A Learning a Day

I received a wonderful new year’s gift from a thoughtful friend – a box of Anson Belts and Buckles. Anson’s innovation is a tribute to every person who has struggled with belts – annoying belt holes and  difficulties adjusting the belt to fit our waists and the loops in our jeans.

I had the opportunity today to pay the gifts forward to a couple folks in the family. And, a few minutes in, I received this email.

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Subject: You are what makes us great

All was quiet today until the…………..warehouse intercom crackled to life:

“Listen up, people! We’ve got an order for our new friend from Santa Clara …….”

….but no one could hear the rest of the announcement over the thunderous roar of applause.

Sparkling Water bottles were popped. Tears of joy were shed. “Don’t Stop Believing” rang from every speaker. Even Alan our lead packer smiled—and Alan never smiles.

Simply put, your order caused pandemonium and everyone is thrilled you’re now a customer. Thank you!

Once we clean up our celebration mess, we’ll be working to get your order packaged, shipped and on it’s way to you ASAP.

If you have any questions or problems, you can reply to this email. We’ll follow up with tracking information as soon as your package ships so you’ll know exactly when to expect delivery.

Talk Soon,

David Ferree
Anson Belt & Buckle
Co-Founder

P.S.- While you’re waiting for your shipment, check out these videos on our website to get familiar with our belts and how to use them.

https://ansonbelt.com/pages/videos

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A wonderful example of a small touch that helps create a great customer experience.

We wrapped up our holiday traveling over the weekend. And, throughout these travels, Yelp and Tripadvisor were constant companions.

We looked to both these services to tell us what we should do and where we should eat. Both services are amazing in their ability to help us add memorable experiences to our lives.

Thank you to folks who work on Yelp and Tripadvisor for all the good work. And, a big thank you to everyone who takes the time to contribute reviews that, in turn, helps everyone else.

It makes a difference.

A reminder for every time we choose cost over value –

1. If our use case is important/high frequency, we’ll inevitably need to undo it and tip the scales back.

2. We’ll end up spending a lot more than we might have if had just chosen value in the first place.

Jana, a colleague + wiser friend, conducted a learning session on personal finance and investing for Executive Admins at LinkedIn. He shared these presentations on his blog and I thought I’d share them with you.

• • The Joys of Compounding (read it with this spreadsheet)
  • What’s getting in your way
  • How to think about investing

I love the simple presentation style and was grateful to him for reinforcing 3 important lessons –
1. Compounding is both magical and backloaded
2. The hedonic treadmill is likely getting in your way of saving for the future
3. Keep investing really simple – after paying off your debts and setting aside an emergency fund, max out your 401(k), and invest in low cost index funds.

A simple tip for when you perform calculations (SUM, SUMIFs, etc.) on a spreadsheet – add checks.

Here’s how it works –

1. Keep the “master” data separate from the calculations – this ensures you never pollute the original data.

2. Once you complete the calculations, ensure you periodically check your math. You can do this by using “=”. For example, it might be =SUM(all cells in calculation)=SUM(all cells in source data)

This is harder to explain with an abstract example. So, here is an example of how you might add checks to a spreadsheet when you are attempting to split costs after a trip with friends. I’ve highlighted the check cells in yellow.

As we work through details on spreadsheets, it is easy to get small details wrong. When that happens, you can rely on these cells to immediately become “FALSE” and save you the trouble of dealing with flawed math.

Checks in spreadsheets are simple mistake detection investments that pay off in a big way.

Just as in other areas of our life.

I spent a couple of hours at a casino recently and was intrigued by the behavior* of a few folks at a Roulette table.

They first placed their bets with pursed lips and frowns, muttered phrases of encouragement to themselves (and got encouragement from a watching friend in one case), and reacted with shock and disbelief when the outcome wasn’t in their favor.

If I didn’t know the roulette game was all about luck, I might have mistaken this show to be about a game that required a high level of skill.

It made me wonder how often we end up mistaking luck with skill in games (both real and metaphorical) we play.

*I didn’t have anything to compare their behavior to – so, this may be normal.

Growth mindset = Fixed Mindset (default) + a deep commitment to the process of learning + a disregard for failure / a love for challenges + a faith in the outcome working out in the end.

We start with a fixed mindset. We then need to cultivate a deep commitment to and appreciation for the process of learning.

That, then, helps us disregard failure/embrace challenges thanks to that deep commitment.

And, underlying all of this is a faith that the juice will be worth the squeeze.

Great teachers understand a simple truth – a great teacher’s most important role is to inspire her student to learn the subject.

To facilitate this, great teachers often enforce a lot of rigor. For example, one of the best teachers I know used to assign a lot of thought provoking pre-work and expected us to come to class fully prepared (and we did). Another refused to let anyone in after the class started. And, yet another – this time at work – put extraordinary emphasis on never using a pie chart.

The purpose of this rigor is to remove all the noise that can get in the way of understanding and appreciating the subject/skill at hand. Appreciation speeds up understanding and understanding inspires more appreciation.

And, once a student makes it past the rigor to understand and appreciate what she is learning, there’s no turning back.

Rigor is a powerful tool to inspire focus.

We still listen to music the “old school” way in our home – i.e. we buy our music on iTunes vs. stream on Spotify. As a result, we have an eclectic playlist with tunes in various languages that we’ve accumulated over the decade.

One of the issues with such a collection is it doesn’t lend itself well to being background music when we have friends over (and we love having music play in the background). You are just as likely to listen to Coldplay or Taylor Swift as you are to Mozart as you are to a Hindi or Tamil artists.

Over the past year, however, our go to has changed to the wonderful stations/playlists on Amazon Music. Even when we’re away from home, we just fire up the Alexa app and ask for “good music” (Top 50 most played) or “nice music” (Mellow Folk) and turn our attention to enjoying games or a good conversation.

Till date, these stations have always delivered. I’m grateful for that.