Scott Berkun's Blog, page 51

Notes from Failcon 2012 – part 1

Here are my notes from Failcon 2012, a conference about learning from failure. You regular readers know I love to write and study failure (see what to do when things go wrong).

I’ve been looking forward to this event for month. I hope to write up notes about most of the talks.

#1. Chip Conley, former CEO of Joie De Vivre Hotels, spoke about the role of emotions in failure and success.

Survived 2000 downturn and the great receision
Decided to reinterpret Maslow’s hiearchy into something simpler: Survive / Succeed / Transform
Which led to Money / Recognition / Sense of meaning, as the basis for their compensation model
Two useful equations:

Despair = suffering – meaining
Anxiety = Uncertainty x Powerlessness

Late in his career he felt like a prisoner in his own company.  ”I didn’t want to be CEO anymore”. He offered that personal crisis follows business crisis. Some of his friends that are entrepreneurs committed suicide, his son was put in prison, and he fainted on stage during a talk. He wrote his new book as a CEO who didn’t understand emotions and failure forced him to reevaluate.

He refered to Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning as a book that helped him.

#2: Suneel Gupta (GroupOn): The Case Against Someday.

I really wish he didn’t use Prezi. It didn’t him as a speaker at all. Some of his slides were unreadable too (low contrast text over background image = readability fail). He’s a fine speaker technically, but his material was a collection of tips and stories that needed more structure for me to follow. I had a hard time capturing his talk for that reason.

He told a story about working for Clinton. He was asked, as an intern, to close the door, by Rahm Imanuel, after Clinton entered the room. Gupta was so distracted by being in front of Clinton he completely forgot.
The second act is the scariest and unsexiest act of a startup.
He showed a video clip of Brian Glazer on the Charlie Rose show, who thought he could jump from being a law clerk to being a producer. He was told what ‘do you have? money? power? No, you have nothing.’ He was told to grab a piece of paper and start writing, and that was something he could own.
Parkinsons law is critical in the first act, because it helps you get to the second act, which many startups struggle to get to.
He showed a study of books written by Republicans and Democrats, and how narrow and separate the sources were (Was the point confirmation bias? I wasn’t sure. He went fast here so I couldn’t catch a name to look up online for more details.)
Interaction > Opinion – watching users gives a better perspective than people talking about what they think users will do (nod to basic user research methods).
Then he showed an embarrassing video of GroupOn employees doing a Gangam Style video. I really don’t know why he showed this. I think he was making a point about treating people well, but I’m not sure.
He finished by offering it’s amazing to work on the web, and in 2012, because we can fail very quickly and learn, unlike entrepreneurs in other fields and eras

 

Poll Results: Would you work from home?

Thanks to all 524 people who voted. All the data is in. Here are the results.

Of the 341 people not currently working from home:

63% of you said you’d work from home if you could
37% said you wouldn’t

Of the total 524 respondents:

33% already work from home 
Since many of my readers work in tech fields, this is likely much higher than average

And some of you have magical powers:

14 people voted “my work transcends space and time”
I can use your help the next time I have a book to promote

Observations from the comments:

Many talked about hybrids (Reffel, Archer, Duff ), suggesting if the question was worded “work from home some of the time” more people might have said yes
Several commenters flagged the culture as critical. Some work cultures would make this easier than others.
For some it’s personal – Elizabeth felt  it’s important to have strict lines dividing work and home.
It’s job dependent: some jobs are much harder to do remotely.
A top concern was perception of performance – the fear that if you worked from home, it’d be harder to prove you were working hard/effectively

Thanks everyone.

 

Quote of the day

The Brooklyn Bridge is one of my favorite buildings. I’ve studied its history and the story of how it was built is also a favorite.

Here’s a great quote from one of the bridge’s engineers:

Man is after all a finite being in capacities and powers of doing actual work. but when it comes to planning, one mind can in a few hours think out enough work to keep a thousand men employed for years.     -Washington Roebling

Here’s an essay I wrote about design, engineering and the Brooklyn Bridge.

Would you work from home if you could? (Poll)

As part of research for the book, I’m curious about general perceptions of working from home.

Assuming you could keep your same job and pay, would you work from home instead of working in an office?

Leave a comment about why you chose your answer.

Take Our Poll

 

New site is live: report any issues here

Thanks for bearing with us. The new design is live and the basics are working.

We’re working on fixing the twitter/fb/feed buttons, and the mailing list signup form.

If you find other issues, from broken links or things blowing up, please report them here. Thanks.

Can self-awareness be taught?

A twitter conversation with Alyssa Fox reminded me of the self-awareness paradox.

It’s funny how sci-fi movies like the Terminator make a big deal about a computer becoming self-aware. It’d be bigger news if most people became self aware. Most of us aren’t aware of ourselves at all. We have an imagined version of who we are, but it’s at best incomplete. And while I can’t claim to be self aware, I can claim to be serious about trying. That commitment is what I think answers my question: you can maybe teach someone to be self-aware, or help them along the way, but only if they are serious about the pursuit.

We all tend to reject negative things we hear in favor of positive ones, even if the negative ones are more accurate. Learning about our blind spots, weaknesses or insecurities is emotionally difficult. For some people even reading about cognitive bias, which effects all of us, is shocking and depressing. As children we develop ways to avoid uncomfortable situations and information, and it’s part of how we’re able to survive. But those patterns grow too strong. It’s easy to blame other people, at least in our own minds, for many disappointments we experience in life that are our own damn fault.

Anyone who offers the complete and difficult truth is easy to avoid in favor of those who tell us exactly what we want to hear, however limited or untrue it is.

Of course some elements of self-awareness are positive. We all have the potential to do things we don’t think we can. Discovery requires risk and life provides chances for everyone to make their own positive discoveries. But there are natural rewards for seeking those kinds of self awareness. It’s easier for people in our lives to reach out and tell us the good things about us we don’t notice, rather than the weak spots they bet we’re sensitive to and are therefore afraid to try and tell us.

There are many methods that can help an interested person in learning more about themselves:

Meditation
Keeping a journal (and reading it periodically)
Traveling alone
Trying new experiences that challenge you
Seeing a therapist
Asking close friends ‘What am I not aware of about myself?’

Many of these are scary and for good reason as more self-awareness, for better and worse, awaits on the other side.

But for any of these to work requires you to want to be more self-aware. A teacher can only provide the opportunity, not the commitment. It’s easy to do any of these things without conviction. “Yes, I tried meditation. Didn’t work.” But why didn’t it work? That’s the question someone serious would ask. Or what does the teacher suggest might work? What if the thing you need to become aware of is that you give up too easily? How can you ever learn that if you don’t know it?

Even with persistence, it’s convenient to wait until the hard parts of an experience arises, right where a discovery is available to us, and reject it before we risk getting hurt. We’re great at inventing logical reasons to cover for the things we’re scared of. Fear is twice as powerful when we call it by other names.

Having spend many years in teaching roles I’ve experienced enough students who simply did not want to learn that I can’t put the burden on the teacher. Or perhaps I simply wasn’t a good enough teacher for them to want to learn? I have no doubt that’s true. But no teacher can reach every student.

Self-awareness, the trickiest thing to develop, is a paradox: to become more self-aware, you have to be aware enough about yourself to know you need to know yourself better. How can anyone possibly teach this to anyone else?

Do you think you are self-aware? Do you think self-awareness can be taught? How?

How to be good at anything

There are only 4 steps:

Do it
Get feedback on how you suck
Study how to improve at where you suck
Repeat

People tell me this is obvious. But it’s ok to be obvious. Knowing and doing are different. Many people know many obvious things they completely fail to do, despite their knowledge.

If someone tells me they want to write, I ask “how much do you write now?” If they say, I don’t really, I say “Go write something. Anything.” There’s often a look of great fear. They’re afraid to even try. Their ego has made just trying something very expensive, when it should be very cheap given how little they’ve done it.

If they tell me they’ve written, I ask them how they suck. If they don’t know, I tell them to get feedback from someone who sucks less than they do. None of this is complicated. It’s not even expensive. The problem is everyone wants to skip steps 1 through 4. No one in history has ever become good at something by skipping these steps, yet everyone wants to try.

Another good question: is how many hours are you willing to spend to become good? It won’t necessarily take 10,000 hours, as that number is mostly just satisfying to say. But it will take many hours. How many? Depends on how good you want to be, and how lucky you are.

For most skills you can do #2 and #3 on your own. Read you own writing. Watch a video of yourself speaking. If you have read good writing, and watched good speakers, you can easily identify your bad habits. A coach or a teacher can help you move through these steps faster, but you can do them on your own, for free, with enough courage and persistence, two things everyone knows about, but few people have.

(This post partially inspired by a chat with Eric Barker and an email from Maria Brody)

 

Related posts:
Nothing is obvious to everyone
How hard to immigrate into the U.S.? Awesome flowchart
Ideas vs. Time: how long does an idea take to develop?
Need a new writing tool: help?
From the mailbag: Best request ever for writing advice

Quote of the week

Here’s the quote of the week:

We’re all going to die, all of us. What a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

- Charles Bukowski

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The history of religion: explained

I have a fascination with religious history. It’s a fantastic lens on the history of civilization. I’ve never had much faith, but the history of it, and the details of various scriptures have held me fascinated for years. The way the roots of all religions wind together mythology, history, culture, selfishness, compassion, wisdom and ignorance is an amazing way to understand our species.

A few weeks ago I visited Israel. I spent three amazing days in Jerusalem. On returning, my passion for history was rekindled and many books I’ve read since I returned were about religion and religious history.

The prize gem of this research has been one book: Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths by Karen Armstrong. It focuses on religions that trace back to Abraham, so there is no coverage of Hinduism, Buddhism, or other beliefs, but many of the lessons I learned from Armstrong have clear applications to any system of belief. The book is short, powerful and well written.

The book uses the city of Jerusalem, a central place in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as the focal point for history of all three faiths. From the shift from paganism to early Judiasm of the Old testament, to the birth of Christ and the diaspora of the Jews, to the rise of Islam, and the centuries of fights over a very small piece of land, many of the questions you’ve had are answered here.

Armstrong focuses on history, not faith. She clearly has knowledge of all three religions, as those are discussed, but her intent is to provide a balanced view not dependent on a particular belief. The book has been criticized by some for it’s lack of balance, but I found her view, as someone with little at stake, impressively fair . Her main bias seems to be towards compassion and against violence, as she critiques everyone when they fall short of their own scripture in this regard.

Some of the facts I enjoyed most were:

Early Christians used the fish as their sign (a symbol of peace and miracles). After the Roman’s codified the religion, the cross became the sign, a sign Constantine associated with war (Hey, he was a Roman.)
The Christian focus on the cross, and crucifixion, began only around 400 A.D with the ‘discovery’ of the true cross. This returned the focus of the religion back to Jerusalem, and began the waves of pilgrims that would eventually lead to the Crusades.
Jerusalem has been destroyed over 40 times, and has changed hands as many times.
There were many other gospels. The Romans and church leaders decided which to include and reject under Constantine in 325 A.D.
There have been periods of peace and tolerance by each faith somewhere in the history of Jerusalem, including between Jews and Muslims (tolerance of other faiths is supported by all three scriptures).
Powerful leaders in all the faiths have been incredibly petty at times, sometimes horribly cruel, contradicting the compassion in their faith.
The core tenets of all three faiths are incredibly similar, a reflection of the derivation from the same source stories.

I’ve always wished every citizen of the world had to take a short course in comparative religion. It would stop a lot of violence. This book would make a fantastic start.  If you have any curiosity about the links between faiths, I highly recommend this book.

Related posts:
The founding fathers and their faith
9 ways to understand how ideas spread
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On Free Speech vs. Religious Respect: in five sentences
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Are design exercises in interviews unethical?

Recently my friend Jared Spool posted on twitter about why it’s wrong to give interview candidates design exercises:

Asking a candidate to perform a design exercise so you can “see how they handle the pressure” is unethical.  #DanceMonkeyDance  @jmspool (#)

This split me right down the line.

First, I think most interviews are bullshit. There’s little evidence interviewing identifies better candidates than other methods do, it’s just one we are all familiar with, and it’s easy, so we do it. Any questioning of job interview practices makes me happy, since we put great faith in something we’ve never examined that is filled with bias. Some interviewers are sadists who never have to justify their cruelty since it’s never questioned.

The ideal way to hire is to use referrals and references of people you trust in your line of work to arrive at candidates. And then, to hire a candidate to do a small project for you where they can demonstrate their ability. That is the best interview in the universe since it is based on what they can actually do for you on real work, rather than an absurdly artificial interview loop of mostly cliche conversations.  To do this requires more work and is less efficient, but I’m convinced the results are dramatically better.

However, assuming I’m required to interview candidates, there’s value in asking people to show their ability to do tasks I’m going to hire them to do. If they were a painter, I’d ask them to give their opinion of the paintings in my office. If they were a carpenter, I’d ask them to evaluate the furniture in the room. I’d pick something real, in the present, where their abilities and knowledge should apply, and get out of their way. “How would you make this better?”  and hand them a whiteboard pen and step back. I’d want to see what questions they ask and what they know about what they need to know before they can design something. I can do this in a friendly way, and at natural points politely disagree with them, just as I would if we worked together.

The idea of “see how they handle the pressure” is a tricky one. Most work environments are not designed around designers. To be successful a designer needs to be willing and able to persuade, convince and persist in selling or defending ideas. While I’m not certain there is a reliable way to test if a person is capable of doing this during an interview, it’s my job as an interviewer to try. I have to find places to challenge and ask tough, but fair, questions, to let them demonstrate their conviction in their ideas. As well as their ability to change their minds and learn from new information.

Or put another way, if I were hiring an Air Traffic Controller, I’d need to know they can handle the stress of being an Air Traffic Controller. It wouldn’t be unethical for me to expect them to demonstrate something of what I need to see to know they are credible. While the means I use to get this information could be unethical, my interest in getting that data isn’t – it can’t be. It’d be unethical to all the passengers of all those airplanes if I hired someone without even attempting to learn about their abilities for a key part of the job.

All of this is obviously more abstract and collaborative than having them build a chair, or paint or a portrait, while I yelled at them through a megaphone while timing  them with a stopwatch. That’s a game show, not a job interview. But if done right a design exercise is a chance for them to lead the conversation through a problem. And if leading the way through a problem is something expected of them in the job, it’s reasonable to provide an opportunity for them to do it during the interview process.

Related: my essay on how to use an hour to interview creatives for a job

Related posts:
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