Category: Everything else

Social needs and status games

I’ve been thinking about our social needs and have begun to test a hypothesis that we have two basic social needs –

a) Fit in to a tribe where we want to belong

b) Stand out – first by seeking ways to improve the tribe’s status and then by seeking ways to improve our status within the tribe by signaling our comparative virtue

So, Jane might be a disgruntled worker in finance who doesn’t really feel a part of the tribe. She might either seek opportunities to go work in a different tribe or may be contacted by a member of said tribe. Let’s say she now has the opportunity to become an analyst at a venture capital firm.

After a year in her new job, Jane’s first need would be met. Since venture capitalists are a relatively “high status” tribe, she may only seek to improve the status of her firm within the tribe. Or, more likely, she might be focused on improving her brand within the community by signaling comparative virtue on Twitter (for example).

Of course, this doesn’t just apply to jobs. We’ve created various kinds of tribes with nations, states, faiths, religions, and so on. We’ve even created tribes around sports teams. Most of these tribes ladder up to bigger tribes.

So, for example, we have different levels of tribes when we consider politics. When things are going well for them, the people of a nation may unite under the larger national umbrella and revel in their collective high status. When things aren’t, they’ll focus instead on improving the status of their local tribe and stop caring about the larger tribes they’re part of.

Once we’re part of a tribe, the goal is always achieving higher status. So, if we feel secure about our status within a tribe and also feel secure about our tribe’s status, we can now get to work on improving our status within the tribe.

Since the goal is achieving higher status, we’re always playing status games – whether we choose to outwardly signal status or not. Choosing to not play status games is just a variant of playing the game.

Our desire to be right

I was sifting through a comment thread of a popular blog recently. The post was related to climate change and I was struck by the nature of the discussion in the comments. The observation that stuck out the most was around our desire to be right.

There were many on the thread who approached the conversations with high levels of conviction based on what they believed. I’m not certain where they got their facts from or the method with which they interpreted said facts – but, regardless, it was fascinating to see them double down on their arguments.

We are in the midst of watching “The Da Vinci Code” (based off the Dan Brown bestseller). While it is a work of fiction, it was interesting to revisit human history and view the bloodshed from a different point of view. It got me thinking about the many wars we’ve fought. And, it is amazing how we’ve always found reasons to wage war and kill each other over the past millenia – our certainty in the beliefs we hold and our desire for more power being the top reasons.

Certainty, conviction, and a desire to be right are important drivers of progress. They spur action and forward motion.

However, like other drivers of progress, they’re double edged swords. And, I wish we made it a habit to add a bit more doubt into the mix as we attempted to work through difficult problems.

Perhaps we’d learn to stop worrying about who is right and, instead, focus on what is right.

Drafting a will

On May 25th, Seth shared a post on his blog about finishing well.

If you start a book, you will do better if you have a plan for finishing your book.

If you take the time and spend the money to go to college, it’s worth considering graduating as well.

Aretha Franklin died without a clearly stated will. As a result, her heirs will waste time, money and frustration, because Franklin was both naive (a will doesn’t make it more likely that you will die) and selfish.

If you’re born, it pays to plan on dying.

Every year, millions of people needlessly suffer in old age because they didn’t spend twenty minutes on a health care proxy.

If you’re going to take a job, everyone will benefit if you think about how you’re going to leave that job.

And if you start a company, you should realize that you’re probably going to either sell it or fold it one day, and neither has to be a catastrophe or a failure.

Beginning is magical. So is finishing. We can embrace both.

This post resonated deeply as my wife and I had spoken about creating a will after having our first child. We’d spoken in the past about a health care proxy as well – however, we never got around to doing it.

So, after reading this post, I made a note on my list of priorities during my week off in July to get it done. And, so, today, after a bit of research, we purchased Quick Willmaker Plus (there’s a 40% discount this week on account of Independence Day) and drafted our wills and health care proxies. It took us about an hour and we intend to sign it front of two of our friends to complete the process in the coming days.

It was time well spent. If you haven’t done it yet, I hope you will consider it.

Climate change and anxiety in kids

The Quartz newsletter featured a good New York Times article today on how to have conversations about climate change with kids without scaring them.

The article provides simple guidance to parents –

1) Start the conversation by enabling kids to appreciate nature and cultivating a love for plants and animal.

2) Do the homework to understand climate change yourself so you can explain it in simple terms (they stress here that parents, in many cases, have as much to learn about the topic as kids)

3) Explain the consequences of the earth getting warmer – using its effect on animals as a starting point

4) Engage them in activities such as a community garden or a recycling program so they get to act on what they’ve learnt

These steps are a great starting point. We’ve seen way too much doom mongering – which, even if it isn’t entirely wrong based on what we know today, isn’t helpful or constructive. We have a long way to go in understanding and solving the problem. And, having constructive conversations is an important first step.

Auto malls and equilibrium

A lot of car buying in California takes place in “auto malls.” These are clusters of car dealers who all set up shop right next to each other. There are two kinds of clusters – the standard cluster (Honda, Toyota, Volkswagen, etc.) and the luxury cluster (Porsche, BMW, etc.).

So, why do they all cluster together instead of setting up shop away from their competitors? For the same reasons competing brands set up shop at a mall, it turns out that clustering together increase the chances of making a sale for everyone.

It also turns out that it is the optimal solution as it satisfies the Nash equilibrium. Here’s a great 4 minute video that explains this.

Changing your ads

“Don’t change your ads when you’re tired of them. Don’t change them when your employees are tired of them. Don’t even change them when your friends are tired of them. Change them when your accountant is tired of them.” | Jay Levinson 

While this has direct applicability to any brand marketing spend we oversee, it is equally applicable to our personal brands as well.

Brands are built by consistency.

(H/T – This is Marketing by Seth Godin)

John Snow, public health, and innovating in teams

I thought yesterday’s newsletter from author Steven Johnson was spot on. Lightly edited text below..

Last week a combination of work and family vacation brought me back to London for a few days. As often happens when I visit the city, I found myself back in Soho, at the site of the 1854 cholera epidemic that was the subject of my book, The Ghost Map—now almost fifteen years old!

For those of you who don’t know the story, the Soho outbreak famously involved a pump, located at 40 Broad Street, that provided public drinking water for the neighborhood. In late August of 1854, the well water became contaminated with the bacteria that causes cholera, and the community was quickly devastated by the disease. At the time, health authorities believed that diseases like cholera were transmitted through noxious vapors, but a local doctor named John Snow—now considered one of the fathers of epidemiology—had developed a theory that cholera was transmitted via water, and he created a map of the outbreak that showed an unusual concentration of death around the 40 Broad Street pump, ultimately convincing the authorities to remove the pump handle—a true milestone in the history of public health.

For many years, a replica of the pump commemorating the events of 1854 had stood a block or two east of its original location on Broad (now Broadwick) Street. But a few years ago, the pump was relocated to what would have been 40 Broad, next to the corner pub that is now known as The John Snow. I‘ve spent a lot of time walking the streets around Soho, and loitering next to the pump, but this was the first time that I’d visited the area during a family vacation. Somehow seeing the pump in the context of other London tourist landmarks made me see it in a new light.

So many of the grand public memorials in big cities like London are devoted to military events and heroes: think of Lord Nelson towering above Trafalgar Square, or the civil war monument in Grand Army Plaza near our place in Brooklyn. But I was hard pressed to think of another urban monument to a public health breakthrough. (I’m sure some are out there — if you happen to know if one, I’d love to hear about it.) And of course the pump memorial is to scale and almost entirely invisible unless you happened to be standing right next to it; you could walk down Broadwick on the other side of the street and not even notice the thing.

There is something off kilter about the ratios here: both the number and scale of the war memorials, compared to the pump on Broadwick Street. Don’t get me wrong — the lives lost at the Battle Of Trafalgar or during the American Civil War deserve the memorials we have given them. But the pump, in a way, reminds us of a different kind of history: it is a memorial to lives saved, to the hundreds of thousands or millions of people who didn’t die of cholera in part because a local physician in a poor neighborhood saw a pattern in the mortality data and changed our understanding of epidemic disease. The history of the last two centuries is filled with comparable triumphs, breakthroughs that shape our day to day existence in incalculable ways, particularly in large metropolitan areas where epidemic diseases were a daily reality just a few generations ago. Why not celebrate those triumphs as visibly as we celebrate the military victories?

Seeing the pump restored to its original spot reminded me of another idea I’ve been mulling lately. One of the lessons of The Ghost Map is that the classic story of the lone scientific genius is almost always a fiction, condensing down a much more chaotic and collaborative process of discovery into a narrative dominated by a single protagonist. John Snow had always been presented as that kind of heroic scientist in the accounts of the Broad Street outbreak, but it turned out that his idea required the help of a number of other people for it to make a difference in the world: most importantly the local vicar Henry Whitehead, who helped with his investigation, and the statistician and demographer William Farr, who had campaigned for more detailed “open source” mortality reports that supplied Snow with important data. For me, the Ghost Map story was the beginning of an idea that I developed further in Where Good Ideas Come From five years later: that transformative ideas almost always come out of diverse networks, not individuals.

But if you believe in the network model of innovation, that raises a further question: how does a society reward and celebrate those networks, particularly in fields like public health where market-based rewards are more elusive. One primary tool we have are prizes. (If the Nobel prize had been around in the 1850s, it’s entirely possible than Snow would have received one for the waterborne theory of cholera.)

But most prizes — however valuable they are in terms of financial reward and professional status — tend to reinforce the lone genius model, and not just in the case of the “Genius Grants” that MacArthur awards every year. The Nobel Prizes, for instance reward one or two discoverers who hit upon an idea, rather than the loose assemblage of researchers — often in different fields — who contribute pieces of the puzzle that ultimately takes on a coherent shape. The whole architecture of our prize system is designed to celebrate the achievements of the alpha dog who towers above the rest in intellectual achievement. It would be nice to have some prizes that for once tried to celebrate the pack.

Two powerful observations that I hope will be applicable to how we attempt to make progress on climate change.

Surfacing a disagreement vs. finding a quick fix

A common misconception about disagreements is that the biggest value lies in finding a quick fix.

However, disagreements often reveal deeper issues that speak to misaligned values or operating principles. Fixing these issues take multiple conversations, thought, and, in some cases, a willingness to “disagree and commit.” In such cases, rushing to find a quick fix and paper over the cracks can do more harm than good.

So, there’s more long term value in habitually surfacing disagreements over attempting to get to quick fixes.

One way to unlock that value is to celebrate occasions when disagreements are found and/or are clearly articulated instead of just celebrating when they are fixed.

Problems well stated are problems that are easily solved.

On how hard it is to learn something

One of the bigger lessons I’ve taken away from attempting to write about learning and the process of learning over the past 11 years is just how hard it is to learn something.

Learning isn’t about about absorbing a new idea. It is about spending enough time with it to create mental models that change how we see. That, in turn, changes how we do things. To learn and not to do is not to learn after all.

Thus, a small change in how we approach our work and lives can take months and large changes can take years. And, as new years resolutions demonstrate, periodic re-commitment count for a lot more than one-time commitments.

So, for better chances of success at learning – i) pick one thing that you actually want to spend a lot of time on, ii) find a coach, community, or habit that helps you stay accountable to regular experimentation and reflection, and iii) be patient.