One Easy Step To Flatter People, Show You Care, and Demonstrate Your Dedication

Posted on March 14, 2012 by AJ Kessler

Don’t be ashamed to need help.  Like a soldier storming a wall, you have a mission to accomplish.  And if you’ve been wounded and you need a comrade to pull you up?  So what?

– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations Book 7 ¶ 7

This goes even further.  Asking for help shows you care about your work, it shows you’re dedicated to doing the best job possible, and, best of all, it flatters the person you’re asking.  If you’re asking for their help, they must be smart, wise, and experienced, right?

Your first instinct shouldn’t be to ask for help (that gets annoying, fast), but it shouldn’t be your last instinct either.  When appropriate, no matter what situation you’re in, don’t hesitate to ask for help.

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Busyness

Posted on March 13, 2012 by AJ Kessler

Cal Newport over at Study Hacks makes an interesting observation about which MIT professors are more likely to disappear from campus during breaks:

Interestingly, the biggest predictor of a professor leaving was status: the more important a person’s work, the more comfortable they were taking time off. Here’s my hypothesis: once they built confidence in their understanding of value — how to identify what really matters and what it really takes to produce it — they gained the confidence required to push everything else aside.

…

It reminds me of an important point: creating value is unrelated to busyness. When you find yourself — as I sometimes do — working long hours, day after day, reacting and e-mailing and hatching schemes, it’s useful to remember that you’re working more than some of the world’s most respected and impactful thinkers.

The hard part, of course, is that it’s easier to be busy than it is to be valuable — but this shouldn’t stop us from every once and a while taking advantage of a nice day to shut things down and spend a few hours trying to figure out the difference.

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Unimaginable Sameness

Posted on March 12, 2012 by AJ Kessler

What’s the worst part about prison?

One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates.

Having never been in prison, I can’t speak to this, but it seems plausible that the  “unimaginable sameness” of the time left to serve would be among the worst aspects of incarceration.  Sameness is a punishment in its own right.  Not just in the repetitious Chinese Water Torture sort of way, but in the “prevent you from experiencing the variety of life” sort of way.  In that regard, it may be the ultimate punishment.

“Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards”  – Bob Dylan

If that’s true, why do so many of us yearn for ubiquitous sameness?  The American Dream was sold to the world as a 1500 square foot box in the suburbs with a patch of grass out front, one car, a gold watch after you grind out 40 years at the same company, and the hope that your kids could have the same opportunity.  For much of the world, this stability may be something to aspire to, but in a nation of such plenty, why do so many wish this upon so many?

I think the answer is convenience.  It’s emotionally convenient to overlook emotional incarceration when you provide people with stability.  It’s financially convenient for people to give up their own dreams in exchange for that stability.  It’s politically convenient to be able to point to a city full of jobs that require a skill anyone can be trained in.  Nearly anyone can serve time, but that doesn’t make it something to aspire to.

But, that’s what people want: to trade even minimal risk for security.  To give up control of their lives in exchange for the illusion of stability.  The irony is that when you make that pact, you have neither control nor stability.  You will always be at the mercy of someone else, often just a single someone else.  As many people have found out in the last 4 years, if your boss doesn’t like you, or your company’s products aren’t selling, or your CFO was embezzling, or any one of a hundred things that are completely beyond your control, you’re job can be taken away from you.

The smarter way is take your fate into your own hands.  Develop a skill set that is highly valuable, and you will never  need to answer to just a single person.  Clients or projects might be taken away, but your skills can’t.  Do this, and you can craft a career and a life where you get to do something different each day.  Where unimaginable sameness is something you can’t even imagine.

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All You Can Do?

Posted on March 11, 2012 by AJ Kessler

John Mayer was supposed to release a new album six months ago.  A granuloma near his vocal chords required surgery and prevented him from finishing the record.  Once the surgery was completed and his throat given a month or so to heal, which means no talking, he set his touring machine in motion to support the upcoming album launch.  Yesterday he announced that the granuloma had returned.  That means more surgery, more throat rest, and no tour.  Not only is that a staggering amount of lost income, it’s got to be a pretty emotional blow after thinking you’re in the clear, medically.  His attitude is inspiring:

Nothing feels worse than having to break the stage down before the performance, and I mean nothing. I love this band you were going to hear, I love the guys and girls I work with, and the only thing that stops me from devolving into a puddle of tears is knowing that it’s a long life, and the greatest gift in the world is being able to create music no matter what the circumstances. So these are the new circumstances, and I’ll find a way to make it mean something. That’s all you can ever do.

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Regret

Posted on March 10, 2012 by AJ Kessler

Interesting explanation for something we have all experienced:

Imagine that you have a flight at 8:00 in the morning. Which would be worse, arriving at the gate, breathless, at 8:02, just after they’ve closed the door, or at 10:00, thanks to a couple unplanned delays in your morning. Obviously, the first scenario would cause far more misery, but why? Either way you’re stuck at the airport until the next flight, eating the same bad, overpriced food, missing whatever you were supposed to do after your planned arrival, whether that’s meetings or a stroll on the beach.

The difference between the two scenarios is the intensity of the regret you would feel—a great amount in the former and a lot less in the latter. As it turns out our happiness frequently depends not on where we are at the moment, but how easily we perceive we might be elsewhere, or in another, better situation. With the missed flight, you’re in the airport either way, but when it’s a close call, you can think of a dozen little things that would have changed the situation, and each one brings a pang of regret. So, the closer we are to this other possibility, what we refer to as counterfactual, the unhappier we become.

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Why Your To-Do List is Hurting You

Posted on March 9, 2012 by AJ Kessler

Interesting thoughts from the Harvard Business Review:

Stop making to-do lists. They’re simply setting you up for failure and frustration. Consider the to-do lists you’re currently managing: how many items have been languishing since Michelle Bachman was leading the field for the Republican nomination? How often do you scan your list just so that you can pick off the ones you can finish in two minutes? How many items aren’t really to-dos at all, but rather serious projects that require significant planning?

There are five fundamental problems with to-do lists that render them ineffective.

The paradox of choice. Barry Schwartz and Sheena Iyengar explored the problems created by having too many choices. Schwartz points out that increasing the number of choices we have — Single-ply or two-ply? Quilted or flat? Aloe-infused or extra soft? — actually increases our negative emotions [PDF] because our sense of opportunity cost increases. In complementary research, Iyengar has shown that our brains can only handle about seven options before we’re overwhelmed. It’s easier for us to make decisions and act when there are fewer choices from which to choose. Looking at the 58 items on your to-do list will either paralyze you or send you into default mode: checking email for an hour instead of doing real work.

. . .

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Failure Gives Perspective

Posted on March 8, 2012 by AJ Kessler

That was the lowest moment I had yet encountered in my life. The phones in my office were even quiet, which had never happened before. In fact, I suddenly had a lot of quiet time to think, and I reviewed the situation objectively.  It became clear to me that part of what got me into this situation was that I had lost my perspective and started to believe the news stories about me having “the Midas touch” when it came to business. In other words, I had become complacent. My momentum wasn’t where it should have been.

…

It’s odd, but in retrospect, I think having a near wipeout made me a better businessman and certainly a better entrepreneur. I really had to think in out-of-the-box ways to keep from being buried alive.

– Donald Trump

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I Could Never Make $xx,xxx,xxx…

Posted on March 7, 2012 by AJ Kessler

Only 1/10th of 1% of the people in the United States have a net worth of more than five million dollars ($5,000,000).

Only 1/10th of 1%?  That’s 357,000 people!  That’s more than the population of New Orleans, or Honolulu, or Cincinnati.

If you could get just 10% of the richest 1/10th of 1 percent of the U.S. population (just 35,700 people) to give you $100, you’d have $3.57 million.  Or, you could get just 1% of them (3,570 people) to give you $1000.  Or just .1% of them (357 people) to give you $10,000.

No matter what your number is, there are a lot of ways to get there, but having a plan is the first step.  The skills required to get 357 people to give you $10,000 are different than the skills required to get 357,000 to give you $1.  Figure out what skills you need for the path you want to take, and go from there.

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Ordinary People

Posted on March 6, 2012 by AJ Kessler

You asked me if an ordinary person, by studing hard, could get to be able to imagine things like I imagine things.  Of course.  I was an ordinary person who studied hard.  There’s no miracle people.  It just happens they got interested in these things, and they learned all this stuff.  They’re just people.  There’s no talent or special miracle ability to understand quantum mechanics or miracle ability to imagine electromagnetic fields that comes without practice and reading and learning and study.

– Richard Feynman

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The Only Motivation Tip You’ll Ever Need

Posted on March 5, 2012 by AJ Kessler

San Franciscans and New Yorkers spent years fighting to get nutrition information like calorie counts listed on menus.  After all, if people only knew what kind of crap they were shoveling into their maws they’d surely change their behavior, right?

Looks like not.   Stanford Researchers found that calories per transaction dropped a whopping 6% at New York, Boston, and Philadelphia Starbucks locations after the chain began posting calorie counts in 2008.  A measurable result, yes, but skipping one week’s venti java-chip frappuccino per year isn’t exactly going to trim Homer Simpson’s waistline.

The information alone isn’t enough.  Cosmopolitan folks in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia know what a calorie is, and they know that eating too many of them will make you fat.  The number itself isn’t enough to motivate meaningful change.

But, frame it in terms of the number of minutes required to burn off those calories, and consumption drops a whopping 40%:

One asked if they knew that the average fizzy drink contained 250 calories, another asked if they knew it was equivalent to ten per cent of their recommended daily intake.

A third asked ‘Did you know that working off a bottle of fizzy drink or fruit juice takes about 50 minutes of running?’

Results showed that providing calorie-related information did cause sales to drop by over a third (40 per cent), but that the physical activity equivalent was most effective, reducing soft drink sales among teens by half. 

Humans are very good at rationalizing away things we don’t want to do.  We tend to automatically frame things to expend the least amount of energy and expose ourselves to the least amount of risk.  Biologically, this is a rational way to go through life.  But, if you want to excel in modern civilization, this is a terrible way to go through life.

That is, unless you can figure out how to use that hardwiring to your advantage.  If your object is to stay skinny, framing a decision whether to eat another donut in terms of the number of minutes it would take to run that donut off is an excellent way to use that caveman brain of yours to make the healthier decision.  If your object is to save money, framing a decision whether to buy those shoes in terms of how the number of hours of work it would take to raise or replace that money is an excellent way to use loss aversion to prevent impulsive action.

While it’s naturally easier for negative goals, like not eating or not spending, it’s not too hard to come up with motivational framing for positive goals.  (“I need to start X project, because otherwise it’s going to take me 40 years of work, instead of 5, to get the job I want.”)

Figuring out how to properly frame things is the only motivation you’ll ever need.

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god Is Not Great

Posted on March 4, 2012 by AJ Kessler

I recently reread Christopher Hitchens’ magnum opus against religion, and thought I’d share some of the excerpts I found most interesting on this pass.  No matter what you believe in, the book is fascinating, and littered with the venomous prose you’d expect from Hitchens.

On the threat of nuclear extinction by Muslims:

It is a tragic and potentially lethal irony that those who most despise science and the method of free inquiry should have been able to pilfer from it and annex its sophisticated products to their sick dreams. (p. 59)

On the origins of belief:

But I am compelled to remember what I know — which is that there would be no such churches in the first place if humanity had not been afraid of the weather, the dark, the plague, the eclipse, and all manner of other things now easily explicable. (p. 65)

A prototypical aside:

(Charles Darwin was born in 1809, on the very same day as Abraham Lincoln, and there is no doubt as to which of them has proved to be the greater “emancipator.”) (p. 66)

Deconstructing wordplay:

Actually, the “leap of faith” — to give it the memorable name that Soren Kierkegaard bestowed upon it — is an imposture.  As he himself pointed out, it is not a ‘leap’ that can be made once and for all.  It is a leap that has to go on and on being performed, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary.  This effort is actually too much for the human mind, and leads to delusions and manias.  Religion understands perfectly well that the “leap” is subject to sharply diminishing returns, which is why it often doesn’t in fact rely on “faith” at all but instead corrupts faith and insults reason by offering evidence and pointing to confected “proofs.” (p. 71)

On the absurdity of mythos:

If we lost all our hard-won knowledge and all our archives, and all our ethics and morals, in some Marquez-like fit of collective amnesia, and had to reconstruct everything essential from scratch, it is difficult to imagine at what point we would need to remind or reassure ourselves that Jesus was born of a virgin. (p. 96)

On Buddhism:

A faith that despises the mind and the free individual, that preaches submission and resignation, and that regards life as a poor and transient thing, is ill-equipped for self-criticism.  Those who become bored by conventional ‘Bible’ religions, and seek ‘enlightenment’ by way of the dissolution of their own critical faculties into nirvana in any form, had better take a warning.  They may think they are leaving the realm of despised materialism, but they are still being asked to put their reason to sleep, and to discard their minds along with their sandals. (p. 204)

On scapegoating:

Our everyday idiom is quite sound in regarding ‘scapegoating’ with contempt.  And religion is scapegoating writ large.  I can pay your debt, my love, if you have been imprudent, and if I were a hero like Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities I could even serve your term in prison or take your place on the scaffold.  Greater love hath no man.  But I cannot absolve you of your responsibilities.  It would be immoral of me to offer, and immoral of you to accept.  And if the same offer is made from another time and another world, through the mediation of middlemen and accompanied by inducements, it loses all its grandeur and becomes debased into wish-thinking or, worse, a combination of blackmailing with bribery. (p. 211)

The Orwell disciple on the totalitarian nature of religion:

The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey.  The resulting tyranny is even more impressive if it can be enforced by a privileged caste or party which is highly zealous in the detection of error. (p. 212)

A baron or king might compel you to pay taxes or serve in his army, and he would usually arrange to have priests on hand to remind you that this was your duty, but the truly frightening despotisms were those which also wanted the contents of your heart and your head. (p. 231)

In order to be a part of the totalitarian mind-set, it is not necessary to wear a uniform or carry a club or a whip.  It is only necessary to wish for your own subjection, and to delight in the subjection of others.  What is a totalitarian system if not one where the abject glorification of the perfect leader is matched by the surrender of all privacy and individuality, especially in matters sexual, and in denunciation and punishment –“for their own good”– of those who transgress? (p. 232)

 

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Why Sharing Your Goals Dooms You To Failure

Posted on March 3, 2012 by AJ Kessler

If you want to accomplish something, it makes sense to tell people about it.  After all, you might be able to collaborate with someone already working on something similar, or gain some ideas and insights from someone who has done it before.  If nothing else, you’ll get some moral support, and be held accountable now that other people expect you to do what you’ve publicly committed to doing.

The problem is, we humans don’t seem to work that way.  In fact, sharing your goals often has just the opposite effect: when we tell people about doing something in the future, we’re less likely to actually do it.  After all, we’ve already gotten part of the benefit: recognition, praise, and support from those around us for even thinking about attempting something.  Since our brain’s pleasure center has been mollified, you lose some of that fire to actually go out and do it.

Derek Silver explains some of the research behind this:

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Kafkatrapping

Posted on March 2, 2012 by AJ Kessler

Excellent way to describe this fallacy:

One very notable pathology is a form of argument that, reduced to essence, runs like this: “Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression…} confirms that you are guilty of {sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression …}.” I’ve been presented with enough instances of this recently that I’ve decided that it needs a name. I call this general style of argument “kafkatrapping”, and the above the Model A kafkatrap.

My reference, of course, is to Franz Kafka’s “The Trial”, in which the protagonist Josef K. is accused of crimes the nature of which are never actually specified, and enmeshed in a process designed to degrade, humiliate, and destroy him whether or not he has in fact committed any crime at all.

There are many variants on the kafkatrap as well:

The Model C: “Even if you do not feel yourself to be guilty of {sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression…}, you are guilty because you have benefited from the {sinful, racist, sexist, homophobic, oppressive,…} behavior of others in the system.”

The Model D: “The act of demanding a definition of {sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression} that can be consequentially checked and falsified proves you are {sinful, racist, sexist, homophobic, oppressive}.”

The Model L: “Your insistence on applying rational skepticism in evaluating assertions of pervasive {sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression…} itself demonstrates that you are {sinful, racist, sexist, homophobic, oppressive,…}.”

The Model M: “The act of arguing against the theory of anti-{sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression} demonstrates that you are either {sinful, racist, sexist, homophobic, oppressive} or do not understand the theory of anti-{sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression}, and your argument can therefore be dismissed as either corrupt or incompetent.”

The Model P: “Even if you do not feel yourself to be guilty of {sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression…}, you are guilty because you have a privileged position in the {sinful, racist, sexist, homophobic, oppressive,…} system.”

The Model S: “Skepticism about any particular anecdotal account of {sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression,…}, or any attempt to deny that the particular anecdote implies a systemic problem in which you are one of the guilty parties, is itself sufficient to establish your guilt.”

Model T: Designated victims of {sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression} who question any part of the theory of {sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression} demonstrate by doing so that they are not authentic members of the victim class, so their experience can be discounted and their thoughts dismissed as internalized {sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression}.

The whole essay is definitely worth the read.

 

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Stop. Breathe. Think.

Posted on March 1, 2012 by AJ Kessler

One of the things law schools sear into students is the ability, and tendency, to argue.  An early emphasis on being able to argue both sides of any case breeds people who argue just for the sake of argument.  Shockingly, this behavior doesn’t evaporate when the dean hands you a diploma.  And so we get a highly educated, highly paid, and often powerful class of people who argue not only both sides of a case, but over every detail and throughout every conversation.  And so we get television shows and movies that glamorize these peoples’ ability to verbally eviscerate anyone at anytime.  And soon this glamorization spreads to police procedurals and medical dramas, then to sitcoms.  And then, we get to watch empty housewives who think they’re Sherlock Holmes, only wittier, argue about nothing, and doing so badly.  And now, arguing is de rigueur throughout society.

The problem with adopting this practice is that you’re not Sherlock Holmes.  Sherlock Holmes doesn’t exist.  He’s witty and pointed and always right because Arthur Conan Doyle had the luxury of thinking about each word that would come out of his mouth.  And then revising those words.  And then revising them again.  Until they were perfect.  That doesn’t happen in real time.

Even the Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins of the world, who go up on stage and debate at length, seemingly without effort, can do so only after a lifetime of intense study and deep understanding of the subject at hand.  If you put either one of those guys in a room where  Richard Feynman or Neil De Grasse Tyson was holding court, their first response would not be to argue, even if what was being said was controversial.  Their first response would be to listen.  To digest what was being said, and what it meant.  To think.

As the Sweet Science slowly stumbles to its death, we’ve replaced it with a new form of pugilism.  But like boxing, nothing good can happen if you argue unprepared and out of form.  At best, your opponent will also be unprepared and out of form, and you’ll both look like two guys, 100 pounds overweight and 10 years past their prime, that everyone tries to shout out of the ring.  At worst, you’ll get your ass kicked.

So when someone says something, especially if it’s controversial or surprising, stop and think.  Don’t react immediately.  If you must react immediately, ask a question.  Let it sink in.  Then ask another question.  If you’re going to launch into an argument, make sure you actually understand what position you’re arguing against.

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No Adjectives

Posted on February 29, 2012 by AJ Kessler

A tip to improve your writing:

Use adverbs instead of adjectives.

Abstractly, this is simple.  Difficult in practice.  Instead of describing something’s attributes, you’re forced to either craft each sentence around a verb, or go the Bob Dylan route and turn your adjectives into nouns.

The benefit here is that you are no longer able to passively describe things.  Instead, you must demonstrate through action.

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