Most embedded audio players offer a tiny player with the basics: play/pause and a progress bar.

While this design works great for the casual listener, Soundcloud has another audience in mind. Musicians, producers and sound engineers want to do more than listen to a track. They want to provide feedback on specific details. The bass at 2:36 needs more compression. There’s a mic out of phase at 4:01. Can we try another patch for this one chord in the bridge?

In order to allow this kind of collaboration, Alex and the guys at Soundcloud could have used a standard player and tossed a comment stream below it. Instead they decided to expand the player and allow commenters to add notes directly inside on the waveform itself. The result is pretty cool. People can post tracks and receive a flurry of comments attached directly to the waves.

The player spans the full width of the screen, so it’s easier to set the playhead at the exact spot you want. Commentor’s avatars appear in the bottom of the player, and their comments pop up on hover.

I like how these guys set out to build a collaboration site for music makers, and what did they concentrate on? The music player. It cuts straight to the epicenter (more).

They also scratched my persistant itch for larger link targets in their “Actions” section of the sidebar:

Soundcloud is still in private beta, but Signal vs. Noise readers can check it out with this link: http://soundcloud.com/guestlist/signalvsnoise .

Lynda Resnick is the billionaire marketer who brought us Pom (the pomegranate juice in the strangely shaped bottle), Fiji bottled water, and other well-known brands. In the recent New Yorker article "Pomegranate Princess," she reveals her "secret" for consistently delivering products that customers want:

People say, 'She's a marketing genius, she just gets it' ... I really don't. I came up with this epiphany the other day: being a great marketer is synonymous with being a great friend. In other words, you have to listen. ... You don't have to be a genius. ... you have to see what people are watching. You have to listen to conversations. You have to pay attention.

You have to listen. You have to pay attention. That's pretty low-tech advice for high-tech marketers and product managers. And yet I can't think of a better foundation for customer-centered work. LISTEN.

Echoing this theme is another recent New Yorker piece, on sleight-of-hand magicians and their craft. One well-known practitioner, Jamy Ian Swiss, wrote that

magic was, in his words, "an experiment in empathy" - a contest of minds, in which the magician dominates by a superior grasp of the way the minds work. The spectator is not a dupe who gets fooled but a rational actor who gets outreasoned. ...

...the magician [must] imagine an audience to experience his effects: "From the very start, the moment a magician looks into his practice mirror, he is envisioning an alien awareness - a mind other than his own, perceiving an illusion that he is creating but cannot actually experience for himself." Only by a command of intellectual empathy can the magician lead the viewer down an explanatory highway ...

Empathy - the driving force behind good listening - is the number one requirement for anyone who wants to create a good experience. Not a long list of methods, not a scholarly knowledge of one's niche field - but empathy. Anyone can learn a method; but people who can listen, can pay attention, can see the experience from someone else's perspective, are rare and valuable.

Writing a book, for example, requires the author to constantly read and re-read the text from the perspective of the readers: will this make sense to them? Not to me, the author, but to someone who's coming at this fresh?

Creating a website, or application, or any sort of product, requires the developer to consider: what will the user think of this? Not me, the developer, but someone who's not me.

It's a difficult skill, and some people are better than others, but it can be developed. Listen. Pay attention. Think about the experience from someone else's perspective. That's the basis of creating good experience.

- - -

References:

• "Pomegranate Princess: Lynda Resnick's eye for a product," by Amanda Fortini, New Yorker, March 31, 2008.

• "The Real Work: Modern Magic and the Meaning of Life," by Adam Gopnik, New Yorker, March 17, 2008.

At UX Week 2008, our Day 4 keynoter is Dr. Michael B. Johnson, who runs the Moving Pictures Group at Pixar. He’s been gracious enough to engage in an email conversation with me, which I’ll be sharing here. For more Michael, register for UX Week. Use the promotional code BLOG and get 10% off!

Peter Merholz: UX Week 2008 is devoted to the discussion of experience design, and we’re excited to have you on the program because Pixar is the premier studio for delivering consistently high-quality cinematic experiences. When it comes to animated filmmaking, the folks reading our blog will be familiar with the roles of the writer, director, editor, animators, voice actors, music and sound effects, those things that are apparent when sitting in the theater and staring at the screen. I suspect, though, that if they even know that such a thing as a “pre-production pipeline” exists, they have no idea its function in the filmmaking process. So I was thinking it’d be best to start there. Given that WALL•E has recently opened, it might be helpful to use it as a point of reference. When did you begin working on the WALL•E production? How did you and your team support it?

Michael B. Johnson: Historically, you can look at the Pixar film making process as one of building a prototype version of each film (known as “story reels”) and then moving on to building the fully realized one. This process has continued to evolve over time, where (perhaps surprisingly) the polish of the story reels has been rising even faster than that of our final films.

The Incredibles really set a new bar for the effectiveness of story reels. I think that had to do with particular leadership in place on that film - director Brad Bird, head of story Mark Andrews and director of photography Andy Jimenez. They’re all super talented, and on The Incredibles their skills perfectly complemented each other. The reels for The Incredibles are jaw-dropping. I think they’re good enough by themselves to be a released film. Rough, 2D, black and white - and completely compelling. They really show what story reels can accomplish - getting a 3D crew to see them and just think to themselves “now I just need to not screw that up” :-).

In the midst of Incredibles (2002), I was part of a team that put together a review/sketching system for Brad Bird, discussed in this article.

I also started working on a digital storyboarding tool for Pete Docter, who had just finished Monsters Inc. I originally called the tool “Pete Docter’s Tool”, a nod to Pixar’s original animation system “Motion Doctor Tool”, but then Angus MacLane suggested “Pitch Docter”, which is what we went with.

Before The Incredibles, storyboards were drawn on paper and then delivered to Editorial, where they were scanned and brought into the computer. On the Incredibles, scanning moved back to Story, where Mark Andrews (the Head of Story) would do a pass in Photoshop to make the images have a consistent “look”.

I showed what I was doing with Pitch Docter to Brad Lewis and Jan Pinkava (producer and co-director of Ratatouille, respectively) and asked if they were interested in trying this for storyboarding on their film. They said they were, and that really started the current incarnation of a “pre-production pipeline” here that my group has been working on since 2002.

On Ratatouille, for the first time we had many of the story artists working full-time in Photoshop, leveraging its brushes, layers, and actions to streamline their workflow. They used Photoshop in conjunction with Pitch Docter, which let them time out their pitches, add sound and dialog, and round trip with Editorial. I’ll talk a lot more about this is in my talk.

The other department that’s vital to the early development of the film is the Art Department. These are the folks who design the look of the film — the characters, the world.

The issue with these folks is not so much their internal workflow, as much as the way they share their work with other departments - when, what, and how. Again, this is something I’ll speak to in my talk.

The important take-home point, though, is that Pixar loves their films so much, we make them twice :-). Compared to the final product, the first time we make it is sketchy and rough - but the most important thing is that it’s still a film. To be clear - our prototype exists in the same medium as our final product. This allows us to judge it by the same standards that the final film will be judged.

I think this is an important lesson for a User Experience Designer to understand - paper prototypes and ethnographic research are great, but if you’re trying to build a prototype that you want use as a blueprint, it should exist in the same medium as the final product. My group (which does lots of ethnographic research and Photoshop/OmniGraffle prototypes) firmly believes in this, and practices it daily.

With WALL•E, my group got involved in early June of 2004. We were in the midst of working on Ratatouille when WALL•E started gearing up. Originally, we started helping their Art Department understand their technological choices available, and then pretty quickly we started helping them understand what was involved if they wanted to storyboard their film digitally.

In talking to Andrew Stanton, we quickly realized that WALL•E would be pushing our process much harder than any earlier Pixar film. Part of this was his approach; with less character dialog, there was a need for more images to make the story explicable. Also, Andrew was reasonably comfortable with technology; as long as our tools could keep up with his thought processes, he was interested in using digital sketching to do his reviews (our efficacy at this waxed and waned over the course of the production, which was itself very educational with respect to the “user experience”).

In short, WALL•E was a great proving ground for a lot of our technology, and was a wonderful cauldron to prove (and disprove) a wide range of approaches we took to bringing digital technology not only to the artists’ desks, but also to the director, where the tolerances are much tighter.

Anyway, I’ll have lots of great stories to share about this at the conference.

PM: Fascinating background. I love that you produce a completed (though sketchy in appearance) film as a prototype. At Adaptive Path, we’ve been moving towards this approach ourselves. As the experiences we design get necessarily more complex, it’s not sufficient to design them as static sketches, and hand them off to others to implement. We’ve been creating richer and richer prototypes, not as an end-product of design, but as a step in design exploration. If you’re going to design for experience, you’ve got to understand what it means to physically engage with your design as quickly as possible, and be prepared to change those designs as need be.

Your commentary raises two distinct questions for me.

First: To make the entire movie twice seems like a significant cost. How has it been deemed worth it?

MBJ: Actually, it more than makes up for the cost. We know we’ll fail a lot; if you don’t fail you’re not doing anything new :-).

We’d much rather fail with a bunch of sketches that we did (relatively) quickly and cheaply, than once we’ve modeled, rigged, shaded, animated, and lit the film. “Fail fast,” that’s the mantra. With a team of 10-20 people (director, story artists, editorial staff, production designer and artists, and skeleton production management) you can make, remake, and remake again a movie that once it hits 3D will take an order of magnitude more people to execute. The complexity of the task does not ramp up linearly.

PM: Second: There seem to be an awful lot of people and roles to coordinate. In our work, one of the biggest challenges we see facing organizations is how to coordinate the efforts of cross-functional teams, often comprised of people working in distinct organizational silos. Most organizations approach this by engaging in some form of the waterfall approach, where product development is handed off from silo to silo in the organization until completed. I get the distinct sense that Pixar’s approach is a lot more “all hands on deck.” How do you coordinate the efforts of so many distinct contributors?

MBJ: I would by lying if I said we knew what we’re doing :-). I think we’re starting to get the hang of it after 9 feature films, but it’s hard. Production management is a hard, hard problem. Like all things at Pixar, casting the right people in the right roles is the most important starting point, but we’re constantly refining/reinventing our processes to work for the problems we have with the people we’ve got.

I always stand in awe of good production management (which we are blessed to have). They keep a lot in their heads, and they juggle a ton of data within a complex web of constraints. Part of my job is to make sure that we track the right things, and make that data transparent to them, so they can generate the decision making information they need. A film is a big pipeline, and there are hand offs between departments, but there’s a lot of iteration and back channels. A lot of it is getting the right people talking to each other, removing barriers to communication.

One of my heuristics for thinking about how we (the designers and technologists) can help with production management is to look at where people are getting mad each other. This usually indicates some frustrating breakdown in the information flow. When people are getting bad/late/incomplete/stale information, they get frustrated. These projects take a long time to make, and like any business, there are always going to be areas where communication breaks down. When that happens, our team works on fixing the information flow.

Morale is super important; assuming a competent team, it’s probably the most important thing for a long project. Brad Bird has a great quote in the interview he did with McKinsey a few months ago:

“In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget–but never shows up in a budget–is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.”

PM: Brad’s comment about morale is revealing. Pixar has achieved remarkable success — with the release of WALL•E, it looks like you’ll be 9-for-9 in terms of hit films, all of which have received favorable criticism as well.

No other studio even comes close. And not for a lack of trying — there are many truly gifted people working in film. The challenge, I think, is that on the production of a major motion picture, there are so many parts, from concept to casting to production to marketing, and then so many things out of your control (weather, economy, current events, the societal Zeitgeist) that it’s seemingly inevitable that when you mix these elements together, sometimes you’ll get a dud. The exact same people can make two different films, and one will be great, and the other not so much, and it’s because of all these other elements.

You’ve been at Pixar for 13 years, and I believe your time there has exposed you to pretty much every aspect of film production. From that insider’s perspective, what can you impart about how Pixar is able to be so continually successful? What have you figured out that others have not?

MBJ: Fundamentally, people at Pixar respect each other, and in most cases, even like each other :-). We are making movies and shorts that we want to see. We’re not afraid to take chances, and we know we’ll fail along the way, but we do a good job of making each failure part of the process and use it to get to something that we’re happy with.

As Edna Mode says, “Luck favors the prepared, darling”.

As you say, we’ve been at this for a while, but we are under no illusions that we know what we’re doing. We do have some real experience under our belt, but I don’t think anyone here would tell you they’re done learning/growing/challenging the processes we use. A lot of the leadership of the films (directors, production designers, creative and technical leads, production management) have been working together in different configurations on films here for over a decade. We have animators, our actors, that have animated on almost every film we’ve made. I like the line: “The harder I practice, the luckier I get.”

I also like a comment I’ve heard Andrew Stanton say, which is “talent isn’t fair.” I’m lucky enough to work at a company where I don’t have a chance of being the smartest person in the room, and I like it that way. I won’t lie; it’s hard to work with so many talented people, you have to have a certain diamond hard sense of self or you can come home bummed out after a hard day at work. But it does cause you to bring your A game. Luckily, we tend to do a very good job of hiring people that are actually nice, and really want to work with other people.

I think it speaks to the fact that you need to assemble the right team of talented people, and inspire them to work on something great, and they will. It almost certainly won’t be the thing they thought they were going to make, but as long they keep true to the high level vision of making something that appeals to them, they’ll be successful. I think it helps that our creative leads here have sensibilities that resonate with the audience at large, and I honestly don’t know how much of that is about the earnest and truthfulness of the execution and how much of it is the subject matter. But at this point we’ve been successful with movies about rats in kitchens and trash compactors on a dead planet, so I have to think it’s the love of the story showing through and catching the audience.

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As much as I respect Apple, Unslow, one of their new iPhone 3G television ads, has me wondering how they kept a straight face when they put this on the air. Try to follow along with your own iPhone 3G:

Web pages load immediately. GPS picks up instantly. Files download about 3x faster than I’ve ever seen a file download — even over wi-fi. I don’t think standing on top of a 3G tower antenna would even deliver such an experience.

This ad borders on bait-and-switch and it’s disappointing to see Apple go there. If the ad wasn’t about speed it might be a different story. If they were just showing off as many features as they could in a 30 second spot it would be understandable. If they exercised poetic license and cut out a few frames to make a different point we’d understand.

But Unslow is about selling speed. Speed that isn’t for sale at any price. It sets the wrong expectations. It leads to a disconnect between the iPhone in the guy’s hand on TV and the iPhone in your hand. When they don’t deliver what they demonstrate people end up disappointed.

When Gruber first linked the TripLog/1040 UI by Stevens Creek, I wasn’t kind either. Bright colors, controls seemingly placed at random. It was the opposite of what designers strive for in our circles. A mess. Soon the Flickr page was a schoolyard of insults. And then something interesting happened. TripLog’s designer Steve Patt posted a comment amidst the bile to share the rationale behind his design. The many who chose not to listen to him won’t learn anything, but the rest of us may find fruit in Mr. Patt’s thoughtful explanation and twenty years of software experience.

The first charge against TripLog is “clutter,” that there’s too much on the screen at once. We’ll get to clutter, but first we have to talk about speed. Patt explains that the #1 purpose of TripLog is to help people track their deductible or reimbursable mileage. If people can’t enter their trips very quickly, the friction of entering data will overpower the motivation to track. For customers, untracked data means miles that aren’t reimbursed. So speed is Patt’s top priority.

What does speed have to do with clutter? I once saw Tufte give a workshop in Chicago where he introduced a valuable concept. He said information may be displayed adjacent in space or stacked in time. Take a book for example. If two dots are on the same spread, they are adjacent in space. All it takes to switch between them is movement of your eye. Compare that to a dot on one page stacked above a dot on another page. You can’t see them at once. You have to flip back and forth between pages to see one dot versus the other.

The trade-offs between elements adjacent in space versus stacked in time are always in the mind of a UI designer. Placing many elements on the same screen reduces the need for navigation and gives users a comprehensive feeling of “it’s all at my command.” Moving focus from one element to another is instant and seamless. On the flip side, separating elements onto different screens slows things down with navigation while increasing clarity. There is more room for explanation and luxurious space when fewer elements occupy the page. The eye has less to filter through. The course of action is more obvious.

So did Patt put too many elements adjacent in space on one screen when he should have separated them out in time? Is his UI “cluttered?” To answer that we should pull ourselves out of the computer and sink our feet firmly in the customer’s shoes. Patt explains that customers load the application for two reasons:

1. They want to log miles they just drove
2. They want to double-check that they logged a recent trip

The first is obvious. Patt explains the second:

There’s a very simple reason, which we know because we’ve been selling our Athlete’s Diary software for logging a different kind of mileage for nearly 20 years. It’s because when you start up the software, half the time you’ll be scratching your head saying, “Did I remember to enter yesterday’s ride (or run)?” ... You want to be able to answer that question immediately, with just a quick glance down to the bottom of the screen.

Half the time people want to add new entries. Another half of the time, people want to verify a recent entry. On top of that, people also like to confirm the accuracy of data after they submit it. These factors together form a motivation to place the “add an entry” and “verify recent entries” features adjacent in space. It’s a decision to optimize for instant access to both features at the cost of showing more elements on screen at one time.

Beyond first impressions

When we talk about “usable” or “intuitive” interfaces, Apple devotees and the web app crowd (myself included) tend to bias toward the first-time user. The idea is an interface is easy to use if new users can figure it out and get running quickly. Or an interface is “clear” if all the parts and functions can be immediately parsed upon eye contact. Typically this means stacking features in time so that each screen has fewer elements and is easier to digest. TripLog, while far from perfect, has a different focus. Rather than first-impressions, Patt is thinking about repetition. Spatial memory and adjacency play a major role in repetitive tasks. How many of you keep an assortment of pens, papers, and peripherals on your desk in specific positions instead of moving them in and out of drawers every day?

Patt’s bias for adjacency and speed continues inside the “Add an entry” block. There are two ways to log a trip: manually enter data in the fields or choose user-defined presets called “Frequent Trips.” Both methods are exposed. However everything can’t be exposed all the times. There are some features stacked in time too. Choosing a date “Other” than Today or Yesterday, selecting a different Car (for IRS purposes), and editing the Frequent Trips list are all behind the time wall and require navigation.

So what did we learn?

The fact that a screen is “cluttered” doesn’t automatically mean it is poorly designed or ill-conceived. To many of us, screens thick with adjacent elements are like cold water we prefer not to step into. The very fact that TripLog is no feast for the eyes attests to the difficulty of bringing clarity and order to a screen relying too heavily on adjacent features. It would be a fun exercise to redesign TripLog for more visual clarity without removing any elements.

However before we criticize we should look for successes. Where TripLog fails on style it may well win on speed and pragmatics. Patt has thought about his work and designed a product intentionally. Following fashion and the status quo is easy. Thinking about your users’ lives and creating something practical is much harder. Patt can work on his colors and alignment, and hopefully please his user base with a helpful tool. Meanwhile the rest of us would be wise to work on the quality and value of our criticism.

I spent almost 45 minutes on the phone with my bank today because of an error with their online banking. I didn’t want to, I had to, after their email support told me my issue couldn’t be handled online. It was such a mind-numbing, protracted, time wasting experience that it made me ask myself, “How can anyone ever ask us why we don’t offer phone support?”

In a perfect world, calling a business for help would be quick, painless, productive, and human. But it’s not and it’s not going to be. That old time ideal of calling the local retailer or company and talking with someone after two rings was demolished by the call centers and overseas help desks that sprung up in the information age. It’s time to stop thinking that phone support is so essential. We’re lucky that we have an email support system that works and is incredibly efficient considering the volume of customers we interact with daily. It works because we’re committed to making it work, and if we can do it every company with a mailserver can do it too.

Now, I know people want to pick up a phone and talk to a live human being. We all want assurance that our money is being spent on something maintained by human beings who speak our language and hopefully live in our same country. I get that instinct, because I share it at times. I also totally and completely understand some people’s experience with email tech support is way too techy, unreliable or frustrating and dialing an 800 number is an escape from that. What I don’t get it is why a person would rather sit on the phone for however long it takes – maybe 45 minutes!!! – rather than send an email and go about their life while it’s read and replied to.

Phone calls require you to stop what you’re doing, go to a quiet place, and concentrate. It requires waiting on the line, listening to hold music, being transferred and possibly having the call lost, all so you have to start over again. You can’t share a phone call with your colleagues, you can’t get someone else’s input or feedback.

Emails can be printed out and saved. They can be sent to someone else who can chime in on th thread. They’re a historical document you don’t have to copy down hurriedly while information is spewed out to you. They can be sent quickly, tagged, labeled, archived. You can send an email whenever you want, there’s no business hours to abide by or schedule to confer with.

We get requests every day from people who don’t think email support will cut it and demand a phone number to call us. Their worries are assuaged when they get a reply from me in less than 15 minutes that is informative, helpful and obviously written by a human being. It’s absolutely 100% possible to provide excellent customer care without a phone or phone number, and our company proves that daily.

Two huge disclaimers:

1. It’s early. iPhone 2.0 and the App Store are just hours old. Everything below is pure conjecture.
2. “A living” is subjective.

Where’s the market?

Pinch Media just released an initial price distribution chart for the initial 500 or so iPhone apps in the App Store.

There are always going to be more free apps than pay apps, but what’s telling is the initial distribution of prices. Most are $10 or less with the bulk at under $5. If that’s where the market settles out, developers who planned on making a living selling iPhone software may be in for market whiplash.

It is certainly possible to make money selling software at $5 or $10 a pop, but you have to do significant volume to make it pay. $20-$49/pop can add up pretty quickly (as many successful shareware authors can attest to), but $5-$10/pop requires real volume.

OmniFocus Outlier

So far OmiFocus is the only app priced higher than $10 in the top 35 downloaded iPhone apps. There are only four other apps in the top 100 that are priced at higher than $9.99.

However, a closer look at OmniFocus shows that the entry price for the desktop app is already $79 so their customers are used to paying higher prices for their software. It will be very interesting to see how many new players without established products will be able to command prices over $9.99. I suspect there may be some seriously vertical apps (like ForeFlight that will command top dollar.

Are iPhone apps just supporting cast members?

It’s way too early to tell, but besides games, might the big winners be the hybridizers? Salesforce.com makes their money selling web-based software — the iPhone app is just a gateway to their core service. OmniFocus will make the bulk of their money on their desktop app. Will iPhone-only developers build profitable companies or will a combination strategy (web, desktop, or both) be required to justify developing for the platform?

Of course an ad supported model is a possibility too. Twitterific, for example, already runs ads from The Deck (or you can pay $10-15 to get rid of the ads).

Another option is the Tap Tap Tap model which is to release a pile of apps for $2.99 each and make the dollars on aggregate volume.

Time will tell

I’m bullish on the iPhone and App Store. I still believe the iTouch platform will ultimately dominate the mobile space for the next 20 years. The next 3 months should set the market for iPhone app prices. I wonder where it will all settle out and where people’s pricing expectations will settle in.

Paul Graham thinks that startup founders need to sell their companies to get freedom and security:

They want enough money that (a) they don’t have to worry about running out of money and (b) they can spend their time how they want. Running your own business offers neither. You certainly don’t have freedom: no boss is so demanding. Nor do you have security, because if you stop paying attention to the company, its revenues go away, and with them your income.

I think he’s wrong in general and I know he’s wrong for me personally.

Fallacy #1: Owning a profitable company is like earning a salary
Getting your company to the point where you can pay yourself a decent salary is a great milestone. You created something sustainable that doesn’t rely on spending other people’s money. You deserve to pop a bottle and celebrate!

You certainly shouldn’t curb your ambitions because of that, though. The real economic pay-off for taking the risk of starting a business is what comes after this. That the company starts making enough money that you can take some and put away. After a while, that coveted financial independence you thought would make your life perfect should be achieved (and you’ll realize that it didn’t make it perfect).

But I can see how this line of thought would arise. If you’re building to flip, then profits aren’t really that interesting. If you can just get to break-even, you’re probably doing better than the majority of other companies in your made-to-flip space. So instead you focus on getting more eyeballs, more sign ups, or more of whatever you think an acquirer would place the highest premium on.

I would want to sell a company built like this too. But there are other ways to build companies. Lots of self-made millionaires made their money selling products for a profit.

So let’s strike out the security claim. Most successful business owners could walk away from their business tomorrow and still live very comfortable lives off the money they put away.

Fallacy #2: There’s always something you’d much rather do
You don’t have to work 60, 80, or 100 hours per week just because you run your own business. Many business owners do that, but if they’re successful, it’s usually because there’s nothing they’d rather be doing. Look at the top tech CEOs. None of them need to work, many of them are billionaires, but still Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and others continue to helm their companies for decades because they love what they’re doing.

I don’t personally like to work 60 or more hours per week. Even 40 hours is pushing it. At 37signals, we all try to work just four days a week. That’s a perk in addition to the fact that we don’t count vacation days (I probably spent 4 weeks last year) and many of us often attend conferences and other out-of-the-daily-rhythm activities.

But when I actually do sit down to work, it’s very often that there’s nothing else I’d rather do. And I don’t think that’s really an uncommon phenomenon. I think lots of people really like what they do and for bursts of the time consider it the most interesting thing they could be working on.

If you’re building a company to flip, though, and feel like you have to put in endless hours to please investors and potential acquirers, I can certainly appreciate that there’ll often be something you’d much rather do. And that it can feel like you’re trapped trying to chase a prize that keeps moving. I don’t personally think that’s a rewarding way to live, but to each his own.

For me, the secret has been to do many other things besides work on 37signals. I enjoy working on Ruby on Rails and pursue a lot of hobbies. When you work less than 40 hours per week on something you actually like doing, it doesn’t feel very much like work at all. It feels like I’ve already retired and get to do a little of many things that I like so none of them really gets boring. There’s what I perceive to be healthy balance instead of a constant sprint.

This comes back to the earlier topic of early retirement as a false idol. I’ve talked to many entrepeneurs who’ve thought that they could just sit back and live the sweet life of no work after selling out. Most of them were right back working another idea after six months. Often times, the second idea wasn’t as good as the first one.

Bottom line is that you really should try to find something to work on that at least for substantial amounts of time constitutes that “nothing I’d rather do” feeling. I think it’s hard to be truly happy if the only reason you work is to win a paycheck. Whether it’s as an employee or a business owner.

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I never liked the idea of the “for Dummies” or the “complete idiot’s guide to” book series’, but their sales success have certainly demonstrated that plenty of people identify with being a dummy or a complete idiot. Self-deprecation is fine, just realize that there’s a dear line between embracing your own ignorance and ensuring a prophesy of certainty.

This extends well beyond the kind of books you’re buying. I’ve met far too many people who seem so certain of their lack of abilities that they curb their chances of success before they’ve walked the first step. While there are probably plenty of geniuses out there, most of the interesting people I’ve talked to are of average intelligence, but above-average aspiration. Stop believing in the myth of triple-A people as a different kind.

Just becomes you don’t know how to program or design or lead or do anything doesn’t make you a dummy or an idiot. Mastery is probably closer than you think.

I didn’t start programming for real until I was 20-something. Rails was my first project in Ruby. Jason didn’t train to be a designer, but got a degree in finance. The world is filled with people who didn’t know jack not too long ago about whatever it is that they’re doing and are now highly regarded in their fields.

If there’s something you don’t currently know how to do, please decide not to be a dummy or an idiot. You’re as smart as you always were, you’re just looking to learn something new. Set your ambition to that of equality: There’s no reason I couldn’t be as good as that guy or girl doing what I want.

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A couple of Getting Realish ideas spotted in Best Life magazine:

Greg Gianforte is the author of “Bootstrapping Your Business: Start and Grow a Successful Company With Almost No Money.” In Follow Your Dream, he advises throwing out your five-year plan and focusing on building something now instead.

Gianforte describes how to build a company from sales rather than enlisting professional financiers. The secret is to stop sweating your five-year plan and start moving the product from day one. If your business idea requires more money than you have at hand, then shrink the idea.

“An entrepreneur getting started doesn’t need a $100 million idea,” says Gianforte. “A $1 million idea is enough. The beauty of a $1 million idea is that big companies don’t care about it. Find a niche within a niche.”

The same issue of the magazine also includes Mark Cuban’s Three Rules for Building a Company. He writes, “Do everything you can to avoid taking money.”

Sweat equity is the best equity. “Taking money from someone else kills more start-ups than anything else does. Do everything you can to avoid taking money. If you must, your best prospects are potential customers. You have something they want, so if they invest in you, it can be a win-win situation.”

Related Getting Real essays:
Don’t Do Dead Documents
Race to Running Software
Fix Time and Budget, Flex Scope
Fund Yourself

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Grady Booch delivered the following axiom at BrainstormTECH last week: “The average work of the average worker is average”. At first, it sounded perfectly rational. But on second take, I got really bothered by this. It’s based on an assumption of bad, average, and good as being static attributes of a person that I find whole fully offensive and narrow minded.

In my experience, we’re all capable of bad, average, and good work. I’ve certainly done bad work at times and plenty of average work. What I’ve realized is that the good and the exceptional work is at least as much about my environment as it is about me. Average environments begets average work.

Good people do bad work or worse all the time
Just think of all the great people and startups that have disappeared into some big borg of a company, only to come out after a few years on the other side with little to show for the trip. Even so-called exceptional people can do unmemorable work when they’re placed in inept environments.

Or think of how easily good people can be made to do bad things when put under the right circumstances. The Stanford Prison Experiment is a good example of the banality of evil.

That’s not to say that we’re all created equal and that star power can be unlocked with hippie music and sandals alone. Just that there’s a ton of untapped potential trapped under crappy policies, poor direction, and stifling bureaucracies. People waiting to do great work if given the chance.

No one can be a rock star without a great scene
So if you want your team to excel, quit thinking about how you can land a room full of rock stars and ninjas (note to recruiters: even if these terms weren’t just misguided, they’d be tired by now anyway). Start thinking about the room instead!

Here are three questions to think about as you begin to self-diagnose your environment:

• Do you value effort over effect?
  Someone who stays up all night working is a hero, but getting the work done and leaving early marks someone who isn’t a “team player”.
• Do you trust people to do the right thing?
  We don’t count vacation days and we give everyone a company credit card but require no real expense reports.
• Do you encourage questioning?
  Ending discussions with “because I want it like that” or explaining policies with “because that’s the way it is”.

But most importantly, stop using the perceived quality of your team as an excuse for why you can’t try or follow new ideas. That’s a self fulfilling prophesy that’ll never fail to disappoint. Humans are incredibly eager to live down to low expectations.

P.S.: You’ll know you’re committing this fallacy when you start your comment to a Getting Real post with “but that would never work here” (it probably would, you just need the courage to try), “sure, you can do that because you have a team full of star players” (we have star players because we do it like that), or “we can’t all just do it like that” (don’t worry about all, just worry about you — and you probably could).

I’m a big fan of swearing. Not in the derogatory, directed-at-you kind of way (“hey, fuck you!”), but as verbal marker to underline key concepts, create emphasis, and express passion. It certainly doesn’t work in every environment nor should it, but there are plenty were it does.

The first place where I’ve found it to be useful is between coworkers (“fuck, that’s awesome”). A team of British researchers found a while ago that profanity at work can help build solidarity and release stress. Couldn’t agree more. When people feel comfortable enough to let their emotions bare with the use of profanity, I’ve found the resulting atmosphere to be so much more relaxed and pleasurable. It’s not the profanity itself (although I adore “fuck” as one of the most versatile words in the English language), but what it says about the knitting of the culture.

The second place I’ve used profanity to great effect is at conferences where you feel you know the audience enough to loosen your tie and want to create a mental dog ear for an idea. Of all the presentations I’ve given, I’ve generally had the most positive feedback from the ones that carried enough passion to warrant profanity and it’s been very effective in making people remember key ideas (“they sell fucking shoes”).

It seems that profanity can work as a record button for the brain. It brings people to the edge of their attention as they’re trying to figure out whether they’re supposed to be offended or inspired. And then the content warrants the emphasis, the idea seems to stick better and longer and with more affection.

As with any tool, it can certainly be misused and applied to the wrong audience. But you can cut yourself with a great steak knife too. Use profanity with care and in the right context and it can be fucking amazing.

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“We get it. But our clients would never understand.” It’s a frequent rebuttal to our Getting Real philosophy.

Read between the lines and there’s a disturbing undercurrent to that message. It’s really saying, “I get it but these other people could never understand. They don’t have the wisdom and the understanding that I do.” It’s like the way some LA or NYC people sound when they talk down about the masses in the flyover states. It’s insulting.

The truth is folks can usually handle a lot more than these wizards think. Are their clients really imbeciles who couldn’t possibly understand why they’re foregoing a spec to build something real ASAP? I doubt it.

A lot of times people are just stuck in patterns. Process gets done a certain way because that’s the way it’s been done in the past. Sometimes the arteries of work get clogged up simply because no one stops it from happening. Inertia happens.

Set a new course
Instead of looking down at your clients, look for ways to convince, educate, and guide them. That’s part of your job.

Start off by agreeing on your common goal: to create the best final product possible. Agreeing on a common goal is an old Dale Carnegie technique that works well because it gets everyone to realize they’re on the same team and fighting for the same thing. You start getting “yes” immediately.

Then steer them in what you think is the best direction. Take the initiative. Set expectations. Explain why you want to do it a new way. Tell them how you think the project should go.

Will this approach lose you the job? If it does, maybe it’s a bad fit in the first place.

But you may be surprised by the results. This kind of effort shows you’re someone who genuinely cares about the final outcome. And a lot of clients would love to work with someone like that. They’d love for you to tell them there’s a better way. They’d love to know that you want to do more than just phone it in.

Don’t assume ignorance. People live up to the expectations placed upon them. If you assume intelligence and flexibility from your clients, you just might get it.