Introduction
I have not been able to decide on a title for this article because I have had an intense debate with myself on whether this article should ever be written. Due to my indecision, I simply gave up trying to title it and decided to called it an epilogue. I also want you to understand that I fought many mental battles with the content of this article before finally deciding to hit the publish button. Things were added, things were removed. Things were re-written. I only hope that the remaining content tells a story that you can understand and appreciate.
Ultimately, I decided to publish this because I think all good stories should have an epilogue. Epilogues give you one final chance to appreciate the story, and I hope that this article gives you one more insight to my story about writing 3danim8’s Blog. If I can tell you what this article represents in a single sentence, I would say that it discusses the story of the driving forces that lead to the creation and ultimate completion of 3danim8’s Blog.
Before I decided on the title “epilogue”, I thought of some other possible titles for this article, even before I wrote it. The titles I envisioned are shown below.
My Failure To Generate Engagement While Conducting A Blogging Experiment
My Blogging Experiment, My Gripe, and My Promise To Myself
Blogging and Bragging are Only Different By Two Letters
This Is The Article That I Never Should Have Written
If those titles don’t whet your appetite for what you are about to read, I don’t know what will.
I am hoping that after you read this article, you will understand my trepidation about publishing this and my inability to title this piece. To explain myself properly, I have to go backwards in time.
About A Month Ago
Today is November 18, 2015. Seven days ago I ended a love affair, of sorts. I stopped writing my technical blog. I really enjoyed writing my blog and I loved the main characters in my blog.
This wasn’t a snap decision, as it took me about 900 days to get to the end point of a long-term experiment. Once I decided that I hit the stopping point, I changed gears and wrote a very public love story. That was a very fun thing to do and I think I’ll do some more of that later, including telling you what it is like to go through such a difficult break-up.
Now that I got the light-hearted stuff out of the way, I have to get down to business. Real business. Tough business because this article was not easy to write.
About Two Months Ago
At the Tableau conference, I heard a talk by Daniel Pink that lit my brain up like the lights on a Christmas tree. My neurons were firing and connecting, flashbacks were occurring and I had a eureka moment of a lifetime as I will explain.
Daniel’s discussion of motivation perfectly explained why I created 3danim8’s Blog. Prior to listening to Daniel, I had no idea of the research related to motivation. I never heard of the concepts that generate motivation, which include autonomy, mastery and purpose.
To understand what I mean by that, you can watch this 10 minute video for the complete explanation of the research behind these findings. Extracted from this full video, I offer about a half of video as an excerpt (Video 1) that explains why I wrote 3danim8’s Blog.
About 2.5 Years Ago
I did a very crazy thing starting in June 2013. I began a blogging experiment. What exactly does that mean? You will have to read this article to find out.
If I could tell you to take a pause from reading this, I would do so now. I would like you to consider what I just said. I said that I conducted “An Experiment”. I want you to appreciate that conducting this 2.5 year experiment was equivalent to completing the work for a MS degree, or possibly even a Ph. D. It wasn’t easy and it was work that took a lot of time to complete.
During this “Experiment”, I spent countless hundreds of hours formulating topics, writing and revising articles, recording videos, and publishing over 160+ articles, many of which were technical in nature. All of this work was being conducted under the umbrella of my “Experiment”.
I wrote everything from single, simple articles, to a full-five article manifesto on completing a modern-day analytics project using Alteryx and Tableau. That work took well over 100 hours to complete by itself.
I exposed my brain to new ways of thinking by creating innovative solution techniques, with insights gained through trial and error testing and by explaining techniques I developed while completing real-world work experience. I also subjected myself to an inordinate energy expenditure. I drove myself very hard for a long time and that wasn’t always a good thing for me.
During “The Experiment”, I created and monitored various blog performance metrics. I also used some process improvement techniques to see if I could become a better blogger. The reason that I did these things had to do with my monitoring of “The Experiment”. The data collected during the experiment was real, focused, and useful in many ways.
The Experiment in Total
From the research I have conducted, this is one of the longest-lasting official blogging experiments that any individual has ever attempted, actually conducted, survived, and decided to write about.
In fact, I cannot find any publications that describe this type of “long-term” blogging experiment. There are published reports of people writing a blog article on a daily basis for a month (as an experiment), or possibly even two months. The people who did that work generally complained about how hard it was for them to accomplish their goal.
In several of these cases, the intent of the experiment was to “gain marketing share” or to improve some other measure of marketing-speak. My experiment wasn’t designed to answer or quantify those types of buzzwords. However, if you want to know how hard it is to write a daily article for a technical topic like Tableau, just ask Nelson Davis what he experienced when he created 30 Tableau articles in 30 days, starting on April 1, 2014. I can guarantee you that it was a huge challenge for him to accomplish that goal because he told me all about it.
There are many blogs that have existed much longer than 2.5 years, but those blogs are ongoing bodies of work that were never designed to be an official “Experiment”. These bogs belong to either (1) really fantastic and prolific people that write the blog for the fun of it (i.e. Andy Kriebel, Russell Christopher), or (2) are professional bloggers that are very prolific writers. These people create a lot more material than what I did, but these people get paid to do it. It’s their job.
Therefore, based on what I can find in the literature, the 3danim8 blogging experiment appears to have some unique characteristics. For this reason, I think that this “Blogging Experiment” should have some value as an “Experiment”. I would think that people would be interested in finding out what was learned by completing this experiment. I think I may be wrong about that, however, and this fact will lead me to telling you about my gripe.
Why Should My Experiment Have Value?
When I refer to value, I am not talking about monetary value. This “Tableau Blogging Experiment” never had anything to do with money. I made no money on that blog and I never wanted to.
I am also not referring to the value imparted to readers by the content of the articles. I know that many of these articles created value because so many wonderful people connected with me to tell me how this work either helped them, inspired them, or otherwise. I have come to understand that type of value very well. I also learned to appreciate those interactions. That type of value humbled me and made it possible for me to complete this “Experiment”.
The type of value I am talking about is different and it has to do with the “Value of the Experiment” itself.
I did everything in this “Experiment” according to my own rules, but I followed very specific guidelines that I first learned back in junior high school. I followed the scientific method (Figure 1) in conducting this experiment.
Figure 1 – The Scientific Method defined.
Why did I do that? I did that because I am a classically trained scientist. I conducted a “Scientific Experiment” that happened to take 2.5 years to complete and happened to be called my “Tableau Blogging Experiment”.
I created and executed this “Blog Experiment” using the scientific method (Figure 2). There were no influences impacting any of my decisions and I was very consistent with the spirit and intent of a scientific experiment while writing this blog.
Figure 2 – The Scientific Method graphically portrayed.
The driving forces behind creating and conducting this “Experiment” were several. I wanted to:
Help people learn to love using Tableau and Alteryx like I had experienced.
Help people use software effectively by exploring their creativity so they could do their jobs with more happiness and enjoyment.
Share the passion I have for my work and my life.
Answer a single question (click here to see that what that question was).
To test my hypothesis.
Hypothesis, you ask? What is that (see Step 3 in Figure 2)? I’ll get back to that a little later in this article to explain why my hypothesis is an integral piece to this story.
I Have A Gripe About This Experiment
My gripe is that I was completely unable to entice anyone to give a damn about the meaning and value of the experiment itself. Period. It can’t be said any simpler than that.
Now before you either agree or disagree with what I just said, you have to give me the courtesy of explaining myself. I think I deserve that opportunity and I hope that you can read my words with an open mind, to see things from my point of view.
My gripe should not be construed as a personal frustration, because it is not personal, nor is it really emotional. As I have written many times, I have never intended for this experiment to be about me. I was simply the story writer and one of the characters.
The gripe I have is related to a few things I have observed:
Nobody ever questioned why I called this blog a “Tableau Blogging Experiment”.
Nobody ever asked me to describe my hypothesis.
Not a single person, group of people, or company has asked me a single question about the results of the “Blogging Experiment” itself.
Nobody has asked me what I REALLY learned from the experiment. Not Tableau, not Alteryx, not Rich Roll, not David VonderHaar, not WordPress, not Data Science Central, and not even a single reader of the blog (I’ll caveat statement #4 later on, with a late-breaking insight).
The final observation (#4) is really the most surprising and disappointing result of all, from my perspective.
Although I have given dozens of people the opportunity to ask those questions about my experiment, nobody did. I would have also expected that at least one person out of the thousands of people that read 3danim8’s Blog would think to ask me some simple questions like these:
“Wow, that was a huge effort to conduct this experiment. Was it worth it? “
“What did you learn in doing this experiment?”
“Why do you call this an experiment?”
“What made you decide to conduct this experiment?”
For over 900 days, I tried really hard to engage people in the concept of the “Experiment”, but ultimately I was not successful. My scientific experiment was a complete failure with respect to engaging people about the experiment.
What this means to me is that nobody has stopped to think about the meaning of this particular experiment. The experiment came and went, and that was it. There was no discussion on what the results of the experiment were. I think people thought I was just using a buzzword when I decided to call this an “Experiment”. I can assure you that I was not just using a buzzword.
To understand what I mean about engagement, I offer you a story that exemplifies what I had hoped to achieve by conducting this blogging experiment.
A Personal Engagement From Another Time and Another Place
It was many years ago (either 2000 or 2001) when I met an amazing guy one evening in the parking lot of a Books-A-Million store in Knoxville, TN. His name was David Michael Anthony. If I could turn back the clock, I would do so to that day so that you could see and hear David. He was 6’2”, about 230 pounds of raw, unadulterated power. He was a man on a mission, and his mission was to end hunger for the homeless.
Back 15 years ago, I could have shown you my own photos of him as well as thousands of photos of him riding his bike (Figure 3) anywhere from Florida to Alaska. There were countless articles written about him, he had his own website, satellite phone, real-time tracking system, etc. David was doing real-time analytics before we had even thought of the words.
Figure 3 – The journey of David Michael Anthony.
David also happened to be pulling a 1,240 pound trailer behind a mountain bike. Yes, that is right, a 1,240 pound trailer. As I already said, David was very strong both mentally and physically and he was dynamic, interesting, and focused on a good cause. Some people said that he was somewhat unusual or strange, but I thought he was awesome.
David told me he was training to be on the US national team to have a chance to make the 2004 Olympics as a road cyclist and/or time trialist. He wanted to be so strong on the bike that nobody could out-perform him. So he rode his bike, day after day, mile after mile through every conceivable environment. He gobbled up the worst that Mother Nature could throw at him and he overcame all the odds.
Tens of thousands of miles stacked up on one another as he crossed the US from east to west, west to east, north to south and every which way it could be done. He rode in Alaska blizzards, driving Florida rainstorms, hailstorms, pulled that trailer over the highest mountains, and crashed going down them. He broke many bicycle frames, chains and wheels due to the stresses he imparted on that equipment. All the while, he raised money for the homeless. In a way, he was a kindred spirit to the great song writer Harry Chapin, because Harry was also on a mission to end world hunger.
So on this particular early evening when I saw David resting in a parking lot, I went over to him and I “engaged him”. I asked him what he was doing and why he was doing it. I knew that what I was seeing was very special. It was so obvious that I couldn’t help myself by taking the time to get to know him. I needed to engage him and my response to him was automatic. This engagement was irresistible because this situation was so unique.
At the time, I was riding my bike to and from work, about 36 miles a day, along with an Olympic cyclist that I worked with. So the next day I convinced David to join us for lunch, which he did. The next day, I saw a man eat about half of a restaurant as my friend told him what he needed to do to prepare to make the Olympics. My friend was an authority in this regard because he had made the US pursuit team in 1996 as a 42-year old cyclist. In other words, my friend knew what it would take for David to reach his goal. When our lunch was over, David rode away into the Tennessee hills and I never saw him in person again.
But see him again, I did. Hundreds of times as I watched his journey continue. I tracked him via his blog and the TV segments that were filmed along the way. In some ways, I admired his free spirit and iron will for completing his mission.
Now about 15 years later, the information about David’s story is quickly fading with the passage of time. One day about 5 years ago, I decided to see if I could find David. Instead of being able to connect with him again, I saw an article that indicated that David had died when he was hit by multiple cars as he tried to run away from a minor traffic accident he was involved in. That discovery made me sad.
Here was a guy that tried to make a difference, and did make a difference to a lot of hungry people. His story was never really told, in total. I wish someone had written a book about what he did. I would have bought that book. I would still love to read his journals if they exist.
Why I Feel Like I Failed In My Blogging Experiment
Since I have been unable to engage anyone with the concept of my experiment, it seems to me that this experiment might have been a huge waste of time. From my perspective, it simply doesn’t matter to anyone (except me) what happened, what was learned, and what can be changed to make blogging even better. Either people don’t think I learned anything useful, or they simply don’t care. Either way, it makes me feel like I failed.
That result is a huge disappointment to me as a scientist because the composite work I did in the experiment had no impact. The individual contributions on an article by article basis may have helped people, but the bigger picture was completely missed – even by WordPress itself.
With over 409 million people reading over 20 billion WordPress pages each month, I would have thought that they might have an interest in hearing what I learned because of the uniqueness of my experiment. Nope – I was wrong.
I even tried to bait WordPress into asking me the question after sending them a link to my final article:
WordPress: Very cool article. Thanks for sharing!
Me: You’re welcome. Although my blog was technical in nature, I have written a lot about blogging lessons learned.
WordPress: Nothing wrong with a technical blog. Though the experiment is over, we hope you’ll write whenever you’re up for it. Cheers!
Their response actually recognized that I conducted an experiment (which surprised me a bit), but then they failed to engage. They just encouraged me to write sometime in the future.
What I hoped WordPress would have said would have been something like this:
Oh, really? We would like to know what have you learned from this experiment! We would be interested in hearing about that since we have a few million bloggers that might be able to use the information you uncovered!
Nope. They didn’t listen either. Nobody did.
At this point, I could document a fairly extensive number of other interactions where I tried to engage people into asking me about the experiment. I’m not going to do that because it will just sound like I’m whining. I know that this article may have already left that impression, and that is why this is the “article that I should never have written”. I certainly didn’t want this experience to end this way.
Before I conclude this line of thought, however, I’d like you to consider this. Imagine that you had an idea that you thought was really important. After some contemplation, you decided to test this idea in an experiment and it took a long time to do. You told your friends, family and co-workers about it because it was something you really liked doing.
While you were doing the work, people would talk about your work with you and some would even share your enthusiasm. Then one day you proclaimed, “I’m now done with testing that idea”. After you made that statement on that day, nobody asked you whether you proved your idea. No person asked you: “Did you prove your hypothesis?” or even “what did you learn?”.
Before I Wrote the Blog
Before I wrote 3danim8’s blog, I believed that I had made an important discovery related to how we are now learning. I realized that reading blogs was how my real-time learning as a scientist, mathematician, programmer, data analyst, and process improvement consultant was happening.
I found real-time solutions to the problems I was trying to solve, simply by reading blogs. This development was clear to me ever since the beginning of the world wide web. Online content was spreading and making me smarter.
I never really took the time to understand that my improvements were a result of the selfless work of so many people taking their time to write blog articles. I learned techniques, I grabbed code snippets, I improved my ability to solve problems, all thanks to anonymous writers that realized before I did, the writing blog articles is important. Blog articles represent the work of teachers that are available to you at any given moment. They are there when you need them. How great is that?
This insight took me years to understand because of the changing nature of search engines, internet connectivity, the emergence of multiple blogging platforms, and the explosion of ideas people were documenting during their creative times. The fact that blogging gave people an outlet for their creativity without the need for peer-reviewed journal articles was simply astounding to me. Now thanks to Daniel Pink, I have a better idea why people do this type of work in their “spare time”.
I wondered if my insight was true. I wondered if bloggers were changing the way we were learning. So I created a hypothesis. I then spent 900 days testing that hypothesis. I proceeded to complete the experiment. But to this day, I have never written the complete account of what was learned from the experiment. In other words, I have not completed step 7 shown in Figure 2. Although I have completed the testing phase of the experiment, I haven’t written my conclusions.
The Methods Used For Testing My Hypothesis
Even though I was not able to engage anyone in the concept of my “scientific experiment”, I wonder about a couple of questions. First, I wonder if anyone followed the experiment from beginning to end. Secondly, I wonder if anyone considered why I used the following techniques in the experiment:
Used music, lyrics, and videos as a compliment to my writing
Created multiple-piece articles, including interweaving multiple, multi-piece articles at the same time
Used extensive hyperlinks to my other articles and previously published work
Developed stories over time
Showed examples using personal data
Tried to engage with well-known entities
Explained very personal aspects of my life
Developed and explained advanced mathematical formulations
Developed and explained simple techniques
Conducted extensive benchmarks studies of Tableau
Challenged the software companies to fix problems, improve documentation, or extend capabilities
Wrote about the work of many members of the Tableau and Alteryx communities
Wrote about company cultures
Used humor in technical articles
Recognized key accomplishments of people that are making a difference in how we learn by reading blogs
Used graphics created by the software products I was explaining
Took the time to explain in great detail configuration settings used in Alteryx and Tableau
Used numbering and descriptive captions to explain the content of figures and tables
Wrote some articles with personal stories embedded and other articles simply with technical details
Used multiple blogging themes throughout the experiment
Used no social media promotion of the blog other than a single Twitter tweet per article
Used predictive analytics on the blog readership
Implemented analytics for every article written
Categorized every article written
Used Tableau Public to track the blog development and content over time
Provided code, data, and workbooks for readers to use
Wrote about sports, stats, players and performance visualized with analytics
Why I published interim results within the timeframe of the experiment in for the form of “lessons learned”
I could go on, as this list is quite extensive.
For the record, these were all techniques I was testing as part of the experiment. The comprehensive evaluation of the success and/or failure of these techniques has never been published. In fact, the complete analysis has not been finished. I’m considering writing the article to complete Step 7 of Figure 2. That article will be titled: “The Results of 3danim8’s Blogging Experiment”.
On the Brighter Side (Always end on a good note!)
I tried to create engagement about the Tableau Blogging Experiment with dozens of people, like I had experienced with David Michael Anthony. I was sure I could do it. It was so obvious I could do it because the Tableau community is so supportive, vibrant and willing to discuss all topics that are Tableau. It was a no-brainer, or so I thought.
I came close to achieving the elusive goal four times. I’ll present the three most recent examples first, followed by a historical encounter. As a bonus, I will also describe something that happened today.
Encounter #1
Within a few minutes of publishing the article that announced the conclusion of my experiment, I received a phone call from Joe Mako. I would say that if anyone understood the value of what I was doing, Joe would be that person. He understood the effort, commitment, and the value of the totality of the content I produced. Joe understood the value of not only the individual articles, but he also understood the overall contribution to the knowledge base being produced for Tableau and Alteryx. We discussed these types of things many times throughout the course of the experiment.
The reason Joe called me was to make me an offer. He offered to house the entire content of 3danim8’s Blog on a server that he maintains. He told me that he didn’t want to lose this information because he understood its value. For this offer, I was flattered. Unfortunately the effort required to move this huge volume of work to another server would be very extensive, so I think I’ll just keep paying the $100 bucks per year to have WordPress hold the information. I really appreciated that phone call from a guy that I consider as a very good friend of mine. Joe is a consistently excellent thinker and person and is someone I can always count on in so many ways.
Encounter #2
About a week or so after the conclusion article was published, I received a somewhat harsh criticism from a girl that I have never met. She challenged me in a way that nobody had ever done by writing a comment on my final article. Figure 4 shows her comments to me.
Figure 4 – The challenge given to me regarding my next project – The Jett Black Experiment.
Even though this comment was critical in nature, she questioned my usage of the word “experiment”. Her perspective was that my “experiment” was more about self-promotion than of an honorable study. She had concerns about potential negative effects I might have on my son, even going as far as saying she wasn’t sure that she would like to have that type of “Dad experience”.
Even though I bristled at that comment when I received it, I appreciated it more than any other comment I had ever received. Her courage to challenge me through this comment is the type of engagement that I hoped to have about the experiment.
So engage, I did. I wrote to her to further explain my motivations for the Jett Black Experiment. I explained why I wanted to do this for my son. I gave her the context she was looking for. In the course of a day, I made a new friend, a person that I can respect because she is a critical thinker and took the time to engage me in the way she did. That was awesome, so thank you Brittne Nelson!
Encounter #3
Elissa Fink of Tableau Software is my data rockstar. I have been watching videos of her doing her thing on stage at Tableau conferences for a few years now. When I engaged her at the Tableau conference after the keynote address, she was kind and willing to listen to my rambling in the midst of a very stressful time for her.
I told her about why I was stopping this blog. I told her about my next experiment. She immediately got it. She understood and she offered me three amazing gifts to help me in my work.
First, she gave me a front row seat for Neil Tyson Degrasse’s keynote. Second, she offered to give me a Tableau license so that I could teach Jett the software. Third, she promised me that if I completed the Jett Black experiment, that Jett would be given a chance to give his presentation at TCC 2018.
I promised her that I wasn’t crazy and that we would be ready. Based on our first quarter of the experiment, I can tell you that I’m now more confident that ever that WE WILL BE READY.
There is a reason why Elissa was the first person from Tableau that I ever followed on Twitter. She is a visionary – so thank you Elissa for following through with everything you said you would. You are a gem.
Encounter #4
The earliest professional engagement (Figure 5) I had during the blogging experiment happened within 6 months of starting and it was from a lady named Anna. She worked for Experfy, which is a product of the Harvard Innovations Lab. She recognized that 3danim8’s blog was different than many other technical blogs, so she sent me an email. In that email, she extended an invitation for me to write a guest blog about big data analytics. Two years later, I now I think I might be ready to write that article and I know what I want to say. Can you guess what it would be?
Figure 5 – This inquiry was sent to me in Jan 2014, or 6 months after I began writing my blog.
Encounter #5
Today it happened. It is 12/9/15, or 922 days after the blog began, and about a month after it ended. Someone actually asked me why I conducted the experiment!
For proof of this, just watch the 1 minute video (Video #2) shown below. Many thanks to my new friend, Jonathan Hodge. Jonathan is a person with an abundance of energy coupled with a gregarious nature, and a lot of talent to boot. Just in case you are wondering, I had just met Jonathan a few minutes before recording the video.
Now I feel relieved.
Final Thoughts
I have three questions for anyone reading this article.
Do you want to make a guess at what my hypothesis was when I formed it in mid-2013?
Do you want me to tell you what what I learned from this experiment?
Is anyone out there interested in seeing a final report, which means I finish Step 7 of the scientific method?