FiveThirtyEight

FiveThirtyEight’s more popular name is simply “Nate Silver’s blog.” Nate Silver is statistician who gained fame for his incredibly accurate prediction models in the 2008 elections. The blog was a licensed feature of the New York Times for a while before being bought by ESPN in 2014. Silver describes the blog as a “data journalism site” and FiveThirtyEight comprises a team of 20 odd writers who cover topics like sports, politics, science, and lifestyle. I think of FiveThirtyEight as among the most thoughtful journalistic outlets that exist.

As an example, they had an article this weekend on “The Sumo Matchup Centuries in the Making.” They started by covering a controversial final match between Yokozuna Hakuho (below) and Yokozuna Harumafuji where Hakuho used a technique derisively called henka, where he side-stepped his opponent and had him crash out of the ring, to win his 36th grand tournament. Winning the 36th tournament cemented Hakuho’s place among the greatest sumo wrestlers of all time. It was just a pity that this happened amid controversy about his final victory. (I was interested in reading this because I had seen the finals of a tournament in May 2014 where Hakuho had won his 29th grand tournament. He was well on his way to becoming the Jack Nicklaus/Roger Federer equivalent of Sumo.)FiveThirtyEight, sumo, hakuho

The article compares Hakuho with a legendary sumo wrestler nicknamed “Raiden” from the 18th century. They used data from sumo records and ran various analyses to conclude that, criticism on his victory aside, Hakuho deserves his place among the best sumo wrestlers ever. Articles on this blog aren’t just about anecdotal opinions (granted, in this case, it would be hard to have too many anecdotes about a 18th century legend). They are about taking the data that is available and digging deeper to uncover a level of insight that wouldn’t be obvious if we just took a cursory glance.

I use this article to illustrate the consistent greatness of the work done by the FiveThirtyEight team. They have taken journalism to a whole new level in the past few years. And, I, for one, am very grateful to them for that.

First principles thinking with Dean Jacobs

I am 3 weeks away from finishing up my final quarter at graduate school. As I reflect on some interesting lessons and moments in the past 2 years, I was reminded of a conversation with former Dean Donald P Jacobs last year. Dean Jacobs, well into his eighties now, was the Dean at the Kellogg School of Management for 26 years between 1975 and 2001. Aside from the fact that the length of the tenure is notable, Dean Jacobs’ accomplishments in that time were nothing short of legendary.

Education is a sector where brands are sticky. There is a joke that Harvard was the top ranked school in Physics before Physics was even taught at Harvard. Reputation matters a lot and stays with you for a very long time. Dean Jacobs took over at Kellogg in 1975 when the school was decidedly a third tier business school. He retired with the school firmly considered in the top tier and consistently on top of the rankings. It is very rare to see a turnaround of that nature. As I was part of the team running the orientation for the incoming class, a teammate and I decided to speak with Dean Jacobs to understand the context and history of our school. Many of the stories he shared are covered in this Poetsandquants article. But, there’s one nugget that stood out to me.

In the 1970s, a lot of management education was delivered by former business leaders. It was a lot about the latest trends in business and was pretty tactical. The parts that were delivered by academic professors were, well, very academic. When Dean Jacobs asked – “What will management education look like in the next few decades?,” one of his key conclusions was that we would need to dig deeper into the first principles which governed business. To him, this meant taking a much more academic approach to management as learning about current trends in pricing was going to be obsolete in a couple of years. However, understanding how the economy works and how pricing fits in would be knowledge that would be evergreen. So, instead of hiring business folk, he focused entirely on hired freshly minted P.hDs in fields like Game Theory, Economics, etc., to teach at the school. While this was a game changing move, he ran into the known problem that these Professors didn’t know much about business. But, since he believed that we were moving toward an era of life-long education, he decided to build the first executive MBA program with funding from Booz Allen’s co-founder James Allen. This was a masterstroke for a few reasons. First, the executive MBA was an innovation that helped build the school’s nascent brand with executives around the world. Second, it was a great source of revenue. And, finally, it gave the Professors the opportunity to understand first-hand what was going on in business in exchange for giving executives a first principles academic perspective on business. In the exec MBA classrooms, the executives shared stories and real life case studies where the learning was applicable. All of this fed right back into the full time MBA program.

His investment in academics led to plenty of interesting new research at the school. Key among the new wave of research was a recurring conclusion that business education needed more emphasis on working in teams. His decision to invest heavily in building a culture where students worked well in teams went on to define the culture of the school and served as a competitive advantage in the late 80s and 90s.

There’s plenty more that can be written about the innovations that Dean Jacobs led. For me, however, the interesting part is that it comes down to that first principles question that can be applied to anything we do – “What drives this and how is that going to change in the next few decades?”

Everything we do is a product of the questions we ask.

Dean Jacobs(Dean Jacobs greeting Dean Sally Blount who took over in 2009)

8 years

When I mentioned the fact that this blog would be turning 8 years old to a friend yesterday, she suggested I share my 8 favorite posts. It is a great idea. I would love to do something like that sometime. But, not today.

Today, I’d like to share a post I stumbled onto on May 25th, 2008. This was 13 days after I committed to writing a learning a day.

Sustainability

I’ve missed 2 learning days in a row. Well, I ‘can’ blame it on long/irregular/busy days among other things but its best if I learnt from this and moved on and hopefully did continue posting a learning a day..

Sustainability – I never really understood the concept till I came across the idea in various similar forms; like consistency, dependability etc. In simple terms, I understand sustainability to be the essential difference between a pro and an amateur, a business and an idea, a billion dollar company and a million dollar company and so on..

In simple terms, the implications are immense – for instance, you would expect Fedex to deliver within a day, whether it means travelling through rain, shine or even thunderstorms. And many such basic examples. What I have further learnt is that it is not easy to think of it in simple terms but in any case, if, hypothetically, this blog had 1 reader who came back for a blog every day and found no entry even on 1 day(forget an unforgivable 2 days..), the chances that the reader would want to come back is never, and when you talk about a service that caters to a few million customers a day, there is just no choice but to be sustainable….

First, I think my writing has gotten a lot better – thank god. But, most importantly, I wanted to share this because sustainability is the single hardest challenge when we commit to a regular system/habit. I missed many days when I first started writing here. For most of the first 2 years, I hacked the system by creating mini-systems – quotes between Monday-Friday and a “Book Learning” on Sundays. So, I largely converted writing to an auto pilot system of sharing content created by others. Once I felt I had developed the discipline to show up every day, I was then free to begin writing.

This experience has been life-changing because it has taught me more than I imagine. But, I imagined there isn’t a lesson that has had a more profound impact on my life than understanding the importance of showing up every day and doing my best.

Here’s to the next 8 years.

8 years

Skills and knowledge

The big insight with deliberate practice is the idea of focusing on skills instead of knowledge.

The obvious example is learning, say, tennis. Sitting in a tennis theory class that explains how to use the racket isn’t all that useful, obviously. It makes intuitive sense for us that we must get out on the field and try things. And, as we try things, we will hopefully have a coach who corrects us when we do the wrong things. That is the difference between developing the skill of how to hit the ball versus simply possessing the knowledge of how to hit the ball.

While this connection is easy to make when we think of sports, it is harder to make this connection with knowledge work or science. In a fascinating deliberate practice experiment in the University of British Columbia, Professors converted a part of the Physics curriculum from lecture notes to in-class discussions facilitated with interactive questions and clickers. The idea here was to move from knowledge transmission to actually helping students develop the skills of reasoning like real world physicists. They executed this with graduate students who were teaching for the first time and improvement was fantastic – 2.5x on a standard test compared to the control group.

skills, knowledge, deliberate practice

This has all sorts of implications for how we think about training in the professional world. A lot of training is still about knowledge transmission versus skill development. And, even if it is skill development, it is done once a year.

As I get back to the working world post graduation in a few weeks, there are a couple of interesting questions on my mind – how do I use the principles of deliberate practice in my work? and how do I use the knowledge vs. skills idea to develop processes to get better?

Deliberate practice has transformed the way we get better in fields like sports and music. It will be much harder to use its principles in fields where progress is less easily measured. But, it can be done.

We’ll just have to stay with the problem a lot longer.

Generous email is alive

There are many who say email is dead.

Yes, certain kinds of email are definitely dead. The kinds that selfishly ask us for a click, a favor without a real explanation, money without trust and attention without a relationship – we’ve learnt to recognize them from afar and they are generally dead on arrival. Thank god for that. We don’t need more of those.

But, the generous compliment, the kind note, the thoughtful ask, the intelligent discussion, the love-filled wish – they are all alive and well. These are the sort of notes which even the busiest of inboxes would love to see. They may not always garner a response (they still do, often) but they are nearly always appreciated.

Generous email is alive. Long live generous email.

generous

Looking good and getting good

There’s a lot of great literature that focuses on looking good. We know plenty about how people perceive us, how people think and how we can do this and that to persuade people. It is no coincidence that “How to Win Friends and Influence People” was the book that invented the self help genre.

Looking good, however, isn’t all that helpful if you haven’t done the work to get good. It can mask competence for a while. But, not for long.

So, what do we know about getting good? I think there are three things we know about getting good.

First, we must commit to getting good. It doesn’t really matter what we choose to get good at. It just matters we choose something. We don’t need more confidence. We just need more commitment.

Second, we must apply the principles of deliberate practice toward our journey. To get better at our craft, we must train relentlessly, seek task specific feedback from a coach and push ourselves to expand our comfort zone. No coach? No worry – find people who’ve done it before and mimic their approach until you find your own style. The end result from this process is developing a mental model that enables us to “see” the world differently. It is these mental models that help us make consistently better decisions.

Finally, once we get good, we must then commit to a life of depth. Becoming good doesn’t mean we will stay good. To become experts, pastmasters even, we must consistently hone our skills and commit to a process of lifelong learning. We do that by building a deep life – one where focus, commitment, and mindfulness are the norm. It is the sort of life where we distance ourselves from the noise of distraction and keep our focus on the things that truly matter – good self-care, good people and a focus on the work that helps us make the world a bit better. A deep life is the surest sign of a good life.

By all means, continue the conversation on looking good. But, if we’re going to run the marathon, let’s make sure we’re fit enough to go the distance… and then maybe go some more.

getting goodImage Source

The Popeye spinach myth – The 200 words project

Popeye the sailorman was a major evangelist for spinach in the 1930s and is said to have increased green consumption in the US by one-third. He loved spinach because the iron content helped him attain super strength.

The only problem was that the “fact”  about the iron content in 100 grams of spinach – 35 milligrams – was off by a factor of 10. That’s because a German chemist named Erich von Wolff misplaced a decimal in his notebook in 1870 and that goof created one of the cartoon characters of the century. The story of the decimal point goof has since been retold multiple times, most famously in a book called “Follies and Fallacies in Medicine,” a classic work of evidence-based skepticism first published in 1989.

All these re-tellings miss another important fact – the decimal point explanation is a myth. The mistake arose from faulty measurement methods. Subsequent analyses just improved measurement closer to the currently estimated real value of 2.71 milligrams per 100 grams (roughly 1/10th the believed 35mg).

So, what’s with these myths that get presented to us as facts? And, why is “science” so problematic? More next week..

It’s a lot easier to spread the first thing you find, or the fact that sounds correct, than to delve deeply into the literature in search of the correct fact. – Samuel Arbesman

popeye, spinach, myth

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Source and thanks to: The FiveThirtyEight Blog – Who Will Debunk the Debunkers?

It’s all in our head

In conversations with people who’ve recovered from an episode of depression or an addiction of some sort, I’ve noticed a persistent theme. They vividly remember the day they realized they emerged into normalcy and this vivid memory generally involved them looking up at the sky for the first time in days and noticing that the sun is shining and that all is well.

I think the reason this moment is so powerful is because they realize that all was well all along; and, with that comes a visceral reaction, that it was all in their head and that they can, if they choose to, focus their minds on better things.

What an incredible realization. Philosopher Eckhart Tolle wisely says – “Don’t take your thoughts too seriously.”

It is one of those perspective changing realizations that I have learnt to remember from time to time. Just yesterday, I had a similar moment as I was thinking of a couple of issues I had been wrestling with over the past couple of days. All was well in the grand scheme of things, the sun was out, the breeze was beautiful, and nearly all of what I thought were issues were all in my head. The moment I found that perspective, I realized that I had the power to shift my perspective and focus my attention on other things.

And, so I did.

We have much more control over our mindset and happiness than we think. As a result, we are much more powerful than we realize.

head

The child prodigy

ESPN has an in-depth article on how Tiger Woods’ life unraveled after the death of his father in 2006. It is a long read but an interesting one if you were curious about his fall from grace. The fact that he had trouble keeping up his performance after his scandals became public didn’t surprise me. Golf, as I understand it, is a mental game.

The extent of his fall did surprise me, however. This article does a good job explaining what happened in the past decade. The author’s view is that Tiger’s relationship with his Dad is what kept him in equilibrium. He was raised to be a pro golfer by his dad and, as a result, didn’t really grow up with a “normal” social circle or support group. And, after his dad’s passing, all of this began to unravel.

I found myself reflecting on child prodigies. Tiger Woods was definitely one of those prodigies as I was growing up. Macaulay Culkin (The Home Alone star) was another one. So was Lindsay Lohan. All three of them (and many more) have had so many difficulties dealing with being thrust in the limelight so young. Tiger kept going for a really long period of time before the house of cards began to collapse.

All of these child prodigies achieve a huge amount in record time. That’s what makes them so popular. But, I do wonder if the costs are worth it? G R R Martin wisely said that he is so glad to have only “made it” in his 60s and 70s because he’s found it so hard to deal with worldwide fame. He feels it would have ruined him had it come to him when he was young. That makes sense. It takes character to deal with fame and not let it ruin you. And, character development doesn’t happen in time for the kids who are pushed into fame.

Child prodigies are manufactured by eager parents. This article made me wonder – would the same parents push their kids to do what they did if they considered the end result more carefully?

child prodigyImage Source

And, on a parting note, I really hope you find your way back to happiness, Tiger.

Generosity with compliments

If a book has made an impact on you, let the author know.

If you really enjoyed a performance, send a note to the performers.

If an event changed your perspective, write to the organizers.

We often benefit greatly from the efforts of others. Sure, they’re likely doing it because they’re getting something in return – a salary, personal satisfaction, learning, etc. But, compliments generally mean a lot. This is not just because it makes you feel good as a builder (it does). It is because it helps you understand what is working. Generally, you get so much negative feedback about stuff that isn’t working that it becomes fairly easy to zero in on what needs to be fixed. But, it is much tougher to understand what is having impact.

Writing an email to thank someone or complimenting someone as you pass them in the building doesn’t take much. But, it can mean the world to someone and greatly brighten their day or week. It isn’t easy being a builder. There are enough opportunities for you to get knocked down without even getting to all the inevitable feedback.

Compliments go a long way. They don’t cost us much. Let’s make it a habit to be generous with them.

complimentsImage Source