Nothing happened.

People I knew talked to me. The presenter hugged me. The guy sitting next to me chatted. A couple of venture capitalists entered the conversation I was part of and were as courteous as they ever are. I had a perfectly fine time.

No one seemed offended, taken aback, disrespected, or dismissive. My worst fears simply didn’t materialize along any dimension. (I suspected  they wouldn’t. When I noticed how much emotional energy I had invested in being afraid it would be problematic, that very investment was a clue that irrational emotional crap was almost certainly overreacting to a real world situation. The fact that many other people have the same fear does not in any way make the fear more real.)

I try to be concrete with my answer. “It would be bad for my reputation” is the kind of thought I have. But what does that actually mean? Do I think I would lose business? Do I think people would say “That Stever, he wears jeans so he must not be any good at what he does.”? Getting concrete makes it clear to me that my fears are rather absurd in a lot of ways. I’ve decided to dress casually tonight just to see what happens–both with the other people, but more importantly, in my own head as I play mindgames with myself.

Would you wear jeans and a T-shirt to a business event? Why or why not? If you’d be scared to, what do you actually think would happen?

Hey, I went to one of those schools that was like “taking a drink from a firehose.” If you don’t have water squirting out your nose, there wasn’t enough content, right?

Here are some of mine:

• I haven’t enough time to get everything done.
• I need large blocks of uninterrupted time to work.
• It’s possible to have consistent, high levels of productivity day after day.
• If I’m not frantically doing stuff, I’m not working.
• I should do things my boss asks for first, even if it means slipping other schedules.

I’ve noticed there seem to be a few different kinds of twitterers:

• Redirectors. People whose tweets mainly serve to point me to other interesting articles, videos, and websites.
• Tipsters. People whose tweets actually contain tips or useful information.
• Personalities. People whose tweets reveal something interesting about them, so I get intrigued by them as a person, and possible also intrigued by their content.
• Marketers. Lots of self-promotion and/or product promotion. 
• Randoms. People who tweet random facts about their life that are not revealing or interesting. “Am walking down Street.” 
• … have I missed any Twitterer types? 

My podcast is where I share tips (let’s get real: the amount of content I have to generate to keep two newsletters, two blogs, a podcast and a book going is unreal. I can’t add Twitter to that load, too).

On Twitter, I’m trying to be a Personality, more than anything. I tweet about things that interest me, and also that affect me in emotional, personal ways. It’s been an interesting journey, since I started on Twitter purely as a way to stay social with my friends. Given the podcast and upcoming book, my presence has evolved into a complicated mix of trying to stay personal and yet build a community that can become the basis for some kind of career (workshops? media presence? information products?).

Since I have no grand plan, I’m just meandering on my own trying to connect in a personal, rather than informational, way.

Do you have any thoughts on my Twitter/Facebook presence? Is there anything you would like me to do differently that would make me more worth following, and/or build a stronger connection of whatever type between me and the Get-it-Done Guy/Stever Robbins community?

When we’re doing something we’ve done before, or trying to do the same thing others have done before, we have many tools: we can set goals, we can break the goals down into subtasks, we can do research, look at statistics and trends, and try to predict the future. This is the thrust of our education (MBA education, at least), and is generally accepted wisdom.

Some things in the world are risky. They’re unknown. For example, should I accept the job offer from company X? With some careful framing of the question, a few phone calls, and some due diligence, I can at least get a good idea of what it might be like to work for company X. 

Other things in the world are uncertain. They are fundamentally unknowable. Either they’re completely new so the human race lacks the past experience to know them, or the outcomes are so dependent on so many different things that for all intents and purposes, they’re unknowable. Some unknowables: (in 2003) Will the iPod catch on in the marketplace? Will my current job lead me to the next career step I want? Will global warming cause serious problems for the human race? What will I be doing in my life five years from now?

We sometimes mistake the uncertain/unknowable for the risky/unknown. We believe that saving for retirement is a good thing and we invest using prudent risk models, which is essentially believing that economic future is risky and unknown, but we can control the risk (and thus, it’s knowable to some degree). Then the economy collapses the very year a person retires, and it turns out that while certain market aspects were unknown, the actual result of “saving for retirement” (which must include consideration of the market conditions at the time of retirement) turns out to be unknowable and uncertain.

How do you approach the unknowable in your life? Do you try to plan? Do you get scared and avoid it as best you can? Do you throw yourself into the future with wild abandon?

What are some of the things you believe about how predictable and controllable your life is, and how your approach to life differs (or doesn’t) for the known, the knowable, and the unknowable?

Here are some of the reasons why:

• I don’t want to admit to myself that I don’t know the thing.
• I don’t realize that I need help, even though I’m not making any progress.
• I only have a certain number of “silver bullets” and don’t want to use them up.

What are some of the things you think that get you not to ask for help?

I’ve been going through my list of gender-neutral names, in an attempt to let readers indulge their own stereotypes instead of my own, when I realized with a shock that all the names are American names, typically of the white, middle-class, variety. There wasn’t a Vinod or Hiroki or Sjooki among them. I’d like to fix that!

If you know any, could you share with me some names from different cultures, languages, and ethnicities? Please let me know the name and the ethnicity/language it comes from, plus what gender the name is. Gender-neutral names preferred but not necessary. Thank you!!

The APA has explicit guidelines for how to do this. You can find them here: http://is.gd/prz4 in the section titled “Unbiased language.” Watch it before reading my critique. It’s only about 1.5 minutes long.

What do you think? I think her solution is clunky and awkward. Furthermore, I disagree with her logic. She says you can’t use “they” as the gender neutral singular: “When a CEO wants to eat lunch, they go to the store.” You can’t use it because it’s “not proper grammar.”

If proper grammar is the metric, however, then isn’t he perfectly acceptable, proper, and supported by several centuries of usage?

She wants to adhere to the grammar rules, yet there are no grammar rules to handle this. That’s precisely the issue: we need a new guideline. I was hoping she would have a more creative solution than simply using “He or she” and then framing everything as a plural. Oh, well.

There’s just one problem. What works in a speech doesn’t work in print. You can’t organize things the same way. You don’t have voice tone and inflection, so spoken jokes fall flat on the printed page, and you miss great written jokes that don’t translate to spoken word.

But even worse, when speaking, you create a narrative that kind of hangs together. Speech is very forgiving. Once it’s down in black and white, however, it became obvious that I repeated sentences, overused certain expressions, and wasn’t very coherent at the level of the chapter or section.

The transcription went fast, but the editing (which really amounted to rewriting) went very, very slowly. Combined, I suspect the two took longer than composing directly at the keyboard. Certainly, editing the transcription has been more like trying to swim through quicksand than anything that might resemble a joyful, creative act.

But now… the editing is fast and easy, like a hot knife through a butter sculpture of Barbra Streisand. Life is suddenly good again!