Dan Ward

Consultant and Author

ChangeThis Manifesto 1.0

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SC Manifesto1When I was in high school, I wanted to host Saturday Night Live when I grew up. I figured as a juggler, magician and fire eater, I could go out there and do some tricks on TV. What I didn’t realize is that 99% of the people who host SNL are actually plugging their new TV show, movie or album… and the likelihood of me ever being in that situation is pretty low. Um, duh.

In 2006, long after leaving high school, I kinda did the same thing with The Simplicity Cycle. I’d heard about a new website called ChangeThis.com, where people could publish short “manifestos” about creativity, innovation, design, or whatever else they might be interested in. Readers could download them for free, and it sounded like a cool way to share this crazy little Simplicity Cycle idea I’d been working on. Like my high school self, I didn’t notice that most of the manifestos were written by authors with a new book to publicize. Or if I did notice, I didn’t care because while I did not have a book yet, I had an idea. And I wanted to share it.

So I sent in a proposal, it was accepted, and I wrote The Simplicity Cycle Manifesto (version 1.0).

It’s not a bad piece, but it’s not awesome. It’s actually a lot like the first article from 2005 (see previous post). Most of the basic ideas are present, and much of the later nuance is absent. I greatly prefer the updated Manifesto I published in 2015 when the book came out (more on that in a future post). But if you’re interested in what this Simplicity Cycle thing looked like 9 years ago, feel free to download it.

And looking at it now, I see there are plenty of manifestos at ChangeThis that are not plugging a book. It’s a great site, with a ton of fascinating content and new stuff added all the time. So whether you have a book or not, I heartily recommend considering ChangeThis as an outlet for sharing your super cool ideas.

NEXT WEEK: Adventures In Self Publishing!

The Simplicity Cycle Meets The World

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SC Article

I started thinking about simplicity, complexity, goodness, and design in 2002. It took a while before these thoughts were ready to share.

The first public mention of The Simplicity Cycle was in an article for Defense AT&L magazine. It was Nov 2005 and I was now a Major in the Air Force, assigned to the Air Force Research Lab in Rome NY.

Before publishing the article, I hashed through it with my little group of un-indicted co-conspirators. We called ourselves Project Blue Lynx, a nerdy play-on-words for the “blue links” on websites and HTML documents. This handful of creative, energetic, and generous friends helped me think through the layout, test out the concept, and identify a few gaps that needed to be filled.

I don’t recall that the article got much attention right away. I definitely recall thinking there was more to be said about it. I recall feeling like I had more writing to do. While this was just my latest in a long series of articles on a wide variety of topics, and while it didn’t make the same splash some other articles had made, I was pretty sure I hadn’t seen the last of this idea.

How about you? Got an idea kicking around in a notebook somewhere? Have you tried writing an article about it, a short treatment of the concept’s basic elements? There are precisely a kajillion outlets out there (I counted every single one), hungry for new content and ready to share your article with the world. Actually, counting your own blog (super easy to create!), there are a kajillion and one. But the first step is to actually write the article.

NEXT WEEK: The Manifesto!