Author Archives: Ben Casnocha

Faith, Community, and Friendship

Posted inRelationships, Religion / Spirituality11 Comments on Faith, Community, and Friendship

Chris Yeh wrote a phenomenal post over the summer titled Faith, Community, Friendship, and Imperfection.

He opens by reminding readers of an idea the two of us have kicked around for years: forming a secular church. Then he shares two beliefs of his that may seem puzzling when juxtaposed: he is not religious, but many of the people he most admires are.

First he explains what emotional void Mr. Rogers filled for his viewers:

Mr. Rogers made a difference because he pursued intimacy with people; he made them feel safe enough to open up about their failings and fears. Whatever the issue in your life, he felt that you should speak openly about it. And once people did open up, he showered them with unconditional love.

He didn’t absolve them; while we crave absolution, we know ourselves too well for absolution to feel real. His genius was to convey a simple, yet powerful message. “You are struggling. You sometimes fail. But despite those things, I love you, and I am proud of you.”

He then goes on to cite Walter Kirn’s recent piece on Mormonism to get to a larger point about faith and friendship:

Perhaps one of the reasons friendship is so powerful is that it represents the kind of loving acceptance that we crave, yet often do not receive.

I can’t speak for women, but among men, one’s close friends provide the same kind of paradoxical support as Mr. Rogers and the Mormons. My friends know my various flaws, and are quick to point them out. Much of male bonding consists of busting one another’s asses with friendly insults and embarrassing stories. Yet underlying it all is a sense of acceptance and brotherhood. The unspoken message is simple: “You’re a fuckup, but I love you anyways. Let’s grab a beer and hang out. Just don’t sleep with my sister.”

When Robert Putnam wrote “Bowling Alone,” he argued that the decay in community institutions (such as bowling leagues) was isolating people and making them angrier and less empathetic. Yet while his concept of declining social capital is a powerful one, I always had problems with finding solutions to the challenge.

I don’t think we can turn back the clock to an age where people lived their entire lives in a small town, and attended Rotary Club meetings every week. Putnam thinks that the entry of women into the workplace contributed to these changes; I doubt many of us want to go back to 1950s chauvinism.

But when I consider “Bowling Alone” in the context of faith, community, and friendship, I think I start to see a different solution.

Ultimately, the institutions of the past were imperfect. I don’t belong to any fraternal institutions because I find them kind of weird and creepy. But we can’t let our desire to avoid imperfection keep us from building meaningful bonds.

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I think we all have a need to be known, really and truly, and then accepted for what we are. Call it love. Call it friendship. Whatever it its, we need it.

I think we all have a need for community–repeated, unplanned interactions with a group of people that accept us–even if the pieces fit together imperfectly.

I think that religious organizations like the Mormon Church, wittingly or unwittingly, have built a culture around meeting both of these needs. And in doing so, they provide great benefits to their adherents, regardless what’s in their theology.

If you are known, accepted, and loved by a community of people, no matter who those people are, I think you have something special that you should hang on to.

It’s a topic I think about constantly, and Chris captured it beautifully. I’m grateful to have him in my community of friends.

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One small nit with the well-circulated NYT piece on how it’s harder to form friends when older: I’m not convinced “unplanned interactions” is a litmus test for a good friendship, or even a necessary ingredient.

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Book Review: Startup Communities

Posted inBooks3 Comments on Book Review: Startup Communities

Want to make your city more of a hotbed for entrepreneurship? It’s the obsession of many entrepreneurs, mayors, and university professors. Finally there’s a book overflowing with practical, credible advice on how to do it — Brad Feld’s latest: Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City. In addition to myriad tactics and examples, Brad also presents a persuasive set of overarching principles that all good startup ecosystems have. It’s a must-read if you are involved in trying to stimulate entrepreneurship in your region in the U.S. or abroad.

For me, the best part of the book is having seen first hand how my good friend Brad walks the walk on the things he writes about in the book. He is the entrepreneur who leads the community in Boulder, CO and who has run or supported almost all of the community-building experiments. He speaks from direct experience.

As it happens, in October, 2008 — well before the national press flocked to the scene! — I wrote a long-ish piece about Boulder as a startup town. The gist of the piece is that rather than be a pale version of Silicon Valley, Boulder is self-confidently something different: a small, energetic startup ecosystem filled with people who love to live in Boulder for the outdoors and quality of life, and who also work in the tech industry. A comparison: A liberal arts college offers something valuable and unique in the higher ed marketplace. It shouldn’t try to compete with a large research university; rather, it should embrace its strengths while fully admitting it’s not for everyone. That’s Boulder.

The one shortcoming of Startup Communities is that there is comparatively little detail about how communities other than Boulder have fared in their efforts to become startup hubs. I’ve personally seen differing approaches in places like Santiago, Chile, Austin, Texas, and Zurich, Switzerland. More on comparing and contrasting approaches from regions around the world on this vital issue would be interesting. The good news is that I expect that’s a theme Brad will take up on the Startup Revolution companion web site. Congrats, Brad!

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Book Review: Why We Get Fat

Posted inBooks, Health / Fitness10 Comments on Book Review: Why We Get Fat

I found Gary Taubes’ Why We Get Fat to be provocative and persuasive. It challenged my long held assumption that the way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more. Taubes’ hypothetical exposes the oddity of the “eat less, exercise more” maxim:

Imagine you’re invited to a celebratory dinner. The chef’s talent is legendary, and the invitation says that this particular dinner is going to be a feast of monumental proportions. Bring your appetite, you’re told—come hungry. How would you do it? You might try to eat less over the course of the day—maybe even skip lunch, or breakfast and lunch. You might go to the gym for a particularly vigorous workout, or go for a longer run or swim than usual, to work up an appetite. You might even decide to walk to the dinner, rather than drive, for the same reason. Now let’s think about this for a moment. The instructions that we’re constantly being given to lose weight—eat less (decrease the calories we take in) and exercise more (increase the calories we expend)—are the very same things we’ll do if our purpose is to make ourselves hungry, to build up an appetite, to eat more. Now the existence of an obesity epidemic coincident with half a century of advice to eat less and exercise more begins to look less paradoxical.

I also liked this sentence:

To ‘explain’ obesity by overeating is as illuminating a statement as an ‘explanation’ of alcoholism by chronic overdrinking.

The thesis of the book is that what you eat determines weight loss. Namely, what kind and how many carbohydrates. Taubes advocates the Atkins diet — low carb, high protein, high fat. Taubes is a science journalist, not a researcher himself, so he positions himself as a syntheizer of the literature. Here’s his recent podcast interview with Russ Roberts on Econtalk. For a more skeptical take, here’s a blog post from Scientific American.

I reccomend Why We Get Fat to anyone interested in nutrition, diet, and health. Thanks to Saar Gur and Tod Sacerdoti for the recomendation.

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Also from the book: diet and disease:

Eat Western diets, get Western diseases—notably obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. This is one of the primary reasons why public-health experts believe that there are dietary and lifestyle causes for all these diseases, even cancer—that they’re not just the result of bad luck or bad genes.

To get a feel for the kind of modern evidence supporting this idea, consider breast cancer. In Japan, this disease is relatively rare, certainly not the scourge it is for American women. But when Japanese women emigrate to the United States, it takes only two generations for their descendants to experience the same breast-cancer rates as any other local ethnic group. This tells us that something about the American lifestyle or diet is causing breast cancer.

Colon cancer is ten times more common in rural Connecticut than in Nigeria. Alzheimer’s disease is far more common among Japanese Americans than among Japanese living in Japan; it’s twice as common among African Americans as among rural Africans. Pick a disease from the list of Western diseases, and a pair of locations—one urban, say, and one rural, or one Westernized and one not—compare people in the same age groups, and the disease will be more common in the urban and Westernized locations and less common outside them.

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Book Review: So Good They Can’t Ignore You

Posted inBooks, Careers3 Comments on Book Review: So Good They Can’t Ignore You

Cal Newport’s latest book launches today and is titled So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love. Having read most of the major career books in the field when writing The Start-up of You, I say with confidence that Cal’s is one of the best yet written. Here are the Four Rules of the book, in Cal’s voice:

  1. Rule #1: Don’t Follow Your Passion. Here I make my argument that “follow your passion” is bad advice. You’ve heard me talk about this on Study Hacks, but in this chapter, I lay out my full-throated, comprehensive, detailed argument against this common advice.
  2. Rule #2: Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You. Here I detail the philosophy that works better than following your passion. This philosophy, which I call career capital theory, says that you first build up rare and valuable skills and then use these skills as leverage to shape you career into something you love. During this chapter I spend time with a professional guitar player, television writer, and venture capitalist, among others, in my quest to understand how people get really good at what they do. You’ll also encounter a detailed discussion of deliberate practice and how to apply it in your working life.
  3. Rule #3: Turn Down a Promotion. Here I argue that control is one of the most important things you can bargain for with your rare and valuable skills. I discuss the difficulties people face in trying to move toward more autonomy in their working lives and describe strategies that can help you sidestep these pitfalls. During this chapter, I spend time with a hotshot database developer, an entrepreneurial medical resident, an Ivy League-trained organic farmer, and Derek Sivers, among others, in my attempts to decode control.
  4. Rule #4: Think Small, Act Big. In this final rule, I explore how people end up with career-defining missions — often a source of great passion. I argue that you need rare and valuable skills before you can identify a powerful mission. I then spend time with a star Harvard professor, a television host, and a Ruby on Rails guru, all in an effort to identify best practices for cultivating this trait.

Longtime readers may be familiar with links to Cal’s blog. For years, he’s been writing about the world of work with an unusual level of imagination. I relied heavily on his insight when working on The Start-Up of You. And over the past several years, he’s become a good friend and trusted ally to me on all fronts.

If you’re a thinking person who knows you can’t rely on easy (and wrong) answers about what will make your career go; if you’re instead ready to confront the necessity of deliberate practice and real skill development — then buy this outstanding book. If you order the book this week, you’re eligible to win one-on-one time with Cal.

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Getting Feedback: Diagnosis and Remedy Are Different Things

Posted inWriting2 Comments on Getting Feedback: Diagnosis and Remedy Are Different Things

In my article on lessons learned from publishing a book, I write about the process of getting feedback on the manuscript:

Here’s my big lesson on how to get helpful help. Remember when Reid asked his friends whether the manuscript was great? The value judgment great / not great is helpful to know whether you are finished. We thought we were close to finished, but in fact we were not. That was a helpful part of the feedback process.

But once we realized we had more work to do, hearing whether someone thought it was great or not great – whether they liked it or didn’t like it – was not useful. What’s helpful is how you actually make the text better regardless of whether they like the current version or not. As Tim Harford suggested to me, if you know you have work to do on the manuscript, just ask someone for one or two tips to make it better. Focus their mind exclusively on practical, actionable specific changes you can make to improve it.

Tucker Max emailed in with the following observation about gathering editorial feedback: “When people say that something is wrong, they are almost always right. When they tell you how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” Exactly the case in our experience, and an excellent point in general.

Being able to identify that something’s not working — be it in writing or in any other context — is separate from identifying how to actually fix it. Problem vs. solution. To offer a good solution, you have to understand the problem. But just because you understand the problem does not mean you have a good solution.

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