Monthly Archives: August 2009

When Exposing Yourself To New Interesting Things, Make It Closely Related To Your Core Skills

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Spend 80% of your time on your passions, improving your core skills. There are plenty of things you can find that simply meet the “interesting” criteria.

The argument that colleges expose you to things you wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to is not that compelling a value proposition because it is not very hard to find new things that are interesting.

You need to be selective about the 20% of your time you spend entertaining new ideas that are interesting but not related to your core passions and work. Ideally you’d like everything that’s interesting but not in your core circle to have the potential to become one of your core skills.

It becomes one of your core skills by being developing it enough to put you in the top 25% of people.

Personal Example:

Why do I watch so many TEDTalks then?

I want to reduce what I don’t know I don’t know and it gives me a lot of conceptual ammo to formulate new ideas and frameworks about the cutting edge.  And understanding the cutting edge is one of my core pursuits.

Should other people watch TEDTalks who don’t have a desire to be on the cutting edge? Yes, but they probably shouldn’t try to watch as many as I do. Their watching should be more targeted and focused on the talks closely related to their core interests.

I’ve developed very systematic approaches to information intake, capturing and digesting information and methods and tools for discerning what to spend time focusing on that I’ll be blogging more about.

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Crowdsourcing Pitfalls for Productive People

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On Thursday I attended Crowdsourcing for Social Good a great panel, with great attendees who I witnessed cook up some great things the mixer time surrounding the panel. Here I’ve written up one cautionary note about crowdsourcing for people who are engaged in their work, and a few notes from the evening.

I don’t think that for most high level people crowdsourced work is the highest leverage way for them to give back.

Crowdsourcing is undervaluing the importance of focus and in the importance of thinking about something for a long time to do anything innovative. Advising, consulting and mentoring I think are higher leverage uses of spare time. Productive, engaged workers shouldn’t consider spare time, spare processor cycles. Most people do mindnumbing work the whole day so it’s okay to tap their spare time for spare brain cycles. But people who are really engaged in their work need these little respites to recharge. Anyone who understands that the currency of productivity is energy will intuitively make the decision to use spare time to recharge but the majority of people ascribe to the theory that time is the currency of productivity and will underestimate the negative impact of using their spare time to crowdsource worthy projects.

Of course, I’m only warning a small minority not to spend their energy crowdsourcing and by and large I think crowdsourcing combined with social networks will do tremendously positive things for society moving forward.

So many people have spare cycles. But that’s because most people don’t have engaging work. It’s true that if productive people feel like they are really doing good it could have energizing effects by satisfying their need for meaning but finding meaning in microtasks even if it’s for good cause would be like spiritual junk food. What if we had billionaires who instead of becoming philanthropists, just decided to do some microtasks and it satisfied that desire or need to give back. A lot of philanthropy, for better not worse, is motivated by the emotional benefit of giving for the benefactor, but what if they could derive benefit much easier from microtasks, without the same positive effect on society?


A few more notes on crowdsourcing:

What kinds of things can outsourced successfully?

Work that can be systematized and isn’t mission critical and it’s simple to train someone to do.

There’s so much untapped labor potential in the developing world.

Crowdsourcing removes the friction of matching supply and demand in the labor market. Elance and Odesk make that a lot easier, they reduce friction. Lower and lower barriers and more fluidity is huge.

Crowdsourcing and the media is really exciting. Social news is the future

Game dynamics are important, so that people have a self-interest and can stroke ego and do well at the same time.

We have a billion more people coming into the labor market and due to unemployment many they turn to illegal enterprises. Train them to create their own companies, social entrepreneurship instead of relying on finite number of jobs in current job market. Plenty of good ideas worth working on.

Mechanical Turk — It has become more mainstream due to recent obsession with lean startups.

If edufire wants to test a new feature they use mechanical turk to have people to test out a page and run through features and say what works and what doesn’t. And all the permutations get tested because you have 1000 people testing it.

People love the creativity involved in critiquing edufire’s page because they get to think, and say things like, “wouldn’t it be cool if you used this tagline.”

How big is the market for crowdsourcing? There is a limit to how much knowledge can be broken into tiny bits and still be useful. Almost all innovation is dependent on synergistic design thinking. But certainly the crowdsourced market isn’t even close to being saturated.

Mechanical turk has 51,000 tasks.

ODesk has done 87 Million . 200,000 people

Elance 211 Million — 200,000 people

Crowdsourced, outsourced, opensourced often get conflated.

74% of U.S. citizens don’t volunteer.

If you have american volunteers do stuff for free because it’s embedded in social games that takes work away from refugees who could get paid to do crowdsourced work.

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A Remarkable Life Requires Exhibiting Courage and THEN Putting in Effort

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I started to write a comment on Cal Newport’s provocative post on whether a remarkable life requires courage or effort?…and while I tried to formulate my opinion on the matter while brushing my teeth enough thoughts broke through my conflicted un-opinionated state  to warrant the comment stand-alone status:

The process that I have seen work is:

1) Realize sticking with the status quo isn’t going to get you a life you want

2) Begin learning about alternative paths

3) Start entertaining thoughts about leaving and making a path for an exit in the near future

4) Meanwhile, experimenting with what you’re going to be really great at

5) Make the leap to leave the status quo not as soon as your famous but as soon you see that investing energy in the status quo gets you next to nothing and you have something that you think you might want to be great at.

The only way to know is to give yourself permission to focus hard. You jump when the value of focusing hard on something, even if you eventually abandon it, is more valuable than stalling in the status quo. You don’t jump when you don’t even know what to focus on, though even then maybe you should, because what are you gaining sticking around in the status quo? The only value I see is a subsidized jump due to money and credibility from society’s run of the mill institutions. So you’re just waiting until you have something worth making a bet on. Even if the bet doesn’t pan out you’ll learn how to play your hand better next time.

It seems like whenever you make that big bet someone comes by and hands you a 500 check-point chip that lets you buy back in at 500 for free even if you bust. Then after the next failure you get to buy back in at 1000. And eventually through combination of luck, timing and experiential muscle you win a hand. It doesn’t even have to be a big hand. And that gets it’s own kind of pass where you get access to the VIP room where only people who have won hands are allowed. This is where you meet your partners in crime, your mentors, who carry you on to the next big thing. And it starts with the courage to make the bet but requires committing hard focus to try and play the hand successfully.

To sum up my longwinded response above, I would basically say living a remarkable life requires courage in the beginning to try, and effort to make the remarkable life a reality.

The first thing you must do is muster the courage to dare to be different and be willing to dream. Then you must match the tiny bit of courage required just to entertain possibilities in your mind, with the little bit of effort required to test the possible paths that might lead to a remarkable life. Then once you find a dabbling interest that you’d like to dive deeper into you have to muster a lot more courage to ditch your current status quo driven path by the wayside, and give yourself the opportunity to put in the massive effort required to pull off being remarkable.

It’s a courage-effort escalation ladder.

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Force For the Future: Real World University

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“Visioning” From the Force For the Future Blog:

We believe the larger long term direction we’re heading towards is becoming the liaison for “Real World University”, the best learning environment of all, where passion, learning and work are all fluid and intimately related. Making an impact and creating value in the workplace is increasingly dependent on leadership, initiative, and working effectively with small teams of innovative people tackling big goals. Corporate America is not doing a good job of allowing creativity and innovation to flourish in the workplace and by and large the university system is doing no better, squandering the potential, ambition and talent of many motivated young people that the world desperately needs to make it through this pivotal period in our history. The pace of change continues to increase and now we finally have the power to create the world of equal opportunity, abundant wealth, endless creativity and boundless possibility that humanity has always desired, but we also face bigger existential threats than ever before, which are also accelerating exponentially.

We need more people working on the big problems of our day instead of opting for dispassionate pay-the-bills work or the allure of fast money from financial optimization. Our school system churns out highly dependent, disengaged citizens, in search of a paycheck instead of a purpose. Failing to realize that the only form of sustainable wealth creation is when your passion becomes your work.

There are simply not enough people working on the big problems of our era and our survival depends on unleashing the talent of the next generation of young leaders.

Force For the Future aims to create the learning institution of the 21st century. We won’t just tell people that they have to find their passion we will show them how. We will connect them with all the resources and people they need to go from a mindless sleepwalk through life to a passionate undertaking of the issues they care about and everything in between. We will assess exactly where a person is on the motivational scale and provide them with the resources to just take the next step. We believe the best way to have happier more fulfilled people who impact others on a large scale is to allow them to take ideas for a better world, refine them, prototype them and scale them. Investment in startup companies represent .02% of our GDP yet they represent 17.8% of our output, and yet over 75% do not succeed. That is a major force for good in the world.

We think too many people overestimate what they need to get started. They don’t three degrees and a lengthy resume before they can began working on realizing their visions for improving the world around them; they just need initiative, a little help and a little luck.

Our model basically boils down to really well connected unschooling with abundant resources. It’s based on the idea that you will contribute the most by putting your time and energy into the things you are really passionate about. And it aims to strike the optimal balance between being completely off on your own, where it’s easy to get lost and being part of a large system where you’re always told what to do.

The path Force For the Future is advocating isn’t anything new, in fact it is a well trodden road by most of the world’s successful people. The rules of success aren’t that hard, and there’s no need to reinvent them. We don’t need new rules we just need more people to use them to create their own success stories. Impact begins with a burning desire to accomplish something, followed by 100% faith that you will achieve it no matter what, leading to definite plans of actions about how to achieve it, and continued persistence through failed plans which give you the feedback to make a better plan until you find one that works. By pursuing this process you naturally gather other necessary ingredients along the way like co-founders, mentors, and funding.

Why do only a select few discover and utilize the basic rules of achievement while it is a fruitless struggle for others?

It’s a mix of personality type, hospitable formative environments, and seizing lucky opportunities when they present themselves.

But we want to open this incredibly fulfilling path to more people and show that a career driven by passion and impact is very possible. We believe that the role of the learning institutions in the 21st century is to enable everyone to invest a majority of their energy in their passions and improve the lives of other in the process.

To create this environment Force For the Future hardly needs to build anything new. We are just going to assemble all the information, resources, and opportunities already out there and make it easier for you to navigate the ecosystem like many successful people have done before.

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Ask Why Not What & Its Role In Resolving Uncertainty

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Most people only ask the “what” questions. What are you doing lately? What’s up? What did you do yesterday? What are you going to do this summer? What are you studying? It takes a rare breed of person to ask the “why” and “how” questions.

The “why” and “how” questions are much more interesting and elevated. But as a basic rule of thumb if someone only asks ‘what’ questions that’s probably the only kind of questions they can answer without reflecting for the first time.

Why are you focusing on what you are lately? You went surfing yesterday? How did you learn to surf? How did you finance your trip to Europe? Why are you studying physics? Reframing your go-to questions in conversation from “what’s” to “why’s” and “how’s” will make the conversation more insightful. I’m not sure if it will make you more likable, though. It will for the people who actually reflect on their actions and will be happy they finally have a chance to share.  But it probably doesn’t do any damage to ask someone who doesn’t reflect on their choices and actions, because they will either take it as a challenge and engage, or they will shrug their shoulders and the conversation will effortlessly move back to “what” like nothing happened. So in some sense it will be a selection mechanism for meeting other interesting people.

“What” also seems to be a question that is subconsciously egotistical. After the questioner receives an answer he has the feeling that he knows you and what you’re up to and can share it with other people. That person who was previously masked in uncertainty can now be put into a box and the lid can be sealed.

Personal Anecdote

When people at my high school asked where I was going to school and I told them I was taking a gap year, they immediately asked, “Oh where are you going?” While I will be traveling some during my year off it is not my focus. My focus is on number of entrepreneurial pursuits and learning from “Real World University”.

The path I’m taking is unconventional and the unexpectedness sometimes seemed to spark people out of rut that the only viable path the future held was AT LEAST 4 more years of boring school work before doing anything interesting. My response injected a tinge of uncertainty into their worldview, which slightly intrigued them, but only because it was a box they needed to fill. I felt most of the time these inquiries from my peers were insincere. They didn’t want to know how or why I’m doing what I’m doing, they just wanted to resolve their uncertainty. Most of the time I indulged and gave a watered down mundane answer, “startup stuff”. I saw the wheels turning in their head, “Oh technology, okay, I wouldn’t want to do that anyway *remain on course, nothing to see here*. And we both went on with our day.

But one time in English class I saw just how much tension is created when one of these boxes is left ajar. We were in breakout discussion groups and the conversation wondered to where we were all going to college and then it was my turn to share. And I thought these were people whose perspective I actually wanted to hear, but I knew I’d be interrupted due to time limitations of class and if I started telling them what I’m doing but didn’t finish, the box would be as good as closed and they wouldn’t ask me about it later. So I told them if they really wanted to know what I’m going to be doing, they could ask me about it outside of class. But they wanted me to tell them NOW. “Just tell us! Max, C’mon why are you being so difficult! It’s really not that hard.” They were laughing not yelling but in a very annoyed kind of way. Eventually they got so loud that the teacher asked what was going on and almost in unison said, “Max won’t tell us what he’s doing with his year off.” After they wouldn’t accept my offer to talk about it after class I had been speaking in abstract provocative platitudes to mess with them. “I’m leapfrogging 6 years of life” “I’m proving competency not signaling it” etc etc.

The uncertainty was pulling at their heart strings. I kept offerring to tell them more outside of class but they didn’t actually want to know, they just wanted to close the box.

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Upward Market Pressure on Creativity

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I recently followed a link to this article on Wired profiling the first scientific discovery made by a machine with no human intervention.

This doesn’t signal the end of the role human scientists. Instead it puts increasing upward pressure on scientists developing their creative faculties. And this trend is not prevalent just in science. Everything that can be automated will be. Automation squeezes all jobs out of the marketplace except the ones that require creativity. On the flip side, these automated tools also enhance human creativity for those who choose to embrace it.

If robotic scientists made their way into other labs, their human counterparts would not be out of a job anytime soon. If anything, they may find their work more exciting.

“There may be teams of humans and machines,” says King. “Robots will be doing more and more of actual experimental work and simple cycles of hypothesis generation. Humans would migrate to more strategic and creative positions. How can we waste trained post-docs by making them pipette things in labs? It’s crazy.

The run of the mill engineering student who can solve known problems is no longer safe. It is a necessity both for the innovative progress of the world and the scientist’s ability to find work that he be able to break new ground, not just incrementally improve on existing innovations.

At a panel at Singularity University I attended in early August, Scott Hassan of Willow Garage, who worked closely with Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford, told the story of how they built the first prototype of Google. He recounted how they coded every evening for about 6 weeks. Only 6 weeks. And now they have thousands of engineers just working on improving that small piece of code they churned out in 6 weeks. “What we have found is that it’s very easy to find someone who can improve something just a little bit, but it’s very rare to find someone who can create even just a prototype of something completely new.”

Recommended Reading: Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind. Richard Florida’s The Rise of The Creative Class (which admittedly I haven’t read yet but it’s on my list. But I have heard Florida’s thesis expressed many times.)

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A Story From My Childhood & Lessons on Intrinsic Motivation

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A story from my childhood on the importance of intrinsic motivation for learning.  On Sunday we had a family party at my house and invited many of the people who were important during the early years of my family. The occasion was a mix of both my parents 25th anniversary and my twin sister and me graduating high school.

I told many people about my decision to delay college and take a gap year. I began hearing many stories from my childhood about how I have always been a self-directed kid.

My mom recounted that when I was about 4 or 5 my memory of baseball statistics was phenomenal. Every morning I pulled open the front door, grabbed the newspaper off the front steps and poured over the sporting green. One time while driving with my mom in San Francisco I saw a street sign for Oak st. I said,” look mom Oakland!” At first she had no idea what I was talking about because we were in the heart of the city and oakland wasn’t the least bit visible, but then she realized that I had seen Oak St. and OAK was the symbol for Oakland in the baseball standings. I think I learned to read well in large part due to my regular morning excursions through the sporting green. I learned to love numbers and collect baseball cards. I then got a board game called Extra Bases and I memorized a good portion of the questions. My knowledge of athlete’s statistics and players names was then furthered when I first got a playstation. Steven Johnson discusses value of video games on kids cognitive development in Everything Bad Is Good For You.

My family didn’t pay for cable so my uncle wondered how I knew so much without even having ESPN?!. But the larger lesson here is if I was told I had to memorize all those statistics and player’s names I probably would have hated it. But it was easy immerse myself and remember far more information than any 5 year old should be able to because I loved it. The desire has to come from within and there has be a use for it, either in pleasure, impressing your friends or something you actually want to do with your knowledge in the near future.

Most introductory science and business classes require remember large amounts information and I find it incredibly dull and none gave me the purpose I needed to really commit. When I read laymen’s books about science and the nature of the universe I was much more engaged and my imagination went wild. But I found the dry equations in class uninspiring and while the fundamentals need to be learned the payoff for their mastery was so far away that I a lot of timing and motivation needs to come together for the learning of fundamentals to really make sense. I believe it’s way more important to first have inspiration and activities you care about before engaging on the long and seemingly endless slog of of building enough scientific chops to do anything of importance.

I was thrown into topics before I was ready. Not intellectually unready, I could have done it if I wanted to, and maybe I did want to at the beginning of the semester, but by the middle, I had much more engaging and intellectually fulfilling interests like learning how to build a company where I could make an impact immediately.

I still haven’t figured out how to combine entrepreneurial learning methods with science to make it engaging and energizing at every step of the way and in a way that pushes engineers to break ground on entirely new problems not just incrementally improve old solutions. Although I haven’t figured out exactly the process groundbreaking engineers go through I know intrinsic motivation, purpose and timing are critical pieces of the puzzle.

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Richard Branson Reflects on His Success

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Desmond Tutu: If a young man says to you, sir Richard, if I want to be successful what must I do?

Branson: You must realize that money is not the definition of success, you want to get involved with whatever interests you in life and try to do it the best you can, it may be that money will be a byproduct of that and you’ll be able to put that money to good use. Achieving things you can be proud of and making a real difference.

DT: You’ve been very successful, what would have happen had you not succeeded.

Branson: Honestly, as long as I tried hard to succeed…I’m not the sort of person who feared failure.

There’s a thin diving line between success and failure. And I feel fear like anybody else. I’ve been picked out of the sea 6 times by helicopters. And on the laws of average I shouldn’t be alive today.

I think there’s not much a difference between an adventurer and an entrepreneur. You’re trying to achieve things that have never been achieved before, you’re trying to do it better than it’s ever been done before and you’re trying to protect against the downside. And the downside for an adventurer is obviously your life.

One could easily psychoanalyze me and say this is incredibly stupid and this incredibly irresponsible, and of course it is. But equally, if you stand back in life, you think would I rather be doing things or sitting in front of a television watching other people do things…

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Longer Incubation Periods

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On Thursday Morning, I was fortunate enough to sit down with Alan Webber over an early morning coffee, who founded Fast Company over a decade ago.

We were talking about some of the skills young people should have in order to launch successful ventures.

Alan noted that while someone is trying to get a startup going there are often two competing needs: The need to make enough to pay the bills and the need to invest a lot of hours to get an idea off the ground. In order to circumvent these challenge he suggested that people learn how to quickly make money on the side, like doing social media consulting on the side for older people who don’t understand for $50 an hour. In launch Fast Company he and his co founder launched a side business called Fast Company Knowledge Exchange or FCKE to finance their work getting their business going.

While I agree that is a very good skill and may be something Force For the Future needs to develop, it’s not the best solution if we want to maximize for impact. Let me draw an analogy from nature. Humans have the biggest brains of any creature that has walked the earth. We also have one of the longest maturation periods of any animal. The more space in the formative years you give an organism to develop the greater it’s potential. That’s what society should be doing, providing longer intellectual incubation periods for its young people. Universities occupy the space where this is supposed to happen yet most young people are at school just because it feels like what they are supposed to do. And they get out of school take an average job, get used to the money and sacrifice their dreams.

The best time to do a startup is in that period of 18-23. You’ve got the least to lose, are capable of functioning autonomously in the adult world and succeed or fail, it’s an amazing learning experience that will push you into a world of possibility, with plenty of interesting opportunities for your next job/venture whatever it may be.

Here I’ll let Seth Berger, who founded And1 while he was in college, do the rest of the talking for me again (besides you probably didn’t read my other posts anyway), because I’m tired of seeing college students go down the corporate route, flush their dreams down the toilet and never leave because double quilted TP is too nice a luxury to sacrifice.

Q: As a successful entrepreneur, what advice do you have for students who are interested in starting a business?

Berger:  Start a business before you go get a job. Here is the reason. If you go get a job, you are going to succeed…. If you come out and work, what are you going to make? 50K to start? You tell me.

So let’s say you are 21 and you get out of school making $60,000. You do real well and three years later they say, “I am going to send you back to grad school. I am going to pay for you. Then, come back to work. When you come back you are making $175,000.” Five years after that, you are going to be making a half million bucks. You are going to have a husband or a wife, two kids, nice car, summer home, country club. At what point are you going to say, “I am going to go start my own company.”? The answer is never.

What you will do is work until you have made enough money, somewhere in your 50s, to go do something you really want to do, instead of now, when you are broke…. When I got out of graduate school and I drove a Honda Civic Hatchback. I was broke. I didn’t care. It just didn’t matter. But once you get used to the good life, you won’t go back. So if you are thinking about starting a business, start the day you graduate. You don’t need experience. You don’t need money. You don’t need someone else to tell you that you can do it. Just go start it before you get used to making all that money.


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If You’re Successful Once, Please Don’t Check Out

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Most people are going to disagree with me here, but I find it sad that Seth Berger checked out after finishing with AND1.  I think having kids was the culprit for the decrease in desire, and this case isn’t the exception.

“Knowledge@Wharton: Clearly you have experienced a lot of success in a very competitive industry. If you were to start another company today, what would it be?

Berger:  [laughs]. I don’t know. I really don’t think I would do that actually. We sold the business in 2005. I’ve got three young kids. I have been coaching high school basketball. I’ve had three or four opportunities to do really cool things; each time I have decided that the time with my kids and the time that I am spending with the kids from my high school, because I coach them six months during the year, are more valuable than starting another business.”

Someone with that kind of innovative spirit and proven ability to make things happen needs to be in the business of making things happen for a lifetime, with a few long vacations interspersed between projects.  What caused him to check out was having kids. I’ve heard having kids triggers some biological mechanism to slow down and stop thinking big. I would urge successful people to be weary of having kids. I honestly don’t know if you can both raise a family and make something big happen. If decide to you, you must be ready to model other people who have made it work. Especially if you consider the fact that if they don’t continue to try to make a difference in the world we might not have a world where any humans can have kids soon because we won’t exist. Wozniak checked out too.

Do you consider yourself an entrepreneur?
Not now. I’m not trying to do that because I wouldn’t put 20 hours a day into anything. And I wouldn’t go back to the engineering. The way I did it, every job was A+. I worked with such concentration and focus and I had hundreds of obscure engineering or programming things in my head. I was just real exceptional in that way. It was so intense you could not do that for very long—only when you’re young. I’m on the board of a couple of companies that you could say are start-ups, so I certainly support it, but I don’t live it. The older I get the more I like to take it easy.

It all comes down to mindset. If you don’t want to do it anymore you won’t. And maybe Energy Management, if you feel you don’t have any gas in the tank anymore. But if you had once, you can do it again, the human body was made to recharge. Just get in shape, maintain a circle of friends and get back in touch with your purpose. The ones who die early are those who retire and check out. Those who live longest stay engaged.

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