Quit

Posted on October 8, 2011 by AJ Kessler

Stephen Dubner, author of Freakonomics, also runs podcast by the same name.  He recently put out an episode titled “The Upside of Quitting” that was full of interesting thoughts.  Full transcript here, and my favorite quote below.

“A quitter never wins and a winner never quits.” In 1937, a self-help pundit named Napoleon Hill included that phrase in his very popular book Think and Grow Rich. Hill was inspired in part by the rags-to-riches industrialist Andrew Carnegie. These days the phrase is often attributed to Vince Lombardi, the legendarily tough football coach. What a lineage! And it does make a lot of sense, doesn’t it? Of course it takes tremendous amounts of time and effort and, for lack of a more scientific word, stick-to-itiveness, to make any real progress in the world. But time and effort and even stick-to-itiveness are not in infinite supply. Remember the opportunity cost: every hour, every ounce of effort you spend here cannot be spent there.

So let me counter Napoleon Hill’s phrase with another one, certainly not as well known. It’s something that Stella Adler, the great acting coach, used to say: Your choice is your talent. So choosing the right path, the right project, the right job or passion or religion — that’s where the treasure lies; that’s where the value lies. So if you realize that you’ve made a wrong choice — even if already you’ve sunk way too much cost into it — well, I’ve got one word to say to you, my friend. Quit.

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How to Earn Their Trust and Stop the Nagging

Posted on October 7, 2011 by AJ Kessler

There’s generally a big lag time between the time you make a change and the time that change is recognized.

You undoubtedly noticed this as a child.  You demonstrate you know something, or know how to perform some task, but you still get instructions or warnings each time you’re about to repeat that task.  The first time a kid uses a knife, the mom is right there, making sure he doesn’t cut his finger off.  After a few successful attempts, she might back away, but kids get that “careful with that knife!” warning for 10 years.

You’ve probably noticed this in a relationship too.  You say you’ll start cleaning your dishes, or walking the dog, or whatever.  But still, every night you get assaulted with “Did you walk the dog yet?”

The same is true for brands.  Audi cars were pieces of shit for years.  If you told your buddy you were thinking about buying one, he’d tackle you before you got to the dealership if he knew anything about cars.

This phenomena is perfectly understandable.  Talk is cheap.  I can say I know how to handle a knife, or that I’ll walk the dog, or that next year’s model is going to be much better.  But people don’t have fruit-fly memories.  Even if I manage not to cut my fingers off or walk the dog for a few days, even if next year’s model is much better, that’s just an anomaly in a long string of shaky performance.

This phenomena is also really frustrating when you do actually change.  You work hard to gain a new skill, or master some field, or build a habit, but you’re still treated like you were before the change.  You’ve only got two options to overcome this.  The first one, is to stick it out.

If you string together enough successes, that becomes the expectation.  Now, if I cut my finger off when I’m making breakfast, it’ s a horrible, unexpected accident.  If I walk the dog every night for six months, it’s weird if I suddenly miss a night.  If Audi releases a bad model, it’s “huh, wonder what happened?  Well, the next model won’t do that.”

But there’s a second, much faster option: Wow them.  If the kid practices to the point where he can show off some impressive knife skills, those mom-warnings end much, much sooner.  If Audi releases a car that tops any comparable Mercedes or BMW, the shitty reputation dies almost instantly.

Both options take a lot of work.  You actually have to make the change.  Option two requires even more work up front, but the benefit is you earn their trust almost immediately, which lets you move on to the next goal that much faster.

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Why We Really Loved Steve Jobs (It Wasn’t The Toys)

Posted on October 6, 2011 by AJ Kessler

Steve Jobs was, by all accounts, an asshole.  He was an ego maniacal, contemptuous, perfectionist who screamed at and even humiliated his employees when things weren’t to his liking.  He was petty, held grudges, and went out of his way to harm those who made his shit list.

And yet, within hours of his death, he was nearly sanctified.  The internet exploded with everyone from Bill Gates to Barack Obama lauding his accomplishments.  Even Lady Di’s untimely death didn’t get the same sort of response.  It was almost bizarre.

Yes, he did some amazing things.  He made computers accessible to “everyone else”.  He helped change the way movies were made.  He gave us a better way to take our music with us, then our computers, then our phones.

But really, the lion’s share of what he did was make existing products better through great design.  He sold some of the first personal computers and championed the modern user interface.  But, Xerox invented that technology, and someone else certainly would have put those pieces together if he hadn’t.  He hired the right people and provided the funding to make Pixar take off.  But certainly, computer animated movies would have come around with or without Steve Jobs.  He hired the right people and had the vision for the last 15 years of Apple products.  But mp3 players existed before the iPod.  Laptops existed before the PowerBook.  Smartphones existed before the iPhone.  Even tablets existed before the iPad.  Yes, he made them all far better.  But he wasn’t an Edison. He was more like the Sam Farber of consumer electronics.

But still, the outpouring of emotion and thanks was tremendous.  Why?  Why did I feel really, really sad when I heard the news (ironically while Billy Joel’s Only The Good Die Young was playing in the background…no shit)?

I think we loved Steve Jobs because he loved what he did.  His passion in everything he did was obvious.  He poured his life into making the best products he could, even when he was staring into death’s maw.  He had this all consuming purpose.  He once told Stephen Wolfram that NeXT, his computer company in between stints at Apple, was what he “wanted to do with his thirties.”  He didn’t think of time as the period before his shift ended, or in terms of days until the weekend, or in terms of weeks until his next vacation, or even in terms of year long projects.  He thought in terms of decades.  He wanted to make something so good that it would take nearly 20% of his life to do it.

I think we loved Steve Jobs because we all wish we had even a thimble full of that passion and dedication.

I think we loved Steve Jobs because we all wish we had that sense of purpose he appeared to have.  That unwavering sense of knowing exactly where he was going and exactly what the fuck he was doing.

Ya, on the surface, he made shiny toys for rich people.  But nobody’s that dedicated to making frivolities.  He believed he was making tools that made life easier, that brought people together, that helped the handicapped live better lives.  And he was.

I think we loved Steve Jobs because he showed us it was possible to start in your garage and actually leave a dent in the universe if you believed in your cause and dedicated yourself to it.

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Embracing Death

Posted on October 5, 2011 by AJ Kessler

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

– Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech

It’s so easy to read these words, be profoundly moved by them, vow to remember them, and then go right back to being buried under your work and never think about them again.  But you should think about them.  Every day.  Set some time aside, just one or two minutes, every morning.  It’s incredibly useful.

One more thought:

So many people go through life just trying to make it through.  They do enough work to put food on the table and a roof over their head.  They hope their bosses don’t hassle them and their work passes muster.

Then there’s people like Steve Jobs and Richard Branson.  These people have a mission.  The list of things they want to accomplish is so long that they know they’ll never get to it all.  Because of this, they wring every fucking drop out of each day they have.  What a way to live.

Click here to read or watch Jobs’ commencement speech.

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How To Not Care When The Shit Hits The Fan

Posted on October 4, 2011 by AJ Kessler

Successful people plan.  People who don’t plan rarely become successful.  You might hit the lottery, but if you want to succeed, you need a plan.  Easy enough.

But one plan is probably not enough.  Now, someone who makes a plan and then stops thinking about it is way better off than someone who doesn’t plan at all, but he’s still not in the best position he could be in.  Why?  Well, most plans go to shit.  (Or, “life is what happens while you’re making plans”, if you want to be couth.)

Really successful people make contingency plans.

Really successful people don’t rely on every step of their plan falling neatly into place and being executed perfectly.  Really successful people realize that their plans rely on other people who are at best uninterested or preoccupied with their own lives, and at worst lazy, incompetent, or evil.

This applies to every aspect of life.  Let’s take traveling.  When you’re traveling with a defined itinerary (even something as simple as: must be in London on Thursday, then Paris on Saturday, then Barcelona on Wednesday), if you just make one set of plans, everything might go perfectly.  But, part of your plan is likely to encounter a problem.  Whether your driver doesn’t show up, or the hotel loses your name, or you get sick, or the fucking baggage handlers go on strike and shut down the airport, or whatever.  Shit happens.  If you want to ensure everything goes smoothly, you make backup plans.  I’ve arranged for Tony can pick us up if Al doesn’t show.  We can definitely get a room at this hostel if something happens at our hotel.  I can take a bus up to Girona and take a flight out of there if the Barcelona airport shuts down for 3 days because the fucking baggage handlers go on strike.  Hell, Tim Ferriss makes sure he has the best nearby hospitals on speed dial wherever he goes.

Weekend plans, trips, educations, career paths, relationships.  It’s extremely helpful to examine it all through the eyes of a pessimist on a regular basis.  What can go wrong?  How can this get screwed up?  When is the worst time this guy I’m relying on could drop the ball?  Who might intervene to make this unworkable?

Shit will hit the fan at some point.  Guaranteed.  Expect it.  It’s easier to lay down some plastic tarp now than it is to scrape it off the carpet after the fact.

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A 10 Second Guide To Mastering Capitalism

Posted on October 3, 2011 by AJ Kessler

Capitalism is the ability to accumulate capital, which can then be deployed at will.

The key to accumulating capital is delaying gratification.

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Slow Heroism

Posted on October 2, 2011 by AJ Kessler

Some people risk their lives in briefs act of heroism.  They pull a fellow soldier to safety during a gunfight, or land a plane in the Hudson after it loses both engines, or chase down the guy who stole an old lady’s purse.  Really admirable shit.  When we hear about these kinds of things, we immediately think about whether we could have or would have done the same thing.  If we think maybe we couldn’t have, we give these guys medals and parades.

Some people spend their entire lives chasing down ideas that they hope will work or building things they think will be useful.  These things aren’t heroic in the same obvious way as charging into a burning building to save a kid.  But spending your life figuring out how to feed a couple billion people, or risking your career to try to find proof of life elsewhere in the universe, or giving up a hedge-fund salary to educate the world for free, is pretty fucking heroic.  Ironically, when we think about these sorts of accomplishments, we don’t think about whether we could have done the same thing.  Most of us couldn’t even imagine where to start or how to develop the necessary skills.  Most of these guys don’t get medals or parades.  But, the slow heroes are as, if not more, important to society than the flashy ones.

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Why Do We Do It This Way, Again?

Posted on October 1, 2011 by AJ Kessler

Two newlyweds were spending their first Christmas together.  Wanting to celebrate properly, the new wife asked her mother for the famous Christmas Ham recipe.  The husband was excited.

He watched as the wife prepared to dutifully follow the recipe.  Curiously though, she started by slicing off a thick slab of meat from each end of the ham.  The husband asked why she was throwing away so much good ham.  “That’s just what the recipe calls for”, she told him.  “Just wait till you taste it.”

And sure enough, the ham was spectacular.

The next year, the newlyweds went to the wife’s parents’ house for Christmas.  The mother, known as a phenomenal cook, made the Christmas ham, as she had every year for decades.  She too sliced a thick slab of meat off each end of the ham.  The husband, now assuming this was the secret to the great ham, asked the mother about the technique.  “That’s just what the recipe calls for”, she told him.  He asks where she got the recipe, and the mother says that her mother invented it in the old country.

The next year, the whole family got together, including the grandmother.  Christmas ham again.  Finally, the husband had the opportunity to ask the grandmother about the recipe and why it called for all the wasted ham.

The grandmother said “Well, in the old country, things weren’t like they are now.  We used to cook this ham all the time.  When we got to America, the hams!  They’re so big!  We didn’t even have a pan big enough to cook them in, so I had to cut some off of each end just to make them fit.”

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Minimum Viable Personality

Posted on September 30, 2011 by AJ Kessler

Excellent thoughts here on cultivating personality in your products.  Note that just about everything can be thought of as a product.  If you produce reports for a living, the report is your product.  You can create a brand out of that report.  If you paint houses for a living, your product is someone’s painted house.  The house itself is hard to brand, since you probably don’t have a lot of creative leeway, but you’re not.  Your trucks aren’t.  Your tools aren’t.  Everything you use can be infused with the personality of your choosing.

How?

Well, it depends on what sort of personality you’re shooting for.  Pick a successful product or company with a personality you want to emulate, and break down how they do it.

Google should be the most boring company on the planet.  99% of their money is made on returning search results.  But, they even manage to inject some fun into that process.  When you think of Google, you think of a nerdy, quirky, smart, and maybe fun company.  They doodle. They provide a ton of fun, free products. Their products have easter eggs.  Everyone wants to work there, not only for the free food.  Google has devoted itself to a culture of science and progress and fun, and this permeates everything they do.

Take a company like Zappos or Nordstrom, who are obsessed with customer satisfaction.  Whether it’s getting help ordering late-night pizzas or returning tire chains, these companies are known for relentlessly working to make their customers happy.  These individual stories come at the expense of the bottom line, but any lost profits are made up with subsequent sales and with an enormous boost in goodwill.  Maintaining this personality takes a ton of work though; hiring the right people, training them, and constantly reminding them of what the company stands for.  Zappos even prints their core values on their shipping boxes.

Or, as Giant Robot Dinosaur says:

HAVE PERSONALITY EASY. ANSWER THREE QUESTIONS:

1. HOW YOU CHANGE CUSTOMER’S LIFE?

2. WHAT YOU STAND FOR?

3. WHO OR WHAT YOU HATE?

NOW HAVE MISSION, VALUES, ENEMY. THAT ENOUGH FOR MINIMUM VIABLE PERSONALITY.

 

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Stop: You Don’t Know His Motivation Until You Ask

Posted on September 29, 2011 by AJ Kessler

A friend of mine once bought a house for roughly half of what it was worth.  The market was still booming.  The seller certainly could have gotten more.  Why would anyone make such a terrible deal?

John G. emailed to ask about negotiation tactics, but he inadvertently brought up an extremely important point.  He was assuming that the other side wouldn’t accept an offer because it was clearly below market price.  This is a common assumption.  It stems from two things.  First, most buyers are chiefly concerned with price.  Because people’s ego interferes with their rationality, this leads them to believe that everyone else is chiefly concerned with price as well.  Second, most people avoid confrontation at all costs.  Making an offer below market price, or “lowballing” someone, feels confrontational to many people.  Thus, people are terrified of making them.  They think it’s rude or disrespectful or something.

But they never stop to consider what a lowball offer is.  If someone needs to sell immediately, is 50% of market a lowball offer?  If someone doesn’t care about money, is 50% of market insulting?

The key to negotiating is finding out what the other person really wants.  Almost all of the of the time, he wants as much money as he can get in his situation.  Those last three words are key.  Everyone’s situation is different.  A seller’s situation might be that he wants to help out a couple who’s just starting a family, or to get out of town fast, or just screw over his ex-wife.  You’ll never know if you don’t ask, but assuming a seller is only interested in price is foolhardy.  Rarely does a person have all of the time in the world to get the best possible price.

Also, if it isn’t immediately obvious, this principle extends well beyond the world of negotiation.

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On Being Too Good

Posted on September 28, 2011 by AJ Kessler

When Roger Bannister broke the 4:00 barrier, a wave of runners suddenly poured through the hole he had smashed.  Before Bannister, a sub four minute mile was unthinkable.  After Banister, well, who cares if you ran a 3:59?  So did 20 other guys, last week.

A similar phenomenon has been happening in the world of piano.  There is now a large group of people who can easily, and flawlessly, play what were once impossible arrangements.  You might think this is great for the field, but, predictably, it leaves people jaded.  As music critic Anthoni Tommasini notes, “With pianists getting better and better, so many are so good that, paradoxically, I am less impressed by virtuosity.”

This is the problem with attempting to compete in any rigidly defined field.  At a certain point, it doesn’t really matter how good you are at hitting someone else’s notes in succession if a lot of other people can do that too.  If that’s all you can do, even if you’re the best in the world at it, eventually the field will catch up.  At that point, you’re replaceable.  All that skill you’ve honed over the years is suddenly far less valuable.  (Remember, #1 gets disproportionately more of the pie than #2.)

It’s far more valuable to become as good as necessary.  Good enough to do the stuff you want to do.  Then you can focus your effort on learning to be creative.  Because nobody can catch up to you if you’re always making something new.

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The Secret To Success Is Failure

Posted on September 27, 2011 by AJ Kessler

Dominic Randolph is the headmaster at an elite New York prep school.  His clientele is made up of offspring of New York’s elite, a group of rich and powerful people who fork over $38,500 for pre-kindergarten.  These kids, you might say, don’t exactly want for anything material.  But that lack of financial strife means they might grow up to lack something more important.  So how does Randolph give these kids something their parents’ money can’t buy?  How does he give them character?

As Peter Drucker famously said, “What gets measured gets managed.”

Angela Duckworth, a Ph.D student at Penn, studies success.  Unsurprisingly, she’s found that people who accomplished great things often combined a passion for a single mission with an unswerving dedication to achieve that mission, whatever the obstacles and however long it might take. She decided she needed to name this quality, and she chose the word “grit.”  Randolph, after connecting with Duckworth, her Penn psychology department chair Martin Seligman and charter school magnate David Levin, came up with six more important character traits: zest, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity.  These seven traits formed the basis of an evaluation system.  A “character report card”.

Teachers answer a two page questionaire with statistically realiable indicators like ““This student is eager to explore new things” (an indicator of curiosity) to “This student believes that effort will improve his or her future” (optimism).”  The beauty of this system, beside the fact that its actually accurate, is that it tells you where you’re failing.  It identifies not only your strengths, but your flaws.  This enables you to correct them before they can really ruin you.

There’s a slight problem with this story.  Randolph hasn’t gotten to employ this system.  Other schools, like Levin’s KIPP charter schools have, but Randolph has only been able to implement a watered down version, one where kids aren’t actually criticized for their shortcomings.  Why?  The great problem that he identifies with his elite prep school kids is their parents.  The ones that call the teacher to try to get their kid an extension on the term paper, or who try to negotiate up their grades.  Randolph’s kids aren’t allowed to fail.  And failure, it turns out, is what builds character.

Without even the possibility of failure, kids never actually have to overcome anything.  When there are no obstacles in the way, you never develop any grit.  Randolph fears that without experiencing failure, his kids will never really experience success.

Read the full article here.

Take the “grit” test here.

See the character report card here.

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Selling Out Your Dream For $140 A Week

Posted on September 26, 2011 by AJ Kessler

You’ve got two job offers:

Option 1 is a job at a fantastic company, with great people, doing something you want to be doing.

Option 2 is a job at a good company, with good people, doing ok work.  But, it pays $10,000 more than Option 1.

Which do you pick?

This might seem obvious when you’re sitting there reading this, but when you’re faced with the choice, a ton of people choose the extra $10,000.  I have a lot of friends who chose that big firm accounting job over the fun startup, or that big firm law job over the boutique one.  They really, really wanted to work at the startup or the boutique firm, but the big firm job paid $5000, or $10,000, or $20,000 more.  Even when they’re miserable after 6 months, they keep plugging along.  They’re beholden to that number.

The saddest part is, when I point out that an extra $10,000 a year amounts to about $200 a week, or maybe $140 a week after taxes, I can see them die a little bit inside.  They never thought about it like that.

Now, if a $140 a week will make a substantial difference in your life, if it’s the difference between paying the minimum balance on 4 maxed out credit cards and eating three cups of ramen a day versus gaining some financial stability and eating like an adult, by all means, sell out your dream for a few years.

But remember, you’re likely going to be at your job 10 hours a day, five or six days a week.  You’re likely to be thinking about your job more like 16 or 18 hours a day.  Unless you’re making under $50k a year, the extra $140 a week isn’t going to change your life a whole lot.

Is your dream really that cheap?

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Test Your Way To A Raise

Posted on September 25, 2011 by AJ Kessler

Testing is fundamentally important to increase your odds of success.  Yes, you may have been born an athletic freak.  You may write a screenplay that strikes the right tone at the right time and is wildly successful.  You may come out with the best cupcake right when cupcakes become the latest fad.  You might hit the lottery too.  But,  it’s not exactly the way to ensure that you’ll be successful someday.  Testing is.

The best part is, you don’t have to be a CEO, or a web 2.0 proprietor, or an athlete to use testing to improve your life.  Literally anyone can benefit from it.

I spoke to an old friend today.  He’s waiting tables in Los Angeles while he tries to get his career going.  I asked him how it was going, and he said he’s having a blast.  We got to talking about finances and he tells me he’s steadily been making more and more money.  “From serving food?” I asked.  “How’s that?”  All he said was “I started testing it.”

Of course.  On any given night, he interacts with maybe 100 people, all of whom show up to his restaurant for roughly the same reason.  Perfect testing grounds.  By testing the way he acts, what he says, and what he does, he’s managed to substantially increase his tips.  For example, being overly outgoing and extremely attentive doesn’t work well.  Patrons at his restaurant like a waiter who’s quiet, nice, and always there when they need you, but not constantly hovering around.  When people ask for a recommendation, he doesn’t say “Oh, everything’s good.”  He says “Everything’s fantastic, but my favorite thing on the menu is X.  My second favorite thing on the menu is Y.”  Most of the time, that’s what people will order.  He also discovered that personalizing every check with a short note is extremely effective.

But, he tells me his coup de grace is the free dessert.  When someone doesn’t order a dessert, he’ll size them up.  If they’ve been nice, and look like they can afford it, he’ll buy them dessert.  With his own money.  Desserts at this place are around $10 to $15, but he can buy them for about a third of that.  And, he’s discovered, that most people will be so pleased by the gesture that they’ll happily leave at least the menu price of the dessert on the tip.  Brilliant.

So the lesson is: you can test anything.  No matter where you work, or what industry you’re in.  If it’s somewhere where there’s a lot of human interaction, there are endless things to test.  How you approach.  How you open.  How you offer.  How you respond.  How you close.  Your appearance.  How you speak.  How much you smile.  If you’re in a cubicle or a mailroom, these same things can be tested, with colleagues and superiors, but you can also test every system and every thing you do throughout the day to figure out the best way to do it.

J. Paul Getty visited one of his factories one day and saw one of his men sealing an oil drum with 49 drops of metal.  He asked the man what he thought the fewest number of drops would seal the drum, but the man had no idea.  Getty said to try 47.  The drum leaked.  Getty said to try 48.  The drum was sealed.  That single drop of metal, times the millions of barrels he produced every year, saved a substantial amount of money.  Imagine what would have happened if the man had asked the question instead of Getty.  He certainly wouldn’t have spent the rest of his career sealing oil drums.

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Should I Go To Medical School?

Posted on September 24, 2011 by AJ Kessler

A lot of bright young people consider going into medicine.  Like any profession, it has its downsides, but, at least to me, it was pretty obvious that those downsides were much bigger than in many other fields.  But, not having gone through it myself, I can’t exactly speak to what it’s like.  For those considering it, here’s a fascinating rant from Ali Binazir.  The short answer is, no.  Don’t do it, unless

You have only ever envisioned yourself as a doctor and can only derive professional fulfillment in life by taking care of sick people.  You should become a doc because you always wanted to work for Medecins Sans Frontières and your life will be half-lived without that.  You should become a doc because you want to be the psychiatrist who makes a breakthrough in schizophrenia treatment.  You should become a doc because you love making sick kids feel better and being the one to reassure the parents that it’ll all be OK, and nothing else in the world measures up to that.

But woe betide you if there’s anything else, anything at all, that would also give you that fulfillment.  Because pursuit of medicine would preclude chasing down that other dream and a whole lot more – a dream that could be much bigger, much more spectacular, much more enriching for yourself and humanity than being a physician.

Additionally, see this Hacker News thread.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a discussion on the internet where more people agree about something.

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