Category: Everything else

The FIRE movement – tactics versus principles

In case you missed it, there’s been a lot of recent press about the “Financially Independent, Retire Early” or FIRE movement. The news is a mixed bag with many strong criticisms about the idea. Amidst all this varying sentiment is a lesson for all of us on taking the time to separate tactics from principles as we communicate ideas.

While the “retire early” part of the name is provocative (and seems to be drawing most ire), the central principle behind the FIRE movement is to become financially independent by being conscious about our financial well being.

Financial independence doesn’t mean not working – it just means being able to build a career and life without worrying about money. This is done with a strategy based on 3 simple tenets – i) Save more by living simply and cutting costs, ii) Invest aggressively in low cost index funds, and iii) Increase your income.

Would anybody argue against these principles? I’d posit that we should all be part of this movement.

The deeper learning here is that it is human nature to lose sight of the principles as we get caught up in the details. So, as we work to communicate our ideas every day, it is on us to obsess about sharing principles versus tactics.

Is right vs. looks right

Shane Parrish, author of the generally excellent Farnam Street blog, had a great post this morning about defensive decision making – the type of decision making that focuses on what “looks right” vs. what “is right.”

Defensive decision making is the “IBM” option. Since “no one got fired for buying an IBM,” it is intended to protect the decision maker. Organizations can often create a massive decision-consequence asymmetry in that they become so risk averse that most decisions come with small upside if they go well and large downside if something goes wrong (e.g. get fired).

So, the natural incentive is to just make the “default” decision. There is no risk to one’s reputation and it is always defensible.

This points to why so many cultures talk about “thinking out of the box” but never actually do so. It also speaks to why cultural change is very hard.

And, finally, it is a great reminder that approaching building products and services for customers with first principles thinking and hypothesis isn’t just about hiring the right people.

It involves building a culture that incentivizes attempting decisions that are right instead of rewarding those that look right.

Cleaning and insecurities

Does cleaning ever get done?

It doesn’t matter how beautifully we vacuum our home this week. We will still need to vacuum next week.

Of course, it helps that we don’t expect to ever be “done” with cleaning or washing vessels or exercising. We understand that our commitment to being clean will be tested every day of every week. It is on us to recommit, take action, reflect, and keep improving how we take action.

It turns out that dealing with our insecurities works the same way. Our trysts with imposter syndrome, our deepest insecurities, and most powerful demons never go away. They are ever present and part of who we are.

And, we must deal with them like we deal with dirt or unwashed vessels every day. Re-commit to acting from wholeness instead of our wounds, take action, reflect, and iterate.

The HQ3 fiasco

I’ve shared a lot of nuggets from Jeff Bezos over the years on this blog. His notes on the importance of being open to changing your mind, on strategic patience and tactical impatience, on using long form memos for business decisions, to name just a few, have all had a big impact on how I think and operate.

As someone who admires much of his thought process and approach to things, I found Amazon’s and Bezos’ approach to their second (and now apparently third) HQ deeply disappointing.

NYU Professor Scott Galloway outlined the many issues with this fiasco in his weekly note today. 2 excerpts –

“Amazon’s HQ2 search was not a contest but a con. Amazon will soon have 3 HQs. And guess what? The Bezos family owns homes in all 3 cities. And, you’ll never believe it, the new HQs (if you can call them that) will be within a bike ride, or quick Uber, from Bezos’s homes in DC and NYC. The middle finger on Amazon’s other hand came into full view when they announced they were awarding their HQ to not one, but two cities. So, really, the search, and hyped media topic, should have been called “Two More Offices.” Only that’s not compelling and doesn’t sell. Would that story have become a news obsession for the last 14 months, garnering Amazon hundreds of millions in unearned media?“

“We are not only witnessing the 1% pull further away from the 99% in our hunger games economy, but certain metros begin to pull away from the rest. Of more than 400 metros in the US, five account for over 20% of the growth. And, you guessed it, two of those five are DC and NYC. This is not Amazon’s problem, but this was an opportunity to do something extraordinary. Locating HQ2 in Detroit would have been transformative.“

Scott Galloway’s conclusion is withering in its assessment of this move that displayed canny PR and negotiation and a disappointing display of capitalism taken to its extreme all at once.

I keep going back to a note from Seth Godin on capitalism – capitalism exists to maximize civilization and not the other way around.

This was a classic case of the other way around.

Written selling

Most non-sales job descriptions underemphasize the amount of selling required as part of our jobs. And, of all the selling we do, the ability to do “written selling” is, ironically, under-sold.

Written selling is all the writing we do on a daily basis – via long form documents, emails, and messaging conversations – to persuade others on the merits of whatever it is we’re selling.

We could be selling belief in a vision in a long form doc, the fact that we’re on top of the crisis-of-the-day in an email exchange, and that the task at hand is the best use of our teammate’s time over a message exchange.

When we picture selling, we picture the verbal version. But, in today’s workplace, our ability to write persuasively is a high leverage skill.

Lessons on change from making yoghurt

Our family is from a part of India where plain yoghurt is a key part of the diet. Yoghurt is a great counter to the heat and, thus, a staple. So, I grew up a big yoghurt fan and that continues to this day.

As a result, I “make” yoghurt 2-3 times a week. I put make in quotes because it makes itself. But, there’s still a lightweight process involved. And, that requires me to heat the milk till it almost boils over, allow it to cool down a bit, pour a bit of existing yoghurt, and leave it to do its thing over the next day or so.

This process turns out to be very instructive in driving change in ourselves –
1. It helps to face the heat and be under a bit of pressure that pushes us to recognize the importance of change (too much heat causes other spillover effects).

2. Next, we must give ourselves a bit of time to partially recover from the period of intensity and use that time to reflect on the kind of change we’d like to drive.

3. Then, it helps to find a role model for that change – either a person who embodies the behavior or a book or a course that teaches us the way – and spend mental time with that role model.

4. Finally, give it time.

Lots to learn from yoghurt, we have.

Bad manager

In a conversation with a leader of an organization recently, I learnt that her list of the three most impactful people in her life features a bad manager – the worst manager she’s ever had.

She said the experience was so bad that she still woke up from bed many years later determined to create the opposite experience for anyone who worked for her. She is known for her ability to lead and manage people now – so, the experience clearly worked out in the long run. :-)

But, it speaks to the interesting thing about bad experiences. Understanding them always involves holding two truths together. On the one hand, it is natural to work to avoid the ones that are avoidable. On the other hand, their presence can both be instructive and provide the sort of perspective that helps us appreciate good experiences.

Perhaps the best way to approach tough situations lies in embracing this contradiction. Do your best to ensure good outcomes – but, don’t beat yourself up if they don’t turn out as you’d expected. If you take the time to reflect and learn from the pain, it more than pays off in the long run.

Learning systems

Our ability to be continuous learners is directly proportional to the quality of learning systems we put in place in our lives.

Our learning is proportional to our ability to synthesize i) our own experiences, ii) conversations with people, and iii) information from books and courses. And, good learning systems enable us to do all 3 of these. For example, a learning system to improve on our communication skills might look something like this –

1. Get a great book on communication or sign up for an online course. Then, spend a minimum of 15 minutes every day reading the books / listening to the course – followed by 5 minutes of synthesis.

2. Practice every morning on our drive or walk.

3. Ask to spend time on a regular cadence with the best communicators we know discussing communication.

4. At the end of every work day,  write down a 1-2 line reflection on how we communicated before we shut our laptop. Do it again on the weekend and revisit our learning system for the week.

5. Teach what we are learning every week or every month to anyone who will listen or read. Our dog, baby, roommate, or mom, are all viable candidates for this. :-)

Each of these mini-systems, on their own, will accelerate our learning. But, piece them all together and learning compounds very quickly.

The beauty about taking the effort to set up a learning system is that we can replace communication with graphic design tomorrow. With a few tweaks, a good system will adapt to aiding our efforts to work on skills that involve other people too.

If we care about improving our ability to learn, consider building a system, we must.

Sharpies and predictions

The 37 signals/Basecamp team once shared a post about using thick sharpies when sketching early designs. The beauty about sharpies is that they force you to focus on the core elements of what you are trying to build. That’s because you can’t obsess about the details the same way you can with thinner markers.

I find a similar approach to be useful when attempting to make long term predictions or sizing markets. Complex models look good and seem more accurate – but they often end up focusing us on details that don’t matter. Since the point of long term predictions is getting a sense of magnitude, there typically are a handful of drivers that actually move the needle.

So, the fewer the variables and simpler the assumptions, the better the prediction generally is.

Or, put differently, if you’re not able to share your model on a whiteboard using sharpies, there’s likely work to be done.

Life lessons from the 30 year reunion

Deborah Copaken, a writer at the Atlantic, shared a beautiful note about lessons she learnt at her 30 year reunion.

I think the magic of this note is that it inadvertently touches on many contradictions – money matters but it can’t be the main thing, love isn’t everything but it helps a lot, diversity is important even if supporting it means going against yourself, and an appreciate of life often requires an acceptance of death.

In doing so, it reminds us of the importance of making peace with the many opposing forces that come together to make this life.

Here are a few notes from her that resonated deeply.

Every classmate who became a teacher or doctor seemed happy with the choice of career.

They say money can’t buy happiness, but in an online survey of our class just prior to the reunion, those of us with more of it self-reported a higher level of happiness than those with less.

Our strongest desire, in that same pre-reunion class survey—over more sex and more money—was to get more sleep.

Many of our class’s shyest freshmen have now become our alumni class leaders, helping to organize this reunion and others.

Nearly all the alumni said they were embarrassed by their younger selves, particularly by how judgmental they used to be.

No matter what my classmates grew up to be—a congressman, like Jim Himes; a Tony Award–winning director, like Diane Paulus; an astronaut, like Stephanie Wilson—at the end of the day, most of our conversations at the various parties and panel discussions throughout the weekend centered on a desire for love, comfort, intellectual stimulation, decent leaders, a sustainable environment, friendship, and stability.

Those of us who’d experienced the trauma of near death—or who are still facing it—seemed the most elated to be at reunion. “We’re still here!” I said to my friend, who used to run a health company and had a part of the side of his face removed when his cancer, out of nowhere, went haywire. We were giggling, giddy as toddlers, practically bouncing on our toes, unable to stop hugging each other and smiling as we recounted the gruesome particulars of our near misses.

I can hold both of these truths—diversity is good; the roots of diversity in the admissions process were prejudiced against my own people—and not only still be able to function but also to see that sometimes good results can come from less-than-good intentions.

Powerful – thank you for sharing Deborah.

PS: To everyone who came here from Seth’s blog post yesterday, welcome! One of the wonderful side effects of writing here for the last ten years is getting to know you and hearing from you on your reflections. The hope is that you find that often elusive mix of content that has you smiling and nodding occasionally, shaking your head in disagreement every once a while, and enabling you to reflect more often than not. I hope you find that.

Please don’t hesitate to write in by replying to this email (if you subscribed via email)/via rohan at rohanrajiv.com. Hearing from you is always a highlight.