Category: Media

A collection of shiny objects

I have a problem. I collect trivia like raccoons collect shiny objects.

I store this collection in a notebook called “Random facts and learnings”.

It’s inspired by Steven Johnson’s Spark File:

I’ve been maintaining a single document where I keep all my hunches: ideas for articles, speeches, software features, startups, ways of framing a chapter I know I’m going to write, even whole books. I now keep it as a Google document so I can update it from wherever I happen to be. There’s no organizing principle to it, no taxonomy–just a chronological list of semi-random ideas that I’ve managed to capture before I forgot them. I call it the spark file.

Sometimes you start a new thing, and after awhile, you stop that new thing. A fad diet, a new friend, a Kindle book.

Sometimes you start a new thing, and you keep doing it. In fact, you find it hard to stop.

That’s the story of “Random facts and learnings”. It’s my spark file for trivia. When I read a statistic, a study, or an acronym, and think to myself, “I’d like to remember this, but probably won’t”, into the spark file it goes. My shiny collection is now ~40 pages.

Here are 5 items that I hope will catch your eye. I’ll attempt to curate and share more each month.

1. Mountain dew was originally slang for moonshine

2. Cryptophasia is the tendency for twins to communicate in their own private language. Like so.

3. Getting married causes a 2-year increase in happiness. Once a married couple has children, happiness steadily declines until the children leave the house, then marriage happiness begins to increase again

4. We have a functional and complex neural network or ‘brain’ in the gut, called the enteric brain, and fear is mediated by this brain. The # of neurons in our gut is equivalent to that of a cat’s!

5. Where does “raining cats and dogs” come from? One interpretation: in the old days, when it rained really hard, they’d find dead dogs and cats in the storm waters

Do you collect trivia, too? I’d love to hear from you. Thanks as always.

The secrets of Reed Hastings and Netflix culture

Recent share price swings aside, Netflix is among the most innovative companies of the last 2 decades.

They’re also incredibly transparent, to our benefit.

I first read this presentation 4 years ago. I remember thinking, “holy shit”, and immediately forwarding to the shopkick team.

I’ve re-read it 3 or 4 times. Still not enough.

It’s now part of 1-Read-A-Day.

Here are my takeaways

I bias towards the unusual (since we all know the old yarns of “A players attract other A players”, “employees are your #1 asset”, blah yada etc)

1. A company’s REAL values are shown by who’s rewarded, who’s promoted, and who’s fired (slide 6)

2. “Adequate performance gets a generous severance package” (slide 22, reminds me a little of Zappos’ $1K to quit) [http://blogs.hbr.org/taylor/2008/05/why_zappos_pays_new_employees.html]

3. The Keeper Test: “Which of my people, if they told me they were leaving, for a similar job at a peer company, would I fight hard to keep at Netflix?” (slide 25)

4. “Brilliant jerks” are avoided – hurts effective teamwork (slide 35)

5. Growth –> More complexity –> More processes –> Less talent –> Long-term irrelevance (slide 52)

6. Netflix’s solution to above? Increase talent density to offset rising complexity. Do this by hiring only “high performance people” and giving them more freedom (slide 54)

7. Example: no vacation policy; take what you want (now a startup-world standard) (slide 69)

8. Departments are “highly aligned” (agree on goals), and “loosely coupled” (freedom in implementation) (slide 93)

9. Pay top of market, because Netflix only wants top people – top of market is re-defined with each hire, each performance review (slide 96)

10. Comp is salary-focused. Employees can choose to trade salary for stock options (109)

11. Everyone gets $10K in benefits, from receptionist to CEO (slide 109) – this was published in 2009

12. All options are fully vested – employees stay for the right reasons

13. For promotion, new job must be “big enough”, and you must be a superstar in your current role

That’s it, folks!

Don’t watch the ball, watch the seams

Thanks to http://www.odt.co.nz/sport/tennis/138357/tennis-federer-beats-nadal-atp-finalsIn tennis, we’re told to watch the ball.

My coach used to say, “follow the ball from their racquet to yours,” pointing out that “Sampras, Agassi…they’re always looking at the ball, even after it makes contact.”

We’re supposed to focus on that green dot like a cat on a laser pointer.

On a recent drive to LA, I was listening to The Inner Game of Tennis. Think Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but replace “Zen” with “Inner Game”, and “Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” with “Tennis.”

Really, both could be called “Life wisdom revealed in the pursuit of a hobby”.

In The Inner Game, author W. Timothy Galloway makes a point that I paraphrase thusly:

“Don’t watch the ball…watch the seams.“

Bam!

It’s the Inception of life advice.

On Level 1 (the reality level), Galloway is instructing us to watch the ball so closely that we see its seams.

On Level 2 (the rainy-city/van-chase level), Galloway is really telling us to pay attention to detail. If you’re truly watching the ball, you’ll notice it’s not just a fuzzy green object. It has a logo. It turns a disheveled, patchy yellow with use. And it has seams.

On Level 3 (the hotel level) – and that’s as far as this extended metaphor goes – it’s all about pushing our limits. Don’t watch the ball, watch the seams. Don’t make a 3, hit a swish. Don’t aim for a million dollars, go for a billion. Now THAT’S cool.

It brings to mind a Bruce Lee quote, one of my favorites.

There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level.

Are you watching the seams in your life?

5 articles you should read, or at least, browse

A high school friend once confessed that he spent 4 hours a day reading the news. Ridiculous, I thought.

Here’s a running list of my readings. It’s not 4 hours – yet – and I avoid the news, but look who’s ridiculous now…

From that list, here are 5 July favorites:

1. David Brooks’ The Service Patch [link]

Young people – particularly the accomplished ones – have a “blinkered view of their options” and don’t think about the kind of person they want to be.

It’s worth noting that you can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck. You can spend your life on Wall Street and be a hero. Understanding heroism and schmuckdom requires fewer Excel spreadsheets, more Dostoyevsky and the Book of Job.

2. Emily Nussbaum’s Difficult Women: How Sex and the City lost its good name [link]

I enjoyed SATC (see, I even used the acronym). Clever, fast, and at times provocative. The show’s weakness is that – while Carrie and friends began energetically against-type – they had a whiff of cardboard-cutout by the end.

Like the Simpsons and Friends, you were watching a magician perform the same card trick for the 37th time.

In contrast, Carrie and her friends—Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte—were odder birds by far, jagged, aggressive, and sometimes frightening figures, like a makeup mirror lit up in neon.

3. Paul Krugman’s Hitting China’s Wall [link]

Krugman takes big public stances that have substance. His ire is usually focused on our economy, but here it turns to China.

China is in big trouble. We’re not talking about some minor setback along the way, but something more fundamental. The country’s whole way of doing business, the economic system that has driven three decades of incredible growth, has reached its limits.

4. Anahad O’Connor’s How the Hum of a Coffee Shop Can Boost Creativity [link]

I prefer working alone, but it can be hard to maintain focus; I’m always looking for hacks and tools to provide a boost. If that sounds familiar, try Coffitivity.

Their results, published in The Journal of Consumer Research, found that a level of ambient noise typical of a bustling coffee shop or a television playing in a living room, about 70 decibels, enhanced performance compared with the relative quiet of 50 decibels.

5. Paul Graham’s Do Things that Don’t Scale [link]

Another PG gem that challenges startup orthodoxy. When you’re early, it’s ok to do things that don’t scale, like Pebble assembling its own watches. You learn, you show grit, and you move your baby forward.

The need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so nearly universal that it might be a good idea to stop thinking of startup ideas as scalars. Instead we should try thinking of them as pairs of what you’re going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you’re going to do initially to get the company going.

The Rage to Master

I first came upon this, from Daniel Coyle’s Talent Code:

That’s not to say that a minuscule percentage of people don’t possess an innate, obsessive desire to improve—what psychologist Ellen Winner calls “the rage to master.”

Rage to master? Interest piqued. So I googled and found Ellen’s original paper, “The Rage to Master: The Decisive Role of Talent in the Visual Arts”.

From the first paragraph:

We argue for the decisive role of talent in achieving expertise in the visual arts. By talent, we refer to an innate ability or proclivity to learn in a particular domain. We argue that individual differences in innate ability exist, and that high levels of ability include a motivational component: a strong interest in a particular domain, along with a strong drive to master that domain.

It’s important to note that Ellen defines talent as including #1 innate ability OR #2 proclivity to learn. Most people – myself included – would not include #2 in a dinner-table conversation about “talent”. To us, talent in its purest expression is Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting. A gift that comes naturally, often with apathy or even active resistance.

I’d like to think I have a “rage to master” (who wouldn’t, right?). So I found the paper interesting and wanted to share some highlights:

Capacity for endurance, concentration, and commitment to hard work…

Reminds me of deliberate practice.

…including a long and intensive period of training, first from loving and warm teachers, and then from demanding and rigorous master teachers.

Another theme in skill-development literature: younger students need teachers who foster JOY; older students need teachers who build SKILL.

They are intrinsically motivated to acquire skill in the domain (because of the ease with which learning occurs). We call this having a rage to master.

Fascinating – interest comes from ease. Conflicts with deliberate practice, but very intuitive.

Case in point: my struggles with multi-variable calculus homework (Math 51, folks?) while one fellow student clearly GOT IT…and could explain concepts better than our TA.

They make discoveries in the domain without much explicit adult scaffolding. A great deal of the work is done through self-teaching

…often do things in the domain that ordinary hard workers never do-inventing new solutions, thinking, seeing, or hearing in a qualitatively different way.

Not to be overlooked – self-teaching and self-invention are key for enduring breakthroughs (think Picasso and cubism, Beethoven and Romanticism).

A disproportionate number of adult artists and children who draw precociously are non-right-handed

Researchers (and pop culture) make a big deal of left-handedness. Not sure how much of that is connecting the dots backward.

I’m fascinated by everything talent and skill and genius. So if you have recommended books, research papers, blog posts…please share!