This morning, I was reminded by Timehop of this Tweet from exactly a year ago.

Coincidentally, yesterday, I Tweeted this.

What a great example of the true time it takes to implement a change.

In response, I had a question from Clare Conroy.

Here’s the answer:

Better Social Dynamics

Walking and talking side by side lends itself to better conversation, less social pressure and less physical awkwardness. That’s why on a first date you should always sit at the bar and not at a table.

Walking allows you to ‘eat at the bar’ while you meet. The focus can then be solely on the conversation and not on the am-I-staring-too-much-or-too-little-do-I-have-stuff-on-my-face-are-they-yawning-cos-they’re-bored anxieties.

Just walk and talk.

Blood flow to the brain.

The blood flow to the brain and stimulated nervous system that results from walking also improves the conversation and energy.

Exercising without exercising.

Physical activity adds up. Fitness isn’t just for gym junkies. It can be for normal people too. And walking meetings are a way to steal activity back from a sedentary time block.

We’re seeing lots of people moving to standup desks, treadmill desks and all manner of workstation styles. Walking meetings are the natural continuation of this trend.

Less shite food, less coffee.

Every ‘coffee meeting’ you end up buying something. There’s only so much coffee you can drink in a day before you start ordering food (muffins, cakes, scones) or drinks (soda, iced-coffee).

In a busy life, most healthy behaviour happens in the margins.

Swapping walking meetings for coffee meetings means less shite food, unnecessary coffee and forced drink purchases.

How I’ve Been Doing It

When I meet someone, I ask them if they’d mind if we walked and talked, explaining it’s one of my New Year’s resolutions. Most people are fine with it.

I’ve figured out that it has to be walking. Lifting weights, playing basketball, even table tennis are too engaged. Walking is the key.

As well, at Sessions, we do a walking meeting (10 minutes) every morning to cover what we did yesterday, what we’re doing today and what roadblocks we’re encountering.

It’s the smallest change, but multiplied over a lifetime, it’s going to have the biggest impact.

The Future of Blogging

For a long time, blogging was either about keeping a public journal or sharing tips and insights.

Collectively, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and Pinterest have replaced the public journal.

The ‘sharing tips and insights’ style blog post has been overdone. No-one needs another half-successful person spouting general tips on half-problems.

One of the most popular posts I’ve ever done was my Floss The Teeth You Want To Keep post, which became a TED talk. But as much as that post worked, I don’t want to write in that way again.

I like the idea of moving to paid newsletters, but the absurdity of paying as much for a subscription to a single monthly email as you would for a New Yorker subscription renders that idea void.

Also, that approach reduces your opportunity for digital serendipity, of which I’ve been the recipient so many times.

Speaking to other people, they talk about a golden age of engagement 2-3 years ago, when people’s comments and feedback was of a much deeper and higher quality and the rush of instant connection with multiple people around the world was as addictive as the web could be.

People are replacing that rush with Tumblr, Facebook and Instagram likes now and as communications shorten, the depth and quality of engagement through comment threads seems to be on the decline.

There’s also the overload issue which seems much more pronounced now than it was 2 years ago. People just don’t want to read longer posts as much as they used to.

Interestingly, they do read really long posts. You see that in the power of Instapaper and Read Later. Gawker’s moving there too, focussing on mixing shorter posts with longer, in-depth writing. This weekend’s Betaworks shareholder letter is another great example.

There’s just a sprawl of ignored middle-ground blog posts that’s shifting into obscurity.

When I think about writing, my test is really just – would an exact replica of me want to read what I am about to write.

My friend Spencer often chastises me for not posting at times when people are actually paying attention (I tend to write and post at times when no-one’s online).

But I’ve felt the power of being Hacker News’d. I had 30,000 views in a day after this post went to the top of HN. But it was a TechCrunch spike. People flooded in, stayed briefly and then things went back to normal. And I feel the same about that 30,000 view post as I do about my 250 view rabbit-hole posts.

Over breakfast this morning, Ross Hill (who recently stopped blogging) said the best blogs are autobiographical – which fits with my preference for writing about stuff that interests me.

Ultimately, you just have to please yourself. I think that means I’ll keep intermittently writing about things that I care about, to a small group of people who might read what I write.

I don’t understand the Internet any more.

When MegaUpload went down, I got an email from my 19 year old sister asking if I knew where she could get the latest series of Louie. She has no TV. MegaUpload is her TV. When it went down, she didn’t know what to do. I don’t think she would know if it was illegal or not – it’s just there and it’s the easiest way to watch stuff so I think she assumes it’s fine.

On Instagram yesterday I accidentally hit Popular. Having never been there before, I decided to see what ‘Popular’ meant. Instagram for me is a way to keep up to date with friend’s photos. I thought that’s what it was for everyone.

Anyway, that’s not the case. Within Instagram’s walled garden – Andrew Barat – a teenage kid who posts photos of himself alongside semi-poetic, mangled lines of dreamarama gets thousands of comments from ache-hearted teenage girls. For example – every photo and comment is a variation on this:

And every comment stream is a variation on this:

Really? This is the world we live in?

Finally, Pinterest. The astronomically exploding Tumblr for Internet Explorer normals. While we’re all building niche-y products for each other, there’s millions of people pinning photos of babies, cats, ice-cream, cheesy garlic bread and flowers with millions more repinning them again. I don’t feel the need to use it, but it’s ubiquity means I must be in the minority.

Some Interesting UI/UX Things

It seems that part of the secret to creating ubiquitous products is to get as close to the border of shady as you can without crossing it.

Skype is an example. On install, it defaults to opening at login. If you right click on it in your dock, you can stop it opening it log in, but all that does is stop it opening – it will still sign you in. To stop it signing you in, you have to open System Preferences, open Users & Groups, select your account, click on Login Items, find Skype, select it, then click on the subtraction symbol beneath the scrollable list.

No way Internet Explorer normals are savvy enough to do that. So every normal person with Skype logs-in every time their computer turns on.

Spotify’s auto-sharing to Facebook is another example of push-the-boundaries-of-user-comfort-UX.

Interestingly, I just noticed that my connected accounts to Facebook (Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter and Runkeeper) were all defaulting to to show ‘Only Me’.

Clearly, the push here is to greater privacy and the utilisation of Facebook as a private diary.

The human need to keep a diary hasn’t changed. The tools for doing it seem to be.

The end.

There are four available responses to the healthcare crisis arising from increasing rates of obesity, diabetes and lifestyle related disease.

1. More efficient hospitals or primary healthcare facilities. This would mean patients would come in and out of the healthcare system faster, return less often.
2. New drugs. For example, to increase metabolism or reduce desire (for food or cigarettes).
3. More readily available surgeries. It’s possible that something like lap-band surgery will become routine, like an appendectomy or colonoscopy.
4. Individuals change their behaviour. Primarily, this would involve eating less and more nutritious food and increasing the amount of physical activity they do.

If we are to divert from our current trajectory (of most of us getting fat and dying from lifestyle related disease) then a mixture of all four will likely occur.

On improving the healthcare system, there will no doubt be improvement in the long-term. Short-term however, it’s not likely there will be a systemic improvement to greatly improve things. Given the majority of a person’s healthcare costs come in the final years of their lives and the baby-boomer generation is about to enter that phase, we can expect the system to become less and not more efficient in the next few decades.

On drugs and surgeries, there’s no doubt these will proliferate – humans will always take the path of least resistance when it comes to change, and the ‘insta’ nature of such options makes them attractive. But such options aren’t yet widely or readily available.

Which leaves us with individual behaviour change. It’s free, immediately accessible and there’s sufficient available resources to solve the problem.

Yet, while it’s the most accessible option, it also requires a tidal shift. Normal people don’t want to eat less pizza, don’t want to say no to a glass of wine, and don’t love waking up an hour earlier to walk or run or ride before their day begins.

But I’m most excited by the fourth option.

Lifestyle change is a tide that rises all boats. Whatever you are – boss, father, sister, employee, lover, partner, friend, artist, thinker or process worker – lifestyle change (eating less, sleeping more and being more active) will make you a better version of it.

I can’t stop listening to Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert.

My Dad listened to it in the 70s. My brother got obsessed with it in high-school and I finally fell into it last year.

The record has an amazing story. I’d assumed it was just an obscure thing that I’d lucked into. Turns out, it’s the best-selling solo album in jazz history and the best selling piano album of all time.

It was recorded at a concert organised by a 17-year-old German concert promoter.

The piano it was recorded on was “in poor condition“, “tinny and thin in the upper registers and weak in the bass register, and the pedals did not work properly” forcing Jarrett to focus on playing in the middle of the keyboard.

The show almost didn’t happen due to a number of mishaps and started unusually late at 11.30pm.

Within all these constraints, Jarrett created a lasting, timeless, transcendent piece of music.

It still sells well today. And still makes sense to my ears, with no context, no press, no promo or momentum.

I have been thinking about timelessness a lot lately.

I’m reading Paul Kelly’s memoir ‘How To Make Gravy‘. Few artists make me feel the way Kelly’s music does. I can’t listen to the song ‘How To Make Gravy’ without welling up.

In ‘How To Make Gravy’ (the book), Kelly talks about The Triffids’ ‘Born Sandy Devotional’ as a “cathedral” of a record.

I bought it to find that ‘cathedral’ but it doesn’t make sense to me. I can’t hear whatever Kelly’s hearing. And yet, I’ve been listening a lot lately to the Paul Kelly record ‘Comedy‘ which came out a few years after ‘Born Sandy Devotional’ and it sounds incredible.

I was moved by the recent Pearl Jam ‘Twenty’ documentary. My musical ears awakened around the same time ‘Ten’ was released (incidentally, the same year ‘Comedy’ was released).

‘Ten’ has now sold almost 10 million copies. Most of its songs were written as demos by the band in order to try and find a singer. When Vedder was given the demos by the drummer from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, he wrote lyrics to them.

Those lyrics and demos became ‘Alive’, ‘Once’ and ‘Black’. From there, the rest of the album took less than a month to complete.

Pearl Jam followed ‘Ten’ with ‘Vs’ and ‘Vitalogy’. In the last 20 years, I’m convinced this is the best debut, sophomore and third album stretch from any band.

But Pearl Jam’s best work, both culturally and commercially, came in those first few weeks. A band whose legacy stretches 20 years, created its best work as strangers, in its infancy. And now, looking back, the band cringes at the way the record was mixed.

Like Jarrett, Pearl Jam looks at its most successful work with a tinge of dismay. And yet, you could argue that a best-of record from ‘No Code’, ‘Yield’, ‘Binaural’, ‘Riot Act’, ‘Pearl Jam’ and ‘Backspacer’ wouldn’t come close to touching the greatness of ‘Ten’.

I saw ‘Midnight in Paris’, Woody Allen’s latest film, and got to thinking – which writers, artists and musicians will we still be talking about and discovering in 20 and 30 years?

You think of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Man Ray, Picasso, T.S. Elliot, Degas, Rembrandt, Dali and Tolouse Le Trec from the era depicted in ‘Midnight In Paris’ – who are their modern day equivalents?

So much of what we consume now is timely, and not timeless.

You think of Drake or The Weeknd or Two Door Cinema Club. Much as I like each of them, you can’t imagine that they’ll stand the test of time. No-one’s going to be listening to ‘Underground Kings’ 20 years from now.

My favourite release of 2011, was definitely Bon Iver’s self-titled album and ‘Beth/Rest’ was my favourite song of the year.

This is how it was described by Justin Vernon:

“I … feel really good about the “Beth/Rest” lyrics, because they come from this 14-year-old, innocent place where I’m not trying to say something super complicated. I allow myself to say certain things that mean a lot to me …

I love that song. I cried while working on that song. I know what that means, where that comes from, and why you cry for music. It isn’t for ironic reasons. It’s for either sad or joyful reasons. And that song is joyous to me. I don’t think it’s going to end up being the biggest statement of my career because I have so much more to learn and grow. But I love it as the last song on this record. It feels so good.”

In it, he sings:

“our love is a star
sure some hazardry
for the light before and after most indefinitely”

On Christmas day, we listened to Ella Fitzgerald records.

“A-tisket A-tasket
I lost my yellow basket
Won’t someone help me find my basket
And make me happy again? again

(Was it green?)
No, no, no, no
(Was it red?)
No, no, no, no
(Was it blue?)
No, no, no, no

Just a little yellow basket
A little yellow basket”

I’d like to see a return to that kind of simplicity in songwriting.

As a representation of everything sport can be, American football is as good as it gets.

Every NFL teams is, in fact, 3 teams. Offense. Defense. Special Teams. Each of these has its own strategies. It’s like playing chess on three boards with three sets of different pieces. But unlike chess, where you react after a move has been made, each NFL team is balancing a proactive strategy (like, sack the quarterback) with a reactive one (like, shut down the wide receiver) in real-time. You react as, and not after, things happen.

Balanced against planned strategy, is what happens amidst the chaos. With so many moving pieces, mistakes are made, people slip, balls are fumbled – in which case, the strategy is replaced by instinct. This means that every play has value. There are no lost downs.

Strategically, it’s a little like spin bowling in cricket. You build pressure and tempo through successive overs and successive spin types which often leads to a wicket. But sometimes you also get an unplanned ball landing on the edge of a crack or a taking a top edge for 4. And you have to be equally prepared for both.

What makes a series of downs more interesting than an over of cricket though, is that you know that everything is building to a third down. Much like a full count in baseball, the 3rd down is unmissable, because that’s where games swing.

Which makes for another great thing. The NFL has a predictable rhythm, but highly unpredictable outcomes.

This is enhanced by the tension between the proximity and difficulty of making scoring plays. Much like in soccer, where a team can be cruising and dominant at 2-0 and then a momentary lapse can bring the score back to a tension filled 2-1, NFL games are filled with that same tension.

It’s incredibly difficult to score a touchdown, but one lapse by the defence and a seam can open up for the opposition to score. 7 points. And they’re back in the game.

Each down provides an opportunity for opposing players to do battle. So while the teams are executing an overall strategy, on most plays, two individuals will be competing at maximum capacity and this makes for compelling viewing.

Many sports offer the thrill of one-on-one competition, but generally the intensity of that competition peaks near the ball. The NFL’s one-on-one competitions have a standard intensity across the field, regardless of where the ball lies.

You want to know if Darrelle Revis is going to shut down his opponent. You have to know who’s going to stop Clay Matthews.

In an athletic sense, the NFL allows for incredible diversity – the 325 pound tackle and the 160 pound running back, going head to head. QB’s aside, so long as you have speed, there’s a place for you in an NFL team.

The fact that NFL players wear equipment adds a super human element to the battle, allowing players to test the limits of human physicality with car-like collisions. I don’t know why, but the anticipation of a collision is one of the NFL’s most compelling features.

AND

Within the intricacy of the broader strategy lies intense personal battles. These are made all the more interesting by character players – TO, Ray Lewis and Ochocinco for example.

Outside of the player to play battles, the city to city battles add a further layer of intrigue. You have to watch the Eagles play the Giants this season because of their epic battle last season. You have to watch the Jets play the Pats. You have to watch the Ravens play the Steelers.

And then finally, amidst this context and complexity and competition and collision, you have the quarterback, the game in his hands for just a few seconds, compressing extraordinary sensory complexity into a single tunnel of vision.

Imagine a free kick in soccer. Now imagine the kicker. That’s the quarterback. His team’s role is to protect him while he kicks. The opposing team’s role is to do whatever they can to physically attack him as he’s attempting to kick. And rather than kicking to a goal, he’s kicking into a series of moving windows that contract and expand to one square meter in surface area roughly every half second. Now imagine the kicker has, on average, 3 seconds to decide which window to kick into. That’s the NFL. Every play.

It makes for unmissable viewing, compelling sporting narratives, incredible competition and athletic excellence, intelligence, strategy, planning and instinctive reaction.

It’s not my favourite sport. But as a sports-fan, I can appreciate that it’s the best.

I finished this book last night. It’s good. You should read it. So much has already been written about the book, but there is some stuff in it that just amazed me.

• Jobs spent years eating at a restaurant his biological father ran. He didn’t know that the man whose restaurant he was eating in was his father and his father didn’t know the Jobs was his son. They even shook hands at one point.
• Right up to taking Apple back over, Jobs made about about $3B worth of mistakes (his ouster from Apple, Next’s limited success, and Pixar losing money for so long). This was, in effect, $3B worth of business lessons, knowledge and training that set him up for Apple’s resurgence in the 90s. Through it all, he maintained a maniacal belief in himself.
• Before he died, he had a long conversation with Larry Page about focus. Lots of Google products have since been chopped.
• He asked Aaron Sorkin to help him with his Stanford commencement speech. Sorkin never got back to him.
• When John Mayer was 27, Jobs used to have him round for dinner regularly and considered him the best guitarist in the world.

“John Mayer is one of the best guitar players who’s ever lived, and I’m just afraid he’s blowing it big time … I think he’s a really good kid underneath, but he’s just been out of control.”

• Through the Jobs lens, all companies, regardless of size, reflect their founders. Actually, this is one of the best parts of the book. Seeing Gates and Murdoch and Iger and Eisner and Ellison through Jobs’ prism of reference.
• Apple’s design team worked on an ‘Applefied’ version of The Daily at the same time the News Corp team did. Jobs preferred the News Corp version.
• On the night of his greatest success, the launch of the iPad, Jobs was depressed:

“As we gathered in his kitchen for dinner, he paced around the table calling up emails and web pages on his iPhone. I got about eight hundred email messages in the last twenty-four hours. Most of them are complaining. There’s no USB cord! There’s no this, no that. Some of them are like, “Fuck you, how can you do that?” I don’t usually write people back, but I replied, “Your parents would be so proud of how you turned out.” And some don’t like the iPad name, and on and on. I kind of got depressed today. It knocks you back a bit.”

The book is filled with so many amazing insights – Jobs’ two hour chat with Dylan, Jobs’ frequent crying, Jobs’ insufferable personality in his 20s, Jobs’ chats with Clinton and Obama, his relationship with Joan Baez and his unwillingness to soften or cede ground, even at his weakest.

Whatever you make of him personally, it was a truly amazing life.

Networked Society On The Brink.

With respect to healthcare, the next decade holds four inevitabilities:

1. People, on average, wil get unhealthier and we will see increased rates of obesity, diabetes and death through lifestyle-related disease.
2. The healthcare system will become less efficient as the boomers start to use up a greater proportion of healthcare resources. In the US, 25% of all Medicare spending is for the 5% of patients who are in their final year of life so as our parents’s generation starts moving into that phase of their lives, there will be an unprecedented drain on healthcare resources.
3. Governments will not be able to repair this inefficiency meaning the onus will shift back on to the individual to manage and improve their own health.
4. As the onus shifts back on to the individual, digital tools will become the primary means of individual healthcare management.

Within that context, many new business are emerging to provide digital health solutions.

Companies like Redbrick Health, Bloom Health, Limeade and others are engaging employees in health programs. One of my favourite products in the space, Runkeeper is building a Health Graph to aggregate all this new data in one place. Buster and Jen are building Health Month and bud.ge to help people change their behaviour for the better. Before he went and built Facebook’s new timeline, Nicholas Felton was helping people to beautify their data with Daytum. Massive Health just released The Eatery to get people eating healthier. Daily Feats are inspiring healthy behaviour through rewards and community support. Withings, Fitbit and Zeo have been leading the charge for #quantifiedselfers for a couple of years now.

And last week UP was released by the Jawbone team, allowing you to track all your data, all day in style.

The video above is a promo-piece from Ericsson, and it includes comments by Wired UK’s editor David Rowan identifying the power of sensors to change people’s health. With Wired Magazine fully bought in, this is a trend that is likely to take off in the mainstream media.

However, there’s some fundamental things that the hype is going to miss.

In a vacuum, your health data doesn’t change anything.

Data is just knowledge, which is a weak lever for behaviour change. If you have decided to make a change to your health, data will help, but it is just one helpful option among many.

Data doesn’t change your environment. It doesn’t give you a genuine social driver for change. It doesn’t strengthen your willpower. It doesn’t create a meaningful stick to make the change. And it doesn’t give you a clear path to achieve your goal.

My friend, let’s call him Johnny, had his first child recently. Johnny was 15kg overweight at the time but realised immediately he needed to protect his daughter’s future by taking better care of himself. And so, he set himself an end of year goal to lose the weight. Using meticulous data-tracking, he did and as a result, he’s a cheerleader for this new movement. However, a year later, after returning to life-as normal (or as normal as it can be with a baby daughter), he put the weight back on.

Occasionally he steps on to his Withings scale, but he knows he’s overweight, he doesn’t need to be auto-Tweeting it. He wants to start tracking his meals again, but he’s done that already and it doesn’t hold the same novelty it once did.

Data’s value decreases over time.

The same datapoint, whether it’s weight or sleep or stress, sent to you over and over eventually just piles up until it’s as meaningless as an inbox with 497 unread emails or a Google Reader with 1397 unread articles.

I have a friend who is bipolar. He meticulously tracks his mood so as to be aware of signals that he may be entering a high or low swing. This strategy was recommended to him by his doctor. The issue is, at the very point he most needs to input the data, just as his mood is plummeting or sky-rocketing, it’s already too late.

Just as taking photos of your food or counting your steps or measuring your heart rate may have some novelty value at first, at the very point you most need data it will desert you.

Because data is you. It relies on you for its value. And when you’re doing the wrong thing, you know it without needing the data point to back you up. In Mint’s early days, the biggest challenge they faced wasn’t getting people to trust them, it was getting people to log in when they knew their account balances weren’t going to tell a happy story.

This is data’s great challenge. Becoming something more than just an unread email. Becoming useful at the point it’s most needed.

When I walk around my neighbourhood on weekends, there’s often stoop sales happening. Almost without fail, in the pile of unsold items lies a fitness relic of some sort – Tae-bo videos, thighmasters, ab-crunchers. None of the people selling these relics look as though they ever gave them much use.

Health data is one crucial piece of the puzzle. But if we’re pinning all our hopes on it, then we’re likely to be disappointed. Healthy behaviour changes is a mixture of many elements, data being just one. If we miss this point, then health-data tools could end up like the stoop sale relics. Unused, still-new and full of false promise.

Slowly.

Update: I received an email from The Australian’s editor Chris Mitchell explaining that sign-ups in the first 8 days had met their expectations (and to be fair, the numbers he shared were pretty good). He admitted the flow was cumbersome but reiterated how engaged users were with the paper across all platforms.

+++

The Australian is Australia’s biggest-selling national newspaper, the first to introduce an iPad App and now it’s the first to introduce a paywall. On those measures, it’s at the bleeding edge of news innovation in Australia, or at least it should be.

I want The Australian to succeed. I grew up reading it on weekends.

I want the paywall to work. Good journalism has high value. $2.95/week is a smart starting point to try and experiment with delivering value to paying news customers across multiple platforms.

Recently, I’ve become increasingly frustrated with smh.com.au and though I love the news.com.au redesign, I don’t find enough good stuff there to keep coming back. (This isn’t a judgment call on the content, it’s a fact. I always forget to go back). So I am ready for a better alternative. And I am ready for The Australian to be that alternative.

I decided today to switch, to add The Australian to my bookmarks toolbar tab and make it my daily Australian news source.

I’d forgotten about the paywall, but fortunately, there’s a clear offer – a free trial for three months. The offer’s nicely designed, clearly communicated and there’s a big red shiny sign-up button. Perfect. I’m in.

Here’s What Should Happen

You enter your email address, hit Try It Now and you’re in.

There’s an email confirmation sent to your inbox. You click on the link in the email, you have a single screen to create a password and agree to Ts&Cs and your account is created. A month later you get an email explaining the different upgrade options and then some final opportunities to upgrade before your 3 months expires. That’s an easy solution based on some plain, current web standards.

But Here’s What Actually Happens

You click Try It Now.

You’re taken to a landing page.

With a lot of different value propositions.

And an array of unnecessary images. Keep in mind, that by clicking on Try It Now I’ve already qualified myself as wanting to Try It Now, so this screen is already baffling enough. Would anyone use the following image to convince themselves of Trying It Now, having already clicked Try It Now?

Then you click Try It Now for the second time, and you’re taken to a generic log-in page.

In terms of hierarchy, we now have a new range of options.

So you Create An Account, which requires 10 fields and 2 drop down menus.

Why re-type password and email address?

Why would you need a security question for this kind of account? It’s news, not sensitive details.

If you type a short password, be warned – you will see this pop-up. Note that “Password must not include the string news”.

So after double entry of email and password, a security question and an 8+ character password, there’s a security check.

And then, to load all this information, there’s 10+ seconds of processing time.

At which point, you’re taken to a Billing Details page with 5 more fields and two more drop downs. Keep in mind, at no point have we entered credit card details, it’s a Free Trial after all. So the Billing Details at this point seem like overkill.

Then to finish, we have been opted-in to receive marketing messages. And there’s a Ts&Cs document to agree to. But, we’re not done yet. There’s still a text-heavy confirmation page to navigate.

But remember, we started this journey trying to read an article. So we have to manually click back to get to that article again, or, go to the home page and find it again. But we’re not done, because there’s still an email in the inbox to come. Not signed by an editor, or even a real person. Just: ‘Customer Service Team’.

I also now have a Subscriber ID (where did this come from?) an a Subscriber Name (terrific).

If You’re Still Reading…

…and chances are that you have given up by now, you have to wonder how many people have clicked Try It Now only to give up frustrated minutes later.

Something that could be one field, one click and  an email confirmation, somehow ends up taking 8 screens, 15 fields, 9 clicks and 3 drop down menus.

The future of real news is going to be hard enough to sustain. It’d be a shame to add digital incompetence as another barrier.

“One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work. In order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two.”

- David Sedaris

If you invest time and energy into building something that matters, knowingly or not, you are doing so to the exclusion of something else.

As I get older and deeper into life, I find myself having to make more and more trade-offs. And when I look at the future, and to people 5 and 10 and 20 years older than me, I see more of the same, only bigger and more complex.

I found this Dalai Lama quote recently:

Q: “What thing about humanity surprises you the most?”

A: Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices his money to recuperate his health.Then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present, and as a result he does not live in the present or the future. He lives as if he’s never going to die, and then he dies having never really lived.”

One of the biggest risks in life is trading off the wrong things.

Some of these trade-offs are minute. Eating a little too much. Working a little longer. Putting that morning walk a little further into the distance. When it comes to small trade-offs, it’s safe to say that collectively, we’re getting worse at making them and they’re getting more frequent and harder to manage.

Some trade-offs, work vs. family, work vs. health, family vs. friends, are much bigger. Rates of divorce, obesity and depression in the industrialised world would indicate that many of us aren’t succeeding at managing those trade-offs either.

Despite their ubiquity, trade-offs are solo missions.

You can seek all the advice available, read all the opinions you can find and wait as long as possible before you decide. But there’s no prescription for them. No science or formula.

Ultimately, it’s just you, with your eyes closed, trying to answer the simplest of questions – what do I really want?

That’s the art of the trade-off.

- Kenneth Koch.

Preparation

In May, my friend Noel invited me to speak at TEDx Darwin.

I said yes before he had time to finish his sentence.

I think I was asked because I had some digital/technological profile through Native, Hunted, Boxee etc. and Darwin is pretty short on that kind of thing.

I had no idea what I’d speak about when I agreed. Originally, I was going to talk about how I think the future of the internet is being built by twentysomethings in New York and San Francisco but couldn’t imagine how that would be interesting or relevant to anyone in the audience.

I went back through my most blog posts and found ‘Floss The Teeth You Want To Keep‘ which had sparked a number of people to email me directly when it was first published. Of all the things I’ve written, it was definitely the post that had resonated the most with people.

The challenge was that I was coming off a low base. I had no authority to be talking about personal change except my own obsession with it. So I really needed to know my stuff to make it authentic.

I approached my friend Stuart McMillen to see if he would animate the entire thing for me.   When I asked him, this was how I saw it looking:

He explained just how big a task I was asking of him and suggested he do static images instead. After we met, he went home and sketched some ideas. This is what he sent back.

Stuart’s a brilliant artist in his own right. His comics St Matthew Island, Challenged and Amusing Ourselves To Death have had over 5 million views. There’s something in his work which is really sympathetic and non-confronting which I think is so key when you’re asking people to think about the things they want to change about themselves. I was thrilled he agreed to work with me at all.

I’d been meaning to update the original post for some time because my thinking had come a long way since it was published so I spent a month just letting my thoughts drift across the top of the speech.

Eventually, on the day before our first drafts were due I spent an entire day writing. I wrote the first draft in a single sitting and then started trying to find external sources to validate the ideas.

Then I left it for 2 weeks while I travelled to Melbourne and New Zealand. By the time I came back to it, I’d forgotten what I’d written and so I had a fresh set of eyes. With my own changes and the first round of feedback from the Darwin TEDx team (thanks a million Ben G) I had 4100 words.

The first time I did a full-read through I went over 28 minutes, forcing me to cut stuff I really liked and which Stuart animated really well, like the boiling frog theory, your internal planning and doing voices and the fable of Odysseus.

Once I’d cut it down time-wise, it was just a matter of rote learning.

Doing it without notes. Referring to the notes when I forgot. Breaking it down into an easily accessible pattern in my mind. Eventually, I just had this spine: Flossing-Story-Stats-Spiritual-Technological-Science-Myths-Single-Time-Activities-Chains-Add-Measure-Alone-Triggers-Environment-Patience-Future-Best Versions.

I did the speech so many times on the Thursday before the event that I lost my voice. It’s oddly tiring work. I would have 40 minute splurges of energy, followed by a half-hour of exhaustion (and NRL highlights on YouTube). I watched video of me talking, and had the awkward realisation that I needed to control or eradicate my nervous tics (circular hand waving, odd walking back and forth, too much staring out sideways as I think).

Even when I’d learnt it off by heart, I did it again and again, playing with timing and delivery and explanations. I gave the speech to Mum on the Friday night when I had no energy to change it and she suggested a bunch of new things, but it was too late. I’d done all I could.

Delivery

On the day, I was the second to last speaker. So I had about 8 hours of nerves to burn up while I waited. I can’t explain why I was so nervous. It wasn’t quite Arafura nerves, but it was close. It had something to do with a combination of the expectations that come with the TED brand and not wanting to be the one guy who gives a terrible speech.

It’s also the vulnerability of no notes and no lectern. It’s very easy to imagine yourself just standing there witha blank mind and nothing to say.

I heard some great speeches, nervously chatted to people over lunch and then in a blur I was on stage. My hands started shaking immediately so I had to grip them together. My mouth went so dry that my lips started catching on my teeth.

I really only started feeling comfortable in the last 6 minutes or so and then, I came to my conclusion. For some reason I just could not consistently hit my spots in that conclusion, no matter how hard I practiced. I think it was the alliteration (single, simple step) and the transition between three thoughts – big challenges of the future – > what state are we in when we get there -> best versions.

As I reached my conclusion, I blanked. For the whole time, these sentences had been stretching out in front of me, I just needed to say them. And then, at 16.50, nothing. And honestly, I felt like I went silent for half a minute. My head was spinning. What is the next line? What is the next line? What is the next line? I had les than 10s left and I was out of words!

It took a month before I saw video of the talk and I was dreading watching that pause. But you look at it in real-time now and the pause is almost imperceptible. I’m still convinced they edited the pause out, but maybe not. I guess it goes to show how incorrectly we can perceive our own physicality.

I didn’t miss too many bits. There are a couple of awkward repeats, I keep doing tongue clicks and I do too much staring at my slides on the back wall. But I’m proud of the speech. I worked hard on it. I cared about it and tried to get the details right.

Stuart’s animations make a huge difference. I’m so glad he and I got to work together on this.

What was most memorable was the TED atmosphere. That rare thing that happens when interested people get together. When all was said and done, there was a special moment sitting with a beer, talking excitedly to people, watching the sunset over the sea from the grass outside the Darwin Ski Club.

(Photo Credit)

Overall

The speech encapsulates 5 years of fascination with what was initially a trivial challenge (flossing), and what grew into something that represents a really important problem (the impact on health of lifestyle). Broadly speaking, it’s probably the most important problem in my life right now. I gave a condensed, revised version of the speech again at Ignite NYC this week and felt good with the material. It’s something that lots of people are grappling with right now.

With the law degree done and Native handed on, it also felt like TEDx was the last obligation of my adult-lescence – that ill-defined period between turning 18 and really truly owning your life. Just a day or so later, I left Darwin and made my way to New York. It was a good way to end and a good way to start.