In the goal to find something, I relied on the social assets around me. In Greg Nudelman’s Designing Search, he talks about how people are increasingly turning to their social networks for information. Not only do social networks provide quick answers, but finding through social means allows you to draw upon people with similar interests.

For example, I have a large network of technical communicators that I follow on Twitter. If I have a question related to tech comm, it makes sense to ask my tech comm network. Most likely they could give better advice then simply searching the general web or turning to a friend on the basketball court.

Anne Gentle has written about social search on her blog Just Write Click. She notes that there’s an increasing trend to turn to your social network for answers rather than the help documentation. She explains,

Lastly, counts on click-throughs on Google searches may soon be surpassed by counts on click-throughs on social sites. Think about this for a moment. … you are more likely to get useful links by asking your friends and colleagues about certain topics than you are going to get them by searching on Google. This finding is a serious disruption for the web, if it turns out to be true. I haven’t seen studies yet that have numbers to support this claim, but I’ve seen it in slide decks about social support communities, community management, and the like. (See The Big Shift From Search to Social)

In other words, people may be searching on social sites like Facebook more than they search on Google because they get more useful information from social sites. As for metrics to support this, I recently saw this 60 seconds graphic:

Infographic by- Shanghai Web Designers

Unfortunately the original post doesn’t cite references, but if it’s true, in one minute there are 694,445 search queries on Google, while there are 695,000 Facebook status updates and 510,000 Facebook comments, along with 98,000 tweets on Twitter. If even ten percent of these social posts and comments are questions and answers, that’s a huge number of people using social networks as a means of finding and sharing information. It’s not a source to be ignored in the effort to make your content findable.

One challenge with increasing your influence in social search, of course, is bandwidth. It’s not possible to connect with so many people, right? One has only so much time to respond to forum posts, comments, and other social threads. Maybe not.

In a recent internal conference, one presenter explained how to get customers to adopt new products you’re rolling out. The presenter encouraged development teams to connect with key influencers in the community. If you can get the key influencers on board, they can help others, the presenter explained. Every department has that one person whom everyone goes to for help. If you give these influencers access to beta test software, reach out to them personally, and reward them for their helpfulness, they can be a huge asset in social findability.

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell calls attention to several key types of people that can cause products to tip. Mavens and connectors (the terms he uses) can be key touchpoints for increasing awareness. When I walked into Home Depot and found a clerk, she immediately routed me in the direction I wanted to go. Although there were probably 50 people in the store, and only about 5 clerks, if I wanted to share information with all the people in the store, I’d focus just on the clerks.

The following graphic shows this workflow. As a technical writer, you don’t need to interact with the social web in its entirety. You just need to interact with the influencers (the mavens and connectors). These influencers are the forum champions who regularly interact with scores of people and thrive on helping and guiding others. They may be the administrative assistant in a department of executives, or perhaps prolific bloggers. The influencers will then interact with the rest of the user base.

If you focus on mavens and connectors (the key influencers), the rest of your end-users will get the information as they reach out to them.

In contrast, if you interact with users on a one-to-one basis, you’ll be overwhelmed with individual support requests and time-draining questions. I know that in past experiences, I’ve reached out to some users to gather their feedback. Later, I became their personal support assistant at beck and call whenever they had a question or problem. That kind of relationship can be very time-consuming.

If you do have the bandwidth to embed yourself in social sites and interact on a one-to-one basis, at least transfer the information you provide into the help content (assuming it’s not already there). This way you’ll convert the one-to-one interaction into a one-to-many interaction and allow influencers to get the information they need to help others.

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Although Gladwell’s Outliers has been criticized for drawing generalizations from a “flimsy selection of colorful anecdotes and stories,” and his argument borders “social predestination,” according to the New York Times, Gladwell’s conclusions do provoke a lot of thought and self-reflection. If you look at the reasons why you’re a successful writer, you may find it was due more to circumstance, practice, and upbringing than any gift you were imbued with from birth.

For example, rather than this model of success:

Common misconception about how success happens

This is really what’s going on:

The real story of success

Practice

Gladwell says most experts accrue about 10,000 hours of practice before they develop their talent. For example, the Beatles spent two years in Germany playing long hours each day (8 hours a day, 7 days a week, for a good chunk of the year) before they became famous. Bill Gates spent hours and hours programming (20 to 30 hours a week), skipping athletics and even sneaking out at night to get in computer time. Although Mozart was skilled at the piano, he didn’t start writing his own compositions until he reached 21 years of age (prior to that, he mostly played compositions that others wrote). If you add up all the hours of practice from those who possess talent, and compare them to those who lack talent, the numbers explain a lot.

Timing

Gladwell relates several examples of people who were successful because they had the right skills at the right time. For example, William Joy (who wrote Unix) learned programming before it became popular. Just about the time he accrued 10,000 hours of programming practice, personal computing arrived, making the scene perfect for someone with his skillset to exploit the market.

As another example, in the 1940s and 50s, lawyers skilled in dealing with hostile takeovers and litigation suddenly became highly sought after, whereas years earlier the practice was considered shady. Those lawyers who accrued the practice before the skills were valued after became wildly successful.

Culture

To illustrate the importance of culture in success, Gladwell relates a story of a Colombian pilot who most likely crashed a plane because, even with diminishing fuel, he wasn’t assertive enough to stand up to the intimidating control tower agents and demand to land. Cultures that encourage passive submission to hierarchy, or who phrase their questions in subtle, vague euphemisms, may find themselves at a disadvantage in some situations, such as the airplane cockpit.

Other times, your culture works for you. For example, Gladwell explains that Asians who spent centuries working in rice paddies, a type of farming that requires meticulous care all year long, passed on this work ethic to their posterity. Many of the inheritors of the rice-paddy culture apply the same diligence in their schoolwork. This diligence, of course, brings more success.

Upbringing

The way you were raised, namely with wealthy or less fortunate parents, also plays a role. Gladwell explains that when wealthy parents drive their children to the doctor, they tell their children things like, “Johnny, now if you have any questions, be sure to ask the doctor. This is your opportunity to talk to him about any health problems you’re having….” And so on.

In contrast, the children of poor parents may feel less entitled to this same questioning. Instead, they accept what the doctor tells them straight out, without surfacing concerns or criticisms. Gladwell then uses Chris Langan, a genius with a 195 IQ who wasn’t able to succeed in college, as an example. Langan failed to get a PhD (his goal) not because he lacked intelligence, but because he had a mentality to passively accept the conditions and limitations others imposed on him. Langan ended up dropping out of college because he couldn’t convince his teachers to accommodate a simple change in his schedule (a change he needed because his truck broke and he could no longer get to campus early in the morning).

My Story

I found it impossible to read Outliers: The Story of Success without looking more closely at my own story of “success.” Obviously I’m not a success like the people mentioned in his book, but I am a professional technical writer with a well-known blog and podcast. How did I manage that?

First, I wrote extensively in junior high, high school, and college. My father, a lover of literature, frequently put books in my hand, established a model of reading, and shared his passion for literature and ideas. My mother made every effort to open opportunities for me, sometimes working two jobs to help pay for my undergraduate education.

After college, I continued writing daily through a three-year MFA program at Columbia. Rather than study fiction or poetry, I studied literary nonfiction, particularly the personal essay. It was my good fortune that I graduated with the degree I did at the time I did. When I graduated in 2002, the blogosphere erupted. It was the perfect time for someone with skills in short personal essays to flourish.

My foray into podcasting follows a similar pattern. Although I don’t have an audio engineering background, much of my success in podcasting comes from my interviewing skills, from my ability to find people and get them to open up. From 1994 to 1996, I spent two years as an LDS missionary in Venezuela, interacting with strangers ten hours a day. Each morning we ventured out into unknown barrios, knocking on doors, talking with people in the streets, talking with people in their homes, befriending members and anyone we came in contact with. It was a social immersion in another culture, but it was also training ground for podcasting, because although I’m generally shy and will keep to myself, I feel completely comfortable approaching strangers and interviewing them in a conversational, natural style. I developed a skill that became extremely useful at the right time.

My facility with WordPress also fits into the equation. I’m comfortable with WordPress and can create websites fairly easily, but it wasn’t always this way. As a composition instructor at Columbia, I created a website for my students because I saw the value of student-to-student interaction. I then created an elaborate website teaching at the American University in Cairo. I spent months painstakingly figuring out how to do technical things. I also had a sister in graphic design and a brother-in-law in interaction design that I could occasionally rely upon for information.

More valuable than specific technical knowledge, though, I learned how to solve technical problems. I learned patience to search forums, persistence to query search engines, and a trial-and-error mentality that encouraged experimentation as a solution. This ability to continue plugging away at a problem, especially when the answer isn’t easy, is a skill incredibly useful for IT (and it’s what enables people to excel at math, according to a study Gladwell cites). When I stumbled upon WordPress, I already had hundreds of hours working with websites, and I brought that skillset to the existing scene and combined it with my writing and interviewing skills.

Besides timing and practice, I also attribute some of my success to lucky opportunities. When I applied for my first job in technical writing, the writing portfolio I submitted included an article about protein, which I’d written as a copywriter for a health company (a job I got through a connection from my techie sister and brother-in law). The hiring manager had a PhD in biology and could see that what I wrote about protein was, in fact, clear and accurate. Not only that, she knew it was a difficult concept to write about. It was precisely because of this article on protein that I was hired, even though I had no experience in technical writing. It was a lucky connection that opened up an opportunity for me.

I’ve also been fortunate to never have technical writing jobs that required more than 40-hour work weeks. I frequently hear about people routinely working 60-hour weeks, which would preclude any spare time for blogging and podcasting. Instead, even with three kids, a wife, and other commitments (such as being a scout leader), I manage to have most evenings and weekends free.

And speaking of that wife, she turns out to be another huge factor in my writing, since she not only writes in an engaging way that motivates and inspires me but also helps create a safe writing environment in our home. When I turn on my computer, she doesn’t pull me away to mop the floor (not usually, anyway). Instead, she joins me and we write together on the couch, sharing thoughts and experiences with each other. When I married her, I never anticipated that our lives would be this way, but it did and has made a significant difference in finding time to write.

Not all of my background, however, works positively toward success. If there’s one thing I’m conflicted about, it’s my lack of a sense of entitlement. For example, I’ve always felt hesitant about returning items to stores, about raising my hand to offer criticisms or complaints in large groups. I sometimes devalue my contributions at work. Frequently I’m content to accept my surrounding conditions and the status quo because either I don’t think I can change it, it requires too much effort, or I don’t care.

After reading Outliers, I find myself acting more assertively. I catch myself when I’m being passive, or when I don’t feel qualified or entitled to something.

I realize that a sense of entitlement is usually looked at negatively (certainly it can lead to arrogance and pride), but not having any sense of entitlement can be stifling. People who don’t feel entitled to anything lack confidence and self-esteem. They accept their conditions. They do what their superiors tell them. They lack ambition and don’t challenge the status quo. They second-guess their worth, attributing any modicum of competence to other people and circumstantial factors. It’s a self-defeating, trapping mentality that limits your ability to succeed because you don’t feel entitled to success.

My point is not to give a biography of my life, but rather to illustrate Gladwell’s point: if you start looking at the underpinnings behind your success, you can start connecting the dots to see how you arrived where you did. It usually isn’t that you have a knack for a certain profession, but that you acquired the necessary skills through practice, upbringing, environment, culture, and lucky opportunities.

Outliers reminds me of a scene from the movie Good Will Hunting, where Matt Damon, playing a poor teen from the South side of Boston confronts a rich MIT student. Damon tells him, You were born on third base and you think you hit a triple. In other words, we often over-attribute our writing successes to our natural talents. But really, those talents and abilities came about through a series of explainable, fortunate circumstances that we should recognize and be grateful for.

Resources

Buy Outliers: The Story of Success from Amazon

See Malcolm Gladwell’s blog

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Background

This is not my own theory. In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell talks about a mind reader, Silvan Tomkins, who can see and interpret the expressions on people’s faces so well that he seems to read their minds. He can pick up on the microcosmic muscular movements of the brow, lips, chin, and understand the emotion it represents.

Tomkins’ mind-reading capability was so shocking that two psychology researchers, Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen, undertook a detailed study of every facial expression possible and its meaning. Their research culminated in a 500 page document titled Facial Action Coding System (FACS).

For example, they discovered that facial expressions made by “contracting the muscles that raise the cheek (orbicularis oculi, pars orbitalis) in combination with the zygomatic major, which pulls up the corners of the lips” indicate happiness (Gladwell p. 204).

Research Leads to Unexpected Findings

As Ekman and Friesen researched the different facial muscular movements, they began to realize that just making the facial gestures affected their emotional state.

For example, making an angry facial expression caused their heart rate to start beating faster and their hands to get hot. When they made expressions of sadness or anguish, they started feeling bad inside. The image below is from Ekman and Friesen’s FACS.

Their conclusion?

“What we discovered is that the expression alone is sufficient to create marked changes in the automatic nervous system” (Gladwell p. 206)

Gladwell further summarizes their findings by saying,

“The information on our face is not just a signal of what is going on inside our mind. In a certain sense, it is what is going on inside our mind.”

What’s extraordinary about this claim is the reversal of causes and effects. We’re used to thinking our emotions cause our facial expressions. And that’s probably true. But the expressions can also cause our emotions.

A Study that Solidifies the Hypothesis

Gladwell records that a group of German psychologists conducted a study that solidified the idea about facial expressions affecting emotional states. Gladwell writes,

“[The psychologists] had a group of subjects look at cartoons, either while holding a pen between their lips – an action that made it impossible to contract either of the two major smiling muscles, the risorius and the zygomatic major – or while holding a pen clenched between their teeth, which had the opposite effect and forced them to smile. The people with the pen between their teeth found the cartoons much funnier…. What this research showed, though, is that … [e]motion can also start on the face. The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process.” (pgs. 207-08)

If you try holding a pen between your lips, the world does look a bit gloomier.

Comparison to Pavlov’s Dogs

The idea of facial expressions causing emotional states may be hard to believe, but if you remember Pavlov’s salivating dogs, the reversal of cause and effect is more understandable.

Ivan Pavlov triggered a conditional reflex (salivation) in his dogs by consistently ringing a bell before giving them food:

“If the bell was sounded in close association with their meal, the dogs learnt to associate the sound of the bell with food. After a while, at the mere sound of the bell, they responded by drooling.” (nobelprize.org)

In other words, even without the presence of food, they began to salivate because they heard the bell. Our facial expressions are like the bell. Even without the emotional state, the brain notes the expression [hears the bell] and triggers a conditional reflex in our emotions.

Applying All This to Get Out of a Slump

On a more personal note, I’ve been in a basketball slump lately. For about the past six months, my shot has been off, and I haven’t been able to figure out what’s wrong. I’ve been playing less frequently, practicing less (ever since I started podcasting, actually). When I’d jump into a pickup game, I’d become a bit tense and nervous because I couldn’t play at my normal level.

Then last week I started thinking about Blink. Gladwell talks about situations where our unconscious judgment fails us. One of those situations is high stress/arousal. He explains that many police departments have banned high speed chases because it puts the police officer in such a high state of stress/arousal, they consequently make poor decisions.

For example, several riots (including the Rodney King beating) took place because of police officers’ decisions after a chase. Police simply don’t make good decisions when their adrenaline is pumping and their heart rate is racing. This is because, Gladwell explains, the body’s evolutionary response to threats is to minimize all sensory intake (such as sound or touch) not relevant to the threat at hand. The sensory distortion may be what impairs our judgment.

In any case, he says after your heart rate goes past 145 beats per minute, our brain starts to go downhill. He quotes Dave Grossman, author of On Killing:

“At 175, we begin to see an absolute breakdown of cognitive processing … The forebrain shuts down, and the mid-brain … reaches up and hijacks the forebrain…” (226).

Gladwell continues:

“Vision becomes even more restricted. Behavior becomes inappropriately aggressive. .. Blood is withdrawn from our outer muscle layer and concentrated in core muscle mass. The evolutionary point of that is to make the muscles as hard as possible – to turn them into a kind of armor and limit bleeding in the event of injury. But that leaves us clumsy and helpless.” (226-27)

Most of the high stress/arousal states Gladwell explores involve police chases, shootings, dialing 911, and other life or death situations. But I think the same thing happens on the basketball court – someone passes you the ball, 9 other guys shift positions on the court, your defender closes in and swipes at the ball, the score is tied, a lot of people are looking on, teammates are moving quickly, raising their hand for the ball, you unconsciously consider paths to the basket, or shooting options. Not a lot of conscious analysis goes on, and when your heart is racing at 160 beats a minute, your sensory perception declines and your shot, which may have been right on target during casual practice, suddenly misses the rim.

The last time I found myself in this situation – my slump – I remembered the cartoon experiment from the German psychologists, and I squeezed out a smile. Whenever I got the ball, I smiled – not a big cheesy grin, because that’s not authentic for me. But a moderate I’m-happy smile.

To my surprise, I became more relaxed, felt less anxiety, and my shots started to fall. My shot started coming back!

High Pressure Situations

I found the technique worked on more than a basketball court. A couple of days later, I had to deliver a brown-bag presentation on a software project I’d documented at work. I was a little nervous, so I made an effort to smile, similar to when I was shooting on the basketball court.

After 5 min. or so, I started to feel comfortable and relaxed. Instead of a stiff, forced, or defensive demeanor, I was calm as can be, moving effortlessly through the presentation and enjoying the questions participants asked.

Yet Another situation

The other two situations may have been chance, but the other morning I had yet another experience.

Foolishly, I was upset at my wife because we were late to church. About 10 minutes after sitting with contempt on the pew, I tried smiling. It actually hurt to smile. I kept trying – why would merely making a facial expression be so difficult, if it weren’t applying some torque to change my inner state of emotion?

After several smiling minutes, I came to my senses and was content again, acknowledging to her that the fault for being late was mine.

Conclusion

When we are happy, we are relaxed. Our heart rate isn’t racing, our muscles aren’t stiffening, and we can think and respond clearly. Our sensory perception is acute, and our performance increases. We can partially induce this state through a facial expression of happiness. Our brain associates the facial expression with the emotion, and fosters it where it was previously absent.

So the next time you’re in a slump, or are walking into a high-pressure situation, clench a pencil in your teeth, or contract the muscles that raise the cheek, pull up the corners of your lips. You can trick your brain into triggering a more advantageous emotional state. Within a few minutes you’ll find you no longer have to try — the smile forms naturally.

Although Gladwell is careful to explore situations where two-second judgments fail, the most interesting scenarios are where rapid cognition succeeds. It contradicts reason to think that a two-second judgment could be more accurate than a carefully made analysis, but in many cases it is.

Knowing too much — learning too much information, processing too many variables — often backfires. It makes our judgment more prone to error.

Gladwell says we make lightening-fast decisions from our unconscious. We don’t understand all the variables that contribute to the unconscious’ judgment, and in fact we can’t understand the unconscious’ process if we try.

Snap judgments and rapid cognition take place behind a locked door (51).

However, in some instances, our two-second judgment leads us astray, particularly when the following is involved:

• Gender
• Race
• The wrong context/environment
• High states of stress/arousal
• Visual information

He explores dozens of psychology experiments that show both successes and failures from rapid cognition.

In deciding whether to trust our split-second judgment, Gladwell says a good rule of thumb is to use our unconscious when making decisions in complex situations, where there are many variables. In contrast, when making decisions about straightforward problems, where fewer variables exist, use careful analysis.

So his advice is just the opposite of conventional wisdom: if the situation is easy, gather lots of information and be careful before making your decision. If the situation is complex, go with your two-second instinct.

In the Afterward, he quotes Freud showing agreement with this strategy. Freud says,

When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature. (268)

The unconscious, the “somewhere within,” is responsible for our split-second, instinctual judgment.

How I’m Applying Blink

Reading this book made me more inclined to trust the quick, instinctual judgments I make about writing. When I write a new post, essay, blurb, or other text, I usually have an immediate gut feeling as to whether it’s good or bad. Sure I could tear apart my judgment by analyzing all the elements: Does it have a thought-provoking idea, evidence for the assertion, transitions between paragraphs, coherence? But really this careful analysis is only an attempt to understand or justify the initial instinct.

When I was a composition teacher, I immediately knew, after reading a student essay, whether it was good or bad. It only took about one or two paragraphs to make this judgment. Of course in my end comment, I had to justify my judgment, writing comments related to qualities I mentioned above. But I never proceeded through a list of characteristics to measure an essay before arriving at a conclusion of its worth.

That’s because an essay is a complicated situation with a variety of complex variables, strategies, and rhetorical techniques. How do you quantify or evaluate insight? style? flow? brilliance? awkwardness? Except for the logic of the argument, much of the evaluation is generated from our unconscious. We don’t consciously move through a specific evaluation algorithm to arrive at our conclusion. We just know — in about 2 seconds — whether the essay is good.

The application for writing? If your split-second judgment says this prose isn’t good, scrap it. Don’t question your instinct. Start over or rewrite it until you immediately feel it is good.