Category Archives: takeaways

(book review) The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson

Posted on by
Reply

TL:DR: Giving so many f*cks about so many things–especially about things that don’t matter–will drive us crazy and make us unhappy. This book is not only incredibly dense with wisdom but also incredibly well written and edited. It really feels like every word was chosen and place carefully, so as to make the precise point intended. I highly recommend the book, and think you will find value paying attention to each and every word.

We live in a world that is constantly berating us to do more, eat more, make more, sleep more, exercise more, buy more, own more, etc. Here in the United States, the world seems to want us to give too many fucks about too many things. As Mr. Manson suggests, this is probably because the U.S. is a capitalist society and this is good for business.

Don’t let the title fool you. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson is a book full of deep insights and smart wisdom that can help you live a better life. Mark does an amazing job of examining behavior that hurts us, so that we can stop repeating our mistakes. There are so many lessons but some of my favorite are:

Life is about choosing which pain you want to endure. One of the biggest takeaways for me was that life is about choosing which pain you want to endure. There is no one choice that is pain free. There are always pros and cons to each choice. You just have to pick the choice for which the cons are something you are willing or enjoy enduring.

Our plentiful society is anxiety inducing. Much of the angst we feel is a result of the vast range and number of opportunities we have in our society. The more we have opportunities we have, the more things we have to measure up to and feel worse about ourselves.

We have really become the victims of our own success. Stress related health issues, anxiety disorders and cases of depression have skyrocketed over the past 30 years. Despite the fact that everyone has a flatscreen tv and can have our groceries delivered.

We have so much f*cking stuff and so many opportunities, we don’t know what to give f*ck about anymore.

Our ability to think about our own thoughts makes things worse. Humans are the unique animal that can think about its own thoughts. Other animals just feel and react to that feeling. As humans, however, we worry about worrying, get more anxious about feeling anxious, get angry about getting angry, get more sad about feeling sad, etc. This ability to think about thoughts and feelings means that we compounding our negative feelings. This is why it is so important to not give a f*ck, because doing so means that you stop that recursive loop and stop hating yourself for your feelings. By not giving a f*ck we simply don’t care that we are sad, angry, anxious, etc. and we move on. “We should accept that the world is f*cked and move on, because it has always been that way and it always will be.” says Manson.

Wanting a positive experience is itself a negative experience, while accepting one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.

When we give too many f*cks, we set ourselves up for perpetual and unnecessary disappointment. 

When you give a f*ck about everyone and everything, you will feel that you are perpetually entitled to feel comfortable and  happy at all times. that everything is supposed to be just the way you f*cking want it to be! This is a sickness, and it will eat you alive. You will feel that you have the right for have everything feel the way you want it to be!  You will see every adversity as an injustice… Every challenge as a failure…

Every inconvenience as personal slight…

Every disagreement as a betrayal.

 

There is a subtle art to not giving a f*ck; and it doesn’t mean being indifferent. “There’s a name for someone who finds no emotion or meaning in anything…a psychopath.”  Not giving a f*ck does not mean being indifferent. It means being comfortable with being different.  Since being indifferent requires figuring about what matters to you, being indifferent requires figuring out who you are and want to be. And since understanding oneself to this degree and what our guiding principles will be is difficult, Mr. Manson properly notes that:

Learning how to focus on what matters…what matters to you, is extremely hard to do; but it is the most worthwhile thing we can work on in our life.

People who act indifferent are probably the saddest form of a human being possible.

People who act indifferent are actually lying about their difference. They actually give too many f*cks about too many things and are too afraid to speak up and act on their own views. The bellow quote from the book’s preface best sums up the driving motivation of the book:

“There’s absolutely nothing admirable or confident about indifference. People who are indifferent are lame and scared. They’re couch potatoes and internet trolls. In fact, indifferent people often attempt to be indifferent because–in realit–they give way too many f*cks. They give a f*ck about what everyone thinks of their hair, so they never bother washing or combing it. They give a f*ck about what everyone thinks about their ideas, so they hide behind sarcasm and self-righteous snark. They’re afraid to let anyone get close to them so they imagine themselves as some special unique snowflake who has problems that nobody else would ever understand.

 

Indifferent people are afraid of the world and the repercussions of their choices. That’s why they don’t make any meaningful choices.  They hide behind a gray, emotionless pit of their own making.  Self-absorbed and self-pittying.  Perpetually distracting themselves from this unfortunate thing demanding their time and energy called life.

 

Because here’s a sneaky truth about life. There’s no such thing as not giving a f*ck. You must give a f*ck about something. It’s part of our biology to always care about something and therefore to always give a f*ck. The question then is: What do we give a f*ck about?  What are we choosing to give a f*ck about?  and How can we choose not to give a f*ck about what ultimately does not matter?

 

 

(book review) A Curious Mind by Brian Grazer

Posted on by
Reply

TL;DR Summary:  I can’t say enough about this book. The content is rich, tangible, accessible, actionable, and as life-changing as anything I’ve ever read. Anyone who reads this book and makes curiosity a driving force behind their behavior, will be the better for it. Also, movie making might be the perfect career.

 

This week, I was fortunate enough to discover and read two books that have helped me better understand the world, life, and myself. Few books have been so meaningful and helpful to me personally as these two books, which were both shoe-ins for my “Favorite Reads” list.

The first book was The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson.

a-curious-mind-9781476730752_hrThis post is a review of the second and equally impactful book: A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life by Brian Grazer. I am sharing this book because it has helped me understand myself in a very core way and because it provides so many good ideas/ways for how to get the most out of life going forward. It really is a powerfully down-to-earth and joyful book that I think pretty much anyone can benefit from reading.

How to get the most out of life going forward.

Better relationships.

One thing I was probably most surprised to learn from the book was how curiosity can be a driving force behind good, healthy inter-personal relationships. For me, it’s more obvious how curiosity can make us all more thorough and more innovative professionals, but what is less obvious is how curiosity can make me a better people manager, spouse, brother, parent, friend, colleague, etc.

As a self-described servant leader, as a fiancee to my future wife with whom I want to build a long and fruitful relationship that doesn’t end in divorce, and as a brother and son to struggling relatives, the stories Mr. Krazer tells about how curiosity drives constant question asking and how this makes people more responsive to him, were priceless.

Better citizen.

No man is an island. We are all members of at least one society and organization, and so perhaps curiosity can be a driving force to our asking questions of our government organizations and elected officials. If we never ask why and seek to understand how things are done, things would never get done better.  Perhaps this topic can be an opportunity for a revised edition.

Proper questioning.

One thing I think worth highlighting is the difference between “questioning” and “asking questions”.  It is a subtle difference but also at the core of how curiosity can be very a powerful force for good; or an insulting and ineffective force that distances you from people and whatever thing you need to understand.

Curiosity can and should lead to you becoming inquisitive and asking a lot of questions in search of understanding. “Questioning”, however, implies critique, which puts people on the defensive. When people feel defensive, they will not share openly with us; and we won’t learn the truth from them. The whole purpose of being curious is to learn the truth. Instead of “questioning”, our aim is to inquire, discover, understand, and discuss ideas.

“Anti-curiosity”

Mr. Grazer makes it clear that he a proponent for using curiosity to achieve desired results. It is a tool and culture. He is not suggesting we be curious for the sake of being curious. I love the practicality of this.

Ever the proponent of curiosity but of also achieving desired results and being a leader, Krazer does something really smart towards the end of the book, and describes this idea of “anti-curiosity”.  He points out that we must also learn when to stop asking questions; otherwise, we increase the likelihood of being convinced by respondents to not move forward with an idea that we believe worth pursuing.

Better understanding myself.

Curiosity is a good thing…a very good thing.

As anyone with ADHD will tell you, we are constantly distracted by things. We are–by definition–wired to notice. Before reading A Curious Mind, I understood my distractibility primarily in terms of an ADHD mind. Since my curiosity inherently makes me even more vulnerable to distraction, and I’ve always thought of distraction as a bad thing, I saw my curiosity as a bad thing. In fear of “not getting anything done”, I’ve spent more time telling myself to ignore my curiosities than to follow them. Not anymore. In A Curious Mind, Brian illustrates–with many tangible examples–that being curious is not only a unique personality trait but an extremely good way to live one’s life.

It is tough to put into words–especially without becoming a bit emotional–how good it feels to have struggled so much with one’s own mind and then come to realize that you’re mind isn’t “broken”. As they say here in Silicon Valley, my unfocused range of curiosities is not a bug; it’s a feature. And this feels so good.

Making movies might be what I should do with my life.

I still remember the first great movie I saw: American Beauty. I was 18 years old. For me, that movie was far more than an entertaining two-hour escape from reality. Somehow, it was a believable story into which I could escape and at the same time continue thinking about the world but in a new light. It was a magnificent experience,  ingeniously written and executed.

The lessons the movie taught me have stuck with me to do this day, almost 17 years later. Lessons like how people can put up facades and hide who they truly are on the inside. How the people society may judge was “weirdos” or “losers” might be the sanest of us all. It put so much of our society in front of us to rethink and question ourselves, making the movie far more than a great story. Immediately after finishing the movie, I knew right away that this was my kind of movie. These movies that cause us to think about things differently. These are the movies that responsibly take most advantage of this most powerful medium.

I’m fortunate to have attended three great institutions of higher learning, all of which I took very seriously, worked hard at, and learned a tremendous amount from; but movies have been my other educational institution.

As I take a step back and consider my vast range of curiosities, my unique ability to engage with people with different backgrounds, my business and intellectual property backgrounds, and my passion for influential movies, what could be a better job for me than producing movies?

 

 

Great stories are…

Posted on by
Reply

I recently attended a presentation by Jeff Gomez, who is the creative mind behind many well-known Transmedia fiction stories, and he gave some interesting insights into what great stories are. I have translated them a bit to be more relevant to the business focus of this blog:

  1. Storyline has to be something worthy of devotion. A good story simply has to be compelling and grappling enough that it moves us emotionally. Ideally, so much so that we share it with others.
  2. Story has to create a world with a past, present, and future.  This is more mechanical, but great stories set the context that helps us understand why the vision is relevant.
  3. Creative visionary & but align to the brand.  It is great think outside the box, but make sure everything aligns to the brand strategy.

How to create brand advocates

Posted on by
Reply

I really liked Rob Fuggetta’s article on generating brand advocates, the pursuit of which I think should be at the core of almost every business and marketing strategy.  I agree with all five things Fuggetta says a company needs to do to create them:

  1. Provide an “insanely great product.”: This was one of Steve Jobs’s famous statements. Very few people go out of their way to advocate mediocre products or services. Advocacy starts with having a product or service people are eager to recommend.
  2. Deliver memorable service: In an era when so many products and services are similar, service is the great differentiator. Nordstrom, Zappo’s, and Four Seasons hotels are examples of companies that created legions of advocates by providing extraordinary service.
  3. Focus on good profits: As loyalty guru Fred Reichheld has stated, there’s a difference between good profits and bad profits. Bad profits include earnings from price gouging, cutbacks on customer service, and hidden charges.
  4. Do the right thing, even when it costs you money: It’s easy for companies to do the right thing when it doesn’t cost extra. But when doing the right thing costs companies money, many firms take the low road. For example, if allowing a customer to return a lemon costs you money, do it anyway. Much better to do this than create a Detractor. If your company has screwed up, admit your mistake and fix it as fast as possible. In the social media age, a handful of disgruntled customers can harm your company or brand’s cherished reputation.
  5. Have a social conscience or get one fast: People are more likely to recommend companies and brands that have a social conscience. When it was revealed that Nike was paying low wages to workers, its advocates abandoned the brand. Take a social stand on issues or give back to your communities. Brands like The Body Shop earn advocacy in these ways.

McKinsey Quarterly interview with Pixar award-winning Director, Brad Bird

Posted on by
Reply

In the McKinsey Quarterly interview of Brad Bird, the award-winning Pixar film Director shared very interesting insights relevant to anyone leading highly-creative innovation work.   Below are some quotes from the interview and takeaways that are worth sharing.

Before I got the chance to make films myself, I worked on a number of badly run productions and learned how not to make a film. I saw directors systematically restricting people’s input and ignoring any effort to bring up problems. As a result, people didn’t feel invested in their work, and their productivity went down. As their productivity fell, the number of hours of overtime would increase, and the film became a money pit.

In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.

Takeaway:  It is how people feel that determines their productivity!

Our goal is different because if you say you’re making a movie for “them,” that automatically puts you on an unsteady footing. The implication is, you’re making it for a group that you are not a member of—and there is something very insincere in that.  If you’re dealing with a storytelling medium, which is a mechanized means of producing and presenting a dream that you’re inviting people to share, you’d better believe your dream or else it’s going to come off as patronizing.

So my goal is to make a movie I want to see. If I do it sincerely enough and well enough—if I’m hard on myself and not completely off base, not completely different from the rest of humanity—other people will also get engaged and find the film entertaining.

Takeaway:  It is critical to believe in what you are trying to create.  It therefore makes a lot of sense to make something that you yourself find valuable, and then trust your own judgment to represent preferences of a larger group.

[At Pixar] Steve [Jobs] put the mailboxes, the meetings rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center—which initially drove us crazy—so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. He realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen.  So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.

Takeaway:  In this information age, with more sophisticated new ideas and technologies swarming around us than ever before, small simple things are still elemental to success.  People making eye contact for example is necessary above and beyond simply being physically near one another.  Communication, engagement, sharing of information, and connecting with colleagues are fundamental elements that lead to effective collaboration and timely execution.

I don’t want him to tell me, “Whatever you want, Brad,” and then we run out of resources. I want him to tell me, “If you do X, we’re not going to be able to do Y.” I’ll fight, but I’ll have to make the choice. I love working with John because he’ll give me the bad news straight to my face. Ultimately, we both win. If you ask within Pixar, we are known as being efficient. Our movies aren’t cheap, but the money gets on the screen because we’re open in our conflict.  Nothing is hidden.

Takeaway:  Don’t waste time with interpersonal conflict.  Seek to identify points of conflict within the team and discuss it right away.   It sounds like, at Pixar, they don’t waste a lot of time and resources building movie parts that don’t ever make it onscreen; rather a large proportion of the work produced ends up in the final product; and this is because the team addresses conflict immediately, without letting it live subsurface, which is distracting and energy-consuming.

“Computers are already better than us at playing chess, but we are still better at recognizing a photo of our parents or children”

Posted on by
Reply

As I was leaving Tom Mitchell’s office, he says to me in the kind of hurried speech of a brilliant individual who has perhaps made the statement before:

“Computers are already better than us at playing chess, but we are still better at recognizing a photo of our parents or children.”

Many consider Tom Mitchell, chair of the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon University, to be a leading pioneer and expert in the field; and I just met with him to get a better understanding of machine learning, its limits, and its future.

Some major takeaways include:

  • We should not be afraid of machine learning replacing humans, at least in the near term
  • Even the area of “unsupervised learning” still requires humans to tell the computer what relationships to tease out of data
  • The lack of understanding possessed by businesses and marketers about machine learning consistently causes them to come to machine learning experts, such as Dr. Mitchell, asking these computer scientists to make sense of these large datasets.  These are under specified and arguably therefore useless questions for which machine learning is of little use.  What is always needed is context, a hypothesis you wish to test, and an ability to gather/capture useful datapoints.

At the end of the day, humans are still needed to perform one very critical function: defining the dependent variable and the range of possible independent variables that explain/affect that dependent variable.

What are insights and what role do they play in leading innovative changes in business?

Posted on by
Reply

I just finished reading a well-written and insightful paper about insights and the role they play in innovation consulting.  The author, Mark Payne, Fahrenheit 212 co-founder and President, seems to practice what he preaches.  The fundamental role of “commercial insights” he explains to be necessary for successful innovation consulting, for example, seem to have greatly influenced the design of his firm, the kinds of people they employ, and how they solve problems for clients.

Below are some of my favorite quotes and takeaways from this paper.

Quote:
“To innovators, great insights are springboards with tensile value.  Throw weight of your imagination upon them and they will forcefully propel you in new directions.”

Quote:
“…an energizing truth because yes, our reaction does matter.  Insight needs to inspire and ignite ideas and action among the people it touches.  Forget the lonely inventor in the garage.  Innovation is a team sport and great insights will electrify and galvanize teams around a sense of new possibility.”

Quote:
“Consume insight is absolutely critical and instrumental, but it isn’t enough to ensure an idea represents as big a step forward for the business as it does for the consumer.”

Takeaway:
I am an Introspector type of insight generator.
It was a tough call, because I think I generate insights in all three ways (Detective, Empathizer, Introspector), but if I had to pick just one, I think most of my insights come from personal experiences that I then seek to understand and validate with other people.

Quote:
“Outside-In means looking inward at company assets from the standpoint of the consumer’s tensions and emerging needs.  Inside-Out means looking out at the consumer from the perspective of the under leveraged assets and tensions embedded in the company.”

Quote:
“…it’s far easier to excite a consumer with creative, new transformational possibility than it is to get a company to embrace something it’s never done before.  Commercial insights hold the keys to winning over the company.”

Takeaway:
I would partially define insight to be about seeing what is already there, but that others have not seen.  Nature already is already providing all the information we need, but we have to connect the dots, analyze the information, look for patterns, and look for the explanatory variables.

Do people have children as means for dealing with our own mortality?

Posted on by
Reply

Do people have children as means for dealing with our own mortality?  Not that this would be a bad thing at all, but does it possibly explain our decision to have children and other deep motivations behind human behavior.

For a while now, I have been curious to understand why some people want to have children and raise a family, and why others do not.   We don’t really live in an age where we need children to do manual labor on the farm anymore so why do some people want something even when it–in many ways–it makes no rational sense.   For parents, children, after all, mean: more responsibility, less  freedom, emotional vulnerability and suffering caused by the relationship with them and their eventual extended family members, etc.

So why, amidst all these reasons to not have children, do people want them?  Since I believe we are rational creatures, we must be having childrent because we essentially feel that doing so will bring us more pleasure than pain.

Then I watched an interview with futurist Jason Silva, and he said some things about human behavior and psychology that I think make a lot of sense and that I had been wondering about for some time.

I think one of the ways children generate pleasure for parents is by helping parents deal with something every human undeniably struggles with: our own mortality.  We know we will die some day, but we do not like this; and so we do things to try and deal with this uncomfortable truth.   One way to deal with it is to rebel, and to try controlling it.    We can try to freeze ourselves in sub-zero ice chambers (Walt Disney) or we can get lost in an experiences that provides an escape or distraction from thinking about the fact that we only have so much time (movies and stories), or we can try and do things that make us feel like we can escape death (daredevils), or, I argue, we can try and create things that will live on after we die.   And I think having children–at some level–serves this selfish need inside us.   In addition, I think this need to create something that will live on beyond us, partially explains the attraction people have to:

  • writing books or blogs (putting their thoughts/voice into a medium that will live forever on Google’s servers somewhere)
  • create organizations or trusts that, legally, can have an infinite life
  • volunteer as mentors to younger people or children
  • join political movements that leave lasting change on something that will exist after we die (environmental movements)

Ultimately, I agree with Jason Silva.  I think all humans want to leave our mark in this world.  We want to feel like we matter; that we have a purpose.  I also  think our struggle of dealing with our humanity and mortality is so core and fundamental to who we all are that it is worth exploring and understanding further no matter who we are; and then make the world a more enjoyable place for us all.   As business person, for example, I wonder how I can create and manage a business in a way that makes people feel like they matter?   Can I listen to employees and customers better?  Can I involve them in the decision making processes such as product development, which results in tangible market offerings that people can point to and know they were a part of?   Indeed, I think we are now seeing modern management practices doing just this, and as a result, seeing improved productivity with employees and greater satisfaction and brand equity with customers; all because they are serving our fundamental human need to feel like we made a lasting difference on our world, and that we are not just some kind of puppet being controlled by some mystical god.

How do you deal with your own mortality?  Do you embrace it?  Do you ever think about it?  I realize it’s probably not healthy to be thinking constantly about our eventual death, but we should probably not pretend like it is not going to happen.  What do you think?   Leave a comment on this post.

the pivot: another entreprenuership lesson that’s relevant for business strategists and managers

Posted on by
Reply

The articulate and insightful Eric Ries, coined the term “pivot”.   In the entreprenuership community, we hear this term a lot.  The definition and examples he provides in a SXSW interview  are just very well explained and insightful.    He says “A pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision.”

I highly recommend the other videos in the PIVOT Series as well.

Paradoux of Choice

Posted on by
Reply

In our quest to maximize freedom, we maximize choice, but is this maximization of choice leading to maximization of happiness?

In his TedTalk, Psychologist Barry Swartz helps me understand why I hate large restaurant menus.  He articulates nicely, ideas that strongly suggest maximizing choice does not maximize our happiness; rather it is in fact reducing our happiness!   I don’t think there is anything more important to ponder than things that directly affect our collective (he mentions the possibility of Pareto Inefficient economies) and individual  happiness, and I highly recommend watching the entire 19 minute TedTalk (below); but some of the major takeaways are below.

The cost of choices includes:

  • paralysis, the resulting procrastination, and the resulting consequences of not taking action create huge costs for individuals
  • the opportunity costs of not choosing another available choice, subtracts from the satisfaction of making the choice that I made
  • with so many choices, we expect one of those choices to be a perfect fit; and high expectations that prevent us from being presently surprised and “The key to happiness is low expectations!”

Some takeaways:

  • “Everything was better back when things were worse”
  • “…pretty confident we have long since passed the point [number of choices] where choices are adding to our welfare”