Sunday, May 30, 2010

Lazy Sunday #121: "Tell Me Again Why You Blog"

Actually, the answer is complicated. Or maybe it's not…

3 comments:

Clint Johnson said...

Money is a means to an ends- not the ends itself. If all of your time is spent chasing money then you don't have time to pursue purpose and mastery - even if you then have the financial means to do so. Then again, if you find a sense of purpose in mastering the accumulation of money... then it's all golden.

The optimal methodology is to bypass the financial reward structure and find a way to offer those ends themselves as the reward. This is contingent on being able to build a sense of mastery and purpose into the job and then allow the people to pursue that- no easy task for 99% of the worlds jobs.

Maybe if they cannot build an acceptable purpose and mastery reward structure within the corporate fold, they could reward the employees with the time and money to fulfil these desires outside the company? Reward outstanding performance on intellectually demanding drudge-work with an expanded and externalized version of Atlassian's single day of unfettered pursuit.

Anonymous said...
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Joel Scott said...

As a cognitive being, I like the rest of my generation spent my formative years reading and consuming all that interested me and also the mandatory reading related to standard educational requirements. I realized quickly that many of the writers/ columnists and artists that I admired or loathed had a built in audience that was provided by their gatekeeper...newspapers, publishers, record companies and television and film companies. These gatekeepers were well established tools of wealth generation and they were strictly controlled by those economic interests.


I soon discovered that virtually all those gates were only allowing one way communication...and when I read , witnessed or heard something that cried out for my personal response, I found myself virtually gagged by the one way flow of art/opinion/information. I called this BOHICA ...".Bend over here it comes again!" There was only an illusion of two way communication. We were given the option to pen a letter to the editor ( which would be published/edited about a week after the first article) or reduced to tracking artists , publishers producers down and engaging them in a personal dialogue. This approach was not time sensitive and was assuredly futile if the artist /writer was at the top of the success chain., as one was considered a fan not a contemporary and fans are required to only flatter the ego...they were not to seriously engage the ego.


It appeared that the only way my creative/political/personal agenda could be addressed was to create my own wealth of content and not try to cut myself in on the established creative wealth offered by standard media gatekeepers. This was viewed as sacrilege and futile back in the 70's, but after I started a alternate high school newspaper called" Pariah" my theory came to fruition. I was suddenly now a gatekeeper and the flow of opinions and articles was now crossing my desk seeking an outlet. I complied and printed ALL to allow the gate to swing with a more acceptable two way hinge. That newspaper led to the first ever city wide Educational summit by students who were 1st person stakeholders in their education. We even formed a city wide High School Students Union, a North American first.


Why do I flog the blogs ? it is simple, it keeps the gate swinging and sates this deeper desire to connect through art and writing with my fellow gate keepers and creators.. It's instant, engaging and fruitful...as a music industry guy, I seldom get a chance to engage writers or filmmakers..and blogging keeps that gate open to me and allows multi discipline dialogue. Media kept telling us to prepare for the 500 channel universe, but no one was prepared for the 5 billion channel universe offered by the Internet. I asked Joni Mitchell what it was like to work within her gatekeepers rules? ( David Geffen) and she told me that "It was better than an impersonal huge record company, but he still controls outcomes because ..He's just so cheap.! " When I asked her about her creative secret and where all that fabulous creativity came from?...she replied "
" Well to find out, all you have to do is give up a little television time ! "


-- Flogging your Blog
joel