Category: Everything else

Great products and brands have one thing in common – they understand the job their customer hires them to do. In technology firms, these jobs are called use cases. While a product might have multiple use cases, it is critical to have one or two killer use cases. One such example of a killer use case “Fuel on the run.”

In our core Marketing course at graduate schools, we studied the 3 killer use cases of McDonalds. One of them was around kids, one was around affordable food and the last one was what we described as “fuel on the run.”

To understand this better, imagine you are at the airport and have 30 minutes to go before your flight. You are hungry and want to grab something quick. It doesn’t have to be something tasty. You just need “fuel.” McDonald’s thrives on people who need a quick pit stop on the go.

It is a use case I relate to a lot because I look for hotcakes and a hashbrown when I’m on a road trip or at an airport. It is the only time I think of McDonald’s and they never fail to deliver.

There’s a lot not to like about McDonald’s. But, there’s also a lot to admire about the way they’ve nailed a simple use case.

Tim Harford, an economist and writer, wrote a posted called “The Problem with Facts” recently. In it, he explained that fake news isn’t a new idea. The most powerful exponents of fake news were the tobacco industry. If you have a few minutes to spare, the article comes highly recommended.

For years, the tobacco industry sowed doubt about research linking tobacco and lung cancer in the minds of smokers. And, for the most part, succeeded. This has a lot to do with the mindset people are in when they’re reading these facts. If people seek the truth, facts help. If they’re just looking for selective reasoning, facts are useless. In some cases, they can even reinforce the myth.

That brings us to a possible solution. So, here’s the conclusion to the article that shares that.

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We know that scientific literacy can actually widen the gap between different political tribes on issues such as climate change — that is, well-informed liberals and well-informed conservatives are further apart in their views than liberals and conservatives who know little about the science. But a new research paper from Dan Kahan, Asheley Landrum, Katie Carpenter, Laura Helft and Kathleen Hall Jamieson explores the role not of scientific literacy but of scientific curiosity.

The researchers measured scientific curiosity by asking their experimental subjects a variety of questions about their hobbies and interests. The subjects were offered a choice of websites to read for a comprehension test. Some went for ESPN, some for Yahoo Finance, but those who chose Science were demonstrating scientific curiosity. Scientifically curious people were also happier to watch science documentaries than celebrity gossip TV shows. As one might expect, there’s a correlation between scientific knowledge and scientific curiosity, but the two measures are distinct.

What Kahan and his colleagues found, to their surprise, was that while politically motivated reasoning trumps scientific knowledge, “politically motivated reasoning . . . appears to be negated by science curiosity”. Scientifically literate people, remember, were more likely to be polarised in their answers to politically charged scientific questions. But scientifically curious people were not. Curiosity brought people together in a way that mere facts did not. The researchers muse that curious people have an extra reason to seek out the facts: “To experience the pleasure of contemplating surprising insights into how the world works.”

So how can we encourage curiosity? It’s hard to make banking reform or the reversibility of Article 50 more engaging than football, Game of Thrones or baking cakes. But it does seem to be what’s called for. “We need to bring people into the story, into the human narratives of science, to show people how science works,” says Christensen.

We journalists and policy wonks can’t force anyone to pay attention to the facts. We have to find a way to make people want to seek them out. Curiosity is the seed from which sensible democratic decisions can grow. It seems to be one of the only cures for politically motivated reasoning but it’s also, into the bargain, the cure for a society where most people just don’t pay attention to the news because they find it boring or confusing.

What we need is a Carl Sagan or David Attenborough of social science — somebody who can create a sense of wonder and fascination not just at the structure of the solar system or struggles of life in a tropical rainforest, but at the workings of our own civilisation: health, migration, finance, education and diplomacy.

One candidate would have been Swedish doctor and statistician Hans Rosling, who died in February. He reached an astonishingly wide audience with what were, at their heart, simply presentations of official data from the likes of the World Bank.

He characterised his task as telling people the facts — “to describe the world”. But the facts need a champion. Facts rarely stand up for themselves — they need someone to make us care about them, to make us curious. That’s what Rosling did. And faced with the apocalyptic possibility of a world where the facts don’t matter, that is the example we must follow.

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What can we do in our lives to have better narratives around facts and enable more scientific curiosity?

Thanks Tim, for an excellent article.

The pursuit of happiness, while a powerful idea, isn’t phrased right.

One of my favorite all time lessons is a story from when I interviewed venture capitalist Albert Wenger ages ago.

“In my first startup, an internet healthcare startup, we brought in a very experienced management team. I thought that was a great day. Subsequently, it turned out that team, which was very experienced, made some decisions that ultimately led to the demise of the whole thing. It turned out not to be a good day. Conversely, when the deal to buy a software company fell apart, I thought I had a terrible day. I had worked intensely on something for 2 years and it fell apart. That, though, turned out to be one of the best things – I wouldn’t be here doing this with you if the deal had happened. I would be in Cleveland working with that company.

One of the things I have come to learn is that you shouldn’t get too depressed on the downside, or too excited on the upside – just keep plugging away. Eventually, good things happen.”

I’ve shared it a couple of times since to make sure every new group of ALearningaDay readers see this story at least once. It is a classic.

I have thought the story many a time in the past few years as it continues to remind me of something very important – don’t hinge your happiness on outcomes. First, you don’t control outcomes. And, second, you don’t really know if what you wish for is what you need.

So, it isn’t a good idea to pursue happiness because happiness is simply a side effect. It comes when we don’t care about it. Or, as Viktor Frankl eloquently put it, it cannot be pursued. It must ensue.

Engage with life and the people in it. Be the best version of yourself. And, pursue doing good work and making an impact on something that matters.

Happiness ensues from the pursuit.

We can swim against the current. It just takes more time and a lot more effort.

Every once a while, it is worth fighting the current – to drive change that might otherwise not have happened.

But, it is foolish to make a habit of doing so. We’re better off using currents to our advantage to make progress and using the limited energy and bandwidth we build up to fight it when absolutely necessary.

Learning when and where to apply our limited energy is the truest sign of good judgment.

Someone I know loves sharing this graphic from Doghouse Diaries – Your plans versus the universe’s plans for you.

The image is deep and there are many things we can take away from this. So, I thought I’d start Monday by sharing three of my favorite observations.

First, specific outcome plans are useless. So, just get the direction right and commit to a process that’ll help you get started. The middle and end will look very different once you get there.

Second, expect problems. This sounds so elementary. And, yet, problems surprise us far too often. One of my goals is to eliminate complaints from my life. And, the only way to do that is to truly take problems in my stride. So, I have a long way to go here.

Third, more people want you to succeed than you know. Organizational politics and a few bad experiences can color our perspective on this. There is always help – we just need to look for it in the right places. People make our journeys special.

More than anything, this comic reminds us that the universe’s plans for us are generally challenging, learning filled and infinitely more interesting.

Thank you, universe, for that. It is such a privilege to be alive, healthy and to be given the opportunity to make this all count.

It is hard to find great partners. Here’s a sketch that describes how to think about great partnerships.

1. Make sure you are aligned on the “why” or things that matter most. The first thing to look for is alignment on the “why.” For most people, this is a combination of what you value and what you are motivated to do. It helps to have strong alignment on what you value and an understanding of each others’ motives. This alignment makes or breaks relationships.

2. Common interests help a ton. The biggest challenge with relationships is that we spend a lot of time on “what,” i.e. activities or things we do. This is how most dating is done. Find a common interest and then attempt to find more common interests. While having common interests matters, it only goes so far. The key is to convert that shared understanding of each other through the interest to a really strong understand of the “why.”

That said, there are two reasons why it helps having some common interests. First, common interests are often indicative of stuff that matters. For example, if both of you care a lot about impact to the environment, it is likely that both of you will enjoy the outdoors. Second, common interests are where we generally bond. If you and the co-founder of your start-up enjoy playing tennis, that’s going to be a place you’ll get to know each other a ton.

Note: I’ve focused entirely on the “why” and the “what” and none on the “how.” My sense is that alignment of the “how” doesn’t really matter. In fact, it probably works better if how you both approach things are completely different. Complementary approaches make for strong teams. And, great partners make formidable teams when paired together.

3. It helps a ton if one of you can make the other laugh. Finally, every close relationship experiences ups and downs. And, it helps a lot if both of you keep a sense of humor. And, in these cases, it helps if one of you can make the other laugh.

Then again, humor is just a proxy for perspective. At the end of the day, there is no substitute for perspective in building meaningful relationships over the course of a lifetime.

While this applies just as much to friendship, I’ve focused this on partnerships. We build partnerships with our spouses and a select couple of folks who we build organizations with. These are very special relationships and can be a source of happiness and fulfillment.

So, it helps a ton to learn how to pick partners well. Life, after all, is a team sport.

A quick search on the blog tells me I first wrote about the “Circle of Influence” in July 2009. I’ve written about it multiple other times since.

I was thinking about a couple of good and not-so-good days recently as I wondered what went wrong. And, the trend was obvious. The less time I spent thinking or talking about stuff I didn’t influence, the higher the probability it was a good day.

That’s not to say we should spend no time talking about things we don’t influence. It is important to think about the future and plan for the long term. In doing that, we automatically think about things we don’t control. However, like salt, it is best to add that to our thought process in pinches.

So, why is it that I am still writing about focusing on the circle of influence despite having first written about it eight years back? That gets to the crux of what I’ve learned when I reflect and write every day. The really hard things are hard to do. And, to learn and not to do is not to learn.

That means repetition and conscious re-commitment to learning the hard things is key to giving ourselves a shot at actually learning them. Focusing consistently on our circle of influence requires time, energy and commitment.

On the bright side, if there’s one thing that’s certain, the difficulty of learning a life skill is directly proportional to its value.

I saw “The Founder” – a movie about Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonalds recently.

All I knew about Kroc was that he was the person who saw the potential of franchising McDonalds. And, I knew little about the relationship between Kroc and the McDonalds brothers. So, watching the movie was an eye opener.

While the movie starts out seeming like a story about the triumph of entrepreneurship and hope, it moves into darker territory and becomes about greed and ruthlessness. Kroc’s success gets to his head and he attempts to write Jim and Mac off from the company’s founding story. He then promises them 1% of the profits of the company through perpetuity via a “handshake” deal and then refuses to honor it. And, finally, he ensured they couldn’t use the name in their founding store and drove them out of business.

It feels like a movie emblematic of a time when there was sayings like “It’s not personal, just business.”

I think that’s less the case today. You can’t choose to write off a person from a company’s founding all that easily. Word gets out thanks to blogs and the internet.

But, that said, there’s still a lot of dirty stuff that happens under the pretext of “business” and “industry.” And, movies like this do make you think about the real cost of a relentless cost of success and wealth.

More than anything, it is a reminder that it is on us to ask that all important question – how will we measure our life? What are we really looking to get out of life? And, at what cost?

PS: The movie is well done. Michael Keaton does a great job in the lead role.

Health and fitness is an area of focus under my broader theme for engagement this year. And, one of my goals here was to get a small workout in every day. This has become very relevant post becoming a parent as I’ve found it much harder to find blocks of time.

So, my “no excuse” work out is a work out that can be done anywhere within 10 minutes. There are 4 exercises, repeated 3 times –
1. 10 x Sit ups
2. 10 x lunges (x 2 legs)
3. 10 x push ups
4. 20 x cross body crunches

The workout is definitely legs heavy. So, over time, I might swap in a couple of other exercises that need no equipment.

But, it has been a game changer as it is. Even on days when I feel exhausted and lethargic, I remind myself that I can do this in 10 minutes and it gives me a 0.5 on my exercise score for the week (I have a target of 6). And, I’m beginning to enjoy it.

It isn’t easy to change behavior. So, it helps to experiment with a combination of alternative structures and incentives to ease the process and create our own “no excuse” habit.

Privilege is a special right or advantage granted to some. We tend to think of it as something granted to the rich or powerful.

But, more of us are more privileged than we think.

We certainly exhibit some of the behaviors that accompany it. Anger, unhappiness, and irritation are examples of such behaviors. They are rarely useful and are almost always born out of unfulfilled expectations. And, the presence of expectations and a propensity to act in a nonconstructive manner are the surest signs of the presence of privilege.

But, here’s the best part. We can choose to put those expectations aside and simply commit to doing good work. Starting today.

It is as simple as it sounds. Simply choose to make every moment meaningful by engaging wholly with life. Starting now. No time or patience for frustration or irritation or unhappiness – just a focused commitment to making progress and making our time and energy count.

When we’re blessed with good health and a sufficient amount of security, we get the opportunity to simply plug away on doing work that matters. Today. Then, we can learn, earn, show up and do better work tomorrow. Your work isn’t just what you do at the office of course. Your body of work is everything you do – it is the effort that goes into showing up for yourself, for those who you love and for those who count on you.

To be able to have no expectations and to do good work – that is the greatest privilege of them all.