Nothing has been scientifically proven to be more effective for headaches.
- TV commercial

Sure sounds better than reality: No scientific studies have ever compared this product to any other product. Modern marketing and politics play fancy free and foot loose with the truth. Spin is king. Harry G. Frankfurt wrote a small treatise on this subject called On Bullshit. He defines bullsh*t (BS) as neither lying nor telling the truth. It is instead a complete indifference to whether the truth even matters.

Our culture has a growing disregard for truth – both knowing what makes something true as well as confronting our own reality. It’s interesting that the original American culture held truth in high regard. For example, the 5th Amendment sure stands in stark contradiction to this trend. Politicians are taught to not even answer reporters questions, or if they have to answer, quibble with the definition of “is”.  Criminals tell half-truths (BS) for fear they might be caught.

I wonder if the founding fathers would have found it necessary for the accused not to be forced to incriminate themselves. This really only matters if one still holds that truth as important.  If truth is not important, than the expectation is simply that the accused will lie if confronted with their crime.  This idea has taken hold so strongly that even someone who “pleads the 5th” seems both guilty and a bad liar.

Everywhere we look, we are confronted with BS. Even when we get in the “No Spin Zone”, we are just asking they apply a particular spin, but we feel more comfortable if they label it as without BS.  The world is so complicated that none of us is able to keep up with all the new information created every day. Epistemology is important.

Having worked in Marketing, there is a fine line between positioning and authenticity. Authenticity is important, or as a good friend of mine says, being WYSIWYG (What you See is What You Get). So I’m working to eliminate BS in my own words, so that if questioned, I don’t need to plead the 5th.

The modern world worships efficiency: trying to get more done, trying to remember all the details, trying to stay organized.  We feel social pressure to “look busy” (at one point in my career I was involved in 30 hours of meetings every week — We had the slogan: Meetings, the practical alternative to work).  To worship this busyness idol, we try various systems for a little while though eventually give up because life is not a series of lists nor about being busy.

Satisfaction with life is not running from crisis to crisis nor working lots of hours to “get stuff done” nor being a slave to our “time-management” system.  It’s about focusing on the most important thing. Efficiency is not a god to be worshiped. He who gets the most stuff done is not the one who wins.

This doesn’t mean that finding a system to help manage our focus is a bad thing. At some level, we each need a system just to survive any modern job.  While there is no system that works for everyone, the system should make sure that we are focused on important rather than urgent and encourage us to spend some time reflecting about what is important rather than getting mesmerized by the constancy of action.

This need for personalization is why there are over 1700 apps for managing todo’s. In the end though, we all have a near infinite number of things “todo”.  The key is deciding which ones we should focus on. It’s not about getting more done, it’s about getting the right things done.

Helpful Resources:

• Pilot Fire is a very light weight system for planning, reflecting and doing that I’ve found to be very effective.
• Another friend of mine highly recommends the Pomodoro Technique, which is great if you really need to get something important done but are having a hard time getting started, or you really like timers that are shaped like tomatoes.
• Finally, a friend and I are trying out Seth Godin’s adaptation of Zig Zigler’s goal setting technique – which is all about doing things in small steps, continuously with friends.  I’m sure I’ll write a blog about it at some point.
• Feel free to comment with any other systems you’ve found that help you focus on what’s important.

Picture Courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrsmagic/

Why is it easy to get psyched-up for starting a diet tomorrow but not right now? Why does an exercise regiment seem so easy to imagine, but hard to follow? We can picture ourselves running miles, exercising every other day, and feeling great, but when it’s time to go to the gym, a myriad of excuses tell us we should put it off. After all, is this one workout really going to make a difference?

When we project ourselves into the future we use the rational long-term planning parts of our brains. The result our projected future-self will see the merits of our long-term goals, and resist the short-term temptations of the moment. It turns out that our future-self acts pretty much the same way our now-self does. Mostly because when our future-self is actually having to decide on the right course of action, he’ll be our now-self, feeling all the same things we feel right now. The result is that if it doesn’t seem worth doing now, it may never seem worth doing.

How can we change this? First, we have to recognize the fallacy that our future-self will be more rational than our now-self. Our future self is not going to be some Übermensch whose willpower is formidable. Knowing this provides ammunition against the excuse that we’ll do better in the future. Instead we should fight against the fear and excuses that plague our emotions now and just do it (or stop doing it, as the case may be). If we don’t decide to do something now, how could we possibly expect our future self to do it. Second, we can empathize with our future-self and set the stage so he is more motivated to make the right course of action. For example, making an appointment to workout with someone else tomorrow.

Popping the delusion of our incredible future-self can help us take action today. What are we waiting for?

“If you’re a 40-yr old mother who likes to run and also knows how to code well, please come talk to me after this discussion because I want to hire you.”

Cheryl Kellond, founder of Bia, made the above appeal during a panel session last night titled Geeks vs. Suits.  She explained that she highly doubted a 23-yr male coder was going to be able to relate with her company’s target market — 40-yr old mother triathletes.

The problem is empathy.  We need those who are writing the software to be able to understand who they are writing software for. Her appeal launched a panel conversation about empathy.  Though not explicitly mentioned, this is pretty much what the entire discussion was about.   Can geeks understand and appreciate what the BizDev guys are doing and can the suits understand and appreciate what the coders wrestle with?  The conversation turned to whether empathy can be learned.  Everyone agreed that it can be, but not many suggested how.

Empathy is one of the most critical skills to entrepreneurial success. We can empathize because we are the target market (like a 40-yr old mother athlete) or we can learn to empathize with our customers by talking to them.

Empathy is an experiential skill not a declarative one — we can’t just read a book to learn it, just like we can’t read a book to learn how to shoot a basketball and expect to win any free throwing contest.  It comes from practice and there are several exercises to help learn it. Steven Blanks’ Customer Development Process (described in the 4 Steps to the Epiphany) is an excellent and practical process for many startups to learn to empathize with the customers they are trying to serve. Outside of entrepreneurship, there are several activities that can help – for example, sympathizing (simulating) a day in the life of the person we are trying to understand, or actually living their life if it’s possible to truly walk in their shoes.

I don’t think you have to be a 40-yr old mother runner to be able to understand what is going on with Bia’s market, but I do think you need to have a lot of empathy to be able to make sure you design a product that will work well for them. Empathy is a critical skill for an entrepreneur to learn.

[There are also many good books on the subject that also give suggested exercises to learn how to use them.  Here are a few: Wired To Care, A Whole New Mind, and The Ten Faces of Innovation. ]

We were about to order and the waitress making small talk said, “It’s cold outside.  The thermometer on the bank downtown said it was zero degrees!”

It’s true that it was cold, but it wasn’t super cold, probably near freezing.  My brother and dad responded that it must be “zero degrees Celsius“.  The waitress said that she was pretty sure it said Fahrenheit.  This began a several minute conversation with my brother and dad striving to convince the waitress that she was wrong while the waitress fended off their comments getting increasingly frustrated.

Witnessing this conversation, I decided that I never wanted to communicate like this. Trying to convince someone they are wrong of a detail which will not edify anyone, but in the process likely frustrate everyone.  Some details are not worth correcting.  Even if they are wrong, even when we know we are right, we still don’t win any friends nor make anyone better off by correcting it.

We hear this situation all the time.  Stories are told, “Then we had to drive 23 miles down the highway…”.  ”It wasn’t 23 miles, it was 27!” When I hear someone interrupt a story to correct a detail like this, I make a comment about how the story is totally different now that we know it was 27. This wastes everyone’s attention and for what?

The reality is that we want our memories to be justified, but our memories are not perfect.  Moreover, corrections require energy on the part of everyone involved — most of the time leaving people drained and not invigorated by the clarification of detail. Unless it is a forum where the detail makes a difference in the outcome, it’s not worth trying to interject the change.

In the end, no one but me seems to remember the conversation about whether it was Fahrenheit or Celsius, and what I remember had nothing to do with how cold it was. Some details really don’t matter.

[I've also written that sometimes details really do matter, the key is knowing whether the detail is essential or trivial]

When something life-changing happens, it’s normal for relationships to change, but often in ways that are not initially understood.  A person gets married, gets sick, has a child, or a new job: these changes don’t only affect us for a moment but change how we relate to others. Up to this point, most relationships have built a set of expectations simply as a matter of course, and so this event doesn’t prompt a conversation about how expectations should be different. This can cause a gap in what is expected of the relationship and what is given.

In the short-term, we tend to simply overlook this disparity and continuing pouring into the relationship even though the other person isn’t reciprocating.  Over time the other person accumulates a debt from which they can never recover.  Even if they started behaving as they did before, it wouldn’t pay back the months of disparity.  Moreover, most of the time their situation won’t allow them to start behaving as they did before even if they wanted to.

This is where many relationships die. The debt creates resentment and makes it difficult to even appreciate the giving the other does. But it doesn’t have to be the end.

There are two critical actions that we must take if we want to help the relationship survive: forgive the past and communicate about the expectations going forward.

This type of forgiveness is different from one which is just about an offense. It is about letting go of the gap that has built up between the event and now.  It means not holding it against the person or expecting that it must be the way that it was before. This is not easy, but it is critical. Letting go of the debt is the only way the relationship will be successful in the future.  

Once you are ready to let go of the past, discussing how the situation has changed with the other person and redefining the expectations under the new circumstances allows both parties to reevaluate and recommit.

One of the things we are tempted to believe is that the other person isn’t the same person any more. Usually, this is just our tendency toward the Fundamental Attribution Error where we assign our behavior to circumstances but others behavior to character.  Most of the times the person is still the same, but their circumstances have changed. Recognizing this can help us approach them with confidence knowing that they still care about us.

Until we have this conversation, the debt only will continue to grow. So if we’re feeling this gap in one of our relationships, maybe the new year is a good opportunity to let go of the past and restore a life-giving relationship.

“It was the most beautiful cheese”, he told me excitedly, “it had an inch of hair growing all over it!”

Not exactly how Americans view beautiful cheese. The French relate to cheese as alive, where as American’s relate to cheese as dead (as in pasteurized, wrapped in plastic and stored in a cold, dark place). I wrote about this a long time ago in a post on “The Culture Code” which discussed how different cultures relate to a lot of different products.

He went on to tell me another story. Apparently, the Belgian’s also prefer their cheese more on the dead side and the French make fun of the Belgians which makes this story funnier. My friend’s dad collected a number of very nice, gourmet cheeses from the cheese shop to send to a business colleague in Belgium as a gift. The Belgian received the gift quite well and thanked my friend’s father gratefully, but was sad to report that many of the cheeses had started growing mold in transit and so they unfortunately had to throw them out! Of course, the mold is what made them gourmet in the first place. Needless to say this did not help rectify the jokes already made by the French about the Belgians.

These stories are why I love international travel and relationships. We all see the world so differently and yet until we share our experience, we don’t know how. Something we hold as garbage, may be precious to someone else.

All this to say, we really should try experiencing more moldy cheeses.

Have you ever stopped to think about how you dry yourself after getting out of the shower? Probably using the same pattern for years, and one that is unique to you.  We all do this without thinking and this is but one of many trails that we follow in life without thought. There are many others: the way we eat, the way we communicate, the way we work.

We create trails as a way of simplifying the world around us.  It provides us with a way to navigate the various challenges and complexities of life so that we can not devote time thinking about things we’ve already figured out. But for the very reason that the patterns become hidden to us, they can also lull us into a false sense of security. Doing something differently feels uncomfortable, yet the only way we can grow is to question our patterns of behavior in the past.  Plus variety is the spice of life.

Even though it feels uncomfortable to go off-road, doing so allows us to experience vistas that we may never have seen if we continued following the same old trails.

Another great example of the process of iterative design is watching a graphic designer in action. One graphic designer described the the journey of one of his projects and recorded a great demo showing viaually how non-linear the process is:

The most fascinating thing about watching the video is the number of complete designs he went through before finally arriving at the solution. There are many projects that require this type of iteration and it is usually what differentiates the amatuer from the profressional. Of course, the unfortunate thing is that when others see the end product it seems obvious; they don’t see all the iterations it took to get there.

The Golden Rule provides a simple heuristic for empathy. Our actions affect others usually in the same way that the action would affect us. This rule of thumb usually works pretty well, especially with people that we’ve never met — when in doubt, treat them as you wish to be treated; however, it doesn’t entirely remove the focus from our preferences. After all, the second part is still about how we would want to be treated, and therein lies the rub.

Sometimes the way we want to be treated is not the way someone else wants to be treated. Intuitively, we all know this; we know that if our boss wants us to be on time, we should be on time, even though it doesn’t matter to us if others are on time. Yet when these differences arise, it’s easy to grumble and complain about how ridiculous the other person’s preference is. We may justify our grumbling from the Golden Rule, after all, we aren’t treating them differently than we would want to be treated. We might even say, “Look, this is how I want to be treated and so this is how you should want to be treated too”. But responding this way is contrary to the purpose of the Golden Rule, which is that it’s not about us.

In any close relationship, we learn that there are things that are very important to others, that are not important to us. Rather than complaining about or arguing to change their preference, we can be quick to recognize that we have our own personal preferences and would really like others to treat us accordingly. We should treat others according to their preferences because we would like others to treat us according to ours.

Because of the complexity, many groups advocate a solution as dogma for how to solve the ills we are facing — an indisputable, clear, simple solution that should solve our problems. These simple solutions provide a basis for determining the direction we should move. But too often  the gap between the solution and the current state is so large that it turns otherwise productive conversations into whining and complaining. When we start thinking, “The world would be so much better if only …”, we must take care not to become unproductive cynics.

This comic summarized this problem perfectly:

Ideal solutions are not enough; a path that allows for implementation toward the ideal is what we need to find. We should improve the status quo, not just whine about it.  It means though that we need to think harder than simply grabbing onto a single dogma and whining that no one will listen to us.

In legal systems, there are two types of laws: positive laws which are prescriptive, requiring a specific action, and negative laws which prohibit a particular action. Goals can be categorized in the same way. A positive goal strives toward some better state. A negative goal strives to avoid falling into a worse one.

Negative law maximizes freedom because we can do everything except the prohibited action. To the contrary, negative goals by themselves lead us to only focus on what we are trying to avoid often leading to failure. We have a hard time not thinking about something  (e.g. st try not to think about a blue monkey). Fortunately, we can convert most negative goals into positive ones. Don’t eat dessert might instead become workout 30 minutes extra before eating dessert. A positive goal lets us focus on a critical behavior we need to carry out a longer term aspiration. This is true not only for our personal goals, but also for our work goals too. Moreover, it provides a much better platform for getting help from others.

This past week a good friend of mine and I wanted to do a better job managing our attention so we could get the right things done. Both of us generally get a lot done, but not always the most important thing. As a result we decided that we would work on trying two things:

1. Planning out our day everyday
2. Working on the #1 biggest priority as early in the day as we could.

Both of us had days where we got distracted and failed, but when we succeeded we both had great productive days.  Moreover,  it was encouraging and energizing to keep updated throughout the week with each others’ status.  Success bred success.

When we want others to keep us accountable, the nature of the goal makes a big difference. Accountability groups focused around negative goals often degrade into pity parties. Groups which instead focus on positive goals continue to encourage everyone on. Failure to reach perfection in a positive goal is simply a sign that we are still on the path.  Failing our negative goal, falling into that which we want to avoid, often causes us to simply feel like a failure.

How we shape our goals makes a big difference in our ability to accomplish them. How can you take some of your goals and make them positive and involve others to help you accomplish them?

The software is the what, the business is the why.

In a world where it is easy to build a new software business, many are doing so. They have a great idea (the what), but when it meets the reality of people’s already oversubscribed attention, it fails to make a difference.

Many at this stage give up. They’ve got another great idea. Others start looking at the market and pivot their business as they figure out the why. Why are the 4 people who signed up using it? What is their problem? This painful learning process starts them on the path of actually making a genuine business (building a product or service people are willing to pay for). As they discover the why, they come to a much more in-depth understanding of what needs to be built. Even if others copy the new “what”, their understanding of the why is missing, which enables the real business to stay a step ahead.

It’s not enough for us to have a great idea and assume others will join. We must also understand why that issue is important to others, and then solve it FOR THEM (not for us).

Do you understand the why of your business?

There is symmetry in the way we spend our time — the regular rhythm of our lives. Each day follows a similar pattern as the next day. We wake, we eat three meals, we sleep, we do stuff in between. At a broader level, each day of the week resembles the same day in other weeks. Many Mondays are alike.  So the two most regularly repeated patterns surround our days and our weeks. There is no smaller pattern of symmetry than a day: one hour is not like the next hour. This makes days the atom of human experience.

In spite of this, I’m surprised that the tools don’t structure things around this experience. Sometimes they allow you to assign due dates to items on a list so you can simulate a list for today. The reality is that tasks I want to do today usually aren’t “due” today. They may just be what I’m planning. When I’m planning the next day, the things which I didn’t get done yesterday are not overdue and I don’t want it treating them like they are. At the same time, having just one list doesn’t let me plan a week nor does it easily show me what things I got done on various days to reflect on them. The only simple to-do list solution that I have found so far that understands this symmetry is TeuxDeux.

I realize I’m not the first to suggest using days and weeks for planning. I have come to realize how important these symmetries are to managing and reflecting on where we spend our time. On this quest for improving my attention management, I’ve found a lot of benefit in the Pilot Fire system. It understands the symmetry of planning and is a great system for thinking through the symmetries of life.

Several weeks ago, my friend and I were both talking about the nature of starting businesses. He mentioned a thought he sent me some thoughts:

Companies are both constructive and destructive forces. When a business creates a new way of looking at the world, it destroys the old to bring in the new. One brainstorm path is to ask which things you have an inner desire to destroy.

There is a bit of risk in setting out to destroy something big. However, this vision may be the most inspiring over the long-term. Think GNU’s GPL and how it has gathered many minds into its vision, so that even ardent capitalists like me have come to almost expect there to be free software of every genre.

This theme is not new – just ask the journalism industry what Google/Craigslist is doing to newspaper sales. Google and Craigslist didn’t actively set out to destroy the newspaper industry, so much as provide a better way of accessing information and classified ads.

When we are starting a business, we spent most of our time building, adding, and creating. Sometimes though, we should be consciously thinking about disassembling, subtracting, and destroying. Maybe not only removing the things we’ve built, but also looking outside our company to see how we can destroy obstacles others are facing in their lives. Most of the time something is destroyed in the process of solving a problem in a new way. Identifying what is being destroyed can help us solve the problem better.

So whether you’re starting a company or working in an existing one, if you’re creating something new, have you thought about what you’re destroying and why?

[Related Post: The Art of Trimming & In Search Of Simplicity ]