Priorities

Posted on September 9, 2011 by AJ Kessler

Power is out.  Pretty much everywhere south of Los Angeles.  Our entire operation shut down immediately.  Even in an office where everyone basically just reads and writes all day, a loss of power is totally crippling.

There was nowhere to go to get distracted, except the beach, since power was out county-wide.  We still had cell phones, but calling or web surfing was almost impossible after about an hour.  What the hell were we gonna do?

Most of us got the chance to evaluate our priorities.

People went home to spend time with their wives and kids.  People worked on their hobbies.  People hung out, swapped stories, and built bonds with people, which is easy when everyone’s in the same situation.  Why don’t we do this more often?

These sorts of events are great times to reflect and reevaluate.  Some of them, like Pearl Harbor or 9/11, can change the priorities of an entire generation or nation.  But most often, these thoughts are fleeting and no real change happens.  That’s why it’s important to schedule this type of reflection and do it routinely.  If you continually do this on a regular basis, you will eventually force yourself to make the changes you want to make today.

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The Easiest Way to Change Behavior

Posted on September 7, 2011 by AJ Kessler

Barriers.  It’s all about barriers.

A barrier is anything that makes an action more difficult.  It can literally be a huge physical barrier, like the Berlin Wall, or it could be nothing but air.

If you want to stop eating so much crap while you work, don’t keep the candy dish at your desk.  Keep it across the room, just far enough so you have to get up if you want a piece.  Just that few feet of air can literally save you five pounds of fat on your ass per year.

If you want people in the office to communicate more, don’t stick them in separate offices.  Arrange their desks so constant communication is inevitable.  If you want to use your treadmill more often, don’t stick it in the garage, put it directly in front of your TV.

Barriers are powerful.  So powerful, in fact, they even work on the king of the jungle.  As told by the Harvard Business Review:

I was on an old, rustic train lumbering through the plains of Harambe, Africa (at Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Orlando, Florida) when I noticed a majestic lion sitting on a rock on top of a hill, in perfect view.

“Aren’t we lucky the lion is out,” I mused to the “ranger” on the train with us.

“He’s always out there, sitting on that rock,” he responded.

“Really?” I said. “How do you get him to stay in that exact spot?”

The ranger just smiled.

It turns out the rock he sat on was temperature controlled. It was warm on cold days, cool on hot days. No need to train the lion or tie him to the rock or hope he likes the view. Just make the rock a place he wants to sit.

 

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Your Horsepower Is Irrelevant

Posted on September 6, 2011 by AJ Kessler

An engine can only produce so much horsepower.  If you’ve got a 300 horsepower engine, it’ll produce 300 horsepower.  Sure, you can expend a lot of effort, bore those cylinders out and up the horsepower 10%, but you’re still in about the same range.  No matter what you do, your engine’s never going to produce as much power as the guy who starts with a 500 hp Chevy big block.

But, that doesn’t mean your 300 hp engine can’t kick the shit out of that 500 hp Chevy.  How?

A lot of different ways.

That Chevy big block, by itself, can’t move at all.  You’ve got to hook it up to a clutch, then a transmission, then a crank shaft, then a differential, then some axles, and then, finally, if you throw some tires on there, you can start to go somewhere.  That Chevy big block might produce 500 hp at the crank, but, due to inefficiencies along that chain, may only produce 300 hp at the wheels.  And, even with all that power, if you attach that thing to bicycle wheels, you’ll never move at all: they’d just spin and spin until you melted them down into nothing.  On the other hand, if your 300 horsepower engine is hooked up to a perfectly efficient drive train, you may barely lose any horsepower at all.

That big block might also be made out of cast iron.  Cast iron is heavy, and weight is the enemy in racing.  Turns out, it’s not so much about raw horsepower, but about horsepower per pound.  A motorcycle with a 100 hp engine can smoke even track cars with five times the horsepower.

You can focus on the engine.  You can bore out those cylinders, trying to eke out as much raw horsepower as you can.

Or, you can focus on the rest of the system.  You can make the drive train as efficient as possible.  You can throw out the back seats, and the air conditioner, and the paneling to get rid of as much dead weight as you can.  You can save up for the appropriate size tires so you get as much traction as possible without picking up excess drag.  You can go out and study every inch of the track until you master it.

If you do the latter, you can flog that 300 hp engine so it performs to its absolute maximum capability and you’ll beat the guy with the 500 hp engine who never figured out how to get his power to the ground, every single time.

 

 

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How Important Is Boredom?

Posted on September 5, 2011 by AJ Kessler

A thought provoking article by Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, in the Wall Street Journal:

If you have a smartphone in your pocket, a game console in the living room, a Kindle in your backpack and an iPad in the kitchen, you never need to suffer a minute without stimulation. Yay!

But wait—we might be in dangerous territory. Experts say our brains need boredom so we can process thoughts and be creative. I think they’re right. I’ve noticed that my best ideas always bubble up when the outside world fails in its primary job of frightening, wounding or entertaining me.

Basically, Adams argues that we’re too connected.  With so much stimulation, we don’t allow ourselves the quiet time to process it all.  Is he right?  After all, most ideas come from other ideas.  We hear stuff, it stumbles around in our brains, we think about it in different ways, we think about how to improve or tweak it, we combine it with some other idea we heard somewhere else, and out pops something new.  So, if we stop hearing new ideas, are we really going to be as productive?  Are we going to be able to come up with those new ideas as readily or as frequently?

Well, Adams’ thinking definitely comports with my own feelings.  Hell, I even wrote about the importance of meditation, of all things.  I think a structured reflection time is extraordinarily beneficial for just about every aspect of life.  But, how much of this unstimulated time do we really need?  An hour a day?  An hour a week?  Four weeks a year?

It’s hard to say.  It seems like 30 minutes to an hour a day of low or no stimulation time is a good place to start.  I would include low-stimulation things like shower time, or driving without the radio on, or even dinner with a significant other where you have a deeper-level dialogue.  That’s my new target, anyway.  This is going to supplement the hour or so reflection time I have scheduled per week.  We’ll see what kind of benefits it brings…

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Selling Technology Sucks: Start With The Goal Instead

Posted on September 4, 2011 by AJ Kessler

How do you sell $10 Billion worth of product a year?

One of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards for the technology”. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it. And I made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room. And I got the scar tissue to prove it. And I know that it’s the case.

And as we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple, it started with “What incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer?” Not starting with “Let’s sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and then how are we going to market that?” And I think that’s the right path to take.

– Steve Jobs

 

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Inherent Problems With Effective Philanthropy

Posted on September 3, 2011 by AJ Kessler

One is that in order to learn how to do something well, you have to fail sometimes. In order to fail, there has to be a measurement system. And that’s the problem with most philanthropy–there’s no measurement system. You give somebody some money to do something and most of the time you can really never measure whether you failed or succeeded in your judgment of that person or his ideas or their implementation. So if you can’t succeed or fail, it’s really hard to get better.

– Steve Jobs

There have been a round of new rebukes leveled at both Steve Jobs’ and Apple’s philanthropy efforts in the last week.  Regardless of what you think about the issue, Jobs raises an solid point in the above quote.  If you can’t readily measure the effect of something, how do you know you’re money is doing any good?

The effect of giving a meal to someone can immediately be seen: that person doesn’t go hungry, or depending on where you are, starve to death.  But is that the measurement you’re looking for?  Is sustaining a miserable life enough?  Is that free meal creating dependency?  Is that dependency keeping evil people in power?  All of this stuff is extremely difficult to measure.

Look at breast cancer research.  It gets more funding than any other cancer.  If I donate to the Susan G. Koman foundation, am I using my dollars effectively?  Honestly?  I have no idea.  Breast cancer is bad, but there’s already a ton of money behind it.  Would my money be better spent battling colon cancer?  Or the nearly 100% fatal pancreatic cancer?  Or heart disease, which kills 10 times as many people each year as breast cancer?  It’s hard to say because it’s so hard to measure results.

Me?  I want to build a school in east Africa.  I love that place, but its people need help, which I think can only come through education.  But how do I know any school I built would have a meaningful impact?  At this point, I have no idea.  Maybe it’s the worst way to spend the money.  One of the biggest breakthroughs we need is a way to obtain better data on the stuff we want throw money at.  We need demographics data that can help us understand not only what problems are going on where, but various inputs that are contributing to those problems.  Hopefully with brilliant minds like Gates behind some major philanthropy dollars, we can figure this out.

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It’s Not God-Given Talent

Posted on September 2, 2011 by AJ Kessler

Professional athletes have god-given talents.

Movie stars have big breaks.

Musicians get discovered.

Executives have connections; uncles or fathers or friends who got them into the business.

These are all variations on the same excuse we use to justify someone’s success.

Of course we would be just as successful if we had Manning’s Arm or Peterson’s speed.

Of course we could be stars if we had Pitt’s bone structure, or got cast in that early Scorsese movie.

Of course we could be rock stars if Weintraub had seen us at that gig.

Of course we would be billionaires if our dad’s had been into real estate.

In reality, these are all bullshit excuses.  Do you know how many people have god-given ability?  People who can run 4.4 40’s or sing like Adele?  Who look like Johnny Depp?  Just watch American Idol, or X-Factor, or America’s Got Talent, or any of their hundreds of international spin-offs: there’s thousands and thousands and thousands of people with this level of talent.  Walk around Los Angeles or New York for a day.  There are much better looking people than Johnny Depp waiting tables and selling shoes.  For every rock star, there’s hundreds of session musicians with more talent and ability in their little toes than the guy they’re backing up.  For every session musician, there’s thousands of amateur Joe’s who could blow those rock stars away with their talent.  These guys never reached the next level not for a lack of talent, but a lack of effort.

You think Miley Cyrus is worth 9 figures because she has some great talent?  Or because her dad was a hack who made one horrifically bad but sarcastically popular song 20 years ago?  She doesn’t have the talent to even make the cut to get on a season of American Idol, let alone past the first round.  She’s been successful because she busts her ass.  She spent a decade doing nothing but working.  Showing up early, staying late, hitting her marks, being competent.

Tom Brady was picked 199th in the 2000 draft.  198 teams didn’t miss this future Hall of Fame quarterback’s god-given talent.  He’s a future Hall of Famer because instead of hanging out in bed with Gisele every morning, he gets up at 5am and hits the gym.  He studies game film on the way home after a game.  Tom Brady is successful because he fucking hustles his ass off, not because Zeus hit him with a lightning bolt.

Stop deluding yourself.  Stop using your lack of god-given whatever as an excuse.

 

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Chasing Glamor

Posted on September 1, 2011 by AJ Kessler

I want to be an architect so I can design amazing buildings.

I want to be a lawyer so I can help people and win big cases.

I want to be a rock star so I can make music.

These professions seem so fulfilling.  They seem fun.  They’re things I would pay somebody just for the opportunity to do.  They seem . . . glamorous.

The reality is that 99 percent of the work in any field isn’t glamorous.

If you want to be an architect, there’s going to be years of reviewing drafts and doing the math on other people’s designs.  Even if you reach the Frank Gehry level and get to design the super interesting, cutting edge buildings like the Disney Concert Hall, most of your time is still going to be spent doing less fun work, like making sure your building doesn’t fall down.

If you want to be a big trial lawyer, there’s going to be years of reading and writing, researching, pouring through documents; excruciating, soul-crushing work.  And that’s before you ever step foot in a courtroom.  Then it’s years more just to get competent.

Hell, even if you look at the life of a rock star, 99% of it is sitting in a van with four smelly dudes, traveling to gigs, handing out CDs, busting your ass to build a following, or, if you’ve really made it, staving off the boredom and trying not to develop a heroin problem.

It’s hard to remember that the grass always looks greener on the other side.  When we look at successful people, we see the final product.  We see the polished metal building, the huge jury award, the face-melting guitar riff.  We don’t see the hours of agony that went into making those things come to life.  In order to be a really successful designer or lawyer or rock star, you’ve got to REALLY want to design buildings, or help people, or make music.  You’ve got to love the glamorous 1% of your job so much that you’re willing to put up with 99 days of somewhere between mild discomfort and pure agony for every one day of ecstasy.

It’s tempting to chase the glamorous lives other people appear to be living.  Just remember, for every hour of glamor, there were 99 spent down in the mud.

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The Million Dollar Answer

Posted on August 31, 2011 by AJ Kessler

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

– Mark Twain

We spend a lot of time and money worrying.  We walk around thinking about earthquakes and hurricanes and terrorist attacks.  We buy insurance for our houses and our cars and our stuff and our bodies and even our lives.  We plan for these things that, in most cases, won’t ever happen to us.

Yet, not so strangely, we don’t do the same on the positive side.  Even most successful people never take home run swings.  They go to school for 20 years, settle into a profession, and grind away until retirement.  Maybe they time the housing or stock market right once or twice and pick up a few doubles along the way, but for the most part, like shitty drivers, they get in one lane and never leave.

Sebastian Marshall put out a great post yesterday, but one line caught my eye:

I keep layering success on top of success, my life is so weird and interesting and cool and crazy, but I don’t have any particularly rare talent. I just do a bunch of stuff that might work, and won’t hurt too bad if it doesn’t work.

That’s a great approach to have.  Going to school and grinding away is fine, but to be successful on another level, you’re eventually going to have to hit a home run.  The only way to do that is to go up and swing big every once in a while.  Try starting that side business.  Go after that big new client.  Try marketing that design, or that invention, or that idea you’ve had for years.

The upside is twofold: (1) Maybe you connect and crush it.  (2) Even if you miss completely, you’ll realize it doesn’t actually hurt that bad, which will make it even easier to swing the next time.

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Lawyer For A Day

Posted on August 30, 2011 by AJ Kessler

Time tracking can be life changing.  And, even though it’s really, really easy to do, it does take a tiny bit of discipline.  Unfortunately, like budgeting, this tiny barrier is enough to prevent just about everyone from doing it.  Fine.  Your loss, but whatever.

Here’s an alternative: for one day, pretend you’re a professional who bills by the hour.  If you hate lawyers, pretend to be a tutor, or a photoshop wizard, or a psychiatrist.  Wait, actually not a psychiatrist; those guys think there’s 50 minutes in an hour.

The Method

Most lawyers bill in 1/10th hour increments.  That means every six minutes you work on something gets marked down.

For one day, do this.

It doesn’t matter what kind of work you do.  If you have to file a bunch of shit, glance at your watch, file away, and glance at your watch again when you’re done.  If it took you ten minutes, jot down “File xx: .2”.  If you have to research something and it takes you 4 hours, do the same thing.  Be conscious of the little breaks you take though: you don’t get to count all the bathroom breaks and fantasy football trashtalk and internet surfing time towards your total.

The Benefit

This is guaranteed to do three things:

First, almost no one realizes how little work actually gets done each day between the bathroom breaks and fantasy football trashtalk and internet surfing.  Keeping track of your time like this, even for just one day, should be eye-opening.

Second, your production value will go way up.  Your wasted time will drop dramatically.

Third, you’ll have ammunition for a raise or whatever else you want.  If you know exactly how your day is spent, to the 1/10th of an hour, you can demonstrate what a waste of time that part of your job you hate is, or how valuable you are since you can do that thing you’re good at faster than anyone else.  This kind of data can get dumber or less observant or overwhelmed bosses the factual backing necessary to give you more responsibility, more money, or whatever it is you’re looking for.

And if I’m wrong about everything, you’ve wasted about 3 minutes of one day of your life.  Is that tiny barrier really going to keep you from finding out for yourself?

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Most Of Your Stuff Is Worthless

Posted on August 29, 2011 by AJ Kessler

I’ve written about the benefits of eliminating clutter before.  I’ve made a conscious effort to only buy stuff I actually need and am going to use.  I’ve gone through several rounds of getting rid of stuff I own.  That said, I’m not exactly a minimalist.  I’ve still got what I consider to be too much stuff.  But I’m also at the point where it’s getting more difficult to throw things away.  Most of the stuff on my shelves has either some use, or some meaning to me.  But, there remains stuff that I keep, not because it’s meaningful or useful, but because it has some other value.

Paul Graham disagrees.  He thinks stuff, even intrinsically valuable stuff, isn’t valuable:

What I didn’t understand was that the value of some new acquisition wasn’t the difference between its retail price and what I paid for it. It was the value I derived from it. Stuff is an extremely illiquid asset. Unless you have some plan for selling that valuable thing you got so cheaply, what difference does it make what it’s “worth?” The only way you’re ever going to extract any value from it is to use it. And if you don’t have any immediate use for it, you probably never will.

Well, when you put it that way, it’s hard to disagree.  Paul points out three more drawbacks to owning lots of stuff:

  1. Stuff costs money.  This is money that could be productive elsewhere.
  2. Your stuff starts to own you.  The more stuff you have, the more to think about, the more to worry about, the harder it is to travel, or move, or in some cases, just live.  If you’re stuff is too good, you can’t even use for fear of breaking it (think nice china).
  3. Clutter saps energy.  Paul thinks that humans create mental models of their surroundings; the more clutter you have, the more brain power required to build that model.  More brain power spent on that means less left for meaningful things.

Great thoughts.  You don’t have to be a minimalist or a devout unclutterer, or anything of the sort to adopt this sort of philosophy.  From now on, before you buy something, ask yourself “Am I going to use this all the time?”  If not, it’s probably better to pass.  Most of us are already stuffed:

In industrialized countries the same thing happened with food in the middle of the twentieth century.  As food got cheaper (or we got richer; they’re indistinguishable), eating too much started to be a bigger danger than eating too little.  We’ve now reached that point with stuff.  For most people, rich or poor, stuff has become a burden.

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Reclaim Your Mornings With An Automated Wardrobe

Posted on August 28, 2011 by AJ Kessler

It can take my girlfriend 20 minutes to decide what she’s going to wear on a given morning.  That’s 20 minutes not spent enjoying breakfast, or the news, or sportcenter, or working out, or extra working time, or whatever it is you want to do in the morning.  That’s 20 minutes of frustration to start out your day.  That’s terrible.

It literally takes me less than five seconds to decide what to wear on any given day.  Why? My closet has 15 polos and 3 pairs of jeans hanging in it right now.  I grab one of each without thinking.  No matter what I grab, it matches.  No matter what I grab, I look fine.  No thought required.

If this sort of uniform doesn’t work for you, you can still use the same logic to save your mornings: buy things that work together.  Solid shirts go with pretty much any dark suit.  Keep a pair of black shoes and a pair of brown shoes, a small tie collection, and the amount of thinking required each morning drops to about zero.  Just grab and go.

For The Ladies

If you’re convinced you’ll die if you wear the same things in the same combinations over and over again, you’re nuts, but whatever, this logic applies to you too.  It’s only a bit more work.

Set aside a Saturday morning.  Figure out a bunch of different outfits/combinations of clothes.  Photograph each one.  You’ve now got a record of what goes with what and how it looks.  The best part is that it’s been planned ahead of time, so there’s no risk that you get to the office and realize “Oh crap, I was too tired; this doesn’t really go together at all” or “Oh crap, I DO look fat in this”.

Aside from the actual time benefit, the stress reducing aspect of this should not be overlooked.  Fewer things to think about each day means more opportunity to do real work.  Less stress and frustration means more opportunity to do better quality work.

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Fake It ‘Til You Make It: Physiologically Sound

Posted on August 27, 2011 by AJ Kessler

From Psychology Today:

The great surrealist artist Salvador Dali was described by his fellow students at the Madrid art academy as “morbidly” shy according to his biographer Ian Gibson.  He had a great fear of blushing and his shame about being ashamed drove him into solitude.  It was his uncle who gave him the sage advice to become an actor in his relations with the people around him.  He instructed him to pretend he was an extrovert and to act like an extrovert with everyone including your closest companions.  Dali did just that to disguise his mortification.  Every day he went through the motions of being an extrovert and, eventually, he became celebrated as the most extroverted, fearless, uninhibited and gregarious personalities of his time.  He became what he pretended to be.

Though the above article is light on citations, this phenomena of faking your attitude is actually physiologically sound.  Researchers have found that grinning like an idiot or frowning like a sad clown actually produces happiness or sadness.  The effect is so powerful that it can actually change your mood.  If you’re sad or anxious or depressed, holding a fake smile for a few minutes can actually make you happy.

Psychology Today suggests the following:

Put a pen between your teeth in far enough so that it’s stretching the edges of your mouth back without feeling uncomfortable. This will force a smile. Hold it there for five minutes or so. You’ll find yourself inexplicably in a happy mood. Then try walking with long strides and looking straight ahead. You will amaze yourself at how fast your facial expressions can change your emotions.

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What They’re Really Asking

Posted on August 26, 2011 by AJ Kessler

A lot of people don’t really want advice, they want you to tell them what decision to make, or they want permission to implement the decision they’ve selected.

Recognize these people and these situations early. If you’re up to it, make the decision or give them permission. If you’re not, save yourself the time and frustration. 

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Don’t Shop When You’re Hungry

Posted on August 25, 2011 by AJ Kessler

You’ll end up buying more than you want.

Make plans when you’re fresh, not at the end of the day when you’re exhausted.

Set goals when you’re on a roll; don’t undermine them after a failure.

The hard part isn’t making these rules.  As Seth Godin says, “the discipline is in obeying the rule you set when you were in a different mood than you are now. That’s what makes it a rule as opposed to a guideline.”

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