Table of contents for SXSW Themes

1. Interconnectedness and Cooperation Overlaid Onto Real Life – SXSW Themes
2. Do you make happiness, dreams, or just kick ass? – SXSW Themes
3. There is more to gain by giving it all away – SXSW Themes
4. Embrace randomness – SXSW Themes

THEME 4: Embrace randomness
‘Go with the flow’ was definitely the best piece of advice I got for sxsw. It’s good to plan, but feel free to break that plan for a chance to go somewhere random with a random group of people. I’ve been very interested in the balance of structured efficiency versus embracing randomness and the effect that has on both creativity and your ability to be effective.

I was moving towards structured efficiency until I read an amazing book on creativity in the workplace called “Orbiting The Giant Hairball” which takes a very opposite approach. Like many things, I think the answer is in the middle, and I think Tim Ferriss nails it on his head in 4 Hour Workweek by showing how carefully placed structure can free you up so that you have much more time to live more randomly (if that’s what you want). Structure if used right can be complementary to randomness

Table of contents for SXSW Themes

1. Interconnectedness and Cooperation Overlaid Onto Real Life – SXSW Themes
2. Do you make happiness, dreams, or just kick ass? – SXSW Themes
3. There is more to gain by giving it all away – SXSW Themes
4. Embrace randomness – SXSW Themes

THEME 2: Help people kick ass so they can reach their dreams. That’s how you create happiness. Make that your business and your life.

Happiness
The products and services we build have a wide array of goals. We think of our business as being the category that our product falls into. My company, Revolution Health, is obviously in the business of health content, tools, and community, right? Well, most businesses are reducible to the business of happiness. Jane McGonigal predicted that quality of life will become the ultimate measure of a product. “Happiness is the new capital.”

Kicking Ass
Similarly, Kathy Sierra asked “How do you help your users kick ass?” I found that to be a really powerful question. How much time do we spend at work on work that does not help an end user kick ass? If that’s the majority of the time, either the product is on the wrong track or you’re doing the wrong work.

New Measurements
We need to reframe and re-evaluate what we and our products actually accomplish in our end users. Metrics should not be around page views and sales but around how effective we’ve allowed someone to be or how many interruptions we’ve eliminated from someone’s life.
Jane provided four common elements that provide true happiness across the board. Take these as starting points for your new ‘happiness startup’.

1) Satisfying work to do
2) The experience of being good at something
3) Spending time with people you like
4) Chance to be part of something bigger

Dreams
I want to leave you with Randy Pauch’s life changing talk on making people’s dreams come true. Creating happiness is something bigger than the products and services we work on. It’s how we should live our lives.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Update: Looks like Randy Pauch has written a book based on his amazing lecture.

Table of contents for SXSW Themes

1. Interconnectedness and Cooperation Overlaid Onto Real Life – SXSW Themes
2. Do you make happiness, dreams, or just kick ass? – SXSW Themes
3. There is more to gain by giving it all away – SXSW Themes
4. Embrace randomness – SXSW Themes

After transcribing my 15 pages of handwritten notes and starting to think through some of it, I’ll be posting a few big takeaways and themes I pulled from South By Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) this year. Here’s the first:

THEME 1: Interconnectedness and Cooperation Overlaid Onto Real Life
A feeling that I came away with after sxsw was that I had just experienced the super-connected world we envision the future to be. Everyone had macs and iphones, icons of great user centered design, and was completely interconnected in a wireless digital sea. But this high tech interconnectedness did not draw people away from face to face interaction (which we often blame new technology for doing). Instead, it actually enhanced it and sped it up. Twitter allowed people to move in groups and figure out what others were doing, yelp helped people sort out what places to go to, social networks like facebook instantly made long term connections for followup and learning more about the person you just met.
On a more global scale, web 2.0 tools are helping with the spreading of ideas and knowledge and helping people take cooperative action with that knowledge.

Spreading ideas
The Africa 2.0 session showed how Africa’s rising entertainment center, known as Nollywood, is currently relying on the internet to get content out and get Africa’s message out to the world (rather than Hollywood’s interpretation of it). Zuckerberg talked about how students from the Middle East that go to western universities are staying in better contact with friends from home and creating idea bridges between the two worlds.

Cooperation
On top of the spreading of ideas was the idea of cooperative action on those ideas. People have worked together to create an index of knowledge known as Wikipedia that is far larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica. Henry Jenkins spoke about how Harry Potter social networks in the UK are starting to make political actions as the members grow together. Facebook groups allow people to channel joint interests or movements together

Overlaying real life
In the last few years I think the new web 2.0 technology and jargon have been the focus. But it seems like the discussion is starting to revolve a lot more on how those technologies are creating real world changes and disruptions. A last example of this was Jane McGonigal’s talk on how games can be used to better design real life. Mashups on the internet between two technologies has become a daily occurance, but this talk sheds light on the new ultimate mashup, the mashing up of technology and the world. Online gaming and social networks have drawn users from the real world to the virtual world, but new ways and ideas are emerging to push some of that back into real life.