Ben Casnocha: The Blog

The Very Best Are Obsessed

On his book tour in San Francisco, the noted crime novelist James Ellroy said:

I'm interested in doing very few things. I don't have a cell phone. Don't have a computer. Don't have a TV set. Don't go to movies. Don't read. I ignore the world so I might live obsessively.

This seems to be the case among many mega-successful people. They are obsessed with their talent. They can do little else, even if they've already hit it big. You see it a lot in writers like Ellroy. The very best entrepreneurs seem to be this way, as well. Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal, can't get off the saddle, even after making lots of money. He's now famously a workaholic at Slide.

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Here's how James Ellroy began a recent public appearance:

Good evening peepers, prowlers, pederasts, panty-sniffers, punks and pimps. I'm James Ellroy, the demon dog, the foul owl with the death growl, the white knight of the far right, and the slick trick with the donkey dick. I'm the author of 16 books, masterpieces all; they precede all my future masterpieces. These books will leave you reamed, steamed and drycleaned, tie-dyed, swept to the side, true-blued, tattooed and bah fongooed. These are books for the whole fuckin' family, if the name of your family is the Manson Family.

The Ethos of Casualness

1.

America was a start-up created by a dozen or so entrepreneurial people who were rebelling against an aristocratic, overbearing empire. They were scrappy, quick on their feet, smart, hard working as hell, and (mostly) open-minded to whoever could help their improbable cause. Kind of like Silicon Valley start-ups. Except for America's founders the stakes were higher and urgency greater.

When George Washington became the first president of the United States, he rejected regal titles like "His Majesty," taken from the British tradition. Instead he made sure "the titles and trappings were suitably republican and never emulated European royal courts." He said he was to be called "Mr. President."

I believe this relaxation of formalities is a component of Americanism. I'll call it an ethos of casualness. Europe's different. EU passports, for example, list your degrees (Dr., PhD, etc). Or when introducing someone's biography at a European business conference you start with his titles and degrees. I remember the senior journalist Martin Wolf being introduced at the St. Gallen Symposium as first a graduate of LSE, followed by his professional accomplishments. In a start-up environment, by contrast, you don't have time to flatter the status sensibilities of everyone in the room.

To be sure, although America has let go of the Victorian era more than Europe on the whole, there are exceptions. "I don't understand you Americans: you wear jeans to the opera but insist on wearing clothes at the beach." I.e., Europeans are more casual about nudity.

2.

I like casualness. It maximizes commonality instead of difference. When everyone's name appears the same way on a passport, what they have in common -- a name and citizenship -- is the focus. If jeans and t-shirt are the attire guidelines, everyone can comply; if Italian suits are the standard, not as much. In this way casualness emphasizes similarity by focusing on a common denominator.

3.

My upbringing stressed casualness and affected the way I think.

First, I grew up in the most casual part of America. There's only one restaurant on the entire west coast which requires men to wear coats. New York City, by contrast, has 13 such restaurants. Clothes are just one part of this, but they stand for a lot: in California you might well see Sergey Brin or Steve Jobs wearing jeans at a nice restaurant, as I have, but you would never see Henry Kravis doing the same in New York. California's billionaires blend in.

Second, at my high school we addressed all of the teachers, including the head of school, by their first name. Several teachers had advanced degrees -- we still addressed them orally and in writing by their first name. Head of School, janitor, Chair of Science department, freshman student, security guard: Mike, Jason, Nancy, Jim, Kevin. There also was no dress code. I wore sweat pants to school many days and sometimes my teachers did the same.

Third, I had little interaction with the institutions that usually prize formality. People with religious upbringings get steeped in hierarchies, traditions, protocols, history. Not me. I also had little interaction with high culture (cuisine, fashion, or the arts).

The ethos of casualness came from my country, city, school, family and it's had an impact on how I think. It could explain why I'm skeptical of certain formalities. When someone dresses fancily, I sooner suspect he is trying to signal wealth than that he actually likes the clothes. I harbor related skepticism of people who talk about how much they love sushi or fine art.

As I've gotten older I have begun to selectively emphasize formality (and thus difference) in certain dimensions, such as use of language. But these are the selective overlays on a casual base.

Bottom Line: The ethos of casualness is a component of Americanism. Casualness maximizes similarities over differences. I am a product of this culture -- I prefer casualness and I harbor skepticism of certain formalities.

(thanks to Steve Dodson, Chris Yeh, and Dave Jilk for helping brainstorm this post)

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Last year I wrote about how weak a hold institutional categories have on my identity, and excerpted widely from an excellent essay titled Identity is That Which is Given.

Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit

Steven Pressfield shares his #1 lesson for anybody in the working world:

Nobody wants to read your shit.

He explains:

The market doesn’t know what you’re selling and doesn’t care. Your potential customers are so busy dealing with the rest of their lives, they haven’t got a spare second to give to your product/work of art/business, no matter how worthy or how much you love it.

What’s your answer to that?

1) Reduce your message to its simplest, clearest, easiest-to-understand form.

2) Make it fun. Or sexy or interesting or informative.

3) Apply that to all forms of writing or art or commerce.

When you understand that nobody wants to read your shit, your mind becomes powerfully concentrated. You begin to understand that writing/reading is, above all, a transaction. The reader donates his time and attention, which are supremely valuable commodities. In return, you the writer, must give him something worthy of his gift to you.

In school anything you write or do will be read and graded by a teacher paid to do so. In the real world nobody wants to read your shit, and you have to earn their attention every single day.

Last year in a post titled You Have to Make People Give a Shit, I extolled blogging as a way to learn this value.

One way blogging makes you a better writer is it forces you to work hard for your readers' attention. On the web, it takes less than a second to close the page or click a new link. Your readers are busy and distracted.

This means you must engage the reader out of the gate and take nothing for granted. If you start sucking in the second paragraph, you'll likely lose the reader's attention. They click to a new page.

It's brutal. It makes you better.

Contrasts in How Google Suggests Searches

When you type a query into Google it will suggest the most popular completions to the given prefix.

There are some remarkable contrasts, Slate found, between "dumb" searches and "smart" ones. People who start their search "how 2" are more likely to search "how 2 get pregnant" or "how 2 grow weed." People who start their search "how one might" are more likely to search "how one might discover a new piece of music" or "how one might account for the rise of andrew jackson in 1828."

The most fascinating contrast is between "is it wrong to..." vs. "is it ethical to." One change in word generates very different suggestions.

"Is it wrong to..." generated the following suggestions:

Whereas "Is it ethical to" generated the following:

 

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Someone once told me that there is nowhere we are more honest than the search box. We don't lie to Google. Period. We type in what we're thinking -- good, bad, and ugly. There's probably no piece of information that would better show what's on someone's mind than their stream of searches.

Cultural Attitudes Toward Language (and Learning Spanish)

James Fallows, on the French/Japanese vs. American/Chinese attitude toward purity of language and foreigners' trying to speak their local tongue:

in France and Japan, the deep-down assumption is that the language is pure and difficult, that foreigners can't really learn it, and that one's attitude toward their attempts is either French hauteur or the elaborately over-polite and therefore inevitably patronizing Japanese response to even a word or two in their language. "Nihongo jouzu! Your Japanese is so good!"  ... Japanese people (to generalize) often seem self-conscious about potential errors in English. Of course, French speakers of English are marvelously non-self-conscious, even jauntily willful, about retaining their French accents, especially the trademark "z" sound for "th." " Zees ees what I mean..." (Yes, I am aware that the fricative th phoneme is the most difficult sound in English for non-native speakers, our counterpart to r's in French.)

The American attitude towards English is: everyone should get with the program, there are a million variants and accents of the language, all that really matters is that you can somehow get your meaning across. Because there are so many versions of Chinese in use within China, my impression is that the everyday attitude of Chinese people toward language is similar: You're expected to try to learn it, no one will spend that much time mocking your mistakes, mainly they are trying to figure out what you are trying to say. Probably both the U.S. and Chinese attitudes reflect the outlook of big, continental nations that encompass lots of internal diversity -- and in America's case, absorb huge numbers of immigrants.

Excellent point. Spanish is closer to English and Chinese in this respect, I think. Getting the meaning across matters most to the Latin American folk I've spent time with. Spanglish has nothing to do with purity and everything to do with utility.

I am trying, by the way, to elevate my Spanish speaking and writing skills from "intermediate" to "advanced." Here are some thoughts on how I'm going to do this:

1. Vocabulary first. If you don't know words, you can't communicate. If you can't communicate even basic ideas, you get frustrated. I'm emphasizing vocabulary. Grammar will come.

2. Spaced repetition. Per Piotr Wozniak's theories on memory -- the optimal time to review a word is the moment before you're about to forget it -- I'm using his free service SuperMemo.net to learn vocab.

3. Frequency of vocabulary over themes. I spent $30 on a frequency dictionary. It lists the 5,000 most frequently used Spanish words, in order, drawn from a 20 million word corpus of non-fiction and fiction writing and oral transcripts. The 5,000 most frequent words account for 95% of the written/oral material I am likely to encounter. I think it's a shame that virtually all Spanish vocabulary in U.S. schools is taught thematically (food, travel, etc) instead of by frequency.

4. Make mistakes, have no fear. Fear of embarrassment stops a lot of people from practicing a foreign language with natives, I think. I'm going to try to make as many mistakes as I can.

5. Immersion / live in a country. Chile is my target country. More on this, soon!

Here's a post on the cognitive benefits of bilingualism.

For those worried about the United States becoming a bilingual country, it's too late. The train has left the station. You cannot deny the demographic trends. Note that we will be bilingual in effect not in law. We are not destined to be Canada, in other words.

Given the competitive advantage they could bestow upon their child, I am surprised when I encounter wealthy American parents who are not paying their (probably El Salvadorean) cleaning lady to talk in Spanish in a structured way with their young children.

Finally, I have read research that shows very young children can pick up a language faster than an adult. But, I have seen no evidence showing an 11 year-old can learn a language faster than a 60 year-old. This seems to be one of the most dangerous myths circulating about language learning. We are damn good at coming up with excuses or rationalizations!

Goal: More At-Bats Per Unit of Time and Money

From Gary Hamel's CliffNotes version of how to "outrun change":

Yet to outpace change, every organization is going to have to master the art of rapid prototyping. Here the goal is to maximize the ratio of learning over investment -- to find the sweet spot of demand for a new product, or perfect a nascent business more rapidly and inexpensively than your competitors. Listen to Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, on this point: “Our goal is to have more at bats per unit of time and money than anyone else.” Your goal should be the same.

Exactly. Here's my long article on the importance of side projects to innovation. Institutionalized side project time is fundamentally about increasing the number of at-bats on the R&D front.

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Bob Sutton blogs about the one definitive paper on which employee selection methods are best at predicting job performance. Top three: work sample tests, general mental ability (IQ, etc), and structured interviews.

Religion for Atheists: A Secular Church

Alain de Botton, in an article titled Religion for Atheists, endorses the idea of a secular church:

In this new secular religion, there would be feast days, wedding ceremonies, revered figures (secularised saints) and even atheistic churches and temples. The new religion would rely on art and philosophy, but put them to overtly didactic ends: it would use the panoply of techniques known to traditional religions (buildings, great books, seminaries) to try to make us good according to the sanest and most advanced understanding of the word.

...there are certain needs in us that can never be satisfied by art, family, work or the state alone. In the light of this, it seems evident that what we now need is not a choice between atheism and religion, but a new secular religion: a religion for atheists.

He goes to write:

A secular religion would hence begin by putting man into context and would do so through works of art, landscape gardening and architecture. Imagine a network of secular churches, vast high spaces in which to escape from the hubbub of modern society and in which to focus on all that is beyond us. It isn’t surprising that secular people continue to be interested in cathedrals. Their archi­tecture performs the very clever and eternally useful function of relativising those who walk inside them. We begin to feel small ­inside a cathedral and recognise the debt that sanity owes to such a feeling.

In addition, a secular religion would use all the tools of art in ­order to create an effective kind of propaganda in the name of kindness and virtue. Rather than seeing art as a tool that can shock and surprise us (the two great emotions ­promoted by most contemp­orary works), a secular religion would return to an earlier view that art should improve us. It should be a form of propaganda for a better, nobler life.

Here's my earlier post The Secular Church and my post about Sunday School for Atheists.

Some of the features of the secular church that Chris and I will co-found includes:

• Chris Yeh as featured choir boy
• No sexual abuse of the children from priests
• Adequate leg room in the pews
• Gatorade instead of wine and Clif bars instead of stale crackers served during communion

Note our church will not be a proactively anti-God institution. It will instead appeal to my fellow pro-religion non-believers.

How to Dodge a Difficult Question

Econ blogger Steve Waldman, who recently participated in a meeting with Treasury Department officials, takes note of the technique employed by officials to dodge difficult questions:

In response to a several difficult questions, one official enthused that what the interlocutor had brought up was an important concern, something he really cared about, but then quickly went on to assert that, in his judgment, it was unlikely to be the pivotal or most challenging problem. I thought this a very effective trick to sweep an issue aside, a kind of jujitsu by which the official would render very sharp comments harmless by moving with rather than fighting against the questioner. After this move, the only possible disagreement is a judgment call about which of many problems is most pressing, and whose judgment would be better than that of a senior official immersed daily in the practicalities of policy?

Clever. Agree that it's an important question, but not the most important question. Then turn to the more important question. Perhaps even present the "more important" question back to the audience for their oh-so-valued feedback.

He then goes on to note how the Treasury officials employed the oldest trick in the book: flattery.

Twice Treasury officials commented on how uncommon a group we were, how we asked particularly pointed questions or were unusually bright. To borrow a cliché, I'll bet they say that to all the groups. One official made use of an expletive early in his discussion, which had the effect of making us feel like insiders, like this was not the sort of canned, guarded conversation one might see on CNN. The same official was quick to address us by first name when responding to questions. That wasn't hard, since our names were in front of us, written on placards in large letters. But it was still effective. Being addressed so familiarly makes you feel important, like you are someone powerful people deem worth their while to know. Obviously, the reality distortion field wears off when you leave, once you think it over. But these guys are pretty good at what they do.

Flattery, false bonding, etc: Even if you know it's happening, it doesn't mean it's not effective.

Budgeting Time to Think

During the campaign Michelle Obama was worried that Barack's schedule allowed him "no time to think."

You hear the expression a lot. But how many people actually budget thinking time on their calendar? You don't often see:

9:45 - 10:00 AM: Meet John Doe
10:05 - 10:20 AM: Conference call with team
10:20 - 11:00 AM: Meeting with client
11:00 - 11:20 AM: Think
11:20 - 12 noon: Meet with direct reports

Even if you had "thinking time" on your calendar, what would you do during that time? Sit in a chair, stare straight ahead, and ponder the world?

Because for some that would feel unacceptably unproductive, people usually do the kind of thinking Michelle was referring to -- synthesis, reflection, processing events and data -- while actively engaged in something else, albeit something that's not too taxing.

Driving is the most popular activity of this sort. Driving requires some level of attention, but you have plenty of cycles to think about other stuff, especially if you're driving a familiar route. "When Joan Didion moved from California to New York, Didion realized that she had done much of her thinking and mental writing during the long drives endogenous to the Californian lifestyle," Steve Dodson notes. I'm the same. I can't tell you how many emails and plans and conclusions I've come to while driving on the 101 or 280 freeways.

Reading is another activity that can be specifically scheduled and invites the kind of reflection and catch-up thinking that we need. It's for this reason I've long been puzzled by those "book summary" services where you buy a two page cheat sheet to a book. After all, it's not just the ideas in a book that matter; it's the time you allocate to reading.

Bottom Line: "Thinking time" usually takes place indirectly during activities such as driving or reading. We should schedule those activities accordingly.

Working Out With Nothing but a Floor

When you're on-the-go, finding a gym can be hard and going for a run outside is always fraught with the risk of getting lost.

So I now pack two good exercise tools in my suitcase that allow me to do a workout anywhere, anytime:

1. Jump rope - A jump rope is light, compact, and use-able anywhere. Because you stay in one place, you can simply take one step outside your hotel building and get after it.

2. Ripcords - I discovered these when their CEO, a blog reader, emailed and offered to send me a box. They're awesome. You can do many types of exercises with resistance bands.

Another blog reader, Adam Gilbert who's CEO of MyBodyTutor.com, emailed me a workout plan that requires nothing but a floor:

1. Jumping jacks - Do 4 sets of 50

2. Body Weight Squats - Do 3 sets of 20 (shoulder width)
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqj1qjIA6E0 - Great video to watch for form)

3. Wall Sit - 2 sets of 1:30 each
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDjKeOCgisw - Good video to watch for form)

4. Calf Raises  - 4 sets of 25 each

5. Push ups (shoulder width) - 3 sets of 20 each (Go slow and steady.)

6. Push ups (close grip) - 3 sets of 20 each (Go slow and steady. Again, own the exercise!)

7. Lying Torso Raise - 3 Sets of 15 each

Directions: Lie face down on the floor and place your hands loosely behind your head. Slowly raise your upper body until your chest is a few inches off the floor. You should feel your lower back muscles contracting as you rise up. Hold the top position for two-seconds then slowly return to the starting position and repeat.

8. Crunch - 3 sets of 15 each
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKg_cdwq9l4 - Good video on how to do them. Most importantly crunch your chin up towards the ceiling. Look up! And hold!)

9. Bicycles - 3 sets of 30 each (Every time you touch a knee it counts as one)
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPKXFarXbys - Very good video with great form!)

10. Plank (Hold for 2 minutes or as long as you can. 2 minutes is the goal though.)
(Perfect form - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ar2iRusnnc)

Your Customers Lie to You

A McDonald's executive, participating in the always-fascinating IamA series on Reddit, writes:

Our customers want mediocre food cheap. Every time we release a higher priced but higher quality product, the people who said they would pay for it... never do.

You say you want more fruits, salads, organic, all natural, etc. well then start buying that stuff and stop buying double cheeseburgers. Our best selling stuff is always whatever we can make taste good, at rock bottom prices.

We've actually learned not to listen to our customers when it comes to a lot of things. Health nuts won't come into McDonald's to eat even when we give them what they want.

As entrepreneurs we cannot blindly listen to our customers. They lie to us. Here's my old post titled Listening to Customers is Harder Than it Seems.

Given that customers lie, sometimes we have to extract information indirectly. Instead of asking customers how much they would pay for a hypothetical product, ask them how much they're currently paying for however it is they're solving the problem that you are trying to solve.

Other times, it can work to ask a direct question but discount the words that come out of their mouth and pay attention to body language. It would be fun to come up with a list of questions that elicit non-useful verbal answers but useful body language answers. In the past I've proposed, "Do you have self-confidence?" Steve Jobs asks employees, "Why are you here?"

Finally, actions speak louder than words. Just as your calendar never lies -- how you spend your time says more about your priorities than your stated priorities -- what customers actually buy and do is more instructive than what they say they'll do.

Book Review: Truman by David McCullough

David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Harry Truman is one of the best books I've read in 2009. At over 1,000 pages, it is a complete examination of Harry Truman's life and presidency, including blow-by-blow accounts of the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, the pivotal meetings with Churchill and Stalin at the finish of WWII, the Marshall Plan, the decision to send troops into the Korean War, his improbable re-election in 1948, and the crafting of America's anti-communist foreign policy.

McCullough is a masterful biographer. His characters become larger than life, he describes historical scenes with gripping detail, and he interweaves just the right amount of subjective analysis with objective facts and events. The result is that you not only get a sense of Harry Truman the man, but you also learn an enormous amount about the period of history in which he led.

Biographies of presidents are portraits of leadership. They are instructive. From Truman I learned about how far decency, straight talk, cheerfulness, and grittiness can take you.

Ambitious by nature, he was never torn by ambition, never tried to appear as something he was not. He stood for common sense, common decency. He spoke the common tongue. As much as any president since Lincoln, he brought to the highest office the language and values of the common American people. He held to the old guidelines: work hard, do your best, speak the truth, assume no airs, trust in God, have no fear.

It is said that George W. Bush read about Truman and his presidency while in office. I now understand why. Both had massive foreign policy decisions thrust upon them early in office; both were war-time presidents; both showed enormous resolve in making difficult decisions in face of criticism; both left office with very low approval ratings. Of course there are differences. On domestic policy, they had little in common. Truman was a common man of Missouri; Bush was born to the silver spoon. And while history has vindicated Truman, I don't think the same will happen to Bush 43.

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Assorted Excerpts:

• To Hopkins, he advised using either diplomatic language with Stalin or a baseball bat, whichever would work.
• As American as anything about this thoroughly American new President was his fundamental faith that most problems came down to misunderstandings between people, and that even the most complicated problems really weren't as complicated as they were made out to be, once everybody got to know one another.
• He is a most charming and a very clever person -- meaning clever in the English not the Kentucky sense.
• Dewey, it was cracked, was the only man who could strut sitting down.
• There was something in the American character that responded to a fighter, said the Washington Post on its editorial page. "The American people admire a man with courage even though they don't always agree with him."
• He ranked NATO with the Marshall Plan, as one of the proudest achievements of his presidency,
• For the first time in history, a world organization had voted to use armed force to stop armed force.
• In seventeen days of savage fighting, American and ROK forces had fallen back seventy miles. It was, in many respects, one of the darkest chapters in American military history.
• that the greatest part of a President's responsibilities was making decisions. A President had to decide. That's his job.
• His insistence that the war in Korea be kept in bounds, kept from becoming a nuclear nightmare, would figure more and more clearly as time passed as one of his outstanding achievements.
• But Mamma could also observe that "Being too good is apt to be uninteresting" a line they all loved.
• Here, he thought, was the eighth natural wonder of the world, a politician who didn't take himself too seriously, a friendly, likable, warmhearted fellow with a lot of common sense hidden under an overpowering inferiority complex.
• "You give a good leader very little and he will succeed," he said, looking at the chairman; "you give a mediocrity a great deal and he will fail."
• And clearly he delighted in talking about himself. He was his own favorite subject, yet nearly always with a sense of proportion and a sense of humor.

The Best Time to Have Sex (and Do Other Things)

Best time to have surgery: Morning (4x less likely to have complications in the morning than between 3-4PM)

Best time to get a human being on the phone when calling a company's customer service line: As early as possible (lowest call volume)

Best day of the week to eat dinner out: Tuesday (freshest food, no crowds)

Best day to fly: Saturday (fewer flights means fewer delays, shorter lines, less stress)

Best time to fly: Noon (varies but pilots say airport rush hours coincide with workday rush hours)

Best time to exercise: 6-8PM (body temp highest, peak time for strength and flexibility)

Best time to have sex: 10PM-1AM (skin sensitivity is highest in late evening)

The nuggets are from Mark Di Vincenzo's Buy Ketchup in May and Fly at Noon: A Guide to the Best Time to Buy This, Do That and Go There which I expect the fun-facts-at-cocktail-parties crowd is buying by the bucketload. The pointer is from Barking Up the Wrong Tree, via Andy McKenzie.

Note that the worst time to do anything is immediately after lunch.

How to Kill It: Passion and Patience

Gary Vaynerchuk delivered a highly entertaining 15 minute "keynote" at last year's Web 2.0 conference which is ostensibly about "how to build a personal brand" but is really about passion, hustle, grit, not making excuses, and wanting to win. His authenticity is what comes through most of all. He's all over the place, but it works. Embed:

(thanks to Rob Montz for sending)

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I'm teaching a free one hour class on entrepreneurship tomorrow (Wednesday) on Edufire. Only 15 spots left.

Impressions and Lessons from Cyprus

I spent the last two weeks in North and South Cyprus. It is a beautiful country! I had the opportunity to meet many businesspeople, government officials, journalists, and students. Here's what I learned:

1. A Divided Country. The first thing to say about Cyprus, both because it's the reality and because the locals talk about it constantly, is the political situation. It is a divided country: Turkish Cypriots in the north, Greek Cypriots in the south. A U.N.-controlled "green line" divides the two sides. Like any disputed territory, each side has a different interpretation of history. This I.H.T. op/ed from last week does a good job at briefly describing the two historical narratives.

2. Will There Be Re-Unification? In 2004 citizens of both sides voted on a referendum on the Annan Plan which would have re-unified the country. The north (Turkish) voted yes and the south (Greek) voted no. Why did the Greek Cypriots vote against? Wikipedia offers several reasons. My impression is that there was in general a distrust that the north would fulfill its obligations in the plan and specifically that Turkish troops would ever leave. But the bottom line was economic self-interest: Why absorb a poorer per-capita neighbor? Why would you want your tax dollars to prop up a people who speak a different language and whose history on the island you resent?

Cyprus joined the EU in 2004. This creates even less incentive for the Greek-Cypriots. Had re-unification been a condition of EU membership, the island would have found a way, I think. Cyprus got into the EU as a divided country because Greece threatened to veto the Baltic countries' membership unless Cyprus gained admission. An obvious weakness of the EU is every member country wields veto power over new applicants.

3. Victimhood Narratives. I was impressed with the businesspeople and students I met in North Cyprus. There is so much to say in praise of their resilience. But I worry about one thing: self-pity, no matter how justified, is an unproductive endeavor. And the victimhood narrative seems to run deep in the North Cyprus psyche.

If you see yourself as a victim, by definition there must be a victimizer. For many Turkish-Cypriots, it is the Greek-Cypriots and the international community which recognizes the South. Victims also usually have saviors or protectors. This is Turkey. Thus emerges an easy formula for both excusing and explaining the past (the victimizer) and excusing and blaming failures of the future (the would-be savior). Missing from the equation is a sense of personal responsibility for the present and a spirit of self-determination to create a better future.

4. Leviathan and Santa Claus. ~ 50% of the people in North Cyprus work for the government. The government then, is both Santa Claus and Satan. When good things happen, thank the government. When bad things happen, blame the government. Individuals depend too much on the government. The government in turn depends on Turkey. We need a stronger and more active private sector. We need more entrepreneurs.

5. "We" vs. "I." Victimhood narratives and a bloated state chip away at individuality. If I were facilitating conversations in North Cyprus, I would prohibit anyone, on the topic of politics and national improvement, from starting a sentence with "We." Sweeping diagnoses of society at large fix nothing and distract attention from the one thing an individual can control: his or her own actions and beliefs. In the language of the collective we can forget that a "society" is comprised of individuals, and "society" only changes when each individual first changes himself. "We" proclamations in politics make for stirring rhetoric, but can stymie individual change. The unity sought by collectivist language, absent a foundation of independent individual minds, is rather brittle. Think Gandhi: Be the change you want to see in the world.

6. Should a Congressman Represent America or His District? It is in the U.S. national interest for Cyprus to be a unified country, not because of Cyprus per se (although a more stable country and larger economy benefits all countries, in the non-zero sum game of economic growth), but because a unified Cyprus is helpful for Turkey's admission to the E.U., and the U.S. wants Turkey in the E.U. Turkey is, after all, a majority Muslim country of 74 million with a secular, democratic government that stands at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East.

Congresspeople don't necessarily hear this story, though. There are about three million Greek-Americans in the U.S. and they comprise a formidable lobby. They oppose unification and regard the Turkish presence in Cyprus as an illegal occupation. This muddies U.S. foreign policy and raises a question about democracy: Should a congressman put the desires and needs of the country ahead of the desires and needs of his particular district? If they conflict, should the national interest trump those of the district whose voters elected you?

7. The Physical and Psychological. It's easier to be a small island, economically speaking, in a globalized world: air travel is easy and cheap, and technology sends bits and bytes over the air regardless of whether it's land or sea below. But I still believe psychological boundaries erect when freedom of movement on your own two feet is limited. The American west worked so well an an idea because it lay physically far away. When the frontier opened, it was possible to get in your car in the east and drive for hours and hours into desert and red clay and canyons and forest. The west lured easterners who wanted to re-invent themselves. The new physical geography sparked new identities and modes of thinking. A small island cannot offer this as easily.

8. Good Food, Good Weather, Good People. There's so much pleasantness on the island. A stroll down Lidra street in Nicosia feels like the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, except more hip. The October weather I experienced was extraordinary. It's too hot in the summer, but fall and winter delight. The local food is delicious, if Mediterranean / middle eastern cuisine is your thing. For spicy girliemen like myself, the mildness of the cuisine meant I faced none of the "will this food burn my mouth?" anxiety that I faced in China in August. Don't forget baklava for dessert. Cypriot people are hospitable, friendly, interested.

9. Tourist Suggestions. 50% of tourists to Cyprus are Brits. It's a hot spot in Europe. I've never been to Turkey or Greece, but I've heard more enchanting stories about Turkey than Greece; so, if you wanted to stick to a single currency and language, a terrific itinerary would be a two week trip to Turkey and Northern Cyprus. In Cyprus, spend most of your time lounging around the harbor in Kyrenia and sitting on the stunning beaches. Devote a day or two to Nicosia, the last divided capital in the world, and soak up the history and observe the U.N. peacekeepers. Eat kebabs, drink Turkish yogurt, and if ancient history is your thing, marvel at relics of a 9,000 year old place.

10. Students Thinking Differently. I had the opportunity to address over 1,000 people on the island, and I have been touched by some of the emails and relationships I have struck up. It is inspiring to see people there thinking big things.

(The views above are mine, expressed as a private citizen, and do not necessarily represent those of the U.S. government.)

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On-the-ground lessons and impressions from:

• China: 2009, 2006
• Colombia
• Mexico
• Argentina
• Chile and Uruguay
• Ukraine
• Ecuador
• Czech Republic
• Hong Kong
• Switzerland (1) and (2)
• Western Europe and Asia
• Russia

My travel blog has over 250 on-the-ground dispatches from 25 countries.

Creativity: Loving, Knowing, Doing

‘…the most useful definition of creativity is the following: people are artistically creative when they love what they are doing, know what they are doing, and actively engage in art-making. The three elements of creativity are thus loving, knowing and doing; or heart, mind and hands; or, as Zen Buddhist teaching has it, great faith, great question, and great courage.’

Loving, knowing, doing. The secret behind becoming excellent at anything is loving one thing deep and hard enough to do it for a very long time. To continue to learn and know it.

That's Eric Maisel via Justine Musk, in her epic post on why you have to read like a maniac to develop a writer's intuition. Later she says:

Don’t just read because it will make you a better writer – although it will. Read because you love to read, you love stories of all shapes and sizes, you love the flow and rhythms and innovations of language, you love to learn stuff about people, you love to learn stuff about the world, you love to form relationships with individuals who don’t exist. Read because you love to write. Read because you love fiction and nonfiction and their pirate chests of treasures.

I can't imagine being interested in writing and not subscribing to Justine's blog.

Obtaining Honest Feedback

Earlier this year I was lucky to participate in a group dinner with five accomplished, interesting people.

One guy at the table you've probably heard of -- let's call him Unaware Big Man -- began dominating the dinner conversation. He kept bringing the conversation back to his own experiences. He made great points -- he is an exceptionally smart person -- so at first we all went along with him playing professor. But soon enough people wanted to hear from others.

Unaware Big Man didn't get this. He did not possess, for example, the social awareness to notice the body language of someone "getting in line" to speak next. Halfway through the dinner, an older gentleman semi-forcefully interrupted Unaware Big Man: "I want to hear what John has to say," pointing to John across the table. Unaware Big Man had no idea he was being asked to simmer it down; he let John speak for 30 seconds and then jumped in with a friendly rebuttal.

I was astonished to witness someone so successful be so oblivious to the social dynamics of the dinner.

Here's the kicker: everyone knew what was going on but none of us gave him feedback afterwards. None of us knew him well enough to say, "Hey man, you really talked a lot at dinner -- let's hear what other people have to say next time." That might seem like easy feedback to give, but not when it's to a high status person. I have no vested interest in his personal growth, but I do have an interest in him not thinking ill of me. It's possible he takes the feedback the wrong way, or takes personal offense. The potential upside vs. potential downside calculation doesn't compel me to deliver honest feedback.

Here's the second kicker, a more general point: I'm sure all of us at one point or another have been the Unaware Big Man or Woman. Undoubtedly there have been times when one or more other people I've interacted with, in their heads, thought: "Gosh, Ben is annoying right now." And yet, they don't give me the feedback. The feedback loop breaks down.

Obtaining honest feedback is hard. Some CEOs tell me it's the hardest part of their job. Without feedback you can't improve. But as you acquire more power and status, people sugarcoat and are reticent to volunteer constructive criticism.

Four thoughts on this topic jump to mind:

1. For feedback on specifics -- such as your participation at a dinner or a piece of writing -- I think you have to proactively ask for it. It still might not come, honestly anyways, but if you don't ask it almost definitely will not come. The rub, of course, is that you don't know what you don't know. It didn't cross Unaware Big Man's mind to ask me for my feedback on his dinner participation. I suppose the solution is to solicit feedback even when you think you did a good job and to do so without seeming needy or insecure.

2. It's harder to get feedback on more permanent personality traits or long-standing habits. My friends Maria and Colin have solicited this type of feedback via the Nohari and Johari exercises, but it's awfully hard to ask someone to assess your character in the abstract. If you're looking for this kind of what-do-you-think-of-me-as-a-person commentary, here's an idea from a friend. Tell someone: "I'm having a hard time dating. Why do you think people are not that into me?" This will prompt a range of "ideas" about what might be unattractive about any and every aspect of your being.

3. When I ask people whether they get honest feedback, sometimes they say, "Of course I do. I always give people honest feedback, and they know this is the case -- and so I have no problem receiving it in return." Not only does this not logically follow, but these types of bull-in-china-shop people are exactly the personalities which intimidate potential feedback-givers. My theory: If you give blunt feedback, you are actually less likely to get blunt feedback in return. The law of reciprocity does not apply here.

4. Should we value feedback less when it comes from people who don't know us than feedback that comes from people who do know us well? Intimacy to a person means you are more likely to be forthright but also more biased and invested in a relationship. Also, how much does anonymity increase honesty and is the tradeoff of not being able to contextualize feedback worth the honesty boost that comes from anonymity?

We Like to be Shocked Because It Means We're Innocent

The other day, sitting in a cafe here in Nicosia, Cyprus, I glanced at CNN International on the TV as the anchor ran through the headlines. Serious dispatches from Africa, from Europe, from Colombia, and then...from the leader of the free world...balloon boy!

Lee Siegel, on the incident that dominated the headlines, writes:

Along with the primal terror of a threatened child, there is something about the ordeal of innocence that strikes deep in the American soul. We are still shocked by everything, by sex scandals, by marital infidelity, by corruption, by violence, by public displays of anger—not an hour goes by when society is not rocked, briefly, by alarm, and then hysteria over Something That Happened Out There. We like to be shocked because we like to think of ourselves as innocent enough to be shocked. So in the spectacle of a child endangered and of all the country’s law-enforcement, and military, and technological resources used to try to save the child, we perhaps see our innocence put to the test, and our strengths and virtues fully on display in response.

It recalls Robin Hanson's interesting essay on Innocence vs. Insight. Why are we so taken with innocence, an apparently attractive form of ignorance?

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I have yet to find a series of insults and defenses more impressive or hilarious than those that Lee Siegel-in-disguise hurled against his detractors.

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Here's Robin Hanson on why people do not care about inequality of beauty (while we do care about inequalities related to genders or ethnicities). Should we compensate ugly people for their bad luck?

Here's Hanson, in response to David Letterman's forced admission that he slept with female producers on his show, in praise of blackmail.

What I've Been Reading

A politics kick:

1. The People's Machine: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of Blockbuster Democracy by Joe Mathews

A stupendously researched account of the first years of Schwarzenegger's governorship of California. It is sufficiently detailed as to only probably interest those who follow California politics, but then again, isn't everyone intrigued by The Governator? After reading you feel sympathetic to Arnold's attempt to reform California and newly cynical about the prospect of anyone being able to effect meaningful change. The title of the book refers to Arnold's strategy of governing via ballot initiatives and circumventing the legislature. His success in office has depended on whether the people vote up or down his many ballot initiatives. Voters are influenced by the interest groups which run California. When the teachers' unions came out against his slate of initiatives a few years ago -- spending millions of dollars to flood the state with ads bashing Arnold and his proposed reforms, which included such insane ideas like lengthening the time it would take for teachers to gain tenure from 3 to 5 years -- his initiatives went down, along with his governorship.

2. Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt by David McCullough

A good look at TR's childhood and early influences. McCullough is masterful, as ever. Here's Edith Wharton on TR:

...he was so alive at all points, and so gifted with the rare faculty of living intensely and entirely in every moment as it passed...

Living intensely and entirely in every moment as it passes: not a bad goal.

3, 4. Dead Right (1992) and Comeback (2008) by David Frum. Frum is one of the wisest conservative commentators. I support his new project, Newmajority, which (unofficially) stands to rebuke the Sarah Palin wing of the Republican party -- and her talk radio side-kicks -- and instead promote a smarter renewal of a conservative movement. Dead Right is more serious and comprehensive and I recommend it to anyone interested in an insider's take on the conservative scene in the 80's and 90's. Comeback is positioned as a playbook for the Republican Party in the coming years but it struck me as rushed and not terribly persuasive. I am intrigued at Frum's evolving view on the role social issues should play in the Republican Platform. His shift is evident when you read his two books back to back. Myself, I am not at home in the Republican Party because of the social views they espouse and so I am always interested in how GOP commentators position their party on this front for the future, given changing demographics and related views on gay marriage and the like.

My Commonplace Book - Words and Phrases

When I come across a new word in a print book I'm reading, and I want to remember it, I write it down in my commonplace book. (Here's the history of commonplace books.) I do the same with cool phrases or sentence constructions.

Here's the link to my commonplace wiki. You can't edit it, but you can view recent words and phrases. In the phrases section, I will sometimes note how it can be used in writing. E.g.:

"fashion a narrative" (fashion = to create)

Splendid, but I part company at the last sentence. (to set up disagreement)

My challenge is I have bits and pieces in various places. For example, my favorite Updike or Wallace lines are not on this wiki.

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Colin Marshall: "I've come to find myself asking only two qualities of a writer: honesty and clarity. The rest is window dressing."

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Justine Musk's latest gem on writing. She echoes other advice I've heard: go out and experience the world, then write about it. Or as Thoreau put it: one ought to "stand up and live before you sit down and write." She hits on other themes and arrives here:

Writing fiction is serious business. It demands nothing less than everything you’ve got to give: your blood, sweat, heart and soul; your time; your ego. You expose yourself in your work and again when you show your work. It deserves to be taken seriously, and yet somehow we have to find a way to treat it lightly, hold it lightly, so it doesn’t slip away from us.

The End is Not Fixed

A 20-something friend, uncertain and a little anxious about her life path, emailed an old professor of hers for advice. Here's what he said:

Don't think too much and don't worry (advice from someone who did too much of both).  Dewey has a lot to say about being on the road.  The most important thing is to give up the idea that the end is already fixed.  It is happening in real time.  Be in what you are doing, and always remain open -- there are opportunities that will be created that don't even exist yet.  Just be there.  They'll come.

We are all on the road, and the end is not fixed.

The Evolving Uses of Twitter

I've been using Twitter for almost three years. I was an early adopter even by tech industry standards; the only guy I know (personally) who's been using it longer is a seed investor in the company.

So it's been interesting to see how the service has evolved from its original purpose (answering the question "What are you doing?" -- i.e., status updates) to a broader range of uses.

My preferred way to use Twitter is:

Status updates: I enjoy being able to passively keep up with what my friends are thinking and doing. Twitter is excellent at this; Steven Johnson notes the "ambient awareness" that Twitter enables and the "strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines."

Micro-blogging: A self-contained thought or theory. You'd be surprised how much profundity can be conveyed in 140 characters! (From others, of course.) I also tweet quotes I read in the offline world. Online I just tag in delicious.

I am not enthusiastic about the following three uses:

Direct communication. It's hard to directly communicate with a person on anything of substance. "Conversations," while the touchstone word in social media, cannot really happen on Twitter. The 140 character limit is limiting and gets tiresome. No threading makes it unmanageable for anyone who gets a lot of replies. Conversations take place in the comments sections of blogs; not on Twitter.

Link dumping: Some people post lots of links on Twitter. I don't like this. If I'm going to follow someone's bookmarks, I'd prefer to read it in delicious or a similar social bookmarking service. I use delicious voraciously. Twitter links are hard to view if you're reading it on your phone; they're not indexed or organized in any coherent way (no tags); they're always shortened so you can not quickly see what the site is before you click it. My friend Steve Silberman prolifically tweets links. I now subscribe to his twitter feed via RSS and I will do this with any other similar user.

Re-publishing RSS feeds into Twitter: This is when bloggers publish the link of a new post into their Twitter feed. If I subscribe to someone's blog via RSS, I don't want to see it on Twitter. For one, it means I'm seeing the same piece of content twice. We need universal, portable read/unread states! Second, it can tempt me to click on the link and read the post, which is inefficient. Batching tasks (such as reading blogs via RSS) is more efficient than randomly clicking links whenever you're scrolling through the timeline. All this being said, I see the argument for re-syndicating it. There are probably a thousand or two people who follow my tweets but not my blog.

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Speaking of RSS, is Twitter killing RSS? Chris Dixon is the latest to jump on this train. He writes:

I’ve used Google Reader religiously since it launched.  I’m a few days away from quitting it forever.  Pretty much every blog I read tweets the titles of their posts along with a link.  Better yet, the people I follow retweet their favorite links, providing a very efficient way for me to discover new articles to read and publishers to follow.

I see Chris's logic as: a) I like Twitter because of the social filter -- my friends link to cool stuff. b) My friends also link to their blog posts on Twitter. c) Thus, whatever shows up in my RSS reader I've already seen on Twitter.

I arrive at a different place than Chris because I don't value (a) as much as he. My RSS reader is itself a social filter. I subscribe to 200 feeds and get all sorts of great content through it. The content comes neatly organized, with longer summaries, categories, and full URLs. By comparison, Twitter is noisy, unorganized, and limited by 140 characters. If you step back and ask, "What's the best way to get content?" I think most would say RSS. The social filter/discovery of Twitter then must be good enough to surpass the inherent advantages of RSS. Not for me.

(thanks to Tyler Willis for conversations on this)

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Three final things:

1. Twitter Inc. will be a fine business. If they wanted to generate millions of revenue immediately, they could.

2. Real time search is the real deal. The Golden Triangle: mobile, real-time, social.

3. When people tell me they've stopped blogging and now only tweet, I want to reply, "So what you're saying is the essence of everything you want to say can be expressed in 140 characters?"

Tragic vs. Utopian View of Human Nature

Beliefs cluster. If you find out someone is an environmentalist, she probably also is sympathetic to rehabilitating offenders, affirmative action, generous welfare programs, and gay marriage, is a secularist and a professor or student. If you find out someone favors a strong military, he probably also "supports judicial restraint, laissez-faire economic policy, is more likely to be pragmatic than idealistic, censorious than permissive, meritocratic than egalitarian, and gradualist than revolutionary." If you find out someone is religious, she probably also supports lower taxes.

Here's a game to play while driving. When you see an activist-like bumper sticker on the car in front of you, guess the person's beliefs. For example, if I see a bumper sticker for the National Organization for Women with a pro-choice message, I bet I can accurately predict 95% of their beliefs on political and social issues.

Thomas Sowell has offered an audacious explanation for why beliefs cluster like they do: the collections each reflect a different fundamental view of human nature. Sowell sorts human nature into two camps: the Tragic Vision and the Utopian Vision. Steven Pinker summarizes it in The Blank Slate, which is where the quote in my first paragraph comes from. Excerpt:

In the Tragic Vision, humans are inherently limited in knowledge, wisdom, and virtue, and all social arrangements must acknowledge those limits. "Mortal things suit mortals best," wrote Pindar; "from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be made," wrote Kant. The Tragic Vision is associated with Hobbes, Burke, Smith, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, the philosophers Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper, and the legal scholar Richard Posner.

In the Utopian Vision, psychological limitations are artifacts that come from our social arrangements, and we should not allow them to restrict our gaze from what is possible in a better world. Its creed might be "Some people see things as they are and ask 'why?'; I dream things that never were and ask, 'why not?'" The quote is often attributed to the icon of 1960s liberalism, Robert F. Kennedy, but it was originally penned by the Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw (who also wrote, "There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough"). ...

In the Tragic Vision, our moral sentiments, no matter how beneficent, overlie a deeper bedrock of selfishness. That selfishness is not the cruelty or aggression of the psychopath, but a concern for our well-being that is so much a part of our makeup that we seldom reflect on it and would waste our time lamenting it or trying to erase it.

The theory is not foolproof in approximating bundles of belief. But it does provide a useful framework to understand certain political perspectives. Usually modern liberals tend to hold the Utopian Vision and modern conservatives tend to hold the Tragic Vision of human nature.

Consider public education in America from this perspective.

Conservatives are generally skeptical of the government monopoly of public schools. The Tragic Vision emphasizes the bedrock of selfishness in human nature, and conservatives see public school teachers and their unions as selfish, greedy economic actors like any other -- no more, no less. The Tragic Vision emphasizes that power corrupts and even very smart people at the top can err; conservatives tend to support decentralized control and competition (through charter schools, vouchers, etc).

The Utopian Vision emphasizes the possibility for great individuals to transcend their darker self-interested temptations and fight for the "greater good." Liberals first see teachers as generous servants fulfilling an important calling, and in political debates give them corresponding deference. The Utopian Vision emphasizes equality, and liberals see government-run public schools as important instruments in this level-playing-field-for-everyone quest.

There are probably better examples of the theory at work, but it's one that jumped to mind as I ponder the state of public education.

Note that Sowell, in his book, actually uses the terms "Constrained Vision" vs. "Unconstrained Vision." The Constrained Vision sees human nature as unchanging and selfish, and the Unconstrained Vision sees human nature as malleable and perfectible.

Feeling Known and Noticed

Recently, as I walked to meet a good friend for lunch in New York, I noticed myself feeling unusually relaxed and peaceful. About halfway into our lunch my friend said, "You know, you seem more relaxed than usual." He read my body language well.

It is an observation that draws upon a historical data set, as "relaxed" is a relative term. It made sense: I've known him for seven years. I do not have many close friends who I have known for more than 4-5 years.

Later the next night, at a burrito place, he mentioned I always order steak or pork when I select a meat option in restaurants. This is true. I ate so much chicken growing up that I never order it as my meat of choice. Meanwhile, I noticed he was wearing a new shirt, and we both noticed our mutual friend of seven years was wearing new shoes.

These are trivial examples, but the point is this: noticing slight changes in a person's behavior, appearance, or state-of-mind requires knowing the person well and over a long period of time.

And it is very satisfying to feel known and noticed.

Time. It heals all wounds, wounds all heels, and more than anything else drives intimacy in relationships.

"What Is That?" A Short Story on Film

A beautiful five minute clip in Greek with English subtitles, especially for parents:

(thanks to Noorin Fazal for sending)