I spent most of my 20s this way without major issues. I would still wake up in the morning full of energy and inspired to work. Friends and colleagues asked how I had so much energy. I just shrugged. I suppose I was blessed.

From 2005 – 2010, I was in a new country at least every two months — often every two weeks. At least once a month I gave a presentation at some conference or workshop. There was always pressure to “sound authoritative,” to have answers for all questions — even if half the time they were bullshit. Frequently I would arrive to some new country without having slept on the flight only to down three double espressos, put together a presentation, and then deliver it later in the afternoon. Later I would crash hard, but by the next morning I was always back to normal.

Then I turned 30. At first I didn’t want to admit to myself what was happening. All of a sudden I needed more than six hours of sleep. At least eight, sometimes even nine. I became more dependent on caffeine. To keep at my normal levels of productivity I now had to drink six, sometimes eight, on occasion even 10 shots of espresso. My stomach suffered. I was constantly dehydrated. Even after nine hours of (usually restless) sleep, I woke up tired with deep dark circles under my eyes. All my life people assumed I was younger than my age; now they are surprised that I’m not older.

The strange thing is that no one asked me to work ten hours a day. It’s not like I was working so hard because I was concerned that I would lose my job. All of my stress was self-induced; a bizarre internal conflict that justified sacrificing my own health in the name of “getting things done.”

Last week I ran into an old friend from the “conference circuit.” We first met years ago in California, but then continued to cross paths in Europe, South America, New York, and now Mexico City. We reminisced about the good old days, when we’d happily stay up late into the night tweaking some WordPress installation or learning the latest design tricks with CSS. Now we were left wondering where all that motivation had gone.

He sent me a link to a blog post about stress, which lists common symptoms:

• Fatigue
• Headaches
• Decreased immunity
• Difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep and waking up
• Mood swings
• Sugar and caffeine cravings
• Irritability or lightheadedness between meals
• Eating to relieve fatigue
• Dizziness when moving from sitting or lying to standing
• Digestive distress

I was ten for ten. Finally it home: I need to change my routine, I can’t keep living like this.

When I am the most stressed, when I am near my breaking point, I fantasize about leaving modernity behind. In my daydreams I hop in my car and drive to some rural farm in Oaxaca where I offer to work in exchange for room and board.

Of course I never actually do this, which would come as no surprise to Todd Buchholz, author of Rush: Why You Need and Love the Rat Race. I listened to Buchholz explain to EconTalk host Russ Robert why our actions speak louder than words. We romanticize a simpler, less modern lifestyle, but in fact we are most content working hard to achieve our goals and better our lives. As he puts it:

We are human beings and we’ve evolved in certain ways. Two of the important ways from a biological point of view and a neuroscience point of view: number one, we have this large frontal cortex that literally sits in the front of our brains. It is our window to the future. It is the part of the brain that allows us to imagine the future, to think forward. It’s like our windshield as we go forward. It rewards us for planning … Number two, we’ve got these neurotransmitters. Most people have heard of dopamine, for instance; dopamine is that neurotransmitter that gives us a rush, a surge of good feelings when we take a risk, when we try something new. So, my argument in Rush is that our brains have evolved in such a way that we are more likely to get good feelings when we move forward as opposed to just staying in place–that’s the frontal cortex. And it’s the dopamine. Dopamine is not the good feeling you get from winning the race. It is the good feeling you get from being involved in something, from being engaged.

Or as Gustave Flaubert put it:

Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

Fine, I probably won’t be moving to a rural farm in Oaxaca any time soon. It is also true that I am often happier working than sitting around listening to people gossip about one another, or watching bad television. The solution, I suppose, is to find a happy, productive balance between my pre-modern fantasies and my cyclical addiction to stress.

It sounds like hippie shit, but I am going to start practicing meditation to see if I can calm my mind. I am going to finally start stretching before and after I run each morning. And I’m going to limit myself to a single cup of coffee in the afternoon. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I will stop comparing my own achievements to those who are willing to live much more stressfully than I.

Today’s accompanying song: Helplessness Blues by the Fleet Foxes.

In front of us was a two hour drive in the rain from Budapest to a Communist-era four star resort on the Tihany peninsula. I needed to digest some anxiety so I went for a long run through the misty rain along the shores of Lake Balaton, Central Europe’s largest. When I returned to my room a copy of Hungarian Playboy – complete with a DVD of amateur videos – was placed perfectly on my bed.

This was clearly not the typical conference I have grown accustomed to speaking at. Over 2,000 people were on their way and, I quickly realized, their priority – in fact, what seemed to be there raison d’être – was to make money online. The night before the conference I had dinner with a fellow speaker, Norm Johnston, who helped get me up to date on all the latest ways that advertising agencies were making money online. (Norm, I should point out, is an extremely likable fellow despite his occupation.) What, I wondered, could I possibly say to a large crowd from the business class all hoping to make money off of people like … well, me. What I truly wanted to say was this:

The night before my presentation was the famous (infamous, I was told) Internet Hungary party with an open bar and throngs of attractive women in pencil skirts and high heels. I was up in my room. Pitiful, I know. I was adjusting some images on my slides a few pixels one direction or another. I was trying out different font types and character spacings. I was leveling the audio on a video I made specifically for the presentation.

While I worked late into the night I could hear giggling, temporary couples stumbling down the hallway and fumbling with their electronic keycards. By 1 a.m. it became obvious that it didn’t matter what I said the following morning; most of the world at Tihany Club Resort would be too hungover to get out of bed. And for the sober minority, I doubt anything would bore them so much as a 30 minute talk on craftsmanship. But still I worked on. I wanted to get this presentation right – not for them, not for me, but for the sake of the presentation itself.

My hope is that one day our children will look back at photos like this one and make fun of us in the same way that we look back at photos of our parents from the 60′s and 70′s and shake our heads in sympathy and shame.

1.) Behind every successful man is a woman. (Groucho Marx’s version was: “Behind every successful man is a woman, behind her is a wife.”)

2.) Men are better at giving powerpoint presentations than women.

Right now I have my feet in two different roles. First I am directing the day to day of an organization – or, at least, an organization within an organization. Second, I am traveling around and giving lots of powerpoint presentations at conferences.

I have come to realize, however, that these two roles are generally split, and they are generally split by gender. The men travel around and give the presentations at conferences; the women meet on skype calls and in offices and talk out all the issues in order to make an organization stable and successful. It is the 21st century version of man in the office, woman in the kitchen.

For example, at Interdependence Day in Brussels at least 90% of the speakers were male. (The stereotypical exception was the poetry reading.) Organizing every detail of Interdependence Day, on the other hand, were three extraordinary women: Elizabeth Dameron, Abi Mihel, and Holly Lane. Unlike the men who were off having drinks at the end of every day, those three went back to their office to print out documents, scribble on whiteboards, and send out emails.

The list of speakers at Ars Electronica is also overwhelmingly male. Again, making sure that everything went off without a hitch were Ingrid and Cornelia. My guess is that neither got any sleep during the event.

In a few weeks I’ll be attending Pop!Tech. The organizers of the conference are very cognizant about the importance of diversity in its presenters, but as you can see, the list is still overwhelmingly male (and, yes, white). Andrew, the curator of Pop!Tech, is a well-known and amazing presenter. But the person who is in charge of all the necessary details to make sure that the event is a success is someone you will never hear about: Leetha Filderman.

Of course, not everyone agrees that men are better presenters than women. Tara Hunt argues that women can not afford the cost of presenting – either in terms of money or time:

We’ve talked alot about “why women don’t speak” on the BlogHer Women in Technology listserv. One of the number one reasons that women give is the COST of speaking. Many of the very talented women I know are also independent contractors, but they are also juggling family lives. They would have to arrange for childcare and getting time to do client work is precious enough, let alone trying to work 40 hours on a presentation. And these women on the list are pretty affluent. I can’t imagine women and men from lower income families or students working on cool projects…

Making a similar argument on O’Reilly’s Women in Technology blog, Tara says that journalists and conference organizers tend to overlook women that they should be writing about and inviting to speak. Jen Bekman, after criticizing the organizers of the Creativity Now Conference for not including a single female speaker, put together a list of talented women speakers to be invited to conferences.

This past week I was in Johannesburg where I was able to call the offices of iCommons my own for a day. I had lunch with the fiercely intelligent and eloquent Rebecca Kahn. (Excellent music-shopping partner as well.) Rebecca has a lot of experience working in organizations and non-profits and has found that there are “idea people” and “procedural people”. The idea people sketch out their great vision and the procedural people then take charge to 1.) make the idea more realistic and 2.) make it a reality.

It is tempting here to assume that the men come up with the ideas and the women come up with the procedures, but I think it’s more complicated than that. From my experience, both men and women come up with the ideas, but the women are more likely to bring up their ideas during meetings and via email whereas men are more likely to incorporate their own ideas (and appropriate the ideas of others) into polished presentations and books. Similarly, both men and women come up with smart procedures, but women tend act on those procedures and share them with others so that they are put into place. Men, like myself, are more likely to write blog posts about why they are great procedures to follow.

Creative Commons is typical of the “woman organizes, man presents” dynamic. When you think of Creative Commons, you think of the following individuals: Lawrence Lessig, James Boyle, Joi Ito, Yochai Benkler, Paul Miller. In fact, if you go to a technology or creativity conference, you’re very likely to see those five gentlemen (the good ol’ boys of the networked era) on a panel together.

One of the fascinating things about visiting the iCommons office was that I was the only guy there. That’s right: iCommons is all women. Listening in on one of their meetings, their conversations were not about the future of copyright and creativity. No, they were hammering out the details of how to educate about flexible licensing, where to launch Wikipedia Academies, how to best use Second Life as an educational resource in South Africa. Applying procedures. Getting things done.

Even though iCommons is run by women, even though they did all the organizing to pull of iSummit, they invited mostly men to speak. This is one of the reasons I believe that men are better presenters than women – otherwise, why wouldn’t the women who organize conferences invite more women to speak at them?

I know that it is immensely unpopular to say that men are better at anything than women (and slightly less unpopular to say the opposite), but I think it’s important to recognize it in order to reverse it. Why are men better presenters? That I do not know. It could go back thousands of years when our ancestors all circled around the bonfire at night. Perhaps for millennia men have been practicing their speaking gigs and it has become genetic. Or maybe it’s just a matter of cultural legacy – we see more men speaking at conferences and so more men in the audience get it into their heads that they too would like to present.

Let’s not fool ourselves – some people are naturally better presenters than others. They are good at telling stories, they have expressive faces, their voices are appealing, they know when to tell a good joke, they don’t get nervous. But for most of us good presentations come with lots of practice. Starting in junior high or high school we should reach out to young women and teach them public speaking and powerpoint presentation skills. Presentation Zen, for example, is a great resource, but judging from the comments it seems as though only men read it. (Why doesn’t someone start a Presentation Zen-like blog specifically targeted toward women?) On the other hand, we should be reaching out to young men and teaching them better listening skills, how to take minutes at meetings, and how to better broker ideas between conflicting groups and individuals. These are important skills that many grown men lack.

This year’s Pop!Tech has a new social innovation fellowship program which will teach 16 up-and-coming social entrepreneurs some of the necessary skills to make their projects successful and sustainable – basically, everything we should have been taught during our formal education, but were not. (I’m honored to be working with Gideon D’Arcangelo on the digital storytelling workshop.) Andrew Zolli, the amazing presenter I mentioned earlier, will be giving a workshop on how to put together a compelling powerpoint presentation. It is one of those important skills that every leader should know, but which we’re never actually taught. I’m looking forward to seeing what the fellows get out of Zolli’s workshop and what they come up with for themselves.

This is not where I expected to be, back at Rockefeller’s Bellagio Center for the third week of the eHealth conference. I made a mistake regarding my Indian Visa (as in not having a valid one), so my flight to Delhi is now delayed for at least seven days and the conference organizers here at Bellagio were kind enough to invite me back for this week’s discussion on “mHealth and Mobile Telemedicine.”

If you are going to get stuck somewhere, this isn’t a bad place to do it.

Projects and Partnerships

There is a much different dynamic to this week’s mHealth group compared to the group focused on access to information last week. While the access to information group was mostly comprised of representatives from international multilateral organizations (WHO, BIREME, etc.), this week we’ve got a lot of representatives from ‘industry’ (that is, mobile phone manufacturers and service providers) as well as groups looking for market-based solutions to social problems like CGAP, the GSMA Development Fund, and Voxiva.

There is another, probably related, difference. The end goal of last week’s meeting seemed to be forming partnerships. While this suited many of the participants, others were frustrated by the lack of concrete actions coming out of the week. Rather, the week ended with a concluding document declaring broad statements like “health information and knowledge are social determinants of health since inequities in access to information and knowledge generate and/or increase health inequities.” And: “The implementation of global eHealth initiatives should be based on partnerships involving various national and international players.”

The first couple day’s of this week’s mHealth session, on the other hand, has largely been focused on thinking through very specific projects. How can mobile phones be used in treating depression? What lessons from mobile banking should be applied to mobile health? What were the specific lessons learned in a public-private mHealth partnership in Vietnam?

On day one, the emphasis on all of these case studies was centered on implementation of the projects. Day two mostly dealt with scaling a project up after it has already been implemented.

As you can probably tell, I am a much bigger supporter of focusing on projects than partnerships. While manifestos and declarations garner a lot of signatures and media attention, it’s the projects that actually make change. I felt like there was a great opportunity to walk away from last week with a committed project that could put to test the enthusiastic presentations made here about eHealth. For example, if a hospital in Angola had expressed a desire to take advantage of communications technologies to improve their service, then all of the various groups that could make that happen where gathered here last week. Cisco could install wi-fi throughout the hospital. Zilics Health Information Systems from Brazil could help implement an electronic health records system. The School of Medicine at Oregon Health and Science University could offer medical training via teleconference. Nurses could be trained by fellow Portuguese-speaking nurses from the Federal University of Sao Paulo. The list goes on and on.

Even if the project itself did not come to fruition, it serves as a useful exercise to think through what some of the major obstacles are to implementing eHealth services in, for example, Angola.

I have to wonder if the mHealth group is more focused on implementation and scaling up rather than partnerships and declarations because there is money to be made in mHealth whereas business models regarding content and information have always been about restricting access, not increasing it.

I am curious what this mHealth group is going to come up with by the end of the week. One of their main goals is to develop a ‘road map’ for mobile health. We will see if that road map takes the shape of broad statements or focused projects. My guess is somewhere in between.

1.) Get a website. The first thing you’ll notice in this strange new-conference-every-week fraternity is that people aren’t just people. They’re brands too. Kinda sad, I know. But, welcome to the 21st century. The first step to branding yourself is getting a personal website. I recommend using your name. http://firstnamelastname.com. Obviously, your personal website is a blog. You should update it regularly with smart posts that show that you’re an expert about something. They should also link to other experts in your same field.

2.) Get a project. This one will take a little more time. But you need to be working on something other than just your personal website. Your project could be something you’re developing at your day job. Or it could be your own budding non-profit or for-profit company. If it is somehow trying to make the world a better place, all the better. If you have a project you get to call yourself an entrepreneur, or even better, a ‘social entrepreneur’. Conference organizers love that. Essentially you need to find a problem and make it into an opportunity. For Van Jones, that means ‘green collared jobs’; for Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon it was Global Voices; for Michael Smolens it was dotSUB.

3.) Collect anecdotes. You will be invited to conferences because a.) they think you’re a charismatic swell person and b.) because you can make a compelling presentation about your project. A compelling presentation depends on relevant and entertaining anecdotes. You need to collect at least five of these. If you plan on going to many conferences (you’re sure to see the same people, I promise), then you need at least 10 – 15.

4.) Become an expert presenter. Once you have a personal identity, a project, and a magic bag of anecdotes, you need to put it all together into an amazing visual presentation. Just like graphic designers are masters of Photoshop and Illustrator, you need to master your presentation software. All of the best presentations I’ve ever seen are done with Apple’s Keynote software, but I’ve also seen some impressive presentations with Microsoft’s PowerPoint (speaking of presentation, why is Microsoft’s website so ugly? Will they ever learn?). Whichever you choose, read the manual at least twice and practice, practice, practice. A must-read blog for all conference presenters is Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen. You can watch how the pros do it by looking at the ‘TED Talks‘ and ‘Pop!Casts‘.

5.) Don’t get nervous. Some people are naturally more comfortable speaking in front of large audiences than others. But no one is a great presenter the very first time. It takes practice and it takes experience. You need to know when to pause, when to become animated, when to make a joke, and how to time the tempo of your talk. All of those things get figured out with experience. If your first presentation goes bad, don’t beat yourself up, just think about how you want to improve it for the next time.

6.) Find the right conference. The best place to start is at a local BarCamp – something that’s grassroots. Most of these are heavily Web 2.0 and tech-centric, but others like Bil touch on social issues. Some of the so-called ‘alpha-conferences’ are the World Economic Forum, Pop!Tech, TED, Idea Festival, PUSH, and soon, The New Yorker Conference.

7.) Think collaboratively not competitively. One of the worst tendencies at conferences is for two people passionate about the same issue to argue endlessly about details with one another rather than thinking about how their two projects could complement one another. I assume this comes from either capitalism or darwinism – we’re all competing for the same sponsors, investors, and funders and so we try to (loudly) prove that our project/product is better than the competitors. Nothing is more distasteful for conference attendees, including investors and funders. Everyone will like you much more if you propose smart ideas for collaboration and partnerships.

8.) Be nice. During your conference-going career you’ll start out waiting in line to introduce yourself to speakers after they are done. And then others will wait in line to introduce themselves to you. No matter which side you find yourself on, the point is to be nice. There is always a power dynamic between who is on stage and who is in the audience. Do your best to remember that everyone is equal. ‘Cause everyone is.

9.) Reach out. Conference dinners often look like high school canteens – all the cool kids always want to sit together. If you’re a cool kid, try sitting at the chess players’ table. You’ll learn something new.

10.) Have fun. The idea of flying around the world and going to conferences where neat people talk about neat things sounds great. And, mostly, it is. But you’d be amazed how many people do it only to endlessly complain about it. Going to a conference is (almost always) your choice, so make sure it’s something you want to do. If you’re feeling stressed out, take a break. (Yes, that’s a note to myself.)

Bonus points: once you establish yourself on the conference circuit, there are two more steps. 1.) Latch onto an institution, usually a university or think tank. This gives you a salary, job security, and a title. 2.) Write a book. Everyone’s doing it.

So there you go. Not necessarily the easiest road, but if you’re willing to invest two or three years, anyone can do it.

OK, So you’ve got your own blog. You’ve started taking pictures and posting them online. But what’s more, you’ve also trained some of your friends, family, and neighbors how to publish online. And, via the blogosphere, you’ve been able to get to know others in your city who you otherwise never would have met. Great!

It gets even better. Through this new online community and conversation you have discovered that many of your daily concerns are also the concerns of your neighbors and friends. You want better public transportation. So do they. You think it would be cool to organize a weekly independent movie night. So do they. You think your community needs more venues for young musicians. So do … ok, so you get the idea.

Great ideas are often the easiest part. But … then what?

Well, if you have an extra $5,000 in your pocket you could go to a conference like TED or Pop!Tech. Or, if you’re deemed important enough you might even get invited to the most exclusive gathering of them all, the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. There you will meet all the important politicians and business leaders who can help turn your brilliant ideas into sustainable social change.

But then, what about for those of us who don’t have an extra $5,000 in our pockets? Where do we go?

Enter BarCamps. The first BarCamp, held in Palo Alto in late 2005, was organized in friendly retaliation against Foo Camp, an exclusive by-invitation-only gathering of Silicon Valley movers and shakers who are one way or another connected to Web 2.0 superstar Tim O’Reilly. According to Tantek Çelik, the first BarCamp was organized in less than one week. Its organizers had no idea that it would spread across the United States, much less become an international phenomenon. But these days you hear more about barcamps in Mumbai, Buenos Aires, and Bangkok than traditional cybercities like Seattle and Austin.

One of the defining characteristics of barcamps is their “unconference format“, which allows attendees to shape the agenda and discussion topics. There are few rules and they perhaps can all be summed up by the popular slogan “no spectators, only participants.”

Bringing the ‘unconference’ movement to the developing world are bridge-bloggers like Evgeny Morozov, a Belarussian Web 2.0 enthusiast now living in Berlin who plays a pivotal role in describing the nuances of the former Soviet Union world to a mostly Western audience. In October 2007 Morozov teamed up with Ukrainian bloggers to host the region’s first barcamp in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. That then gave birth to last week’s BarCamp Baltics, held in Riga, Latvia. As Morozov describes the gathering:

For many of our participants, attending BarCamp Baltics was the first time they ever saw what young people from other ex-Soviet countries look like: think Ukrainians meeting Latvians, or the Kazakhs meeting Lithuanians, or the Azeris meeting Belarusians — it is thanks to BarCamps that many of them finally heard about the problems of each other for the first time. I still remember the puzzled faces of many young Latvians when they heard about the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict from the Azeris — obviously, a subject they barely hear about on their national TV or radio. While I am saying this without even a pinch of nostalgia for the Soviet times, I still find it a bit sad that nowadays the actual social and cultural connections between all these countries — some of them already in EU, having so much to teach their neighbors — are kept at minimum. It was good to see us somehow trying to address that, and, I believe, quite successfully.

Given BarCamp’s tech-centric beginnings, most gatherings still focus on open source technologies, but increasingly the discussions are about how open source software can be used to affect social change. For example, from Mike Stopforth’s summary of BarCamp Johannesburg, we learn of SchoolNet Namibia, which partners with Namibian schools to help support them with open source software solutions, wireless internet access, Creative Commons-licensed educational content, and even solar-powered school computer laboratories. Kenyan blogger Wilfred Mworia tells us that November 2007′s BarCamp in Nairobi focused largely on encouraging innovation in Kenya’s tech sector.
Video game maker Wesley Kiriinya gave a presentation there stressing the need for company-school partnerships, noting the weak curriculums in local computer science departments. Meanwhile, at BarCamp Buenos Aires, which could only accommodate 150 of the 550 registrants, Alejandro Marticorena gave a presentation on how participatory media tools offer important support networks for individuals suffering from the same disease. (Marticorena has chronic kidney disease and regularly writes updates about his health and treatment status on his blog Diary of Dialysis.)

Evgeny Morozov and the organizers of BarCamp Baltics took the encouragement of social innovation one step further by organizing an “Innovation Incubator” session in which attendees applied for micro-grants to help get their projects off the ground:

The idea was to solicit project applications from our participants, show them to potential investors that we know, and see what happens. I was surprised that we received around 70 applications for ideas in all fields, from journalism to tourism. More than half of the applications were non-commercial projects, which I think is a very good sign. In the end, we decided to devote a few hours for meetings between the applicants and the investors — we spent most of Sunday on this. I think this was one of the most productive sessions at BarCamp Baltics — those who didn’t get funding got TONS of feedback, both from investors and other participants. We have definitely created more good with these 3 hours than we could ever have with 3 hours of presentations …

Despite all these powerful examples and important discussions, it should be noted that the unconference format isn’t without its pitfalls. Neha Viswanathan, who attended BlogCamp 2006 in Chennai, notes that there is a big difference between an unconference and a disorganized conference. In fact, organizing a successful BarCamp requires at least as much work as organizing a traditional conference with big-name speakers. Morozov also blogged extensively about his lessons learned during BarCamp Kyiv and BarCamp Baltics.

If you would like to organize a BarCamp in your city, there is no better starting place than Crystal Williams’ “Ten Steps to Organizing a Barcamp.” (With German, Portuguese, and French versions available.) Barcamp.org, of course, also has a valuable list of resources.