A Learning a Day

There are stretches when, for a mix of reasons, I notice myself operating from a place of confidence. And there are stretches when I’m walking around with a knot in my stomach, tuned into everything that could go wrong.

Over time I’ve noticed these states are never caused by one thing. It’s always a confluence, some of it in my control, most of it not. An unexpected argument, a couple of customers having a bad week, and suddenly I’m in a more nervous place.

I used to think the useful move was figuring out the cause and trying to shift the state. I don’t think that anymore. What’s actually useful is noticing the state I’m in and using it for what it’s naturally good at.

Confidence is a good window for taking on something new, something that feels a little risky.

Nervousness is a good window for exactly the opposite: running premortems, getting paranoid about the right things, going after the projects that are quietly worrying me.

I can’t always line up my work with the state I’m in. But when I can, it’s worth doing.

I’ve started thinking of these as internal weather. They don’t last as long as real seasons, but the same logic applies. There’s no point complaining about a heat wave, or wishing summer becomes winter. You just do the things that make sense for the season you’re in.

I’ve been slowly working through Rafa, the Netflix documentary on Nadal. As a casual tennis fan, I’ve always admired his fighting spirit, but the documentary brings home just how much he suffered to get there.

He played almost his entire career with Müller-Weiss syndrome, a degenerative condition in his left foot, since being diagnosed in 2005. It’s the kind of chronic injury that would have ended most careers early. He played through it anyway, for two decades, and became one of the greatest players the sport has ever seen.

I’ve written before about how Nadal’s fight makes him a remarkable role model, and this documentary only deepens that view.

But the other learning it left me with is this: cultivating a high threshold for pain, in whatever we do, is a serious and durable competitive advantage.

The simplest way to improve our performance is by improving our attitude.

I came across an interesting study out of Singapore that tracked children’s screen time from age one to eight, then measured their academic performance and working memory years later. Two things stood out:

• Even after adjusting for other factors, screen time at age one, at eighteen months, and at age six was still linked to weaker academic performance years later.
• Total screen time across childhood was consistently tied to lower academic performance, and the earliest exposure, in infancy, showed the strongest effect of all.

This is an observational study (vs. a causal study). And, before we draw definite conclusions, you want many studies pointing the same direction. But directionally, it’s intuitive.

I was at a restaurant recently and watched a family having lunch with their one-year-old, a loud YouTube show blasting the whole time. My first thought was, this is wild. My second was, how does this become acceptable?

My guess is that, in time, we’ll look back on this one the way we look back on smoking on airplanes.

“We become ready only when we have to be.” | Katara, Avatar: The Last Airbender

Truth

A simple way to build better presentations: don’t start with the presentation. Start by writing out the logic, the storyboard, and the narrative. Get that right before you touch a single slide.

The same holds true working with AI. These tools are fantastic at visualizing difficult concepts, building things that would’ve taken hours in minutes. But the art isn’t in the visualization. It’s in the rigorous thinking underneath, the insight that decides what’s even worth visualizing.

Get the foundation right first. The visuals that follow will be better for it.

There’s an old line about internet businesses: if the product is free, you’re the product. It’s catchy, but not quite right. The simpler way to understand consumer internet systems is to look at advertiser incentives.

You’re not the product. But you are who the advertiser is trying to reach, and that’s where the money comes from and that’s the outcome the product is architected for.

On a feed, the goal is to keep you scrolling, because more scrolling means more views, and more views means more clicks, and clicks are what most advertisers actually pay for.

If you’re searching, the incentive is subtler: worsen relevance just enough that paying for placement matters, but not so much that the product breaks. Advertisers pay for ranking and prominence, and that only works if money can distort the results a little. Good search systems maintain a line money can’t cross.

Once you see feeds and search this way, the rest of their design makes sense.

Three takeaways: Be intentional about any feed you choose to consume. And, when there isn’t utility, make a point to avoid them. They’re built to be addictive, and willpower alone doesn’t hold up well against that for long.

Second, with search, remember that placement is bought and organic relevance isn’t, so the top result and the best result aren’t always the same thing.

Finally, whenever you use a free product, understand the incentive underneath it. That will help you find the fastest way to get the best out of it.

I take public transport to work three days a week, which means I need to remember to pay for parking each morning. One day I forgot, and found a ticket waiting at the end of the day.

What struck me was that it was marked as a first warning. It wasn’t a fine, just a nudge. I appreciated it because it assumes good intent, and I love that a system was designed that way.

It got me thinking about how compliance systems could get even smarter. If they looked up my plate, they’d see I pay every single day. That track record should count for something, a reason to extend the benefit of the doubt.

The same logic could apply to fines. Someone who’s paid consistently for a year and slips once is clearly making a mistake. Someone on their fourth offense is a different story. I remember hearing that fines in Switzerland scale with income, so by your fifth offense, it can get expensive fast.

This is a lovely reminder that even something as simple as parking enforcement has room to be thoughtfully designed.

For every what, there often is an elegant how.

Groucho Marx once said he’d never want to belong to any club that would have him as a member. I think about that line often.

No matter where you are, at work or in your social life, there’s always some in-group that seems just out of reach. The one that seems to have more fun, discuss the more important things, sit closer to the center of whatever matters. It’s easy to turn life into an endless chase for the next one.

A better approach is to focus on what you’re actually solving for, and what you need to get there.

Beware chasing the next club and the next in-group.

If you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.

“If you look for the light, you can often find it. But if you look for the dark, that is all you will ever see.” | Uncle Iroh, Avatar: The Last Airbender

True in so many ways and across so many different contexts.