Author Archives: Ben Casnocha

People Don’t Want to Be Blamed for Giving Bad Advice

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Sometimes, when facing a hard decision in our career or in a relationship, we just want someone to tell us what to do. Or, if not tell us exactly what to do, at least to proactively assert ideas for what we may want to do.

But you’ll find that thoughtful advice-givers are sometimes reticent to proactively assert very much. Rather, they ask, “What do you want to do? What are you passionate about?” Then, once you express a preference, they figure out how they can help you realize your goal. Based on your existing inclinations, they’ll amplify what they see are the important things to keep in mind.

Why is this? One perhaps a non-obvious reason: People don’t want to be blamed if something goes wrong. If a person gets you thinking that the right move in life is to backpack around Asia for two months, or accept job XYZ, or go to grad school, and it doesn’t work out — you may (if unconsciously) blame them.

So if you ask for blue sky feedback — open ended advice on what you should do in your life  — be aware of risk aversion on the part of the advice giver, and perhaps make it easier for them by saying something like  “Don’t worry, I’m going to own this decision, be completely honest and throw out any idea that comes you.”

But, really, even with this qualifier, the open ended advice conversations like this only work if you know the other person really well and vice versa. In a majority of cases, proposing specific ideas and asking for specific reactions works best…

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David Cohen recently posted about asking for introductions, and encouraged people to not ask him blue sky questions like, “Know any good investors for our company” but rather to request introductions to specific people. When you request an intro to a specific person, David can…

explain to [the person he’s introducing you to] that YOU thought of HIM for a specific reason, and are requesting that I introduce you to him. In this case, I’m merely facilitating an introduction that you requested. Socially, it’s pretty much expected of me that I would do this, and doing it as a double-opt in literally has no “cost” in terms of social currency associated with it.

In other words, there’s less downside risk to David if the meeting goes poorly. You asked for it; he just facilitated. Had HE been the one to suggest meeting a certain person, and the meeting goes poorly, he takes some of the blame. He’d quite understandably rather you request and he enable, instead of dreaming up who would be the best person to meet. Same principle as I discussed above.

But, it can be helpful when someone proactively recommends meeting someone you didn’t previously know about it. I’m sure David does this for close allies. After all, you don’t know what you don’t know…and you don’t know who you don’t know!

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Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose

Posted inMovies9 Comments on Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose

So many smart friends had told me over the years that they liked the television series Friday Night Lights. “It’s about much more than football,” they told me. If memory serves, it was a Jonah Lehrer tweet about how the finale was the best 43 minutes of television he’d ever seen that pushed me over the edge (more specifically, pushed me to log onto www.netflix.com).

A few weeks ago I finished all five seasons of Friday Night Lights. I have not read the book nor watched the movie version. But the TV show was awesome.

The show worked for me on several levels. First, the marriage porn. The marriage between Coach Taylor and Tami Taylor has been praised by critics as one of the best ever on television. The marriage is perfect in part because it’s not a perfect marriage, but they manage to muddle through, and so to viewers their relationship dynamic seems at once amazing yet attainable. The husband-wife gender roles are also realistically complex. Sometimes it’s traditional, with a strong breadwinner man and loyal wife who raises the kid and follows him wherever his career takes him. But other times the roles reverse to a more modern dynamic, with the wife becoming principal at his high school and telling him (indeed, having the power to tell him) that she ain’t taking any of his crap. This interplay in gender roles approximates how many 20 and 30-something men and women today envision their 21st century marriage playing out; thus, how Coach Taylor and Tami Taylor work through their issues makes for fascinating viewing.

Second, the show let me enter a world I’m out of touch with: small town, middle to lower class America, by way of west Texas. The characters, their dilemmas, their evolution, their dialogue, their life choices — much of it was familiar enough for me to get emotionally invested, yet foreign enough where it felt like I was genuinely learning about a different part of America and the people who live there.

Third, the cinematography and music. When you watch the opening montage of small town Texas life with the Explosions in the Sky soundtrack playing in the background, it’s hard not to get a little reflective on What It All Means.

Fourth, Coach Taylor’s leadership — on the football field and off — was reliably inspiring. Tim Riggins says in one episode that Coach is a molder of men. You get fired up after his locker room pep talks. And in the way he keeps a steady voice and clear gaze when confronting one of his players, you want to emulate his style.

There are many TV shows people rave about that I have yet to see: Breaking Bad, The Wire, Lost, among many others. I’m holding off on committing to another show because many months of Friday Night Lights cancelled out time I would have spent watching movies. And while the character depth and emotional investment you build with a cast over five seasons cannot be rivaled by a two hour film, at the same time, the creative energy and money producers pour into a two hour film vastly exceeds that which goes into two hours of TV. A movie is a more intense experience. I find that a great movie (like Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close which I recently saw in Palm Springs) can hold my undivided attention for a full two hours — which is a rare treat in our always-on, always-connected culture.

In any case, here’s to Friday Night Lights. A show that I did not foresee would draw me in so deep, and a show I won’t soon forget. Clear eyes. Full hearts. Can’t lose.

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The Sweep of Nostalgia

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Joan Didion once advised you remain on nodding terms with your past. I returned to Chile last week to do just that.

All told, I’ve spent about 9.5 months in the long skinny country, mostly in Santiago, though I’ve been as far south as Patagonia and as far north as the Atacama desert — and most places in between. I was last there in August, 2010.

I returned to Chile for a visit because right now I’m prioritizing depth in my relationships with places and people. And also because I worry about the slow fade of memories, especially the fade of memories associated with important personal and professional experiences (such as beginning work on the book, which happened in Chile).

On my first day back in Santiago, the sweep of nostalgia was strong. Memories started coming back in bursts, like how a Polaroid photo takes shape with a few good shakes. There were things I hadn’t thought about for 15 months; the memories were in my brain somewhere, they just needed to be activated into present consciousness.

It’s funny the little things that you remember upon prompting. When I checked into my hotel in Santiago, I noticed the door handle was similar to that of my old apartment, and so was the lock and key. Door handles and locks are the same everywhere in Chile, but only in Chile. When browsing the shelves looking for a bottle of water, I had forgotten that supermarkets play American pop music hits from 10 years ago. When lying in a park listening to locals chat with each other, I had forgotten about the small idioms and slang that define Chilean Spanish, cachai? When ordering a lunch menú, I had forgotten that you should always order mashed potatoes as a side dish because while Chilean cuisine is on the whole forgettable, its mashed potatoes remain the best in the world.

Mashed potatoes may be a memory held by many, but so much of what I remembered during my trip was utterly personal. There is nothing special about a bench along Av. Andres Bello that looks out across the river to Cerro San Cristobal. Yet I once had an important stream of thoughts while sitting on that bench, so returning to it on a sunny morning while listening to “Catch Me” by Demi Lovato on my iPod was a blast.

When you call upon dormant memories, you change them in the process. You remember the most recent version of your memory + whatever present lens you’re using at the time of recall. In other words, how I changed since I left shaped how I remembered what I once experienced.

Some months ago, I watched saw the beautiful documentary Nostalgia for the Light. It’s about the astronomy done in the Atacama desert in the very north of Chile. Here’s the trailer. The Atacama desert is the driest in the world and the only place on earth with zero humidity year-round. Soon, 95% of the world’s astronomy will be done there. The film juxtaposes the work of scientists in the desert who look to the sky for answers, with old women just miles away who look to the ground for answers, searching for the bones of relatives assassinated by the Pinochet regime and buried in the desert. The film is about the connection between the past and the future, ground and sky. It’s also about memory.

In the film, director and narrator Patricio Guzman says, “Those who have a memory are able to live in the fragile present moment. Those who have none, don’t live anywhere.”

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The Upside of Taking a Chance

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Will Wilkinson has spent more time than most digging through happiness research in an analytical way. In his post announcing a major career move — he says he’s going to do less political punditry in order to get an MFA and start writing novels — he reflects:

I think the most important thing I took away from all that time with my nose in happiness research and behavioral econ is that we overestimate the value of what we already have and so underestimate the upside of taking a chance, leaving something behind, and making a big change. Most of us end up where we are through a sort of drift. Sometimes that works out splendidly. And drift hasn’t not worked out for me. I really like what I do. But, alas, I don’t really love it. I never wanted to be a pundit or a “public intellectual.” I always wanted to be an artist of some sort and I still want that. I want to make awesome shit people love. It’s my new motto: make awesome shit people love. So here we go!

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Sentence of the Day

Posted inStart-Up of You9 Comments on Sentence of the Day

The most highlighted sentence from the Kindle version of The Start-Up of You is:

The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be.

I did have a feeling that sentence was a winner when we wrote the book, but in the electronic age it’s interesting to be able to see data around it.

I should note that there is a rich-get-richer effect with highlights on the Kindle. Unless you turn it off, as a reader you begin to automatically see flags on the sentences that other readers have most underlined. This no doubt influences you to highlight the same.

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