Month: November 2023

The central theme in Eduardo Briceno’s book “The Performance Paradox” is about creating environments with combine a focus on performance with a focus on learning.

Environments that are overly focused on performance burn people out. Environments who focus entirely on learning don’t succeed because learning happens best when there is some tension.

Two stories stuck out to me. The first was about Beyonce’s routine while she’s on tour. Every night on tour, she reviews the entire performance video. By the time her team wakes up the next morning, they would have received notes from Beyonce on the many things they all could have done better.

The next was from research by HBS professor Amy Edmondson examining error rates in hospitals. Logically, she hypothesized that more effective patient care teams made fewer errors.

But she found the opposite. It turns out the first step to solving errors is being aware of them and reporting them. The most effective teams created environments where everyone was encouraged to share mistakes and learn. More errors were a feature, not a bug.

Both of these point to what we can do to create learning environments on our teams. First, create frequent opportunities to reflect via “retros” (or retrospectives) that help everyone grow from mistakes and lessons learnt. Second, encourage conversations about mistakes. The more we’re aware of them, the more likely we’re learning from them.

I came across Charlie Munger’s notes for career success the other day –

• Don’t sell anything you wouldn’t buy yourself.
• Don’t work for anyone you don’t respect and admire.
• Work only with people you enjoy.

All three of them resonated.

We become like the people we work.

Choose wisely.

Being surprised when things go as per plan is a far more productive approach than the other way around.

One way to understand a person’s character is to pay attention to what they claim credit for.

Strategy is often better understood when we explain what we aren’t focusing on.

Similarly, culture is often better understood when we can explain the kinds of people who’d hate working here.

No trade-offs, no strategy. And no dark sides, no culture.

Like many things attributed to Albert Einstein, he likely didn’t say – “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

It is a great quote though – both simple and powerful.

It is a mistake I find myself making from time to time – doing the same thing and expecting different results.

To change the outcome, we must often change the process.

Competence is how good you are when you have something to gain. Character is how good you are when you have nothing to gain.

People reward competence – often generously. But they love you for your character.

—

H/T Mark Manson

For all the advancements in technology and the ability now to create custom GPTs, the one advancement I hope for is a home printer that just works.

No troubleshooting, no error messages, no prayers sent to printer gods… just switch it on, press print, and the document pops out.

Note: There’s a lot I like about the HP Officejet Pro 9010 that we have at home. HP’s ink subscription program has made it easy to manage ink. But there are still those moments when I have to switch on and switch off the thing or reinstall the driver or deal with a buggy app. This was written during one such moment.

That’s not counting the hours I’ve spent trouble shooting inane printer settings at home. The complexity involved in switching Wifi networks alone added a few gray hairs to my head.

There ought to be an easier way.

“Things do not need to be perfect to be wonderful. Especially weddings.”

“To learn from your mistakes, first laugh at your mistakes.”

“Superheroes and saints never make art. Only imperfect beings can make art because art begins in what is broken.”

This was another compilation from Kevin Kelly’s book on the theme of mistakes. All three of these notes resonated deeply with me.

The first is an idea that I believe in. Few experiences – if any – feel perfect in the moment. We tend to feel we’re stumbling our way through. Great experiences feel great (often in retrospect) when we ignore what didn’t go as per plan and do the small things with thoughtfulness and love.

The next speaks to the purpose of this blog. To learn from my mistakes, I write about them. The act of writing brings a lightness to it that I wouldn’t have associated otherwise. And, in time, perspective from reflecting on the many mistakes I’ve made has made it a lot easier to keep a sense of humor even when things are not going my way. I think the ability to consistently keep a sense of humor is highly correlated to perspective.

And the final note on superheroes and saints struck a chord. I consider this my art. And it really does begin in what is broken.

One of my recurring frustrations is around water bills. We moved to our home two years ago. In the first year, I simply treated our bill as a baseline. Then, as we went into year 2, I began digging deeper into trends to better understand why our bills are higher than what I’d expect.

After a few leak detection adventures, we found one leak. But the trends still seemed stubbornly high. That led us to a second leak that we fixed a couple weeks ago – this one was a major one. I got my bill for the past 8 weeks today, and it is still hard to tell if we made a dent. I * think * we did as I compare y/y trends and see the decline in the past two weeks. But I’m not certain and it’ll take another billing cycle or two before I know for sure.

Considering we’re talking about a critical natural resource, this feels horribly inefficient and I really wish we had better infrastructure and more transparency into what is going on.

Contrast this to electricity. We have a Powerwall from Tesla and solar panels from Enphase. It all connects beautifully on Tesla’s app. Every day, I know exactly how much energy was generated, how much I saved via my Powerwall, and how much we consumed.

I can have per-minute precision here – I know exactly how much we’re consuming at this moment. Over time, this has helped me understand how much energy my dishwasher or dryer consumes when they run, and we’ve continued to optimize our use so it doesn’t coincide with peak times.

We aren’t mega optimizers – but we’re optimized enough to make significantly better decisions. And, if Tesla went a step further, they have enough data about my consumption and trends to make recommendations for how we could better optimize our use and spend.

Real-time reporting is a big gift. I’m hoping we’ll see more of it.