Month: August 2024

Often, the only difference between a problem being perceived as painful or powerful is whether we feel we chose it.

With great responsibility comes great power.

H/T – Mark Manson

We can’t want the reward without also wanting the struggle.

“Hope clouds observation.” — Frank Herbert in Dune.

One of the harder things in this life is to see things as they are instead of as we want them to be.

Andy Grove, Intel’s legendary former CEO, famously wrote a book called “Only the paranoid survive.” The line that summarized his approach was – Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive. In sum, he advised us all to not believe our own hype.

The contrast between Andy Grove’s advice and Intel’s recent troubles thanks to poor decisions in the past couple decades is telling. Intel’s management focused on the short-term growth in their stock price in the 2010s and sadly ignored strategic options that required hard decisions that would set them up for the next decade.

They believed their own hype.

It can easily happen to all of us. It is a very natural and normal thing – the default option if you will. We acquire competence at something, then get lots of compliments for it and likely experience an increase in our status and wealth and the hype around us, and then start falling for that story.

It happens on a small scale all around us. I’ve met so many people over the years who couldn’t stop thinking about and talking about themselves as the best things since sliced bread. They had done well in a job or two at a “big brand” company. And, in their version of the story, they were instrumental to its success. Some of those stories might well be true. But it was evident they had begun believing in their own hype.

It happens on a large scale too. Elon Musk will likely go down in history as a legendary entrepreneur. But there’s a visible difference between the Tesla and SpaceX version of the early 2010s and the Twitter/X version in the early 2020s. In some ways, I guess it was admirable that he resisted believing in his own hype for so long.

And I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read about a high potential teenage “wonderkid” in <insert your favorite sport or field> – to then never hear of them ever again.

All our actions have consequences (i.e., “Karma”). And the simple truth is that our actions when we believe in our own hype aren’t optimal. They don’t represent our best judgment. And Karma has a way of catching up with all of us in time. It just doesn’t happen in a predictable timescale.

Rudyard Kipling’s wonderful poem “If” has a collection of lines that drive home this idea.

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
 And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

They all get at the same idea. Things are neither as great or as bad as they seem. If we’re experiencing a great run, wonderful. If we aren’t, that’s fine too. In reality, we rarely control outcomes. We just get to pick a direction and focus on the process. Assuming we’ve picked a reasonable direction and are open to change, a good process will lead to good outcomes in the long run.

When we do that, we’ll realize it was never about the outcomes anyway… and that we did our best work when we learned to stay grounded by refusing to believe in our own hype.

Getting better at communicating is an exercise in focusing on outcomes (did the intended person(s) understand?) vs. outputs (the specific document or artifact you use to make your point).

If the output isn’t leading to the outcome you want, it needs to be changed.

The key is to not get attached to how you’re communicating. Just focus on what it’ll take to get your point across.

The Aquatic Center for the Olympics at Paris was heated with a unique source – heat from Equinix data centers. From the Equinix blog

Conventionally, data center operators remove residual heat generated from cooling IT equipment and reject this heat to the atmosphere. In a common scenario, fans carry air heated by the IT equipment to the data center’s air conditioning system, where this heat is transferred from the air to water. The warmed water is then transported to the data center cooling system which rejects the residual heat from the building.​

When data center operators incorporate heat export from their data centers, they transfer a portion of this heat to a third-party heat network via a heat exchanger instead of rejecting all the residual heat to the atmosphere. The heat exchanger keeps water in the data center cooling system separate from water in the infrastructure owned and operated by the heat network operator.

In many cases, the heat network operator uses a heat pump to increase the water temperature so it’s suitable for the community heat requirements. Then, they distribute the heated water via underground pipes which are typically installed under roads and sidewalks.

These projects launched in Helsinki in 2010 to provide heat for homes. Now, Equinix is extending this to Toronto for home heating as well as water heating.

Data centers are frequently at the cutting edge of energy innovation because of their intensive and consistent needs. This is another great example of that.

It is an elegant solution to divert excess energy (in the form of heat) to other uses. Given data centers are only going to grow over time, this could be the man-made equivalent of a geothermal source. It has a lot of potential to be scaled.

I’m impressed at the ingenuity. Well played, Equinix.

One of the fascinating side-effects of social media is that the words “posting” and “boasting” don’t just sound similar.

They are often the same in practice.

I worked with Vanguard’s personal advisory service until recently. I wrote about why in this post five years ago.

The good news is that the research and the thesis/reasoning behind going with Vanguard panned out as well as I’d have hoped. However, a few years in, I found myself wanting a bit more flexibility in approach. But Vanguard’s scale made that hard.

And, just when I was beginning to wonder if it was time to try something different, my long-time advisor decided to leave and join a smaller firm for the same reasons. The decision was easy.

But, even as the move played out, I appreciated how thorough Vanguard were in the exit process. They followed up a few times just to make sure they could do a quick exit interview and get feedback.

Three reflections:

(1) Companies celebrate scaling – it is capitalism at its finest. But as a company scales its operations, it inevitably loses its personal touch. I love that Vanguard has thoughtful systems like exit interviews for customers. But it is always a great reminder of the fact that – especially as a customer – scale isn’t always what it is cracked up to be.

(2) There was a nice moment in the exit interview when I shared that I was following my current advisor. The gentleman said “Makes sense. We’re in a relationships business after all.” It made me reflect on the idea that so many businesses are relationship businesses at the end of the day. Again, with scale, that’s easy to forget.

(3) I’ve spoken to many folks over the years about the approach they take to their finances. Every time I’ve done so, I’ve realized that deciding how to manage our finances is a very personal decision as it is driven primarily by our level of interest in the topic. People who are passionate about it do a great job. Others, like me, prefer working with a human we trust. As is the case with so many important questions, there’s no right answer.

Just what’s right for us given our preferences and constraints at this point of time.

“We’re only different from the bacteria because we are able to ask what the hell this is all about. Not answer, just ask.”  — Carolyn Ives

It resonated.

I work with someone who is relentlessly solution oriented. There’s just no wasting time griping about problems. Every conversation is about finding a path forward, negotiating one if necessary, and moving forward.

Solution oriented folks are a pleasure to work with. But the addition of the relentlessness makes it a formidable combination as every positive interaction becomes an opportunity for forward momentum.

That forward momentum has a way of building and compounding over time.

Obstacles are expected of course. But forward momentum makes resistance futile.

Seeing this always serves as a good reminder to self – it is amazing what we can accomplish when we’re relentlessly solution oriented.