I'm liking this very temperate July weather. The couple sunsets I've seen lately (one tonight) have been awesome. The two I'm thinking of have been near Ellis Park -- I didn't actually see the sun set, but I saw the reflection of the just-past-sunset sky on the water. Very serene. In the midst of that, there were the usual summer riverish activities -- a couple people along the trail. Houseboats. People across the river on the sort-of peninsula. A loud boat or two. Just a very nice place to be.
But that was the icing. I started my evening by driving to Noelridge Park. I thought there should be hot air balloons tonight, and of course Noelridge is the place to go to see them. I also wanted to do some "readwalking" as I'm going to call it now -- the precarious pastime of walking and reading at the same time. I'm getting pretty good at it.
I started reading the book "Made to Stick", about how to come up with and share ideas that "stick" -- that people connect with. I read the first chapter, about "Simplicity". Good ideas are simple -- not "dumbed down" - but they have a distinct core point, and are compact in their use of words. (Some of you wish my blog was like that, right?)
The book also mentions the "Curse of Knowledge" - the realization that the more we know on a subject, the harder it is for us to remember what it's like for everyone else who doesn't have all that knowledge on the subject. This causes a very real problem in "knowledge transfer", because we must be very careful to not make assumptions about what an appropriate starting point is.
As I was reading all this I was trying to figure out how to be more creative, how to have good, better, more inspiring ideas. How to explain things in ways people resonate with.
In the midst, and over the last week, I've been thinking about one of my big self-proclaimed creative ideas: wikis. I'm a wiki-addict! At work especially, but also in the rest of life. But someone could (and some do) challenge the overall effectiveness of "the wiki way" -- of knowledge management -- the way that I think is so valuable. I say, "Word documents and emails are information silos. Wikis -- really database-driven pages of information -- are the way to go." But are my arguments simple, concise, attention-holding? Do my statements come across as anything other than opinion and mediocre personal preference? Is the cost of relentless documentation worth it? I think it is, but as I go on down this wiki path I need to think about how to state that in a simple, concise, convincing way. And of course, the same goes for any other "good ideas" I come up with. I need to practice being assertive about what I consider to be a good idea.
That's enough self-psychology for one entry. I think I'll make a separate entry documenting the 2nd half of my readwalking.
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