Productivity – @habits

An essay all online writers should read, from Patrick McKenzie

Patrick is an inspiring entrepreneur and writer who generously shares what he learns. His writings have taught me how to be a smarter, more effective business person.

“Making Your Writing Work Harder For You” is one of my favorites. Please read the whole thing; in the interim, here are some of my notes!

calling it “content” often devalues it
write things which retain their value over time (less news-y, less sensational)
remove dates from your work
call your best work “essays” or “comprehensive guides”, not blog posts
build your best work into the core navigation of your site so it’s easy to discover
have a goal for each piece of writing; often, it’s to continue the conversation via an email newsletter
provide something of immediate value to readers for giving you their email
build a library of your best content that you can re-use and remix (e.g., a case study, data)
types of content:
- high-quality beginners’ guides (e.g., Moz’s beginner’s guide to SEO)
- next steps for intermediate learners
- dedicated task-oriented content (e.g., how to setup Rails on your new MacBook)

33 Insights From Deepak Malhotra’s “How To Negotiate Your Job Offer” Lecture on YouTube

One of the best intro videos I’ve watched on the subject of negotiating. The advice is both strategic and practical, and it’s from a guy who literally wrote the (business school) book on negotiating.

Below are my notes; I’ve taken a lot of liberty in rewriting, but the insights are all Deepak’s.

P.S. I’ve been helping people negotiate their job offers recently, hence the somewhat new topic here on the blog. If this topic interests you (especially if you work in tech), email me.

General negotiating concepts:

1. Do your homework. He who is most prepared usually wins. I think Sun Tzu said something similar about war
2. People think it’s about convincing the other party, but nothing is more important than understanding the other party
3. What’s not negotiable today may be negotiable tomorrow
4. When someone says no in a negotiation, it often means “not right now”; for example if there’s an offer deadline two months from now, and they say they can’t extend it, they may be able to when you ask them 4 or 5 weeks later
6a. Mike Tyson: “Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the face”, in response to: “How do you fight someone when you know they’ve prepared specifically to fight you?”
6b. Prepare for the tough questions; sometimes the other party will throw something at you that you don’t want brought up; they might ask “do you have other job offers?” or “did your summer internship turn into a full-time offer?”
7. If something is ambiguous, strange or unexpected, your goal is to investigate by asking good questions
8. Don’t forget: They’re not out to get you…they like you and want to continue liking you…but you’re not the only concern they have
9. Companies don’t negotiate, people negotiate; it depends heavily on their role; negotiating with the boss is different from with HR; the boss may be willing to go to bat for you, but annoying them is more dangerous than annoying HR
10. Don’t be in a mad rush to get the offer; it can backfire (for example, you might get less time to decide)
11. If you think about life happiness, job negotiation success is unimportant; what job you take, what career path, is MUCH more important
12. If they’re repeating themselves, it’s a bad sign
13. In small companies or with close relationships, the range of outcomes is higher – you could either get a lot less or a lot more; everything is more important – them liking you, you being more honest, you learning more about what they can or can’t do
14. It can be easier to ask for something in the future, like working from a different city, but you need to stay at the table to make sure they don’t forget it

Goals you should always try to achieve:

1. They need to like you and want to do it for you
2. They need to believe you deserve it
3. They need to be able to justify your requests within their company
4. They need to believe that they can get you; no one will go to bat for you if they think you’re gonna eventually turn them down
5. Shoot for an 11 out of 10; imagine that they’re going to leave the negotiation and they’re either going to give you what you ask for or not, and they’re also going to rate you 1 to 10 on how much they’re looking forward to working with you; you don’t want a 9, or even a 10, you want an 11
6. Understand where they have room to give – for example, startups may offer lower salaries but provide more equity and flexibility in your role
7. Always tell the truth; don’t get into habit of just saying and doing what you need to achieve your goal
8. Sometimes people undervalue you because they don’t know the value you bring; educate them on what you can do

Tactical advice during negotiations:

1. Don’t ask for something without explaining why – just like you’d never want them to say no without a reason
2. Try to be flexible on the currency you’re paid in – you should care most about the entire offer (location, salary, benefits, stock) and not become too fixated on one component. This includes being flexible on maybe not getting something today, but a tacit agreement to reward you down the line
3. Negotiate multiple interests simultaneously, don’t negotiate piecemeal; signal what is most important, what is less important; avoid “and one more thing…and one more thing…and one more thing…” (Mark Suster says this too)
4. Stay at the table and stay engaged; what they couldn’t share before they gave the offer, they can after they give it to you; what they can’t share before you accept the offer, they can after
5. When they ask a question like “if we give you an offer tomorrow, will you say yes?”, don’t get stuck on what they’re asking; figure out why they’re asking that; what they ask is less important than why
6. Avoid, ignore, downplay ultimatums of any kind; if someone makes an ultimatum, just ignore it – pretend it was never said and move on; if they really mean it, they’ll repeat it over and over again
7. Sometimes you need more time; it’s totally fine to take it, just be nice and considerate about asking
8. Learn what their process tends to be; great question: “What is your usual process here? What does your process tend to be for this situation?”
9. You never want negotiation to end with a no; you want to end with a yes, or a why not
10. “Imagine a world where that is possible, describe that world for me” – gives you a better idea of what’s causing that constraint; or, “can you give me examples of situations where you have done that?”

Ironically as I was writing these notes, Deepak published a similar article. But I didn’t want these notes to go to waste :)

1-Page Summary: Race Against The Machine by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee

Race Against The Machine I’ve been reading a lot about our economy and in particular, the tumultuous marriage between jobs and technology. If you believe in punctuated equilibrium, then certainly the microprocessor and the internets and the iPhones have forced a jump upward in socioeconomic development; some people jump higher than others.

Race Against the Machine [Kindle] is one of the better books I’ve read on the subject: it’s short, well-written and from experts who have a balanced point-of-view. And it’s got the usual eye-widening assortment of data and anecdotes.

So, I hope the below is informative and not boring. If the topic interests you, I’d love to hear from you. I can loan the Kindle version.

– – – – –

Employment is taking longer and longer to recover from a recession

Recessions always increase joblessness, of course, but between May 2007 and October 2009 unemployment jumped by more than 5.7 percentage points, the largest increase in the postwar period.

Just look at this chart:

Unemployment recovery

A lot of people have quit the workforce…one of several reasons why I discount unemployment rates

And the workforce participation rate…fell below 64%—a level not seen since 1983 when women had not yet entered the labor force in large numbers.

Franklin D. Roosevelt put this most eloquently: No country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources. Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our greatest extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order.

Just look at food stamp rolls, which have increased from 21M to 47M Americans in the last 5 years!

But people can’t stop, won’t stop investing in tech

And by 2010, investment in equipment and software returned to 95% of its historical peak, the fastest recovery of equipment investment in a generation.

Why has unemployment stayed high? According to the authors…

#1 cyclicality (shit happens)

Paul Krugman is one of the prime advocates of this explanation. As he writes, “All the facts suggest that high unemployment in America is the result of inadequate demand—full stop.”

#2 stagnation (we’re not innovating)

Stagnation in this context means a long-term decline in America’s ability to innovate and increase productivity. – Economist Tyler Cowen

A variant on this explanation is not that America has stagnated, but that other nations such as India and China have begun to catch up.

In particular, labor productivity can be measured as output per worker or output per hour worked. In the long run, productivity growth is almost the only thing that matters for ensuring rising living standards. Robert Solow earned his Nobel Prize for showing that economic growth does not come from people working harder but rather from working smarter.

Economists Menzie Chinn and Robert Gordon, in separate analyses, find that the venerable relationship between output and employment known as Okun’s Law has been amended. Historically, increased output meant increased employment, but the recent recovery created much less employment than predicted; GDP rebounded but jobs didn’t.

#3 “end of work” (robots are replacing us)

In it, Rifkin laid out a bold and disturbing hypothesis: that “we are entering a new phase in world history—one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population.”

“the role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the role of horses in agricultural production was first diminished and then eliminated by the introduction of tractors.”

What a quote!

The authors believe it’s #3: we’re losing “the race against the machine”

The root of our problems is not that we’re in a Great Recession, or a Great Stagnation, but rather that we are in the early throes of a Great Restructuring.

Such versatility is a key feature of general purpose technologies (GPTs), a term economists assign to a small group of technological innovations so powerful that they interrupt and accelerate the normal march of economic progress. Steam power, electricity, and the internal combustion engine are examples of previous GPTs.

Vending machines now sell iPods, bathing suits, gold coins, sunglasses and razors; some will even dispense prescription drugs and medical marijuana to consumers willing to submit to a fingerprint scan.

In 1995, for example, 2.08 people were employed in “sales and related” occupations for every $1 million of real GDP generated that year. By 2002 (the last year for which consistent data are available), that number had fallen to 1.79, a decline of nearly 14 percent.

But, you know, computers still can’t manage a team or paint a Picasso…

Computers so far have proved to be great pattern recognizers but lousy general problem solvers; IBM’s supercomputers, for example, couldn’t take what they’d learned about chess and apply it to Jeopardy!

And for all their power and speed, today’s digital machines have shown little creative ability. They can’t compose very good songs, write great novels, or generate good ideas for new businesses.

David Ricardo, who initially thought that advances in technology would benefit all, developed an abstract model that showed the possibility of technological unemployment. The basic idea was that at some point, the equilibrium wages for workers might fall below the level needed for subsistence. A rational human would see no point in taking a job at a wage that low, so the worker would go unemployed and the work would be done by a machine instead.

Not everyone is losing the race; 3 types of runners are going to win (but they were in the lead to begin with)

In fact, economist Ed Wolff found that over 100% of all the wealth increase in America between 1983 and 2009 accrued to the top 20% of households. The other four-fifths of the population saw a net decrease in wealth over nearly 30 years.

Instead, the stagnation of median incomes primarily reflects a fundamental change in how the economy apportions income and wealth. The median worker is losing the race against the machine.

Runner #1: High-skilled workers

Over the past 40 years, weekly wages for those with a high school degree have fallen and wages for those with a high school degree and some college have stagnated. On the other hand, college-educated workers have seen significant gains, with the biggest gains going to those who have completed graduate training

Even the low wages earned by factory workers in China have not insulated them from being undercut by new machinery and the complementary organizational and institutional changes. For instance, Terry Gou, the founder and chairman of the electronics manufacturer Foxconn, announced this year a plan to purchase 1 million robots over the next three years to replace much of his workforce. The robots will take over routine jobs like spraying paint, welding, and basic assembly. Foxconn currently has 10,000 robots, with 300,000 expected to be in place by next year.

Runner #2: Superstars

Income has grown faster for the top 1% than the rest of the top decile. In turn, the top 0.1% and top 0.01% have seen their income grow even faster. This is not run-of-the-mill skill-biased technical change but rather reflects the unique rewards of superstardom. Sherwin Rosen, himself a superstar economist, laid out the economics of superstars in a seminal 1981 article. In many markets, consumers are willing to pay a premium for the very best. If technology exists for a single seller to cheaply replicate his or her services, then the top-quality provider can capture most—or all—of the market.

Um, that’s the internet. Bits and bytes.

Runner #3: Capital(ists)

In particular, if technology replaces labor, you might expect that the shares of income earned by equipment owners would rise relative to laborers—the classic bargaining battle between capital and labor.

Similarly, corporate profits as a share of GDP are at 50-year highs. Meanwhile, compensation to labor in all forms, including wages and benefits, is at a 50-year low.

But if humans and machines work together, everyone wins!

As Kasparov writes, it instead consisted of a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. … Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.

Technology enables more and more opportunities for what Google chief economist Hal Varian calls “micromultinationals”—businesses with less than a dozen employees that sell to customers worldwide and often draw on worldwide supplier and partner networks.

wonderful study by economist Robert Jensen found, for example, that as soon as mobile telephones became available in the fishing regions of Kerala, India, the price of sardines dropped and stabilized, yet fishermen’s profits actually went up.

We need to incentivize better teachers…

Start by simply paying teachers more so that more of the best and the brightest sign up for this profession, as they do in many other nations. American teachers make 40% less than the average college graduate.

…and encourage immigration…

Increase the ratio of skilled workers in the United States by encouraging skilled immigrants.

…and support entrepreneurs! :P

Foster a broader class of mid-tech, middle-class entrepreneurs by training them in the fundamentals of business creation and management.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, as each successive wave of automation eliminated jobs in some sectors and occupations, entrepreneurs identified new opportunities where labor could be redeployed and workers learned the necessary skills to succeed. Millions of people left agriculture, but an even larger number found employment in manufacturing and services.

Trivia: productivity is hard to measure

Compounding this measurement problem is the fact that free digital goods like Facebook, Wikipedia, and YouTube are essentially invisible to productivity statistics.

Reminds me of Tim O’Reilly and the clothesline paradox.

Health care productivity is poorly measured and often assumed to be stagnant, yet Americans live on average about 10 years longer today than they did in 1960.

That’s it, folks! Thank you for reading. I plan to do Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You next. It’s the best career advice book for 20-somethings that I’ve read. The irony is not lost on me as 30 is right around the bend…

Here’s a list of all 1-page cheatsheets, and a list of all books!

The Inverted-U: the research behind why there can indeed be too much of a good thing

The Inverted-U is a journal article by Adam Grant and Barry Schwartz. It’s the pillar of Malcolm Gladwell’s arguments in David and Goliath, which is how I discovered it.

Reading academic papers is tougher than your regular blog posts and nonfiction books. It’s uncomfortable but I try to push through one or two each month. I can’t imagine how grad students (and law students) do it. I suppose as with all things that you get used to it.

Here are my notes. Reader beware – there’s a good chance some of the below is inaccurate, incomplete, or misrepresentative, since this is only one read-through in the eyes of a pure layman.

Adam Grant and Barry Shwartz are professors at UPenn Wharton and Swarthmore, respectively; I’ll refer to them below as GS.

The Inverted-U by Adam Grant and Barry Schwartz

Both excessive and defective exercise destroys the strength, and similarly drink or food which is above or below a certain amount destroys the health, while that which is proportionate both produces and increases and preserves it. So too is it, then, in the case of temperance and courage and the other virtues. – Aristotle

The academic term for too much of a good thing is “nonmonotonic inverted-U-shaped effects”
Psychology research has proven that certain behaviors increase happiness (eg, sending thank-you messages, spending money on others, making choices to increase autonomy), but GS believe there needs to be more discussion and research on the downsides of excess
Aristotle argued people need to find the mean, the “proportionate” response to things
Cited studies and examples include:
- Learning (on the job) is good, but people too focused on learning can divert attention from performance, waste resources, distract from key priorities
- Complex jobs provide satisfaction and fulfillment, but jobs that are too complex (I’m thinking anything in public office these days) can lead to stress, burnout, dissatisfaction
- An NBA study showed that practice was helpful and improved performance, but excessive practice (and excessive experience, as measured in years) led to overconfidence, complacency, and lack of creativity
- Detail-orientation is important to success, but when you are too detail-oriented – especially for simple, mechanical jobs, you can miss the bigger picture
- Generosity is good, but too much consumes your time and energy. A study of volunteers showed that 100 to 800 hours per year is optimal
Other examples of the inverted-U include optimism (too much can lead to under preparation and under estimation of risks), self-esteem (can harm relationships and health), cheerfulness (can lead to engaging in risky behaviors), and life satisfaction (“moderately satisfied” people earned the most, “extremely satisfied” people earned less and had lower levels of education)
GS stress that most data are correlational, and thus causality is uncertain. We’re not sure if moderately satisfied people are driven to be more successful, or if more successful people, once they compare their BMW to their neighbor’s Porsche, are less satisfied
Why does this happen? I struggled through this part, but here’s my best shot:
- One reason is “virtue conflicts”. In other words, life is zero-sum, and the more of one virtue you cultivate, the less time and energy you spend on other virtues (helping others is good, but so is investing in yourself)
- The second reason is “good things satiate and bad things escalate”. So a good burrito is great on the first bite, but not so tasty near the end. And bad things – like substance addiction – can grow in magnitude
- The third reason is the characteristics of some virtues, where one effect is harmful in excess (eg, motivation is a positive virtue, and increased focus is an effect, but too much focus can be bad for complex, big-picture tasks)
GS end by asking a few questions, including:
- 1. How much of a specific trait is too much?
- 2. Why does this happen?
- 3. When – under what conditions, circumstances, contexts – does this inverted-U happen?
They believe that applying Aristotle’s concept of the mean and the inverted-U are helpful to understanding behavior and happiness. For example, researchers used to believe that the more choice we had, the better. It was only recently that the same researchers realized too much choice can make you less happy (the paradox of choice)
Are there any virtues where more is always better? What is known as an “unmitigated good”?

We believe that the search for the Aristotelian mean represents an opportunity for psychologists to answer fundamental questions about the limits of positive experiences. The inverted-U is a widespread phenomenon in psychology, and we believe it deserves more attention in psychology writ large and in positive psychology especially – Adam Grant and Barry Schwartz

Here’s the original article. Happy reading! I’d love to hear what you think and if you came across different insights than I did.

For more readings, check out my linkblog. There, you can see what I read and highlight. Thanks to Postach.io for building this tool, which integrates neatly with Evernote.

10 inspiring and entertaining Youtube videos

I keep a list of favorite Youtube videos that I go back and watch regularly. They all move me in a different way. Here are 10 of the more “inspiring” ones.

1. Frozen Grand Central – from the folks at Improv Everywhere. I like the social commentary in this one.