An incomplete list of things I don't understand

There is snow everywhere, I am still trying to find most of my stuff after a recent move, I have 879 HR Tech Conference speaking proposals to review (only a slight exaggeration), and I am heading out tomorrow for my first work trip of 2015. In short, I have no time/energy/good ideas for the blog today.

But carry on we must. Actually, we don't 'must', it just feels better to post something than not to post, so here goes something nothing. The first installment of what might become a semi-regular series titled 'An Incomplete List of Things I Don't Understand'. These things can be anything really, stuff that is really complex, things that are really popular and I don't get why, or just things I can't be bothered to figure out.

Feel free to add the things you don't understand, (including the point of this post), in the comments.

Here goes...

10. The tendency when one popular social platform is down, for people to immediately migrate to a different social network to report/moan/whine/joke about the first network being down. 

9. Taylor Swift. She might be great I guess. I don't really know.

8. Why many people think music should be 'free', and artists should just give it away or allow it to be taken for no compensation. Actually, that was Ms. Swift's issue recently too. Maybe I do understand her.

7. Why I get pitched 29 times each week to reprint someone's terrible infographic. 

6. 'Follow Friday'

5. Adults who think they need a 'Birthday month' or a 'Birthday week'. We were all, you know, actually born and have birthdays. You have not accomplished anything special here. Shut it about your stupid birthday already.

4. Carmelo Anthony bashing that is done primarily by 'experts' that read statistics and don't actually watch Knicks games. Have you seen this team? Who else do you want taking shots? 

3. Conference call PINs or Access codes that are actually longer than the dial-in number itself. Holy Hannah, we make cracking into someone's boring conference call harder than stealing their ATM pin number.

2. Life coaches

1. Stupid lists on the internet.

Have a great day!

Months, ranked

The often imitated but never surpassed 'Ranked' series resumes - this time with your semi-researched, highly subjective, and obviously definitive ranking of the months of the year.

You may disagree with these rankings, but of course you would be wrong.

Here we go:

12. February - there is a reason the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition always appears in February. This is a terrible month, mercifully cut short, but still miserable.

11. January - Cold, wet, long - did I mention cold yet?

10. April - The cruelest month

9. August - very overrated since it is a summer month. Long, hot, sticky, and if you are stuck working you will get almost nothing done since no one else is around.

8. March - Winter's over - or so you think. No, it's not over. March dares to give you a tease of the upcoming Spring, but just wait until you head out for that St. Patrick's Day parade in the freezing rain.

7. June - Such a non-descript month. Only redeeming quality is the NBA finals, but even I admit that appeals only to a fairly limited group. What else worthwhile happens in June?

6. November - now we are in to the top half of months, so let's spin this positive. Thanksgiving, Black Friday, lots of great pro sports in season, gearing up for Christmas make November the best month since June.

5. May - A solid, if unspectacular month. Good weather, finally shaken off the last bits of Winter, and Memorial Day weekend kicking off the summer. Hard not to like May.

4. December - Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year's Eve, snow, hot cocoa, mistletoe..... You get the idea. December is pretty cool

3. September - Some people might argue with the 'end of summer vacation' month ranking so high on the list. These people are not parents of school aged children.

2. July - Quintessential summer month. Has everything you need - solid national holiday, great weather, and still only is the mid-point of summer. You can waste July by working all the time and still have August to look forward to. But July is better.

1. October - Fall foliage, Halloween, pumpkin flavored everything, fresh apples, and for the first time in ages that strange excitement that comes with the first really cool, crisp day of the season. It should be October for 11 months a year. Except when it is July.

Leave your thoughts in the comments, but remember, you are probably wrong.

If you're not sure

Spotted, in this piece from Esquire, The 16 Wisest Things Men Have Ever Said About Style:

"If you're not sure whether it looks good on you, it doesn't."

 
– Scott Omelianuk, Author of Things A Man Should Know About Style

Great advice, I think, not just for fashion but for all manner of situations and endeavours. 

Not that being sure, matters all of the time of course. We can't always, maybe hardly ever, be sure about things.

But for the times when we need to be sure, whether it is the choice of clothes, careers, or maybe even sorting out whom you can trust and whom perhaps you should not, well, I think that the advice from Mr. Omelianuk is pretty solid.

Now the trickier part I reckon is knowing when you need to be sure and when you only need to feel reasonably confident you're doing the right thing. 

But for now at least that hat/shirt/coat/monocle/walking stick/handlebar moustache/eyepatch/neck tattoo/sketchy person you are thinking about sharing an important business item with that you are considering?

Stop considering them.

Happy Thursday.

OFF TOPIC: More and Less

We Need More:

Really cool, interesting, and innovative ideas for work, workplaces and people (see Fuel50, BlackbookHR, Data Morphosis, BrandAmper, QUESocial, and Zenefits).

Simple and elegant approaches to solve complex questions.

Pumpkin donuts.

People who don't take themselves too seriously.

BBQ.

Walt 'Clyde' Frazier.

We Need Less:

Updates on your Fantasy Football team.

Emails sent at 11:49PM.

Details about your latest run, CrossFit Workout, or set of push-ups you did.  You do know you get the same benefit and burn the same number of calories even if you don't Tweet about your stupid workout, don't you?

War or combat analogies when talking about sports. 'That quarterback sure is a warrior down near the goal line.' 

Sports analogies when talking about business. 'This new marketing campaign is sure to be a home run with the target demographic.'

Telling us all how busy you are or how hard you are working.

Comparing yourself to the competition. Forget the competition. Most of the time the people/companies that you are worried about are just as amazingly paranoid and possibly dysfunctional as you. Don't worry about them. There is plenty of opportunity for everyone.

Tom Brady. I am so sick of Tom Brady. (I am a Jets fan).

Have a great weekend! 

The problem with pie charts

is that they don't allow the visualization or the possibility of something else, something that is unknown, or undefined. They can only show some measure of allocation of the pieces of a thing that can be identified and named.

Even the pie charts that have 'other' or 'undefined' as a component or slice, still have the overall context of the chart to set the definition. The 'other' slice of most every pie chart is not really 'unknown' anyway, it just means that there were too many additional defined things that bothering to chart them all individually just made no sense or was not visually appealing.

But we like pie charts, I think, because we like to classify and identify things, and we like even more to have the things we classify and identify sum up into a tidy and logical package. There is that thing, or process, or amount, or opportunity that we have to examine and describe and the way that we feel most comfortable and capable addressing this problem is to separate, partition, and sum. And to make sure that nothing is missed, nothing is unknown, nothing is indeterminate.

I think this is probably the cause of another, and related, truth (one we don't like to admit either), that the vast majority of your peers don't actually want you to be successful, as it would mean in the logic of the pie chart, that they are losing. They want to keep the size of their piece of the pie as large as possible, and ceding any area to you or anyone else can only diminish their status or income or opportunity. Sure we can talk about 'making the pie larger for everyone' but we almost never think that way when we encounter news of someone else getting a great new job or landing a big account or signing up a new sponsor.

Even in markets where actually determining the absolute total size of the pie, (say for example, all the potential organizations that might hire you to speak to their employees or customers or prospects) the instant you find out that someone else just got hired by company 'X' to work on 'Y', you lament the missed opportunity. And while in that narrow, slice of the pie context you might be correct, spending more than one second trying to re-calibrate your relative position compared to the market (which you can't know how large it really is anyway), is foolish.

Forget the pie, forget trying to grab a progressively larger share of some fixed and finite thing. Do what you do and if it is honest enough, and good enough, you will have your own pie. And you will finally stop caring about what everyone else is doing.

They will still hate you though.

Have a great week!