Lead Designer: [Holding up an iPod] Ok, so we want to make one of these.
Associate Designer: Embrace and extend one of these, you mean.
LD: Right, right. [Nods] Right. So are we done?
AD: Well, no. We have to design it.
LD: I thought we were embracing their design.
AD: No, Jobs has good lawyers. We need to do lots of extending.
LD: Right. Right. [Turns iPod around in his hands] VistaPod?
AD: More than the name.
LD: Right. Well, how about we make this scroll wheel thingy textured. With little bumps and shit. The TexturePod!
AD: No. We can’t use a scrollwheel. Apple has that patented. And we want to stay away from pod, if possible.
LD: [sighs] Tell me again why we don’t just buy the fuckers?
AD: Jobs won’t sell.
LD: Oh, good. I thought it was principles, or something.
AD: No. We haven’t embraced principles. How about we make the screen bigger?
LD: I like that! We’ll have a VistaPod Enterprise Edition with a big screen, a VistaPod Home Edition with a really small screen, a VistaPod Business Edition with a big screen, but only half of it works, a VistaPod Student Edition …
AD: We’re going to try to embrace simplicity for this one. Only one edition.
LD: [pauses] I don’t understand.
AD: Only one kind of VistaPod.
LD: Huh.
AD: And we can’t call it a VistaPod.
LD: Right.
AD: Right.
[uncomfortable silence]
LD: So how much did we offer Jobs?
AD: Lots. Ok, so a bigger screen. And let’s use buttons instead of the wheel.
LD: Right. Wheels are dumb anyway. You don’t type with wheels!
AD: Yeah. [pauses] You know that there’s not going to be any typing on this thing, right?
LD: [frowns] So how are they going to pick songs?
AD: Well, not by typing their names.
LD: So are all the songs going to be in the Start menu?
AD: [pauses] There’s not going to be a Start menu either.
LD: Oh.
AD: Have you even looked at an iPod before?
LD: Well … no. I was just going to hand one off to our Embrace and Extendgineers and tell them to make one.
AD: Well we can’t do that.
LD: Right. [pauses] So bigger screen, buttons. No Start Menu. No keyboard. No mouse?
AD: No mouse.
LD: No mouse. Ok. [thinks] I’ve got it.
AD: Alright.
LD: iPods come in a bunch of colors, right? White and black and blue and whatever, right?
AD: Right.
LD: Let’s come up with a color that no one’s ever used before.
AD: [sighs] That’s a start, I guess.
LD: Brown.
AD: Brown?
LD: Brown.
AD: Like a UPS truck?
LD: I was thinking more a carmel shit brown.
AD: A shit-colored MP3 player.
LD: Yeah. [smiles] Oh yeah.
AD: So you’re proposing a ShitPod.
LD: [frowns] I thought we couldn’t use pod.
AD: Why would anybody buy that?
LD: It’s reverse psychology. Everyone always says our stuff looks like shit, right? So what happens if we make something that actually does?
AD: [rubs temples] I don’t know.
LD: Then we get to say yeah it looks like shit! That’s the point!
AD:
LD: It’s countercultural! It’s bold!
AD:
LD: I feel like we’re having a moment here.
AD: Have you ever designed anything before?
LD: Also, let’s make it look like a brick. A sort of clunky brown brick with a big screen and buttons.
AD: A ShitBrickPod.
LD: Something like that. [claps hands] I think we’ve got it. We’ll get marketing to take pictures of teenagers laughing and partying and being cool while they’re listening to their ShitBrickPods. And we’ll call the campaign “Bringing the Ugly”.
AD: I don’t think that’s a great idea.
LD: Apple’s already done pretty, ok? They’ve already done elegant and well-designed. We need to go in a different direction.
AD: So you’re saying we need to boldly sell something ugly and poorly designed.
LD: Look, we’ve been doing it for the past fifteen years. Why stop now? What’s so special about the ShitBrickPod?
AD: I really don’t think …
LD: Ok, lunchtime! [stands up] That was fun. Let’s design something else tomorrow!
The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield, is one of those epiphany books. It advertises itself as a guide to getting past the blocks that keep you from expressing yourself creatively, but it’s much, much more than that: it’s a manifesto on the importance of overcoming your fear and letting your soul speak through your art.
That sounds a little mushy and groan-inducing, and if I were someone else reading this I’d probably have stopped reading by now. But trust me: this book isn’t a new-agey treatise on discovering your inner light through the medium of magic crystals, or hug therapy, or kitten worship. It’s an absolutely no-bullshit kick in the ass, a shout from the ramparts. It tells you why you need to get your act together, and then it tells you how.
Here’s a passage:
When we conceive an enterprise and commit to it in the face of our fears, something wonderful happens. A crack appears in the membrane. Like the first craze when a chick pecks at the inside of a shell. Angel midwives congregate around us; they assist as we give birth to ourselves, to that person we were born to be, to the one whose destiny was encoded in our soul, our daimon, our genius.
When we make a beginning, we get out of our own way and allow the angels to come in and do their job. They can speak to us now and it makes them happy. It makes God happy. Eternity, as Blake might have told us, has opened a portal into time.
And we’re it.
I’d admit to shedding a tear on reading that last line, but that would be a clear violation of several Articles of Guyhood, so I’ll just say this: I might have misted up, a little bit, in an intensely masculine way. And this book is littered with gems like that.
But it isn’t a panacea, or a therapy, or a ten-step program on how to defeat your blocks. It doesn’t prescribe medication, or offer canned solutions. It won’t give you any answers. But it will give something a lot better: the wherewithal to identify the real problems, and the weapons to combat them.
So read this book, if you want to be a writer or a painter or a dancer or a bottle drummer or a trampoline expressionist or anything at all that requires you to draw stuff out from the core of yourself and show it to the world. We all have lifelong ambitions that we simultaneously define ourselves by and dismiss as silly or impractical or unattainable. The War of Art tells us how to dispel those doubts, and do the things we want to do, and become the people we want to be.
Many people hate giving presentations at work, and for good reason. I personally would rather eat a plate of broken glass soaked in cyanide than get up in front of people and talk for an hour. But that’s what I had to do, yesterday. And, in order to get through the process without fainting or puking or sinking to my knees and cursing the gods I’d apparently angered, I used several techniques I’ve learned over the years to make the whole ordeal less excruciating. I will now share these techniques with you.
Talk really, really fast. Think about the guy who reads the fine print at the end of commercials, the one who sounds like he’s been forcefed vast quantities of speed and then drilled until he’s able to squeeze thirty syllables into 300 microseconds — think about that dude, and then go twice as fast. This has many advantages. One, it significantly reduces the amount of time you’re up there. Second, it makes it difficult for people to criticize any part of your presentation, since they can’t understand a single word you’re saying. But you’ve said the words, and that’s what’s important.
Become a mass of annoying tics. Fidget with your slide clicky thing. Wipe constantly at your nose, as if to dam an incipient flood of snot. Gesture aimlessly with your hands. Nod at odd times. Pace backwards and forwards, as if you’re a novice line dancer. If you can manage a full epileptic seizure, by all means do it. This stuff may make your presentation go a little longer than it absolutely has to, but it will definitely make people avert their eyes, and tune you out, so that they’ll have less cause to mock your crappy presentation skills afterwards. They’ll mock you for being a crazy person, of course, but that’s the price you pay. In life, one has to make choices.
Talk constantly about what you’re about to talk about, and then don’t talk about it. This is a subtle but effective trick. As you go through the bullet points in your slides, say something useless and vague about each, and then say “But we’ll get to that later”. Do this at least ten times in the first two slides. And then — and this is the key — do it ten more times in the next two slides. You have no intention of talking about any of this stuff, of course. At some point your audience’s short-term memories will fill up with the muck of all of these broken promises, until eventually they’ll just dump the whole mess and fall asleep. Or they’ll stay awake. It doesn’t matter. This technique allows you to get through the whole hour without actually saying anything, but you’re saying nothing in a way that involves the speaking of many words.
Freeze like a deer in headlights whenever anyone asks you a question. Stand up very straight (you should be slouching throughout the whole presentation, incidentally, until this point) and then stare at your questioner like he’s a giant viking marauder with a huge battleaxe poised quivering over your head. Open your mouth. Make noises. Stutter. Eventually, say something inconsequential but vaguely related to the question — an old politician’s trick. This will get you past that question, and dissuade any future questions. Win-win.
Sabotage your presentation equipment. If thing are going very, very badly, then you can always go nuclear. Plant tiny explosives in your projector, for example, or loosen the moorings on the projection screen, or maybe even install some nasty, viral software on your laptop — Microsoft Windows, for example. Then, if you absolutely can’t stand it anymore, trip every one of these mechanisms. When the projector blows up, and the screen falls down at your feet, and the laptop crashes … well, what can you do? Here’s what you can do. You can rush through an abridged version of your presentation, make your apologies, and end early. Hey, you did the best you could. You’re a trooper.
If you learn all of these techniques, and practice them well, presentations will soon become effortless, and possibly even fun. Try it. You’ll thank me.