Recommended Consumption: Thanksgiving edition

Well... there you go. (source)

Read:

• TED talks are lying to you, by Thomas Frank @ Slate.
• If He Hollers Let Him Go: Searching for Dave Chappelle Ten Years After He Left His Own Show, by Rachel Kaadzi Ghanzah.
• Two-Hit Wonder, by D.T. Max. The New Yorker's profile of Jack Dorsey. I'm glad to hear that I leave my apartment far earlier in the morning than Mr. Dorsey does.
• The Scratch Interview with Jonathan Franzen. I like reading more criticisms of the technology industry because from the inside, this discussion just does not occur. For example, this quote from Franzen:
• "I think the tech corporations are like the nineteenth-century coal magnates, and the free-lance writers are like the people slaving in the mines, the only difference being that the tech corporations can’t stop congratulating themselves on how they’ve liberated everybody. I think the Internet should be really strictly regulated, the way the airwaves used to be. If an entire region of the country had its main industry suddenly lose 90 percent of its paying jobs because of the predatory practices of a different region’s industry, you might, if you were the government, step in and say, “We can’t actually let this entire region starve. We’re going to subsidize prices, we’re going to redistribute some income.” Why should Apple shareholders be getting rich while working journalists are getting fired? This is an unjust situation, and the libertarians in Silicon Valley are either moral idiots or liars. They know they’re getting away with shit they shouldn’t get away with, and all they’ve got is this idea of libertarianism. That, and the mantra of making the world a better place."
• Facebook Feminism, Like It or Not, by Susan Faludi. A take-down of Sheryl Sandberg and the "Lean In" movement. Brilliant journalism.
• The Robots Are Here, by Tyler Cowen. The future is now.
• The Truth About Marissa Mayer: An Unauthorized Biography, by Nicholas Carlson. Yet another polarizing woman in tech.
• How Medium Is Building a New Kind of Company with No Managers. Really interesting read. I've often wondered if this was a possible organizational management framework; it seems to be doing well at a 40-person organization, but companies always seem to fracture at above 150 employees (if you believe Malcolm Gladwell, that is). Also see my previous post on Medium here.

Watch:

• How to Die in Oregon. About Oregon's Death with Dignity laws, and a profile of several people who chose to end their lives deliberately and peacefully.
• The Pruitt-Igoe Myth. A very captivating film about St. Louis' failed housing projects.

Listen:

• Two Fridays ago I saw The Chainsmokers perform live at Vessel near Union Square. And I've got to say, if you like fun, poppy, uplifting progressive house tunes and just having a great time in general, you have to find time to see them. Here are my favorites: One, Two, and Three.
• More good tracks here and here and here.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.

Recommended Consumption: Mid-October 2013 edition

Being a goof in Las Vegas this past weekend.

Short Reads:

• The Guardian's Voices of Finance series. I clicked through almost all of these in an hours-long binge. Really confirms a lot of my suspicions about the banking industry lifestyle; somewhat vindicating some career choices I made coming out of undergrad. My favorite interview is this one. Don't miss the comments on the bottom.
• Create something every day.
• Smells Like Middle-Aged Spirit: The High School Reunion. Moving and well-written. 
• What's wrong with the modern world, by Jonathan Franzen. JF comes off long an old fogey in this piece, but he's undoubtedly correct about a large number of things. One of the things that makes cultural self-criticism so difficult is that your own culture (and Franzen is specifically talking about the technological first-world here) is largely invisible to you. The ways in which our society is different from others -- or blatantly destructive -- can be hard to detect without broader experience and perspective.
• When a Crop Becomes King, by Michael Pollan. This guy is so good at turning societal assumptions on their head (just like the Franzen piece above). Killer quote: "Add to that all the corn-based animal protein (corn-fed beef, chicken and pork) and the corn qua corn (chips, muffins, sweet corn) and you have a plant that has become one of nature’s greatest success stories, by turning us (along with several other equally unwitting species) into an expanding race of corn eaters."
• Startup Metrics for Pirates, by Dave McClure. I'm a sucker for a good pirate pun.
• There’s a .00006% Chance of Building a Billion Dollar Company: How This Man Did It. The math in this article is dubious (read: stupid) but I still love the concept of taking on a difficult & unglamorous niche and exploiting it.
• The 10 Stealth Economic Trends That Rule the World Today. Illuminating.

Long Reads:

• Power Systems, by Noam Chomsky. A requisite lefty tome of corporate-bashing. Really thought-provoking and awesome. Much like the Franzen and Pollan pieces, the main function of this writing is to get the reader to reconsider his/her positions on things that are largely invisible to most people. In this case, that would be: how much power do multinational corporations wield, are they truly a force of good in the world, and how is government compelled to support these interests? There are just as many books out there attacking this position as defending it, but as somebody with an undergraduate business degree and employed by a Fortune 100 company, I could use a little more of Chomsky's perspective.
• Rework, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, aka the 37signals guys). This was recommended to me by Mike and Zal who said it just might be the best business book they've ever read. While I thought it was a little airy and reductionist at times, overall it didn't disappoint. Their main thesis is that you can build a sustainable business without outside capital, a fast-growth philosophy, lots of employees, a physical office, or really anything that people assume is required for Silicon Valley-style software companies. If the focus is firmly on the customer, then everything else is secondary, and optional. This is a product management book, really.

From Afrojack's set at XS. The guy to his right is Mario Lopez. Weird, I know.

Listens:

• Hyperbits' Project Pink Mix. Lots of uplifting progressive house stuff.
• Mord Fustang's new EP. Incredible, really excellent. Electro house.
• Chainsmokers Live @ Tomorrowland 2013.
• Check out my page on Soundcloud for lots more of this stuff.

Views:

• I re-watched Requiem for a Dream this past week... highly, highly recommended.
• Also, Trainspotting.
• Can't forget Snatch.

DO NOT WATCH UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES:

• Michigan-Penn State highlights.

Consume me!:

• I'll be in Detroit & Ann Arbor from this Thursday 10/17 through Monday 10/21.

And now, your moment of Zen:

Klegg, BotRob, Max

It'll Be All Right

I went for a short jog around Alta Vista Park this afternoon; my last run before the half marathon on Sunday. Weekday afternoons are an odd time because it's when children are all leaving school, and seeing packs of kids walking down the street is a pretty rare sight in a major city like San Francisco. You almost forget what they look like, or that they even exist.

On this particular sunny afternoon there was a whole pack of them at the corner of the park, huddled around a few adults, ostensibly there for a party or birthday of some sort. About eleven or twelve of them were together, doing normal kid stuff, but I also spotted a straggler a few dozen feet from the main group. He was maybe ten years old, chubby, and shy-looking. In between glances back at the main group he kept his head down and kicked a piece of stick around the sidewalk.

Kick... shuffle shuffle shuffle. Peer back at the group. Head down. Kick... shuffle shuffle shuffle...

I remember being that kid.

Here's what I didn't do: Break stride. Open my mouth. Make eye contact. I didn't do a thing except send some vibes out into the universe -- vibes that I hope made their way through the magnetic field and into this lonely little boy's psyche, one way or the other.

The message was: "It's gonna be all right, bud. Everything is going to be fine."

Courtesy Fred Canonge link

P.S. I'll be in Portland this weekend. See you there, party people.
P.P.S. Some tunes to help you dissociate.

Why it's never too late to invent Facebook

When thinking through my future career and inevitably (and unhealthily) comparing myself to the outliers of my field -- Mr. Zuckerberg, Mr. Dell, Mrs. Mayer -- there's always a point when I start mentally grumbling about missed opportunities. You could have invented the Tesla, Patrick, but you didn't! There's only one guy gets to make a billion dollars from the electric car, and now that can't be you!

My boss.

Ignoring for a minute all of the silly things about that statement, I think it's fair to guess that a lot of people harbor similar thoughts. When someone else exploits a market opportunity, it seems like the opportunity existed for a period of time, somebody had the vision to exploit it, and now the gap is filled. Meanwhile the market modernizes further, eliminating more gaps & inefficiencies, and you're a year older and closer to death. People don't need a fancy new MP3 player anymore because that other guy already gave it to them, and wait... is that a grey hair?

Truth is: this is all wrong. And I think we all intrinsically know it's wrong even though emotionally it feels like the train has already left the station. There is so much shit left to be invented and built. It's likely that as humans we'll find a way to exterminate ourselves far before we ever approach a diminishing rate of invention opportunity. As Geoffrey Moore says in the preface to Crossing the Chasm:

"... technological changes do not live in isolation but rather come under the influence of changes in surrounding technologies as well. In the early 90s it was the sea change to graphical user interfaces and client-server topologies that created the primary context. As we come to the close of the century it is the complete shift of communications infrastructure to the Internet. These major technology shifts create huge sine waves of change that interact with the smaller sine waves of more local technology shifts, occasionally synthesizing harmonically, more frequently playing out some discordant mix that has customers growling and investors howling."

Invention begets invention. The Internet is a perfect example of a precipitating wave, and I can tell you that as someone who is finally starting to understand how computer technology actually works: this stuff isn't all that complicated. I mean, it is super complicated. But fundamentally, all of the fancy stuff that you can do on your iPad nowadays is built on an infrastructure designed to transmit packets of text and numbers. I've seen the code that scaffolds the interior or iOS, Android, and web apps, and it's mostly a series of instructions explaining how to take some bits and change a few other bits depending on how those first bits look. Yet those little operations can combine to accomplish a bazillion different things.

That's what makes the Internet so amazing. A bunch of guys got together in the late sixties, figured out how to send signals from one computer to another, told some people about it, and waited. It took a little while, but eventually... BANG: electronic mail, web publishing, online banking, classified markets, dating sites, interactive gaming, online encyclopedias, social media, etc. etc. etc.

Guess what? They all just shuffle bits from place to place. Somebody left buckets of pink, yellow, and blue paint laying around, and waited until Van Gogh figured out what to do with them. And that's why we shouldn't glorify these founder-innovators and christen them with superhuman abilities. Yes, the Facebook guys are smart, but they're not prodigies. They're just a few sharp guys who put in the effort to build something that people wanted.

One final comforting thought is this: everything repeats. There must have been thousands of would-be inventors kicking themselves in 1909 for not building the Model T. They must have thought that all the good ideas were taken, too.

Could be you.

Recommended Consumption: Early September

I've been sitting on a lot of these for a while, so this is a big one. Enjoy.

Read (shorter):

• The Chickens and the Bulls: The rise and incredible fall of a vicious extortion ring that preyed on prominent gay men in the 1960s. I read this last year and totally forgot about it before rediscovering the piece last week. What an ordeal these guys went through.
• Shooting the Messengers, from GQ's Ed Caesar. It begins with "The life of a war correspondent has never been cheaper..." and just escalates from there.
• The Story of a Suicide: Two college roommates, a webcam, and a tragedy. The Tyler Clementi tragedy. Sometimes I think back to the dumb things I did over the internet circa 2004 and wonder how close I veered towards serious shitbag behavior that could have ended really poorly. Even though the antagonist is reprehensible at times, this story has more to do with the naiveté that surrounds adolescence, technology, and personal relationships. We've all done shitbag things at one point or another, sadly.
• The Rise and Fall of Jeremy Hammond: Enemy of the State, from Rolling Stone.
• The Small, Intense, Unfairly Exclusive World of Football Placekickers. Very, very interesting.
• Don't Fly During Ramadan.
• Why We Need Nomads.
• The Joy of Old Age, by Oliver Sacks.
• Fuckarounditis, from Martin. I've set a mental note to re-read this every few months.
• How Athletes Get Great. Basically a Malcolm Gladwell hit piece.
• The Leadville Trail 100. Long read, but you won't believe what some people will do for fun.

Read (longer):

• A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 1). Finally finished the first book last week. Read it people!
• Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel, by Rolf Potts. The backpacker's Bible.

Listen:

• 3lau: What I Would've Played (Ezoo 2013)
• Mat Zo's India Mix.
• More good stuff (note: mostly electronic)

Recommended Consumption: The Best Posts from Medium, July 2013

This week I decided to browse through Medium to see what the fuss is all about. My overall impression: beautiful design; truly impressive UX; uneven content. While scanning through one of their best-of lists, I found July's Top 100 to be a mixed bag ranging from heartstring-tugging brilliance down to self-masturbatory nonsense.

It's unfortunate that a small population of flimsy & self-promotional pieces are distracting from the all of the other great work on the site, because some of it is really quite good. For example, here's my favorite articles from the July Top 100 list. Enjoy:

• The Risk Not Taken by Andy Dunn (my favorite)
• A Product Manager's Job by Josh Elman
• Sell Everything by Marshall Haas
• Coffee vs. beer: which drink makes you more creative? by Mikael Cho
• Everything there is to know about startup competition by Tony Stubblebine
• Rise of the full-stack marketer by Kyle Tibbits

The Internet

A lot of people characterize the internet a great enabler for innovation and entrepreneurship. Obviously this is the case -- one merely has to look at the entirely new industries, creation of wealth, and changes in our everyday routines to validate that claim.

But what if the internet is also a great enabler for inactivity; an inhibitor of achievement? I'm not talking about the time and productivity lost to things like World of Warcraft. What I mean is, now that everybody with an internet connection has a megaphone with which to communicate his or her point of view, what happens when the talking outpaces the doing?

We all know that talking about our goals lessens the chance that we will actually accomplish them. When one guy writes about gaining 34 pounds of muscle in 28 days and over a thousand people comment on his article, many expressing a desire to match the feat, what's the net change in aggregate exercise among those readers? Do the newly-inspired gym rats outnumber those who satisfied their dopamine urges just by commenting on the article, or is the other way around?

Food for thought.

P.S. I wrote a pretty lengthy answer on Quora today about my undergraduate recruiting experience. Check it out.

College Tuition & Student Loans

I wanted to publish part of my conversation with mom last night. My comments over e-mail do a good job explaining my position on the issue of rising tuition costs and the heavy loan burden on American students.

[Conversation has been edited somewhat for readability.]

Me:

Check out this article on NYU [her alma mater]: link

The comments are interesting… people seem divided about whether students are to blame for assuming so much debt or if it’s unethical to provide 18 year olds with >$100k loans that can’t be cleared even by bankruptcy.

All I can say for certain is that the ROI of higher education is decreasing rapidly. I feel really fortunate and grateful that you and dad paid for my college tuition and expenses, but if I had to pay for it myself I would have gone to U of I or applied to 15 schools and shopped around for scholarships.

 Her:

I will take a hard line on this and say to prospective students, don't go to schools this expensive, just say no! 

My girlfriend's daughter is at Iowa and just finished an internship in London. I believe good, hardworking people will always do well.

Me:

Re: don’t go to schools this expensive – I completely agree, but the one caveat is that there’s an implicit assumption, almost mythology if you will, in this society that a premium education is always a good investment. And I think parents and other authority figures sometimes reinforce this too… perfect example being my friend [name redacted] who decided to go to [law school redacted] (ranked 23^rd overall at the time) without a scholarship instead of the [law school redacted] with a 50% scholarship (ranked 25^th at the time) because of the idea that a marginal improvement in program ranking is worth an additional $80-100k in student loans. Frankly – it seemed like I was the only person at the time who told him that was a stupid idea, and I bet he would have made a different decision if his family or professors had said “hey man, this is a sub-optimal investment, you will regret this later.”

So my point is that everybody needs to become better educated on how the costs of higher ed at an institution-to-institution basis compare to the benefits of that particular degree – not just the students themselves, but the authority figures around them who may be operating on outdated assumptions about the investment value of higher ed and reinforce those assumptions onto today’s 17-year-olds.

Debt might be a reasonable decision if the student has an opportunity to get an elite degree for that investment, but the last thing you want to say in retrospect is what I heard [name redacted] tell me one time: “You know what the worst part of going $35k into debt for a college degree is? All I got for that money is a degree from [university name redacted, but let's just say that they're not known for their research]…” 

Her:

Ps we saw the band Journey at Ravinia tonight.

I guess you can say that rising high school seniors should "Stop Believing" the hype about college degrees having high value regardless of cost.

For some really aggressive thinking on this topic, check out these posts by James Altucher. And also check out what the POTUS had to say on the matter this morning:

"Higher education cannot be a luxury. It's an economic imperative." —President Obama #MakeCollegeAffordable
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) August 22, 2013

President Obama: Colleges that keep tuition down and provide quality education will see their federal funding go up. #MakeCollegeAffordable
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) August 22, 2013

Recommended Consumption (April 2013)

• Watch this.
• So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love, by Cal Newport. The premise is that choosing a career based on a pre-conceived passion is both foolish and self-centered. The better way is to focus on developing rare and valuable skills first, and using them as leverage to create an ideal lifestyle. Frankly, this is one of the best career books I've ever read. Check out Cal's blog for more great insights.
• How I Evaluate Each Position by Bill Walsh.
• Jerry Seinfeld Intends to Die Standing Up.
• No to NoUI. The more time I spend reading about design theory, the more fascinated I become.

Humility

Paradoxically, I find that the less I focus on my own state of well-being - and instead divert my attention towards how I can deliver value to my environment - the happier I become. Conversely, the benefits of time that I spend attending to my own needs (with the exceptions of food, sleep, exercise, etc.) are fleeting at best, and counterproductive at worst.

Obviously, this isn't groundbreaking insight; but it's a pretty reliable truism. My relationship with my girlfriend demonstrates this every day: when I dwell on what I'm not getting out of the relationship, a gulf opens between us. Communication breaks down, feelings are hurt, antipathy grows. My need to satisfy my own desires ends up ruining things for the both of us. Yet when I leave my apartment with the thought of what can I do to make her happy? in my head, well, that's exactly what happens. And as any man will tell you, when mama's happy, everybody's happy.

Cal Newport devotes a lot of real estate in his book to examining the same phenomenon from a career perspective. He explains that when we chase careers that are passion-based (that is, focused on our own interests and desires), disaster ensues because we didn't consider whether those passions are even remotely valuable to others. Basically, a breakdown of product market fit. Instead, he advocates that we build careers that are skills-based, which means seeking every opportunity to acquire competence in abilities that are valued by the market.

This is the career equivalent of "when mama's happy, everybody's happy." Instead of a girlfriend or wife, we're talking about "people who would consider paying us for services rendered."

There's also a philosophical basis for delivering value in lieu of satiating oneself. Buddhists and neuroscientists might make the argument that there is no "oneself" at all, and if that's the case, it's a pointless exercise to satisfy such a non-entity. Who is doing the consuming, anyways?

Instead of taking the sollipsist's point of view that "I know I must exist, but I'm unsure whether anybody else does," I'd prefer to take refuge in self-ignorance. A far more useful heuristic is "I'm not sure that I even exist, but good things seem to happen when I behave as if everybody else does. So I might as well try to make somebody's day."

I'm certainly a long way from mastering this perspective. But the more time I spend on becoming a process - a machine that spits out value into the surrounding environment - and not a primary recipient of that value, the better I seem to do.

On Wonder

[Reader note: This song randomly came on while I was writing, and I think it's a pretty apt tune for this post. So if you'd like the full multimedia readership experience, listen as you read.]

When I first moved to San Francisco, I was literally entranced. I'd be jogging at night, or meandering around neighborhoods on a Saturday afternoon, and I'd say to myself: "I can't believe this place actually exists." It was like some writer had taken all of the ingredients of a perfect town - beauty, friendliness, affluence, an accepting culture - and literally wrote it into reality.

When I would visit Chicago, or Minneapolis, or Ann Arbor, people would ask me what I thought of the west coast, and I'd whip out my shit-eating grin and brag about how I lived in the greatest city on Earth. I knew I was coming off like a smug little prick, but I didn't care. I felt awed, and at home, for the first time in a long while.

Unfortunately, as I've noticed with elevating unease, the feeling didn't last. As with many things that change slowly in our personalities and attitudes, I only discovered this in retrospect. It's getting close to two years since the cross-country move, and a significant portion of my earlier wonder has eroded away.

Granted, I expected this. It's a common pattern that I've witnessed in life (mine, at least). You enter a new environment (a new job, perhaps, or the start of college) with gobs of both excitement and inexperience. As time goes on and experience rises, the sense of wonder begins its inevitable dissipation.

I imagine this is why people tend to bounce around hobbies or vocations, riding an initial wave of excitement just long enough for the sense of newness to run its course. As experience rises, the effort still needs to be spent, but we don't have a reserve supply of wonder & earnestness to propel us through the tough spots. This could apply to living in a major city - we still have to wake up every morning and live our lives, despite greater disenchantment with city life over time - or to mastering a skill like playing the guitar. It sounds sexy and exciting at first, but once we open our eyes to how many hours it takes to become a rock star, vigor evaporates, but the unlearned chords remain.

So how to do fight this pattern? Do we even want to?

Since this is a blog, and I'm basically just talking to myself here, I'll propose a solution to my own question. If everybody who developed a skill or became ingrained in a community faced the kind of perpetual malaise that I described above, then nobody would stick with anything long enough to get good at it. There must be something that replaces the euphoria of inexperienced wonder. That thing is competence, or expertise.

If you stick with something long enough, interesting things start to happen. For one, you actually get good at it. You pick up nuances that are imperceptible to outsiders. You stop making rookie mistakes. You realize that you're part of a community of like-minded people. You gain some confidence that, hey, I know a thing or two about this.

With that comes the satisfaction of someone who's survived apprenticeship. And when that happens, some of the wonder comes back. It's not the same as it was in the beginning, but it's a little more sincere and a little less naive. It's like the entertainer who enters the industry dazzled by the challenge and spectacle of it all, conquers disillusionment, and one day assumes the deep fulfillment of a veteran.

So, yeah: maybe I'm no longer awestruck during my twilight jogs through Pacific Heights. And maybe I've stopped calling my parents every few days to relay some city-life minutia like a freshman who can't believe he's actually going to a real-live frat party. But at least I'm starting to get it. And like anything we want to improve at - playing a sport, building a profession, or becoming a better husband - that comes with its own satisfaction.

The "Stick With What Works" Fallacy

How many times have we heard this before:

If things are going well, just stick with what works. Don't rock the boat.

Probably plenty. But I don't believe in this maxim anymore. Instead, I think: success can lead to complacency. Success hides problems. Just because it seems to be working doesn't mean that you know why it's working, or if it is at all.

At Kace, we had an unbelievable run of success... something like 27 quarters of consecutive revenue growth. And that was great -- everybody is extremely proud of the work we did. But the one big important thing we neglected to do over that timespan was parse out exactly where we were truly being effective, and where we were just riding a current propelled by our partners and the market. When that inevitable missed quarter appeared, we finally got around to the self-examination. And we found that there was a gap between what we thought we were good at, and what we were actually good at.

From Fred (this doesn't apply exactly to the Kace example, but the major point is the same):

One of the things I have observed over the years is that a hard charging sales oriented founder/CEO can often hide the defects in a product. Because the founder is so capable of convincing the market to adopt/purchase the product, the company can get revenue traction with a product that is not really right. And that can hide all sorts of problems.

Be skeptical of your accomplishments. Dissect them. Disprove your company myths. Figure out where you actually performed well, and where you were just lucky (or particularly persuasive). Only then should you begin to feel comfortable sticking with what works.

Key Metrics

Two Cal Newport articles, one from 2009 and one from last month, both tackle the topic of narrowing focus to a pinpoint and only considering feedback specific to those specific goals.

An excerpt from the first post (which I highly recommend reading):

We soon hatched a plan. He would forget the random advice he’d been receiving from various friends and hangers-on — the suggestions to hand out demo CDs in front of radio stations or network to meet the right executives. Instead, he would turn his focus solely onto the Pyramid Club. He would return to the open mike again and again until he was able to win over that crowd. After that, he would progress to the showcase and play to win.

Our logic was simple: if he couldn’t become good enough to win over the Pyramid Club crowd, he couldn’t become good enough to attract industry attention. So why waste energy doing anything else?

And the second, more recent post (also a great read):

My above experiment sweeps these compelling sounding ideas off the proverbial table, and replaces them with an approach backed by data. What matters, it tells me, is something we can call: quality cited papers. In more detail, how many papers per year are you publishing that: (a) are in quality venues; and (b) attracting citations? 

This metric can tell me if I’m improving or not from year to year. Similarly, it provides clear feedback on which of my research directions should be dropped and which emphasized. When deciding whether to join a project, for example, I should start by estimating the expected impact on my quality cited papers value for the year. When deciding whether to apply for a particular grant, the same question should guide the decision.

I take the combined message as follows: be extremely deliberate when it comes to goal-setting, and be just as deliberate about choosing key metrics for tracking progress. We want to have as few key metrics as possible, and we want each one of them to be practically synonymous with goal achievement.

Let's take strength training as an example to illustrate the point. Say I want to become stronger, so I buy a gym membership and starting lifting weights three times a week. Pretty soon I devise a training plan and start tracking my performance on a variety of different exercises: pulldowns, biceps curls, leg extensions, dips, crunches, etc. Each workout I attempt these exercises in whichever order the machines are open, sometimes but not always making it through the entire list. Generally my performance improves, more or less, but the gains are uneven and hard to decipher. Sometimes I do so well on the chin-ups that I can barely perform a curl, and other days I save my favorite exercise for last but find that I've completely run out of energy to do a single rep. It ends up being pretty discouraging because I seem to be moving backwards at something every single workout.

Contrast that with the "key metric" approach: the only metric that I'm going to monitor closely will be the squat. Squatting is the most intense and important full-body strength exercise there is; being able to squat a lot of weight is practically synonymous with strength. You can't squat 400 pounds with a weak core, inflexible legs, or an underdeveloped chest, arms, or posterior. Everything that I consider doing within a strength-training context will be judged against the question of "will this help me increase the amount of weight I can squat, or not?" So, yes, I'll continue to work on increasing my bench press and chin-up numbers, but the squat is the only exercise that 1) I will consistently perform during every single workout, at the very beginning of the lift session, and 2) I will mercilessly demand a personal record from myself each and every time. If the numbers keep going up, then my strength is undeniably improving; all other metrics are just noise.

Attempting to track (and thus allow yourself to potentially panic - or gloat - over) every single quasi-relevant metric is like congratulating yourself for ordering a Diet Coke to go with a 1,200-calorie large buttered popcorn. The key metric is "calories-in-calories-out", not "fructose calories avoided." Remember that in a dynamic system anything that optimizes the sub-parts tends to sub-optimize the whole.

Here's a couple other examples of Key Metrics:

• Cardiovascular fitness: Is my five-mile run time decreasing month over month? NOT: how tired am I after walking up stairs, how fast can I run 100 meters, am I groggy in the morning...
• Work output: Am I increasing the number of high-quality projects I complete each month? NOT: how many hours am I spending in the office, how many random compliments or kudos I receive during the day, how large my most recent raise was...
• Pretending for a second that I have my dream job as an NFL General Manager: Are we increasing the ratio of production to salary expenditure over time? Notice how the very best NFL franchises tend to eschew pricey free agent acquisitions in favor of value and upside. The Baltimore Ravens' GM is clearly not measuring himself against the "how many aging veterans can I re-sign to placate our fanbase?" metric.

Contrast that approach with the Philadelphia Eagles over the past few seasons...

Right Now

Much of our thinking is consumed by the future. Delaying gratification; contriving plans; toiling away in the darkness while eroticizing the image of ourselves as we may one day be.

I've done plenty of this myself: "One day I'll be confident and experienced and rich enough to ask that girl for her number." Or: "Sure, that's a great idea for a company, but I should really gain a few years' more experience before I take the leap." And even: "Even though I was planning on taking that six week work trip to western Europe, I have more pressing work here now, and in any case I can always do it another time."

I'm not ready. I'll be way more equipped to accomplish that later. I don't feel comfortable trying until I know I'll succeed.

What bullshit. It's like a hazing ritual, and you're the pledge.

Not that I begrudge the concept of putting in the reps. Grit and hard work are essential. This isn't about turning down that Saturday night party invitation because you're consumed with finishing the first draft of the next great American novel. This is about turning down that Saturday night party invitation in order to stay in and fantasize about how you're going to totally crush it at the party next week.

We're so wrapped up in who we want to become that we forget to live right now. Think about the very best time you had during your freshman year of college. On the morning of that day, you woke up feeling just like you did this morning. Now it's crystallized past, just like today will be when you're seventy. How many things did you postpone at age 18, telling yourself that you would be ready to do them when you're 25? And now that you're 25, are you still telling yourself that you'll be ready by age 30?

Trust me on this: You are ready right now. If not now, then when?

Some additional thoughts on the subject follow. From Brett & Kate:

Memento mori is Latin for “Remember death.” The phrase is believed to originate from an ancient Roman tradition in which a servant would be tasked with standing behind a victorious general as he paraded though town. As the general basked in the glory of the cheering crowds, the servant would whisper in the general’s ear: “Respice post te! Hominem te esse memento! Memento mori!” = “Look behind you! Remember that you are but a man! Remember that you will die!”

And:

It at once becomes starkly clear the great tragedy in always waiting for your life to begin. If you wait for your life to start, it never will. This is your life, right now. Whether you’re in a college dorm room, or your first apartment, or a brand new house in the burbs. Whether you’re single, dating, or married. This is your life. Whatever it is you want to do, whatever it is you want to change about yourself, whatever it is you want to see and feel and experience in this lifetime, you can’t put it off until your life begins or it will never happen. Get started now.

From Cal:

Am I living well now or preparing to live well later?

If you’re not trying to live well now, what are you waiting for?

And from Seneca (via Tim):

You will hear many men saying: “After my fiftieth year I shall retire into leisure, my sixtieth year shall release me from public duties.” And what guarantee, pray, have you that your life will last longer? Who will suffer your course to be just as you plan it? Are you not ashamed to reserve for yourself only the remnant of life, and to set apart for wisdom only that time which cannot be devoted to any business? How late it is to begin to live just when we must cease to live! 

The fool, with all his other faults, has this also, he is always getting ready to live. 

On Fame

This weekend in Chicago I had an opportunity to eat dinner with some very famous people. It was nothing planned on my end; more of an invitation extended, and accepted, and the next thing you know it's seven hours later and the combined Twitter follower count at the table is well into 8-figures.

Meeting famous people is a funny thing that tends to be both overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time. For one thing, people who look extremely handsome on TV are, in fact, extremely handsome in real life. And they do often possess that swagger, or gravitas, that comes from perpetually inhabiting the center of attention. And despite the aphorism that "famous people are always way shorter than you expect," some, in fact, turn out to be gigantic.

On the other hand, there's the underwhelming/humanizing aspect of the encounter. Even famous female pop stars eventually have to take a crap after a few days. Not to mention a few other funny things I just saw famous people do: hold awkward eye contact, lose their phone in a public bathroom, walk into a chair, trip while getting into a car, tell a lame joke, hold their cigarette like a cornball, and (most intriguingly) eye other famous people with bewilderment.

At the end of the day, the stars really are just like us. The only difference? Risk-taking, luck, and focus.

"Life is a warfare and a stranger's sojourn, and after fame is oblivion." - Marcus Aurelius

Recommended Consumption (March 2013)

• Starting Strength, 3rd Edition by Mark Rippetoe. The Bible of barbell lifting.
• Behind the Book: Lessons Learned and Personal Reflections on Publishing a Bestselling Business Book by Ben Casnocha. Long form article on Ben's experiences writing The Start-up of You, which just arrived in my mail.
• Shut Up and Play the Hits, an awesome documentary film about (and concert footage of) LCD Soundsystem.
• The Fab Five.
• How I Stopped Eating Food. And the follow-up.
• Talent and Production: The Great Emotional Divide, blog post by Matt Waldman. This guy is an unbelievably keen football observer, and writer.

Kevin

Last Thursday I met Kevin, the nicest crackhead in all of the Tender-Nob.

It was 7:45pm and I was just getting back to my apartment at the end of the work day. This was before the Daylight Savings Time switch so it was 100% dark at this point, and both my front and rear bicycle lights were activated. As I decelerated onto the sidewalk in front of my place, my bulbs illuminated a thirty-something man hunched over the stoop at the base of the stairs.

When he first growled something, I didn't totally understand him and figured that he was probably asking for money. Honestly, my first reaction was to tell him to get the hell off of our front porch. I have no problem with beggars but I'd prefer that they don't loiter in front of my place of residence -- we have a hard enough time convincing friends that our neighborhood is non-sketchy.

It turns out that he didn't want money at all: he was asking me to call an ambulance. You see, he explained, he made a very bad decision earlier in the evening. He knew better than to take drugs: they were the reason he was living on the street in the first place. And he had been sober for quite some time, definitely a few months. But that day he decided to smoke some crack cocaine, and now his feet hurt so badly that he couldn't even walk. He asked me, please call him an ambulance so he can detox and receive the treatment & rehab that he really needs.

At first I was a bit apprehensive. My next (completely, entirely non-judgmental) thought was that this would be a pretty clever lead-in to punching me in the face and stealing my cell phone. I went upstairs to fetch Ari to be my second pair of eyes in case this man had nefarious intent. Then we called 911 and arranged for an ambulance to arrive in ten minutes or less.

So we chatted with this guy to kill time until then. It turns out, Kevin (as his name turned out to be) was an extremely nice guy. Or at least as nice as somebody could be while going through a drug relapse. His eyes may have been pointed different directions through the whole conversation, but he wore a fat grin and generously shared the details of his life and how he ended up on the streets of San Francisco.

Eventually the paramedics came, put Kevin in a stretcher, and took him to the hospital. And that was the whole encounter; maybe fifteen minutes at max.

When I started writing this post I wasn't exactly sure how I planned on ending it. Originally I was going to write more extensively about Kevin's past and the tough breaks that led him to the situation he was living through. But even though his story is actually very compelling, it's not my business to spread it. I also thought about comparing the minutia that consumes our days in the San Francisco tech world (viral coefficients and mobile gaming platforms and such) to the suffering of real human beings in the very same city, but that would be patronizing and predictable.

As such, I think I'll just end with this thought: I really, truly, fucking love this city, and I'm trying very hard not to slip into that sort of milquetoast apathy that people get once they're too jaded to remember how fortunate they are to live in a place like this. And that means keeping my eyes open -- not down at my phone, or the sidewalk, or blankly staring off into space pondering god-knows-what.

And that means being grateful. Because we're quite lucky on two levels: one, that we don't often suffer the way Kevin did last week; and secondly, that we're crammed close enough to actually help the Kevins of this world when they need it. If we're paying attention.

A Brief List of Interesting Web Companies

When brainstorming new business ideas, I find it's useful to remind myself that (most of) the best ideas are very narrow in scope. Instead of trying to be all things for all people ("It's a dashboard for managing the intersection of your social, mobile, and real-world lives!"), they just pick one problem or task and find a way to make it 10x easier to solve or accomplish.

To be sure, most companies don't start off this way. It takes a lot of positioning and segmenting work to whittle a company's offering and position down to the ultimate succinctness. But when it actually happens, the effect is like magic.

To that end, I keep a list of inspirational companies that do a great job of this. Here are some recent additions:

• usertesting.com
• DailyLit
• longform.org
• MobileDay
• Yesware
• Voomly
• PivotDesk
• shelby.tv
• InternMatch
• FreedomPop
• Fizzle
• getAbstract
• CoFoundersLab

In addition to the inspirational effect, this list always reminds me that there are a lot of opportunities out there.

Minimum Effective Dose

In part to support my goal of a metrics-driven lifestyle, I've begun rigorously tracking my running performance. One motivating factor is to ensure I'm making progress so I don't waste months spinning my wheels with nothing to show for it. Another is to use evidence of previous improvement to drive myself through tough, demoralizing stretches. And the third reason is to identify my minimum effective dose (MED) for improvement.

Tim Ferriss defines minimum effective dose (MED) as "the minimum dose that will produce a desired outcome." Here's an analogy he uses to describe it:

If you need 15 minutes in the sun to trigger a melanin response, 15 minutes is your MED for tanning. More than 15 minutes is redundant and will just result in burning and a forced break from the beach. During this forced break from the beach, let's assume one week, someone else who heeded his natural 15-minute MED will be able to fit in four more tanning sessions. He is four shades darker, whereas you have returned to your pale pre-beach self. Sad little manatee. In biological systems, exceeding your MED can freeze progress for weeks, even months.

He then uses this in the context of exercise to show how excessive weightlifting does not increase strength over time but rather invites the possibility of fatigue, mental burnout, and injury risk. I've appropriated the same concept to examine my running habits.

Here's the thing: I don't want exercise and fitness to become a primary goal in my life. Since I'm trying to narrow my focus and only focus on a small number of projects at once, treating running like a "big project" will just sap energy from my other intermediate-term goals, like becoming better at my job and learning how to ski. Rather, I'd like it to become a habit that I perform without having to think too hard about it. Therefore, I'm seeking to understand my minimum effective dose for running frequency, which I've defined as "the minimum running frequency that will ensure improvements in proficiency over time." Ignoring for a moment the fact that everybody has good days and bad days, I want to identify the maximum number of days I can allow between runs while still increasing speed and distance each week.

To answer that question, I look carefully at my running logs. Even after only three weeks of tracking this way, I've gained some insight:

• Between my 2/15 and 2/20 runs, my course time (on the same course) dropped from 51:00 to 48:30. This means that five days between runs were sufficient to realize performance gains. My MED is at most a 5-day frequency (meaning that I could probably get away with going 6 or 7 days between runs and still seeing improvement.)
• Due to travel & work conflicts, I went 13 days between my next two runs (2/20 and 3/5). I actually ran a different course these two runs so I can't compare times directly, but I can subjectively state that the run did not go well. My feet felt raw and blistery, I was sluggish, and I felt weak and soft overall. Combining that information with the common-sense notion that "thirteen days is probably too long between runs to see consistent improvement," I can semi-confidently state that my MED is at least a 13-day frequency. So now I know my MED is likely somewhere between six and twelve days, and subsequent runs will be scheduled to measure it more precisely.

It's important to remember that MED will change over time. Incremental improvement eventually takes exponentially more effort (like how I lowered my mile time by 20 seconds last week but elite track & field athletes work for months to shave off fractions of a second.) But the goal is to use MED to schedule runs that ensure improvement without dominating my lifestyle. If, for example, my MED turns out to be 8 days, I'll run once a week until gains start to taper off.

Is this the right approach for marathon training, or to become a world-class sprinter as soon as possible? Definitely not. But I believe it's a reasonable methodology for avoiding effort that does not yield results.

On Focus (and the Law of Complementary Accomplishments)

From one of my favorite posts in Cal's blog:

Once you accomplish something of a non-trivial impressiveness and effort score, you can achieve many complementary accomplishments that have similar impressiveness scores but require very little additional effort.

In sum: success begets success. Once one has achieved something significant and noteworthy, not only will subsequent opportunities appear more frequently, they'll be easier to tackle because momentum & credibility have already been established. In other words, noteworthy accomplishments possess scale advantages.

The trick, then, is to specialize. To maintain a narrow focus in order to burrow deeply into an industry, craft, or field of study. That's the most direct way to get to "significant and noteworthy" territory as quickly as possible.

When I think about particularly successful contemporaries of mine, a few themes emerge:

1. They focused narrowly.
2. They took advantage of complementary accomplishments to catapult themselves into ever-more exclusive opportunities.
3. They migrated to communities dominated by their particular industry.

Here's two examples:

• Andrew is one of my best friends from high school. During the fall of his H.S. freshman year (2002), he volunteered for the political campaign of U.S. Representative Mark Kirk. His responsibilities in that first election were modest: just typical campaign fare like handing out flyers and propping up lawn signs. Kirk won the election, and Andrew participated in roles of ever-increasing responsibility for the 2004, 2006, and 2008 Congressional elections, and then the 2010 U.S. Senate election. By that time, Andrew was one of a small group of full-time paid staff members (he took off a fall semester from Northwestern University to participate in the Senatorial election.) After Kirk won that final election, Andrew moved to Washington to work for the Senator as a legislative aide, where he handled campaign correspondence, met with constituents on the Senator's behalf, and helped craft policy. After gained several years of experience at the Capitol and a letter of recommendation from a U.S. Senator, he left D.C. to attend the University of Chicago Law School.

• Yuriy is a close friend and former roommate from college. He came to the University to study acting after being recruited by many top theater programs around the country. Yuriy spent the first two years of college balancing the life of a frat boy with that of a serious theater student. Unfortunately, after two years of mediocre success at managing these two conflicting lifestyles, he made the difficult but necessary decision to move out of the frat house to a remote corner of campus and dedicate himself to his craft. This single-mindedness paid off with several lead roles in campus productions and eventually a professional role in the Chicago run of The History Boys which necessitated a semester break from college. Yuriy parlayed these experiences into several feature film roles and, currently, a significant recurring role on the NBC TV series Chicago Fire.

It's easy to look at successful peers and say "how on earth did he get a job in the U.S. Senate?", or "I can't believe your old college buddy is on a network television show!" If they eventually become Congressmen or Oscar winners themselves, their accomplishments will seem even more stratospheric and unapproachable. But the truth is that both of these guys -- and most successful people I can think of -- followed a very simple formula to arrive at their present state:

1. Find a unique and challenging role to fill.
2. Remove all distractions.
3. Succeed impressively and unequivocally at that role.
4. Examine the opportunities that now present themselves and pick one.
5. Repeat step 2.

And that's it.

Bottlenecks

About 60% of the way through Startup Lessons Learned, I ran across a particularly interesting quote of Eric's. In the middle of discussing lean deployment methodologies (something that I barely understand but can at least follow loosely), Eric describes the following hypothetical tweak:

Most organizations have their batch size tuned so as to reduce their overhead. For example, if QA takes a week to certify a release, it's likely that the company does releases no more than once every 30 or 60 days. Telling a company like that they should work in a two-week batch size will sounds absurd - they'd spend 50% of their time waiting for QA to certify the release! ...

Imagine moving to a two-week release cycle, with the rule that no additional work can take place on the next iteration until the current iteration is certified.

Okay, I'm with him so far. So the week-long QA cycle is treated like a one week long task in a Gantt chart. That makes the reduction to a two week release cycle seem counter-intuitive. But:

The first time through, this is going to be painful. But very quickly, probably even by the second iteration, the weeklong certification process will be shorter. The development team that is now clearly bottlenecked will have the incentive needed to get involved and help with the certification process. They'll be able to observe, for example, that most of the certification steps are completely automatic (and horribly boring for the QA staff) and start automating them with software. But because they are blocked from being able to get their normal work done, they'll have a strong incentive to invest quickly in the highest ROI tests, rather than overdesigning a massive new testing system which might take ages to make a difference.

Ah-ha. The key bit of insight is: don't assume that task duration is necessarily static. Clever scheduling can apply pressure to drive out waste in a system. When you compress the time allotted to complete a project, your team is probably smart enough to identify and take advantage of opportunities for automation.

(By the way, Eric's original post lives here.)

Musings on Vegetarianism

For the past four weeks I've been dipping my toes into vegetarianism by cutting all meat out of my diet except for seafood. That means that about 50% of my days are fully meat-free and the other half feature fish and other crustaceans. I'm not entirely sure if I will end up going full vegetarian or remaining pescetarian (or abandoning the whole project), but at the very least it's a nice exercise in becoming more thoughtful about eating.

A few things that have been on my mind:

• I've been very concerned with keeping my protein intake high. The potential to slip into a carbohydrate-only diet seems precarious. For that reason I've been focused on prioritizing the following foods: eggs, cottage cheese, salmon, tilapia, tuna, beans, and quinoa. But even quinoa scares me a little bit because despite relatively high levels of fiber and protein, it's still a grain.
• Eating socially has been far less frustrating than I expected. At restaurants I just scan down the menu and skip anything featuring beef, chicken, pork, or lamb. Fish dishes, salads, and soups have been key. And very few people have commented on my change in consumption.
• Physically, I feel.... not a whole lot different. It's not like a magic switch flipped and all of the sudden I got a lot healthier. Alcohol, lack of exercise, and poor diet choices still interrupt my fitness progress. However the one major improvement is that I'm far less prone to stuff myself on meat and become too lethargic to exercise or do anything else. This has helped me keep up with my running which has contributed to a slight decrease in body fat (and given me more energy overall.)
• To add to that last point: when you're taking several approaches to improve your health, it's really difficult to parse which efforts are yielding positive returns and which are useless. Since I'm eating (slightly) better, running more, and sleeping more all at once, I can't tell which strategy is most effective. At the end of the day I feel better (I'm optimizing the total system) despite not optimizing any one variable. [Further reading: here and here.]
• Next up on my reading list are The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life And Our World and Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think.

Recommended Consumption (February 2013)

• The Art of the Long View by Peter Schwartz. Utilizing this for a work project.
• Startup Lessons Learned by Eric Ries. I found this title in the free book exchange kiosk outside my apartment. It's a pretty fascinating read; much of it is above my head from a technical standpoint, but it's a good jumping-off point for understanding which technical issues are important for startup founders.
• Learn Ruby The Hard Way by Zed A. Shaw. On lesson 35 as of today.
• The Marinovich Project. Probably middle-of-the-pack as far as 30 for 30 goes.
• The Book of Coach, an ESPN The Magazine article by Seth Wickersham. This describes the history and influence of Bill Walsh's Finding The Winning Edge, which I would own already if it weren't so damn expensive.