This is part 4 of my series on the hyperbrain. If you’re just joining us, please have a look at parts 1, 2, and 3, before continuing.

Some jobs are “process jobs”. They consist mostly of taking some sort of input (phone calls, support tickets, orders, sales leads), performing some work on them, and providing some form of output (a satisfied customer, a filled order, a new sale). These jobs exist at all levels and in all kinds of businesses - from a small business support technician to a large business sales director). A lot of people (in fact, most people) have jobs that fit this description, are happy with that work, and do it brilliantly.

If you’re a hyperbrain, however, this kind of job is your worst nightmare. Why? Because it is a job you will always screw up.

Imagine you’re a manager in charge of a process. What do you care most about when hiring people to put in the roles you’ve identified? Predictability. You don’t care if the person handling the support tickets is capable of churning through 200 tickets on a really good day. You want to be sure that, on any given day, they’ll handle the 20 or so tickets that come in on average. Unfortunately, the hyperbrain does not work like that. It can produce exceptional results, but it is lousy at being consistent.

This is a weakness that, once again, can be worked around. Read on for this technique.

If you define a “scam” as a system designed to trick people into purchasing something they didn’t really want to purchase, the internet - and the real world - are rife with scams. Almost every business, no matter its size, uses every trick it can think of to convince people to purchase its products.

Scams are not created equal, though.

This is the third article in my series on the hyperbrain. If you haven’t read them yet, you might want to look at parts 1 and 2 first.

Subjectively, I think the greatest challenge about having a hyperbrain is distractibility. If not handled effectively, it can make you feel really useless. I’ve often sat in front of my computer, knowing that I’m supposed to be getting on with some piece of work that’s half done, and not been able to focus on it (whilst remaining quite capable of focusing on dozens of blogs and other wastes of time). Learning to work with your distractibility can make an order of magnitude of difference in your productivity.

So, you have an idea for a startup, but need a tech guy to build it… how should you find him?

Last week I ripped into a job advert with, I hope, some good comical results. Some people asked, more specifically, what I would do in Redline’s place (Redline was the company that produced the advert). How do you make that first technical hire?

Of course, you want the company to sound personable and friendly, and that was probably the noble impulse that drove the poor anonymous job ad writer to write that awful ad. A formal, stiff job ad is indeed not going to attract good early employees - let alone a start-up CTO, which I believe is what they were trying to hire in this case.

First of all, let’s define our terms a little. Everyone has different terms for these things, but there’s two general stages to recruitment of technical guys in a really early start-up (one with fewer than 10 techs). Please note that when a company grows beyond that size, things shift and evolve. This applies to very small technology start-ups only and, as ever in the start-up world, there are and will always be exceptions.

This article follows a previous article. It’s part of a series of yet undefined length. If you haven’t read the first instalment yet, it might be worth going back and reading it.

This is addressed mainly to people who recognise themselves in the description of the hyperbrain, although it may be of interest to others. When you count up all the different ways in which your hyperbrain differs from the average, you might be tempted to think you’re not normal. Well, it’s true, you’re not. You’re different from the norm, but that can be a good thing. After all, you can’t be normal and expect abnormal results. The focus of these articles is to make you more aware of how you can deal with those differences, counteract your limitations, and build on your strengths, to achieve what you’re capable of.

So what are you capable of? Well, you can do anything you want (that’s the good news). But in order to do those things, you need to learn to work with your hyperbrain, otherwise you will constantly fail in public and humiliating ways at the worst moments (usually, on the cusp of victory, at least in my experience). And that will hurt you more than the average person, because you are far more sensitive to negative feedback than you’d care to admit. Let’s look at the first practical step to take to improve your chances of success.

The first step to success with a hyperbrain is to both accept your limitations and reject them.

Recently, I found a Craigslist job advert that made me chuckle. It seems to manage to do almost everything wrong, from the point of view of recruiting the kind of person it appears to be targeting.

So, in the spirit of improving the web, here’s my blow-by-blow description of all (or most of) what’s wrong with this job ad.

Recent news has pointed out that gold farming in China has become a $500m industry.

Blizzard should be ashamed.

We have many challenges in the world today. Entertaining people (as Blizzard does with their main products) is a worthwhile activity for a business. Hard-working people do need it, and even though there are some extreme cases of “entertainment abuse” (similar, in many ways, to drugs abuse), the abuses of the few should not limit the many from enjoying a perfectly healthy, if somewhat fruitless, activity.

However, gold farming is not entertainment. Gold farming is an entirely sterile activity. It produces nothing other than a transfer of wealth from one part of the world to another. The “gold” that is being farmed is purely artificial. It represents no value creation whatsoever. It is merely a symbol of time that has been wasted on a pursuit that is designed to be entertaining. Each piece of gold farmed represents a small amount of wasted productivity for the human race. In aggregate, the $500m gold farming industry represents $500m of wasted human productivity.

Moreover, Blizzard could very easily stop this trade, by creating an official gold market where people can exchange dollars for gold. There would still remain some market for rare items, but those are necessarily less fungible than gold coins, and so would at least greatly decrease the $500m black hole.

If anything, Blizzard should see its own self-interest here: if it can get even a 10% slice of this $500m market (and there’s little reason to think that it couldn’t get 100%), that would represent $50m - not an amount to be sneered at. From a business sense, Blizzard should be ashamed not to have opened up a gold market yet.

Dear readers,

I’m very sorry, but for some time the commenting system was utterly and totally broken. And in a very frustrating way, too, giving no useful feedback to the commenter.

I’ve now fixed this, and I recovered what comments I could from the logs, so they’re now up (although it looks as if they were all posted at the same time) - and it is now possible to add comments without tearing your hair out!

Thanks for your support!

Do you have a hyperbrain?

A recent article posted up on HackerNews presented a list of symptoms (representing things that the author felt about himself). These symptoms are not common to everyone, but they are common to enough people to warrant this and further articles. Plus, I promised some of them that I’d write about this.

The characteristics exhibited there seem to touch on almost every so-called mental disorder out there: Bipolar-like ups and downs of energy and, sometimes, emotions; Obsessive focus (under certain circumstances); Compulsion to do certain things that just have to be done; Hyperactivity (with a tendency to start many things at once); Attention Deficit (hell yeah.. oh, shiny stuff!). Yet it is far from diseased. With that brain, you can achieve great things, so long as you apply a few simple, practical approaches to harness it.

(From XKCD)

Here’s an article from VentureBeat waving about some figures about how much money can be made with Facebook apps. Although the figures are a bit anecdotal, and I hope for their sake that no VC’s ever invest based on such hand-waving mathematics, the real gem is at the end:

Either way, the many naysayers suggesting that it’s impossible to make money on Facebook might want to think again.

I don’t know if anyone’s ever suggested it’s _impossible_ to make money from Facebook. The main backlash against Facebook applications as a business model has really been against the gold rush mentality of the early Facebook app “golden age”. In those days, the mental processes went a little bit like this:

1. Facebook has lots of users
2. Facebook is inherently viral
3. If I make a Facebook application, it will be easy to reach millions of people
4. An application that can reach millions of people is bound to make money.

That’s a nice story, and it explains why some many people (myself included) rushed into Facebook application development last summer. Since then, most of them have pulled out, and for very good reasons.

1. Facebook became much more protective of its users (and quite sensibly). A large part of the changes to Facebook in the last year have been to protect its users from over-greedy and spammy applications
2. Many changes entirely nerfed the virality, making it much, much harder for an application to magically spread from 10 users to a million within a few weeks
3. Therefore, it’s become very hard to reach any large number of people on Facebook
4. Even applications that did benefit from the early “golden age” conditions didn’t manage to make that much money. Their business models are still being proven. Slide and RockYou may have a few very successful apps, but they also have many developers, and it’s unlikely that their Facebook revenues cover their costs yet (though I’d love to hear some hard numbers on that).

The truth is, yes, it’s possible to make money with a Facebook app. But, and this is the key, it’s no easier than making money with a non-Facebook app. In many ways, it’s harder. Working with the Facebook platform and its many limitations is a challenge in and of itself. Even if you’re a consummate start-upper outside of the Facebook bubble-world, you’ll have to learn application development all over again in this new, different environment. That’s not a huge deal, but it should give pause to people who think they can just “make a Facebook version” of their otherwise successful application.

More importantly, building a Facebook application puts you in the thrall of Facebook. That is a huge deal, because Facebook is their own business, and they will always do things to their own advantage, even if that involves doing something that will completely destroy your business. The internet is fickle enough as it is. Do you need the extra risk?