A Learning a Day

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.

I chuckle when people make big pronouncements about choices other people make about where they live or work.

“I will never live there” or “I will never work at that company” have way of being satisfying put downs.

Over the years I’ve come to see how much of this is just context and choices. If you’re truly in need, there’s very little you wouldn’t do. For most things, the honest answer is just that it depends.

And if you’re in a position where you don’t have to make choices you don’t want to make, that’s a privilege.

One worth being grateful for.

A couple of years ago, I switched to Charles Schwab for my checking account, and later moved some investment accounts over too. Back then, I remember being delighted that every time I called, they picked up in two rings. Such a different experience from every bank before it.

I called again recently, after a gap of well over a year. Two rings. Same as always.

It’s hard to express how much that delighted me. Perhaps it is made worse by the fact that I had to make a few such customer service calls in the meantime, and always end up blocking a minimum of 30 minutes to get through to a person.

Regardless, I’d recommend Schwab to anyone without hesitation. It’s not even close.

And I think it comes down to this: customer experience isn’t separate from the product. Done well, it is the product.

I was sprinting toward a gate, trying to make a connection. Our first flight had landed ninety minutes late, leaving ten minutes to make it. With a minute to spare, four other passengers and I made it to the gate, out of breath.

That’s when the gate agent decided to get snarky. Complaints, comments, no interest in helping. Eventually a supervisor walked over and she asked if she should process us.

Lucky for us, the supervisor knew the context and said yes.

It stuck with me because of how circumstantial power like that is. For a few minutes, this one person stood between five or six of us and our flight, through no fault of ours. And in that moment, she chose snark over empathy and chose to get in our way instead of getting out of it.

It is worth remembering for all of us for the next time we’re the ones holding that kind of circumstantial power that impacts someone else.

I was talking to a friend recently on the cusp of a big career decision, going back and forth on it. We discussed a lesson I picked up making my own version of this decision.

It’s tempting to use such conversations to seek validation. But nobody has as much information about your situation as you do, and in your heart of hearts, you usually already know which way you’re leaning.

So use the conversation differently. Ask people to stress-test the assumptions underneath the decision, not to bless the decision itself.

If you’re leaning toward yes, use that to do a premortem, go in with eyes open about everything that could go wrong.

If you’re leaning toward no, write out exactly what you’re assuming will hold true by staying.

Either way, you come out ahead. If it goes well, the premortem helps you get through the inevitable bad days. If it goes badly, you’ve learned something that makes your next decision better.

Outside of a partner, the only opinion that really matters on a career decision is the one belonging to the person who has to live with it. That’s you.

A good friend recently lost her father, and she shared a beautiful, poignant account of his final weeks.

He’d gone in for a checkup after some discomfort. The doctors found stage four cancer, already in the bone. A few days, maybe a few weeks if he was lucky. He asked one question: how sure are you?

Very sure, they said. In that case, he told them, no treatment. His daughter had some good bottles of wine. He’d rather spend his time enjoying those.

Then the doctors mentioned one option that might buy him a few extra weeks or months. He asked if he’d still be able to travel, to make it back to his hometown unassisted. Possibly, they said. He said he’d try it.

A couple of days in, he called his kids together and told them it wasn’t working. And instead of dwelling on that, he spent the time helping them sort out the logistics that would carry them through the months after he was gone.

Next, he said his goodbyes to them the next day. To his nineteen-year-old grandson, he said that when he looked back on his life, what he remembered most fondly were his adventures, the ones that worked and the ones that didn’t. He told him to make it a priority to have as many as he could.

Then he went to sleep, and his organs shut down one by one. As he loved science, my friend read to him about the miracle of engineering that is the human body. As she read to him, she saw it slowly diverting all energy from failing organ to the brain and finally the heart.

He passed the next day.

His grandson said it reminded him of the ending of the tale of the three brothers in the Harry Potter books.

And then he greeted Death as an old friend, and went with him gladly, and, equals, they departed this life.” — The Tale of the Three Brothers

The youngest brother, after a long and full life, finally takes off his cloak of invisibility, passes it to his son, and greets Death as an old friend, going with him gladly, as an equal.

Indeed.

It’s tempting, when you’re surrounded by people who all seem to be running the same race, to compare where you are against where they are.

But you don’t know their starting point.

You also don’t know where their finish line actually is.

And you have no idea if their path is a sprint, a marathon, or a cross-country run.