordinary focus (no, it doesn’t involve some fancy variation on GTD).

Do you have a hyperbrain?

A recent article posted up on HackerNews presented a list of symptoms (representing things that the author felt about himself). These symptoms are not common to everyone, but they are common to enough people to warrant this and further articles. Plus, I promised some of them that I’d write about this.

The characteristics exhibited there seem to touch on almost every so-called mental disorder out there: Bipolar-like ups and downs of energy and, sometimes, emotions; Obsessive focus (under certain circumstances); Compulsion to do certain things that just have to be done; Hyperactivity (with a tendency to start many things at once); Attention Deficit (hell yeah.. oh, shiny stuff!). Yet it is far from diseased. With that brain, you can achieve great things, so long as you apply a few simple, practical approaches to harness it.

(From XKCD)

Do you have a hyperbrain?

A recent article posted up on HackerNews presented a list of symptoms (representing things that the author felt about himself). These symptoms are not common to everyone, but they are common to enough people to warrant this and further articles. Plus, I promised some of them that I’d write about this.

The characteristics exhibited there seem to touch on almost every so-called mental disorder out there: Bipolar-like ups and downs of energy and, sometimes, emotions; Obsessive focus (under certain circumstances); Compulsion to do certain things that just have to be done; Hyperactivity (with a tendency to start many things at once); Attention Deficit (hell yeah.. oh, shiny stuff!). Yet it is far from diseased. With that brain, you can achieve great things, so long as you apply a few simple, practical approaches to harness it.

(From XKCD)

The hyperbrain is full of contradictions

On the one hand, the attention-deficited brain can be easily distracted by almost anything (a dire condition in the age of blogs, RSS feeds, and social news aggregation). On the other hand, it is also capable of extraordinary focus on the right task, and can turn that temporary obsession into a spike of productivity that has a nasty tendency to result in previously impossible things being achieved over the weekend. Unfortunately, the typical productivity approaches simply don’t work very well for this kind of brain, perhaps because they attempt to cure the symptoms, not the cause, and perhaps also because while temporarily decreasing one’s distractibility, they also obliterate the focus ability that gives the hyperbrain all its power.

On the one hand, it is practically incapable of multi-tasking. On the other hand, it can, under the right circumstances, plough through an enormous to-do list in an astonishingly short amount of time. This makes it particularly galling when you go through a low-productivity day. Not only you haven’t done much that day, but you did so much only two days before! Not living up to one’s potential is always disappointing.

On the one hand, it seems incapable of organising itself, working in a glorious mess that would drive most people nuts. On the other hand, this very habit is a side-effect of its ability to make sense of vast, churning oceans of chaos, where most analytical approaches would fail repeatedly or take forever. The hyperbrain can devour a new, ill-defined topic, organise it mentally into a fractal tree of practical thoughts, and successfully apply it to a problem at hand or explain it to others - all in less time than it would take the normal brain to even decide to go on a training course, let alone book it, endure it, and apply it.

On the one hand, it is often extremely good at grasping technical subjects, such as physics or hacking, which makes it very likely to settle for an engineering career. On the other hand, it has powerful artistic aspirations, and a sensitivity to the world that is usually found only in dedicated artists - not in your stereotypical engineer.

On the one hand, it suffers from a truly compulsive obsession with details - for instance, it might be incapable of going through a document without noticing almost every typo and grammatical error, as if they were circled with a red pen. It might listen to a piece of music and hear every false note. This can make one wonder: “Am I some sort of minor savant?” On the other hand, it is capable of rapidly leaping to the larger picture and drawing big picture conclusions at the highest levels.

On the one hand, it is capable of extreme highs of energy and enthusiasm. On the other hand, it regularly goes through days or even sometimes weeks of bored semi-depression, where it simply cannot be moved into any sort of productive activity. Well, it can, but we’ll get to that later.

On the one hand, this brain is, I firmly believe, capable of acts of genius. It surprises and delights its owner with its irregular achievements, even as it disappoints with its unpredictability. On the other hand, the enterprise world values predictability more than excellence, and the hyperbrain is thoroughly incompatible with that environment, and so is regarded by many as inferior, worthless, a nuisance. It can lead to misery, as described by lispy in his follow-up post.

Many of these characteristics exist in most people, to an extent, but in the hyperbrain, they are essential, primary, central, and acute. It is not a superbrain (though it can occasionally produce some extraordinary results), it is a hyperbrain - a more extreme version of the average brain. Because of that, however, it can be quite challenging to make the best out of it.

Do you own a hyperbrain?

If you recognise yourself in this, like many people, then do stick around (bookmark this in your RSS reader, perhaps), as I intend to publish a series of articles going into various aspects of this. If it doesn’t sound like you at all (which will be the case for a large percentage of readers), you might still wish to read it to understand some of your friends who might exhibit these traits (and perhaps point them this way). Don’t feel bad about it - hyperbrains are not superior, just different.

What makes me qualified to talk about this hyperbrain? Well, I happen to be the proud owner of one such specimen that I’ve been living with for a while - as long as I can remember, actually. Moreover, having had to survive for 4 years in a large business consulting firm, and having since started my own business - both of which are activities rather unfriendly to the hyperbrain - I’ve figured out a good number of approaches to harness this gift of nature, and, since others seem interested, I might as well share what I’ve discovered, in hope that it may be useful to others who are similarly blessed.

For it is a blessing, so long as it can be harnessed successfully. Out of control, it will make you miserable, as you constantly fail to live up to the potential that you know you have, the potential to achieve things both great and just plain normal, including, perhaps, things that will make you happier.

As I post up these items, please do keep in mind that this is not an absolute, objective guide to all cases, but a series of subjective observations from my own case as well as from the cases of people I know. You should take each piece of advice as you would any piece of advice found on someone’s blog - with a pinch of salt. Then again, do try some of these, and see if they work for you. At the very least, they should provide a starting point to develop your own techniques, or interesting ideas to enhance your existing approaches.

Next: part 2, High-level approach to getting the best of the hyperbrain.

Here’s an article from VentureBeat waving about some figures about how much money can be made with Facebook apps. Although the figures are a bit anecdotal, and I hope for their sake that no VC’s ever invest based on such hand-waving mathematics, the real gem is at the end:

Either way, the many naysayers suggesting that it’s impossible to make money on Facebook might want to think again.

I don’t know if anyone’s ever suggested it’s _impossible_ to make money from Facebook. The main backlash against Facebook applications as a business model has really been against the gold rush mentality of the early Facebook app “golden age”. In those days, the mental processes went a little bit like this:

1. Facebook has lots of users
2. Facebook is inherently viral
3. If I make a Facebook application, it will be easy to reach millions of people
4. An application that can reach millions of people is bound to make money.

That’s a nice story, and it explains why some many people (myself included) rushed into Facebook application development last summer. Since then, most of them have pulled out, and for very good reasons.

1. Facebook became much more protective of its users (and quite sensibly). A large part of the changes to Facebook in the last year have been to protect its users from over-greedy and spammy applications
2. Many changes entirely nerfed the virality, making it much, much harder for an application to magically spread from 10 users to a million within a few weeks
3. Therefore, it’s become very hard to reach any large number of people on Facebook
4. Even applications that did benefit from the early “golden age” conditions didn’t manage to make that much money. Their business models are still being proven. Slide and RockYou may have a few very successful apps, but they also have many developers, and it’s unlikely that their Facebook revenues cover their costs yet (though I’d love to hear some hard numbers on that).

The truth is, yes, it’s possible to make money with a Facebook app. But, and this is the key, it’s no easier than making money with a non-Facebook app. In many ways, it’s harder. Working with the Facebook platform and its many limitations is a challenge in and of itself. Even if you’re a consummate start-upper outside of the Facebook bubble-world, you’ll have to learn application development all over again in this new, different environment. That’s not a huge deal, but it should give pause to people who think they can just “make a Facebook version” of their otherwise successful application.

More importantly, building a Facebook application puts you in the thrall of Facebook. That is a huge deal, because Facebook is their own business, and they will always do things to their own advantage, even if that involves doing something that will completely destroy your business. The internet is fickle enough as it is. Do you need the extra risk?

Here’s an article from VentureBeat waving about some figures about how much money can be made with Facebook apps. Although the figures are a bit anecdotal, and I hope for their sake that no VC’s ever invest based on such hand-waving mathematics, the real gem is at the end:

Either way, the many naysayers suggesting that it’s impossible to make money on Facebook might want to think again.

I don’t know if anyone’s ever suggested it’s _impossible_ to make money from Facebook. The main backlash against Facebook applications as a business model has really been against the gold rush mentality of the early Facebook app “golden age”. In those days, the mental processes went a little bit like this:

1. Facebook has lots of users
2. Facebook is inherently viral
3. If I make a Facebook application, it will be easy to reach millions of people
4. An application that can reach millions of people is bound to make money.

That’s a nice story, and it explains why some many people (myself included) rushed into Facebook application development last summer. Since then, most of them have pulled out, and for very good reasons.

1. Facebook became much more protective of its users (and quite sensibly). A large part of the changes to Facebook in the last year have been to protect its users from over-greedy and spammy applications
2. Many changes entirely nerfed the virality, making it much, much harder for an application to magically spread from 10 users to a million within a few weeks
3. Therefore, it’s become very hard to reach any large number of people on Facebook
4. Even applications that did benefit from the early “golden age” conditions didn’t manage to make that much money. Their business models are still being proven. Slide and RockYou may have a few very successful apps, but they also have many developers, and it’s unlikely that their Facebook revenues cover their costs yet (though I’d love to hear some hard numbers on that).

The truth is, yes, it’s possible to make money with a Facebook app. But, and this is the key, it’s no easier than making money with a non-Facebook app. In many ways, it’s harder. Working with the Facebook platform and its many limitations is a challenge in and of itself. Even if you’re a consummate start-upper outside of the Facebook bubble-world, you’ll have to learn application development all over again in this new, different environment. That’s not a huge deal, but it should give pause to people who think they can just “make a Facebook version” of their otherwise successful application.

More importantly, building a Facebook application puts you in the thrall of Facebook. That is a huge deal, because Facebook is their own business, and they will always do things to their own advantage, even if that involves doing something that will completely destroy your business. The internet is fickle enough as it is. Do you need the extra risk?

Ok.

So I’ve been a bit sparse on the posts lately.

Well, that’s all going to change. I intend to start posting a bit more often from now on, with shorter posts most of the time (although the odd big post will still come up every once in a while). I’ve been terribly busy with my start-up, and, well, I know it’s not an excuse, but hey, that’s life. I’ll probably be terribly busy in the future too, but I’ll make more of an effort on the blog.

In other news, I’ve actually published a couple of articles in the meantime, which you may be interested in reading. They appeared on Sitepoint, and are titled Why You Should Fire Your Clients And Launch A Product and Nine Deadly Startup Diseases—and How to Cure Them. If you like my usual start-up oriented articles, those should be of interest.

In any case, thanks for reading this blog, and I hope the new publishing regimen works out for both you and me.

Ok.

So I’ve been a bit sparse on the posts lately.

Well, that’s all going to change. I intend to start posting a bit more often from now on, with shorter posts most of the time (although the odd big post will still come up every once in a while). I’ve been terribly busy with my start-up, and, well, I know it’s not an excuse, but hey, that’s life. I’ll probably be terribly busy in the future too, but I’ll make more of an effort on the blog.

In other news, I’ve actually published a couple of articles in the meantime, which you may be interested in reading. They appeared on Sitepoint, and are titled Why You Should Fire Your Clients And Launch A Product and Nine Deadly Startup Diseases—and How to Cure Them. If you like my usual start-up oriented articles, those should be of interest.

In any case, thanks for reading this blog, and I hope the new publishing regimen works out for both you and me.

“Very deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?” - Thomas Mann

Whenever working on anything remotely artistic, I feel compelled to try and be original. After all, what’s the point of creating something just like everything else that came before? That seems like a noble aim: add something new to the world, rather than re-hashing the same old thing. It’s a desire that all artists share, to an extent. History appears (on the surface) to recognise those who brought forth something entirely new, and, particularly, to recognise them for the very reason that they brought something entirely new into existence.

Recently, someone wrote an adaptation of a famous Russian fairy tale by Alexander Pushkin, ”The fisherman and his wife”, adapted to the topic of greedy SEO tricks, and called it ”The web developer and his wife”. On YCNews, someone commented: “Sometimes it is better to not make bad copies of good things.”

I couldn’t disagree more. In fact, I believe that this is the exact formula for making great things.

“Very deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?” - Thomas Mann

Whenever working on anything remotely artistic, I feel compelled to try and be original. After all, what’s the point of creating something just like everything else that came before? That seems like a noble aim: add something new to the world, rather than re-hashing the same old thing. It’s a desire that all artists share, to an extent. History appears (on the surface) to recognise those who brought forth something entirely new, and, particularly, to recognise them for the very reason that they brought something entirely new into existence.

Recently, someone wrote an adaptation of a famous Russian fairy tale by Alexander Pushkin, ”The fisherman and his wife”, adapted to the topic of greedy SEO tricks, and called it ”The web developer and his wife”. On YCNews, someone commented: “Sometimes it is better to not make bad copies of good things.”

I couldn’t disagree more. In fact, I believe that this is the exact formula for making great things.

Bad artists copy

“Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.”

Quick. Who said this? Ah, of course, Picasso. Or was it?

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”

That one’s from TS Elliot. Ok, so they both said. it. Wait a minute… what’s this?

“A good composer does not imitate; he steals.”

Damn. This one comes from Stravinsky.

This is just from ten minutes of googling. It is likely that this quote can be traced not only to many contemporary artists, but also to many before them. There are many deep, interesting, worthwhile ideas in the world, but the world has existed for a long time, and mankind has been thinking up ideas for well neigh on ten thousand years. Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine author who wrote many interesting, mind-bending short stories. He was also the Head Librarian in Buenos Aires and spent much of his time researching ideas.

I am not an erudite scholar, so I cannot reproduce the intimately wide knowledge of the history of ideas that Borges was capable of. However, to illustrate the depth to which one can go when looking for the true origin of an interesting ideas, here is a passage from André Maurois’ introduction to Labyrinths, a fantastic collection of Borges’s short stories that I warmly recommend:

“[Borges’s] sources are innumerable and unexpected. [He] has read everything, and especially what nobody reads any more: the Cabalists, the Alexandrine Greeks, medieval philosophers. His erudition is not profound - he asks of it only flashes of lightning and ideas - but it is vast. For example, Pascal wrote: ‘Nature is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.’ Borges sets out to hunt down this metaphor through the centuries. He finds it in Giordano Bruno (1584): ‘We can assert with certainty that the universe is all centre, or that the centre of the universe is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.’ But Giordano Bruno had been able to read in a twelfth-century French theologian, Alain de Lille, a formulation borrowed from the Corpus Hermeticum (third century): ‘God is an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.’”

Nothing new under the sun

Thousands of years ago, an unknown writer (purported to be Solomon the Wise) complained //www.gnpcb.org/esv/search/?q=Ecclesiastes+1%3A9>:

“What has been is what will be,
      and what has been done is what will be done,
      and there is nothing new under the sun.”

In today’s world, that seems hard to believe. Nary a week goes by without some new-fangled gadget or website. This especially affects the start-up world. Everyone is always trying to come up with the Next Big Thing, and here again, it is easy to confuse and merge the quest for success with the quest for newness or originality. As with art, the latter is misleading, dangerous, and futile.

There were auction sites before eBay. There were classified sites before Craigslist. There were money transfer sites before PayPal. There were social networks before Facebook. There were search engines before Google. Each and every online success had precursors, some of them very successful. None can honestly claim that they did anything really new. At best, they can claim that they did something better.

The truth is, being the first to come up with a great idea for an online site would be more a curse than a blessing. If it happened to be a really good idea, it would burn a hole in your mind and never let you rest until you had seen it implemented. However, any idea that is truly completely new would likely be alien and bizarre to most people. You would need many years of bashing people on the head before they finally realised your genius. In a way, having such an idea would condemn you to decades of never-ending failure until the world finally caught on — and by then it would probably be someone else’s implementation of it that took over. This is the hidden sting beneath Howard Aiken’s quote, “Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”

Is it even possible to come up with something completely new, or was Solomon truly wise on this matter too? It all really depends on your definition of new, of course. What about the first person who created an online social network site. Well, it was new in the sense that it wasn’t online yet. But was it truly new? Hardly. Social networking is such a powerful concept on the web only because it is such a powerful concept outside the web. There have been many sorts of organisations, both businesses and others, who have focused on allowing people to extend their social networks. Societies, clubs, cafés, pubs and gala events, etc, are all social gathering places where people reinforce and extend their social network. Facebook, in a sense, is like an online club which optimises that process, but it is only new in small, ancillary ways.

Power concepts

The point that I’m driving at (and that I failed to quite explain in this comment thread on YCNews), is not that it’s impossible to come up with a new idea. Of course it is possible. Google’s PageRank algorithm was new in its application to search engines. I’m not denying the creativity of people who come up with new businesses or artistic creations. In fact, creating a successful new business doesn’t take one creative idea - it takes many thousands.

However, when you look at the ecosystem of ideas as a whole, there are only a few really powerful ideas out there. Depending on how you slice the cake, that “few” can be literally a handful or hundreds, but all of the key ideas have been uncovered already, and successful “new” business ideas are merely extensions and variations of existing, powerful business ideas in new directions. eBay is just a marketplace — that’s existed for many thousands of years — spread to the whole connected world. Facebook is the fireplace in the middle of the encampment — virtualised onto every computer. Craigslist is the town crier — multiplied by ten million.

When you’re looking for that new business idea, don’t bother trying to be original, or to come up with something completely new. If your idea is really different from each of those power ideas, chances are it won’t be a successful business. Far better to link your idea up to some powerful, key human concepts than to try and keep it separate.

Back to square one - the world inside your head

Let’s step back to the art world for a few more inspirational thoughts. Art is not just about what you express, but also about what the viewer, reader, listener — the appreciator of the art — takes in. A hundred million people throughout the modern and ancient world have probably said that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. Even if your work seems unworthy, even if is is a bad copy, someone might see something in it.

Some years ago, I watched a movie, Jakob the Liar, which finished with a puzzling proposition. The protagonist was dead, shot in the head by a nazi officer for refusing to deny the hope of the people in the ghetto, and those people were packed into trains. The movie proposed two possible endings. In one, they ended up all dead in a concentration camp; in the other, they were rescued by Russian tanks halfway to Auschwitz. I’m grateful to this movie, as it presented a very powerful idea.

The world inside your head is yours to do what you please with. If you see something that is clearly a “bad copy of a good thing”, instead of putting it down, look for the good thing hidden inside, and see how it could be a better thing yet. If you feel so inclined and are capable of it, perhaps you should take that opportunity to make your own, better copy of that good thing.

Next time you catch a bad movie in the cinema, see if you can improve it in your head. You will be rewarded immediately with a better movie.

The web is an amazing thing for many reasons. One of them is that it makes the copying process quasi free and inherently allows anyone to copy anyone else. The result is a fascinating vortex things both great and appalling, many of them copies of copies of copies of something that wasn’t worth much in the first place. Start by making a copy of a good thing instead of a bad one, and you’re one step ahead already.

Even if your creation is imperfect, or even downright bad, let the world judge for itself. Others may see more into it than even you intended or imagined. I’ll close this with a translation of Yves Duteil, a French singer, from his song Regard Impressioniste:

“The world has the beauty of our own gaze upon it
      The garden of Monet, the sun of Renoir,
      Are only the reflection of their vision of things
      For which each of us can be the mirror.”

Sometimes, marketing efforts go awfully, terribly wrong. Sometimes, it’s nobody’s fault - it’s just the way things turned out.

However, sometimes, it’s absolutely and clearly someone’s fault. Some ad campaigns are really badly designed. They don’t necessarily come out of an obscure, inept company. The ad campaign I’m going to talk about today is from Forbes.

Sometimes, marketing efforts go awfully, terribly wrong. Sometimes, it’s nobody’s fault - it’s just the way things turned out.

However, sometimes, it’s absolutely and clearly someone’s fault. Some ad campaigns are really badly designed. They don’t necessarily come out of an obscure, inept company. The ad campaign I’m going to talk about today is from Forbes.

So, I was taking in my daily news intake, browsing a blog article that I picked up on Hacker News. At the bottom of the article, I saw a Flash advert that actually puzzled me. It seemed interesting, worth at least a click to see what it was about. After all, Forbes is a respectable company, and I figured they wouldn’t advertise something like this unless there was something reasonably cool on the other side of that click.

So, expecting some information about this “most innovative and smart blog community”, I clicked. Woe unto me. This is where I landed:

No information, just a dubious, unfriendly signup form. I don’t know the exact stats, but I’d wager that they lost 99% of the click-throughs on this page. Way to go, Forbes. Such appalling ineptitude seemed worth poking a bit further. What exactly was this thing they were trying and likely failing to get people to sign up to? Fortunately, there was a help link in the top right:

I clicked it. Information about the service? Nah, of course not.

More clicking…

Perhaps now…

Fantastic. A completely useless blurb. Let’s give it one last shot. Adify’s website:

Dear god. Even their website is a failure. The only sentence 90% of people are likely to read if they ever get that far is “Are you ready to Adify?”. More than half of the above-the-fold space is wasted. Now, I don’t know about you, but my natural reaction to this is to close the window. Nevermind the text below that perhaps holds some sort of amazing information that will change my life. I’ve clicked about 10 times to get to this page and it still fails to tell me what I need to know to decide what this Forbes thing is all about.

This is doubly ironic considering that “Adify” is plainly some sort of blog advertisement venture. That an advertisement venture would fail so spectacularly at even advertising itself is just plain sad.

What should they have done?

How about make the advert link to a page with a clear set of straighforward, 5-7 words bulletpoints that immediately explain to the would-be member why they should join. Then, below that, a simple sign-up form asking people to just enter their email address to get more information. This isn’t rocket science, it’s just very basic online marketing.

If you’re going to pay good money to get people to click on your adverts, make sure you have an effective, self-contained, simple page on the other side that visitors can grasp and interact with within 5 seconds. Because most people will leave after about that amount of time if their interest hasn’t been piqued.