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Solitary Scrivener

Well, This Is What We’ve Been Saying For Years

Whitney Potsus (SIG Manager)
28 May 2009 		Categories: • Working with Others
Comments: 1

TechRepublic recently posted an article titled, 10 ways developers can meet user expectations and ease frustrations. The list included things like accurate data, responsive user interfaces, compatibility, responsible resource consumption, and others. Being a technical writer, #7—Documentation, naturally caught my attention:

We all know how much developers dislike writing documentation. So we tell ourselves that the application is so easy to use, “only an idiot would need a manual.” There are two problems with this thinking. The first is that the world has plenty of idiots in it. The second is that we are usually wrong about how easy the application is to use. If your organization has a technical writer to create the documentation, involve that person from the get-go; the top complaint I hear from technical writers is that they are handed a nearly finished product and told to document it, with little insight into how it actually should be used. If you do not have a technical writer available, you will really need to work hard to make sure that the documentation does not merely state the obvious and is written in a way that will be helpful to end users who are unfamiliar with your application.

I’ve been at this for more than a decade and it mystifies me that this point STILL has to be drummed into the heads of managers and development teams. Or that #10 on TechRepublic’s list—Does what it says it will—has to be either. With all the blogs out there that crucify products that are anything but user-friendly, and with help desk call databases documenting the “how do I….?” calls that come in over and over again, it shouldn’t be such an epiphany that users have no patience for products that

So, instead of burying this discussion on our SIG listserv or the Discussion Board of our LinkedIn Group, let’s get it out in the open for everyone to read. What’s the reason—or reasons—for this persistent block? What’s the “magical sales pitch” that you, fellow tech writers, think will help clear the blocks once and for all?

 

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Contemplating Natural Talent

Whitney Potsus (SIG Manager)
21 May 2009 		Categories: • Career Management
Comments: 3

While catching up on some reading in my RSS aggregator, I discovered a post that Tom Johnson wrote about Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “Outliers.” About an hour later, while looking at Seth Godin’s blog feed, I discovered he’d responded to Gladwell’s book back in December.

Reading both of them, and having a strong reaction to both, prompted me to pull “Outliers” out of the middle of my to-read stack and read it. In arguing that natural talent isn’t much more than a myth, Gladwell states that:

  * Your success is greatly determined by where and when you were born.
  * Superstardom is achieved with 10,000 hours of hard work.
  * Where you were born + when you were born + working 10,000 hours (or more) > (is greater than) natural talent.

I know people with natural talent at something who’ve never gone anywhere with it because they lacked ambition and possessed an aversion to (or fear of) hard work. I know people who created extraordinary lives for themselves with their talent. There’s little doubt in my mind that work and experience can help you hone and harness natural talent. But it can’t replace it. Maybe I’ve hung around too many musicians and artists, but I believe there’s an intangible “something” that natural talent brings to the equation that simply cannot be matched by learned skill.

Talent exists at a cellular level. It affects how you experience the world with your five senses. Natural talent frames, from the start, how you see the world and all that’s in it. It frames how you process information for your own understanding, how you interpret what you see, how you transform what you know into something that the world—or some part thereof—can subsequently use. Natural talent overrides many of the objections to pursuing an activity that someone not similarly talented would have to beginning the pursuit. Someone with talent for neurosurgery has no reservations about the years of education, training, expense, and sacrifice that are required to become a surgeon. Someone who is capable of learning to be a surgeon—but who lacks a natural talent for it—would be overwhelmed by the work and not interested in pursuing it.

To say that something can be achieved with hours upon hours upon hours upon hours of hard work, and not so much by natural talent, is an oversimplification of a complex human process that is driven by intelligence, creativity, emotion, psychology, desire, and so on. A person born with a gift for language and communication, even with 10,000 hours of work, will not be nearly as effective in a career in biostatistics as they would be in a career that calls upon their talents. Using his logic, I could have been a successful computer programmer except that I would have been miserable at a personal level, because I would have been doing something that ran counter to the gifts I was born with. I didn’t enjoy my programming courses. I worked hard for the grades I got and felt out of my element. Sure, I could have stuck with it, overcome initial challenges, and made a living at it.

But I didn’t want to.

Which brings me back to my earlier point—that natural talent drives desire, fuels passion, feeds energy, defines goals, maps a course. It makes Gladwell’s 10,000 hours look manageable, not insurmountable. It makes challenges look like welcome creative opportunities. It makes Gladwell’s 10,000 hours look like a darn fine way to spend a life.

To deny the importance—even the existence—of natural talent is to devalue the singular contributions made by the people through whom ideas and visions and theories came. It is to say that anyone could have done what Albert Einstein did, that anyone could have seen the world in the same way that he did—he simply got there first.

What Gladwell’s book should offer all of us is another opportunity for self-reflection, the kind that Tom Johnson openly engaged in on his blog. An opportunity to recount and document our individual journeys, the crossroads we’ve navigated, the decisions that we regret or revel in. A “how did I get here from there” analysis can make us more comfortable with and accepting of who we are, where we are, the decisions we’ve made, the value we offer, and where we are headed. If it doesn’t lead to greater self-acceptance, it should lead to greater self-awareness. Such analysis can dispel any victim myths we may have been telling ourselves (and, likely, others), where we’ve been too passive, where we’ve clearly been “working in flow” (read: on our path), and what things make our hearts sing or sink. It can illustrate for us whether we need a course correction.

This lifeline/timeline analysis is one that every career and life coach makes you do when you go to them to “sort things out.” In Tom’s case, his analysis proved to be a validation that he is where he wants to be and, maybe, is “supposed” to be. For others, the analysis may lead to an entirely different conclusion about their own lives. In either case, the folks doing this analysis become more conscious of what they’re doing, thereby kicking themselves off auto-pilot. Extending the analysis to look at the activities and decisions of people we respect and admire—without comparing ourselves to them—and being aware of our reactions to them is almost as telling as self-reflection. Does watching a former colleague turn being laid off into a launching pad for their own business or career change stir up envy, or old dreams and goals of your own? Or does it help you reaffirm why you’re content—consciously content—with where you are and what you’re doing?

Like Seth Godin, I may not always agree with Gladwell but I can always count on him to provoke thought, to make me, if not change my beliefs and opinions, reaffirm to myself why I formed them in the first place.

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Writer’s Toolkit: Cleaning The Crap Off Your PC

Whitney Potsus (SIG Manager)
05 May 2009 		Categories: • Writers Toolkit
Comments: 0

Years ago, when we launched Scrivener as a newsletter, we had a regular feature called “Writer’s Toolkit,” which was a sampling of the tricks, tips, and tools that were shared on the SIG listserv. (Grant Hogarth, a senior member of both the STC and our SIG, was by far the most frequent contributor.) It’s a feature worth reviving for the blog.

While cleaning out my overstuffed mail folders, I found dozens of Toolkit-worthy e-mails that I’ve been saving. One such group of e-mails was about cleaning junk off your hard drive and clearing out unnecessary processes. Listed below are the tools that were recommended, and one resource site:

I can vouch for the freeware program CCleaner, which is a great tool for routine cleaning of your drive, particularly after you’ve been on the Web for any length of time. You can have it search for the whole default list of garbage-file generators, or some customizable subset thereof. It also scans for and repairs Registry problems. It installs quickly, updates quickly, and is not a resource hog. Although it’s freeware, I encourage folks to throw a few bucks to Piriform; it’s well worth it.

System Mechanic is a full suite of optimization tools, from defragmenting hard drives to cleaning out Registry junk to optimizing various performance factors and more. I have an old version, which can be a bit of a resource hog but my geek friends tell me that more recent versions of System Mechanic are less greedy for resources.

Have your own favorites? Share ‘em here!

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