A cool app to help illustrate a story

http://www.haikudeck.com/p/AKYF05PCZH/obamacare-is-coming-get-ready

While lying around with an earache and cough today, I played around with a new app, Haiku Deck, on my iPad. What a fun and compelling way to tell a complex story.

Because I am in health care communications, I am consumed these days by health care reform. It is my job to help people understand what reform means to them. I have found that few people know much about this fundamental change that’s on our doorstep.
So this Haiku Deck I created (link at top of post) is a very basic primer. I used research from Enroll America and Families USA.

  • If you’re interested in Haiku Deck, here’s an overview:
  • It provides a few basic templates that govern colors and fonts. You can buy more.
  • It has only three layouts for text: a headline/subhead combo, a bullet list and number list. I suspect they will add more. I could have used one for quote liftouts.
  • I love this part: it does not let you put much text on each slide. It forces you to simplify so that you remain true to the visual medium you are using.
  • An integrated keyword search allows you to peruse thousands of commons licensed images. It was so simple that there was no barrier to following several creative paths in search of the perfect image.
  • When finished, you may upload to the Haiku Deck website. You may choose to make it public or limit to people you give the URL to. You can add a description to the title slide, and notes to all other slides.
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A victory over Lizard Brain

So this is what the Lizard Brain looks like.

It tells you that you don’t have what it takes to write a novel. You really aren’t that good. You don’t have enough passion for it. You spend all your creativity at work. You don’t want to steal time from your kid.

So you let the novel idea ferment in your head. For eight years.

You beat back the Lizard Brain long enough to put down two chapters. But the Lizard Brain comes back.

That was hard work. You don’t have what it takes to fit that into your life.

Four years later, you put the Lizard Brain down again. And even as you take steps to start the novel again, it’s telling you: “Don’t even look up those chapters. They’re crap. You might as well start from scratch. Yeah, that’s right. Go back to the very beginning and start again. Work, work, work. Then you can compare the two pieces of crap and realize this is futile.”

But I called up the chapters this morning. They had last been touched March 28, 2009. They were pretty good. I didn’t even recognize them as mine, that’s how effective old Lizard Brain had been. I’ll take them for now.

I wrote Chapter 3 this morning.

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Putting it out there

This week, it seemed like everything I read and listened to was telling me to put myself out there. Seth Godin urged me not to give in to The Man; to do my art. Jonathan Fields challenged me to tap into my inner mission.  And Stanford Smith coached me to blog, blog, blog.
Then my son, Casey, goes and records a song on YouTube, putting his art out there.
All of this counsel is doing wonders for my creative thinking at work. But each prod stirs up an inner guilt.
You see, there’s this novel I started years ago. Two sketchy chapters gather digital dust in some Word file somewhere. I remember the spurt of energy that powered me through the first 20 minutes. And I remember the next several hours of drudgery. Writing fiction is hard work!
The latter memory kept me from diving in again. There were convenient excuses: job stress, grad school for awhile, growing toddler/kid/tween. Maybe I should wait until Kai is in college.
Then Michael Stelzner threw down the gauntlet last week on his Social Media Marketing podcast: commit to your dream in public and let the crowd hold you accountable.
Even though there’s not much of a crowd here on my oft-neglected blog, this is my public commitment. I will get back to the novel.
As soon as I find it.

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Thinking inside the basket

Our company bathroom was remodeled recently. The roll dispenser was replaced with a classier trifold-towel-in-a-basket presentation. Facilities apparently won’t stock the trifold towels until we’ve used up the rolls.

For several days, we ripped off manly hunks of paper in a two-handed maneuver. Until someone invented a more elegant solution by putting the roll in the basket, where it can spin and towels can be snatched one-handed.

Innovation on a bathroom scale.

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Next life chapter must include creation and connection

The universe was telling me something last week. Seems like every podcast and TED talk I heard was an interview with someone at the top of their game, every one exuding passion for their purpose, love of their craft and willingness to risk.
Patti LuPone turned down an opportunity to star in “Les Miz” on Broadway in favor of smaller roles that allowed her to grow.
Whole Foods CEO John Mackey redirected the company from the mundane world of selling products to the purposeful one of “helping heal America.”
Astronomer Natalie Batalha speaks of stardust, consciousness and love while discovering planets orbiting distant stars.
These people throw themselves wholeheartedly into their work. Composer Benjamin Zander said he wants “everyone” to love classical music and he means everyone. He could not feel — or show — passion if the goal were only an incremental increase in classical music fans.
Perhaps these people’s stories drew me in because I’m thinking about the next chapter in my life’s work. My “sensei” Carol Alm has taught me a few new moves that open up the game for me. And Seth Godin’s new book, The Icarus Deception, is prompting me to say goodbye to the old safety zone of compliance and conformity and hello to the new safety zone “where art and innovation and destruction and rebirth happen. The new safety zone is the never-ending creation of ever-deeper personal connection.”
My playlist last week was a soundtrack from this new safety zone.
Mackey was mentored for 14 years by his father — a business professor and successful executive. But when the younger Mackey went for maximum social value rather than maximum shareholder value, they clashed. Mackey fired his dad and set off on his own (they later repaired their personal relationship).
The chief designer of the Tesla electric car, Franz Von Holzhausen, sees himself as “the conductor of an orchestra, bringing together all the arts and elements that make a car — product design, fashion design, sculpture. My job is to make all those different experiences come together.”
Sophie Blackall accepted a commission to illustrate a classic Aldous Huxley book for young adults, which she found to be uncomfortably misogynistic. She artfully remained true to the manuscript and to herself — she drew the disparaged mother crow sleek and larger than the rumpled, hectoring father crow. She also gave mother crow a bag packed and ready under the bed.
LuPone has frequently defied conventional wisdom by taking high-risk, low-fame roles that “scared” her. She lives for her moment on stage: “It’s magical … to have an experience with a group of people. …. Not just your fellow actors on the stage, but people that leave the theater going, ‘Oh my.’ I mean, I’ve done that. I’ve walked out of a production going, ‘Oh my. What street are we on?’ We’ve been transported. We’ve been taken away. … And we’ve experienced something that has changed us.”
Batalha is sure of life on other planets and wonders what connection with them might mean. “We are stardust. Atoms came together to make this being, me. I am the universe, a portal to the universe that is my physical self. I don’t know why we exist, but it’s leading us someplace. And along the way it’s changing us.”

 

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Conclusion: you’re never too old to screw up a science project

The Petri dishes oozed brown liquid as I moved them from Kai’s desk, which was scorched by molten plastic. I needed to find a warmer location, where germs would thrive.
“This is dredging up some old emotional issues,” I told Karen, only half joking, as I hustled Kai’s science project to the furnace room. I was almost blushing again, decades after the debacle of my third grade science fair project. And the fourth grade. And the fifth grade.
There was the bogus chemistry set demo. The magnetic field rocket that defied the laws of physics and just hung there, despite every volt my Dad could coax from an old TV transformer. The water filtration model that leaked and dribbled all over my classmates’ projects.

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And here was Kai’s project — a test of the five-second rule — headed for the Krizman Science Fair Hall of Shame.
I tried so hard to eliminate the variable that had destroyed my science fair career — bad parenting. I helped Kai choose a project from the latest Myth Busters Science Fair book, whereas my parents forced me to pick from an outdated World Book Encyclopedia set. I mail ordered real Petri dishes, whereas my Dad used scraps from his amateur TV repair shop in the basement.
It was all going so well, until it came to the part where we had to keep the germ factory around 90 degrees for 72 hours. I hadn’t thought through the logistics of doing that in February in Colorado. I screwed a 100 watt bulb into the shop light and laid it next to the Petri dishes, under a plastic box. In only a couple of hours, the experiment was a toasty 104 degrees and the plastic next to the bulb was melting.
The furnace room wasn’t warm enough. And who knew that a grow light doesn’t put off much heat? I reconfigured the 100 watt shop light contraption to reduce the odds of fire, but by then many of the Petri dishes had dried up. Should have bought dishes with tighter-fitting lids. Or positioned them lid-side-up.
After four days of fluctuating temperatures, the sorry mess was laid out on the counter. Either our floors are clean enough to eat off of, or I just suck at growing germs.
While I stew in shame, Kai breaks away from her Just Dance 4 game long enough to jot her scientific judgment — “inconclusive” — and shrugs. She obviously won’t be plagued by self-doubt and harbor a parental grudge.
Those are my issues to work out. At next year’s science fair.

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‘I feel’ — wake-up words

“I feel …”
The rest of the sentence changed my week. In retrospect, though, the first two words were the most important.
The full sentence: “I feel like we’ve gotten nothing accomplished in the last two weeks.”
This from a coworker who has burned the midnight oil on a project of critical importance to the organization. She got my attention.
I asked more questions about what was standing in her way. She was swimming against heavy cultural currents. I rearranged my schedule to join her at a pivotal meeting. I set up my coworker’s presentation with an impassioned call for action.
She later thanked me for backing her up. I thanked her for putting her frustration on the table.
You don’t often hear the words “I feel” in business. Feelings are to be swallowed while we spout reason and facts.
My coworker’s open frustration hit my empathy button. By giving voice to her frustration, she caused me to tap into my own. It went from an “issue” to a challenge to my purpose for clocking in every day.
I like to think that I invest my time and talent wholeheartedly, all the time. But I’m human, and I sometimes sleepwalk it. When feelings rise to the surface, it’s time to wake up.

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Gun violence: It’s not just about the gun

Whenever gun tragedies happen — and that’s, what, a weekly occurrence now? — I am reminded of the five bullets that mushroomed into spinning saw blades as they chewed up my sister’s insides.

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That’s what dum-dum bullets do — expand on impact, then zig and zag through the body, wreaking havoc. They were called “cop-killer bullets” back when we talked about controlling access to them. Now you can buy them easily, load them in a 50-round magazine, in your concealed Glock, or in your assault rifle if you want.

The perverse argument against controlling dum-dums was that they are less likely to pass through one person’s body and into another’s.

Think about it. Rather than do something to limit the number of bullets flying around, design them so that human tissue slows them down. Problem solved! Snap on that 50-round magazine and fire away with confidence.

The guy who murdered my sister was diagnosed with a “schizoid personality disorder.” He was a weirdo. Everyone knew it. Everyone knew he had guns. He broke no gun laws that existed then, in 1995, nor would he have broken any of today’s laws.

I doubt that outlawing dum-dums would have prevented my sister’s murder. Five regular bullets probably would have done the trick. But bullets don’t kill people. People kill people. And with all that we know about people, surely there are things we can do to keep guns out of wackos’ hands and limit the damage they can do if they do get one.

What if we stopped reducing this to a binary for-or-against gun control argument? What if we agreed to start by trying to solve the people problem? Instead of looking for one thing to blame, try to figure out how all the factors contribute. What is it about troubled young men and their fascination with violent media? Why violent media? Why don’t we invest in behavioral health as much as we do in physical health? What are the clues that family and educators should look for, and what do they do when they see them?

And, yes, if there are reasonable gun control measures that make it harder for ticking time bombs to set records in carnage, then let’s set ideology aside and just do it.

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Moehringer’s bank robber tale is poetry

J.R. Moehringer writes poetry. His new novel, Sutton, embellishes the myth of notorious bank robber Willie Sutton while layering on musings about life, love, America and culture.

A line about culture:

Two thousand years later, why do we know the name of Judas and not the soldier who nailed Christ to the cross?

A stanza about life:

Look back on your life and see if you can pinpoint the moment when everything changed. If you can’t? That means you haven’t had your moment yet, and you better hold on to your ass, it’s coming.

A couplet about love:

So many things I never got to say, things I dreamed of saying, and now it’s too late. If only someone had told me back when I was your age that you need to say what’s in your heart, right away, because once the moment is gone—well, kid, it’s gone.

A doggerel about America:

I think America is the way it is, kid, because it’s the only country ever founded over a beef about money.

Moehringer turns phrases as only a language lover can. Describing a Dane for whom English is a second language:

When he’s not bunching words in strange clusters, Funck is planting them upside down in sentences, their roots showing.

Sutton wrote two memoirs that contradict each other, and the newspaper reporters of his day never let facts stand in the way of a good story. So Moehringer had pieces from several different puzzles to place and grout into an artful mosaic — one in which Sutton is a good heart gone bad, the product of his times.
I was periodically frustrated, wondering what was fact and what was fiction. Cleverly, Moehringer’s last chapter stays in fictional mode as it does the mop-up work. The Reporter character ties up loose ends and concludes that fact and fiction are a matter of perspective:

Sutton lived three separate lives. The one he remembered, the one he told people about, the one that really happened.

Moehringer’s autobiography The Tender Bar is among my favorites by contemporary authors. Sutton also makes the list. I wonder what J.R. will come up with next.

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Why don’t my friends think exactly like me?

I see some of my friends’ Facebook posts and wonder: I know he’s a good, smart, open-minded person. How could he possibly support that greed-head Romney?

I assume my friends who support Romney wonder something similar about me.

Most of us follow the maxim of not talking about religion and politics in social settings, but Facebook dispenses with that polite veneer — at least for those of us who choose to wear our politics on our Wall. I fear that online revelations could leak over into real relationships. Since Facebook hasn’t created a filter button that weeds out my friends’ political posts, I will have to figure out a way to better understand why good people can have such completely different world views.

I found guidance in Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Righteous Mind. A pioneer of “moral psychology,” Haidt has used liberals’ theology — science — to show how evolution, social development, and genetics have created innate moral foundations, hard-wired into us at birth and revised through life experiences.

His theory categorizes those hard-wired morals into five foundations. Liberals rely heavily on two of them while conservatives balance all five. Haidt, himself a liberal academic, argues that insistence on the correctness of only one or two foundations dismisses valid moral beliefs of others and fuels tribalism and polarization. It makes compromise and civility impossible.

Here are the five foundations. The first two are important to both liberals and conservatives. The last three are important to conservatives and make up what Haidt calls a society’s “moral capital.”

  • Care / harm — the concern for welfare of others.
  • Liberty / oppression — liberals emphasize the fight against oppression while conservatives emphasize individual freedom.
  • Loyalty / betrayal — the commitment to your group or country.
  • Authority / submission — the belief in institutions that ensure order.
  • Sanctity / degradation — the reverence for life and our bodies.

You can take interesting surveys at YourMorals.org to find out which of these moral foundations drive you and how you compare to liberals and conservatives.

Your upbringing and personal experiences lead you to dial some of these moral foundations up or down. Being raised a Catholic in the 60s, civil unrest around me, seeing my parents demonstrate courageous support of the powerless, I hold social justice above all else. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

But Haidt’s construct allows me to reframe how I interpret the views of others. To take an extreme example: I see a pickup truck with American flags flying. Instead of judging the driver as a simpleton who thinks of the world as one big football game, I can peg him as someone who highly values the loyalty / betrayal foundation — a moral position that is important to the survival of groups, such as our free and democratic society. I can better understand why he bristles when he hears Barack Obama tell an adoring crowd in Berlin that he is “a citizen of the world.” I will never agree with him, but I no longer cast him as ignorant, and that’s a step toward civility.

Haidt suggests that such reframing will help us discover the beneficial yin and yang of differing moral views:

“Liberalism—which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity—is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions.”

We subvert this beneficial balance when we try to advance “us” by denigrating “them.” Romney fell into that trap in his “47 percent” comments, as did Obama in his “guns and religion” statement during the last election cycle. It is heartening that both of these gaffes prompted bi-partisan disavowals. It shows that many of us still can detect the language of closed-minded righteousness.

As I absorbed Haidt’s book, I consciously stopped spreading Facebook posts that defined “them” (the hardest has been the Dogs Against Romney ones). I continue to like and share political posts that comport with my moral foundations, not to prove the rightness of my beliefs but in hope that it describes my moral compass — and establish that liberals do, indeed, have moral compasses.

In researching this blog post, I looked at the Kindle passages that other readers highlighted and commented on. I detected an equal number of liberals and conservatives making favorable comments. Rare is an online discourse that doesn’t devolve into troll vs. troll.

If you don’t have time to read the book, you can get the gist in Haidt’s TEDtalk. Amusingly, he polled the audience and found only a handful of conservatives, confirming his thesis that liberals are more inclined to seek out new ideas. Here’s hoping his new idea takes hold among liberals and conservatives alike.

Posted in Life, Opinion, What I figured out | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment
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