Ubiquity Illusions and the Chicken-Egg Problem

September 29, 2011 By

I enjoy thinking about chicken-and-egg problems. They lead to a lot of perception-refactoring. Some common examples include:

  1. You need relevant experience to get a good job, you need a good job to get relevant experience.
  2. You need good credit to get a loan, you need to get loans to develop good credit.
  3. You need users to help you build a better product, you need a better product to get users.

This post is about one particular way to solve the problem, using what I call a ubiquity illusion. It is one version of what is colloquially known as the fake-it-till-you-make-it method.

Creating a ubiquity illusion is the most readily available method for solving a chicken-egg problem. It is, to be perfectly honest, not the best method. There are other methods that are superior, but they are generally not available to most people.

Ubiquity illusions are like the sculpture above (The Awakening, by J. Seward Johnson, photograph by Ryan Sandridge, Creative Commons 2.5 Attribution). It is actually five separate pieces strategically buried to give the impression of a much larger buried sculpture, of which three are visible above.

Let’s talk magic.

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The Milo Criterion

September 23, 2011 By

There is a saying that goes back to Milo of Croton: lift a calf everyday and when you grow up, you can lift a cow. The story goes that Milo, a famous wrestler in ancient Greece, gained his immense strength by lifting a newborn calf one day when he was a boy, and then lifting it every day as it grew. In a few years, he was able to lift the grown cow. The calf grew into a cow at about the rate that Milo grew  into a man. A rather freakish man apparently, since grown cows can weigh over  1000 lb.  The point is, the calf grew old along with the boy.

I have been pondering this story for a couple of years, and it has led me to a very fertile idea about product design and entrepreneurship.

I call it the Milo Criterion: products must mature no faster than the rate at which users can adapt. Call that ideal maximum rate the Milo rate.

It seems like a simple and almost tautological thought, but it leads to some subversive consequences, which is one reason I have been reluctant to talk about it. The most subversive effect is that it has led me to abandon lean startup theory, which is now orthodoxy in the startup world.

As a consequence, I have mostly abandoned notions like product-market-fit, minimum viable product, pivots and the core value of “lean.”  I only use the terms to communicate with people who think in those terms.  And I can’t communicate very much within that vocabulary.

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Forgivable Sloppiness: The Art of Epoch-Driven Time Management

September 22, 2011 By

I didn’t write a whole lot about time management in the book. This is because I believe it is a pretty mature field and I don’t like reinventing the wheel.  But I do have ideas about how to make your time management behaviors more robust, so you can allow for a certain amount of forgivable sloppiness in how you operate. David Allen of GTD fame once remarked, only partly in jest, that the fastest way to increase your productivity is to lower your standards. Forgivable sloppiness is my term for what it means to safely lower your standards.

The core idea is what I call epoch-driven time management: varying your behaviors based on the tempo of a project.  The idea can be generalized to your whole life, but let’s start with a single project, a thread in your life. This diagram, the Double Freytag triangle, which I discussed at length in the book, is one systematic way to carve up the time-line of your project into epochs with consistent tempos.

For the purposes of this post, all you need is your intuitive reading of the diagram. Think of the cheap trick and separation event as the psychological starting and ending points of a project (if you haven’t read the book, the choice of terms will remain somewhat cryptic, I am afraid). The height of the graph at any given point is, roughly speaking, a measure of how crazy your life is at that point. Each phase of the diagram is an epoch: it has a consistent rhythm, energy level and emotional feel.

Now that we have our terms defined (I am still working on an online glossary so I don’t have to do this for every post), let’s talk about forgivably sloppy time management.

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The Gervais Principle in New York, and Friday 9/16 NYC Meetup

September 12, 2011 By

It’s been nearly a year of procrastination since I posted Part IV of the Gervais Principle, and I am finally getting my act together. I’ll post the final part in the next few weeks. Blame hugely inflated expectations for the finale for my tardiness. But I finally decided, like Tony Hayward, that I wanted my life back. So I have legitimately started work on the finale (for those who don’t know what I am talking about: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV).  Whether it turns out to be a smooth touchdown or a crash-landing, either way the end is near.

But this post is mainly a news flash. I will be doing a 7-minute talk based on the Gervais Principle at the Human Potential conference, Sept 14-15 in New York. It is part of the Ideas Economy series of events organized by the Economist.  As far as I know, this Slightly Evil revolution is not being webcast, but the video should be available at some point. If you are attending, make sure to say hello.

I am extending my stay by a couple of days to meet people. If there is enough interest, I’d like to do an NYC meetup (or  a couple of small group/1:1 meetings) on Friday the 16th. If you are interested, let me know your availability. I expect to do any meetings somewhere midtown, 34th – 44th st or so.

Also, if you can offer me a couch in Manhattan to crash on for the night of 15th or 16th, let me know.  Thanks to my nomadic summer, I’ve acquired a serious taste for couchsurfing as a way to meet interesting new people, and have actually started to prefer it to staying at a hotel or with friends/family.

 

Fixing the Game by Roger L. Martin

September 8, 2011 By

Sometimes the difference between a good book and an Aaargh! book is a single unexamined value. Fixing the Game by Roger L. Martin is an Aargh! book. The phrase that kept running through my head as I read was so close… so close.

The book is two things: an exceptionally clear and original analysis of the question of what ails modern capitalism, and an exceptionally woolly headed prescription for how to fix it. Unlike many books that are strong on analysis, the prescription isn’t bad because it is an anemic afterthought shoved into a last chapter (here, the prescription runs through the entire book, with a goodly fraction of the word count devoted to it). It is weak because its foundational assumptions about the psychology of capitalism are hopelessly idealistic.

That’s what makes the book so frustrating. It could have been so much more. Still the book retains a lot of its value because it is relatively easy to tease apart the parts colored by idealism from the parts that are not.

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Tempo goes to Burning Man

September 7, 2011 By
Burning_book

Andrew Boardman named his copy “Burning Book.” His rule: the copy must be passed on to someone who has been to Burning Man.

Bandwagon Timing verus Biding Your Time

August 31, 2011 By

There are two basic types of timing: bandwagon timing and biding your time. They are the extremes of a spectrum. Most people focus on the first extreme. A minority focus on the second extreme. Successful timing requires a synthesis. Only a tiny fraction of people achieve synthesis.

We use different kinds of language to talk about each type.

Bandwagon timing is associated with the following types of language:

  • This is the right time to sell
  • Computer science is a hot major right now, and you should focus on Web technology
  • He was in the right place at the right time
  • It’s the perfect time to move to China

Biding your time, on the other hand, is associated with very different types of language

  • This is your moment
  • “There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, lead on to success” (Shakespeare in Julius Caeser)
  • This is an idea whose time has come
  • This is the moment I’ve been waiting for all my life
  • He was a visionary ahead of his own time

To synthesize the two, you have to understand how they relate.

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The Scientific Sensibility

August 26, 2011 By

I don’t like or use the term scientific method. Instead, I prefer the phrase scientific sensibility. The idea of a “scientific method” suggests that a certain subtle approach to engaging the world can be reduced to a codified behavior. It confuses a model of justification for a model of discovery. It attempts to locate the reliability of a certain subjective approach to discovery in a specific technique.

It is sometimes useful to cast things you discover in a certain form to verify them, or to allow others to verify them. That is the essence of the scientific method. This form looks like the description of a sequential process, but is essentially an origin myth. Discovery itself is an anarchic process. Like the philosopher Paul Feyerabend, I believe in methodological anarchy: there is no privileged method for discovering truths. Dreaming of snakes biting their tails by night is as valid as pursuing a formal hypothesis-proof process by day. Reading tea leaves is valid too. Not all forms of justification are equally valid though, but that’s a different thing.

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New Research on Decision Fatigue

August 24, 2011 By

There is a very interesting article in the New York Times  on the phenomenon of “decision fatigue.”

Decision fatigue is the newest discovery involving a phenomenon called ego depletion, a term coined by the social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister in homage to a Freudian hypothesis. Freud speculated that the self, or ego, depended on mental activities involving the transfer of energy. He was vague about the details, though, and quite wrong about some of them (like his idea that artists “sublimate” sexual energy into their work, which would imply that adultery should be especially rare at artists’ colonies). Freud’s energy model of the self was generally ignored until the end of the century, when Baumeister began studying mental discipline in a series of experiments, first at Case Western and then at Florida State University.

These experiments demonstrated that there is a finite store of mental energy for exerting self-control. When people fended off the temptation to scarf down M&M’s or freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies, they were then less able to resist other temptations. When they forced themselves to remain stoic during a tearjerker movie, afterward they gave up more quickly on lab tasks requiring self-discipline, like working on a geometry puzzle or squeezing a hand-grip exerciser. Willpower turned out to be more than a folk concept or a metaphor. It really was a form of mental energy that could be exhausted. The experiments confirmed the 19th-century notion of willpower being like a muscle that was fatigued with use, a force that could be conserved by avoiding temptation.

Commentary: I haven’t yet thought this through since it is recent research, but in Tempo-terms, it seems to fit in with the general notion of the momentum and entropy of mental models. If you forcibly steer the momentum through an effort of will, you increase entropy and make the narrative less controllable further downstream.

This goes into the hopper for some serious future examination.

The Calculus of Grit

August 19, 2011 By

I find myself feeling strangely uncomfortable when people call me a generalist and imagine that to be a compliment.  My standard response is that I am actually an extremely narrow, hidebound specialist. I just look like a generalist because my path happens to cross many boundaries that are meaningful to others, but not to me. If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know the degree to which I keep returning to the same few narrow themes.

I think I now understand the reason I reject the generalist label and resonate far more with the specialist label. The generalist/specialist distinction is an extrinsic coordinate system for mapping human potential.  This system itself is breaking down, so we have to reconstruct whatever meaning the distinction had in intrinsic terms. When I chart my life course using such intrinsic notions, I end up clearly a (reconstructed) specialist.

The keys to this reconstruction project are: the much-abused idea of 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, the notion of grit, and an approach to keeping track of your journey through life in terms of an intrinsic coordinate system. Think of it as replacing compass or GPS-based extrinsic navigation with accelerometer and gyroscope-based  inertial navigation.

I call the result “the calculus of grit.” It is my idea of an inertial navigation system for an age of anomie, where the external world has too little usable structure to navigate by.

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