Monthly Archives: October 2018

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The Work so far this week

I was interested in how good my outline would be for supporting a vomitout.  My hope was that it would be satisfactory, but in fact it’s turning out not so good.

Looking back, I padded the outline with bullet points that were not fleshed out enough to be real guidelines to the drafting.

For example, I had a bullet called “Tragedy of the Commons”.  Not a bad idea, but I needed more detail on just how I would move that theme forward in the draft, and, when I got to that part today, I didn’t have a clue.

What I’ve ended up doing is falling back on more reading and research instead of using the time today for drafting.  Not the most terrible outcome in the world, but I’ll know better the next time I do an outline for a book :-).

Another thing that’s emerging: I’m not treating the subject matter as if it were self-help.  Having a self-help orientation to this book has always been a touch problematic.  All of the 7 problems could be treated as observations about society as well as self-help, and my kneejerk reaction in this draft so far has been to treat the material as “current events”.

In part I set myself up for it because of the way I kicked off the chapter.

My scheme was to kick off each chapter with a master anecdote that sets the theme for the chapter and frames the big issues in a vivid way.

I started off this chapter, on Individual Wealth and Commonwealth, with a depiction of the Trump election in 2016.  Vivid enough, certainly, but hardly the master anecdote for a chapter in a self-help book.  Starting with such an anecdote cried out for a more social or political treatment, and that’s the way the draft has skewed.

I’m getting good stuff out, and I think there’s a lot I can use, but I’m a little nervous about reasserting the self-help focus of the book.

All of the 7 problems are big social problems — in one way or another — with a “social” aspect and a “self-improvement” aspect.  I think I’m going to have to balance them somehow, since I don’t want to leave all the social observations out.

Well, work in progress…

One bit of good news as well: I’m finding an interesting thread in the Tragedy of the Commons stuff.  It turns out that the Tragedy of the Commons is closely related to the game-theory game called Prisoner’s Dilemma.  There’s an very interesting thread of stuff from game theory on both PD and TofC.  Herb Gintis’ book Game Theory Evolving has a terrific chapter on the topics and what they say about individual wealth and commonwealth.  So that’s all goodness.  Gintis’ book is from 2000, and he’s gone on with the topics of cooperation and competition, so there’s grist for the research mill there.

Onward and upward.

7 Hard Problems, Lifehacking, Tradecraft

Mastering a Subject Quickly, 80/20-style

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I’ve gotten pretty good over the last twenty years at mastering a subject quickly.  I want to share some of my tips.

I used this skill as a VC to rapidly understand a new business sector.  One of the joys and terrors of working in early-stage tech companies is understanding new stuff that comes along:

  1. What It Is: New technologies don’t come with a user manual.  It takes a lot of people experimenting in a lot of different directions to figure out even what a new discovery is.
  2. What It Can Do: Once you figure out what it is, you need to know what it can be used for, which involves trying it out in a bunch of different business areas.  Usually a new technology comes with some assumptions about what it’s good for, but these are often wrong and need to be revisited.  Again, a lot of people do these experiments.
  3. How It Fits In: Last is figuring out how the innovation will become the Next Big Thing in one of the sectors where it’s good for something.  By this time the innovation is usually known to the sector, but it is not (yet) well-known; in particular it is not known what the business of bringing it to market will have to be.

I’m fond of using the PC as an example of these three stages when I teach classes in innovation and entrepreneurship.  In the case of the PC:

  1. Microprocessors arose out of calculator chips
  2. It took a while to figure out that you could make a general-purpose Turing Machine out of a calculator chip because it took a while to figure out why you might want such a thing
  3. The fledgling PC was “unlimited in its uses”, meaning no one had a use for it… Until Dan Bricklin wrote VisiCalc and the spreadsheet was born.
  4. The PC went from “Nice to Have” to “Must Have”.

So, let’s say you come along in Phase 2 or 3 (which is often the case with an innovation) and you want to know, “what’s happening with PCs”?  Here are some steps I’ve found useful:

  1. Find the right search terms to exhaustively trawl the ‘net about the subject.  The right search terms are ideally MECE (a McKinsey-ism: “Mutually Exclusive/Collectively Exhaustive”.  None of the terms describes any of the others, and together they describe all the entities.  What mathematicians would call a “basis,” a linearly-independent spanning set.  Finding these search terms involves a lot of experimentation.  Each experiment yields a broader set of relevant search results until you reach a point of diminishing returns, where additional search terms either don’t add new pages or add “false-positive” results.
  2. Use the search terms to find 3 good reviews of the topic, preferably not by deep technologists but by journalists or other good generalists.  Nothing wrong with technology mavens but journalists are quicker to see connections between the technology and potential business uses.
  3. Talk to one or more of these sources.  Presto, you’re an expert, or at least you can play one on TV.

Some giants have also worked this territory.

I want to particularly call out Tim Ferriss, whose Four Hour Chef book is subtitled “The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything [emphasis added], and Living the Good Life.”  Ferriss discusses some very similar approaches to characterizing the key elements in a subject area.  Read his book.

I’ve also read books by Josh Kaufman (“The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything”) and Joshua Waitzkin (“The Art of Learning”).  Waitzken’s book is much deeper and more inward-looking, but both are of interest.

Enjoy!

7 Hard Problems

Cabinet of Curiosities: “Freedom Road”

While I was looking at “Black Reconstruction”, I was reminded of a novel about Reconstruction written by Howard Fast called “Freedom Road”.

Full disclosure: I’ve never read FR.  But the gloss I received about it years ago was that it dramatized the attempts of a multi-racial commune to set up in post-Civil-War South Carolina.

Howard Fast was a bit of a Leftie, and served 3 months in jail during the McCarthy era for not “naming names”.  In jail he began his best-known work, Spartacus, the movie of which, with Kirk Douglas,  was a fixture of my youth.

I finally did purchase a copy recently, and it’s sitting on the list of things to be read.  But the couple of dips I took into the book (I almost always look at the end of the book, for reasons I’m not going to go into now; I also looked at the beginning and another place) looked like well-written, good story, page-turner.

Googling the book this morning, I realized that it was made into a TV mini-series in the ’70’s, starring, of all people, Muhammad Ali and Kris Kristofferson.  Seems like that mini-series might be worth a gander for the TV-oriented.

7 Hard Problems

Main Job for Work and Learning, week of October 28

I’ve got an ambitious goal for this week: vomitout the chapter in 7Hard on “Individual Wealth vs. Commonwealth”.   This is the first substantive chapter of the book — after the (hopefully) engaging introductory section — and it raises some themes, like the sorry history of the 20th Century with respect to justice, human rights, and welfare, which persist through several of the Laws.

I’m looking over the outline, which I wrote over the month of October, which will guide this process, and I’m sorry to say I’m a little disappointed with the quality of the guidance it’s going to give to the next phase.

If you’ve ever worked on a multi-stage “knowledge worker” kind of project — a software release, a big report, etc., I’m sure you know the drill: optimize for making the current phase look good.  In this case, I was racing to check off the todo-list item “finish outline” and, frankly, I cut corners to do so.  For example, there’s a bullet in the outline for WEALTH (as we’ll call the chapter this week) saying “The Tragedy of the Commons”.  That’s great, and I kind of sort of know what to say about it, but it’s the minimum possible placeholder for that part of the outline.  The sad thing is that the outline is chock-full of minimum possible placeholders.  Sigh.

In any case, I sort of know what I want to say, which is good, so I’m going to get on with it.

In addition, I have a target of opportunity this week.  I got Black Reconstruction by W.E.B. DuBois (BR) out of the library and I’ve got three weeks to read it and get it back.

(My algorithm for a book is 1) try to get it out of the library 2) try to get it used 3) get it new.  I could eventually spring for this book, but let’s see how the race to read it goes.  It’s not bad to have a forcing function on reading a book.  Focuses the attention.)

BR is a classic of U.S. history.  DuBois was the first scholar to claim that Reconstruction — the post Civil-War period where Union troops  were occupying the South and enforcing an interim government — was not a disaster of Yankee greed coupled with Southern progressive incompetence — but was actually a success which was ended by the premature de-occupation of the South before the work could be finished.

I believe it’s impossible to understand the history of the U.S. without understanding slavery and white supremacy, which continue to vex us today.  DuBois is an essential reading on the road to understanding those issues.

BR is related to WEALTH, as it is related to other sections in the book.  I can’t pretend that it “belongs” in this week’s workload, but it isn’t utterly out of place.

I’ve been doing the main Deep Work in the morning, which means fitting in things like reading BR in the afternoon, not my sharpest time for reading.  I’ll need something to keep me from nodding out.

I’ll keep you posted on progress on the writing, and the reading.

 

Lifehacking, Personal Information Management, Workhacking

Hack of the Week: 5-day Sprints

What I want to do on Friday is kick back a little from the intensity of the Deep Work by finding some cool hack that I think would be of interest to my fellow life- and work- hackers.

I figured we needed some ground rules, so:

  1. The Hack needs to have come to my attention in the previous week, since the previous Friday.  I’m not as au courant as I used to be, but I still see a lot of stuff slosh by.  Requiring any hack I tout to be recent seems like a service to all of you.
  2. I have to be using it, or want to be using it or noodling how to use it.  If it’s of academic interest, let’s leave it to the academics.
  3. Slight prejudice in favor of non-app hacks.  In my entrepreneurship courses almost every student idea takes the form of an app even if the app is somewhat negative for the use case.

We may need more ground rules as we go along.

With that framing, my Hack of the Week this week is 5-day sprints.

I read about 5-day sprints in “Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days” by Jake Knapp, John Zeransky, and Braden Kowitz from Google Ventures

The basic idea is kind of a mashup of Agile and Lean Startup:

  • Monday through Thursday, devote all the hours between 10-5 100% for working through a structured process for generating a solution to a pressing problem for the team.
  • Friday is then “customer reaction day” (from 9-5).  The day is spent finding out what real “customers” (those who would use the solution) think of the solution generated.
  • So there’s a looming deadline all week supplying urgency.  And there’s a 100% dedication of the team that’s working the problem to… working the problem.  So there’s focus.

What gets my juices going is the idea of applying this to my own weekly “sprints”.  I’m not a team and I differ in many respects from the examples discussed in the book.  But I believe that structure — and specifically some of the structured ideas worked out in the book — are going to make my sprints more productive.

Check out Sprint.  Let me know what you think.  Have a great weekend.

7 Hard Problems, Platform

How The Work Went This Week

It’s Thursday, which in my week is the conclusion of the Deep Work sprint for the week, and time to sum up how things went.

The main goal this week was to vomitout a part of my book proposal on “Why I’m the Right Person to Write ‘7 Hard Problems'”.

Good news:

  1. I did vomitout the “Right Person” section.  It’s just a vomitout so far ( and therefore not ready for prime time), so I’m going to hold it back for the moment, but I did do it.
  2. I got a lot of good ideas about more general platform stuff, like how to work with an online group of followers that’s small.  The basic scheme is to always add value to the crewe even you can’t deliver much value from having a big network.  I think I can add value to people who follow me by doing some of the things I’ve done in the past that have invited engagement: talking about what I’m thinking about, talking deeply about PIM issues and PIM technologies, and generally trying to be interesting to my virtual committee here on line.

Things didn’t go as well in a couple of other areas:

  1. TED Talks.  I’m still not sure I understand how to use them as part of my work.  I think it’d be a kick to do a TED talk, and it might make a big difference to me, but it’s also a lot of effort and maybe that effort should just be poured into the book.
  2. Finish Althusser.  I made progress, but didn’t read much this week and didn’t finish “Lenin and Philosophy”.  I got bogged down in a sub-dither about whether or not I had to read Hegel, and progress forward ground to a halt.
  3. Finishing the Jungian shrink book “Finding Meaning…”.    I did finish it, but there was something very unsatisfying about this book.  Partly has to do with what I’ll call the repetitive vagueness of his prose.  Jung is a bit vague from time to time, but never repetitive and always interesting.  Serves me right for accepting a stand-in for the man himself.  I’m going to move forward by reading a couple of things of Jung’s: “Memories, Dreams, Reflections”, and a Modern Library collection, “The Basic Writings of CG Jung.”  I’ve read them before, so I may bag it if it seems like I’m not getting anything new out of the exercise.

So, a good week for the Work, a good first outing for the “blog every day” scheme.

Tomorrow’s blog is “Hack of the Week”, another (I hope!) regular feature of some cool tech- or Life- hack I think might be newsworthy and interesting.

Let me know what you liked or didn’t like, want more of or less of.

Lifehacking, Workhacking

Mediating between two worlds may be a good career strategy

As a software engineer in Silicon Valley in the ’80’s and ’90’s, when our skills were deeply in demand (and the Flat World hadn’t happened yet), my salary crept up from job to job.  Not nothing, but maybe 100% increase over 20 years.  Not much year over year.

Starting in the late ’90’s, I switched to jobs where I was helping another group with technology.  First I was a Thought Leader (whatever that is) at PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Global Technology Centre, and then I was a VC at Valhalla Partners.  Over that 20-year stretch my salary went up 3x.  300%.

Why?  I think it’s the difference between cost-based and value-based price for my labor power.  As a software engineer, I was very good, but essentially I was a cost to my employers.  The less they paid me the lower the cost.  As a Thought Leader and a VC I was harder to price.  People tended to pay me a percentage of the value I was adding to their “product”, which worked out to a much sweeter deal.

I don’t know if this story constitutes a proof that mediating between two worlds is a better career strategy than being a star within one.  But I suspect it’s true.  And I recommend it to you.

7 Hard Problems, Platform

Readings so far on “Why I’m the right person to write 7 Hard Things”

I started on this problem by reading:

  1. Books and articles on how to give a TED talk (and a tiny bit about why)
  2. Books and articles about building an online platform, particularly for a writer or “thought leader” (not my favorite phrase although it is exact).
  3. Articles about measuring my online platform

It was easy to come up with a fair amount of reading on both topics, but it was pretty low-grade ore.

I was looking for things that were thoughtful and told me stuff I didn’t already know.

One article stood out:

“How to Launch Your Digital Platform”, by Harvard Business Review.  An older article (2015?) but good advice, particularly further along in the article.  My online platform has seen better days (like when I was an investor), so I was quite interested in suggestions about how to manage small numbers of users.  The trick there, it seems, is to give them something of value even though they don’t experience the grand Network Effect.

Here’s a little schematic from the article which summarizes some of the interesting points.

Let me know if you’ve seen anything good on platforms, measurement, or TED.

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Cabinet of Curiosities: Claude Levi-Strauss

In Show Your Work, his terrific book on online presence,  Austin Kleon suggests, among many many other things, that a blogger might write about something from his or her “Cabinet of Curiosities” every once in a while.

I want to do a CofC entry every Monday if I can (because I won’t yet have much to say about my work for the week but I probably will have yet another curiosity to unfold).  So here goes CofC #1

I’m reading Claude Levi-Strauss for reasons having to do with 7 Hard Problems.  He is a very important “structuralist” thinker from the mid-20th century, and structuralism was very important in forming my views.  Louis Althusser, whom I’ll be writing more about this week, was also a structuralist, although, as he would point out, a “materialist” one instead of an “idealist” one like Levi-Strauss.

What’s the difference between a materialist and an idealist, you say?  Materialists believe that objective reality is more important than our minds.  Idealists believe that our minds are more important than objective reality.  Extreme idealists believe that external reality is a figment of our imaginations.

Levi-Strauss wasn’t that bad, but he did believe that he could figure out universal laws of thought.  And his scheme for doing so was to investigate the myths of “primitive” peoples, mostly from South America (where he had done fieldwork as an anthropologist).

What I’m doing is slogging through “The Raw and the Cooked”, a Levi-Strauss production containing things like this (his opening sentence):

The aim of this book is to show how empirical categories — such as the categories of the raw and the cooked, the fresh and the decayed, the moistened and the burned, etc., which can only be accurately defined by ethnographic observation and, in each instance, by adopting the standpoint of a particular culture — can nonetheless be used as conceptual tools with which to elaborate abstract ideas and combine them in the form of propositions.

Aside from soliciting your sympathy for what a tough job I have, I’m pointing this out because of this grand objective: to illuminate universal laws of thought.

Another Levi-Strauss work, “Tristes Tropiques” (shown above) is much more accessible, and is essentially like Darwin’s “Voyage of the Beagle”, an aid to understanding the man and his quest behind the work.

Could you live a long and happy life without reading either of these Levi-Strauss books?  For sure.

But hopefully I’ve aroused your curiosity enough to go to the Levi-Strauss Wikipedia page and have a gander.

(BTW, not certain if he has any connection to the Levi Strauss of jeans fame whom we know a bit better…)

7 Hard Problems, Lifehacking

Themes for work and learning, week of Oct 21

I’ve decided to reboot my “themes for study and learning” blogs, with a couple of twists:

  1. Weekly instead of Monthly.  I wasn’t getting much of anywhere with the monthly themes; they were too diffuse and too easy to put off.  A weekly rhythm is more actionable?
  2. The Theme is tied to my weekly main goal.

So this week the main goal is vomitout a section for my book proposal on “Why I’m the Right Person to Write ‘7 Hard Problems.”

Perhaps some context is in order.

I’ve decided to get serious this fall about a book project I’ve blogged about in the past: “7 Hard Problems”, a book about solving a bevy of difficult personal and societal problems — the contradiction between individual wealth and the common wealth, for example, or global vs. local.  You can read the one-pager if you like.

The first order of business was to finish the one-pager, which I did early in the summer.   This fall I’m trying to put together a book proposal.  I’ve got an outline and a fair amount of sample material, so it’s time to work on other sections of the book proposal.

I’ve put off working on what I call the braggables section of the proposal — how many followers I have, how peerless my insights are, why any publisher would be foolish to refuse me — because I have a hard time bragging about myself, but it is time to put it off no longer.

So I’m starting this week with an easier braggable section, something about why I’m the right person to write this book.

That’s the work theme for the week.  I’m going to slog away at it Monday through Thursday.

Part of slogging away is reading some stuff about publicity, about self-promotion, and about platforms online and off-.  So I’ll be digging into the publishing/TED talk/platform/persona literature this week, starting with stuff about how to do TED talks and how they help the publicity effort.  If you have suggestions in this area, please comment.

In addition to working away at the theme, I’m continuing my reading for the book itself.  I’ve been reading Lenin and Philosophy (or, rather, re-reading it, since I read it many years ago under circumstances I explain in “7 Hard”).  There’s a handsome new edition out now with a generous preface by Frederic Jameson.  So that’s reading objective #2 for the week: finish Althusser.

Finally, I’m wrapping up a book I’ve been reading before bed, “Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life…” by James Hollis, a Jungian shrink.  I’ve been reading about a book a week on the topic of “what the hell to do with myself in ‘retirement'”, and picked this one because I’ve always had a soft spot for Jung and because it was recommended by another book I read in this area.  Hollis has taken much more than a week to finish, partly because his style is a little ponderous, but partly because it doesn’t take long for me to fall asleep at the end of a day.

So that’s it.  This week, trying to set out why I’m the right person to write “7 Hard Problems”.

I’ll sum up how things went on Thursday.