Category: 200 Words

Stalactites and Stalagmites

I visited New Zealand earlier this year and one of the highlights was a glowworm cave outside Auckland. Imagine a series of pitch-black and low-slung caverns whose walls are covered in large stationary fireflies. Your own starry night, cold and up close.

On this particular tour, our guide said something about the cave’s stalactites and stalagmites that struck me as a good metaphor for relationships.

By the way, stalactites point down. The word includes the letter C. Think C for ceiling. And stalagmites point up. The letter G, for ground.

“Any time you find a stalactite, you’ll usually find a stalagmite,” he said. They form in pairs, fed by the same source of mineral deposits.

He went on, “They grow at the rate of one centimeter every 100 years. And sometimes, when enough time has passed, they will connect. These two, for example,” he pointed at a slender pair, separated by the width of a baby’s toe, “have been growing for 15,000 years. Soon they’ll touch.”

Fifteen thousand years. Certainly puts my relationship problems in perspective :)

Life = a Garden

The garden is about life and beauty and the impermanence of all living things. The garden is about feeding your children, providing food for the tribe. It’s part of an urgent territorial drive that we can probably trace back to animals storing food. It’s a competitive display mechanism, like having a prize bull, this greed for the best tomatoes and English tea roses; it’s about winning, about providing society with superior things, and about proving that you have taste and good values and you work hard. And what a wonderful relief every so often to know who the enemy is—because in the garden, the enemy is everything: the aphids, the weather, time. And so you pour yourself into it, care so much, and see up close so much birth and growth and beauty and danger and triumph—and then everything dies anyway, right? But you just keep doing it. What a great metaphor!

A friend recommended Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird [Kindle]. It had a cute title and seemed a quick read and was about the life and advice of a successful writer, so I read it. I confess, I had to grind to finish the book. I just wanted her to tell me how to be a better writer. Semicolons or no. When to use adverbs if at all. How to start and finish a short story.

Instead, she wanted to use writing as a metaphor and a gateway to explore the more important issues, of family and loss and struggle. I was too impatient. Maybe that’s her point. Just take it bird by bird, right.

Apparently the book has quite a cult following. I found the above passage glowingly quoted in another book (I forget which one, sorry). And then the flashbacks came, of Anne’s wonderful writing, of the neat little images she painted into my mind’s eye. Her voice really is unique. Part of me suspects that when I reread the book in a few years, maybe sooner, it will be like seeing a casual friend after many years. And who knows, times have changed. Maybe we can become great friends now.

What I learned starting a newsletter (1-Read-A-Day)

I think you misinterpreted...In July, I launched a newsletter called 1-Read-A-Day.

Every day, I recommend and summarize one article on some aspect of starting or growing companies.

Entrepreneurs – especially CEOs – rarely have time to learn. But they are constantly checking email.

I ask them to spend 2 minutes reading my email, and in return they’ll learn something that will make their startup better. If they want to dig, they can read the original article.

The original articles feature well-known guys like Paul Graham and Chris Dixon. They also feature lesser-known people who are in the trenches, struggling every day to build something great.

Like I mention on the signup page, it’s Cliffnotes for startup essays.

Enough pitching. I hope you subscribe :)

Starting today, I’m going to write a monthly post that shares what I’ve learned running this newsletter. I’ll be transparent and include subscribers, analytics, experiments, and general observations.

Please keep in mind that this is a side-project. I’ve spent an hour a day working on it and have no plans to increase my time commitment.

What is it?

  • It’s an autoresponder sequence (also known as a drip sequence) which sends emails on a pre-determined schedule. If you subscribe today, you’ll receive the same first email that a subscriber 2 months from now will receive
  • I’m the only one curating and summarizing the content. Some of the articles I use are influenced by the Hyperink list. Others are sent to me by friends and colleagues
  • I use Mailchimp for everything: from design to sending emails to managing subscribers
  • My goal is 100 of these email lessons. After that, who knows?

How well is it doing?

  • Subscribers: 161
  • Open rate: 22.8%
  • Click rate: 2.2%

The subscriber # is low. Once I hit 50 email lessons, I will start marketing the newsletter more aggressively. For now, I’m content with referrals and pimping it on this blog.

What have I learned?

  • Your subject line heavily influences your open rate. When I mention “CEO” or “VC” in the subject line, the open rates are noticeably higher
  • People enjoy quizzes. I send a 2-3 question quiz after every 5 lessons, to help people retain what they learned. The quiz emails get the highest open rates and positive responses
  • Design matters. My design is simple, but on the sucky side of simple. Look at Sacha Greif’s newsletter then look at mine. I’ve made small improvements but this is a weak area. I will eventually seek help from those much better at design than me
  • I enjoy finding great educational content and summarizing it. This is a central lesson I’ve learned about myself: to keep doing anything, I need to enjoy the meat-and-bones of the work. It seems an obvious insight from simpler pursuits (after all, don’t all successful painters enjoy painting?) but becomes less obvious in more complex pursuits (if you’re growing an enterprise software company, what is the meat-and-bones of the work and do you enjoy that? in that case maybe the meat-and-bones is the actual growing of the company)
  • Email newsletters are in. Old-school online marketers (they of the David DeAngelo and Frank Kerns variety) have known for years that email converts. Everyone hates on email, but its still the #1 online communication tool. My favorite newsletters like Sinocism and Hacker Newsletter just keep growing, and are a favorite part of my daily media consumption routine

I really like this quote from Chuck Close:

Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will — through work — bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great ‘art idea.’ And the belief in that process, in a sense, is liberating and that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every day.

I’ve discovered this truth while building 1-Read-A-Day. Adding emails, listening to feedback, and doing the work has really opened up other possibilities. For example, I plan to launch an audio complement for each email (so you can listen to it while you’re on the road). I will also launch more focused drip sequences, on common problems like “how to raise a seed round” or “how to hire great engineers”.

Here’s to showing up and getting to work. Cheers!

PS. If you run an email newsletter, I’d love to hear what you’ve learned, what works, and what doesn’t.

Great reads – from Facebook Platform to Craigslist Missed Connections

Read all the booksBenedict Evan’s mobile presentation at BEA. Like Mary Meeker’s famous presentations, but more Apple, less McKinsey.

Hamish McKenzie’s Move fast, break things: The sad story of Platform, Facebook’s gigantic missed opportunity. Hamish is my favorite PandoDaily writer. I recently finished his China book. Covers how Facebook conceived, launched, and evolved Platform over time, and Platform’s impact on the startup ecosystem (ie, Zynga).

Cennydd Bowles’s Slow swordfighting. Cennydd (Twitter product designer) travels to the World Chess Championships and beautifully narrates his experience. Another Kottke find.

Gary Rubinstein’s The Three Biggest TFA Lies. I share this link not because I agree with his arguments or agenda, because it reminds me to read stuff I find uncomfortable.

Craigslist Missed Connection to end all missed connections. I read half the post thinking it was real. It feels so real that your brain doesn’t need to make believe. I mean, who hasn’t experienced this? Seeing a beautiful girl, and not having the courage to even say hello?

Jeff Weiner’s The Importance of Scheduling Nothing. Keep 1-2 hours of free time in your day to reflect. Confucius said that’s the noblest way to gain wisdom :) I enjoy reading Jeff’s posts. They remind me of Ben Horowitz’s, the gold standard for startup-CEO content.

Bonus: Orwell’s Politics and the English Language. Long but, like a 5-mile run, worth every minute of pain.

For those who like clicking things and browsing media, here’s an archive of everything I read/highlight.

If you’re talented, 5000 hours is enough (and if you’re not, even 10000 won’t cut it)

Dilbert - 10000 hoursMalcolm Gladwell popularized the idea that 10000 hours of practice are necessary to attain mastery in a range of skill-based pursuits (for example, chess, programming, basketball, journalism).

As a writer, one of Gladwell’s responsibilities is to turn nuanced concepts into simple messages. “10000 hours” is the perfect example. Its popularity has helped make Gladwell a household name and a “public intellectual”, one of those hand-wavy terms for well-known writers who weigh in on public-interest topics, but aren’t academics or politicians.

Of course, the devil is in the research details and after reading Practice Isn’t Everything, another great Wilson Quarterly article, I was compelled to share another perspective.

In 3 sentences:

Critics have lambasted the theory. What about the hard-working strivers who fall short, and the prodigiously talented people who practice less but shine anyway? Now the doubters have data to back them up.

In 5 bullets:

  • Researchers analyzed data from 14 studies of chess players and musicians
  • Among musicians, the best pianists had all practiced at least 10000 hours (supporting Gladwell and the original researchers), but some had required more than 30000 hours to get there. Whew
  • 25% of chess players achieved “mastery” in 7500 hours; 20% achieved mastery in less than 5000 hours
  • The number of hours spent practicing only accounted for 34% of the variation in chess player skill levels
  • What explains the remaining 66%? Starting age (younger is better), working-memory capacity (larger is better), and grit (more is better), among others

Here’s the full research paper. I’ve yet to read it closely.

It’s an understatement to say this is a complicated topic, but one that highly interests me. If you haven’t already done so, check out my 1-page cheatsheet of Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code, which also discusses how people become the best in the world at a particular skill.