Fish Food: Episode 604
How to be interesting, Ann Handley on writing, Ethan Mollick on doing stuff with AI, Richard Huntington on brand-led business transformation
If you do one thing this week…
‘Interesting isn’t a personality type, it’s a set of habits and a way of seeing the world‘
Russell Davies
The best thing I read this week was this extract from Russell Davies’ book Do Interesting: Notice. Collect. Share. In the post Russell writes about a talk he gave years back on ‘How to be interesting’:
‘The way to be interesting is to be interested. You’ve got to find what’s interesting in everything, you’ve got to be good at noticing things, you’ve got to be good at listening. If you find people (and things) interesting, they’ll find you interesting.
Interesting people are good at sharing. You can’t be interested in someone who won’t tell you anything. Being good at sharing is not the same as talking and talking and talking. It means you share your ideas, you let people play with them and you’re good at talking about them without having to talk about yourself.’
It’s really worth reading the whole thing of-course but I loved his point about how ideas come from: ‘…the slow, quiet accumulation of seemingly banal and obvious habits. It’s just doing the right things to make sure your mind and your life are brimming with hearty compost’.
His point is that paying attention to the small things in every day life can reveal a world of interesting things in amongst the seemingly mundane. Small acts of attention are accumulative, particularly when they are repeated: ‘A tiny creative act, repeated, gets powerful, quickly’. This, he says, is like a compound interest for creativity. The inspiration comes from putting the work in.
I guess an example of my own version of Russell’s tiny creative habits are the many #corporatecarpets, #hotelcorridors and #occasionaltourguide posts that I’ve posted over on Instagram.
I’d also add that small acts of noticing and curiosity can lead to big things – unexpected insights that no-one else has considered, or completely new ideas that can lead to breakthrough innovations. There are some lovely examples of this history. Like how X-rays were invented by Wilhelm Röentgen in 1895 whilst testing whether cathode rays could pass through glass one Autumn evening in his lab. Covering the cathode tube in black paper he noticed a faint green light that was being projected onto a nearby flourescent screen.
Curious about what it was he tested placing different objects in the path of the unknown rays in front of photographic plates and noticed that thicker, more solid objects blocked more rays. When a hand was placed in the path of the rays the bones of the hand and a wedding ring showed up clearly on the photographic plates. Within a year Röentgen’s discovery was being widely used across the world in the treatment of broken bones and gunshot wounds.
Or then there’s Tabitha Babbitt who, whilst living in a Shaker community, noticed how difficult it was to cut wood using a long saw that needed two people. She then saw her spinning wheel and came up with the idea of attaching a circular blade and came up with the much more efficient circular saw.
Or then there’s the melted peanut cluster bar that led to the invention of the microwave oven, the burrs caught on dog’s coat that inspired the invention of Velcro, and the accident with a glass flask that led to the creation of safety glass. A let’s not forget of course perhaps the most famous example of all – Alexander Fleming returning from holiday and noticing that a mould that had grown on petri dishes of Staphylococcus in his lab seemed to be preventing the bacteria from growing.
The point is that without Tabitha Babbitt noticing that half the effort of using a unidirectional saw was wasted, or Wilhelm Röentgen being curious about the faint green light, or Fleming seeing that the mould stopped the growth of bacteria, none of these important discoveries would have been made.
We might not be discovering X-rays or Penicillin but developing a habit for small acts of attention helps us to get more out of the world.
A version of this post also went up on the Only Dead Fish blog.
Links of the week
A brand new episode of Google Firestarters is now LIVE, featuring the brilliant bestselling author and digital marketing pioneer Ann Handley talking about why, in an age of abundant communication, knowing how to write well is more critical than ever. So many great insights in here including how to build writing into your daily practice, writing with one person in mind, how writing longhand slows down your brain, and lots of good thoughts on using AI tools in the writing process.
This was a nicely thought-provoking piece from Richard Huntington on the idea of ‘brand-led business transformation’ (sidenote: I wonder if this speaks to a wider opportunity for agencies to expand their value to clients?)
Ethan Mollick’s six monthly guide to doing stuff with AI has lots of useful practices and tips in it. He mentions the jaw dropping Suno and Udio which I’ve seen a few times now - amazing (and I mean amazing) text to music generation tools
I liked the idea of everyone (not just designers and creatives) using portfolios of work in interviews
A wonderful post from Priya Parker on setting up a room effectively for a workshop, event or meeting (HT @undermanager)
This week I also wrote about the downside of using sector-specific case studies (a little bug bear of mine)
Quote of the week
‘Elections: when the people temporarily become interested in politics to vote for politicians who have temporarily become interested in the people’. Gurwinder
And finally…
Speaking of writing, I loved this extract from Gary Provost’s book on how to improve your writing (shared by Susan Cain)
Weeknotes
This week I ran some workshops for the African Development Bank which I loved doing. I loved working on case studies such as Kiva.org, Ushahidi, and M-Pesa, and I loved their inspiring stories about how they’d made a difference in people’s lives. Next week I’m back working with Imperial College again, teaching on their Digital Transformation module and I’ll also be cycling around Norfolk with a bunch of other MAMILs.
Thanks for subscribing and reading Only Dead Fish. It means a lot. If you’d like more from me my blog is over here and my personal site is here. Do get in touch if you’d like me to give a talk to your team or talk about working together.
My favourite quote captures what I try to do every day, and it’s from renowned Creative Director Paul Arden: ‘Do not covet your ideas. Give away all you know, and more will come back to you’.