Q3 Book Review

Since returning to work from paternity leave, I set out to read 4 books. I started 14, but only finished 8. This was an intentional strategy: I have made a promise to not finish books that don’t grab my attention quickly. Below I’ve rated each book (as well the ones I didn’t finish) and included some interesting tidbits I learned along the way.

The Good

Here are some interesting things I learned from 3 of the books I read:

The Old Way 4/5 In the 1950s, the co-founder of Raytheon took his family into the Kalahari desert to study a group of hunter gathers that are believed to have been living in that habitat in much the same way for the past 150,000 years.

1. The society they found was largely non-violent, non-hierarchical, trusting, and resourceful. In stark contrast to other ancient societies, it is believed that the !Kung had been forced by resource scarcity into extreme egalitarianism.

2. The !Kung used to hunt using poison-tipped arrows. Each arrow was constructed to fall apart upon impact, leaving the poisoned tip in the animal and the shaft (bearing telltale signs of the person who made it) behind. The neurotoxin poison would then slowly kill the animal over the course of the next several days. As a result, a hunt would routinely take several days and require not just skill at shooting the animal, but then tracking it for many miles across the desert. The person who’s arrow was identified as having killed the animal would have the privilege of deciding who gets to eat how much of the meat, even though several men were commonly required to track and bring the animal back to camp.

3. On the Kalahari desert, lions are at the top of the food chain, not people. For this reason, the !Kung would hunt during the day to avoid being attacked. This would routinely involve braving heat up to 115 degrees Fahrenheit at mid-day. Despite closely co-habitating with lions and hyenas, the !Kung had very few violent altercations. The primary killers for the !Kung were infant mortality (due to sickness) and injuries involved in hunting large game.
   
   
   

The Rise and Fall of Nations 3/5 Ruchir Sharma presents a framework for predicting the fate of nations based upon macro and microeconomic trends.

1. Historically, about 50% of a nation’s GDP growth can be attributed to growth in the working-age population. As a result of aging populations globally, GDP growth is expected to slow, but some nations will slow more quickly than others. The US is well-positioned with a workforce that is aging slower than contemporaries and strong immigration. Nations like France and the UK are going to have a tough time growing in large part due to greying populations.

2. Much of China’s recent growth can be attributed to domestic monetary easing and direct capital investment. Due to dodgy numbers, it’s hard to be sure, but it seems likely that in the past several years, the state has been leveraging cheap debt to invest in speculative infrastructure with little to no productivity improvements on the horizon. For this reason, as well as China’s rapidly aging population, it seems likely that the country’s yearly growth will start to fall in the coming years.

3. Positive press attention about national outcomes tend to be slightly negatively correlated with outcomes. Basically, if Time magazine writes about the miracle in country X, it’s more likely than not that country X’s run of good luck is coming to an end. The inverse is not necessarily true: bad press tends to signal only the beginning of a longer period of reform and reinvestment. Sharma suggests the countries that are poised to be the next miracle growth economics are not mentioned in the press at all.

How Will You Measure Your Life 3/5 This book is a thoughtful meditation on how to live a fulfilling professional and personal life. Although there are saccharine bits that are a bit over the top, and the appeals to authority are laid on pretty thick, I learned a few useful lessons:

1. Every job has what Clayton terms “hygiene” factors (things like salary, working hours, and prestige) as well as “motivating” factors (things like mission, people, and intrinsic interest). Every person will strive for a different mixture of the two, but it’s commonly a bad sign if you find your work skewing heavily to one side or the other. Really loving your work is more than just pay, but it’s also more than just loving a particular problem space. You need balance to find long-term satisfaction.

2. For those driven careerists, it can help to think about your important relationships as the most important job you have. Rather than taking the love and support you receive from your close friends, spouse, and family members for granted, always ben thinking “what job does my [friend/spouse/family member] need me to do?” Christensen posits, and I can anecdotally confirm, that deep life satisfaction and meaning come from sacrificing for others. Thinking about the job others need you to do gives you an opportunity to build love and trust while experiencing a deep sense of meaning.

3. I know from firsthand experience that it’s deceptively easy to shortchange your most important relationships in favor of your job, but it wasn’t until I read this book that I could quickly articulate why: long term relationships require massive investments of time, love, and presence. Because the investment is so great, at any particular moment, it’s hard to feel as though you are making progress or doing something meaningful whereas jobs are calibrated to give you an immediate sense of progress and self-importance. Basically, our society has learned how to get highly motivated people addicted to work through complicated systems of recognition and visible progress, and we’ve done the opposite for marriages and families by normalizing divorce, estrangement, and loneliness. It takes a wise person to recognize this trend, and I’ve definitely been guilty of overlooking it.

I read 5 more books that I really enjoyed. I won’t provide detailed summaries here for brevity, but here’s the TLDR cliff notes review:

1. The Great Leveler 4/5 This book takes the hypothesis that income inequality is only ever substantially reduced by human violence. I was so taken by this book, I’m doing more research and will post a longer blog post response later.

2. Strangers Drowning 4/5 This is about people who sacrifice almost everything they have to help others. The author does an amazing job at deeply empathizing with her subjects and contextualizing their sacrifices. I was enthralled.

3. How to Lie With Statistics 4/5 This one has held up incredibly well over the years. It’s also very fun, short, and practical. I’d strongly recommend it to anyone who wants a quick statistics refresher.

4. Frozen in Time 4/5 Ah, survival-porn. I do enjoy stories about the most extreme survival situations and this one delivered. It didn’t teach me anything profound and it didn’t alter my world view, but I know a lot more about glaciers, WW2 planes, and living in the arctic.

5. Global Inequality 4/5 Follow-up reading from the Great Leveler. This focuses on global, rather than domestic inequality. The author presents some fascinating (and well-researched) counter-culture beliefs on immigration, the US government, and how we might be able to build a better tomorrow.

The Bad

Books I couldn’t finish:

1. What Should We be Worried About?: Real Scenarios that Keep Scientists Up at Night 1/5 This is just a collection of short (and I mean very short), unsubstantiated suggestions from scientists about what we might want to worry about. Very little evidence is provided for their beliefs and the segments are too brief to even get into the reasons why something is worrisome.

2. Men, Machines, and Modern Times 1/5 The audio recording of this book is only a few hours long. The introduction, forward, and notes about this edition are 1 hour long. When I finally got to the bit about how a naval officer corrected gun sights and increased firing throughput in the last 19th century (interesting premise!), the author glossed over the entire discovery process in about 5 minutes, and returned to over-intellectualized academic philosophizing about technological progress. I know it’s a classic, but it was worse than useless.

3. Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa 2/5 This one was a bit better and may have actually been a good book, but it makes for a difficult audio experience. I think this is the sort of book you read with a notepad to keep track of everything. I knew I was in for trouble when the first 5 minutes of the recording was nothing by a wall-to-wall acronym glossary of rebel groups operating in the Congo over the last 30 years. Add to that a difficult time telling apart Congolese names without seeing them spelled, and I was lost almost immediately in the minutia.

4. This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral-Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!-in America's Gilded Capital 2/5 This purports to be a somewhat shocking tell-all about the depravity of DC political culture, but it actually just reads like the story of any industry/city/location populated by wealthy, hyper-motivated people. I wasn’t able to learn much and after a short period, the narrative style starts to read like a disaffected barista trying to seem worldly and detached while name-dropping about all their powerful friends.

5. What to Think about Machines that Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence 2/5 This was slightly better than What to Worry About, but only slightly. The segments are too short, too little evidence is presented, nothing is learned.

6. Stories of Your Life and Others 2/5 These are supposed to be some of the best recent sci-fi stories, but I couldn’t really get into them, which is strange because I deeply enjoyed the movie adaptation of Arrival.

The 10 Best Movies I've Seen This Year

Over parental leave, I was able to indulge my inner cinephile. I watched 61 movies in 56 days - mostly while feeding my new infant. That’s ~1.08 movies/day, for a total of approximately 130 hours of film. If you think that sounds like a lot of time feeding an infant, it is.

I’ve included the full list of movies that I watched at the end of this post, but below you’ll find the top 10. For anyone not familiar with my taste in movies, these are pretty much all what my friends have euphemistically labeled “depressing indie dramas.” Look elsewhere for lighthearted comedies!

#10 - Burning

I loved the understated, ambiguous storytelling in this thriller. On the surface it’s the story of the wealth and opportunity divide in South Korea, but under the straightforward plot points there are layers of meaning that peel back and imply different interpretations. These additional layers keep interested viewers second-guessing assumptions beyond the ending credits. I consider myself a fairly sophisticated movie viewer, but I missed some major metaphors and allegories and had a satisfying time reading the Wikipedia summary afterwards only to realize that fact. Another big plus for this one: although it deals with explicit, violent themes, it’s not visually explicit. Like all good taut, psychological thrillers, the violence is left out of the frame for the viewer to imagine.

#9 - You Were Never Really Here

Like Burning, this one deals with heavy, violent, uncomfortable themes, but is more explicit in their depiction. I was initially turned off by the slow start to the story, but it’s ending can best be described as a subtle and beautiful conclusion to a nightmare. The thing I loved most about the film was the mixing of the real and the unreal to explain the character’s mental states. Unlike other films that have similar storylines (8MM for instance), the focus here is less about what happens in the real world and more about what happens inside the heads of the protagonists.

#8 - Wild Tales

This one was a blast and shares a great deal with The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (see below). The “film” is actually a collection of shorts that meditate on the theme of revenge. Most are pretty short (<20 minutes) and are darkly funny. If you like early Cohen brothers movies, comedies of the absurd, or if a towing company has ever caused you to boil over with anger, you’ll enjoy this movie.

#7 - Shoplifters

Shoplifters tells the story of a group of petty thieves eking out a living at the margin of modern Japanese society. Although they aren’t related by blood, they function as a family and the film encourages the viewer to question what really defines a family. Other movies have told a similar yarn, but they either devolve into 2D characters spouting syrupy truisms (“family are the people you choose!”) or they become absurdly dark or overly complex (think Oceans 11 but in melodrama form). Shoplifters threads the needle and tells a story that feels real every step of the way, warming your heart without sliding into postmodern cynicism.

#6 - The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Like Wild Tales, this one is a collection of short films and it follows a similar trajectory: starting with the lightest and funniest of the bunch and ending with the most profound and touching. As someone who loves western films as a genre and aesthetic, I couldn’t get enough of these short films. They were schlocky, flawed, serious, devastating, and profound at all the right times. My favorite of the bunch was the last one, so if you’re struggling with some of the humor and gallows humor that comes first, stick around until the end.

#5 - The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

This was the first movie I finished after starting leave and it was incredible. Normally I don’t go in for movies that have extensive narrative voice-over. If you have to outright tell me what’s going on in the movie, then it’s failing to tell the story itself. But here, the interstitial narration made everything more poignant and added what felt like genuine attempts to understand the historical truth of the story. Sure, it was glamorized and sure there were large portions of fiction interspersed to fill in the holes of the real story. Yet it managed to take an event whose meaning is largely lost to modern viewers and contextualize, humanize, and dramatize it. That’s no small feat.

#4 - Winter’s Bone

Boy, did the director nail the depiction of rural, rustbelt America. I grew up in Appalachia, which isn’t quite the Ozarks, but this felt a bit like a documentary in several parts. It’s always tempting for Hollywood writers to depict poor rural people like the murders in Deliverance, and what struck me most about this movie was how nuanced and dignified the characters are. They are real humans with foibles and weakness, but also dignity and strength. I always love a movie in which “the good guys” commit transgressions and “the bad guys” partially redeem themselves, because that’s the way I perceive life: there’s a lot more grey than there is black and white. If you’re wondering whether the world of this film is accurate to reality, the answer is “yes.”

#3 - 1945

This one came completely out of left field and left me speechless. It’s a story from World War 2 that I’ve never heard told: we open on a rural village in Hungary after WW2 has ended. Two Jews get off a train and start walking from the depot into the village center. Advance notice reaches the village, where a prominent couple is preparing to be married. The villager elders don’t know whether the Jews are returning to reclaim property that was taken during the Holocaust. The uncertainty causes tensions to rise and secrets to be revealed. I loved the black and white photography, slow and deliberate pacing, and the (somewhat) twist ending.

#2 - The Handmaiden

Fair disclosure: this one was pretty twisted. That said, it was also beautifully filmed, directed, and acted, and I think that somewhat makes up for the sadism. For me, there were two elements of this film that really made it shine: the cinematography and the twists. The cinematography was so deft as to be initially invisible. The story is moved forward as much by the way the film is constructed as the dialogue and acting, and that’s always a pleasure to behold. The twists are baked in from the first few scenes: you know that you are going to be guided through the plot by an unreliable narrator, yet the hints as to what’s really going on are provided to the astute so that you don’t end the movie with a big reveal and artificial “gotcha” moment.

#1 - Roma

Roma is the story of a housemaid working for an upper-middle class Mexican family in the 1970s. It’s a simple story, but the film is tremendously nuanced and beautiful. Like Shoplifters, you end the story feeling simultaneously repulsed by some of things you’ve witnessed, but at the same time, a tremendous urge to hug the very same characters. Unlike most arthouse films, there’s enough reality and narrative to make this compelling without sacrificing the breath-taking visual meditations on daily struggles. Most of the other films on this list are too dark, too artsy, or too weird for most people to appreciate, but Roma is the rare gem that is simultaneously accessible and exquisite.

The Full List

Below is the full list of films that I watched, along with my subjective 1-10 rating:

1. Roma 9

2. The Handmaiden 9

3. 1945 9

4. Winter's Bone 9

5. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford 9

6. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs 8

7. Shoplifters 8

8. Wild Tales 8

9. You Were Never Really Here 8

10. Burning 8

11. Mid90s 8

12. Ida 8

13. Tucker & Dale vs Evil 8

14. The Florida Project 8

15. The Last Black Man in San Francisco 8

16. A Separation 7

17. So Sorry to Bother You 7

18. A Most Violent Year 7

19. Searching 7

20. Nocturnal Animals 7

21. Leave No Trace 7

22. Room 7

23. Changeling 6

24. Prisoners 6

25. The Guilty 6

26. First Man 6

27. The Mule 6

28. Bad Times at the El Royal 6

29. Gone Girl 6

30. Can You Ever Forgive Me? 6

31. Green Book 6

32. Vice 6

33. The Old Man and the Gun 6

34. Hail Caesar! 6

35. Becoming Bond 6

36. The Secret In their Eyes 6

37. The Square 6

38. Fyre 5

39. Beasts of No Nation 5

40. Incendies 5

41. Up In the Air 5

42. Papillon 5

43. Spider Man: Into the Spiderverse 5

44. The Favourite 5

45. Suburbicon 5

46. They Shall Not Grow Old 5

47. Tully 5

48. Hacksaw Ridge 4

49. Her 4

50. The Post 4

51. Three Identical Strangers 4

52. The Sisters Brothers 4

53. Infernal Affairs 4

54. A Prayer Before Dawn 4

55. A Simple Favor 4

56. Bone Tomahawk 4

57. Upgrade 3

58. Won't You Be My Neighbor? 3

59. Dangal 3

60. Game Night 3

5 Books I Read on Paternity Leave

Back in May, our second child (Rose) was born. Starting on her delivery date (5/9/19), I started 12 weeks of paternity leave. Family is a great gift. I’ve been able to really get to know my daughter while not worrying about the effects of sleep deprivation on my work or career.

At the same time, family leave is a lot of repetition and grueling hours. Infants sleep a lot, but in very short bursts without respect to adult circadian rhythms, which often left me bouncing, feeding, and holding Rose for hours at a stretch in the early AM.

One of the big lessons I learned last year from the birth of my older son is the importance of distraction. It’s frustrating to have your sleep ruthlessly destroyed by an infant, much less so if you have something to distract you from the endless cycle of bouncing, feeding, changing, bouncing, and holding.

To help with that distraction, I created a goal for myself to read 3 books while out on leave. It was an intentionally modest goal because I wasn’t sure how bad the sleep deprivation was going to be, but it turned out to be too easy. I ended up reading the equivalent of more than 2,800 pages worth of nonfiction across 5 books. I “read” most of the content via Audible using Apple Airpods, which are a great way for parents to be productive while also accomplishing chores.

Below, I’ve summarized 5 things that I learned from 3 of the books that I read as well as some short notes on 123 Magic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the two books I started, but didn’t finish:

The Power Broker by Robert A Caro

The Power Broker is the best biography I’ve ever read. It’s also the most detailed, realistic, and clear-eyed explanation of how politics actually work that I’ve encountered. Here are a few things I learned:

1. Authorities (IE “New York Transit Authority”) during the mid-century were legally not governed or subject to the whims of elected officials. I don’t know if this is still the case, but the result was that any official who directly or indirectly ran such an authority was effectively above the law. Add to the mix that authorities could both raise bonds whose covenants were strongly protected by law as well as raise money to service the bonds with tolls and you have the key to Robert Moses’ power: a massive, independent, quasi-state organ that answered only to it’s commissioner.

2. Robert Moses created the modern park. This doesn’t just include the parks he directly built (of which their are hundreds). He literally trained a generation of civil servants in the US and abroad in disciplines like architecture, landscaping, zoning, fundraising, PR, and budgeting. If you have been to a park that was built after the late 1920s, it was almost certainly heavily influenced, if not outright designed and built, by Robert Moses.

3. As with parks, the supremacy of the automobile in US cities was heavily influenced by Robert Moses’ outdated ideas about transit. He grew up wealthy in the very earliest parts of the 20th century when cars were predominantly owned by wealthy families and used for recreation. To him “driving in the car” was about relaxation and leisure. But for most mid-century drivers, cars were utilitarian and traffic was a quality of life problem. Moses built infrastructure in NYC to intentionally exclude public transit, which made people’s lives worse.

4. Money for public improvements has always been in short supply and the only reason that NYC has so much top-quality infrastructure is FDR’s New Deal and the federal highway programs of the 50s. These programs, despite being nationally funded, we disproportionately spent in the empire state.

5. If you want a more definitive, detailed study of the misuse of power, look no further. If there’s one thing I took away from The Power Broker, it is that in the real world, there is no benevolent justice and that might makes right.

Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw

I read Chernow’s “Titan” about 6 months ago, which focuses on Carnegie’s contemporary, John D. Rockefeller Sr. I’ve always been curious about Carnegie and figured I’d read the two biographies close together so that I could retain historical context. Although I personally found Nasaw’s writing to be less interesting than Chernow’s, this was still a good read.

1. Carnegie (like Rockefeller and many of the Gilded Age robber barons) was born poor, raised by a mother who received little to no help from her husband, and benefited greatly from being the right age at the right time in American history.

2. US Steel, which is the company Carnegie is remembered for, was actually only incorporated under that name upon the trust’s creation by JP Morgan in the latter portion of Carnegie’s life. For most of his professional career, the interests that we know today as “US Steel” were a lose web of companies, with the two primary being “Carnegie Steel” and “H. C. Frick & Company.” Internally, the companies were divided into works and foundries that had their own worker demographics, advantages, and challenges.

3. Carnegie only started in the steel business in his 30s after already having become wealthy working for Thomas Scott and the Pennsylvania Railroad. While working for the railroad, he worked his way up the corporate ladder on the basis of his work ethic and personal appeal. In a word, men in power generally liked him and gave him his first lucky breaks.

4. He remained a bachelor until the age of 51 because his mother exerted an outsized influence over her adult son. He and his wife Louise spent several years (a very long time for the era) in a secret courtship because their mothers disapproved of the match. Rather than anger them both, Carnegie and Louise agreed to wait until one of them passed away to get married.

5. He initially became wealthy by exploiting his connections at the Pennsylvania Railroad to profit from insider trading. Interestingly, insider trading was not illegal in the late 19th century. The lack of modern taxation, coupled with very few laws that regulated cartels transformed him from merely a very wealthy man into one of the wealthiest of all time.

Ali: A Life by Jonathan Eig

1. For those of us non-sports fans, Muhammed Ali was not the boxer’s given name. He was named Cassius Clay by his parents and adopted the name Muhammed Ali after falling under the influence of Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammed’s Nation of Islam.

2. Everyone can judge Ali however they please, but I think he was a pretty unpleasant human. He was wildly unfaithful to his 4 wives, abused substances (primarily, but not restricted to alcohol), verbally and emotionally abused friends, lovers, and wives, had a studied inability to self-reflect, and was vain to the point of absurdity.

3. He was a great boxer, but probably not as great as you might assume given his legend. His early career was indeed marked by skill, athleticism, and strategy in the ring that defied the odds, but this period was relatively short-lived. Most of the fights that he’s best known for (Liston, Foreman, and Frazier to name a few) were fought past his prime and increasingly demonstrated that his competitive advantage late in life was not in his boxing skill, but in his ability to absorb damage and not fall over.

4. Financially, he was a typical professional athlete. At the same time as he was being paid more than any other athlete alive, he had perennial money problems. Although he rarely admitted it, there’s ample evidence that he kept fighting well past his prime for the simple reason that he’d become adapted to being a spendthrift and didn’t want to face up to mounting pressures to reign in his lifestyle.

5. As with most highly successful people in modern times, a large part of his success stemmed from an ability to handle and manipulate the press to his advantage. Without reading several biographies of Ali, it’s hard to tease out Eig’s bias from reality, but from the facts presented in this book, he won multiple championship fights on the basis of public approval, not skill. Further, his ability to attract contenders, generate hype, and sell tickets proved an essential element to his fame,

The Rest

The last two books I read were Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and 123 Magic. I don’t either deserves their own 5 point writeup, but if you’re interested in philosophical musings or parenting techniques, I would recommend them both.

In the spirit of avoiding publication bias, I thought I’d close by mentioning the two books I started, but couldn’t finish.

The Myth of the Strong Leader: Political Leadership in the Modern Age. The problem here was that I tried to read this directly after The Power Broker and Archie Brown was just no match for Robert Caro. Brown’s thesis statement—that charismatic leaders are less effective and dangerous to the systems in which they operate— simply felt like so much useless ivory tower idealism. Who cares whether charismatic leaders are dangerous and less effective if everyone always puts them in power anyway?

Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation. I really wanted to like this one because I know next to nothing about Russian history. Unfortunately, this book reads like a textbook for students studying Russian history. In other words, extremely dense, lacking in narrative structure, and with an almost glee in focusing on historical details that are either inaccessible or boring to a casual reader.

Conclusion

It’s been fun continuing to read challenging nonfiction, even while sleep deprived and I look forward to continuing for the foreseeable future. If you have any good nonfiction recommendations, ping me and I’ll add them to my list!

First Half of 2019 Goal Retro

The Backstory

In April of 2018, my first child (Greg) was born. It took a while to sink in, but the biggest thing that immediately changed in my life was a profound sense of being out of control.

Prior to being a parent, it was easy to fool myself into thinking I could control the conditions of my life. It's not that I've ever felt supremely in control, but I honestly believed that I could exert my will over large, abstract things like my career, where I lived, and generally how I spent my time.

But when fundamental elements of life -- things like sleep, hygiene, and marital satisfaction -- are taken out of your hands by a squalling baby, it becomes hard to avoid the fact that you were never in control in the first place.

I spent the six months after his birth wallowing in an ever-deepening realization that plans and effort were futile. None of my pre-kid coping strategies worked anymore. I could't just take a walk to empty my mind because Greg was crying and I told Becca I would take care of him. I couldn't rely on a good night's sleep to rejuvenate me because Greg was waking me up every 1.5 hours to feed. I couldn't listen to music because I should be trying to make up all the lost sleep. I couldn't reduce work stress by catching up on email at home because there were bottles to be cleaned, etc, etc.

I made a list of the most important elements of my life and concluded 5 were significantly worse off after Greg was born. I stopped trying to plan anything because it seemed irrelevant. Often I couldn't focus on anything for more than a few minutes anyway. What good were plans that were whole days away? People told me it would get better as Greg got older, but I honestly couldn't believe them.

Then, late in 2018, a close friend (who also has young children) shared that he kept personal goals for himself and it got me thinking that perhaps I could regain some small vestige of control and predictability. So, in November and December of 2018, I created some goals and I started working on them in January.

H1 2019 Goals

I won't share all the goals publicly because some are quite personal, but after 4 months, I can say that they have been a huge help in regaining a small sense of control again. Here's the abridged list of goals:

Personal

1. Be less angry at home.

2. Invest in my marriage through regular action.

3. Read 6 books, write 1 blog post about my reading.

4. Get better at playing Battlefield 5.

Professional

1. Ship the projects I committed to for this half.

2. Broaden my professional network at work.

3. Build team culture.

Report Card

Here’s a summary of how I did. I’m evaluating myself early because this week my second child is going to be born and I assume most of this is going to go by the wayside in short order once she’s around:

Exceeded My Goal

1. Read 6 books. I've already read 11 and this blog post satisfies the second constraint.

2. Get better at BF5. In January, I had a K/D ratio of about .2, now if I'm trying, I can typically hit 1.5.

3. Broaden my professional network at work. I originally set the goal of meeting an additional 25 people, which proved too easy and also not valuable. But by focusing on expanding my network, I made choices that exceeded the spirit of this goal.

Met My Goal

1. Ship my projects at work. I intentionally constrained this to be delivered before I went out on leave, and I hit it.

Did Not Meet My Goal

1. Be less angry at home. The way this goal was written was great, but it wasn't formed in a way that I could actually make good progress towards it. I essentially stopped trying to accomplish this in January.

2. Build team culture. I got to February and realized that this wasn't a goal that was worth completing. As a result, I didn't accomplish it.

3. Invest in my marriage through regular action. I had planned to be more intentional about spending time with Becca and for reasons discussed below, that didn't work.

Summary

So, I had mixed success at the specific goals that I set, but I had very high success at regaining a sense of small-scale control and excitement to achieve things of personal importance again.

What’s Am I Going to Change?

1. Shorten the goal horizon. I set myself the goal of accomplishing these items over 6 months, but then quickly realized that two of the goals weren't really actionable and/or I hadn't set myself up for success to accomplish them. But to honor the system I'd set up, I'd have to wait another 4 months to change and revise my goals. I'll be changing to quarterly goals on 6/30.

2. Setup a weekly tracker. I was on-track for my marital improvement goal until about 6 weeks in when I realized the format of my tracker didn't let me see whether I'd actually done something nice for Becca for the preceding 6 weeks. I thought I had, but that didn't feel satisfying or convincing and I lost steam. Next time, I'll setup a weekly tracker so that I can track my progress more closely.

3. Don't include work goals. I have a separate system at work for tracking my career goals, and the redundancy was more confusing than helpful.

4. Have fewer goals. I had 7 goals for this six month period and that was probably 2-3 too many. If I can't easily enumerate my goals while walking from my car to the office, I probably have too many.

5. Add a fitness goal. I avoided doing that this time because in the past, fitness goals just haven't been a good use of my time. Other people claim regular workouts make them feel good. I can honestly say that's never been true for me. But, it's become obvious that if I do nothing, I start actively feeling bad after a while, so I need to do something physical, even if it's not the typical “train for a marathon/crossfit/rock climbing” thing, so I'll be adding that in for next quarter.

3 Things I Learned From Each Book

I decided to make it easy for myself just write out three of the neatest/most impactful things I learned from each book that I read:

The Case Against Education

1. Almost all of the value of education is signaling, so curricula doesn't really matter. Also, there's no strong evidence that attending prestigious schools (high school + college) have any significant positive impact on opportunities and earnings.

2. For good to excellent students, it probably makes sense to attend a public university and get an engineering degree.

3. For average or below average students, college doesn't make sense and learning practical skills (like a trade) as early as high school is a good idea.

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

1. The difference between John D. Rockefeller and other less prosperous businessmen from his generation was mostly luck.

2. Despite contemporary reporting, Rockefeller was a virtuous person with few vices outside of his ruthlessness in business.

3. The antitrust breakup of Standard Oil not only failed to stem Standard Oil's control of the market, it was the major event that catapulted Rockefeller from being a wealthy industrialist to one of the wealthiest men in all of recorded history.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

1. Humans are not built for rational thought. We evolved to impress other primates and pass on our genes. It is a modern conceit that we are capable of making rational choices.

2. Most rational argument is in defense of intuitive reasoning, not the other way around.

3. We make almost all of our choices based upon emotion and intuition. We are so dependent upon emotion and intuition that people without the capacity to emote or intuit become fundamentally incapable of making choices and functioning in society.

Nothing Like it in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad

1. The transcontinental railroad was started during the American Civil War and was enabled by the US government and Abraham Lincoln in particular.

2. Prior to the transcontinental railroad, it took months to travel from New York to San Francisco. Travelers could cut the voyage short by as much as a month by traveling overland across Panama, but for most Americans, the odds of dying from yellow fever, dengue fever, malaria, or other tropical illness during the crossing was between 20-33%.

3. As with most huge construction projects, there was a phenomenal amount of graft, brinksmanship, and political maneuvering required to span the continent.

Master of Doom: How Two Guys Created An Empire and Transformer Pop Culture

1. John Romero and John Carmack both had troubled youths and started ID software out of Shreveport Louisiana, rather than of the current tech hotbeds.

2. Shareware was a largely untested publishing path before Commander Keen and Doom.

3. History appears to have vindicated Carmack's game-engine-first style of development.

Killers of the Flower Moon: the Osage Murders the Birth of the FBI

1. In the early 1920s, oil was discovered in vast quantities under the Osage Indian reservation in Kansas, and made individuals in the tribe millionaires overnight.

2. Through a system of racism, bigotry, and greed, white landowners and politicians stealthily killed and stole the mineral rights from hundreds of Osage Indians.

3. The oil fields became exhausted in the 1940s and today the tribe and their reservation has largely been forgotten.

Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding And the Meaning of Things

1. People who compulsively collect things often treat their possessions are physically part of them.

2. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to cure hoarding behaviors.

3. Goat trails is a term that refers to the narrow paths through piles of hoarded belongings that hoarders create to navigate their homes.

Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder

1. Through numerous quirks of geography, the United States is predisposed to having a larger, more dynamic, and more stable economy than any other nation on earth.

2. Due to technological breakthroughs (fracking, automation, et al) and rapidly aging populations outside of the US, the US will have diminishing incentives to protect and invest in global trade in the 21st century.

3. The same forces that cause the US to de-prioritize participating in the economy of the world will make it more attractive to live here in the coming decades.

Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World

1. During the mid-1500s, Christian Europe and the Ottoman empire were fighting for supremacy of the known world in the first ever large-scale maritime battles on the Mediterranean sea.

2. To secure the western Mediterranean, the Turks needed to capture Malta, but Christian Knights (the order of St. John in particular) held the island despite battles of almost inhuman savagery.

3. The violence and disregard for human life by both empires contrasts so strongly with our current world views about human rights that certain elements are hard to believe.

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

1. Randomness in all things is the rule, not the exception, and accounting for that fact can often mean the difference between catastrophic failure and incredible success.

2. It is easy to be fooled into linking cause and effect in complex systems, especially over relatively short periods of time (like a market cycle).

3. Even what would be considered traditionally "safe" investing strategies incorporate enormous risk in the form of extremely high impact low probability events, that are actually fairly probable when compounded over a person's lifetime. (And example would be a country defaulting on their debt and ruining the currency or environmental degradation causing large areas to become rapidly depopulated.)

Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool

1. There is no definitive, reproducible evidence that breastfeeding improves outcomes for children apart from moderate reductions in infant rashes and diarrhea. This includes the infamous Belarus study that claims the opposite.

2. Sleep training is effective, can be implemented as early as 3 months of age and has no documented long-term negative effects.

3. Children that talk earlier test slightly higher on verbal skills in high school, but the effect size is not huge.

The Best 3 Books I Read

1. The Righteous Mind

2. Fooled by Randomness

3. Killers of the Flower Moon

How One Check Box Lowered Conversions by 17%

This post was originally published on 12/7/2010.

At Skritter, we've been experimenting with email campaigns as a marketing tool. Specifically, we wanted to see if opt-in email marketing to customers that were trying the software was an effective way to boost engagement and sales. To do this, we set up four experimental groups and began sending out some short "how to use Skritter" emails (more on the results of that effort in another blog post). In the course of testing the emails, we needed to randomly show a check box field on our signup page that allowed customers to opt in/out of the emails. Initially we used the A/B test purely for the sake of helping us with the experimental design of the test, but what we found was interesting in its own right.

Two Designs

Here are the two signup page designs:

The control design.

The variant design.

The Result

I'll save you the effort of comparing the two: the only difference is the check box above the "Sign up" button. Surprisingly, adding that field to receive emails was surprisingly effective at deterring signups. After only a short period of time we were able to determine with 94% confidence that the variant was performing worse, to the tune of a 17% decline.

We hadn't expected that tiny email option to have such a large impact on sign ups! Lesson learned: never, under any circumstances, modify the appearance or function of a mission-critical part of your website without testing. That simple test helped us avoid a 17% decline in sign ups every month.

21 Empirical Findings About Human Happiness

In the American Declaration of Independence it states that all men are endowed with certain unalienable rights, one of which is the pursuit of happiness. Yet up until very recently, we humans did not have much information about what actually makes us happy. In the US, most people would agree that you shouldn't cheat on your spouse, that you should live within your means, and that it's a good thing to show charity to those less fortunate.

The problem is we don't actually know -- in a scientific sense -- whether these behaviors actually make us happier at the end of the day. It wasn't until the late 1950s  that any serious scientific rigor was applied to measuring happiness, and even then it was a nascent branch of psychology without much public interest.

Researching Happiness

I came to be interested in happiness research as the result of watching "Why are we happy?" For those of you interested in the answer to that question, I highly recommend you take the 20 minutes and view the talk. It got me pumped up enough to read a slew of research papers that have informed my outlook on everyday life and made me a happier person.

In the course of my readings, I decided it would be a good idea to write up my findings in bite-sized chunks so that others can better understand themselves and research the topic more effectively. Think of this blog post as a cliff notes to happiness research. I don't go into detail on any of the points, and if you want further information, I'd recommend reading the resources at the bottom of the page.

Counter-Intuitive Findings

1. It is often easier to overcome very bad events than trivially bad events because of what is called the region-ß paradox. This occurs because events that are more difficult to overcome trigger critical threshold attenuating mechanisms that allow humans to recover much faster than had the bad event been of a lesser degree. This means that in some circumstances, it is actually advantageous to make situations more difficult than necessary because it's the small stuff that gets you.
2. People systematically overestimate the positive and negative effects of future events, this is called impact bias. Example: people consistently rank becoming crippled as negatively affecting lifetime happiness in a large way. People also predict winning the lottery will have a significant positive effect. In fact, after several years,  people that experience either event are about equally happy. When asked to focus on a certain event, we forget that being crippled or winning the lottery does not continue to affect our lives in big ways for long periods of time. The change is sudden, big, and then we adapt.
3. We experience greater happiness from unexplainable positive events than from explainable positive events. Barring any creepy overtones, if someone gives you $5 and tells you it's for a known cause, you will be less happy than if the same person gave you $5 and walked away without explaining why they gave you the money.
4. We think that losing will hurt more than winning will please us, but in reality, losing doesn't hurt as much as we expect. This finding suggests that we should be more adventuresome. The old saying "nothing ventured, nothing gained" isn't a truism for nothing.
5. Try not to make choices based on comparison, but based on values. Ex: don't choose a job because of it's comparative "betterness" to other offers you have received, because the comparison no longer exists when you make your choice and begin working. Instead, choose a job because it fits your values (eg, "close to home," "reasonable hours," etc).
6. We remember state changes most vividly, and the ending state most vividly. For example, even if a marriage is good for 15 years and bad for 2, the ending state has a disproportionate effect on the happiness derived in the future.
7. Typical life events stop effecting your happiness after 3 to 6 months, although in the intervening time period, they can raise your happiness. The implication is that big life-events don't effect us that much (if at all) in the long term.
8. Widowhood and divorce are listed as the two most stressful events in adulthood, marriage was listed as #7. In addition, long term studies of marital satisfaction find that during the first  years of marriage, life satisfaction declines. Later in marriage, however, satisfaction rises. This is small wonder. During the first years of marriage people merge their entire life with someone else. It stands to reason that after a while, the stress of adapting turns to satisfaction with sharing life's journey.
9. Happy people get married more often than sad people. People who get married tend to rank themselves .25 points (on a 0-10 scale) higher on average before marriage than those who do not get married.
10. The heritability of well being is thought to be between 50-80%. Stated another way, 50-80% of your day to day happiness level is thought to be genetically determined. This finding is referred to in the research literature as the "set point theory" (not to be confused with the identically named theory about weight loss). Where we are born, cultural aspects of life, demographics, age, gender,  and ethnicity all account for a mere 8-15% of our total minute-to-minute  happiness. So if you're an optimist, 42% of your happiness is in your hands. If you are a pessimist, you only have 5% to play with.
11. Some of the big attitudinal factors that can positively affect happiness are: general optimism about life circumstances, an inclination to avoid social comparisons, and the tendency to feel a sense of optimism about one's life.
12. Personal projects are worth pursuing. Accomplishing and  continuing to accomplish projects and pursuits of personal importance have lasting effects on day to day happiness. Example: research has found that almost nobody regrets spending time developing skills or hobbies, even when the pursuit is discarded later and never resumed.
13. People regret actions more in the present. People regret innaction more in the long term. Example: you are much more likely to regret going on a disastrous trip to Europe the week after returning, but in the long term you are much more likely to have regretted not going at all. One possible explanation for why this happens is that we over-emphasize the effects of ambiguous happiness  (what could have been if we had gone to Europe) and minimize concrete badness (that train wreck we caused in Germany).
14. We get happier with age, up until around 65, after which happiness tends to stabilize. Only in the very old (some studies suggest 95+) does day to day happiness decline.
15. We don't end up regretting circumstances out of our control. Persons that have experienced polio and other life altering (but unavoidable) mishaps don't tend to list those events as regrets when asked. This should make you worry less: things beyond our control generally don't affect our long term happiness.
16. Self control is a muscle. Presenting people with two tasks that require self control one right after another shows that the successful performance on the second task diminishes significantly. In other words, self control is a muscle that we can exhaust. This explains why alcoholics and dieters more often lapse when they are experiencing bad moods, frustration, and stress. Although theoretically possible, there isn't much empirical evidence that we can increase our self control with practice.
17. It pays to be an extrovert. Extroversion as a personality trait correlates strongly with experiencing more positive interactions as well as achieving higher happiness stability. So for us introverts (myself included), developing your ability to be an extrovert appears to pay off.
18. We sometimes overwhelmingly prefer to be less happy. Even though we may prefer eating a lollipop to eating spinach or broccoli, we tend to choose a mixture if presented the choice. This is strange because we enjoy repeated preferred experiences (the lollipop) more in the moment but less in retrospect. We prefer to sacrifice total happiness for higher retrospective happiness, even though studies show retrospective pleasure is by far less important to lifetime happiness than moment-to-moment enjoyment.
19. Income expectations do not appear to effect happiness, ie, a person who grew up poor with expectations of continued poverty is not significantly more happy if they earn a lot of money. In addition, there is substantial evidence that income that exceeds $60,000/year doesn't make you any happier.
20. People don't always prefer less pain. People care less about total pain (ie, how long a pain is experienced) and more about peak pain level, ending condition, and the time trend of the pain. Example: controlling for peak pain level and the result of the operation, people show no retrospective preference for a 4 minute colonoscopy or a 69 minute colonoscopy!
21. The desire to get discomfort out of the way early and quickly appears to be a universal preference. People also tend to prefer sequences of events that end better than they start, even if the total sequence results in less overall happiness. If you offer someone a salary that increases from $35k-50k over a year as opposed to a salary that goes from $70k-50k, people will widely prefer the first, even though it earns them $35k less. The preference for best thing last changes according to a documented "Magnet Effect" which states that if events/decisions occur close enough in time we treat them like a sequence.

The above studies are just a sample of what I've been reading, and I expect to continue my research slowly in my free time. I will probably post here again when I have another batch of interesting nuggets. What I have learned is that there is growing momentum in the quest to increase human happiness and I am looking forward to learning ever more about how to make my life more enjoyable.

Bibliography

Gilovich, Thomas, and Victoria Husted Medvec. (1995). "The Experience of Regret: What, When, and why," Psychological Review 102(2), 379-395.

Kahneman, D., D.L. Frederickson, C.A. Schreiber, and D.A. Redelemeier. (1993). "When More Pain is Preferred to Less: Adding a Better End," Pyschological Science 4, 401-405.

Loewenstein, George, and Drazen prelec. (1993). "Preferences for Sequences of Outcomes," Pyschological Review 100(1), 91-108.

Brunstein, J. (1993). Personal goals and subjective well-being: A longitudinal study. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 1061-1070.

Charles, S. T., Reynolds, C.A., &amp; Gatz, M. (2001). Age-related differences and change in positive and negative affect over 23 years. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 136-151.

Diener, E., Sandvik, E., Seidlitz, L., &amp; Diener, M. (1993). The relationship between income and subjective well being: Relative or Absolute? Social Indicators Research, 28, 195-223.

Muraven, M., &amp; Baumeister, R. F. (2000). Self-regulation and depletion of limited resources: Does self-control resemble a muscle? Psychological Bulletin, 126, 247-259

Ratner, R.K., Kahn, B.E., &amp; Kaneman D. (1999). Choosing less-preferred experiences for the sake of variety. Journal of Consumer Research, 26, 1-15.

Hill, C.T., &amp; Peplau, L.A. (1998) Premarital predictors of relationship outcomes: A 15-year follow-up of the Boston Couples Study. IN T. Bradbury (Ed.), The Developmental course of marital dysfunction (pp. 237-278). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Brunstein, C. Joachim (1993) Personal Goals and Subjective Well-Being: A Longitudinal Study, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Vol 65, No. 5, 1061-1070

The Peculiar Longevity of Things Not So Bad, Daniel T. Gilbert, Matthew D. Lieberman, Carey K. Morewedge, and Timothy D. Wilson, 2004, American Psychological Society

Affective Forecasting: Knowing What to Want, Timothy D. Wilson and Daniel T. Gilbert, 2005 American Psychological Society

Thinking about Values in Prospect and Retrospect: Maximizing Experienced Utility, Joel Huber, John Lynch, Kim Corfman, Jack Feldman, Morris B. Holbrook, Donald Lehmann, Bertrand Mueir, David Schkade, Itamar Simonson

Events and Subjective Well-Being: Only Recent Events Matter, Eunkook Suh and Ed Diener, Frank Fujita, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1996

Reexamining Adaptation and the SEt Point Model of Happiness: Reactions to Changes in Marital Status, Richard E. lucas, Yannis Georgellis, Andrew E. Clark, Ed Diener, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2003

Pursuing Happiness: the Architecture of Sustainable Change, Sonja Lyubomirksy, Kennon M. Sheldon, David Schkade, Review of General Psychology, 2005, Vol. 9 No. 2 111-131

IMDB Score Bias: It's Temporal

This post was originally published on 2/7/2011.

I'm a nerd, economist, and a movie snob. Sometimes it makes me hard to deal with.

My brother has a natural fear of picking movies with me. During our holiday visits home we invariably try to watch a movie and it ends in eyes being rolled in my direction. My family has taken to calling any movie I pick as a "depressing indie drama."

I don't think of this as being difficult, I think of it as getting the most out of my time. Having seen thousands of great movies, I have trouble committing two hours to a movie of dubious quality. In an effort to avoid wasting time on bad and mediocre flicks, I am on a quest to better predict how much I will enjoy a given movie. I've rated more than 700 movies on Netflix, I visit IMDB about 25 times week, I've tried Flixster, Rotten Tomatoes, and the blogs of well-known critics. The goal is to accurately correlate my movie-watching happiness with the ratings provided by these sources. So far the results are disappointing. No one source accurately predicts my preferences. Even inter-comparing and creating composite indexes frequently leads to contradictory predictions. To date, the best predictor I've found is a film's IMDB rating, but this number is far from perfect.

IMDB ratings are worst when movies are newly released. For a film like Citizen Kane, the IMDB score is accurate, and no wonder: enough people have seen it to decide how good it is. In fact, Orson Welles' masterpiece has 145,319 ratings on IMDB, a score of 8.6/10, and is listed by the American Film Institute as the best movie ever made. [1] Citizen Kane is pretty similar to other critically acclaimed films on IMDB. Among the top ten films, the average number of IMDB votes is 152,073 and the median score is 8.45. With so many ratings, my guess is that these movies are more accurately rated than a movie with 1% as many reviews that was released last week.

Take Inception for example. When it was released it had a rating of 9.3 on IMDB and thousands of reviews. But how could this be? Was Inception actually a better movie than Citizen Kane, Casablanca, The Godfather, Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, The Wizard of Oz, The Graduate, On the Waterfront, Schindler's List, and Singin' in the Rain?  Having seen all of these films, I had a hard time believing it.

So, I hypothesized that IMDB ratings were biased upwards for young movies. When new movies come out, the first people to see them are early adopters and critics. As an example, someone disinterested in a new film may see it eventually [2], but they are unlikely to see it the first day it comes to their local theater. My contention was that seeking out such pre-releases, in combination with marketing and release hype, would select and reinforce overly-positive movie reviews.

To test this theory, I spent three months sampling a randomly-selected group of 21 new releases. I started sampling on November 9th by finding IMDB's list of upcoming movies and recording the first data point for all of them [3]. I then checked the ratings once weekly to see if my prediction about prerelease hype held up to a little empirical rigor. My sample was surprisingly diverse. Among the movies I sampled there were big budget Hollywood films like Tron: Legacy as well as indie films like Rare Exports [4]. Because some of the films were slated to release later in the month of December and some had pre-screeners who rated the movies before a popular release, I didn't have an equal number of data points for each film. Almost every film did reach score equilibrium; the score remained stable for at least three sampling periods (three weeks). Here is a time series for the films. I've omitted the titles since it would clutter the graph too much:

Looking at the graph is a bit confusing, and there isn't a clear trend. So I turned to the numbers. With a little statistical crunching I found that the average movement in rating was -.2125, significant at 95% confidence. In other words, new movies do have inflated IMDB ratings, on average those ratings are .2 points above where they will eventually settle.

The greatest volatility in rating was in the first two sample periods, which is to be expected. The Tempest and Casino Jack were the biggest losers (shedding 1.6 points in the 3 month period). There were several films that appear to have been correctly assessed from the get-go and had no rating change after 12 weeks: I Love You Philip Morris, The Tourist, The Fighter, Little Fockers, and a French film by the name of The Illusionist. The rest suffered small declines in score that are consistent with my theory. 

The takeaway here is that if you are asked to watch a new release, assume that the IMDB rating is overly-optimistic by about a fifth of a point, then go anyway and have a good time.

[1] Even a film snob like me must admit that it is ridiculous to make such a claim but it sure sounds definitive.

[2] I suspect the biggest reason that disinterested people see films is social pressure.

[3] The equivalent page for this week would be here.

[4] I tracked all of the following films: Black Swan, I Love Your Phillip Morris, Rare Exports, The Warrior's Way, The Tourist, The Tempest, The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Company Men, The Fighter, Tron: Legacy, Yogi Bear, How do you Know, All Good Things, Rabbit Hole, Casino Jack, Little Fockers, True Grit, Somewhere, The Illusionist, Gulliver's Travels, and Country Strong.

How to Overcome Your Fear of Hustling

The Horror

You know the feeling well: you've decided to attend a networking Meetup, you get to the location and only see one other car in the parking lot. You go into the building and your stomach sinks as you enter the appointed room. There's only one other person there, and it looks like the organizer. You quickly check your phone: it's 20 minutes past the starting time. How embarrassing. You're the only schmuck who turned up.  There  are unopened drinks on the table next to uneaten food. You look desperately around:  this poor organizer looks ready to talk to anyone and you see the next 2 hours of your life vaporizing in a mist of uncomfortable conversation as you try to politely leave.

You're Doing it Wrong

Most people I know would be uncomfortable with the situation I described above. In fact, I would have been uncomfortable with it until very recently, when I realized how much it was holding me back. I don't like being witness to, much less a part of a failing enterprise as much as the next person, but if you are going to start something new, you better get used to that feeling and stop letting it affect you.

Almost every new venture starts with discomfort. It's easy to forget that when you are starting a company because coding a site allows people to hide from that sort of discomfort for far too long. I would wager that if every web startup required the founders to knock on a 1,000 doors and pitch their product to the resident inside before being allowed to write code, very few businesses would get started, but those that did would be 1,000 times better off.

I'm talking about being willing to physically put yourself in socially uncomfortable situations to push your vision forward. I'm talking about hard sales, cold calls, meet and greets, and asking people for favors. I'm talking about being willing to politely ignore the unwritten rules of social decorum and get down to business. I think the more you are able to do that in your life, the more successful you will be at achieving your goals.

How to Do it Right

It's all well and good to talk about being brassy and hustling for your vision, but how do you go from being a shy, socially-hypersensitive person (like I used to be) to a self-determined success? Here are two tricks that I use:

1) Prediction Boxing

When you are faced with something uncomfortable, you will find yourself making excuses to avoid it. What you are doing is trying to avoid encountering the worst case scenario. Let's say you are going to cold call a potential customer. You have been putting it off for a week, but why?

There's a quick mental exercise I do which helps me put possible outcomes into perspective. It works like this: think about what you are going to do, and generate a scenario in which everything turns out impossibly well, and I mean push this to the extreme. To use the cold calling example, the extreme positive situation is that your customer not only buys what you are selling, but they 100 copies of it and refers 100 of their corporate friends. Bam, your company is now a success.

Now, think about the absolute worst case, and I mean the most god-awful worst way this could turn out. This time, your customer screams curses at you for the unsolicited sales call, tells all their corporate friends you're an idiot, and adds you number to their block list. Okay, that would suck pretty hard.

Finally, think about a situation in the middle. Maybe you get a curt hangup, or a polite denial. Maybe they tentatively agree to try your software for free with no obligation, maybe they try to get you off the phone by making up an excuse not to talk with you.

I have found time and time again that the middle situation is the most likely, and so long as it doesn't contain any truly horrible results, you should probably do what you are contemplating. Remember: think of the best, then the worst, then the middle situation, and if the middle doesn't seem bad, go for it.

2) Pre-commitment

This is a motivational hack that one of my good friends shared with me, and has proven effective time and time again: tell people what you are going to do, and tell them when you are going to do it. You will get the most out of this if you tell people you respect, and since we are talking about intimidating challenges in a business context, I would recommend your co-founders. Here's how I was able to push myself out of my comfort zone repeatedly to get stuff done:

Whenever my co-founders and I would come up with a marketing or sales suggestion that was uncomfortable, I would volunteer to do it regardless of my comfort level with the task and set a concrete deadline. This part is easy: it makes you appear valuable and important to your cofounders, and that feels good. The hard part comes later and you can build up the courage when that time comes. The most important thing is that you tell them exactly what you are going to do "I will cold-call 5 of our potential customers" and give it a deadline "and I will call them by this coming Monday."

By making a formal, concrete, public commitment, you have raised the stakes of failure, and made it that much harder to back out. Now if you fail, you can't hide: the people you respect most will know. You've put yourself in the position of having to succeed. Make no mistake, you don't end up hustling accidentally. I recently saw a talk by a guy talking about customer development in which he said that he would never have done it if the alternative hadn't been firing his best friends. One cold call may not push you to that extreme, but it's a good indicator of how difficult it is to make a habit of hustling.

If you're interested in learning more about the tips and tricks I use, you should read my cofounder's book: The Motivation Hacker. 

Conclusion

Starting something new is scary because failure is scary. You maximize your chances of success by improving your hustle and overcoming that fear. To use the example at the beginning of this post, there is no reason to be scared of an empty room. Worst case scenario: you lose a bit of time, learn what doesn't work, pack up early and try again.

The Manly Art of Making Guy Friends

When I was growing up, my parents moved our family 5 times. Then I went off to college (+1 move). Then I moved to be near my now wife. Then I moved to the west coast for my startup. And Rebecca and I eventually plan to move back east.

In my relatively short lifespan, I've moved 11 times in 5 cities in 4 states across more than 4,000 miles. Every time I move, I'm back to square one with regard to in-person friendships, and it gets harder to make friends the older you get. You get busy, you have a family, you have kids, a house, 2 cars, inlaws, a garden, and a slew of other responsibilities which make it difficult to find the time for other new friendships.

What's worse, as a guy it's taboo to want to make more guy friends. American men aren't supposed to talk about their feelings, much less ask for relationship advice about how to befriend other guys. We are supposed to be silent islands of emotionless self-sufficiency like Stallone in Rocky, only less talkative.

But let's get real: most humans need friends, and men are humans. There's a massive amount of research that suggests that happy, lucky, content people tend to have larger social networks and deeper friendships. Even if you don't believe that, think of it more pragmatically: if you want to find co-founders for a company, get promoted, or even get job offers, you need to make friends with people and it's a lot more socially acceptable to do so among your own gender.

Three Pointers

1) Find groups of men close to your age, intelligence, education, and socioeconomic background.

If this sounds harsh, get over it. You want to meet people who are similar enough to you that you feel comfortable forming long term friendships with them. If you are a middle aged guy of above average intelligence with three children and a wife, you probably won't feel comfortable throwing back cans of PBR in a parking lot with a bunch of unemployed 22-year-olds. And that's good. Even if you seek out men who are similar to you, you will still find an enormous amount of variety in the people you meet, so you don't need to feel like an elitist bastard for seeking folks like yourself. It's natural to do so, and it's the basis of long lasting, trustful friendships.

2) Participate in groups that are creating something or working towards a common goal.

My wife used to participate in the #1 nationally-ranked small women's barbershop chorus. They met weekly to do something they love (sing) and polished an arrangement of songs for competition. This aspect of creating and working towards a common goal is even more important for men. Guys bond by doing things together: building a fort in the woods when you're 10, fixing your car for prom when you're 17, helping a friend move when you're 20, and planning backpacking trips when you're 25. Let me say it again: guys connect with one another by working together. The opposite of man-bonding is sitting around and talking. You want to find a group of dudes like you that are doing something you can join in.

3) Find groups of guys comprised of members that are more successful than you.

Don't misread this one: I don't mean "hang out with guys who make a lot money." I'm talking about personal success, which is something you have to define for yourself. For me, someone who barely scrapes by on the earnings from the company he started is a big success. So is one of my Dad's friends who has built up a support network for homeless people in Southeastern Ohio. Being friends with my startup co-founders has proven how valuable it is to surround yourself with successful friends who challenge and force you to grow. It's difficult to find people like that, but don't give up searching. Being around a peer group that is motivated and successful is critically important to achieving your own goals.

I don't assign equal weight to these criteria and you shouldn't either. I generally assume that finding men like me (#1) is about 50% of the search problem, find a group that is creating stuff is 30% of the challenge, and the rest is finding successful peers. I weight my search to stay sane because if you try to meet all three criteria without compromising you'll be sad and lonely.

Actionable Steps

1. After moving somewhere new, find a job working with smart people you enjoy, even if it's not 100% ideal.
2. Start attending meetups that vaguely match your interests. You probably won't end up going to them for very long, so it's not important that they match your schedule or hobbies perfectly.
3. Talk to both coworkers and folks at meetups about the groups you really want to join. Maybe you joined an outdoors meetup but what you really want to do is train to climb a local 5,000 ft peak. Chances are if you start asking, you'll discover other people who want to do similar things. Surprisingly, even in our hyper-connected internet world, I've found the coolest groups of people are NOT organized around meetup groups.
4. Commit and contribute. The easiest way to show you're interested in what other guys are doing is to offer to help them or their organization. Agree to host the group, organize travel logistics, manage the gear inventories, research trail conditions, or any other number of tasks that active groups need to make them successful.
5. Wash, rinse, repeat, and be patient. My experience has been that it takes me a long time to start making friends in a new city, normally about a year. By years 2-3 I typically have ONE or TWO guy friends I might be comfortable hanging with on a Saturday afternoon, and most of my best friends only became a large part of my social life after more than 3-4 years. The point here is that building genuine, healthy friendships takes time, don't expect otherwise.

Conclusion

So, whether you are reading this because you want to make more friends to hang out with, you want to find a cofounder for your startup, or you want to build your professional network, I've found the above steps to be effective and rewarding. If you follow the guidelines earnestly, you'll end up with life-enriching friendships with other guys that make you into a better man.

Quit Your Job Now, Before It's Too Late

This was originally posted on 4/7/2013.

Six weeks ago I handed my employer my formal resignation. Two weeks ago I waved goodbye and left the office to begin work on my second startup.

At this stage in my life I have no children, no mortgage, a small passive income from my first startup, two rock solid technical cofounders, a working prototype for our idea, a monetization strategy, and enough cash saved up to bankroll some small business expenses. In short, there was very little risk to quitting. Yet I still struggled with the decision and on that Thursday as I walked into the chilly North Carolina air, I couldn't help but wonder if I was making the right decision.

Quitting is hard for social reasons. I worked at a small Django consultancy with an excellent group of folks who I respect and admire. But even there, among independent-minded, intelligent, professional, driven peers, most were confused why I would want to quit an excellent job. One coworker was frustrated that I was helping perpetuate the Silicon Valley brain drain, "don't move out there and be one of those guys," he told me during my last week. But by far the most common reaction to my news was "why?" accompanied by what I perceived to be quiet pity. "Oh dear, he thinks he's going to start the next Facebook."

To everyone yearning to quit their job and pursue their startup dreams, do your homework, then quit now. I'm not sure I would be capable of quitting my job with $100k in a home loan, 2 children, and a car payment. Quitting gets more difficult the longer you wait, so brace yourself and jump soon.

This is Why You Don't Want Nice Things

A while back I wrote about how I think renting is a superior form of ownership. As I keep reading and trying new secondary markets, from Uber to Getaround to AirBnb, I am even more convinced that owning things is ill-advised. Right now every internet user can rent cars, tools, bikes, and dozens of other products and services which used to be enjoyable only by the people who ponied up the cash to purchase them [1]. Distributed economies have changed the value of owning things, but most people are still paying too much to own too many things and it makes us unhappy - I call this over-ownership.

A classic example of over-ownership would be buying a home when early in life.

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, 50% of people between the ages of 20 and 24 have been with their current employer for less than 2 years [2]. The only age group in which people have worked for their current employer longer than 8 years is 55+. An 18 year old person can expect to move 9.1 more times in their life. By age 45, people can expect to move another 2.7 times [4]. That's approximately 1 move every 4.2 years for people between the ages of 18 and 45.

Using the New York Time's "Is it better to rent or own?", I calculated that if you live in Raleigh (my previous city of residence), pay less than $1,000 in rent, and want to purchase a $200,000 home [5] on a favorable 2.8% mortgage and 1% property tax rate, it only makes sense to purchase if you expect to stay put for more than 6 years. If you live somewhere like San Francisco (where I currently live), and want to buy the average $1M home, and you currently pay $3,000 per month in rent, it will take 18 years before it makes sense to buy.

So most young people shouldn't buy houses, yet according to Calculated Risk and The Atlantic [6], more than 38% of people between the ages of 25 and 29 do own their houses. This says that me that a fair number of those buyers are going to lose time, money, and sleep on their housing purchases.

Now, think about all the items in your home and think about how much you use them. Think especially of expensive items; KitchenAids, belt sanders, laptops, etc. I would be willing to wager that it would be cheaper for you to rent items you use infrequently instead of owning them. I would go even one step farther: renting would not just be cheaper, it would solve a myriad of other lifestyle problems. If you had 50% fewer objects in your house, think about how much easier it would be to clean, how much less time you would have to spend maintaining possessions, and how much easier it would be to move to the next home/apartment.

There aren't currently enough online services and they are still too inconvenient for my vision of utopian rentals to be practical tomorrow, next month, or perhaps even next year [7]. But in the near future, renting will make our lives universally better by allowing us to own less stuff.

[1] Car rentals, boat rentals, parking space rentals, and especially service rentals like Taskrabbit. And these are just a few examples in each category.

[2] http://www.bls.gov/news.release/tenure.t01.htm">http://www.bls.gov/news.release/tenure.t01.htm

[3] Surprisingly, the old adage about 7 career changes in a lifetime is also bunk: Seven Careers in a Lifetime? Think Twice, Researchers Say.

[4] Calculating Migration Expectancy Using ACS Data

[5] Trulia housing demographics for Raleigh puts the median value of a house in Raleigh NC at $200,000.

[6] http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/04/us-homeownership-by-age-group.html, The end of ownership: why aren't young people buying more houses?" 

[7] One comment I received on the original version of this post was that in making my recommendation for renting, I forgot to include time costs. The basic argument is that there is too much friction in renting, which makes renting a $300 Kitchenaid, for instance, a bad deal. Existing services would require you to find a nearby person renting the item, perhaps drive to their home, sign a paper, drive back to your home, use the mixer, and repeat the process when returning it. But I'm not thinking about existing services. When I first wrote this post, Getaround didn't offer instant rentals, but now they do. The same is true for AirBnb and a host of other services. The instant acceptance peer to peer rental markets are already thriving, we just haven't hit saturation with all the stuff we could possibly rent.

Special thanks to my good friend Ben for checking my numbers on this post and keeping me honest.

Knowing How to Code Isn't Valuable

Silicon valley would have you believe that learning how to program is an extremely valuable skill set that unlocks untold career and personal possibilities. All you have to do, dear reader, is learn enough to sling some Ruby on Rails, deploy your own website, and the world will be your oyster.

Back in 2012, I believed this line of reasoning and began teaching myself to program. I tried everything from Codecademy to traditional textbooks, but couldn't make anything stick. I am extraordinarily motivated, but I found it It difficult to make forward progress. Even after exhausting hours learning the basics, my goal of building products and turbocharging my career seemed just as unattainable as when I started.

This frustration motivated my cofounders and I to start building Code Combat in early 2013. Our goal was to teach the world to code and bring that silicon valley prosperity to everyone. It seemed obvious to us that if we created a product that was fun to play and at least slightly educational, people like me (motivated 20 somethings) would find it easier to continue learning CS and become valuable software developers.

Over the course of two years, I learned the hard truth that knowing how to program computers isn't actually that valuable. The skill that is valuable is wanting to program computers. And that distinction is troublesome for motivated 20-somethings.

Young adults have an incredible ability to teach themselves anything, but they are especially motivated to learn things that improve their quality of life. Often that means earning more money or finding a job with better work/life balance. And so for many people who graduated college with useless liberal arts degrees (like myself), it is tempting to teach ourselves skills that actually make us valuable members of the economy. As in, paid well and sought after by employers.

Programming is a particularly attractive skill to learn because it's very well compensated, in extraordinarily high demand, and doesn't require as many unpleasant work/life compromises as other industries [1].

To many people, then, programming looks like a ticket out of their humdrum career trajectory. All you need to do is learn a bit of obscure syntax, and you'll be raking in the dough while being endlessly pursued by recruiters offering ever-higher salaries.

The reality is more disappointing.

Like most valuable skills, programming is difficult to master. Unlike other skills, however, the barrier to entry is very low and the rate of change is very high. This means that you, newbie programmer, can learn one or two frameworks and languages and be unemployable in a year or two if you aren't constantly learning and improving your craft. To make matters worse, thousands of new programmers and tinkerers are constantly entering the labor market out of inherent interest. Because they want to program and can learn for free, they will outcompete and outbuild you.

This is why coding boot camps heavily screen for people who want to program. And it's why, even with 1-5% acceptance rates, they still have an image problem with their graduates [2]. Companies don't want to entrust their mission-critical backend infrastructure to a philosophy major who is dabbling in programming. They want someone whose desire to program has given them years of experience wrangling complex systems and making them work.

Our initial business model at Code Combat was to educate players enough to be employable. When that failed, we turned to simply discovering players with enough skills to be employable. When that didn't scale, we turned to the real hard work: introducing programming to kids who might otherwise have never learned about it. 

That turns out to be an extraordinarily difficult niche to monetize, but it's what adds the most value. Because of Code Combat, millions of kids who otherwise may have never heard about programming have written hundreds of lines of Python and JavaScript.

It's my profound hope that in 10 years I'll meet a child that was introduced to programming on Code Combat. I imagine that child much like myself: a sort of nerdy kid who fell in love with computers and developed a real passion for tinkering with them. For her, all the silicon valley promises of prosperity and opportunity will be true because she doesn't just know how to program, she will want to program, which is the skill that's actually in demand.

[1] I'm looking at you management consultants.

[2] When we started Code Combat in 2013, most bootcamps were earning money by charging recruiting fees for their students. Today, they have almost all stopped doing that and fund their operations the good old fashioned way: charging tuition. Companies hiring boot camp graduates simply don't value them enough to pay placement fees.

Know Thy Platform

This post was originally published on 5/5/2011.

Four months ago my two co-founders and I went to visit one of our investors for a quarterly check-in. Our investor runs an iOS development company from a renovated turn-of-the-century office atop a 28 story building. It would be an understatement to call his experience and surroundings impressive.

While sitting in front of a 9 foot window that looked out on most of downtown, we were discussing plans for our upcoming iOS app. Specifically, we were discussing how many features should be included in version 1. We had just started to translate our codebase to Objective C, and we were trying to define the scope of the project. Our development approach to date had been to build a quick and dirty v1 and use it to gauge user interest. The process had served us very well.

Like an all-knowing Buddha, our investor grabbed a nearby white board and drew a graph similar to the one at the top of this post.

"What does this graph tell you about the features you need in version 1?" he asked, pushing the graph towards us.

We all three thought for a moment. None of us liked the implications, but Nick eventually replied "I guess we can't build a minimum viable product then."

Our investor just nodded and gave us a smirk that seemed to say "sucks, doesn't it?"

What he knew was that the window of opportunity for a hot app on the App Store was measured in days, and especially for the kind of app we were building, a Hollywood Launch was the way to go.

When we actually starting building the app, we had our product scope waiting: it needed to be full-featured and polished. Prior to that meeting, we didn't know anything about the App Store as a platform. What our investor let us know was that building an MVP iPhone app would have been as stupid and useless for my co-founders and I as trying to iterate our way through FDA drug approvals for a new medicine.

Knowing your platform makes you a more effective entrepreneur. It means you have a better grasp of how your product will be shared and used. This means you can cut out unproductive iterations and get to pay dirt faster. Whether your entrepreneurial ambitions are to make enterprise software or fluffy mobile apps, qualified knowledge of your platform will significantly reduce the number of times you have to pivot strategies. And in some cases (like ours), platform knowledge can save the project completely. Had we made an iOS app that wasn't polished on day one, we would have thrown away our best chance to test the market and make money on our creation.

Even going between two similar platforms (web apps to mobile versions of web apps) requires entrepreneurs to have a firm grasp of the differences of the platforms. Most of the time you won't have a kindly investor at your shoulder to reiterate this point, which means you have to know thy platform without being told. Sucks, doesn't it?

You Can't Use Customer Discovery for B2C Products

This post is a simple reminder to everyone out there starting a B2C web startup: it's risky and no framework or theory is going to change that.

Steve Blank’s Customer Discovery framework has helped an entire generation of entrepreneurs focus on the most important aspect of their business from day one: finding paying customers. But Steve Blank focuses on B2B products, and even more specifically, B2B enterprise products. These are products for which the number of potential customers is relatively small and each account is relatively large.

But what if you are building a B2C product? This business model aims to build something that a large number of customers will use, and any one customers will have a tiny impact on your bottom line. I’m talking about consumer web products, Netflix, Prezzi, and Instagram all fall into this category.

If that is what you are trying to build, the Customer Development process really only has three steps:

1. Build a minimum viable product (MVP).
2. Show it to people and see if they use it.
3. Rinse, repeat, or pivot.

The only input the Customer Discovery process has for this type of product is to build as little as possible in step #1. But this is hardly new information. Building a minimum viable product has become de facto industry advice for entrepreneurs and was good advice before the 4 Steps to Epiphany was published.

The takeaway here isn’t that Steve Blank’s advice is flawed or that the Customer Discovery process is useless. The takeaway is that unlike B2B startups, there are no straight-forward steps you can take to validate your B2C startup idea quickly without writing code.

So if you are starting a B2C web product, remember there’s no magic bullet when getting started. The best thing you can do is just start building a stripped down minimum viable product and get people using it. Which is essentially what it’s always meant to build B2C consumer web products. The best thing you can do is get started!

How to Choose A Name For Your Startup

Naming a product is tough. It's thankless, there's no objective criteria for success, and when you're first starting out, it can seem unproductive. But none of these are legitimate excuses for not spending a tremendous amount of time and energy picking that name. Later on, when you have paying customers, the name that shows up on their credit card statements will be a soothing reminder of your consistent and trustworthy brand. Changing it requires far more effort than most founders imagine, so do it right the first time. Here's a concrete step-by-step guide to finding a great name for your startup's product.

Create a list of possible names.

There are dozens of excellent articles that can get you started with the process of brainstorming possible names. Most of these articles do an excellent job of summarizing the most common guidelines, so I will only briefly mention them here:

• The shorter the name, the better.
• Choose something that can be verbed. "I'm going to Twitter this" works much better than "I'm going to ShortMessagesWithFriends" this.
• Choose a relevant name, if you are starting an invoicing company, bikemanufacturers.com probably isn't appropriate.
• Choose names with greater phonetic clarity. The word "phonetic," for example is terrible because it isn't clear when spoken whether it should be spelled "fonetic," "phonetic," "fonetik," or "phonetik." The proliferation of mis-spelled domains and product names have exacerbated this problem.
• For products that create new markets (AirBnB for instance), it won't be important to have a name with high SEO value like "bestbnb.com." If search discoverability is important, however, consider shelling out cash for a name that will rank for your keywords. You can think of this as money well spent compared to the Adwords, conference attendance, and content marketing you would need to do later to drum up traffic for a less discoverable domain.
• If you are struggling to come up with ideas, I recommend using Impossibility, which has the added benefit of only showing you available, non-parked domains.

Check availability and price.

For my second startup, we generated about 150 possible names to start. My cofounders and I checked their availability using InstantDomainSearch, and weeded out names that both didn't excite us and were unavailable. Since we were creating a product that was unlikely to benefit a great deal from organic SEO, we disqualified quite a few domains that were selling for more than a few thousand dollars. [1]

Gather relevant data.

Next, my founders and I rated each name on a scale of 1-10. Using this data, we created an average score for each name that equally represented our preferences. We sorted the names using our aggregate scores and chose the top 15.

We then create a Google form, and sent the top 15 names to 30 people who were either potential customers, close friends, or both. The form asked recipients to rate the names using the same 1-10 scale.

Using the data from real potential customers and those who were heavily invested in our success, we created a final index of each each name's overall goodness.

Steve Blank says that products rarely survive first contact with customers, and the same is true of names. In our case, we had an internal favorite which was disliked by our friends and potential customers. If we hadn't sought feedback, we would have chosen a terrible name!

Contacting Domain Owners

Domain names can be shockingly expensive [2], but for most product-based companies, it doesn't make sense to spend very much on the domain. Quality products take thousands of hours to build, brand, and market. Invest your time in a new name rather than fighting the baggage left by the domain's previous owner.

After getting feedback about our choices, we disqualified the lowest five options and focused on getting one of the top ten names. Of those, only one was not registered, two were unwilling to sell, two did not return our inquiry email, and the remainder quoted prices ranging from $32,000 to $700. The audience favorite, however, was listed for $788, which we ended up purchasing.

Conclusion

Considering the costs associated with re-branding, it makes monetary sense to invest heavily in choosing the best available name. It took us 20-30 hours to make our decision, and among the tasks associated with getting a new business started, I count those hours as some of the most valuable.

[1] Interestingly, the most expensive domain we discovered had a "suggested retail price" of $80,000.

[2] For kicks, you might enjoy checking out the list of the most expensive domain names ever sold. The current king is $35.6M for insurance.com.

I Want To Unsubscribe, Not "Manage My Preferences"

Spam is a huge problem. But my experience with the Gmail spam filter has been heavenly; it's been years since I've seen spam in my inbox promising to enlarge my manhood with a Rolex.

The big problem today is opt-in email. I have been actively unsubscribing from email lists for months. But newsletters, special updates, coupon offers, and other email marketing still arrive every day in droves. During the last seven days I have received 14 notifications from meetup.com, 6 Google+ friend requests, 3 Facebook event reminders, 2 notifications from job boards, 2 newsletters from services I've long since stopped using, 2 survey requests for services I've recently used, 1 LinkedIn update, 1 travel advertisement, and 1 airline advertisement. That's 32 emails in 7 days. I never consciously opted into any of these emails and have tried to unsubscribe myself as best I can.

But increasingly, I see emails sent from large, respectable companies [1] that provide me with no unsubscribe link. Instead there is an insidious trend towards "Managing Preferences," which invariably requires a log in, a brief search to find the unsubscribe option, and a form submit. And after all that am I unsubscribed? Apparently not because I keep getting messages. The companies assure me that I'm off XY email list while seemingly putting me on ZQW list simultaneously. Perhaps most irritating of all, I am spending an increasing amount of time browsing and checking email from my phone, and elaborate unsubscribe workflows thwart my ability to quickly opt out.

As the founder of a web startup myself I do not believe there is anything wrong with emailing customers. I don't even mind that I'm being opted into email lists by default; it actually makes a lot of sense. We did an A/B test a while back to see whether visitors to our site wanted to subscribe to five introductory tip emails [2]. Interestingly, we found that just putting the option to get email--we phrased the offer several different ways-- decreased signups, even though 78% chose to receive them, and getting them vs. not getting them made no difference in conversion past the free trial. Users didn't mind getting email, but they did mind being asked. We derive monetary value from sending customers email, and subscribing users by default causes fewer than 1 complaint per 10,000 emails sent. In summary, a company has every incentive to email its customers, and I don't begrudge those attempts. The problem is that these companies aren't respecting my ability to unsubscribe.

Skritter and CodeCombat newsletters go out to a lot of people every month, and folks seem to enjoy it. We easily get 10x the number of positive responses to our newsletter for every request to unsubscribe. I suspect the reason is that we provide a one-click unsubscribe link that respects people's time and privacy. If my company were 20x larger, we would probably want to send more and different email to customers. But complexity doesn't magic away a company's responsibility to allow innocents like me to easily opt out of their email presence. When a company asks me to "Manage my Preferences," they disrespect my time and fracture my trust.

[1] LinkedIn and TripAdvisor spring to mind as companies that have foisted this on me just in the past 7 days. I still can't figure out how to make the Trip Advisor emails to stop, even after wandering around the "My Account" section on my laptop for several minutes.

[2] The tip emails were a series of 5 emails sent to users during their trial periods that introduced them to site features. They were 100% instructional and intended to increase engagement. We didn't put marketing or sales materials in them.

How Netflix Can Ruin Your App's Value Proposition

When you are running a subscription-based web app, cancellations are a part of everyday life. At Skritter, we realized early on that knowing why people cancelled would be of critical importance. We ask everyone who cancels to let us know why, and a surprising 50% of people actually do. We get these missives via emails and I track them to keep a pulse on what we need to improve. And so it was a fairly routine morning a few weeks back, while reading one such cancellation email, that I was struck by what the user had written:

"I have no money these days. Great program, but $10 is a bit too expensive. Would sign up and keep it for 1/2 the price. Netflix costs less than you guys."

Comparing prices between products is nothing new of course, and the big players in any space will always influence prices for the little guys, but this was personal for two reasons. First, I use Netflix all the time and personally love the company and their product. Second, I also happen to run a small startup which charges more per month than the big red giant I so adore. This user's comment was damning because while Skritter helps people a lot, it was hard to argue that Skritter is more fun or better value than renting 20,000 streaming movies.

This got me thinking about web app subscriptions as a whole. For founders, choosing a price for your product is difficult. It's also one of the most important decisions you will make as a business owner. So it's no surprise, faced with such an important decision, that many founders--ourselves included--look to the market for pricing clues.

The market for subscription services is homogenizing and falling. Back when monthly subscriptions were relatively unusual, there was less consensus regarding what an online web application should cost per month. Was it $50? Or was it $2? There was and is no one right answer for all teams. Unlike the market 2 years ago, however, customers seem more certain today how about much web apps should cost. This certainty is being driven by relative giants, the Netflixes and Xbox Lives of the world, who seem to be settling on a base price between $5-10/mo.

Just as people browsing the App Store expect paid apps to be a few dollars [1], so too do customers now expect to pay a certain amount for consumer web applications.

Big companies are providing customers with price anchors which will increasingly impact customer perceptions of value. While individual web apps will always have unique aspects that enable variable pricing, I don't think the day is far off when a young entrepreneur starting a B2C web app will unthinkingly set his price at $8.95/mo because that's what everyone expects.

The trend, however, is worse still. Because large consumer internet brands--like the industrial widget manufacturers of old--can leverage similar mass production economics, the perceived "correct" cost of a web app is likely to decline over time. Netflix already benefits from a virtuous cycle of user adoption, which allows it to reap more profit by lowering prices. There will be some basement price at which Netflix will no longer want to lower their price, but given that it used to cost $14.99/mo to get worse service than I currently get for $7.95/mo, I suspect that price is lower still. [2]

For those of us in the far remote niches of the internet, I believe that companies like Netflix have an increasing ability to ruin the perceived value add of B2C products through increasingly lower prices. And here I thought the selection was the worst part of Netflix streaming.

[1] $4.03 for iPhones, and $4.37 for iPads, according to marketing firm Distimo.

[2] And perhaps more importantly, the predictability of revenue streams.

Increase Your Productivity by Getting Busier

This post was originally published on 12/22/2011.

At the beginning of 2011, my work schedule was light. I could stop work on the startup early without stressing out, I took longer lunch breaks, and I spent the evenings recreating. I watched a bunch of movies that had been on my list for years, I caught up on correspondences, and I thought about and wrote more blog posts. I went to sleep when I wanted, woke up when the sun rose and generally lived it up. From the outside, I was living the lifestyle business dream, if only temporarily, while other projects wrapped up.

I was, however, deeply unhappy. After the first week or two, I found that watching a lot of movies at once was kind of boring, that I could correspond with others much faster than they could reply, and that it didn't take long to write all the blog posts I had been planning. But much worse, I discovered that for me, being productive had a large impact on my happiness and I simply wasn't efficient when I wasn't busy. Without hard deadlines and time limits, coworkers and customers, it was always acceptable to dally and watch an episode of Community. Or stay up late reading Reddit. Or hit the snooze button more than once.

Just to be clear, I didn't have motivation problems at first. I found that the less I had to do, the less I had to worry about using my time efficiently, and this led to a rapid decline in productivity. The whole slowdown process took 2 weeks.

Starting in the summer, work started picking up again. Even though I was working more than full time, I realized I was accomplishing more on my personal projects than I had when a two hour lunch break was no problem and my days ended at 4PM.

In short, I've found that the right kind of productivity (as in, working on projects/work that matters to you personally) tends to increase as you get busier. There is a linear relationship between how much you have to get done in a day and how much work will get done on personal projects.

There's an old saying that goes "if you want to get a job done, give it a busy person." This isn't a new or revolutionary thought, but the inverse is new and revolutionary: "if you want to get a job done yourself, get busier." I can't speak for everyone, but I've definitely found this to be true.

Have others found this to be true? If so, have you found any hacks that increase productivity even more?

Why You Should Refuse to Build a Company on Content

As web business models go, content is well understood: you produce something of value and then monetize through ads, lead generation, or just charging for what you produce. I refuse to start a new business based on selling content and so should you. Here's why:

It Doesn't Pay

The web has produced an extreme abundance of content. It has simultaneously failed to fix micro-transactions. This has resulted in the expected value of any specific information falling to zero. There are isolated niches in which content is still worth money, but they are becoming fewer and father between [1]. As a test of this mindset: would you be reading this right now if I had asked you to pay me even $0.10 for the privilege?

The average piece of content is worth almost nothing. This means that most people in the US can't make a living wage producing content. If you are a good developer, for instance, your time is worth many times more producing code than it is producing content of almost any type.

Producing Content is Unpleasant Work

Some people have realized that content has become too expensive to have people keep producing it. These new content companies (like Demand Media) are highly profitable while traditional content producers (like newspapers) wither and die. Algorithms will be increasingly important in content creation, and they do it just well enough to invite a click and then frustrate you into (hopefully) clicking an ad. Sites like About.com and Mahalo flood search results with just-good-enough information at scale and it's hard to beat companies that wield hundred of millions of links.

With that as your competition, you are forced to create bad/mediocre content as quickly as possible. Producing content is therefore a race to the bottom in which you must compete with the lowest paid global workers to produce bad content as quickly as possible. I don't want to make anything that sucks, much less in large quantities.

There Aren't Any Interesting Problems

You could argue that monetizing content in a sustainable way is an interesting problem, but I would beg to differ. Creating ever-more complex link farms at scale isn't my idea of doing great work. And past that problem, producing content is essentially the same process as it was 500 years ago. I do not mean to imply that creating good content is easy, but the problem is well understood, labor intensive, and has reached a level of development where success is defined more by cutting input costs than by creating better outputs.

Piracy Exists

But just for the sake of argument, let's ignore everything above. If you have a real itch to write the next revolutionary book of jQuery tutorials, there's the issue of piracy. Despite misguided legislation attempting to curb the behavior, piracy is easier today than it was when I downloaded my first MP3 on Napster in 2001. If it's easy to take from you and all you have is takeable, you are in a position of extreme vulnerability.

Again, there are content businesses that make money, but you'll notice such businesses are almost always established B2B companies operating in specialized markets where the liability of piracy is higher than the cost of acquiring material.

This Situation Is Deplorable

I say all of this with the greatest sadness. If people can't make ends meet producing good content, the world is a poorer place. I won't really miss another review of the iPad 9, but I will miss proper journalism. I just finished reading the book 1491. It was both enthralling and breathtaking in the scope of research that went into it. But reading it was a guilty pleasure because I knew the author had to take a huge gamble to write the book, and his odds of making money on his investment were poor. If societies lose people that make it their business to seek truth and produce content, those societies become worse. Watergate was only exposed because 2 Washington Post journalists spent more than three years researching and seeking truth full time. I want to live in a world where people like that can feed their children.

At the same time, I realize I'm not prepared to devote 10 years fighting this issue, and so I refuse to start a company based upon content, and I think if you realistically evaluate the costs, you will too.

[1] I can imagine a number of niche B2B content business models in which you charge for access to highly specialized technical information that changes a great deal. Perversely, one such content business model is law, which doesn't produce any economic value, law merely re-allocating resources between parties.

It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass Mobile App

It would be hard to find a self-respecting geek and technologist who disagrees with the phrase "the future is mobile." All the coolest new gadgets are tablets and smartphones and all the biggest plays in content are on those devices. The market dominance of the biggest tech companies depends on how you use that device in your pocket or backpack.

So we get it. Mobile is hot. Mobile is irreplaceable. And most importantly, mobile is the future. But this mobile future takes software for granted.

At both Skritter and CodeCombat, we learned that because we built mobile versions of our apps for iOS. We found that there are so many apps, they have been devalued to the point of monetary irrelevance. That's sad because a good app is a piece of art. The user flows, the interface, the streamlined backend, all the pieces of a finely-tuned app take so much time and energy to perfect that I wanted to write a post to call attention to the level of software perfection that most people have acclimated to without even knowing it. Here are three reasons why it's insanely hard to make a kick-ass Mobile app:

System Constraints

You could say that Objective C is the problem, or put another way, the lack of >insert language< or >insert framework<. But the reason why developers are shackled to Objective C is to make sure processes finish in human time, and this is fundamentally a performance bottleneck in mobile hardware. Swift is a great step forward, but it's immature and for complex backend work, Objective C is still necessary. 

Skritter's iPhone app is great, but at core it is just an app to learn Chinese characters. Skritter doesn't pilot your car or allow you to edit movies or do any other mind blowingly complex task. But when it first launched, it wouldn't run on all but the n-1 generation of devices. When we tried to launch CodeCombat's tablet app, on the iPad 2 Air could run it at decent speeds. Why? Because older devices have limited memory, CPU cycles, and bandwidth, newer versions of iOS brick older devices, and news features are only available to developers on newer versions of iOS.

For a generation of coders accustomed to limitless managed memory, high-level programming abstractions, and thousands of deeply functional opensource libraries, mobile is a step back to the Byzantine world of Commodore 64s.

If you have built an app that doesn't choke on graphics and feels responsive, you have accomplished an incredible challenge and I tip my hat to you.

No Features

User-software interaction paradigms are changing and simplifying. Photoshop's submenus, window management, and setting screens afford it a level of feature depth I don't believe can be achieved in a mobile environment no matter how sophisticated and intuitive UI conventions become.

Put another way, there is a terminal threshold of feature depth to an app and this limits the scope and usefulness of any one app. That's not an intractable problem and the solution that has been embraced to date is app fragmentation. There are separate Skritter Chinese and Japanese apps for this exact reason. But consider the logical extreme of this design trend: if you were to make a fully-featured Photoshop app work on a mobile device, you would end up with several hundred micro-apps to do one thing very simply. Just download Instagram to see what I mean.

So, if you are attempting to make a kick-ass mobile app, you must make a lot of decisions that ultimately come down to "how little will my customers allow me to integrate into this thing?" Err on the side of simplicity and you might end up with a fart app. Go the other direction and you have a pile of unusable menus and sliders.

Extreme Polish

The app market is cruel; even moreso for the need to do a Hollywood launch. Because nobody has solved the discoverability problem in the app store, you need to launch big and magically figure out exactly what users want ahead of time. That last point is especially troublesome for people used to iteratively designing for the web. The road to app store success is littered with the corpses of apps that launched big but hadn't fine-tuned their interfaces, didn't have time to include that key feature users wanted, or just failed to make the app novel in some primal way.

Even the basic business sense of not overbuilding is turned on its head for mobile development. If you somehow manage to land that sweet TechCrunch article or New York Times acknowledgment, the app has to be perfect not just from an implementation point of view, but from a feature and context perspective as well. A perfectly implemented, compelling, novel app isn't enough; you have to know that your customers will agree about your choices.

There's always another app for whatever you are doing, and that makes customers more picky. The pressure to get it right the first time can be crushing.

So Get Insane and Start Building

I write all this not to discourage, but to uplift all those developers struggling with their mobile projects. It's tough to make something good, let alone make something good that also happens to make enough money to warrant the effort. For those out there building apps of consequence, I want this to read as a note of enouragement: stick to it and overcome the difficulties I've written about above. The mobile future is depending on you.