A Learning a Day

As organizations, every dollar that doesn’t feed our ego will feed our growth.

As individuals, every dollar that doesn’t feed our ego will feed our joy and peace of mind.

(H/T: John Bragg on Farnam Street for the first part)

“Success is being excited to go to work and being excited to come home.” | Will Ahmed

Simple and profound at once.

It resonated.

A professional fighter we know shared – “Sleep is the most effective legal performance enhancing drug.”

I’ve noticed significant lifts in my energy and productivity when my average during a work week is closer to 8 hours vs. closer to 7.

True in fighting, and true in life.

Marcus Rashford, a former Manchester United player who was transferred to Barcelona, recently shared in an interview that he felt the club was stuck in no man’s land.

It’s easy to dismiss criticism from a player who grew up at the club and was eventually forced out by the latest in the string of managers he’s played under. But there was truth in what he said.

The real issue he pointed to is one of instability. Managers have been cycled in and out so quickly that none have been given the 4–5 years typically needed to mould a team in their philosophy. No manager in the past decade has lasted longer than three years.

In retrospect, the club lurched from one short-term and ill thought out managerial decision to the next.

That’s why Rashford’s point resonates.

Too much change creates chaos and prevents long-term progress.

Too little change – especially when results are consistently poor with no line of sight to improvement – is equally ruinous.

Sustainable success, whether in football or in organizations, lies in knowing when to persist and when to pivot.

As always, the magic is in balance.

The goal of the first attempt is to learn. We do that when we give ourselves the space to understand what we’re up against.

On our first day in a new place, we’re going to make mistakes. If we’re a tourist, we’ll have to keep that sheepish tourist grin handy as we figure stuff out.

If we’re operating a machine for the first time or trying out a new process, we’re not going to figure out the optimal approach till we try it once or twice.

Best to approach the first time with a gentle reminder to cut ourselves some slack when we’re attempting something for the first time.

Focus on the learning. There’ll be plenty of opportunities to optimize later.

I was fascinated by Bloomberg’s story about Hampton Inn. A centerpiece of the story is the free waffles available at breakfast.

The key constant is the tub of Hampton’s malted vanilla waffle batter. In a now-familiar ritual, guests push a plastic tab to extrude the mix into a paper cup, drizzle it over a waffle iron, then flip the handle and watch the seconds tick down on a digital timer. As with almost everything at Hampton, the process has been rigorously engineered. Those little paper cups of batter are what peak hotel performance looks like.

Last year, Hampton Inns around the world cooked up more than 2 million gallons of batter, or about 30 million waffles. With all due respect, they’re not great. Nor is the coffee or the orange juice, the bananas or the convection-oven eggs. What all these things are, crucially, is free to lodgers. It costs a US Hampton franchisee less than $5 per occupied room to furnish this cornucopia, but to a family of four, the perceived value is closer to $50, or roughly one-third of the average cost of a nightly stay. That math has helped power Hampton Inn’s unlikely rise to become the world’s largest lodging brand, with almost 350,000 rooms spread across 43 countries. Hampton sold almost 90 million room nights last year, according to Bloomberg estimates, a few million more than its closest competitor, Holiday Inn Express. That helped it generate nearly $12 billion in room revenue, dwarfing that of the industry’s luxury leaders.

Those are impressive numbers. There’s more about the waffles though.

“Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, waffles are just for kids,’” s“Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, waffles are just for kids,’” says Buckley. “It’s surprising how many men in suits will pretend nobody’s looking and grab their little waffle.” The self-serve aspect of the experience is also a plus: Hilton toyed with the idea of using machines that dispensed waffles with the press of a button before deciding that pour-and-flip made for a homier experience.

I enjoyed reading this because we’ve stayed Hampton Inn for a few nights over the years. And I can attest to both the popularity of these waffles and how much we enjoyed them.

I now have more appreciation for the rigorously engineered processes that make such experiences possible.

On his 75th birthday, there was some discussion in the Slashdot forum about how Steve Wozniak made a bad decision to sell his Apple stock back in the day.

The man himself jumped into the comments to add his 2 cents –

I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.

Classy and wise.

One of the most dependable levers to align behavior is to align the incentive.

A colleague recently reflected on some feedback she’d gotten and described it as “a painful lesson, but a necessary one.”

As I thought about her reflection, I realized that the presence of pain is just a sign that the lesson is likely to stick.

Pain + Reflection = Progress.

Or put simply, no pain, no gain.

“To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer. The people they don’t recognize inside themselves anymore. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into.

We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out; to become speedily found when they are lost.

But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honor what emerges along the way.” | Heidi Priebe

I came across this quote in James Clear’s newsletter and I thought it was beautifully put.

It resonated.