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Links from Around the Web

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Quick thoughts and links:

  • There’s nothing like reading about a personal experience that supports an age-old aphorism like "Try one new thing every day." To me, tired wisdom such as "work hard" only resonates if there’s a compelling personal example under it. My friends Paul Berberian and Seth Levine both recently blogged about doing something for the first time. For Paul, it was flying his plane through clouds for the first time. For Seth, it was kick-boxing with his wife. Have you accumulated an interesting and new experience this week?

  • Hail casual attire! The official Neck Tie Association recently closed…after a particularly telling sign: members showed up to their annual meeting without wearing a tie.

  • Awesome list of questions any sales exec should ask him/herself about revenue projection numbers.

  • Megan McArdle on the ridiculous notion spread through European poltiical circles that American neo-cons got Ireland to vote down the Lisbon treaty:

    Canada and Europe, particularly, seem to be prone to the illusion that we spend all of our time thinking up ways to make them feel bad, when in truth we barely think about them at all. Probably we should, more. But it’s hard to imagine a situation in which our first thought would be: "Let’s make Irish voters reject the . . . what was the name of that treaty again?"

  • Felix Salmon with a wise line on what makes a person’s writing/thinking valuable, via Walt Mossberg rarely saying anything new but re-stating known ideas in interesting ways:

    This is a powerful idea, I think, and one which the best politicians understand intuitively: if you say something which everybody already knows, that doesn’t automatically make you boring.

  • Bill Flagg identifies two popular business models for internet companies: the profit model or the popularity model. Should a web company charge for their service (aka Match.com) or become really popular (aka YouTube) and generate profit via ads and sponsorship from that scale?

  • An interesting assessment of David Foster Wallace’s voice:

    Wallace has the vocabulary. He has the energy. He has the big ideas. He has the attitude. Yet too often he sounds like a hyperarticulate Tin Man. Maybe this is concentrated version of how we all sound lately. Data-dazed. Cybernetic. Overstimulated. Maybe this is the voice of the true now. Or maybe genius, like language, can’t do everything, and maybe the Wizard should give the guy a heart.

  • Tyler Cowen on how to overcome book fatigue: read books in a category you wouldn’t normally touch.

    The reality is this: the best popular book on geology, gardening, or basketball is very very good, whether or not you like or care about the topic. Try to find those books and read them.

  • A deliciously devastating take-down of Sex and the City movie in the New Yorker. One of the best movie reviews I’ve read.

On Earnestness

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"He’s nice, but he’s just too damn earnest. Where’s the edge?" a friend asked me in discussion of somebody else.

In an old post I asked which traits have a backstop — that is, for which personal characteristics is more of it always a good thing? For example, flexibility is a good character trait, but too much flexibility is bad. Persistence might be a trait that is valuable nonstop, but it’s hard to think of any others.

Earnestness, to me, definitely has a backstop. I value earnestness to a point. But I cannot spend large chunks of time with someone who won’t mix their style with irony, joking, or edginess in general. (I’m not exactly sure these social styles oppose earnestness — earnestness is hard to define.)

Say you had a shitty day. You come home and I innocently ask, "How was your day?" The earnest response would be, "Oh Ben, I had a really tough day. My car broke down. And I got in a disagreement with a co-worker. And worst of all, the supermarket was out of my favorite type of drink. It was, indeed, a tough day." The more amusing response would be, "How was my day? Oh, I had a super day Ben. Just super. First my piece-of-shit car broke down in the middle of the freeway, then my co-worker and I argued about some feature that was in the works, and finally the supermarket didn’t have my drink, which was icing on the cake."

Clearly, too much non-seriousness is hard to take. But in small doses, I find it endearing and funny. It’s a balance.

In general, in terms of the personalities I’m attracted to, I like people who can make fun of themselves, who can deliver good rants if the time calls for it, who know how and when to say "fuck," who aren’t afraid to say something that may not be politically correct, who aren’t entirely predictable, who try to get to the bottom of things (in other words, they rarely say "Whatever…"), who are open to changing their mind, who through it all have a big heart and sense of humor.

That’s my take. What’s yours, on earnestness?

Annoying “Gotcha!” Conversation Stoppers

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Things people say in arguments that annoy me:

"You can’t say that!" – Mr. Politically Correct. (A response: "I just fucking did. So respond.")

"Correlation does not equal causation!" – Mr. I Took Statistics 101. (A response: "True, but some correlation in the right way does show something.")

"In the end, you can’t judge someone else’s choices. You’re not in their shoes." – Mr. Relativist. (A response: "True you can’t judge 100% without 100% information, but don’t you think that some choices are better than other, some values better than others, some truths more sensible than others?")

"But here’s a counter-example!" – Mr. I-Think-One-Anecdote-to-the-Contrary-Disproves-a-General-Theory. (A response: "That’s the exception that proves the rule.")

Listening to Customers is Harder Than It Seems

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Maintaining a core value of "listening to our customers" is trendy among companies big and small. But it’s harder than it seems. Albert Wenger absolutely nails it in this post about why listening to customers is hard, hard, hard. Key excerpt below, bold font my own. I want to highlight point #2 — it is often the case that customers do not know what they want, or actually don’t want what they say they want.

First, which customers should you listen to? Is it the early adopters or should you try to identify what you believe to be “mainstream” customers? This turns out to be very hard to answer. If you don’t keep the early adopters at least somewhat happy you may never make it to the mainstream. Or it could be that there is no real mainstream for your product, so looking for it might make you neglect the early adopters you already have. Conversely, if you only cater to early adopters you might build something that fills their generally more advanced needs but is too complicated for the mainstream.

Second, how should you listen to customers? Is it what they are saying about the product/site/service or what they are doing? Here too are conflicting pieces of advice. On one hand is the theory that for every one customer complaining about a particular problem there is a silent group of 100 or more having the same problem but not bothering to complain. On the other is the view that verbal complaints and even more so feature requests tend to be what users “think” they want as opposed to what they actually want need (thanks to tweetip for pointing this out). The latter can only be learned, the theory goes, by observing their actual use. Often what customers say and what they do conflicts.

Third, how should you reconcile listening to your customers with your strategy? This is often the hardest part. You have a strategy that you believe in. It’s difficult enough to not outright ignore any customer feedback that’s not on strategy. After all, you don’t want to be a flag waving in the wind and shifting with every breeze. But how can you tell that apart from your customers telling you that your strategy is actually wrong? What if you are trying to solve too hard a problem, when the customers really need something much simpler?

On point #1, I think you have to develop for the early adopters and just accept that you will probably over-develop and need to modify the product for the mainstream. This is a frustrating cost but an unavoidable one since capturing the early adopters, winning their support, and leveraging their testimonial into mainstream accounts is critical. In my experience many mainstream customers fancy themselves early adopters and hence won’t discount the early adopter’s testimonial as much as they should (in the sense that a product working in an early adopter won’t necessarily work in a mainstream inasmuch as the needs and cultures are different) allowing the company to really leverage an early adopter’s success to potential clients who actually look and act different.

Attack on Every Pitch – AOEP

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A friend who works at a division 1 baseball program told me a lot of the staffers sign off emails with "AOEP" which stands for Attack on Every Pitch. It’s a pitcher’s mantra. It doesn’t mean the pitcher has to throw strikes every pitch — a pitcher can still attack a hitter’s weakness by throwing out of the zone. It simply means that each pitch should have a purpose.

This one is easily adapted to business / life. I like it. Attack on every pitch.