Month: March 2024

“Be prepared to appreciate what you meet.” | A Fremen saying, Dune by Frank Herbert

“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.” | Anne Lamott.

It is legitimately amazing how well unplugging works.

Over 8 years, undergraduate students at Northwestern university were assessed on their performance on topics when their introductory class was taught by an “expert” on the topic. These students’ grades in subsequent advanced classes were logged and studied.

The trend of the results was clear – taking an introduction class from an expert decreased performance.

After a recent post on downhill skiing, Rebecca responded with an insightful note. She grew up skiing competitively and is both an excellent skier and a good teacher. But she’s, in her words, terrible at teaching beginners how to ski.

“Skiing always reminds me that you don’t want to learn from the ‘natural’ or from the person who has been doing it forever… or even from ‘the best’ — you want to learn from the person who fought hard to gain the skills (and developed a cognitive understanding of how they work), ideally not that long ago.”

This lesson on experts reminded me of this note. It is a good one – thanks Rebecca.

H/T: Hidden Potential by Adam Grant (for the study)

I saw a piece of news today about a legendary founder and investor, Andy Bechtolsheim.

I heard the name first when listening to the story of Google’s founding. Bechtolsheim invested $100,000 before Google was incorporated – probably one of the top 5 best investments of all time. His net worth is estimated to be $16 Billion.

The SEC alleged that he was caught insider trading. After confidentially learning about a Cisco acquisition, he traded options by accessing the brokerage accounts of a relative and associate. He’s agreed to pay $1 million to settle the lawsuit and he is barred from being a Director of a public company for five years.

The article concludes – “It should be inconceivable that someone so wealthy would do something so reckless for relatively little reward. Except that we’ve seen it happen time and time again.”

I thought that was a poignant note and speaks to just how hard it is for us humans to say… enough.

A recruiting leader recently said to me – “I used to think of my job as filling roles. Now I think of it as de-risking business decisions.”

Resourcing decisions are among the most important decisions any leader makes when they set strategy. The success of that strategy then depends on the people in place.

And great recruiting de-risks that strategy.

It is a simple and powerful reframing that changes how you approach the job. It made me wonder if I’m due a similar reframing.

The term “soft skill” originated in training courses in the US Army in the 1970s. The course designers involved attempted to separate the skills required to operate machinery or weapons from interpersonal skills.

So they called them “hard skills” and “soft skills.”

They didn’t realize the terminology they used would make one feel more important. The context in which the definition made sense was, of course, lost over time.

There are a few interesting lessons here. The one I keep going back to is the importance of context as we communicate and make decisions. As we seek to make better long-term decisions, it is generally worth asking – how would what we do or say be interpreted by someone who doesn’t have the context we have?

Breaking Bad is a consistent presence in lists of the greatest TV shows of all time. After watching the show, I realized that its genius lies in its deep exploration of one core concept – a slippery slope.

Walter White’s transformation from ailing Chemistry teacher to ruthless drug lord happens slowly and gradually – one bad decision after another. It is an inevitable consequence of his growing greed and the need to do two misdeeds to cover a previous one.

It reminded me of a reflection I shared from Clay Christensen’s “How will you measure your life” –

“No athlete starts out wanting to dope. But, one small compromise leads us down a slippery slope and we soon find ourselves in a place where we never intended to be. It might seem like one extenuating circumstance but life is a series of extenuating circumstances. 

Figure out what your values are and never deviate. You can’t follow 99% of an ideal. It’s 100% or nothing.”

Indeed.

For the longest time, my laptop wallpaper said that one zen master described the essence of zen as the ability to always do just one thing at a time.

It is one of those reminders I need from time to time as it is a lesson I haven’t learned as yet.

“The quality of any creative endeavor tends to approach the level of taste of whoever is in charge.” | John Gruber

It resonated.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

I think of G B Shaw’s quote from time to time.

On the one hand, it explains why humans who drive tremendous amounts of progress have personalities/characters many of us wouldn’t want to emulate. After a point, being unreasonable violates virtues we hold dear.

On the other, it is a reminder that we also ought to be unreasonable about the things that matter to us from time to time. It isn’t a risk-free strategy and it certainly isn’t a strategy that solves for popularity of any kind.

But it is often how progress is made.