A Learning a Day

An email came in from Amazon Prime announcing that they’re adding Amazon Music to the Amazon Prime bundle.

Without knowing anything about the internal rationale, this feels like a smart move.

My guess is that this wasn’t a big money maker for Amazon – likely a rounding error relative to Amazon Prime. And this move enables them to do 3 things at once –

(1) Win customer loyalty – at a time when most subscription services are working on ways to increase prices, Amazon has chosen to go the other way and make an already valuable Prime subscription more valuable.

(2) Simplify their SKU line up and focus any and all sales on the Prime product

(3) Increase the value of the Prime bundle so that it is easier to raise prices on Amazon Prime later. It is likely that increasing the value of the Prime bundle by $1 will give them orders of magnitude better RoI vs. attempting to sell Amazon Music separately.

More is not always better.

Smart.

“I don’t mean this callously, but it is an undeniable fact that if you are interested in getting newspaper headlines, you are better off becoming a mass shooter than inventing a life-saving medical therapy.” | Steven Johnson on the quiet passing of Dilip Mahalanabis.

Dilip Mahalanabis (see more in SJ’s tribute post) was the key figure behind Oral Rehydration Therapy, a revolutionary and surprisingly simple technique that has prevented millions of people, particularly children, from dying of diarrheal diseases like cholera over the past few decades.

RIP and respect.

Great coaches consistently make good players great by (a) putting them in roles they’re best suited to succeed and (b) inspiring self-belief.

Finding the right role is a pre-requisite to great performance – it creates the right environment. Self-belief is the difference maker.

“There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions. In a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me.

She looked at me and made a threatening gesture, now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went.

Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening getsture to my servant when you saw him this morning?

That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”

There are two lessons I thought of when I heard this.

The first is that there’s no point outrunning death. It catches up with us all. Best to make peace with our mortality and make the most of the time we have.

The second is an idea Master Oogway shared in the (likely) most quoted movie on this blog – Kung Fu Panda – “One often meets their destiny when trying to outrun it.”

I’m not a fatalistic person. But we also live in a world where we control little.

And it is good to recognize that from time to time.

People learn when they’re surprised.

This simple insight has shaped how I design learning sessions of late. Instead of focusing just on the content, structure, and delivery, I’ve found myself spending time thinking about how to introduce surprise.

Surprises introduce humor, make insights more memorable, and inspire a shift in perspective.

That shift in perspective, in turn, leads to learning.

I had the opportunity to listen to humanitarian chef Jose Andres recently. Chef Andres started his talk with a beautiful story about learning to cook from his dad.

Every Sunday, his dad used to invite a whole host of people from the village for lunch. His dad loved cooking and his son was his de-facto assistant. Despite his eagerness to learn how to cook the paella, his father used to always put him on fire duty. This meant going to the forest, finding logs, and then making sure the fire was burning with the right intensity.

One day, his father explained why his obsession with the fire. He shared that everyone who was eager to learn how to cook paella jumped to trying to stir the paella or put ingredients into the pot. However, he believed that the most important part of cooking well was learning how to control the fire. Control the fire right and you’ll figure out the rest.

This was a wonderful lesson in cooking for an eager young cook. But, in retrospect, it turned out to be an important life lesson that stayed with him since.

Learn how to control your fire. The rest will follow.

Powerful.

“Charity should not be about redemption for the giver. It should be about liberation for the receiver.” | Jose Andres (originally by Robert Egger)

It resonated.

Getting out of our comfort zone isn’t a result of a big decision we make one day. It isn’t a trait some are born with.

Instead, it is simply a habit we develop. We start by doing small things to get out of our comfort zone – have an uncomfortable conversation or be more vulnerable than we’d have thought – and work our way up to bigger things.

We are what we repeatedly do.

“Yelling doesn’t get your point across, it only makes it louder.”

This made me chuckle. It is a lesson I’d do well to remember when I find myself in situations where I’m frustrated with my kids.

A good friend shared a few excerpts from an article in The Atlantic titled “It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart.” His notes inspired a wonderful conversation on our friendship and reminded me that I should reflect on and write about this topic more as it is one that matters a lot to me. For now, here are the excerpts –

Back in the 1980s, the Oxford psychologists Michael Argyle and Monika Henderson wrote a seminal paper titled “The Rules of Friendship.” Its six takeaways are obvious, but what the hell, they’re worth restating: In the most stable friendships, people tend to stand up for each other in each other’s absence; trust and confide in each other; support each other emotionally; offer help if it’s required; try to make each other happy; and keep each other up-to-date on positive life developments.

The problem is that when it comes to friendship, we are ritual-deficient, nearly devoid of rites that force us together. Emily Langan, a Wheaton College professor of communication, argues that we need them. Friendship anniversaries. Regular road trips. Sunday-night phone calls, annual gatherings at the same rental house, whatever it takes. “We’re not in the habit of elevating the practices of friendship,” she says. “But they should be similar to what we do for other relationships.”

When I consider the people I know with the greatest talent for friendship, I realize that they do just this. They make contact a priority. They jump in their cars. They appear at regular intervals in my inbox. One told me she clicks open her address book every now and then just to check which friends she hasn’t seen in a while—and then immediately makes a date to get together.

“Philip made me feel that my best self was my real self,” he finally said. “I think that’s what happens when friendships succeed. The person is giving back to you the feelings you wish you could give to yourself. And seeing the person you wish to be in the world.” I’m not the sampler-making sort. But if I were, I’d sew these words onto one.

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Each of these is beautiful. But this idea – “The person is giving back to you the feelings you wish you could give to yourself. And seeing the person you wish to be in the world.” – is exquisitely put.

Here’s to more conversations about friendship.