Quote of the Day on the Media

Posted inCurrent Affairs, Quotes2 Comments on Quote of the Day on the Media

From Alexander Solzhenitsyn‘s scandalous commencement address at Harvard in 1978, on the press/media:

Because instant and credible information has to be given, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be rectified, they will stay on in the readers’ memory. How many hasty, immature, superficial and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters, pertaining to one’s nation’s defense, publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: "everyone is entitled to know everything." But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information.

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press. It stops at sensational formulas.

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Assorted Links from Around the Web

Posted inRandom4 Comments on Assorted Links from Around the Web

1. James Surowiecki reviews Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. It’s terrific in its even-handedness and layman’s language.

2. Ask the Harvard MBA. Chris Yeh’s new Q&A site – ask him anything. In a recent answer he notes how men can be picky when filtering through woman:

Of course, the crowning example might be the friend whose criteria for a woman were: “Regular user of Twitter and del.icio.us. Must subscribe to the Atlantic Monthly.”

Now, who in the world would ever hold criteria such as these?!

3. Billionaires trying to fix the school system. A NYT Magazine piece which asks, “If I’m super rich and want to help education in America, what should I do?” An interesting conversation…

4. Podcast interview with me. I did about a 30 minute podcast interview (MP3) with life coach Christine Hassler. We cover a bunch of career/life issues. Skip the first five minutes.

5. Aguanomics. A blog called Aguanomics is an excellent take on water economics issues. Here’s his recent post on how farmers are trying to dodge water cuts even though they pay less to begin with. Farm policy in America is so fucked up.

6. How to make yourself look good and others look bad. In other words, things not to say in a meeting, courtesy of always-stimulating Gretchen Rubin. My favorites (and yes – it all depends on context and tone):

“You might be right.” You seem open-minded while simultaneously undermining someone else’s authority and credibility.
“I think what Pat is trying to say is…” You show that you’re a good listener and give credit to others, while demonstrating that you can take Pat’s simple thought further than Pat could.
“I can see why you might think that.” Variant: “I used to think that, too.” You sound sympathetic, while indicating that you’ve moved far ahead in understanding.

7. Marty Nemko on You U. How Marty acquired professional-level skills in career counseling, rose breeding, screenplay writing, and strong amateur-level skills as an actor and play director without ever having taken a course in any of the above. Hint: his answer is only one paragraph long.

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You Have to Make People Give a Shit

Posted inWriting9 Comments on You Have to Make People Give a Shit

One way blogging makes you a better writer is it forces you to work hard for your readers’ attention. On the web, it takes less than a second to close the page or click a new link. Your readers are busy and distracted.

This means you must engage the reader out of the gate and take nothing for granted. If you start sucking in the second paragraph, you’ll likely lose the reader’s attention.

Contrast this to school. In a writing class I’m taking this semester, everybody writes essays and turns them in to the class to be workshopped. Our homework is to read each others’ essays. As a writer, you know your classmates and professor are going to read your writing — no matter what. It’s their job. In a recent workshop, I was thinking to myself, “This is good for what it is, but I would never read this in my free time.” I’m sure professors across other disciplines, like History or Philosophy, think this all the time. School, then, might breed a bad habit for aspiring writers and thinkers: the illusion that people will always read your entire essay just because it’s you.

The so-called real world is super competitive. Nobody will read your stuff (well, other than your mom) just because it’s you. The real-world reality is: No one cares what you think. It’s up to you make people give a shit.

The blogosphere, with its tens of millions of competing blogs just a link a way, captures this brutal “life” reality perfectly. Nobody cares what you did yesterday. Nobody is reading your archives. Nobody is reading your bio. Show me something today.

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Six Habits of Highly Effective Mentees

Posted inBusiness18 Comments on Six Habits of Highly Effective Mentees

There’s no shortage of people hailing the benefits of mentors. There’s also ample advice on how to find mentors. Few talk about what to do once you’ve made contact with someone who wants to help you. You sit down to lunch with a potential mentor. What do you say? How do you act? How frequently do you follow up, especially if the person is busy and important?

I know many professionals who would like to be mentors but are not, mainly because once they start interacting with a potential mentee they find it’s not nearly as fulfilling as they imagined. I place the blame in many cases on the mentee and how s/he approaches those early interactions. Smart mentees realize that successful mentoring relationships don’t necessarily happen automatically; rather, they’re the result of genuine engagement and sustained effort.

Drawing upon my own experience and that of others, here are six habits of highly effective mentees.

1. It’s all about the questions you ask.

Here’s an example of a bad question: "What career should I go into?" Expect a worthless blue sky answer, or something that corresponds closely to what he does.

Here’s a better question: “I’m deciding between these two jobs, which each offer these benefits and these drawbacks. What do you think? Which factors should I consider most highly – salary, geography, etc?”

In other words, present options and then get help on how to think about the options.

Here’s a common question mentees ask that I think is problematic: “What would you do if you were me / you were in my shoes?” This is ambiguous. This either means, “What would you do in this situation?” which is asking what the mentor herself would do after considering her own situation, which is not what you really want. Or, it means, “If you were me, you had all the same strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats as me, what would you do?” It’s unlikely the mentor (or anyone) knows you well enough to have a 360 degree perspective. So the question fails with either interpretation.

2. Have strong beliefs, weakly held.

This is maybe the hardest habit: How do you at once demonstrate greenness, a blank slate, and open-mindedness (ie, a genuine interest in hearing an advisor’s ideas and potentially incorporating them into your own life) while also showing potential through your existing ideas and convictions? In other words, mentors want to mentor someone they can influence, but they only want to influence people they think can be successful, and people bound for success tend to have beliefs about the world. Asking a million questions but putting forth no ideas of your own, or simply nodding hungrily at anything and everything the mentor says, puts you too far in the "green" direction. By the same token, acting like you’ve figured out the world is just as much a turn-off — who wants to help someone who thinks he doesn’t need help?

So how do you walk the line between these two extremes? Try articulating your existing stance to your mentor in an expository fashion: here is what I feel, here is why, here is my level of certainty.

3. Have a long term perspective.

Mentoring relationships are like any friendship or romance — it takes time. Lots of time. Years of time. If things are going well, don’t try to cover every topic on your mind in one meeting. Meander. Dive deep. Have a memorable conversation about just a couple things. Don’t bring a "pump-and-dump" attitude to the relationship.

4. Be open to topics not on your short-term agenda.

Say you’re trying to start a business and you meet with a start-up expert. You want to pick her brain about successful start-ups. One problem: everyone wants to ask this gal about start-ups. She’s bored of doling out the same advice. So spend some time probing her on off-the-beaten path topics. Religion? Politics? Wander on the path less trekked upon.

For example, if you’re young, everyone is going to want to give you advice about colleges and higher ed. Be open to hearing it.

In the long term, you’ll have plenty of time to cover the topic that made you interested in her in the first place.

5. Follow up by showing interest in them (at least four times a year).

To form a long term relationship you need to stay in touch. But what does "stay in touch mean"? A meeting a year? An email every month? Phone calls? It all depends on the situation.

Nothing beats an in-person interaction. So aim for those, but it can be hard to see busy people. At the least, email him four times a year.

Remember, in your communications, show interest in his life, and he’ll reciprocate and show interest in your life. Send a relevant article, or comment on a move his company recently made. Set a Google News Alert on his name.

If the mentor reads blogs, maintaining a blog is one of the best ways to stay in touch. Because it is "opt-in" — people choose to read blogs — you can get away with more frequent communications. If you email someone, he feels an obligation to read and respond. If you write a blog post, you’ve created no such obligation, and he still will probably read it in his RSS reader.

Try to be creative in your communications both in format (try postcards!) and timing (never send an update during the holiday season).

6. Don’t make the mentor do the work.

It’s not up to the mentor to figure out how to mentor you. It’s up to you to figure out what you need help on.

Need an introduction to someone? Need to figure out which of three options is best? Have a life/personal question that would be great over a cup of coffee? Take the initiative.

—

What should be added to this list?

For more on this check out my book My Start-Up Life. Thanks to Chris Yeh, Ramit Sethi, and Cal Newport for giving feedback on this post.

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My Day in Airline Hell Last Week

Posted inTravel8 Comments on My Day in Airline Hell Last Week

Last week was one of the worst in US air travel history with over 100,000 passengers affected by the cancellation of over 3,000 American Airlines flights, various airline bankruptcies, and tornadoes in the midwest. This post has the story of my own travel hell last week, followed by a handful of links to interesting articles and posts on air travel.

On Thursday, I attempted to fly from Kearney, Nebraska, where I gave a speech, to Ontario, California, which is 15 minutes away from Claremont, on Great Lakes Airlines which serves a bunch of small towns in the midwest by flying from the small town (like Kearney) to Denver airport, a United and Frontier Airlines hub.

I was on a 7am flight out of Kearney to Denver. It started with the airport. One-gate, small airports present unique challenges. Thanks to the new TSA regulations which don’t allow you to bring water through the security checkpoint, most of us water-guzzlers-to-the-point-of-being-almost-diabetic have to buy new water bottles after security. Really small airports, however, don’t usually have stores after security. Nor bathrooms. Nor food. So you better pray to Jesus that you take off soon after clearing security, or else you’ll be waiting with a parched throat and bloated gladder.

After clearing security, we waited to board. 15 minutes later the gate agent comes over and tells us that poor weather in Denver means we’re not taking off. The agent makes it clear that if we choose to leave secure area and reenter the more spacious lobby where there’s a vending machine of drinks and many-year-old bags of chips, we will (emphasis his) have to go through security again.Greatlakes22 (photo credit)

I leave the secure area, buy water, start reading. Our delay is indefinite, we are given no ETD. One guy decides he’s had enough already (it’s only 7:30 AM!), and rents a car to drive to Denver Airport, five hours away by car. Most of us laugh at him. He looks at us, rental car keys in hand. He says nothing. His eyes say: you sorry looking sons-of-bitches. He leaves. Naturally, he turned out to be the smart one.

Weather delays are not uncommon. From Kearney you can only fly to Denver (one hour flight) on a small, regional jet that has propellers. Smaller jets require good weather to land safely. The midwest has some sketchy weather. Hence, small jets often get hosed by weather that doesn’t affect large planes.

About an hour and a half later the agent announces that Denver weather has improved and we’ll be taking off. Ha, I say to myself, we’ll beat the rental car guy by at least four hours. We go back through security checkpoint. Then the agent announces that we must wait for the plane to be fueled. Then they open the terminal door and let us loose. To board, you must fast-walk across on the tarmac, climb the stairs, and crouch into the plane. The rain was really coming down, and the stairs into the plane were rickety, so the gate agent advised us, "One at a time." When I ran across the tarmac, braving Mother Nature, I felt like Hillary Clinton running across the tarmac in Bosnia.

An hour later, in the air, we approached Denver airport. And approached. And approached. 20 minutes after the pilot announced an imminent landing, I turned to the guy sitting behind me. "We’re not, ahem, circling are we?" I didn’t want to hear the answer. I knew what we were doing. It made me sick. We circled for a full hour. Pilot comes on: "Guys, weather has deteriorated, we’re going to Pueblo." Huh? Pueblo? The flight attendant comes by each of our seats and explains we’re going to land in Pueblo, Colorado, re-fuel, and then try Denver again. We land in Pueblo 20 minutes later. We sit on the runway for 30 minutes. We don’t de-plane because we want to be prepared to take off again for Denver the moment conditions improve.

People are getting anxious. It’s stuffy. The lavatory is almost full, the flight attendant announces, and Pubelo airport (where we were) doesn’t have the capability to "service it." Someone says, "Let us off!" I yell out, "Is there a restaurant in there?" The attendant consults with the pilot and they decide to let passengers off but not our checked luggage.

I suppose we fared better than the more famous incidents of people spending more than nine hours in the plane on a runway. Every time I read these stories it always amazes me that the passengers don’t punch out the flight attendant and barge open the door. I mean, nine hours on a runway – are you fucking kidding me?

We wait around the Pueblo airport hoping for a good word on Denver weather. I do two sets of 20 push-ups. I must admit, in my ceaseless quest for the silver lining in shitty situations, the camaraderie that emerges among fellow stranded passengers is always good fun. Taking turns sharing our stories. Trying to one-up each other in the horrible, horrible consequences of our delays. Calling our loved ones after we hear the latest update, "No, honey, I’m in Pueblo. Yes, it’s been four hours. No, I haven’t left yet. No, I’m not joking." Common goals bring together uncommon people.

Yes! Better Denver weather! We have to go back through TSA security. The agent puts every other person through extra screening, which is ridiculous. She’s acting as if she hasn’t had anything to do for at least 24 hours. Half the group, from another re-directed plane, gets back on their plane. About to take off. They don’t move. The other half of us sit in the post-security lounge – no water, no bathroom, no food – and watch the idle plane. They don’t move. 20 minutes. 30 minutes. 40 minutes. Finally, they deplane again. They’re pissed.

The agent announces that it’s not Denver weather, now, but Pueblo weather. High winds. Can’t take off. "Christ," I say, "Who wants to rent a car?" Enough with air travel. I’m too young to rent a car, so I needed to find a willing co-conspirator. People swarm the Hertz desk. I’m third in line. Hertz runs out of cars after the second person in line. Shit. We partner up. We fight with the flight agents to get our luggage off the plane. We fight. We fight. Get the luggage. We start the 3 hour drive to Denver airport. (Several people decided to stay in Pueblo and wait it out.)

In the car, I call United and move my flight back to the 6:00 PM flight to ONT (originally I was on the 9:30 AM). My fellow passengers race to the airport and drop me off curbside. I arrive at DEN at 5:20 PM. I raced through security and made the flight, which was delayed but full (lesson: call the airline and get on a later flight if you’re flight is delayed, even if you’re in an airport because desk counters can have long lines).

I arrive at Ontario some 14 hours later than expected. As we taxi on the Ontario airport, the cabin is basically quiet. Then a guy two rows back says in a loud, thuggish voice, These seats are so uncomfortable. Everyone kind of ignores him awkwardly. He says to no one in particular, Seriously – this is like sitting on bleachers. I felt like turning back and telling him to quit his bitchin’, that I had been up for 19 hours trying to move a mere 1,200 miles. I said nothing. It was 70 degrees at night in Southern California. And my throat was parched.

Here are some interesting links on flying:

  • James Fallows has an interesting article in the latest Atlantic about air-taxis. This might be the future for short haul flights if firms like DayJet figure out a business model that makes it affordable for the masses. I hope they expand to California next — there’s a huge opportunity to compete with United Express on all the puddle jumper flights throughout the big state.
  • The Economist has launched a new travel blog called Gulliver.
  • Patrick Smith on why, despite all the problems with airline travel today, we should still be grateful. US commercial aviation is the safest modest of transport in the world; prices are cheaper than they were 20 years ago; route maps are as dense as they’ve ever been.
  • Jeff Jarvis asks, "What if a plane flight were networked and became a social experience with its own economy?" He then proposes The Social Flight.
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