Category: Commentary

TL:DR not all units of time are equal.

I posted about the horrors of someone asking if they can ask you something, and trying to call before defining why.

Some people on the Facebooks objected.  “But sometimes a call is faster!”, and, “Is this just about status, forcing people to email you?”

I don’t really understand the status objection.  Scarcity can’t be avoided, so rationing must occur.  If a stranger comes to me and wants input, I’ve got to give something up to provide it.  I can get to what they want more efficiently if it starts with email.

Notice I said more efficiently, not necessarily faster.  This reveals the flaw in the objection that calls can be faster. Efficiency and speed are not the same thing, because not all minutes are equal.

Even if something could be handled in 2 minutes on the phone, 10 minutes of emailing may still be more efficient.

Phone requires a double coincidence of availability.  Not only do both parties need to be around at the same time, they both need to have the cognitive capacity to handle the call.  If you email me a question about sales leads, I can scan it and respond immediately or wait until I’m in a better frame of mind to provide the best answer.  If I’m in the middle of crunching numbers, flipping the brain switch to a totally different kind of thinking is costly.  It will take me a lot more time and energy to switch back and finish the task.  Writing, planning, budgeting, and other tasks all take very different kinds of thinking.  A phone call forces you to switch modes on someone else’s time, whereas email lets you preview then batch your tasks with those of similar type.

If the conversation begins with an email that lays out exactly what’s wanted, a call may be required, but now it can be scheduled and planned for to optimize results and minimize cognitive cost.  A cold call with no context is the worst.  I have no idea which frame of mind to bring, and if you ask me spur of the moment while I’m distracted by a stressful interview coming up, you’ll get a lower quality version of me.

The risk factor of phone-first is very high too.  Even if the call is short, taking a call with someone you don’t know for something ill-defined is a huge unknown.  They might be a crazy.  You might be walking into a call from which you can’t wait to escape.  Or it could be a delight and you’d wish you had more time.

Email first.  Ask your question up front and directly.  If it requires a call, schedule one.

 

I love words.  An editor told me that to really love words is to use as few as possible.  It maximizes the impact of the focus word in each sentence.

He said true logophiles work to find one perfect word instead of three good ones.  He was right.

It’s hard to love words with dignity.  At first, we’re like a boy in love with a girl.  Too eager to do too much, sacrifice his identity, and throw everything at her, hoping something sticks.  Pathetic.

Confidence.  No neediness.  Those reveal a deeper kind of love on a firmer foundation.  Movies praise desperate grand gestures, but that guy is too unstable in the real world.  He doesn’t get the girl.  He’s too excitable.

Focus your words.  Respect them and yourself enough to reign in the crazy.  Don’t spatter the page.  A scalpel is better than a shotgun.

Person: “Can I ask you something?”
Me: “Yes”
Person: “Can we chat on the phone?”
Me: “Email me what you want to ask”
Person: “It’s too hard to explain in an email, can we talk?”
Me: “No, sorry. I don’t take open-ended calls”
Person: “OK, it’s this” (easily explained in two sentence email)

This happens all the time. All could have been done in a single email. Instead four vague asks just to get to one.

I want faster growth, so many new systems and processes internally, so many new product advancements externally, new marketing channels, new sales efforts, and on and on.  I have so many new ideas, plus so many current things moving in all directions it can get overwhelming trying to map out and make sense of it all in my head or on paper, let alone trying to tackle them.  The more the business grows, the more complex the problems seem.

Sometimes I have to stop and remind myself that business problems are all really simple at bottom.

When it comes to product development, what problem does the product solve?  Solve it better.

When it comes to marketing, get more leads.

When it comes to sales, close more leads.

That’s it.  Solve customer problems better, get more leads, close more leads.  Everything else is in service to those and matters in proportion to how well it serves them.

A handful of good books
A network of intelligent, contentious friends
A job (just about any job)
Daily blogging for 30 days
Five good podcasts
Daily exercise
Quora
Amazon book reviews (writing or reading them)
Signing up for the email workflows for every company you like
A few weeks in a different country
Cold call sales
Building something from scratch
Running a marathon
A FEE seminar
Brainpickings.com
Breakingsmart.com
Creating a website
Making $500 on eBay
Interviewing people for a podcast
Season one of Silicon Valley
Giving three talks in front of a crowd
The Wire
Starting a business and failing
Starting a business and succeeding
Playing in a band and getting paid gigs
A cross-country road-trip
Writing a book
Being debt-free
Having some cash on hand and a low cost of living
Being interested and interesting
A good salami sandwich

I’ve met lots of extraordinary people. People who are lightyears ahead of their peers in smarts and skill. They are often aware of their extraordinariness and assume it means they are amazing employees deserving of better than average pay. 

It doesn’t.

You’ll get paid based on how well you solve specific problems other people have, not how amazing you are on the whole.

Remember what Alec Baldwin said about great fathers in his famous Glengarry Glen Ross speech?

When you’re making the case and someone raises an objection based on particulars, don’t respond with particulars. Come back to the abstract, universal principles.

If your audience can’t connect the abstract to the particular case that matters to them, they’ll never gain from your message anyway. It’s your job to lead them to water, not submerge their head.

It’s always better to leave people wanting more than lose them to boredom. 

I get a high building a new spreadsheet and perfecting the formulas. I get the system perfected so I can track and update and project and it’s beautiful. 

I’m convinced it will be my new daily way to track whatever it is. After a few days I almost never use it. 

I used to feel kind of bad about this. Today, another CEO told me he does the same thing. He said he builds new spreadsheets knowing he probably won’t use them once complete. That’s not why he builds them. The process of breaking down the margins and the ratios and ways variables affect each other clarifies the numbers in his head and helps him see things and understand them far better. The act of building the spreadsheet is what transforms his mind and lodges a new model there.

This relieved a bit of a mental burden and helped me understand myself better. I now feel no guilt about hours spent perfecting a spreadsheet I’ll never again use. The building process is the payoff.

My son just spent a few hours trying to get a sandwich business off the ground.  He was initially depressed because he only had one order, but he decided to give away free samples in exchange for email addresses of people who want to be notified next time he delivers.

He started with a prepared script.  He was pretty nervous about approaching anyone at first.  But after he pushed through and finally got his first sign-up, everything changed.  Soon he was surrounded by people and began to ad-lib and even make self-deprecating comments about how people expect a kid’s sandwich to be white-bread and bologna.

On the way home he looked over the 25+ emails he collected and told me he’d never been so pumped.  He relived the interactions and talked about ideas for the next sale and new menu items and marketing.

Then he stopped mid-sentence.

“Can you imagine if I was sitting in a classroom right now instead of trying to run a business?  How are you supposed to learn about business without doing it?  I feel bad for those kids.  Even if they do well in school, they’ll be starting from scratch when it comes to business.”

I just nodded and the conversation moved on.  It made me sad, but also hopeful.  Sad that so many are languishing in classrooms in a social/educational system designed to shut kids up and keep them out of the real world.  Hopeful, because every day more people realize it and opt out.  Kindergarten through college, more people are jumping off the education conveyor belt and creating their own life and career.

By the way, this experience was no picnic (pun very much intended), and my son is not great at math and figuring out his costs, margins, etc.  The whole thing was a little annoying at times, he needed my help more than I would’ve liked, and he did a lot of things wrong.  But that’s just it; the bar is really low.  He came up with an idea.  He executed it.  He experienced the results in the real world.  What he gained from one good sales interaction after initial rejection is more valuable confidence and social awareness than whatever he’d get from a week being force-fed algebra or history texts.

“It is amazing what you can do if you don’t care who gets the credit.”

— Not even gonna attribute this one (see what I did there?)

Just creating value without worrying about credit is a powerful secret weapon when it comes to effectiveness and building social capital.  A reputation as a generous doer who cares more about project completion than approbation will propel you to great heights.

But don’t you need a brand?  In the digital age, if people can’t find anything about what you do and create, won’t you miss out on opportunities?  Don’t you need to openly share your work and build publicly visible projects and a digital footprint demonstrating your interests and value?

Yes.  Absolutely.  Don’t hide.  Be open.  Review books on Amazon, answer questions on Quora, podcast, blog, engage your interests frequently and openly on the best platforms.  Be findable, knowable, and signal who you are and what you can do for others.

These principles don’t need to be in conflict.  If you publicly show your work, you can do so in a way that doesn’t greedily grub for credit.  You can be generous (not phony or falsely humble) in crediting others.  You can share honestly, not whitewash or over-hype your brand. (Without engaging in failure porn or oversharing to be “authentic”).

I’ve seen people who are good at doing without taking credit. They are tremendously valued in their circle of personal contact, but nowhere else.  They’re missing out on some opportunities.  They are appreciated only by those who know them.

I’ve seen people who are good at publicly sharing their work and building a brand, but who are so quick to take credit for everything both personally and digitally that real life people distrust them.  They are appreciated only by those who don’t know them.

The best is to combine both.

A digital footprint that pisses off your flesh-and-blood acquaintances with exaggeration, posturing, or credit-seeking will kill you long term.  All your opportunities and relationships will remain surface level.  No one wants to feel like every lunch conversation they have with you or every favor you do for them will end up on their blog, woven into some grandiose narrative that’s not exactly accurate.

If you can find ways to share honestly and humbly about what you’re interested in and working on that’s externally visible, while keeping the more internal personal stuff you do private, and looking for unheralded ways to help others, you’ll do best.

My colleague Chuck Grimmett is great at this.  You can find tons of examples of Chuck’s amazing and diverse interests and projects, professional and otherwise.  But I work with Chuck personally every day and I can tell you, what you see on his website is just a tiny sliver of all the value he creates.  The casual observer could easily find Chuck’s areas of interest and expertise, but his personal friends could tell you ten times as many ways Chuck is valuable and awesome.

That’s what you want.

You don’t want every little tiny thing you do for people to immediately be broadcast so that people who know you feel like every bit of value you create is publicly shared.  You want people who know you to say, “Yeah, her online presence is great, but her real-life work is even better.”  You want the show onstage be awesome, but the person backstage to be better.

Do so much that you couldn’t possibly document or take credit for all of it.  Be involved in building so many things and sharing so many ideas that there will be many instances where others get credit for things you’ve done.  Don’t try to correct the record.  Be so prolific no one can catalog it all, not even you.

Don’t hide.  Share.  But share out of interest and openness, not desperation for credit.  And always create a lot of value no one will ever know about except those directly involved.  The tip of the iceberg is pretty impressive above water, but what’s below the surface is even more immense and powerful.

(Ghostwriting and uncredited editing and creative projects for others are good ways to practice)

If you’ve ever observed someone with a deep interest or passion and thought, “Man, I wish I had such a fire for something”, you’ve got it wrong.

They don’t have fire, interest, or passion as much as they have commitment. 

To even obtain deep interest comes from a dogged commitment to pursue something. What it is matters less than how it’s pursued. 

You can have passions too. Pick something and commit to go deep. 

“Post-scarcity”, “Post-economic”, and “Post-capitalist” are meant to convey a fundamental shift in the principles of human action, wrought by technological advancement.  In reality, they are just cute linguistic hyperbole.

There is no change in wealth that can ever alter the basic science of economics. (In the Smithian and Mengerian tradition, not any of this modern macro math vodoo stuff).  Scarcity is a necessary attribute of reality, inseparable from the laws of identity and non-contradiction.  A is A; not-A is not A.  No matter how many zero-price widgets you have access to, every time you choose one, you forgo something else.

Choice implies scarcity and is impossible without it.  To choose one thing is to not choose something else.  The thing not chosen is the cost of the thing chosen.  Everything has a cost.

This doesn’t mean technological progress can’t radically alter the things we choose and the margins on which decisions are made.  Sending information to someone far away was once very resource intensive in time, horses, etc.  Automobiles and planes brought it down exponentially.  Telegraphs and the internet make communication almost instantaneous for almost zero energy.  This doesn’t mean the transmission of information is exempt from scarcity, hence economic logic.  It only changes the costs, dropping one resource to near zero, while introducing previously unknown costs elsewhere.

Take email.  It’s almost instant and almost zero price.  But this doesn’t mean every human with internet access has all information from all other humans frictionlessly in their brain.  There is a high cost to sifting through the hundreds of emails that come to me every day.  To consume this “free” information is quite costly.  I must forgo other activities and fill up mental space that could be utilized for other tasks.  I must choose, weigh costs and benefits according to my subjective preferences, adjusting when supply and demand shift.  I must economize.

Changes in price do not change the laws of economics.  Neither do changes in preference curves, supply, or demand.  Even if you could cheat death, you could not cheat the laws of economics.  An infinite life still requires choice and trade-offs in each individual moment.  Economics is eternal.

An age of abundant information, food, medicine, or any other resource will radically alter the way we experience life.  But every one of those experiences is still better understood with rational choice theory and the basic economic principles of scarcity, price, supply, and demand.

We sacrifice the most valuable analytical tool in all the human sciences if we let ourselves be fooled by abundance into thinking it alters the basic logic of human action.