How Could Anyone Live Here?

Posted on August 24, 2011 by AJ Kessler

If you’ve traveled at all, even if it’s just a few miles from your home, you’ve undoubtedly run across places that you can’t imagine living.  Desolate or teeming, scorching or freezing, swamp-like or bone-dry, gaudy or spartan, run down, dilapidated or just different.  How could anyone live in a place like this?

It’s easy to forget that life is about relationships.  People might initially choose to live in one place because of a career or a lifestyle, but they stay because of the people.  You move somewhere, you take up a certain lifestyle, you meet some great people, and suddenly this new place you’re living in is the best place on earth.

Fundamentally, it’s not the place: the people and the relationships you form are the driving force behind your perception of any locale.

This is good news if you’re miserable living somewhere: all it takes is a few great friends to completely change your perception.

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Why Procrastination Is Good

Posted on August 23, 2011 by AJ Kessler

Very interesting thought from Cal Newport:

The evolutionary perspective on procrastination, by contrast, says we delay because our frontal lobe doesn’t see a convincing plan behind our aspiration. The solution, therefore, is not to muster the courage to blindly charge ahead, but to instead accept what our brain is telling us: our plans need more hard work invested before they’re ready.

So, procrastination might not be a character flaw, but a telling signal: your brain doesn’t buy your plan.

Posted in Food For Thought, Productivity, Quotes, Rationality, Self-Improvement | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Why Economists Are Wrong, or How Specialization Makes Us Unhappy

Posted on August 22, 2011 by AJ Kessler

We generally understand how specialization and competitive advantage make us all richer. Lawyers particularly, and I imagine other highly paid hourly workers, understand that the best use of their time is spent lawyering. For this reason, these professionals have an easy time seeing the benefits of paying other service providers for their time. After all, if I get paid $500 an hour, I’ll happily pay my accountant $200 an hour to do my taxes. Even if we’re equally skilled at tax preparation, if it takes either of us 10 hours, I come out $3000 richer if I pay him to do it and lawyer for 10 hours instead.

The fascinating part, explained by Dan Ariely, is that this thinking, applied broadly, might not maximize happiness. The reason is, we enjoy things done with our own hands more than we enjoy things done by others. The video is definitely worth 5 minutes of your time:

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It’s Always Incompetence

Posted on August 21, 2011 by AJ Kessler

Whenever an event can be explained by either a vast conspiracy or simple incompetence, always assume incompetence. This is merely a corollary to Hanlon’s Razor, but it can save you just as much anguish.

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Curiosity, or How Elon Musk Thinks

Posted on August 20, 2011 by AJ Kessler

ELON MUSK:

I think, generally, their {other people’s} thinking process is too bound by convention or analogy to prior experiences.  So it’s very rare that people try to think of something on a first principles basis. They’ll say, “We’ll do that because it’s always been done that way.”  Or they’ll not do it because, “Well, nobody has ever done that.  So it must not be good.”  But that’s just a ridiculous way to think.

I mean, you have to build up the reasoning from the ground up from first principles as in the phrase that’s used in physics.  So you look at the fundamentals and construct your reasoning from that and then see if you have a conclusion that works or doesn’t work.  And it may or may not be different from what people have done in the past.  It’s harder to think that way, though.  Sorry.

INTERVIEWER:

Why is it so hard to think that way?  And how have you managed to?  I mean, obviously, you’ve thought the other way.  How have you broken that path?

ELON MUSK:

I don’t know.  I’ve just always thought that way, I suppose.  I mean, I would always think about something and whether that thing was really true or not.  Could something else be true or is there a better conclusion that one could draw that’s more probable? I don’t know.  I was doing that when I was in elementary school.  And I would just question things.  Or, maybe, it’s sort of built-in [to our nature] to question things.

It would infuriate my parents.

INTERVIEWER:

That you would think differently about things, or, what?

ELON MUSK:

That I wouldn’t just believe them when they said something ’cause I’d ask them why.  And then I’d consider whether that response made sense given everything else I knew.

 

“Why?” is a really hard question for some people to ask.  I imagine this is because these people had parents who discouraged such questions, either because they found them annoying or because they simply couldn’t answer them.  This always infuriates me though.  Don’t you want to know why??  How can you not want to know??

Though Musk doesn’t actually mention creativity or curiosity, the “Why?” is really the foundation, as Musk hints at, to a successful life.  He’s right: it is harder to think this way.  There’s not a lot of time for your brain to just idle or veg out once you get in the “Why?” habit.  But, nobody ever became an electric car baron/rocketship designer/ solar king by turning their brain off.  For that matter, nobody ever became anything by turning their brain off.

See the full interview here.

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Stalin Was Right

Posted on August 19, 2011 by AJ Kessler

One death is a tragedy.  One Million is a statistic.

This fundamental deficiency in our humanity, as it has been called, is a weird phenomena.  Why can we be so emotionally moved by an individual’s story, and yet so unmoved by the story of millions of individuals?

We don’t really know, but this research shows that this phenomena does in fact exist, and that its implications seem to stretch well beyond life and death situations.

No matter what your goal, whether it’s fundraising, managing a team, or just selling widgets, always personalize the message.  Always look to make heroes and poster-boys.  This isn’t as hard as it sounds: you can turn people into willing evangelists if you merely do a great job, or provide something unexpectedly nice.

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Appreciation For Inaptitude

Posted on August 18, 2011 by AJ Kessler

To the Gods:

[Thanks] That I wasn’t more talented in rhetoric or poetry, or other areas.  If I’d felt that I was making better progress I might never have given them up.

– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 1:17

You hear a lot of professional athletes thank god or their parents for their natural, or god-given, physical abilities.  This makes sense.  If Mike Vick didn’t have more fast twitch muscle fibers than a gazelle, he wouldn’t be an NFL quarterback.  But, for every Mike Vick, there are 1000 guys who are just moderately less gifted.   These guys are relegated to being called “these guys” because they just didn’t have the physical ability to hack it at an elite level.  Some of these guys put in the same amount of work as Vick did, some probably more.  Maybe they’ve got a few good stories to tell about their playing days, but they’ve essentially wasted years of their prime on something that would never bear fruit.  All those precious hours could have been spent on something that would have.

When something doesn’t suit your character, or your future, it’s better to recognize this as early as possible.  I’ve wanted to learn programming for a few years now.  Today, I found this neat little site and did some of the lessons.  Great stuff.  But you know what?  I’m trying to be a lawyer right now.  I don’t know shit about lawyering.  Those minutes I pour into learning how to program something, while they may be interesting or stimulating, aren’t really going to benefit me.  I’m not going to be a programmer.  I’m going to be a lawyer.  Even if i have an aptitude for coding (doesn’t look like it…), it doesn’t suit my future right now.  So, after 10 minutes of playing around, I cut bait. I’ll never hit the app or web lottery now, but you know what?  I wasn’t going to hit it anyway.  Not in my wheelhouse.

Focus on what’s in your wheelhouse.  Once you’re successful, you can branch out.

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I Don’t Know

Posted on August 17, 2011 by AJ Kessler

My friend Richard Feynman said, “I don’t know.” I heard him say it several times. He said it just like Harold, the mentally handicapped dishwasher I worked with when I was a young man making minimum wage at Famous Bill’s Restaurant in Greenfield, Massachusetts.

“I don’t know” is not an apology. There’s no shame. It’s a simple statement of fact. When Richard Feynman didn’t know, he often worked harder than anyone else to find out, but while he didn’t know, he said, “I don’t know.”

– Penn Jillette

Ego has a nasty way interfering with our best interests.  Where it might serve us much better to simply say “I don’t know”, sometimes we provide an answer we think we’ve heard or read somewhere, without any real understanding or knowledge of its truth.  Worse, once we provide that answer, we usually try to defend it, even it it’s plainly wrong.  This makes us look stupid, or at least petty, but worse still, this means we skip over Feynman’s second step and never endeavor to find out the truth, lest we strike one more blow to the ego.

Honesty: one of the simplest ways to keep ego in check.

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Recognize When You’re Being An Asshole

Posted on August 16, 2011 by AJ Kessler

There are some instances when I can’t stand wasting time.  If someone’s driving 10 mph under the speed limit on a one lane road, I’m infuriated.  If the one guy behind the counter at the post office is moving at a glacial pace when there’s 5 people in line in front of me, I want to scream at that guy.  When the waiter says it will be just a minute but disappears for five, I want to leave.

But when I tally the actual time wasted on things like this per day, it’s often in the single digits.  Even if all three of the above happen on any given day, the total lost time is probably 15 minutes.  Whenever I think about this, I feel ridiculous.  Ten minutes in line at the post office?  How long am I going to let that piss me off?  Certainly not just the 10 minutes I’m standing there.  60 minutes?  600 minutes?  The amount of fury that results from those few wasted minutes is grossly disproportionate to the actual inconvenience.  Even if I billed my time out at $1000 an hour, did I really just lose $250?  Not really.  So I work til 7:15 tonight instead of 7:00.  Big deal.

Why am I allowing minor inconveniences to have a major effect on my day?

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Backup Your Life

Posted on August 15, 2011 by AJ Kessler

A crisis like the death of a family member, or a broken leg or back, or even something as mundane as a sick pet can knock you seriously off course.  Even without a major event, a convergence of smaller distractions, commitments or interruptions can similarly disrupt your work.  Not only does this mean you’ve lost the hours you were unable to focus on real work, you generally have to waste a bunch of hours just to get back to the point you left off: you forget what your thought process was, you forget what work has already been done, you forget what you were planning on doing next, you forget, you forget, you forget.

Don’t wait for the crisis or convergence to strike.

Just like you (hopefully) backup your digital data on a regular basis, it’s far easier, and more realistic to continually backup your life data than it is to hope to remember to do so when an actual crisis or convergence of bad events hits.  An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

In a law firm, you often get half a dozen or more different projects, each containing a multitude of discreet tasks, thrown at you at any one time. It’s impossible to keep track of all the ideas floating around your head if you don’t write things down. It’s very helpful to write a quick note at the end of the day about what you were working on/thinking about last, steps you were thinking about taking next, etc.  Takes a minute, but can save hours in duplicated effort the next day.

For those doing any sort of creative work, documenting each step in a process can also be incredibly useful, not only so you know what’s been done on a piece and where you left off, but also so you can duplicate it in the future.  I find this unbelievably helpful when editing photos: there’s simply no way I could remember what I did on something I edited 3 years ago if I didn’t take notes.  With those notes, if I want to go back and improve something, I can see where I might have screwed something up, or where I could employ a new technique.  If I want to apply a similar effect to a new photo, I can go back and know exactly what I did to achieve that effect the last time.

Posted in Advice, Art, Business, Creativity, Productivity, Self-Improvement, Time Tracking | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Being Interesting Requires Being Interested

Posted on August 14, 2011 by AJ Kessler

Seth Godin with another pithy post:

Interesting and Interested . . . it helps to be both.  These are the two ways you earn attention.

If it’s so obvious, why is it so difficult?

Everybody wants to be interesting, to have people listen intently to their thoughts, to have them yearn for their advice, laugh at their jokes, revel in their successes and commiserate in their failures.

But the only way to be interesting is to be successful.  The only way to be successful is to be interested.

Your success can come in any field, be it business, art, literature, gardening, mechanics, welding, whatever.  All that matters is that you accomplish something, that you succeed at something.  And the only way to accomplish something is to be interested enough to put in the long hours it takes to become proficient, then to become good, then to become great.  Then you’ll be interesting, because you’ll have something to offer.

If Michael Jordan hadn’t gone on to become the greatest basketball player of all time, no one would care that he got cut from his high school team.  If that’s where the story stopped, if that’s the height of his accomplishments, he wouldn’t be interesting.  The success made him interesting, and it only came because he was interested in the game, interested in being good enough to make that high school team, then good enough to be a college player, then a star, then the greatest.

You can’t choose to be interesting overnight.  The only choice you have is to be interested.

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People Aren’t Racists, They’re Assholes

Posted on August 13, 2011 by AJ Kessler

If I was black, I’m pretty sure I would think a huge section of our society was racist.  If I was flamboyantly gay, I’m pretty sure I would think a huge section of our society was homophobic.  If I was Indian or Chinese or South American, I’m pretty sure I would think a huge section of our society was xenophobic.  But I don’t think a huge section of our society is any of those things.  Instead, a large section of society are assholes, and all of our society is self absorbed.

Looking essentially like a white male, when the guy behind the counter gives me a dirty look for no reason, or the 30 people working in the Apple store seem to systematically ignore my presence, or the hostess tells me she can’t seat me even though I can see the restaurant is empty, or I can’t seem to catch a cab to save my life, I don’t have the opportunity to label people’s actions as racist or homophobic or xenophobic or anything else.  But the things I most often hear characterized as examples of persistent, daily racism or homophobia or xenophobia or whatever-ism/bia, are really just people being self-absorbed, incompetent, or at worst, assholes.

It’s important to realize that people spend the vast majority of their time thinking about themselves.  How to feed/clothe/shelter themselves, their wants and dreams, their desires, their failures and shortcomings, and their ideas and plans and possibilities take up the majority of that time.  How to interact with those around them, what those people think about them, what those people are saying about them, how their relationships affect their lives, and why they’re pissed at their wife or girlfriend or boss or kids takes up almost all the rest of their thought process.  The tiny percentage left over, maybe 5 or 10 percent, can be allocated to empathizing with other people, to putting yourself in their position and thinking about their wants and dreams and desires and hardships.  But remember, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of other individuals any given person cares deeply about.  There are also hundreds, if not thousands, of people any given person comes into contact with on a daily basis.  The amount of empathy the average person has to dole out to a stranger is tiny.

This is why it’s silly to take things personally.  If someone’s a dick to you, it almost certainly has nothing to do with you.  If someone ignores you it’s almost certainly not because they hate your kind.  He’s just having a bad day, or a bad minute.  His boss just yelled at him, or his girlfriend just broke up with him, and all he cares about at that moment is himself.  Or he’s an asshole.  In either case, it has nothing to do with you.  This is also why it’s silly to get embarrassed.  People simply don’t have the mental capacity to process and remember your flaws and mistakes because they’re too busy worrying about themselves.

Obviously racism and homophobia and xenophobia and a slew of other ridiculous mindsets still exist in the United States, and people still do horrific things  in service of these retarded ideas.  The point here is to recognize that the daily indignities that all of us suffer are not the result of an association with some victimized class, unless you consider humanity such a class.  We do a disservice to the victims of actual racism/homophobia/etc. when we paint so many of our daily indignities with those brushes.  We do a disservice to ourselves by reinforcing this victim mentality.

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Don’t Judge Me, Bro

Posted on August 12, 2011 by AJ Kessler

Judgment is a basic animal process.  A dog’s brain instantly processes hundreds of data points of sounds, smells, visual cues and behavioral phenomena to determine which animals are friendly and which are not.  The reactions are so quick because these data points get crossed checked against a set of prior experiences to instantly produce a result.  If a dog sees bared teeth, it immediately thinks “hostile” or “danger” even if the other dog just has some peanut butter stuck in its gums.  It doesn’t rationally think about the bared teeth or break down what’s going on.  It sees bared teeth, it’s mind quickly says “hey, that data point is scary!” and rings the “fear” alarm.  This is exactly how the human brain works.  (See How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer).  The difference is, we have way more processing power, and way more storage.  This means we can make a lot more judgments based on fear.

The bad news is, this process isn’t going away.  It’s how we’re hard wired.  Better to get scared by that rustle in the grass than to ignore it and get done in by a snake.  The good news is, we can definitely temper this impulse, and to some extent, train ourselves out of it.

The Ancient Greeks had an idea that might be useful here.  The Stoics believed that our minds, bombarded by millions of stimuli every second, first process these stimuli to create a mental impression, or phantasia.  From this the mind generates a preception, or a hypolepsis.  Gregory Hays, in his introduction to Meditations, compares the phantasia to a photographic negative and the hyolepsis to a print: we hope the print is faithful to the original, but there can be many flaws.

Chief among these flaws are inappropriate value judgments: declaring something “good” or “bad” that is neither “good” nor “bad”.  This is where the importance in distinguishing between the impression and the perception comes into play.  Let’s look at Hays’ example:

My impression that my house has just burned down is simply that — an impression or report conveyed to me by my senses about an event in the outside world.  by contrast, my perception that my house has burned down and I have thereby suffered a terrible tragedy includes not only an impression, but also an interpretation imposed upon that initial impression by my powers of hypolepsis.  It is by no means the only possible interpretation, and I am not obliged to accept it.  I may be a good deal better off if I decline to do so.  It is, in other words, not objects and events but the interpretations we place on them that are the problem.

The goal then is to separate the impression from the perception.  You can’t control the impression, and you probably can’t control the immediate perception, just because of human physiology.  But, you can take a beat, think about the impression v. the perception, and alter your opinion.

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Pay Attention To Get Rich

Posted on August 11, 2011 by AJ Kessler

Being aware of the world around you is important.  It makes life more interesting.  It’s the foundation for creativity.  It can also make you rich.

I’m reminded of this fact by Sam Farber, founder of OXO.  How did Sam, a 65-year old retiree at the time, find inspiration to found yet another company?  He did what he always did: pay attention.

In this case, he was cooking with his wife, who complained about the tools she was using.  “Why can’t someone make more comfortable tools?” turned into OXO, a company with 500 kitchen and home products and $120 million in annual sales.

Maurice Kanbar, in his book Secrets from an Inventor’s Notebook, shares similar insights on how he came up with the D-Fuzz-It Sweater and Fabric Comb (leaning up against a concrete wall, then noticing the pilled wool on his sweater cling to it as he moved away) and the multiplex cinema (he noticed most theaters had about 100 people in them, no matter the screen size).

Stupidly simple, right?  Right.  It all starts with always being aware.

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Your Preferences Don’t Matter, Your Customers’ Do

Posted on August 10, 2011 by AJ Kessler

If you’ve ever tried to go to a restaurant’s website, there’s a 98% chance your experience was horrifically unpleasant.  Usually, after the obligatory 10-30 second load time, there’s some weird music that starts playing, there’s obnoxious pictures or slideshows coming out of nowhere, and worst of all, whatever you’re actually looking for, usually a menu, a phone number, an address or a reservations form, is buried deeper than a Kardashian’s dignity.

Why?  Slate offers two plausible explanations:

“In restaurants, the expertise is in the kitchen and in hospitality in general,” says Eng San Kho, a partner at the New York design firm Love and War. “People in restaurants have a sense that they want to create an entertainment experience online—that’s why disco music starts, that’s why Flash slideshows open. They think they can still play the host even here online.”

This makes some sense.  At any restaurant that serves entrees costing more than $20, people expect service and atmosphere in addition to good food.  At higher end places, they call this “an experience”, so it makes sense that the owners of such establishments want that experience to extend online.  This is pretty silly though, since it’s just about impossible to replicate the experience of fine dining online.  There’s also another explanation:

“Say you’re a designer and you’ve got to demo a site you’ve spent two months creating,” Bohan explains. “Your client is someone in their 50s who runs a restaurant but is not very in tune with technology. What’s going to impress them more: Something with music and moving images, something that looks very fancy to someone who doesn’t know about optimizing the Web for consumer use, or if you show them a bare-bones site that just lists all the information? I bet it would be the former—they would think it’s great and money well spent.”

This is also plausible, since a lot of people are incompetent, uneducated/unfamiliar with the web, or both.

Both of these explanations offer an even bigger insight into business.  These lines of thinking absolutely ignore the point of having a website: to make you money.  The point of spending money on a website is to drive customers, who in turn spend money at your establishment. Does the shitty euro-jazz and Ken Burns style pan and zoom picture of the dining room really drive traffic to your restaurant?  Maybe, but knowing people who decide not to go to restaurants after getting pissed off by the website, I’m guessing no.  I’m guessing 99.9% of these owners have never tested the conversion rates on their own sites.

I’m also guessing that a similar percentage never ask themselves what their customers want from the site.  Sure, I want the site to be an extension of myself, Chef Amazing, and my amazing restaurant’s amazing experience.  Or, since all these other restaurants (50% of which fail within a three years) have shitty flash sites with terrible music, that must be the thing to do.  No!  It’s this same “what I like other people must like” mentality that likely leads to the whole restaurant going under.

This mentality is in no way unique to the restaurant business.  No matter what industry you’re in, figure out what your customers want, and what pisses them off.  This is actually harder than it sounds, since most people avoid confrontation (and giving advice or critiques is often thought of as confrontational), but it’s definitely doable, and pretty easy if you’re a public business like a restaurant: read reviews and keep up with the times (hey, if there’s an entire company dedicated to putting menus online, MAYBE MY CUSTOMERS WANT TO SEE MENUS ONLINE).  If you’re in a more private business, communicate with your customers: find out what they like, what they hate, why the left your competitor, why they left you for a competitor, etc.

This applies even if you never see a customer: Don’t just deliver what you think your bosses and co-workers want, figure out what they actually want (hint: rarely does anyone tell you everything they want, even when you ask).  This is work, but you will be rewarded.

 

Note: Since I spent so much time bashing the restaurant industry, some praise: Beast and the Hare.  Site loads instantly.  Name, Phone, Address (that directly links to googlemaps!), hours, and a menu clearly visible.  And to those who use the video and flash bullshit to replicate their dining experience online: I’ve never been here, and never heard of this restaurant before stumbling on its site, but I already know exactly what kind of place to expect, and I have a pretty good idea of what the place will look like, all done without a single picture or note of new-age muzak.

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