A Learning a Day

Author Steven Johnson tells a fascinating story about Willis Carrier. Working in a humid Brooklyn printing shop, Carrier needed to find a way to reduce the humidity so the ink didn’t run on the page. So he created a dehumidifier which seemed to also make the air cooler.

Before long, others in the shop wanted to spend time in the printing room because of how cool it was. That then led to the modern airconditioner.

A fascinating side effect of this is how it changed the population spread in the US. Suddenly, people could live in hotter places without worrying about dying of heat. Tucson, Arizona, grew 400 percent in 10 years, Phoenix 300 percent, Tampa, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, population double, triple. Carrier’s invention was circulating people, as well as air, changing lives, changing America.

But then something even more interesting happened. People moving to the hot states were older and tended to vote Republican. And the growing population in the conservative South meant more Electoral College votes there. Between 1940 and 1980, Northern states lose an incredible 31 Electoral College votes, while Southern states gain 29.

Enter Ronald Reagan. As Steven Johnson says – “A very important component of Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 is kind of the Sun Belt bloc of conservative voters that just would not have existed. It sounds crazy to be like, a guy in Brooklyn is trying to stop the ink from smearing on the page and it ends up helping to elect Ronald Reagan. But it’s actually just a couple of steps between those two things.“

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Just a couple of steps indeed. A wonderful reminder of the power of unintended second and third order effects of past events that shape the forces that we see in play today.

“What feedback do you have for me?” is a commonly used feedback question that doesn’t perform well because of how open ended it is.

Two kinds of constraints help.

(1) “Do you have any feedback for me on the structure of my presentation?”

(2) “If you had to pick one thing that went well in that meeting and one thing that you’d suggest I do differently, what would you pick?”

Variant (1) puts a clear constraint on scope. Variant (2) puts a constraint on the amount of feedback you’re seeking – in effect helping the giver prioritize.

If you’re not getting high quality feedback, it might just be time to revisit the questions being asked.

Constraints and focus in our questions are leading indicators of clarity.

NASA has shared the first images from the James Webb telescope.

This first image shows some of the most distant galaxies we’ve ever seen or studied (overview of the images are here).

“Carina’s Nebula” shows the process of the formation of a star.

“Southern Ring Nebula” shows the gas around a dying star.

“Stephan’s Quintet” shows a compact group of galaxies.

Seeing these images inspired awe and reminded me of Carl Sagan’s note on a view of the Earth in the Milky Way galaxy as a pale blue dot.

“It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” | Carl Sagan

Peace arrives when we realize we’ll never get everything on our list done.

The only way forward is to prioritize.

“We organize much of our lives around reassuring ourselves about the accuracy of the hallucinated model world inside our skulls.” | Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling

The Science of Storytelling has done a great job reminding me just how much of our lives are shaped by stories. The section that featured this quote, however, took it another level deeper as it pointed out just how central stories are to our identity and how we fight to reassure ourselves about them.

Juan shared a deck by an anonymous artist with a few slides about mentality. Here are the 5 that resonated the most.

(1) “Keep at it.”

(2) “Just get started already.” I thought this was fantastic – so very true.

This illustration is a variation of the same idea.

(3) “Don’t over-think it, just get started.”

(4) “Failing is not the falling down, it is the staying down.”

(5) “Make sure to look back and celebrate your journey so far from time to time.”

Kudos to the anonymous artist on this. And thanks, Juan, for sharing.

Angled parking spots are great. They make it easy for us to drive straight in.

Perpendicular spots – especially those that don’t have much room between rows of cars – require a different approach. Attempting to drive straight in and adjust is an exercise in pain.

Instead, we’re better off –

(a) turning into the next parking spot – stopping behind the parked car
(b) backing up and straightening
(c) and driving into ours

Perpendicular parking spots are a great metaphor for things we want on a day-to-day basis.

We can’t just walk in and get what we want. Instead, we need to take others into consideration, do some amount of zigging and zagging and even take a step or two backward to eventually get it.

No drama. Just part of the process.

The simplest way to understand if a team is aligned on the problem they’re solving is to ask every member to write out the problem statement and then share it with the group.

It is amazing how much downstream angst this simple exercise saves.

When in doubt, it is worth a try.

Jim Sinegal, cofounder and CEO of Costco, tells a story that embodies the values he’s helped build into his company.

Back in 1996, he often recounts, Costco was doing a brisk business in Calvin Klein jeans priced at $29.99. When a smart buyer got a better deal on a new batch of the jeans, company guidelines calling for a strict limit on price markups dictated a lower price of $22.99.

Costco could have stuck to the original price and dropped seven extra dollars a pair straight into its own pocket. But Sinegal insisted on passing the savings on to customers, because he saw the company’s focus on customer value as the key to its success.

The story continues to be told in Costco’s hallways today. It vividly conveys a message about the company’s values—one that resonates, in part, because it’s aligned with the personality of its author. Sinegal answers his own phone, draws an annual salary of just $350,000 (a fraction of what most big-company CEOs earn), and has signed an employment contract that’s only one page long—all of which means less cost for customers to absorb.

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I’m always intrigued by the stories that are told in companies with unique value propositions. Low-cost retailers have a consistent theme in their stories. Amazon, in its early days, told stories about Jeff Bezos using Ikea doors as desks. Wal-Mart had similar founder stories as well.

It is a great reminder that the culture we intend to create is a function of the stories we tell vs. any set of well-crafted words we share and put out there.

Our ability to be productive is dependent on our ability to channel dissatisfaction.

For starters, we have to refuse to be satisfied unless we’re working on the #1 item on our priority list.

Then refuse to be satisfied until we’ve gotten that done.

Rinse and repeat.