Brad Salomons

Author: Brad

  • strategic simplicity

    strategic simplicity

    I write all of these things I post into an offline word processor first.  Then I do some light editing, copy and paste into the blogging software, and then ultimately push publish.

    Maybe you read that and thought so what? 

    Big deal? Obvious.

    We all have these simple little habits that keep us organized. They are each of them personal strategies to creep us towards whatever definition of success we’ve chosen. And each of these strategies are fundamental building blocks of who we are how we can get stuff done.

    I was observing a coworker yesterday inputing some data into a spreadsheet. She made a mistake and quickly realized that she had entered the data into the wrong cell. For me, I would have highlighted the cell, Ctrl-Xed it and then highlighted the right cell and Ctrl-Ved it, and been off to the next item. She used the mouse, located the undo button on the menu, clicked it to erase what she had written, then highlighted the correct cell and retyped the data.  Same result, but my method would have been literally five times faster.

    Never assume the little things are obvious or so what? moments. We might spend hours writing and talking about our big strategies for getting stuff done, but often I think I could teach a course on all the little things I’ve learned about getting things done and each individual step I take to accomplish it all.

  • social games

    social games

    I spent nearly a decade feeding the massive social media networks like Facebook and Instagram with my creative output.

    What did it get me?

    I could tell you that I learned some skills in social media engagement, but that would be a bit of an exaggeration because an invisible algorithm did most of the work.

    I could tell you that it gave me an excuse to write and create, but that would be something of a cop out because one shouldn’t need such excuses to practice one’s craft.

    I could tell you that it gave me an audience, but honestly I could have currated an email list of my friends and family and had nearly as many eyes to see what I made.

    What it really did was create value for someone else.

    What the social media networks never admit is that the house is only one guaranteed to win, and it’s always their house. Sure, some folks hit a jackpot and walk out richer and wiser, but most of us spend our creative chips and they vanish into the coffers of the app or network.

    I can’t tell you that you shouldn’t play the social media game, but I can suggest that there are far fewer winners there than there are the rest of us. And I can tell you that I have lately been, and will continue to be, putting more effort into building my own (much smaller and less social) networks with my creative energies.

  • human disadvantage

    human disadvantage

    I don’t have a problem with Artificial Intelligence tools.

    I do have a few problems with what I call the AI advantage.

    That is to say, I have a problem with the idea that these artificial intelligence engines, generative algorithms and the like, that they are somehow above the moral and legal code to which the rest of us are obliged to adhere.

    AI is just another tool, after all. It can do amazing things for businesses and individuals. I can drive change, teach, inform, advance and help give a leg up to anyone trying to bootstrap an idea into reality in a world already saturated with successes.

    But it needs to be used in a way that is fair.

    And if we cannot do that through regulation, it is probably incumbent upon us a society to accept and normalize a moral code for technology systems that mimic the things that sets humans apart from the rest of nature:  intelligence, creativity and thought.

    Computers are faster. AI systems work across geographic barriers with ease. And for now these systems are accessible to a broad public. Advantages. 

    And they have these inherent advantages as a foundational aspect of what they are and how they have been built. So, we should not let them carelessly break the rules which we have put in place for people. Specifically, we should not let them ignore copyright rules and fail to respect the intellectual property rights of humans.

    We would not tolerate a human being building a business on stolen property, so—even if we can’t seem to make our governments stand up and regulate it—we should, as humans, prevent this particular AI advantage from becoming accepted as a moral norm.

  • hiragana

    hiragana

    We have loosely settled on a trip across the Pacific.

    Unable to confidently travel southbound across the border for our semi-annual pilgrimage to the house of the mouse in California, my wife has set her sights on the sister park near Tokyo for sometime, hopefully, next year. And of course a couple weeks checking out more than just Disney, too.

    I love the idea of visiting Japan. The art and culture and food and architecture and everything that I feel would be familiar from the exports of media and such in which I partake locally.

    And as is my oft-usual approach to these things, I’ve started to prepare for this still-hypothetical trip by taking language lessons. In other words, I’ve been studying Japanese…for about a month now.

    And while the actual need to speak the language as a European-toned North American tourist has been repeatedly called into question by many friends, many Asian-descended themselves, I can’t help but feel having a basic grasp of how to (at the very, very least) read some of it might come in all too handy.

    I mean, let’s just forget for a moment the academically-rewarding aspect of learning any language, and take that as a given: Learning new languages is simply, well, human.

    But instead picture Brad stumbling through the Tokyo subway system or down a bustling alley and having some basic ability to read the signs for a shop or a washroom or even an exit. In that aforementioned Euro-centric approach I’ve taken to travel, the languages are almost always close enough and use the familiar latin-descended alphabet system. I get by. But arriving in Tokyo I would assume that recognition and some general familiarity with hiragana and katakana script will give me some advantage. And increase my enjoyment and comfort on such a trip, too.

    Thus, I have been learning. Learn slowly, of course, using apps and flashcards and online resources. But learning.

    And that hypothetical concept of a maybe trip to Asia next year seems a little bit more real in the process.

  • two hundred and fifty

    two hundred and fifty

    There are many ways to approach a problem, but by far my steady go-to approach has long been incrementalism.

    A little over a year ago I started writing a novel.

    This is actually a complex and confusing anecdote about sitting down to write a trilogy of novels, nearly finishing the first one, deciding that it was actually not a trilogy but just one great big story, then reopening what I thought was a climactic conclusion of my book to instead trudge into the effort of writing another entire novel-worth of story to finish the plot in a meaningful and interesting way.

    The first half took me two months. The second half is approaching a year worth of effort.

    Of course, in that time life has got in the way. I’ve been working, parenting, going back to school, and coding a video game—but I digress.

    The point is that I have been incrementally working towards finishing the novel. I have been writing it two hundred and fifty words at a time. Little steps. Inching closer to completion. Trudging ever forward.

    Is this the ideal approach?

    Heck, I don’t know. I’d like to tell you that I have stumbled onto some great secret of success, but the reality is that slow and steady progress is such an old piece of advice that it literally has it’s own spirit animal in the tortoise.

    Each day I sit down and write (at least) 250 words, one word at a time, one keyboard stroke at a go, all to add onto my novel. Each day I incrementally move slighty closer to the end. Each day I am 250 words closer to being done.

    My point is that some problems and projects are just big and there is no quick and easy fix.

    My fix, neither quick nor easy, is to write two hundred and fifty words each day. Like a tortoise in a foot race.

  • only reading

    only reading

    Used to be that when I bought a new piece of technology I wanted to push it to the limits to see what it could do. But earlier this week I bought myself a new e-reader and I’m approaching it with a completely different tactic: I’m using it solely as an e-reader.

    Let me elaborate. 

    A decade ago when I bought myself a similiar piece of technology, my first instinct would have been to dig into it and see how I could use it beyond reading books. I may not have gone as far as hacking the firmware, say, but I certainly would have connected it up to a computer within the first day, dug into the file system, tried loading other media types, experimented with connecting things to the bluetooth, attempted to use it as a game device of some kind, certainly dabbled in using it to write if that was any way possible. Played. Pushed. Nudged. Forced the single-function device to bend to my will.

    Today? I bought one of those new colour Kobo readers to replace my Kindle and continue moving away from my Amazon dependency. And I’m using it as a book. I’m going to read books on it. I’ve hooked it up to the accounts it suggested, linked it with my public libary card, and I downloaded a half dozen books. That’s it—and I have been reading.

    Only reading.

    And while I would like to emphasize that this does not necessarily signal a shift away from my inquisitive and exploratory nature, it may indicate that I’ve quenched that need to “multi-purpose” everything in my life.

    A decade ago I found joy in making simple things do complex things.

    Today I find joy in using simple things closer to and merely in the way they were intended. And I’m good with that.

  • down by the bay

    down by the bay

    I was lamenting the latest stage of the long, slow collapse of Hudsons Bay Company, once a literal icon of the Canadian retail landscape.

    The very history of this country is tangled up in the complex colonialist role played by this company in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and if for no other reason than that I’m sure there are justified cheers at the karmic collapse of this once epic company. Still, the collapse of the modern Hudsons Bay retail enterprise is nothing to celebrate, what with the scope and variety of employment it offered in many communities, its status as a signature anchor tenant in many shopping centres, and too, as one of the last historic holdouts against the dominance of Amazon and such. 

    I could probably write for pages on this complex role it played in communities, its decline and now complete disappearance from many cities, including my own. But instead, I woke up in the middle of the night and was tossing and turning in bed thinking about—I kid you not—the customer experience at The Bay.

    Maybe it was tradition. Maybe it was money. Maybe it was stubbornness. But the experience at that store never seemed to adapt to the modern retail world. From the ancient point of sale systems to an online experience that, on the three occasions I made use of it, revealed the reason Amazon holds a place of utter dominance in this domain. It was slow and cumbersome, like so much at The Bay. 

    But my strangest late night insight was in an unfair comparison to Ikea.

    We all laugh at the maze-like design of the furniture retailer, but the truth is the user experience in that store does two things very well. First, it gives the customer a little mini-adventure upon each visit. There are shortcuts, true, but I suspect many or even most shoppers walk the Ikea mile dutifully. Second, the maze walks you past virtually every product the store sells. The net result of this is that I, even mediocre consumer that I am, rarely leave without at least one purchase.

    The only thing that The Bay ever coerced any customer to walk past was the fragrance department, and the only adventure I got from that was testing my ability to hold my breath.

    I have no great insight upon this sad and seeming final chapter of a once-proud Canadian retailer, at least nothing that countless other online commentators haven’t already written on, save for maybe that even corporations get old and senile. And maybe that’s the lesson we should take from it, that everything has a time and place, and we should remember fondly the good times rather than shaking our heads at some analysis of a business failure, and rather accept that nature and the passage of time can take its toll on most anything.

  • genuine

    genuine

    The temptation felt by the potential of a blank page as I sit down to type these words each time I post is sometimes bigger than I can explain.

    We all want to be more than we are, don’t we?

    I see this blank page in front of me and I yearn to manifest some sort of great and compelling wisdom through my fingers, into the keyboard and out into the universe. I want to inform. I want to entertain. I want to make people think and wonder and philosophize.

    There are a handful of great communicators out there doing just that. Men and women who each day sit down at a blank page and turn their thoughts into a missive on life or business or success or coping with failing at any or all of those things.

    I read some of those words.

    They do genuinely inspire me.

    And here I sit, yearning to have even a fraction of the impact.

    Yet, their secret to success probably has little to do with the effort they make, and likely almost entirely to do with the truth of their situation: when they sit down at that canvas to write or paint or shape bits into meaning, they have something that is unique and genuinely worth communicating.

  • discomfort

    discomfort

    I was in class this past weekend, continuing the work on my Business Analysis Certification, and the topic we were discussing was “solution design.” One thing led to another and we were going round the table talking about interfaces and user experience and people-centric innovation.

    This all came to me bringing up my current desktop computer setup, specifically that I’m using an eclectic and expensive mechanical keyboard and running Ubuntu Linux as my operating system.

    Both are interesting choices, and the instructor called them out, not to question the choices but to forward a discussion and drive a point.

    “Why do you use a mechanical keyboard?” he asked.

    I fumbled through a reply that manifested in my brain, a jumble of words that I’d heard on keyboard video reviews about typing sound profiles and tactile feedback.

    “So why do you run Linux?” he followed up with.

    Here I said something about it being a better coding platform and free and so on.

    Neither of my responses were wrong, but I got to thinking later that they didn’t really tell the whole story. And the reasons are not disjointed, either. Sure, mechanical keyboards are aesthetic choices and Linux is a fairly mature platform with particular benefits, but both are costly to me in either money spent to buy them or time spent to understand them.

    So why did I use them?

    Here’s what I think: both the keyboard and the operating system–and a dozen other things I could list if I were to wander around my house and point at my eclectic choices–have a higher “friction” associated with them.

    Or, simply, they are slightly uncomfortable.

    Uncomfortable to acquire. To use. To maintain. To explain.

    I realize that I often choose interfaces and tools that bring me mild discomfort because it forces me out of complacency. Discomfort breaks the surface tension of the world, just a bit, and makes everything a bit more interesting. There are dozens of so-called benefits, as well as any number of disadvantages to these choices, but the tension of those things is really, deep down, my personal allure.

    And there is lesson there, isn’t there?

    Some things need to be simple, frictionless, and invisible.

    But, too, we should try to do things that challenge us. We should do things not because they are easy, but exactly because they are not.

  • business analysis

    business analysis

    It’s only been a few months, but I’ve been putting in a tremendous amount of time and effort this year to work towards my Business Analysis Certification. Previously, I spent twenty-plus years working in non-profit, non-governmental agencies, and then municipal government doing a lot of work implementing and running projects, products, and programs. And so the decision to formalize some of that knowledge with a few classy letters behind my name was obvious. And now, being most of the way through the program, I’m confident that is was a good fit and a good choice. I’m actually pretty good at this stuff, if you don’t mind me bragging a little bit.

    Now? In a little over a month I should be done.

    I guess that means I’m officially open to work. And I suppose that also means I need to start poking around job boards, contracting agencies, and other places that might be looking for someone like that.

    Then… I also figured I’d put some good vibes out into the universe. So, hey all out there in my little professional network. Big ask, I know, but if you hear anything or have any advice, I’d love to hear from you.