mengwong

Received in email this morning:

1) Listen to the album Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill by Grouper!
2) Write in your blog more often!
3) Remember that there is a young lady an ocean away who loves you all of the time, even when she's watching ducks follow each other around in the canyon, especially when she sees Method soap, and never more than when she's reading a good book.

It is nice to be loved. I love you too!

It is well known that as bad news moves up bureaucracies, it gets milded down, until the topmost layers of management may never know what's really happening on the ground.

As strategic directives move down bureaucracies, they get CYA'ed.

I just had an interesting conversation with a banker at DBS who works with with media SMEs. He said:

Government wants us to help startups. And we try our best. We want to help. But many times we do our part and the government side does not. We do all our due diligence and approve a deal. Then the government side does their own due diligence, and they do not approve it. Why? Because a senior government official will say, here is a strategic direction, we want to do this. But the junior officers are afraid that taking a risk will hurt their career, so they create so much CYA paperwork that the deals don't get approved. And I have to pick up the phone and call the senior guy and say, "If you are going to have stricter requirements than the bank, why should we bother doing any DD at all? Look, do you want to do this or not?"

This has matched my experience exactly: the head says yes, and the feet say no.

People in Singapore are used to living in fear. Fear is the national emotion. And junior officers work in fear of audit: that they will have been found to have wasted taxpayer money on a project that failed. So they only want to approve projects that succeed.

But it is impossible to know with certainty which projects will succeed. Junior officers understand this when they dabble in stocks, and I have not yet met a junior government bureaucrat who does not play with securities on the side.

When it's their money, they are willing to gamble.

When it's somebody else's money, they aren't.

Isn't that backwards?

Senior government officials need to explicitly instruct their staff that they are allowed to take risks and have a go at a deal that might fail, in order to have a shot at producing projects that succeed. Senior government officials need to take the responsibility of possible failure, and shield their junior staff from portfolio risk. Right now the incentives are perverse: they get all the downside and none of the upside. Is it surprising that deals don't happen?

Maybe the SDU should give their course on "If You Want To Get Married, You Have To Ask Girls Out" to SPRING.

Michael Yap at IDMPO had the right idea. iJam was a bold experiment: it was intentionally established to create more failures than successes. But ever since the AGO's audit last year I hear it's been frozen in its tracks.

The magic of great literature, great storytelling, great art, is that a story bound in time and space can echo universal themes. Fictions spun by a single author can contain truths that appeal to everyone.

Similarly, a great startup can express a single auteur's vision, yet find a worldwide audience.

The difficulties faced by media startups who hope to touch the world are essentially identical to the difficulties faced by writers in their garrets.

The Singapore Government does a pretty good job establishing and promoting a spectrum of incentive schemes designed to encourage economic growth. In the high-tech startup entrepreneurship sector, the government has been particularly vigorous: groups like SPRING, EDB, IDA, IIPL, MDA, IDMPO each wave different stimulus packages at the entrepreneur. Multi-million dollar budgets are allocated, with the aim of artificially inseminating the presumptively fertile ecosystem, in hopes of squeezing out some green shoots.

I applaud this. But the restless entrepreneur in me asks if things could continue to improve.

If the Singapore Government wanted to take things to the next level, they could publish accountability statistics.

I would like to see a time-to-yes distribution that shows how long someone can expect to wait before they get a "yes" answer from whatever grant or incentive scheme they're applying to.

Similarly I want to see a time-to-no.

As you may already know, Singapore came up with a #StartupVisa some time ago: it's called the EntrePass.

Recently some changes were announced that impose a minimum bar on applicants: they have to be starting a company with a paid-up capital of at least $50,000.

This change occurred against a backdrop of very mild protectionist, anti-immigrant sentiment. This is understandable: an economic downturn is the kind of situation that promotes the development of xenophobic memes; and uniquely the Singaporean middle class are being squeezed from both above and below.

(Yes, I am familiar with the rational economic arguments against protectionism, but I am also sympathetic to Jane Jacobs's city-scale economics. In any case, the (citizen) middle class votes with their hearts, not with their heads.)

But back to the point. In response to the new regulations, the entrepreneurship community were generally dismayed.

The Ministry's argument: weeding out the chaff would lead to a higher average quality of entrepreneur.

That may be true, but it misses the forest for the trees.

Startups are basically an r-selected species of animal.

Large MNCs are a K-selected species.

K-selection is, on short time scales, relatively deterministic. Take care of the baby elephant, it grows up.

r-selection on the other hand is stochastic. Lay a million eggs, swim away.

The government is promoting entrepreneurship ultimately because it recognizes that on long time scales even K-selected MNCs will succumb to Schumpeter's creative destruction and go extinct. We may be going through a K-T boundary right now: MNCs are pulling out of SG, and the government has been trying to encourage a local entrepreneurial ecosystem to take its place.

It's shortsighted policies like the $50k requirement that shoot that strategy in the foot.

Sure, weeding out the chaff will increase the average quality, but it will also, counterintuitively, decrease the chances that a breakthrough (black swan) event will occur and revolutionize the ecosystem.

Why?

Because the huge successes are likely to emerge from the chaff, not the wheat.

It's a bit like photography. You will notice that when I take your picture, I take a lot of pictures. And, as n increases, it is true that the average attractiveness will converge to a relatively low number: most pictures of you will look unflattering. But, as n increases, it is also true that the probability of finding a good picture in all that lot will converge to 1. The more pictures I take, the higher the chances that one of them will become your next profile pic. One is all we need.

As it is with spray-and-pray, so it is with startups.

The topmost layer of Singapore government are very smart, they read the right books, they grok statistics. They know this.

The bottommost layer of bonded scholars likewise understand this.

Unfortunately, the middle layer of bureaucracy in the civil service may not.

Will the mysterious wheels of Government grind out a Ministerial review of this matter? If Singapore is serious about encouraging entrepreneurship, I sure hope so.

There seems to be a pattern where the greatest masters of a technology tend to arise around the time the technology is invented.

Dürer, for example, was one of the foremost practitioners of copper engraving. His work has not been equalled since.

Similarly Gutenberg's work is still held up as a model of technical and aesthetic mastery.

If Gutenberg was the foremost inventor of the printing press, Shakespeare was its greatest user. And he came not long, comparatively speaking, after the press gained popularity.

Giants like Woz and Stallman and Bill Joy grew up as computers were growing up, and this afforded them the Da Vinci-like ability to know everything there was to know about the field.

Recently I saw a blog where somebody was, for educational purposes, looking for large-scale electronics components – the kind he grew up with back in the 70s and 80s. He wanted young people to learn electronics the same way he did. He wanted relays and capacitors and transistors that he could touch and move around. Today, due to miniaturization, components are so small that electronics has actually become harder to learn because the parts have become less concrete, more abstract.

Computing will become harder for young people to learn when the average Linux computer is in the cloud, rather than sitting on a workbench with its case open and innards exposed.

Today there is so much to know in computing that the frontiers are in specialized fields, and so we see the rise of the specialist. The generalists who can cross-pollinate are rarer. But generalists are important because only they understand Leaky Abstractions.

What does all this mean?

There is a steady supply of Renaissance men and women throughout time; they are drawn to the frontiers of innovation. During the Enlightenment they were drawn to alchemy and the sciences; they wanted to figure out how the world worked. During the 70s, 80s, 90s they were drawn to computing, because that was the most interesting thing going.

And now they're beginning to drift out of computing, into energy tech. Saul Griffith is a good example. And into social change. And religion, aka lifehacking.

The unifying spirit across all of these fields – across all of the early days of these fields, I should say – is the hacker ethic.

But the neuro-economic rationale for the rise for the Renaissance man is simple. Only when a field is new can it be compassed by a single mind. And single minds of unusual capacity enjoy a disproportionate advantage and effect, when they're in the right place at the right time.

if an invention must make sense in the world in which it is finished, and the best way to predict the future is to invent it, economies of scale favour google -- they have a better guess at what the future is going to be. never before has information asymmetry been so relevant to market power.

In August 2009 I spent some time in Beijing and Shanghai on conference (APNIC28).

Memorable moments:

Beijing 2pm. After a daylong fast, sitting in the Yonghegong temple museum on a bench next to a pair of illiterate Buddhist monks (they asked me to read aloud a Chinese SMS one of them had received, and I humbly explained that I could barely speak Chinese, much less read it. You'd think Chinese cellphones could do text-to-speech pretty easily.) I watch vast billows of incense smoke gust skyward and ponder the small sign in the foreground that cautions "No Smoking."

Beijing 4pm. Looking through the wide-open windows of the Lazzy Cafe a few doors up from VineyardCafe.cn, enjoying my second chicken Caesar in three days, I watch the street go by: a woman on a bicycle rides past, with a loudspeaker playing a repeat recording of her voice touting the caseload of pig parts on the back of the bike.

Shanghai 2am. After a whirlwind tour of the Bund's nightspots with stops at M, Yuyintang, the Captain Bar, and the Glamour Bar, Christoph and I take a young lady, recently graduated from INSEAD, for fried rice, Harbin lager, and Astacoidea Cambaridae (小龙虾) served 麻辣 style. From behind second-storey plate glass we watch Wujiang Road wind down: under sodium streetlamps, three young men, day labourers in construction judging by the size of their tanned triceps, hang chin-ups from bamboo scaffolding, as motorcycles whiz past at harrowing speeds. After we finish our meal we go downstairs and, clad in suit and tie, try some pull-ups too, to their droll applause.

Later we try to break in to the back entrance to Christoph's temporary lodgings: the front entrance, being a print shop, is shut. Eventually someone wakes up and lets us in. We apologize profusely.

Shanghai 11pm. After infiltrating Cloud 9, a fancy bar atop the 88-storey Jin Mao Tower, of which the top half is a Grand Hyatt, Christoph and I sit on a streetside bench to investigate a pint of Dreyer's Rocky Road. Thirty meters away, in a phone booth, a distraught young lady, her voice bright with anger, alternates between shouting into the handset and staring, stoop-shouldered, at the silent payphone. At the end of one of her outbursts, she hangs up and weeps hotly. Christoph walks over with ice cream in one hand and a spoon in the other. She stares at him with numb red eyes, then declines and returns to her tempest.



Shanghai 4:30pm. We visit People's Park, where parents of children nearing 30 – apparently in China I am well past my "sell by" date – are so worried that they'll grow old without two diversified income streams to support their retirement that they take the initiative to find matches for their kids. http://www.chinatravel.net/forum/Finding-True-Love-Parental-Matchmaking-Sundays-in-Chinese-Parks/2653.html



A short distance from the worried parents, across the lily pond, young people in their twenties gather, with wholly different goals: they are intent on improving their English, and so they mob Christoph, the white guy.



Christoph and I respond by taking out a deck of setgame.com cards and we teach them all to play. I expect this time next year pirated copies of the game will flood Eastern China.

Shortly thereafter I become the subject of an involuntary shoeshine, which starts out being free, peaks at 18 RMB, eventually converges to 5 yuan. It is all over in five minutes.

Shanghai 12am. Christoph and I pop into his Wildfire.asia office on the way to KTV. When we turn the lights on, we are greeted by the sight of cockroaches everywhere legging it to shelter. Upon closer inspection I learn that the office roaches in Shanghai are the same hardy species as in my office in Singapore. For a moment it feels like home.

During next bout of Copious Free Time, implement multi-track timeline software similar in spirit to the Histomap of World History and to the Haarmann & Reimer genealogies of fragrance (masculine · feminine), for the following applications:

- history of Typography
- history of Perfumes
- history of my actual family tree
- history of the startup ecosystem in Silicon Valley and SG showing founders and funders

The important difference is that this software will show connections between items.

I know that there are things like Bee Docs Timeline and the hoary GraphViz out there, but I want to do one that reads XLS/CSV input and produces SVG/PDF output.

Singapore has a national inferiority complex.

Its government agencies and, to be fair, the majority of its citizenry, seem to hold the belief that if it's local, it's no good; if it's foreign, it's better.

Hence recent actions by economic development boards who are desperately trying to bring in foreign startups. The "I love you long time" model of economic development worked fine for MNCs, but in the case of startups, they keep making one crucial mistake: they keep forgetting to check if there are already local startups doing the exact same thing.

"Oh, we have startups doing that?"

Yes, we have startups doing that. Remember that whole campaign to get local technopreneurs to start companies? They did. With one hand, you're funding them. With the other, you're bringing in competition.

Now, I know the protectionism vs globalism arguments, and I don't want to get into them right now. I'm not saying we shouldn't be bringing in foreign startups, or foreign talent, or foreign anything. I like foreigners. I practically am one. And if the Alchian-Allen effect means we get better talent, I have no problem with that. A gradient has established itself, and talent is flowing from West to East. It's happening.

What I do have a problem with, is the unfair advantages enjoyed by foreign startups. They get more funding. They get the benefit of the doubt. They get a welcome mat, an "expat package", that the locals don't get. And the government then turns around and says, "ah, but look, nothing since Creative, we have no choice!" Self-fulfilling expectations.

It goes back to the national inferiority complex.

I propose a solution: think of Singapore as a truly global city. In a globalized world, travel is just not that big a deal. There are plenty of Californians who think about moving to Singapore they way they think about moving to New York City. Sometimes Singapore wins. (More often, Shanghai does.)

Yet in our media, and in our discourse, we keep making this distinction between "local" and "foreigner".

What do you think might happen if we stopped saying that? If we just assumed that different people are in Singapore for different amounts of time -- some people are here for two weeks to do an art installation, others are here for two months on a consulting assignment, and others are here for two years or twenty. Some people happen to have citizenship. Some people happen to have PR. Some, a PEP. Some, an Entrepass. Some are just here on a thirty-day "have fun storming the castle!" visa. But they're all here, and that's what matters, and sooner or later they'll be back.

That, paradoxically, might get us a lot closer to our various public policy goals.

Yesterday's Peter Schwartz talk was mind-blowingly awesome, but sometimes one must gently take the piss.

I know a young lady who is confronting the job market. I feel great sympathy for her. Applying for jobs is hard!

You put yourself out there, you dress up a bit, you try to impress, you think on your feet and hope to demonstrate value. At the end of it, through no fault of your own, they say "no, thank you" and you have to go do it all over again.

Men are used to this. They call it "dating".

Women are not. Take two recent grads, fresh out of university. One male, one female. The male has the advantage. He knows how to play the game. His expectations are right. He'll try and fail and he'll pick himself up and try again.

It's a numbers game, right? People who accept that nine rejections equals one acceptance will stick at it longer, apply for more challenging positions, eventually get the jobs they want, and make more money.

Sure, partly there's sexism in the workplace, like with that old surgeon joke.

But mostly, in a great irony, it's because women have trained men to handle rejection.





Rejection is painful. The solution: thicker skin.

Women who, for whatever reason, haven't developed that thick skin, are more sensitive to rejection. If rejection is so painful you'll avoid it at all costs, you're more likely to apply for a sure thing, even if it's beneath you.

I think it was back in 2005 that Brad and I talked about creating an email-to-OpenID convention.

Some progress has happened since.

This blog post records my research into the state of the art as of 2009.

http://brad.livejournal.com/2357444.html
http://siliconflorist.com/2008/06/20/email-to-id-my-openid-is-an-email-address/
http://siliconflorist.com/2008/07/22/the-beauty-of-eaut-email-address-to-url-translation/
http://www.eaut.org/
http://emailtoid.net/
http://ben.adida.net/research/w2sp2008-emid.pdf

To provide a secondary fallback to EmailtoID, I propose to develop a simple OpenID infrastructure service which, in the spirit of the Unix Philosophy, only associates email addresses to OpenID URLs (and to other identity system identifiers, like FB Connect). Anyone can sign up to it and associate one or more email addresses to one or more OpenIDs. Anyone can query it with an email address and discover the OpenID URLs. It would be both an OpenID Provider and possibly an OpenID Relying Party. This would be provided as an Internet-scale public service.

I don't know how I feel about XRDS so maybe I'll just scrawl on DNS some more.

(A related service could evolve into a preference database.)

Dear would-be entrepreneur,

You are the product of an expensive education, one component of which was "research skills."

Remember the field trip to the library? Remember the class on how to format a bibliography? Remember pulling a piece from an encyclopedia and "rephrasing" the article in your own words? Remember discovering Google for the first time?

Now that you want to strike out on your own, please don't forget all those painfully acquired research skills. Look for the prior art. At the very least figure out what your industry is called and what generic names are commonly applied to your kind of product, and do a search to see who else is working in your space. You just might find that somebody started a company in 2002 to do exactly what you're thinking about doing, and maybe they got acquired by Microsoft last month. If that's what comes up, read it as God's way of telling you to go do something else. Don't reinvent the wheel.

Some people act like they'll only have one good idea in their lives.

You had an idea? Great. You know what? Chances are somebody else has already had that idea before you.

You want to commercialize that idea? Great. Chances are somebody else has already tried. Why don't you see their products out there in the market? Because they failed, that's why. Maybe they couldn't build it. Or maybe they built it and nobody wanted it.

Sure, by all means, try: nobody will tell you that you're wasting your time; it's an unspoken cultural rule. In this business nobody ever discourages anyone from trying, they just say that the deal isn't right for them. An experienced investor won't try to stop you, but she will be thinking, even if she's too polite to say it, that you'll probably fail, just like the last guy failed. You can tell that's what she's thinking when at the end of the day she doesn't write you a check.

There are exceptions.

If you can come up with very good reasons why you won't fail, some very good ways that you'll be doing things differently, that becomes interesting. You're running a new experiment. You might discover a market.

Maybe the last guy was a college undergrad who couldn't program, who partnered with his roommate who was also a college undergrad who couldn't program, whereas you're a thirty-eight year old Ruby, Java, and C expert, and you're also a three-time entrepreneur who sold your last company to Google twelve months ago, are about to get out of your lockup, and are ready to do something different.

If the idea is truly new -- say it's based on groundbreaking research, science, or technology that simply didn't exist a year ago, before you perfected it -- then it could be interesting.

(This is why the institutional innovation ecosystem looks to institutes of higher learning and research institutes and R&D corporate labs as a source of new product ideas. Ideas that come from elsewhere simply tend to be retreads.)

But if your team and your ideas pass these tests, any angel or pre-seed early stage investor will take a meeting.

Are you making a new product, or are you building a new kind of product?

Are you building a new business, or are you building a new kind of business?

That's the difference between evolutionary innovation and revolutionary innovation.

Generally, though, remember this: the best way to take great photographs is to take a lot of photographs. The best way to have a great idea is to have a lot of ideas.

So I ran into Peter Schwartz the other night and ranted at him about the problem of linguistic development in Singapore.

You see, this is a culture that has been lobotomized twice.

Chinese immigrants who came from China in the early 20th C spoke the dialect of their home town. Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, etc.

They came to Singapore. The government said, "we're going to standardize on Mandarin -- putonghua." So a generation spoke Mandarin at school and dialect at home to their parents.

Then the government said, "oh, and English is important." And the next generation grew up speaking English at school and Mandarin at home to their parents.

Even today there is a divide between the Chinese-educated and the English-educated.

But the latest generation can't really speak dialect. And they can't communicate with their grandparents.

This is a shame, because grandparents can pass on tremendous wisdom to grandchildren, that parents cannot pass on due to the different power relationships and degrees of experience.

So that's what I call the double lobotomy.

On top of that, to add insult to injury, we have the problems of a slave-owning society. I'm sorr, I mean, a society that is dependent on foreign domestic workers.

In short, both parents work. Who raises the kid? The maid.

But the maid is from the Philippines or from Indonesia.

And nobody wants the kid growing up speaking Bahasa.

Normally, from age 0 to 7, the kid and the primary caregiver go around saying "look, that's a plane! Look, that's a bus! Look, that's a cat!" I saw a stat that said children learn 10 new words a day.

But with a maid, that doesn't happen.

During those crucial years of language acquisition the kid is effectively being raised by a deaf-mute.

Is it any wonder that Singaporeans don't really have a first language so much as a handful of second languages?

Fluency is so, so important. But economic hypertrophy has led to social atrophy.

A slaveowning culture isn't good for the slaves, and it isn't good for the owners.

The 12-bonk rule, first introduced to me by my sister, is explained here:

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,,22056158-23272,00.html

I have a complementary observation.

Many entrepreneurs go into business with their friends. But 90% of startups fail, and 90% of the time when they do, the friendship fails too.

Marrying the love of your life is like going into business with your best friend. One day you have kids, and suddenly it's not about the two of you: it's about the three of you, the four of you.

"We were doing just great before we had customers!"

Children are the customers; they can throw a whole business out of whack, but without them, you're not really a business, you're a research institute.

Of course, it ultimately depends on the person, but there are plenty of experienced entrepreneurs who prefer to keep friends as friends and go into business with partners.

"Bob and I grew up together. Great guy. Best man at my wedding. Great storyteller. Would I go into business with him? Not in a million years."

Some people might pick a life partner based on attributes like responsibility, executive ability, patience, parenting ability, and role modelling. It sounds so boring and old-fashioned, compared to sense of humour, excitement, intelligence, chemistry, great sex. But it just might be better for the kids.

"Oh, but when we got married, we weren't thinking about kids!"

That's like two inventors going into business together because they've built a great technology .... but they have no idea about the market.

Some women have a dating style that looks like one fun-loving teenage crush after another.

Other women have a dating style that looks like due diligence. They want an arranged marriage, as long as they arrange it.

Somewhere in the middle is the golden mean ....

In the Evolution of God, Robert Wright claims that our social moral sense, designed by evolution for hunter-gatherer tribal conditions, "misfires" when larger polities fail to recognize non-zero-sum relationships with one another, so they end up making war, not love.

(BTW, I would like to see all evolutionary texts globally replace "designed" with "optimized", please, for the avoidance of doubt.)

Wright suggests a number of reasons for this misfiring.

First, we have technology. Television emphasizes conflict, so the baddest of the bad guys get disproportionate airtime. 99% of Muslims are quite happy to live and let live and go home for dinner and put the kids to bed, but that would make for pretty boring television. (Children of Heaven is one exception.)

Second, in the old days, it was possible to pack up one's marbles and leave. If conflict within hunter-gatherers became too intense, the communities would simply fission, like a swarming beehive, or Jerry Maguire. But nowadays the world is full and there's nowhere else to go.

I have a comment on the second point, and I want to propose a third.

I don't think belligerence is a misfiring. We invented law partly because it became hard to pack up and leave; disputes had to be settled locally. But I would argue that back in hunter-gatherer days, a certain degree of unmitigatable pique was adaptive: it encouraged propagation, exploration, colonization. Peace-loving societies with highly evolved altruistic, cooperative cultures weren't prone to jumping on a boat and discovering new worlds.

Just as the Puppeteers drove Kzin evolution toward pacifism, a maxed-out planet will drive us toward universal post-national social organization. I just hope we don't become so peaceful we give up on space travel. Discovering strange new worlds might be something we rationally talk ourselves into, but I have my money on simpler motivations: can't deal with the in-laws, time to move out of town! In a fair fraction of interstellar sci fi, seedships are organized along national and religious lines. The Sunnis sponsor a colony ship in one direction, and the Shi'ites sponsor another. If we eliminated all capacity for dudgeon those colony ships might never leave!

You know, the great thing about evolutionary psychology is that you can use it to explain anything. It has almost the same degree of explanatory power as blaming things on God. It reminds me of the Zen koan "Maybe": one can always shed new light on past events.

A third reason we misfire is because we have literacy. In a sense this is related to the first – after all, both TV and printed books are information technology. We can't blame TV without also blaming books.

In a hunter-gatherer environment, oral histories were mentally taxing: passing on intimate details about the local flora and fauna was a full-time job, and besides, if all strangers were bad, there wasn't much point in keeping track of which strangers were especially bad.

That changed with literacy. The great irony of being Peoples of the Book is that The Book records old wrongs to inflame each generation anew: what the Sun is to the Olympic flame, the Bible and the Koran are to interreligious conflict. When you memorize the Koran, you memorize all kinds of mean allegations against people who are long dead, but whose descendants live on. That's enough to keep revenge memes alive in a vicious cycle.

For Melissa, for my nieces and nephews, and for anyone who's still not yet free from school...

http://theconversation.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/advice-for-high-school-graduates/

http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/universities-and-economic-growth

Yesterday at lunch Joi Ito gently mocked founders who have trouble hiring talent.

"Where do we find engineers?" distressed entrepreneurs would ask. "The job boards are no good."

"Maybe start with IRC," Joi said. "You want Ruby programmers, try the #ruby channel, duh."

This made total sense. IRC was my entrée to the Perl community, the Unix community, the opensource community, the startup community. To me, Josh Schachter isn't the guy who started Delicious; he's FMH from #memepool. IRC is how I know Vipul (Cloudmark) and Nat (O'Reilly) and Rael (Stikkit, Twitter) and nocarrier (Napster) and coral (Topsy). I've been on IRC since 1992. Lots of friends know me by my IRC nickname.

But some people are afraid of IRC. If the docs say "for more information, join freenode and go on #ruby" they will say, "oh, god, not another technology. I don't want to go to the trouble of researching IRC, downloading a client, learning a new vocabulary, figuring out how to join and leave channels and set a nickname. It takes too much time. Isn't there something easier?"

At TEDxKL one of the talks emphasized that good leaders are good at learning new things: not just declarative knowledge but procedural. In other words, they're good at transforming themselves and learning whatever skills are needed to rise to the occasion. If the job requires that they learn IRC, they do it. It's not a big deal.

But for some people, learning new things is a big deal. For most people, in fact, years of school has taught them that they're stupid, that learning new things is fraught with failure, potentially painful, best avoided. Or maybe they just don't like doing hard things. Maybe they lack motivation.

These people may be very intelligent – like a battery with high voltage – but they also have high internal resistance.



Po Bronson explored this paradox, that intelligent people are often more afraid of new challenges.

What's your internal resistance to learning new things?

6:24pm James: hi
6:24pm Meng: hi
6:24pm James: how are you doing?
6:24pm Meng: ok, you?
6:24pm James: i am not fine
6:25pm Meng: oh?
Meng: H1N1?
6:25pm James: did i tell you about my travel to London
6:25pm Meng: no
6:26pm James: so sorry about that
6:26pm Meng: hmm?
6:26pm James: please i want you to know that i have a problem
James: and i need your help right away
6:26pm Meng: mmhm
6:27pm James: i was mugged at a gun point last night
6:27pm Meng: oh
Meng: and?
6:28pm James: now i need to get back home so i need your help
6:28pm Meng: right, go on
Meng: brb
6:29pm James: I'm stranded in London because i got robbed at a park in Kentish town,it was a brutal experience, all cash i had on me were stolen and my credit card was collected too now i'm left with no money here.I need help out of here.
James: are you there
James: ?
James: k
6:35pm James: are you back...please i need your help right now
6:43pm Meng: go on then, give me some instructions
6:43pm James: are you there
James: ?
6:43pm Meng: hi
6:44pm James: so i need your help
6:44pm Meng: what do you want me to do?
6:44pm James: i want you to loan me some money
James: so i can get myself back home
James: please i will pay back
6:45pm Meng: okay, go on
6:46pm James: please i want you to get it wired to me here
6:46pm Meng: ok
Meng: go on
6:47pm James: how much can you help me with
James: ?
James: are you there
James: please i have no time to waste
6:48pm Meng: where are you now, then?
6:48pm James: London
James: You can have it done online (www.westernunion.com) or you can go to any nearest bank or amazon booklet..and send me the money here in London
6:49pm Meng: and what's the routing information, then?
6:50pm James: you don't need my bank details
James: all you need is my full name and my present location which is United Kingdom
6:52pm James: are you there
6:52pm Meng: yes, hi
Meng: how much do you need?
Meng: are you in some sort of cybercafe now?
6:52pm James: $500
6:53pm James: so can i send my name and location to now
6:54pm Meng: yeah, send me your exact location, please, so i can direct it appropriately
6:54pm James: Name: James Kao - Location: Kentish Town
James: Address: 256 Kentish Town Road, London, NW5 2AA
James: are you going to send the money right away
James: so i can wait for you for the details of the payment
6:56pm Meng: what's the easiest way for me to do it from within my browser?
Meng: tell me about this amazon booklet thing.
6:57pm James: i think you can even do it online
James: check www.westernunion.com
6:59pm James: are you on the webpage?
6:59pm Meng: are you sure $500 will be enough?
6:59pm James: $800 is all i need right now
James: i was think maybe you could loan me the whole $800
James: i will definitely refund you as soon as i get back home.
6:59pm Meng: you need to buy yourself a plane ticket home?
7:00pm James: no
James: my return flight leaves in some few hours but having troubles with the hotel bills
James: so wondering if you could loan me till i get back home.
7:01pm Meng: which hotel are you at?
7:02pm James: Perry Hilton Hotel
James: are you on the webpage now?
7:05pm James: are you there
7:05pm Meng: oh, right, sorry
Meng: i was just trying to get through to westernunion.com
Meng: what were you up to in london, anyway?
7:05pm James: ok
7:07pm James: vacation
7:07pm Meng: with Jen?
7:08pm James: yes
James: are you no the webpage
James: please i have no time to waste
7:10pm Meng: hey, westernunion.com redirected me to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/20/AR2009012003062.html
7:11pm James: how
7:11pm Meng: isn't that weird?
7:12pm James: I'm not sure of that
7:13pm Meng: you're not sure of what?
7:14pm James: i did not see anythin there
James: ?
7:14pm Meng: does that link not work for you?
7:14pm James: if you have transfer the found there be a details of confirmation
James: yes
7:14pm Meng: wait wait wait, not so fast, you should see this link
7:15pm James: is like you think i'm joking here right
James: ?
7:16pm Meng: wait, look at this link. http://mengwong.com/photography/20040520-rourkejen/dsc_1962.html



41.191.108.130 - - [15/Jun/2009:04:16:31 -0700] "GET /photography/20040520-rourkejen/dsc_1962.html HTTP/1.1" 200 1160 "http://www.meebo.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 YFF3 Firefox/3.0.6"


Host name: 41.191.108.130
IP address: 41.191.108.130
Location: NIGERIA




7:16pm James: are you there
James: don't you want to help me out of here
James: why all this
James: talk to me
James: let me know ok
7:17pm Meng: :)
Meng: hey, can i ask you a question about 419 scams?

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