Category: Everything else

Fixing typos and email friendships

Over these years, I’ve been fortunate to get to know some of you via email. Some of you write in with feedback and counter points, some share ideas for future posts, and others write in with notes of appreciation and encouragement. These are my favorite kind of email.

Many of your notes give me ideas for future post and help me articulate what I’m learning better. Over the past months, however, I’ve been receiving a special variant. John from the screenshot below (email redacted) writes in from time to time with a link to the post in the subject and a list of the typos I need to fix.

The email above is a recent example with just one. I have, however, received notes with 8-10 typos and grammatical errors that John thoughtfully helps me fix.

With a 2.5 year old and ~1 year old, getting these blog posts out is nearly always a rush job these days. That, in turn, means I make more of these mistakes than I did before. So, a big thank you to John for making these better for all of us.

And, on that note, thank you to the many of you who share your notes and reflections with me from time to time. Your notes add so much positive energy to my life – they mean a lot. I really couldn’t be more grateful for your time, attention, and thoughtfulness.

Nursery rhyme and lullaby messages

We’ve spent a lot of time listening to lullabies and nursery rhymes in the last 2 years. Amazon Music’s Lisa Loeb nursery rhyme collection alone ensures we’re daily active users of our Echo.
But, while I love the simply melodies, I’ve come to despise the lyrics of most rhymes and lullabies. If “despise” sounds too strong, check out this link for the creepy backstories behind some of our favorite nursery rhymes.
And, for a recent example that is currently trending in our households, below are the lyrics of a melodious Southern American lullaby called “Hush Little Baby.”
Hush, little baby, don’t say a word.
Papa’s going to buy you a mocking bird.
And if that mocking bird don’t sing,
Papa’s going to buy you a diamond ring.
And if that diamond ring is brass,
Papa’s going to buy you a looking glass.
And if that looking glass gets broke,
Papa’s going to buy you a billy goat.
And if that billy goat don’t pull,
Papa’s going to you a cart and bull.
And if that cart and bull turn over,
Papa’s going to buy a dog called Rover.
And if that dog called Rover don’t bark,
Papa’s going to buy you a horse and cart.
And if that horse and cart turn round,
You’ll still be the sweetest little babe in town.
Or, don’t worry – your dad’s going to buy you whatever you want and solve your problems. Exactly the message we want to send our kids.
There has to be a better nursery rhyme solution. Maybe we keep the same melodies and replace the lyrics?

On making friends and building community

I’ve become a fan of Jenny Anderson’s articles on Quartz of late. She covers topics like life, parenting, and happiness and her notes on all of these resonate. The piece I enjoyed today (here) was on making friends, building community, and the metric of success that both matters and is ignored. I hope you find time to read it. Here’s a powerful bit at the end –

I used to think that community was as simple as having friends who bring a lasagna when things fall apart and champagne when things go well. Who pick up your kids from school when you can’t. But I think community is also an insurance policy against life’s cruelty; a kind of immunity against loss and disappointment and rage. My community will be here for my family if I cannot be. And if I die, my kids will be surrounded people who know and love them, quirks and warts and oddities and all.

In future-proofing my life, I have made every day richer. A problem shared is a problem halved, my kids were taught at school. Communities do that too. I arrived in my version of the soulless suburbs, and it turns out they are not soulless at all.

Warren Buffett, a friend of Gates, says that his measure of success comes down to one question: “Do the people you care about love you back?”

“I think that is about as good a metric as you will find,” wrote Gates.

I’d concur. Keep connecting with people, and in time, you will have a community.

Wishing you nice, connection filled, weekend.

A long PS: A follow up on the LinkedIn Premium post – a couple of you wrote in asking if you could be “picked.” That made me cringe as I was hoping to avoid any such connotation. I wish I’d been more thoughtful about how I’d phrased what I wrote.  The intent was to help anyone who was searching for a job in a small way – job searches are hard. The good news is that I reached out to a few of my colleagues for help yesterday and many of them have generously offered their subscription gifts. So, we should hopefully have enough for all those of you going through an active search within the next few days.

And, related, I just started work on the team working on job seeking at LinkedIn. As you might have gathered from my many posts on the topic, this is a problem I’m grateful to be working on. We know there is plenty that needs to be better in our product and are working hard at it. All feedback on what is working and what is not working would be helpful and appreciated. Thank you. :)

Stopping shoplifting

Bloomberg shared the story of the company behind the product that claims to be able to detect shoplifters by monitoring fidgeting, restlessness, and other suspicious body language. The goal is prevention – if the person is approached, the chances are high that the crime never happens.

On the one hand, this is awesome. If we can use technology to stop folks from committing crimes, that is a win.

On the other hand, it does make me wonder where this road will take us.

For example, will the data about the identified shoplifters go to a centralized database? Will that database be shared with other retailers to stop crime together? Will law enforcement make a case that the data should be shared with them? Will we then use the data in the database to move beyond behavioral signals to demographic signals?

It isn’t hard to envision why these steps wouldn’t logically follow the first. What happens to someone who makes a bad decision to steal a loaf of bread because he’s going through a tough time? Given how quickly he will be identified and caught, how hard will it be for him to pick himself back up after he commits that first crime?

Many questions. No simple answers.

The millionaire who wanted to get involved

The college admissions bribery scandal reminded me of a story I once heard from someone who had exposure to the inner workings at prestigious universities. They shared that top administrators were (re-)introduced from time-to-time to multi-millionaire alumni who wanted to get “involved.”

And, whenever this happened, the odds were high that this alumnus had a kid who was 16 years old – in perfect time to influence admissions a year later when it would be illegal to do so. Of course, at top universities, 2 million wouldn’t get you in. It would just mean you get the marginal decision in your favor.

And, as the New York Times lays out, you can guarantee you are in the playing field by shelling out another 1.5 million for a 5 year package from “Ivy Coach.”  The Ivy Coach program guides kids from the 8th grade on the best ways to stand out via extracurriculars while also coaching them intensively on SATs.

Of course, bribery takes all this to a new, amusing or dark (depending on your point of view), level. The SB Nation article I linked to had a few powerful quotes. My favorite was –

When talking about the case, Andrew Lelling, the US attorney for the District of Massachusetts, said, “We’re not talking about donating a building … we’re talking about fraud,” a statement that validates one way that rich people openly game the admissions system. What makes the acts fraudulent, apparently, is that the defendants tried to buy admissions in a way that is not allowed, not that they tried to buy admissions in the first place.

Privilege is powerful.

3 free subscriptions of LinkedIn Premium for 6 months

I work at LinkedIn. Our vision is to provide economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. One of our initiatives in 2019 is called the #plusonepledge where every member of the LinkedIn team helps someone in their network with finding economic opportunity – finding a new job, a new contract, a new client, and so on.

As part of that initiative, I now have access to gift 6 months of free LinkedIn Premium Careers subscription to 3 folks who are actively seeking a new opportunity. LinkedIn Premium is particularly helpful for job seekers who’d like more custom insights on how their experiences fit toward a job and who’d like the ability to get in touch (selectively) with recruiters and hiring managers of jobs they believe they are a fit for.

So, I thought I’d write in to check if there are members of the ALearningaDay community who’d find this useful. If you are in the midst of a job search, please just reply to this email or send me a note on rohan at rohanrajiv dot com with how you think Premium might help your search. I’ll follow up via email.

Thanks.

(Update: these are no longer available. I’ve completely run out of mine + those of 20 generous colleagues who shared theirs :))

People problems are generally system problems

Consider a few situations that we’ve all likely been through.

a) A few folks on your broader product team seem to frequently spend their time chasing crazy ideas with no result to show for them.

b) You are working on an initiative with folks across multiple teams and find yourself constantly dealing with issues related to miscommunication.

c) You have a cross-functional partner who can’t seem to stop sending you new requests.

d) Your sales team just doesn’t seem to be cooperating.

In each of these situations, it is tempting to think you are dealing with people problems and that the solution is to simply isolate the characters involved and “deal with them.”

In truth, however, each of these could either be partially or completely fixed with better process/systems. a) The product team would spend their time better if the planning process was more rigorous, b) the multi-team initiative needs regular alignment meetings where the issues are consistently surfaced, c) the cross-functional partner needs to be made aware of your priorities (a shared doc?) and could benefit from a light-weight requests process, and d) the sales team likely needs better incentives to cooperate better.

Good management – whether within your team or in your project – is less about dealing with individual people and their preferences and a lot more about thinking in systems that will solve the people problems you face.

And, the first step to being that systems thinker is to be able to say – show me the people problem and I’ll show you the system problem that is the actual root cause.

Filler words – 2019 edition

Self-improvement projects that require us to break old habits are hard. Such projects aren’t settled in a few weeks – instead, I think of them as 3 year construction projects.

One of the many gifts I’ve received from writing everyday here for ~11 years is the ability to work on a few such 3 year construction projects. Writing here forces a level of accountability that I’d otherwise not have. But, while I’ve made visible progress on many self improvement projects, an area where I’ve repeatedly failed is in eliminating filler words.

I was in a conversation recently where I thought I used more filler words – “kinda” and “I think” – than actual words. It was disappointing to hear myself stammer and stutter in my attempts to make a point.

As I reflected on that conversation this weekend, I was reminded of a post on the topic from Seth’s blog that inspired me to revisit this habit a few years back. A few of my favorite bits from the post –

“For a million years, people have been judging each other based on voice. Not just on what we say, but on how we say it.

I heard a Pulitzer-prize winning author interviewed on a local radio show. The tension of the interview caused an “um” eruption—your words and your approach sell your ideas, and at least on this interview, nothing much got sold.”

“Persuade yourself that the person you’re talking to will give you the floor, that he won’t jump in the moment you hesitate. You actually don’t have to keep making sounds in order to keep your turn as the speaker. The fastest speaker is not the speaker who is heard best or even most.

Next step: First on your own, eventually practicing with friends, replace the “um” with nothing. With silence.”

“Talk as slowly as you need to. Every time you want to insert a podium-holding stall-for-time word, say nothing instead. Merely pause.”

“You’re not teaching yourself to get rid of “um.” You’re replacing the um with silence. You’re going slow enough that this isn’t an issue.”

“Our default assumption is that people who choose their words carefully are quite smart. Like you.”

Communicating constructively and with clarity is one of my 2019 themes. Unlike in past attempts, I intend to stick with the filler words this time till it gets solved.

Fourth time’s a charm, I hope.

See you in 2022.

Collective notification log

NYT reporter Katie Rosman shared a screenshot she found of a teacher who had her students turn up their phone volumes in class and create a collective record of notifications they received.

I wonder what this chart would look like if we, as co-workers and family members, did this exercise at important meetings and family meals.

And, perhaps more importantly, what if we made it a point to do it periodically?

(H/T: Greg’s “Cofounder Weekly” newsletter that brings together a collection of interesting/fun tweets on tech/entrepreneurship)

Mailing in the last bit

I recently bought two pairs of jeans. That’s a once-in-eighteen-or-twenty-four-months event in our household. So, we planned a morning trip over the holidays to an outlet store (we’re fans of 7 for all Mankind if you’re looking for comfortable daily wear jeans :)) 40 minutes away, tried a bunch, and wrapped it up.

Of course, there was the small matter of alterations remaining. So, I picked a store that was open and relied on them to get it right. It would have helped to show up there with an existing pair of jeans so we could ensure they got the length right. But, I didn’t. I figured altering these jeans should be simple enough.

It turns out it wasn’t.

Despite explicitly requesting them not to cut the extra cloth away, they did. And, after I made my third visit today, I’m beginning to realize this purchase might just be wasted.

Every once a while, we do a lot of hard work on a project to get it to 90%. But, just as we’re about to get to the last bit, a new shiny project pops up. And, since our 90% project is, well, 90% of the way, why not just mail in the last bit?

In one word, don’t.