YouSaid · the spoken record

Warren Berger

lines on the record
87
first
2017-12-14
most recent
2017-12-14
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “No, I don't use that. I think it's a good idea to have a treadmill desk, but for health reasons, I don't know if it would help with what I'm talking about with creativity. It's probably just good for your circulation. But I do think that for me anyway, outdoor walking seems to be the trick. For some people, it's taking a drive or some people it's doing the dishes. It's different for everyone. It seems to be you need to do some kind of a low an activity that immerses where you become immersed in the activity, but not so much that you can't think and daydream. And so that's sort of the sweet spot, you know, finding those activities where obviously going to a movie doesn't work, right? Because you get too immersed and there's.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “It helps me to put thoughts together and it helps me make connections in my thinking. So I'll do a lot of walking in the morning and I'll come up with ideas. And then a lot of times I'll sort of put the idea I might jot it down when I get home or I might just kind of store it in my brain. I'm pretty good at if I come up with an idea, you know, kind of remembering it later. And so I find that walking is a big, big, big plus, but it helps to do it outdoors. Treadmill is not as good. I just find with a treadmill there's too much stuff coming at me and there's a TV in front of me and there's people all around talking. And if I can get out into the outdoors and walk, preferably in a park or in the woods, that seems to work really well for my creative thinking.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Smallest habit that makes a big difference I would say outlining in my work is a habit that makes a big difference. I'm always producing outlines, as I said earlier, and I think what that does is it helps me really organize like complex subjects well. And so that's a kind of a little habit walking is a habit that helps me. I try to walk every day if I can. How does that help you?”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Yeah, no, I stop rating if something is not good. I definitely can't waste my time on something that isn't compelling to me.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “And it was just, it changed the way I thought about teachers. It gave me a different perspective into the mindset of a teacher that I just never had before. So that's basically everything I read, I feel like changes my thinking. If it's any good, it seems like anything that is well done and you read it, I just feel like it shifts your whole understanding of a subject or of a person or a perspective.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “It was intense and it changed my understanding of that whole period. And it was so amazing. I think it was, I thought of it as really a work of art that he created there in terms of the way he put together the elements of it. And so that was something that definitely changed my thinking completely. Let's see, what am I reading that has changed my thinking lately? Reading an interesting book called Getting Schooled, I've been trying to get into the mindset of teachers these days because I talk to teachers a lot and there's a book I'm reading by a teacher in New England, Garrett Kaiser is his name and he wrote a book about his experiences teaching in a rural community.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Oh, wow. The last thing I read that changed my understanding of the world. Well, I'll tell you the last thing I experienced that changed my understanding of the world. And it wasn't reading. It was Ken Burns's Vietnam, which I just finished getting through that the other day. And 18 hours.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “In the document, when I'm typing in the document, I have trouble doing that kind of structural thinking because I need to see it in front of me. And so I do a lot of playing with outlines. Sometimes on oversized sheets of paper or all kinds of crazy stuff. So yeah, that seems to be a visual thinking thing that I'm doing.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “It feels more visual thinking. And one of the things also that I need to do, and I seem to need to do it more and more these days, which maybe is a sign of aging, but I seem to need to see everything in front of me at the same time. So when I'm creating outlines, a lot of times, you know, I may have information spread out over 20 pages, but I need to figure out how to get it into a form where I can look at two or three pages side by side in front of me and see everything, see all the ideas that I'm playing with. And then I can, I'll get ideas about structure at that point. I'll say, oh, okay, this is obviously the structure is I need to take this stuff that I'm talking about and shift it up here. I have trouble doing that on the...”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Things out. I want to be able to use arrows to point this over to that. And it just works better for me. And then when I get on the, when I'm on the computer, it's more like I'm in writing mode. Now I'm actually writing. And I don't know. It's two separate stages to me.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Yeah, my brain knows it's there. And of course, I should be doing this in Evernote or something like that because it would be so much easier to access it digitally by putting in a keyword or something. But I just am, you know, I'm just a kind of more comfortable with working on paper. I still work on paper a lot. I even do outlines on paper. I do outlines where I'm just scribbling and writing outlines long hand on paper and then going to the computer and putting them into my document. But it's amazing how much I work on paper. And I don't know. I feel more creative on paper and I don't know why. I've heard other people say that too. I just feel like when I'm in that really rough stage of things, I want to be able to scratch.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Yeah, I will sometimes weed the matter or I'll put or I'll create a second folder that's sort of like B level stuff like once I start to think something might not be as relevant I'll put it into the B folder which means I'll probably never look at it again but I might remember something and say oh you know I had an article on that and then I'll want to go back into the B folder but your brain knows it”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Take all these pieces and first of all, figure out which pieces are really the ones I want to use, and then figuring out how they all fit together and fit with my larger theme or my vision. So a lot of times I feel like I'm putting puzzles together and the information that I've gathered are the little pieces of the puzzle. So it's just like, what do you do with this really interesting bit of information that you have? It might be one line that somebody said about something and what do you do with that piece and where does it fit with your larger narrative?”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “I am just constantly taking things, anything interesting I find off the internet and just sourcing it and printing it. And then I still use paper files. I'm somewhat of a dinosaur. So I have bulging files based on subjects, anything to do with I'm writing about decision making, then I'm just collecting tons of articles, tons of posts, interviews, excerpts from Ted speeches, you know, just whatever. And I'm just getting it all printed out and keeping gigantic bulging files on that subject. And then I have to go through those files. And a lot of times what I'm doing is trying to just.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “I seem to take a long time to read. Now, I think it's part of a good thing. I mean, I pay a lot of attention to what I'm reading. But part of it is just that I'm slow too. I'm a slow reader. And so a book is a major undertaking for me. And it usually takes me quite a while.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “I'm not a huge reader. I tend to these days I'm doing a lot of reading online. I'm reading online magazines, online, I'm reading blogs. I'm reading, as I mentioned earlier, some magazines. And then books, you know, I will usually be working on one book at a time and I'm having a lot of trouble. I just have a lot of trouble getting through books. It takes me a long time because I'm a slow reader. So it's just a weird thing. Like my wife is an amazing reader. I mean, she knocks off a book in like one or two days. And I'm just not built that way. I seem to read very slowly and deliberately. I kind of pour over sentences.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Or less I did an event in Seattle that was billed as it was going to be at Seattle Town Hall and it was being organized by someone who was in the Seattle City government and it was going to be this amazing event bringing together all these great people and I got there and it was like 12 people at Seattle City Hall and Town Hall Seattle Town Hall so and I just got there and thought oh man you know wow I really spent a lot of time on this and it's just not going to amount to anything and I've had a few of those kinds of things where where so now I try to be really careful about you know traveling to an event and try to make sure that there's enough going on there's going to be enough people there's going to be enough energy there that it's at the end I'm going to feel like it was worthwhile”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “I think a lot of times it has to do with saying yes to, like, I don't usually regret saying yes to, say, an interview or something like that because it doesn't take that long. What I have regretted saying yes to is going somewhere or an event. And a lot of times it's because the event as it's being described to me is different from the reality. The reality ends up being something a lot less”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “I will keep that block fairly uninterrupted. But I do say yes to a lot of stuff otherwise. And so I'm saying yes to a lot of stuff in the morning and in the other parts of the day. So I'm probably not a good person to ask about that because I don't think I have a huge amount of discipline when it comes to saying no.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “That's a hard thing for me because I always feel like everything, I look at everything as an opportunity. You know, that's just my mindset. So like every person that comes to me and says, oh, I'd like to talk to you or I'd like to do this or that. I always like think, oh, that's interesting. That could be a good opportunity. So my default position is definitely to say yes. And, you know, what I've tried to do is to say, okay, I will at least create these sacred time blocks. And what I'll say is I'm not going to do anything after, you know, let's say two o'clock, three o'clock in the afternoon, because I know that from two to seven or ever three to seven, that's a sacred block. And so at least I say no in terms of that kind of stuff.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Because everything in you is telling you, you know, it's not going to work. You don't have it today. You might as well just pack it in. And it's really hard to get past that tough period.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “I may just get up and walk around a bit. I find walking helps a lot, but I try not to allow myself to stray too far. I'll give myself maybe a short break. But then I'm committed to coming back to my chair and taking another crack at whatever I'm working on because I just find that it's so easy to give up. It's so easy to feel like, oh, it's just not flowing today. You know, I just don't have the, I don't have the right vibe today. So I should just pack it in. And I've just seen so many instances where I have that feeling. And if I can get past it, if I can get past that hour, that difficult hour, then all of a sudden things will start clicking. But it's really hard to get through that hour.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “And when you're on the manager's schedule, you're scheduling everything hour by hour and it's all like meetings and I'm going to do this for an hour and I'm going to do this for an hour and this for an hour. And then the other type of schedule is where you create these big blocks and you just try to arrange your schedule so that at some point in the day you have a large block that is uninterrupted and it's got no meetings. It's got no phone calls. It's got no nothing. And that I subscribe to that theory. I really think we need to create those blocks somewhere in our day. And then really stick to them. Like don't get up and leave in the first hour you're having trouble because you have to sort of commit to the three hours or the four hours. And if you do that, a lot of times midway through the three hour block, all of a sudden things will start flowing.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “Yeah, he's with the incubator company out there, a startup incubator, but he also writes a lot about, you know, he writes essays about creativity and stuff. And he had an interesting thing about how people are either on a manager's schedule or a creator's schedule.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “Yeah, I think that's it. And maybe there are some people that can work while they're connected. It's possible, you know, I'm sort of of an older generation, so I may not have that split attention span thing or whatever. But I find that in my case, it doesn't matter what time you do it or when you do it, but I think this idea of creating uninterrupted blocks is really interesting. I heard an interesting, I came across an interesting quote from it was written by the guy up in Silicon Valley. I think his name is Paul Graham. Do you know Paul Graham?”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “In the morning, in fact, it might even be advisable. I think really people have to figure out for themselves what their creative peak time is. It's probably different for different people. You know, it probably depends on your biorhythms or something. But I think in the morning, I'm a little slower. And I feel like that's a good time for me to be doing internet stuff and just kind of catching up. And then I kind of build up to that afternoon period where I just go. And that's when I'm going to work basically until I burn out. And then that's the end of my work period.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “That's just the way I've done it. I think probably, to be honest, I think you'd be better off flipping that because a lot of people are more creative in the morning. And also, you know, there's that whole thing about the waking dream, you know, the idea that when you've been sleeping, your mind has been making a lot of your subconscious has been making a lot of connections and there's been a lot of interesting stuff going on. And so some people feel it has never really worked for me that much, but some people feel that if you can kind of rise out of bed and just go straight to your creative workspace and start writing or creating, you will be able to tap into some of that nighttime creativity. And so I would think it would be perfectly fine to do your creative blog.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “And that's what I've been doing for the past six or seven years in various different locations, but I always try to have a cave that I can go to. And I feel like it's the only thing that works for me because once I go into the cave, then I'm no longer looking things up or bouncing around from one blog to another. Now I am, I have no choice but to actually create something because otherwise there's nothing to do. You're focused. So that's that seems to work for me.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “What I do is I now try to separate my day into an online portion of the day and an offline portion because I found I can't do, I just find the online part of my day just takes over and it will dictate my behavior in ways that I can't even control. So what I have to do now is I will spend, let's say, the morning dealing with lots of internet searches, lots of catching up on stuff, responding to email, communicating with people, maybe doing some interviews, things of that nature. And then I try to create a block of four hours, five hours where I am actually cut off. I have no internet contact. I do it in an office where I don't have internet connection there. And so I have decided it's like a cave. I've created a cave for myself.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “Yeah, I tend to have a very haphazard consumption of media. I have certain blogs that I follow pretty closely. And then from there, I just kind of bounce all over the place. And I have certain print publications. I still read regularly The Times The New Yorker, things like that. But I'd say my media consumption is kind of all over the place. And I feel like there's so much media out there now that I feel like it's dangerous. I just feel like, you know, one of the things I'm talking about in my newer book is creativity and how you can use questioning to spark your own creative.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Why is it so easy to get yourself out there because there are so many outlets? It feels to me like the content is often seen as not being worth as much as it was years ago. You still have some magazines that are hanging in there and paying well for content. But more and more, we're moving into this digital realm where the pay scale is totally different and the valuation of your writing is just completely different. And I guess it has to be. I guess that's the way the economics works. But, you know, that has definitely been a negative side of all of this.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “Yeah, exactly. Like getting your name out to readers, but also to potential outlets, clients, people that might hire you to write. So I think that's all changed. And that is a huge change for the better, just the ability to get yourself out there. What has changed for the worse is, I think, a devaluing of the content.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “Well, I think it's a very mixed bag. I think in some ways you have more opportunity than ever before because there are so many outlets. I also think you can, if you're a self-promoter, which I'm not really, but if you have a little bit of self-promoting capability, there are ways to promote yourself as a freelance writer now that you never, ever had before using social media, using blogs, using podcasts. I mean, you can really get yourself out there and get your name and your brand as a freelance journalist out there in a way that, you know, in my early years of my career, it was just, you just, there was no possibility of doing that. The only way you got your name out there was your byline. That was it.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “I'm going to stay with this subject for a while. I think I'm finishing up my second book on it now. And, you know, there's just so much to do within that subject.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “Lot of books that have a chapter on questioning, or you see a lot of articles written about the importance of questioning, but I couldn't find a book that had really gone into it the way I thought it deserved. So I did, and that led to a more beautiful question. And now I'm kind of hooked on it. I think I'll be, you know, I'm calling myself a questionologist.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “They seem to be sort of within the creative world design was becoming more and more important in the business world. So I started to talk about design. And then the leap from design to questioning was really just because as I started to analyze design and design thinking, I kept coming back to questioning. It always seemed like questioning was at the center of everything. It was how designers tended to think and how they solved problems and how they framed a challenge. So I just kept noticing that questioning was such a central issue. And I felt like it hadn't been talked about. It certainly has been talked about in limited ways. You know, you see a lot of”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “I think it was really just following my interests. Well, I guess in terms of originally, it was probably practicality. You know, I started out as a business journalist because, I don't know, it seemed like that's where the work was. And then within the business journalism world, I tried to, I gravitated towards things I found interesting. And so I started to go towards the creative side of business. And that got me really into deeply into the world of marketing and advertising and how creativity is used in the advertising world. And that was a big kind of obsession of mine for a long time. And then I, from creativity and advertising, I started to move into design because I noticed a lot of interesting things were being done by designers.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT