Today, it’s Panera, and this one’s a long time coming.

Dear Panera Marketing,

First off, congratulations. You have clearly done the research to understand your customers’ needs. Your ideal customers are:

• in a hurry
• craving the convenience of fast food, but too college-educated, guilty, and socioeconomically advantaged to let themselves have it
• happy to drop a few extra dollars for a sandwich with the word “Asiago” in the name

In short, they’re me. Above-average-income professionals who are sensitive to time above all, then quality, then price.

The highlights of my 5-minute customer experience today:

• 2 minutes to get through 8 people in line ahead of me.
• 3 minutes to get my sandwich, which doesn’t taste like ‘fast food.’
• During this time, one customer was greeted by a store employee by name. “Hey Laura!” just like they were friends. No sense of social awkwardness. A real conversation ensued.
• For customers waiting in line, free samples of seemingly gourmet cookie pieces, just like at my other favorite food chain, Whole Foods. Doesn’t matter that $2 for a cookie is pocket change for your ideal customer, free is just so delightful.

Last week, I squatted in your spacious outlet at 4th and King in San Francisco for a full 4 hours, using your reliable, free wifi and nursing a $1.50 tea that a business acquaintance had bought me. I forgot my wallet at home that day, but was never made to feel uncomfortable and was offered varying free samples of pastries and food a total of 4 times by friendly, smiling female staff members. I accepted every offer.

Every local cafe within 1 mile of your store should be quivering. Despite my strong locavore values, I’m starting to choose you over the local, organic competition. It’s just so convenient! And we humans are just so lazy.

It was my dream cafeteria. Comfortable, private bench seating, no crowds, middle-of-the-road food.

Why am I writing this to you, dear marketing team, and not to the management at your 4th and King branch? Because I know that each facet of my experience has been carefully researched, crafted, and optimized so that (relatively) rich, lifestyle-oriented customers like me will choose you over Whole Foods, Starbucks, Subway, Peet’s, and our local cafe.

Let me count the ways of your highly targeted messaging:

1. Calorie info, labeled “nutrition”
2. Use of the word “artisan”
3. Use of the word “passion,” as in “See where our passion comes from”
4. Use of “bakery” and “oasis,” as in “Our bakery-cafes are an everyday oasis.”
5. “Comfortable, friendly, fashionable,” your own words to describe how you want me to view your stores.
6. “Natural” meats — we (your target customers) all know this is supposed to be better than industrial meats. While it’s not exactly clear what “natural” means in the context of your chains, such label-dropping is still vaguely comforting to a lapsed Michael Pollan-ite like me.

What can other businesses learn from your execution?

1. Research, research, research. Know thy customer. Know her worries (time, calories, a vague concept of sustainability), know her limits, know her job and income. And, know her name.

2. The second lesson here has to do with implementation. Each staff member’s role was carefully orchestrated, from cashier to line prep to store manager. Each person seemed intelligent, alert, and highly efficient — well-trained, machine-like, character-less and utterly inoffensive. Sandwiches were accurate and timed to the minute. This is what you have over the local cafe and even the Whole Foods of the world, where employees showcase bright personalities and unique minds, in the wrong setting.

3. Extreme customer service — every customer counts. From their company page (an unapologetic, yet still convincing, mix of fact and fluff):

As reported by The Wall Street Journal, Panera Bread scored the highest level of customer loyalty among quick-casual restaurants, according to research conducted by TNS Intersearch. For the eight consecutive year, customers rated Panera Bread tops among chain restaurants in the 2009 Sandleman & Associates Quick-Track® “Awards of Excellence.” Additionally, Zagat named Panera Bread Most Popular and No. 1 for Best Facilities, Best Healthy Options and Best Salads (for chain restaurants with less than 5,000 outlets) in 2009. Recently, Panera Bread was named to BusinessWeek’s 2010 list of top 25 “Customer Service Champs,” and has also won Awards and Recognition in nearly every market across states.

4. Tradition plus ambition. Finally, the company’s trademarked mission statement is “A loaf of bread in every arm.” This simple phrase tells a great story — and simultaneously evokes tradition (a loaf of bread) and ambition (in every arm). It also shows that Panera’s humble bakery origins, while quaint, were probably not enough to bring the company to its current place on the NASDAQ. Panera’s marketing strategy has clearly been “capture the niche and expand the demand.” Rinse and repeat.

Today I almost missed my train to get one of your sandwiches. And, as expected, the sandwich was just ok. No matter, my expectations were already exceeded by my perfectly controlled and honed customer experience long before I took my first bite — and for your business, the experience is what matters.

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Recently, my friend Ramit and I recorded over two hours of video footage all about negotiation:

We got an overwhelmingly positive response from all kinds of different people - guys, girls, established professionals, college students, people making lots of money, and people making less all found useful ways to apply the principles of negotiation to their lives.

One person had a different take on it:

The woman in the video (and it is almost always a woman who says this, even when the material isn’t explicitly aimed at women) just has to point out that women make less money than men, and that women are not very good negotiators (”by nature” is assumed even if not said) and often aren’t shown how to do it…so obviously, you know, that leads to the completely logical conclusion that if women were better negotiators, we wouldn’t have such a problem with wage disparity.
….
Of course, it’s no accident that the woman in this video is younger than me, recently graduated from Stanford and got 60K/yr at her last, poorly-negotiated job.  So if I, or someone else, were to say to her, “YOU’RE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT.  LET’S TELL ALL THE WOMEN WHO WORK AT WAL-MART TO NEGOTIATE BETTER SALARIES, AND MAYBE WAL-MART WILL AGREE TO PAY THEM THE SAME AS MEN,” I’m sure she would be genuinely shocked to ponder that, for the vast majority of women, being fresh out of Stanford and needing to pull better than 60K out of your next round of “recruiter” interviews is not, in fact, the main problem.

Wage discrepancy, gender inequality, and labor issues are all very, very complex social issues. So, I can understand how someone can get lost in the overlapping areas, or have trouble understanding how their individual actions fit in with seemingly uncontrollable macro factors.

This person touches on an interesting point: women working low-wage, unskilled retail jobs at Walmart have a hard time negotiating for higher salaries, not just because they don’t know how but also because they may be working in situations where retaliation is a real risk.

Yes, there are plenty of things wrong with society. There’s ongoing discrimination that maintains a wage gap not only between men and women, but also between all sorts of different people. Big companies like Walmart - or really anyone in a position of power - have the ability to discriminate against you and make your life bad.

How could I possibly encourage a hardworking but low-paid Walmart worker to take on risks that are a privilege of rich white collar employees who should be more than satisfied with their generous paychecks? Because it’s not about absolute numbers, it’s about the act of standing up for yourself.

Here’s some interesting data from the New York Times:

Women earn less than men, especially at the top. In most jobs, the gap between men’s and women’s earnings narrows greatly when you adjust for factors like career path and experience. But at the top of the income scale — jobs paying more than $100,000 — the salary gap between equally qualified men and women is still vast.

Negotiation is an individual’s opportunity in the face of overwhelming macro-social factors like discrimination. As a skill, it’s just as important of a for low-wage workers at Walmart as it is for so-called privileged women earning over six figures.

Negotiation is a way to advocate for yourself, your community, your ideas. Making more at your desk job (though still less than your male coworkers) than you used to make at Walmart doesn’t mean you should sit down, shut up, and be satisfied with your relative good fortune. Now, times may be tough and you may still work at Walmart, but that’s exactly why this is your golden opportunity to do a little better in what might otherwise be rough social conditions.

Let’s explore this commenter’s statements a little more.

The woman in the video (and it is almost always a woman who says this, even when the material isn’t explicitly aimed at women) just has to point out that women make less money than men, and that women are not very good negotiators (”by nature” is assumed even if not said) and often aren’t shown how to do it…

Women do make less money than men.

Women have actually been shown to be better negotiators than men - when negotiating on behalf of their company, group, or community. Women are talented advocates, but women are afraid or unused to being advocates for themselves.

W omen attempt to negotiate for themselves far less than men. A 2002 research study of Masters degree recipients at Carnegie Mellon University revealed that while 51.5% of men negotiated their initial offers, only 12% of women did. If you don’t ask, you won’t receive.

There’s no “by nature” implied here. One major reason why women don’t negotiate for themselves is because they don’t know that they can. When I asked female friends in their 20s if they negotiated their salaries, every single woman said “No, I didn’t know you could do that.” When I asked male friends in their 20s if they negotiated their salaries, every single man said “Yes, of course.”

Since there’s no “women are bad at negotiating by nature” implication here, and since it’s clear from employment data that women negotiate as much as 40% less than men, we can assume that many women can improve their earnings simply by trying to negotiate.

Finally, as a woman, my statements were definitely aimed at women. I should have been more explicit. To the ladies: go out there and ask for it!

so obviously, you know, that leads to the completely logical conclusion that if women were better negotiators, we wouldn’t have such a problem with wage disparity.

Yes, that’s right.

The reasons we have a wage gap are very complex and plentiful. You can read up on it here. That said, one of the reasons women make less than men is because they don’t negotiate their salaries. And remember, your employer is unlikely to agree to pay you more if you do the same work.

Negotiation - or self-advocacy - doesn’t just refer to the dollar amount on your paycheck. You can ‘ask for it’ in a multitude of ways — higher-value responsibilities, more visibility on the job, a more prestigious title to match your new, high-value responsibilities, and, finally, a pay raise to wash it all down.

Of course, it’s no accident that the woman in this video is younger than me, recently graduated from Stanford and got 60K/yr at her last, poorly-negotiated job.

While it’s convenient to think so, the truth is that Stanford’s not a golden ticket.

To some people, a Stanford degree signals privilege. For me, it was a huge privilege - and an honor - to have been able to attend Stanford, but privilege is no guarantee. No matter how you get there, or who funded you, graduating with a Stanford degree does not guarantee your entry into your dream job, and it certainly doesn’t guarantee you the highest possible salary for your position.

Nearly every one of my coworkers at my first and second jobs had graduated from great universities. That’s literally tens of thousands of golden ticket-holders. Salaries still varied wildly, even among top performers. How could this be? If you do a good job, won’t you get recognized and rewarded?

One of my first lessons as a young person in the job market was that recognition and reward aren’t automatic. People are busy. People who are important enough to make decisions about other people’s salaries are even busier.

Very few employers these days deliberately discriminate against women, employees at either end of the age spectrum, or people of color - especially since it’s illegal to do so - but that doesn’t mean bosses are going to spend their time taking careful inventory of your contributions and calculating out a handsome monetary reward for you to take home. They’re just not going to do that. Unless, of course, you advocate for yourself and bring it to their attention.

YOU’RE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT.  LET’S TELL ALL THE WOMEN WHO WORK AT WAL-MART TO NEGOTIATE BETTER SALARIES, AND MAYBE WAL-MART WILL AGREE TO PAY THEM THE SAME AS MEN

Many non-management retail or service jobs technically have non-negotiable wages, but this doesn’t mean people in those jobs can’t advocate for themselves in other ways.

My friend Hillary is a public schoolteacher whose salary is not negotiable, but who didn’t like the way she was being pressured to run her classroom around standardized tests. She advocated for her ideas, successfully negotiated for the diversified curriculum she wanted to teach, and is now starting her own charter school. That last part is an especially inspiring example of what can happen when you decide to take control and ask for what you want, but the point is that it can happen.

My friend Jon works at an hourly job through a temp agency where his wage is definitely non-negotiable. However, he was able to successfully negotiate for flex scheduling that has allowed him more concentrated time to work on his freelance business. Again, anyone can say “but I can’t do that! My case is especially bad because I work at Walmart / my boss hates me / XYZ” but I think it’s important to note that these are fundamentally limiting beliefs that we sometimes use as excuses. While they might be comforting in the short term, they do us no good in the long term.

Negotiating doesn’t mean you storm up to your employer and demand more money. Negotiating is not about alienating others, and it’s not about arguing with them either - it’s two parties working together to achieve an outcome that both can be reasonably happy with.

Some employers like Walmart have a long and well-publicized history of discrimination. We all know it’s not legal to fire someone because they asked for a raise or different hours or time off, and this is the reason why ‘Walmart’ and ‘lawsuit’ are such commonly associated words. And yes, even the women who work at Walmart, who are being paid less than their male coworkers in similar positions, should initiate conversations about their wages. If they don’t want to, because they perceive that there’s a risk of retaliation, then that’s one more unfortunate sign of persistent inequality in our society. Women - including Stanford-educated women - reaching positions of power is a great way to start to change this.

I also think of any “other” minority (not that women are numerically a minority; I suppose you could say “oppressed class”), and what being a job candidate must mean for them. Probably saying “and oh, by the way, I’m aware of the issues and my rights as a _______” is a great way to never get called back — even if they “need” to hire one, they’re not going to want the trouble and expense of one like you.

The retaliation question again. No one wants to get on the bad side of someone who has power over you. However, it’s a huge mistake to think that negotiation is an argument, a demand, or an adversarial interaction. If that’s your attitude going into any kind of negotiation - whether that’s with your boss over your salary or with your spouse over who washes the dishes - you will not get what you want. You may get your boss to give you a raise, or your spouse to wash the dishes, but you’ll also get a fat load of resentment. For that reason, your negotiation will have failed.

A negotiation is a cooperative discussion where two parties try to find common ground. Your employer wants you as an employee and may be willing to pay a little more; you want your job at a higher salary, but may be willing to take a bit less. Focusing on compromise and cooperation while negotiating makes it possible for all parties to walk away satisfied. The act of negotiating in itself doesn’t mean you’re a ‘trouble’ and an ‘expense’ if you know your true value and are simply communicating it — but, if you’re not worth the salary you’re asking for, then that’s when resentment can begin.

I’m sure she would be genuinely shocked to ponder that, for the vast majority of women, being fresh out of Stanford and needing to pull better than 60K out of your next round of “recruiter” interviews is not, in fact, the main problem.

What is the single main problem, then?

Negotiation as a way of life

Why do I care if other people negotiate? Can’t I be happy with my generous salary, my flexible schedule, and the fascinating and glamorous career opportunities that my Stanford degree has opened up for me? The truth is, I am happy with my salary, my schedule, and my career path. But I still care very much about negotiating. The act of negotiating doesn’t simply mean you’re dissatisfied with what you have.

Instead, think of it this way: negotiation is just a fancy word for knowing your own value, understanding the value of where you stand in relation to others, and of speaking up for yourself. In my dream world, every little girl and boy would happily embrace this type of self-advocacy, and nobody would cry out in backlash against those who have succeeded in asking for what they want.

Negotiation is about agency. It’s not just about money, or your job title, or even about getting exactly what you want.

Negotiation is a philosophy of change - it’s believing and seeing proof that every situation is changeable in some way or another.

And every situation is, if you give it a try.

***

Learn more about the gender wage gap:

http://delicious.com/susanfsu/wage-gap

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It seems easy, but there’s a trick - it’ll cost you $600 to win me over. Yes, that’s it. $600 buys my love, my brand loyalty, and possibly a hefty percentage of my friends and network. But, it is $600 after all.

What do you choose?

To people in sales or marketing, this should seem like a no-brainer. But, somehow it trips up big companies all over the world time and time again. Is the customer always right? Or, is your market share big enough to steamroll a single dissatisfied voice?

Seth Godin recently wrote that simple acknowledgement is the first step to customer satisfaction. If you can follow that up with cooperation and a resolution to your customer’s problem, then you score a major win for your brand and your bottom line.

Let’s look at a few examples.

Air France

My friend Chris had a gloriously memorable experience when he visited Paris last year. The world’s best museums, crepe-filled side streets, charmingly rude locals, and beautiful women everywhere… these were his glowing impressions of the City of Light. Everything was great until he had to take the RER commuter train to Charles De Gaulle International Airport. Confusing metro stations, attendants that didn’t speak English, and broken change machines collided and Chris missed his flight. A grown man near tears, he explained his story to the Air France front desk lady and here is what she said:

“We’re very happy you enjoyed your stay in Paris, and we wouldn’t want you to leave here with a bad impression of France. I’ll find you an alternate route that leaves today… no charge to you.”

To this day he remembers this experience, tells the story to his friends whenever ‘France,’ ‘Paris,’ ‘travel,’ or ‘airlines’ come up in conversation, and is a smiling, walking spokesperson for Air France and French tourism.

Customer retention cost: $600-$1000

Apple

I got an iPhone last fall and have nurtured a tumultuous love-hate relationship with it ever since. About three months ago, its software crashed and needed intervention from Apple tech support. My guy was courteous, solved my problem, and then reminded me that my phone was still under warranty and could be replaced by Apple if the crash happened again. A month or two later, it did, and I made myself an in-person appointment at my local Apple store. When I went for the appointment, my new tech support guy couldn’t reproduce my problem… thus invalidating my complaint. However, here is what he said:

“It looks like your phone is ok, but since we already set the expectation that we’d replace your phone, we’ll go ahead and set you up with a new one today.”

He was wearing a t-shirt that said “Not all heroes wear capes,” and I thought I maybe saw a halo floating around his head. The Apple-Susan relationship is now 100% love-love, and I’ve since told all my friends.

Customer retention cost: $400

GES

GES is a multinational exhibition logistics and management corporation.

I recently helped a 10-person startup exhibit at its first industry conference, and we brought in a pinball machine. Apparently, GES has a clause in its contract that says no one but a GES employee may wheel things from the loading dock to the booths. Carry by hand, yes. Wheel, no. The charge for wheeling a pinball machine (weighing in at 250 lbs) 200 feet from the loading dock to the booths, was $650 - more than the entire cost of rental for the machine itself.

Since I didn’t receive the handbook that describes this clause, I was irate at this nasty surprise at the end of a long conference. I pleaded with the sales manager, knowing that $650 would be a big hit for a small company, talking about customer satisfaction and retention. Here is what she said:

“The rules are the rules. It’s right there in the handbook, and if you didn’t see it, that’s not our problem. You wheeled, you didn’t carry. There is a fee associated with that.”

Wow. My reaction? Still simmering… and I’m now writing this blog post.

Customer retention cost: $650

What’s a corporation to do

All of these companies have two things in common -

1) They’re big corporations with multi-million or multi-billion dollar annual revenues.
2) They all have the potential to extract multiple decades of customer patronage from me and from my growing network.

Folks, it’s only a few hundred bucks. If your company can afford to spend tens of thousands on marketing collateral, why not invest a fraction of that in word-of-mouth marketing to achieve a lifetime of returns?

If you think your customers are expensive - too expensive, perhaps, for you to want or need them as a customers - then you should either plan on monopolizing the market so you don’t have to compete, or you should close shop. If your customers love you, they will come to your parties. They will wear your t-shirts. They will watch your commercials - voluntarily and repeatedly - on YouTube. They will buy your products even when they’re neither the cheapest nor the best.

Listen, be empathetic, be consistent, and respond to customer desperation (not just whim). You may lose the fight, but you’ll win the customer.

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It is, instead, some ideas for ambitious people on how not to manage time.

The problem

I’m writing this in the wee hours of the morning. An hour ago, I felt extremely sleepy - barely awake enough to get through 15 minutes of bedtime reading. Now, I’m wide awake. As my normally rational thoughts started morphing into stranger and stranger dream threads, I let myself think one thought about all the things I want to do. Not just all things I have to do, but also all the things I want to do. Then, BAM. Awake. Thinking. Planning. Plotting. I’m a chronically ambitious person, and it keeps me up nights.

Sleep is only the beginning. Lately, as I’ve been allowing myself full immersion in my wild and plentiful ambitions, I’ve started to notice that I don’t watch a whole lot of movies anymore. Or see anybody on weeknights. Or cook dinner and eat it not in front of the Internet. Or read that David Mitchell book I borrowed from the library and have renewed three times just so I don’t have to shuttle it back to the library.

Don’t misunderstand - I actually ‘manage’ my time decently. I’m super extra crazily productive with work matters, I exercise every single day, and I cook and clean as well and often as a first-year housewife.

But, if my brain were an Apple device, this is what my time meter would look like:

The ambitious people I know all sleep strange hours. And by ’strange,’ I do in fact mean ‘few.’ Very few. 4 to 6 hours a night. I wonder if they’ll drop dead one of these days soon, and I hope not because I’m still looking forward to their guaranteed contributions to humanity.

They, and others like them, are major multitaskers - switching between emails and projects and phone calls and friends and IMs and sales meetings and press events every few minutes.

The problem is, multitasking makes me crazy, and it makes me fail.

And I know I’m not the only one.

The solution

Right after graduating college, when I got interested in meditation (or at least, reading about it), I read about a technique called “One-pointed attention.”

With multitasking, your attention - and your power - are scattered in as many directions as you have thoughts. On the other hand, when you focus in a single direction, your attention transforms from a roomful of diffused light into a laser beam. Lasers can do a lot.

Nobody wants to argue with focus, but it’s pretty dang hard when it comes your turn to practice it. Meditation can help because your work is to notice all those flitting fleeting thoughts and tell them, “bye for now!” while you focus on nothing but your breathing.

I don’t love meditating, and I hardly ever do it officially, but there are a number of things that also get the job done:

• exercise that lasts longer than 30 minutes
• reading a novel for at least 30 minutes straight (NOT a magazine, webpage, advertisement, or short story)
• staring at the wall and thinking about only what’s in front of me (lumps in the white paint)
• watching trees (they don’t move all that much)

To smoothe the jagged edges of my ambition, the best solution I’ve found is to take away points of attention, and also take away ‘time management’ pressure. In my head, I picture removing files one by one from my activity meter. Sometimes, it feels good to clear your device’s drive.

It’s hard to do with all those cloying ambitions running loose in my head. But, in the end, this practice helps me to get closer to realizing them anyway.

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You can’t listen to ‘Mushaboom’ by Feist anymore because of its homage to the cultural myth that renting is a tragedy and you have to own your house and two-car garage to be a Happy American.

When she sings:

…But in the meantime we’ve got it hard
Second floor living without a yard
It may be years until the day
My dreams will match up with my pay

She means:

It’s sad that I don’t make enough income to afford a yard and 2 floors to my house and can’t realize my dreams because of how hard I’ve got it with my employer / industry / government.

When she sings (in a wistful tone):

…I got a man to stick it out
And make a home from a rented house oh
And we’ll collect the moments one by one
I guess that’s how the future’s done oh

She means:

It takes a lot to make a home from a rented house, but it might not take so much to make a home from an owned (’real’) house. She’ll just focus on the little things and maybe one day in the future she won’t have to suffer like this anymore. At least she has a husband.

Then finally:

…How many acres, how much light
Tucked in the woods and out of sight
Talk to the neighbours and tip my cap
On a little road barely on the map… Well I’m Sold.

She means:

She’s going to have her an owned house (and a mortgage) even if it takes all she’s got, by god! A mortgaged place on a little road that’s barely on the map is still better than having to make a home of a rented house - she’s ‘Sold.’

Songs are fun, but cultural myths are myths -

They’re stories our culture tells us to explain some hard-to-explain thing, like why everyone doesn’t own a 2-story house with a yard and a big garage. They’re convenient, but they’re usually not completely truthful.

Here in the Bay Area, for example, our rents are exorbitant, but the mortgages are even more mind-boggling and out of reach. For many people and families, it probably won’t ever be a good idea to shoulder loads of debt, taking on multiple mortgages, jobs and other sacrifices just so they can be members of the so-called ownership society. Is this the fault of inflated Bay Area real estate or the yuppies that are ‘gentrifying’ the region (as well as bringing jobs and wealth to lower-paid sectors)? Maybe in part.

But, what’s the point of shaking your fist at the sky?

With money questions, as with job-seeking, personal entrepreneurship, marketing yourself or your company, there’s no point in wasting time shaking fists because you didn’t get what you thought you were entitled to. What if, instead, we thought about the many cultural myths we’re all working with? Yes, perhaps it’s sad that you have kids and you’re still renting, or that you won’t be able to buy a house in your city for many years, but… why is it sad? Is home ownership the cornerstone of a family? Or, do the people have something to do with it?

When we take time off to examine the myths for what they are, the tragedies of us not getting what we ’should have’ don’t seem so bad after all.

This applies to lots of things. Did you graduate from college expecting a dream job in your dream industry (because that’s what you thought should happen to bright 22 year olds), but didn’t get the job? Did you create a product that you thought was so great it should have sold itself, without marketing, but didn’t make your sales goals? Did you take a job and start a life in an expensive city, thinking that you should be able to own your home, just like George W. said, but can’t afford one?

We all have personal expectations and desires, and we all go through delusions of entitlement sometimes too. When you add unattainable cultural myths to the equation, you get the kind of dissatisfaction and melancholy that’s perfect for alt-folk singer-songwriters but sucks for the rest of us.

[Personal expectations, desires] + [cultural myths] + [sense of entitlement] + [practical limitations] = :(

–

Notes:

In this Erica.biz post, Erica writes a great analysis of buying vs. renting and why she’s happy to make her home from a (lovely) rented house.

You should only buy a house if it makes financial sense - not just for emotional / cultural reasons. To this point, Ramit presents an excellent excerpt from his book I Will Teach You To Be Rich, along with links to a bunch of articles and blog posts.

I still like Feist. Her video for this song is super fun:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDZwThM7vAg

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hahaha... sob.

Charlie Hoehn wrote a post this week about failing cheaply. When trying to figure out your dream job or project, you might fail. Better to fail cheaply - doing something you initiate on your own - than to pay a grad school $100,000 so you can fail with an egregious amount of school debt trailing you for the rest of your life.

Another blogger, Tim Grahl, also wrote about the wastefulness of advanced education.

I’ve even posted about this topic on Ask the Entrepreneurs, where the tech entrepreneur Bob Ippolito gives me reason to believe that entrepreneurs don’t need grad school.

This trend is because bloggers tend to be a very independent-spirited bunch; they’re the people who are doing exactly what Charlie suggests - sticking their necks out every day or week to share their thoughts and work in a public forum.

It doesn’t mean we all hate education institutions, but it does mean that we don’t think they should be a crutch to help you hobble along till you figure out what you really want to do with your life.

I was a history major at Stanford (SUPER non-vocational major), loved it, and don’t regret a single class or dollar.

For me, college (and my history courseload):

- provided me with the structure I needed to learn things that changed my paradigms. Most people will fail as autodidacts, no matter how many libraries surround them.

- taught me ANALYSIS much more than facts. It shaped my thinking in a way that no amount of years in Silicon Valley, corporate or startup, ever could.

- made learning FUN and gave me the opportunity to meet other people who felt the same way - that education was not only vocational but also artful. The kids from my public high school never gave me the sense of thrill and shared wonderment that my peers in college did.

- endowed me with a brand and social affiliation that I’ve used countless times, to open as many doors, since graduating.

That said, my take is that people should never start an education - college or grad school - thinking that it’s going to be their golden ticket out of [fill in the blank].

To me learning - from great professors, from other thoughtful students, and from the experiences that are available exclusively in the setting of an education institution - was its own joy.

But there was PLENTY of stuff that I never learned at Stanford.

Stuff I NEVER learned at Stanford (but that ended up being really important in my life):

- how to write and connect with others through words in a way that’s not selfish, boring or trite (still working on this life lesson)

- how to sell things: myself, my skills, my ideas, other people I care about, products or services that I represent

- how to be concise

- how to think outside a normalized structure and come up with solutions to unarticulated, real life problems (like how to handle life as a corporate drone, how to manage ‘up,’ how to deal with losing your job, or transitioning to a new one)

- what I really wanted to do with my life

- how to fail, and be ok with it (At Stanford, there’s a metaphor that the students are like ducks on a pond - calm-looking as they float along, but staying afloat by frantic, invisible paddling beneath the water’s surface. Actually, I think ducks are way better at this than college students.)

It would’ve been a royal mistake if I’d gone to school to try to answer those questions and, four years later, had learned these lessons instead….

Stuff I learned at Stanford (that was really fun):

- How to analyze the history of South African apartheid from a Foucaultian perspective

- How to understand Chinese footbinding as an economic practice

- How to write a persuasive short story - in French, in Spanish, and (almost but not quite) in Mandarin

- How Darwin figured out the science behind natural selection from observing Galapagos finches

- How to search for life elsewhere in the solar system

and lots more.

Like most people, I still have lots of questions in my life. I don’t expect another degree to answer them for me, or to entitle me to my dream job, or to make me into anything more than I am all on my own.

As Charlie writes, if you want to try for a dream, fail cheaply first. Later, when your many small, low-risk failures have helped you to figure some stuff out, you’ll be all set to succeed really, really big.

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…Canopy of Heaven.

These poetic words could be the titles of music, or novels.

Actually, they’re the lovingly crafted names of the coffee blends at Philz Coffee, a popular Bay Area gourmet coffee chain.

I was transfixed one morning while grinding some coffee and reading the package, whispering each melodic syllable under my breath. I hadn’t realized I was talking to myself, and I ended up over-grinding my coffee.

Whatever. I was too busy thinking, “Mmm, that one sounds good… ooh, so does that one. Whoa, ‘Silken Splendor’… that must be good,” to worry about one batch of coffee-turned-dust.

I also felt a sudden, scarily powerful craving for more Philz Coffee… and different kinds than what I had on my counter.

What’s in a name?

For Philz customers’ — pent-up desire, sleepy imaginations, and willingness to purchase.

Here’s why naming makes Philz a smart business, and the perfect coffee brand for the SF Bay Area:

They get their customers. They know that San Francisco people are a bunch of yuppie-foodie-creatives - even (and sometimes especially) the ones who work in corporate skyscrapers - who like stuff to be special (just like them!).

Maybe Philz wouldn’t fly in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, but why should they care? Who’s more likely to pay $3.50 for a cup of coffee (not even a latte, mind you) and $15/lb for Swiss Water Decaf beans?

San Franciscans, that’s who.

Before anyone scoffs, let me say that the line at my neighborhood Philz is SO obnoxious every morning, and throughout most of the day, that I actually go buy coffee at 7 pm, right as they’re closing. I also heard that they recently installed a custom Philz machine at the Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto. They’ve sealed the deal on the yuppie-foodie-creative market.

Philz Coffee has named their products for their audience - those yuppie-foodie-creative customers with a high appreciation of unusual, melodic product names and an even higher willingness to purchase.

Dark roast coffees: Tantalizing Turkish, Jacob’s Wonderbar Brew, Aromatic Arabic, Ether (my favorite name), Julie’s Ultimate, Mocha Tesora

Medium roasts: Tesora, Philharmonic, Ambrosia Coffee of God, It’z the Best, Philtered Soul, Silken Splendor, Anesthesia To The Upside (my favorite name), Dancing Water, New Manhattan

Light roasts: Greater Alarm, Canopy of Heaven, Sooooo Good

When I asked the people at the Castro Philz which were their best sellers in each category, here’s what they told me:

Dark Roast - Jacob’s Wonderbar Brew

Medium Roast - Tesora

Light Roast - Greater Alarm

“Jacob’s Wonderbar Brew” has great alliteration and a personal connection to Phil’s son (co-owner of the business). “Tesora” implies something superlative, and alludes to Spanish romance. “Greater Alarm” sells this high-caf light roast to the sleep zombies.

The Philz people probably didn’t think about these names as much as I have. They’ll just tell you the coffee sells because it’s good. But, they come from their own audience - they are your typical SF creatives - and I’m pretty sure that has something to do with how well they’ve connected their business and marketing to their customer base.

Also, the coffee’s really good. I swear. At least, it sounds good…

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English is one of the hardest languages in the world to master.

It doesn’t make the standard Top Ten Most Difficult lists (which include the usual suspects Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Russian) because of its relative accessibility for first-time learners. It’s near impossible, however, to master.

This is because:

• – We have tons of grammatical exceptions.

• – At least in the U.S., we don’t really care about perfection.

To me, English language mastery means:

• – In speaking: being able to tell jokes based on homonyms

• – In writing: getting it right with contractions

Now, who cares about getting it right with contractions and other minor spelling and grammar stuff? If people get what you’re trying to say, why does it matter if you know the difference between [its] and [it's]?

Yesterday, I received a postcard advertising a luxury Alaskan cruise in the mail. Everything about it said “fancy!” - from the photo montage of gourmet dinners, spa rooms, and majestic glaciers, to the award logos printed all over it. I’m not a cruise person, but it nonetheless got me thinking about the possibility of an Alaskan vacation, until…

“Amazing Alaska, few places anywhere in the world can match it’s splendor.”

FYI, postcard people -

[it's] is a contraction of the two words [it] and [is]

[its] is the possessive form of the pronoun [it] that you’re looking for

Here’s why contractions are so important to converting those discerning customers:

• It’s rarely a typo when you use [you're] instead of [your] or [it's] instead of [its]. You just don’t know the language rules
• Since it’s not a typo, it doesn’t so much show carelessness as it reveals ineptitude
• I’m not going to trust a company with my vacation, my safety, and thousands of my dollars that can’t get the basics right

Note to self:

If I’m ever in a position to spend tens of thousands of dollars on marketing campaigns targeting customers’ mailboxes, inboxes, and Facebook profiles, make sure to edit for ineptitude.

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The other day I was talking to my friend Chris, a video person and aspiring filmmaker who spends his days working a state admin job, about how much he hates his job and finds it deadening to his creativity, etc.

I suggested that maybe he could start doing small, iterative video experiments - on the side - and post them on YouTube or on his own website to give his creative portfolio a more current, ‘bloggy’ component.

It sounds obvious and basic - a creative person using the Internet to showcase their work, get in some practice, and maybe get noticed - but most people never get around to doing any such thing.

“But, I don’t have…

• enough time
• the right equipment
• the right situation
• the right connections!”

Chris started off with these standard protestations. Now, I happen to find this kind of talk extremely annoying and disempowering, even for ME the listener, so I suggested that he make a few little videos of all the ideas he supposedly has all day long, and actually show them to some people.

A couple of days later, he surprised me and actually did it.

Here’s how Chris turned his boring administrative work into a simple creative experiment in 30 minutes:

Made with:

• 9 minutes of filming with an old MacBook Pro built-in iSight camera
• 20 minutes of editing
• a lot of his own inspiration and initiative

working with the aoc from Chris Whitmore on Vimeo.

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On Facebook, I think it’s better if you DO NOT:

1. Change your relationship status from ‘Single’ to ‘It’s complicated’ to ‘Single’ to ‘It’s complicated’ to ‘Single’ in a span of 5 days. Facebook recognizes your lovelife humiliation as extra juicy news, so it says sticky in the “Highlights” bar of all your friends’ and network members’ homepages.
2. Post personal health information: “Weird juices flowing out, Vicodin finally kicking in.”
3. Name names. Unless it’s a lovingly funny joke.
4. Broadcast the expensive new toys you buy yourself: “Love driving around my BRAND NEW Mercedes” - BARF.
5. Do numerous poorly written and highly predictable quizzes every day. People will mute you from their news feed.

All else is fair game!

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