Thank You for Being Late, Page 2

  Does he know how many people read his blog? I asked.

  “From month to month it fluctuates with the issue, but there is a steady audience out there,” he informed me, adding that the Web metrics he uses suggest that he is being read in around thirty different countries. But then he added: “If there is any way you can help me manage my website, I will be extremely happy.” The thirty-five hours a week he’d spent over the last eight years working in the parking garage were just for “subsistence—my website is where my energy is.”

  I promised to do what I could to help. Who could resist a parking attendant who knows his Web metrics! But I had to ask: “What’s it like for you—parking attendant by day, Web activist by night—to have your own global blog, while sitting in Washington and reaching people in thirty countries”—even if the numbers are small?

  “I feel like I am a little bit empowered at this time,” Bojia answered without hesitation. “These days I kind of regret that I wasted my time. I would have started some three or four years ago, and not sent stuff here and there. Had I concentrated on developing my own blog by now I would have a bigger audience … I have a deep satisfaction from what I am doing. I am doing something positive that helps my country.”

  Heating and Lighting

  So over the next few weeks I e-mailed Bojia two memos on how I went about constructing a column, and I followed up with another meeting at Peet’s coffee shop to make certain that he understood what I was trying to say. I can’t say how much it helped him, but I learned an enormous amount from our encounters—more than I ever anticipated.

  For starters, just entering Bojia’s world a tiny bit was an eye-opener. A decade ago the two of us would have had little in common, and now we were colleagues of sorts. Each of us was on a journey to bring our priorities to a wider audience, to participate in the global discussion and to tilt the world our way. We were both also part of a bigger trend. “We have never seen a time when more people could make history, record history, publicize history, and amplify history all at the same time,” remarked Dov Seidman. In previous epochs, “to make history you needed an army, to record it you needed a film studio or a newspaper, to publicize it you needed a publicist. Now anyone can start a wave. Now anyone can make history with a keystroke.”

  And Bojia was doing just that. Artists and writers have moonlighted from time immemorial. What is new today is how many can now moonlight, how many others they can now touch from the moonlight if what they write is compelling, how fast they can go global if they prove they have something to say, and how little money it now costs to do so.

  To live up to my side of the bargain with Bojia, I had to think more deeply about the craft of opinion writing than I had ever done before. I had been a columnist for nearly twenty years when we met, after being a reporter for seventeen years, and our encounter forced me to pause and put into words the difference between reporting and opinion writing and what actually makes a column “work.”

  In my two memos to Bojia I explained that there is no set formula for writing a column, no class you attend, and that everyone does it differently to some degree. But there were some general guidelines I could offer. When you are a reporter, your focus is on digging up facts to explain the visible and the complex and to unearth and expose the impenetrable and the hidden—wherever that takes you. You are there to inform, without fear or favor. Straight news often has enormous influence, but it’s always in direct proportion to how much it informs, exposes, and explains.

  Opinion writing is different. When you are a columnist, or a blogger in Bojia’s case, your purpose is to influence or provoke a reaction and not just to inform—to argue for a certain perspective so compellingly that you persuade your readers to think or feel differently or more strongly or afresh about an issue.

  That is why, I explained to Bojia, as a columnist, “I am either in the heating business or the lighting business.” Every column or blog has to either turn on a lightbulb in your reader’s head—illuminate an issue in a way that will inspire them to look at it anew—or stoke an emotion in your reader’s heart that prompts them to feel or act more intensely or differently about an issue. The ideal column does both.

  But how do you go about generating heat or light? Where do opinions come from? I am sure every opinion writer would offer a different answer. My short one is that a column idea can spring from anywhere: a newspaper headline that strikes you as odd, a simple gesture by a stranger, the moving speech of a leader, the naïve question of a child, the cruelty of a school shooter, the wrenching tale of a refugee. Everything and anything is raw fodder for creating heat or light. It all depends on the connections you make and insights you surface to buttress your opinion.

  More broadly speaking, though, I told Bojia, column writing is an act of chemistry—precisely because you must conjure it up yourself. A column doesn’t write itself the way a breaking news story does. A column has to be created.

  This act of chemistry usually involves mixing three basic ingredients: your own values, priorities, and aspirations; how you think the biggest forces, the world’s biggest gears and pulleys, are shaping events; and what you’ve learned about people and culture—how they react or don’t—when the big forces impact them.

  When I say your own values, priorities, and aspirations, I mean the things that you care about most and aspire to see implemented most intensely. That value set helps you determine what is important and worth opining about, as well as what you will say. It is okay to change your mind as an opinion writer; what is not okay is to have no mind—to stand for nothing, or for everything, or only for easy and safe things. An opinion writer has to emerge from some framework of values that shapes his or her thinking about what should be supported or opposed. Are you a capitalist, a communist, a libertarian, a Keynesian, a conservative, a liberal, a neocon, or a Marxist?

  When I refer to the world’s big gears and pulleys, I am talking about what I call “the Machine.” (Hat tip to Ray Dalio, the renowned hedge fund investor, who describes the economy as “a machine.”) To be an opinion writer, you also always need to be carrying around a working hypothesis of how you think the Machine works—because your basic goal is to take your values and push the Machine in their direction. If you don’t have a theory about how the Machine works, you’ll either push it in a direction that doesn’t accord with your beliefs or you won’t move it at all.

  And when I say people and culture, I mean how different peoples and cultures are affected by the Machine when it moves and how they, in turn, affect the Machine when they react. Ultimately columns are about people—the crazy things they say, do, hate, and hope for. I like to collect data to inform columns—but never forget: talking to another human being is also data. The columns that get the most response are almost always the ones about people, not numbers. Also, never forget that the best-selling book of all time is a collection of stories about people. It’s called the Bible.

  I argued to Bojia that the most effective columns emerge from mixing and rubbing these three ingredients together: you can’t be an effective opinion writer without a set of values that informs what you’re advocating. Dov Seidman likes to remind me of the Talmudic saying “What comes from the heart enters the heart.” What doesn’t come from your heart will never enter someone else’s heart. It takes caring to ignite caring; it takes empathy to ignite empathy. You also can’t have an effective column without some “take” on the biggest forces shaping the world in which we live and how to influence them. Your view of the Machine can never be perfect or immutable. It always has to be a work in progress that you are building and rebuilding as you get new information and the world changes. But it is very difficult to persuade people to do something if you can’t connect the dots for them in a convincing way—why this action will produce this result, because this is how the gears and pulleys of the Machine work. And, finally, I told Bojia, you’ll never have an opinion column that works unless it is inspired and informed by real people. It can’
t just be the advocacy of abstract principles.

  When you put your value set together with your analysis of how the Machine works and your understanding of how it is affecting people and culture in different contexts, you have a worldview that you can then apply to all kinds of situations to produce your opinions. Just as a data scientist needs an algorithm to cut through all the unstructured data and all the noise to see the relevant patterns, an opinion writer needs a worldview to create heat and light.

  But to keep that worldview fresh and relevant, I suggested to Bojia, you have to be constantly reporting and learning—more so today than ever. Anyone who falls back on tried-and-true formulae or dogmatisms in a world changing this fast is asking for trouble. Indeed, as the world becomes more interdependent and complex, it becomes more vital than ever to widen your aperture and to synthesize more perspectives.

  My own thinking on this subject has been deeply influenced by Lin Wells, who teaches strategy at the National Defense University. According to Wells, it is fanciful to suppose that you can opine about or explain this world by clinging to the inside or outside of any one rigid explanatory box or any single disciplinary silo. Wells describes three ways of thinking about a problem: “inside the box,” “outside the box,” and “where there is no box.” The only sustainable approach to thinking today about problems, he argues, “is thinking without a box.”

  Of course, that doesn’t mean having no opinion. Rather, it means having no limits on your curiosity or the different disciplines you might draw on to appreciate how the Machine works. Wells calls this approach—which I will employ in this book—being “radically inclusive.” It involves bringing into your analysis as many relevant people, processes, disciplines, organizations, and technologies as possible—factors that are often kept separate or excluded altogether. For instance, the only way you will understand the changing nature of geopolitics today is if you meld what is happening in computing with what is happening in telecommunications with what is happening in the environment with what is happening in globalization with what is happening in demographics. There is no other way today to develop a fully rounded picture.

  These are the main lessons I shared with Bojia in my memos and our coffees. But here is a confession, which I also happily shared with him at our last meeting, which happened as I was completing this book: I had never thought this deeply about my own craft and what makes a column work until our chance encounter prompted me to do so. Had I not paused to engage him, I never would have taken apart, examined, and then reassembled my own framework for making sense of the world in a period of rapid change.

  Not surprisingly, the experience set my mind whirring. And not surprisingly, my meetings with Bojia soon led me to start asking myself the same questions I was asking him to explore: What is my value set and where did it come from? How do I think the Machine works today? And what have I learned about how different peoples and cultures are being impacted by the Machine and responding to it?

  That’s what I started doing—in the pause—and the rest of this book is my answer.

  Part II is about how I think the Machine works now—what I think are the biggest forces reshaping more things in more places in more ways on more days. Hint: the Machine is being driven by simultaneous accelerations in technology, globalization, and climate change, all interacting with one another.

  And Part III is about how these accelerating forces are affecting people and cultures. That is, how they are reshaping the workplace, geopolitics, politics, ethical choices, and communities—including the small town in Minnesota where I grew up and where my own values were shaped.

  Part IV offers the conclusions I draw from it all.

  In short, this book is one giant column about the world today. It aims to define the key forces that are driving change around the world, to explain how they are affecting different people and cultures, and to identify what I believe to be the values and responses most appropriate to managing these forces, in order to get the most out of them for the most people in the most places and to cushion their harshest impacts.

  So you never know what can result from pausing to talk to another person. To make a short story long—Bojia got a framework for his blog and I got a framework for this book. Think of it as an optimist’s guide to thriving and building resilience in this age of accelerations, surely one of the great transformative moments in history.

  As a reporter, I am continually amazed that often, when you go back and re-report a story or a period of history, you discover things you never saw the first time. As I began to write this book, it immediately became clear to me that the technological inflection point that is driving the Machine today occurred in a rather innocuous-sounding year: 2007.

  What the hell happened in 2007?

  PART II

  ACCELERATING

  TWO

  What the Hell Happened in 2007?

  John Doerr, the legendary venture capitalist who backed Netscape, Google, and Amazon, doesn’t remember the exact day anymore; all he remembers is that it was shortly before Steve Jobs took the stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco on January 9, 2007, to announce that Apple had reinvented the mobile phone. Doerr will never forget, though, the moment he first laid eyes on that phone. He and Jobs, his friend and neighbor, were watching a soccer match that Jobs’s daughter was playing in at a school near their homes in Palo Alto. As play dragged on, Jobs told Doerr that he wanted to show him something.

  “Steve reached into the top pocket of his jeans and pulled out the first iPhone,” Doerr recalled for me, “and he said, ‘John, this device nearly broke the company. It is the hardest thing we’ve ever done.’ So I asked for the specs. Steve said that it had five radios in different bands, it had so much processing power, so much RAM [random access memory], and so many gigabits of flash memory. I had never heard of so much flash memory in such a small device. He also said it had no buttons—it would use software to do everything—and that in one device ‘we will have the world’s best media player, world’s best telephone, and world’s best way to get to the Web—all three in one.’”

  Doerr immediately volunteered to start a fund that would support creation of applications for this device by third-party developers, but Jobs wasn’t interested at the time. He didn’t want outsiders messing with his elegant phone. Apple would do the apps. A year later, though, he changed his mind; that fund was launched, and the mobile phone app industry exploded. The moment that Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone turns out to have been a pivotal junction in the history of technology—and the world.

  There are vintage years in wine and vintage years in history, and 2007 was definitely one of the latter.

  Because not just the iPhone emerged in 2007—a whole group of companies emerged in and around that year. Together, these new companies and innovations have reshaped how people and machines communicate, create, collaborate, and think. In 2007, storage capacity for computing exploded thanks to the emergence that year of a company called Hadoop, making “big data” possible for all. In 2007, development began on an open-source platform for writing and collaborating on software, called GitHub, that would vastly expand the ability of software to start, as Netscape founder Marc Andreessen once put it, “eating the world.” On September 26, 2006, Facebook, a social networking site that had been confined to users on college campuses and at high schools, was opened to everyone at least thirteen years old with a valid e-mail address, and started to scale globally. In 2007, a micro-blogging company called Twitter, which had been part of a broader start-up, was spun off as its own separate platform and also started to scale globally. Change.org, the most popular social mobilization website, emerged in 2007.

  In late 2006, Google bought YouTube, and in 2007 it launched Android, an open-standards platform for devices that would help smartphones scale globally with an alternative operating system to Apple’s iOS. In 2007, AT&T, the iPhone’s exclusive connectivity provider, invested in something called “software-enabled networks
”—thus rapidly expanding its capacity to handle all the cellular traffic created by this smartphone revolution. According to AT&T, mobile data traffic on its national wireless network increased by more than 100,000 percent from January 2007 through December 2014.

  Also in 2007, Amazon released something called the Kindle, onto which, thanks to Qualcomm’s 3G technology, you could download thousands of books anywhere in the blink of an eye, launching the e-book revolution. In 2007, Airbnb was conceived in an apartment in San Francisco. In late 2006, the Internet crossed one billion users worldwide, which seems to have been a tipping point. In 2007, Palantir Technologies, the leading company using big data analytics and augmented intelligence to, among other things, help the intelligence community find needles in haystacks, launched its first platform. “Computing power and storage reached a level that made it possible for us to create an algorithm that could make a lot of sense out of things we could not make sense of before,” explained Palantir’s cofounder Alexander Karp. In 2005, Michael Dell decided to relinquish his job as CEO of Dell and step back from the hectic pace and just be its chairman. Two years later he realized that was bad timing. “I could see that the pace of change had really accelerated. I realized we could do all this different stuff. So I came back to run the company in … 2007.”

  It was also in 2007 that David Ferrucci, who led the Semantic Analysis and Integration Department at IBM’s Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, and his team began building a cognitive computer called Watson—“a special-purpose computer system designed to push the envelope on deep question and answering, deep analytics, and the computer’s understanding of natural language,” noted the website HistoryofInformation.com. “‘Watson’ became the first cognitive computer, combining machine learning and artificial intelligence.”