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That moment when you realize marketers have taken the success of Intel's "Intel Inside" marketing campaign too seriously.

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Humans have a drive to eat. We have a drive to drink. We have a drive to reproduce. Curiosity is no different, says George Loewenstein,…

Indeed, scientists who study the mechanics of curiosity are finding that it is, at its core, a kind of probability algorithm—our brain’s continuous calculation of which path or action is likely to gain us the most knowledge in the least amount of time. Like the links on a Wikipedia page, curiosity builds upon itself, every question leading to the next. And as with a journey down the Wikipedia wormhole, where you start dictates where you might end up. That’s the funny thing about curiosity: It’s less about what you don’t know than about what you already do.

This perfectly explains why I am a voracious consumer of useless trivia. You just never know when you'll need to know how to ride a motorcycle or run away from an angry band of Japanese Macaques.

Schools claim to teach it; voters lionize it. But we know surprisingly little about how it works.

We don’t have much better an idea of how to grow good leaders, or of how to stop or at least slow bad leaders, than we did a hundred or even a thousand years ago.

There's shockingly little data on what works or doesn't work when leading a team. Despite the volume of leadership self help books out there, I haven't found even a reasonably scientific understanding of the basic tenants behind leadership. It's primarily dominated by anecdata: Everyone has a theory on what works or doesn't work, but in the end none of it consistently correlates to success.

One interesting caveat on the above, though, is that they are talking about developing leaders. Is it possible that, while we cannot teach someone to become a leader, we can more consistently identify who is a good leader?

A few years ago, another Harvard Business School professor, Gautam Mukunda, grew interested in how different organizations fill leadership positions. He noticed that in some organizations the candidate pool is heavily filtered: in the military, for example, everyone who aspires to command must jump through the same set of hoops. In Congress, though, you can vault in as a businessperson, or a veteran, or the scion of a political family. Mukunda hypothesized that, in highly filtered organizations, leaders would end up being relatively interchangeable; in less filtered organizations, individual variation will be greater. By this logic, generals, but not members of Congress, will tend to be more or less equally competent.

I just finished Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, so everything reminds me of prospect theory. Prospect theory suggests that people will prefer consistency and risk aversion for positive outcomes, but prefer high risk chances for negative outcomes. Identifying preferences for leaders follows this exact same track as well. When things are going well, people prefer leaders from within the organization, groomed for the position through years of learning how "our system works". When things aren't going well, we seek dynamic leaders that come in to "shake things up", with the hope of a miraculous turn around occurring.

However, that might not always be the right course of action. From Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma, we know that when things are going well is exactly when a company needs to be thinking of new existential threats. Conversely, when things are going poorly, what we really might need is someone with a deep understanding of the business to stabilize and triage. We can't teach people to be better leaders because we don't even know what a better leader is.

My strategy in this space has been to assume no knowledge on what works best. Test each style for each situation, and objectively measure the results. Relying on a long-time insider may work for one project, and fail for another. Unfortunately, when it comes to leadership, we're still a thousand years in the past.

#rms titanic

NASA has been commissioning these awesome, golden age inspired travel posters for the solar system. They just released another 3, and they're incredible!

If you've ever wondered why companies invest billions into their brand marketing, this is it. With direct response advertising, the kind where you expect someone to buy or do something after seeing it, you capture desire or intent. With Brand Marketing, you capture a generation.

Thoughtful commentary of the day, April 18, 2015

My work weeks in London typically go by like any other. Once every two months, just jump out to LON for a week of meetings, catching up with folks, and making sure our global business is operating alright. Totally normal schedule.

Today I realized it's not normal; it's actually pretty fucking cool. Life is awesome.

Thanks for coming out, London friends!

A year of mistakes

In 2015, I'd like to be a little less afraid to talk about how I've messed up. It's easy to "stay positive" and focus on the successes, but just as interesting are the many times I've just plain ol' fucked up.

There's something great in going back and rediscovering mistakes you made as a prior you. I find it amazing context for where you've come from, almost like looking back in an ice core to a time past. You could almost trace the lines on how my thinking has changed over time just by looking back at the significant mistakes in my life. It's pretty neat.

Some people will say it's very depressing to focus on the mistakes we make. On the contrary, I find it incredibly energizing to see just how far we've come. For example, I started playing golf last year. The videos from my first month on the range are an abomination; my swing is halting and jerky, and I can see every flaw as I run through the tape. It's ugly. Real ugly.

But working through the following months, you can see where the refinements have taken place - a small adjustment here, a little tweak there - and how they've gradually shaped my swing. Not only that, but you also get to see all the little detours I took along the way, like the time when I thought that sticking my butt out further was giving me perfect contact. Don't believe everything you read on the internet, kids.

I laugh at these things now, but at the time I was anything but entertained. Recording these for posterity was the last thing I wanted to do. I'm pretty sure I've considered deleting them off my phone more than once. But that'd destroy a valuable piece of personal history, a brief snapshot into who I was and how I got here. It's like I'm creating my own little museum, filled with cast off memories I never thought were important at the time.

One last thing: I need to get OK with just writing about mistakes without a resolution. I tend to not want to write about my fuck ups until I figure out what I learned from it and what I should do next time. The problem is that sometimes these issues can stymie me for months, leaving me to stew for ages. Might as well get these thoughts out fast and move on with our lives. What else is a journal for?

The Challenger K2

The Challenger K2, ready for battle

When we unloaded the rubber kayaks, I was a little concerned. The plastic ones at the rental shop were sleek and well maintained, shaped to pierce through ocean waves. These looked more at home in a backyard pool, ready to pierce no more than a 30 pack of beers.

My co-captain, Kenny, decided to christen our kayak the Challenger K2, because that's what it said on the side of the inflatable walls. I'm still unsure if the manufacturer wanted to build the #1 inflatable kayak for climbing Mt. Everest or if they just wanted to create a product so shitty that every trip out is like scaling the tallest mountain in the world. In any case, they fully achieved both counts. This boat is ready for adventure, and so are we. We laugh, pile in, and set off on the water.

As we paddled across Tomales bay, the 50 lbs of camping gear we'd brought was making its weight known. The bottom of the boat sat low in the water, and each stroke became harder to paddle. My butt was making friends with several milliliters of cold salt water. But we were still floating, so what's the worst that could happen, right?

Then somewhere around half a mile away from shore, we start to hear something. Barely audible over the sound of the waves, but still painfully clear: Tssssssss. The indomitable Challenger K2 sighed gently, and began to ever so slightly sag in the center.

An interesting thought exercise is to figure which of your friends you want in your boat (literally) when facing mortal peril. Perhaps you want the strong one, the one who owns all those guns and knows how to survive in the woods for a while, or perhaps your friend who was on swim team in high school. People who have the skills and temperament to save the day in dire situations.

Kenny was none of those people. We were well and truly fucked. The boat filled panic faster than it filled with water.

"Shit, are we sinking?", Kenny asked cautiously, careful not to overplay the situation.

"Sounds pretty bad", I responded cooly, trying not to betray the zlarm bells and klaxon sirens exploding in my head.

"Well, we should probably get to land soon then, or else our stuff will get wet", Kenny sagely added, conveniently staying silent on our chances of hypothermia, drowning, and death.

"Yeah, let's paddle a little harder", I suggested. It was better than the other alternative I had: No, perhaps we should paddle smoothly and slowly, conserving our energy until we inevitably go under, lose all our stuff, and then helplessly flail until we get cold and die. That seemed unnecessarily harsh.

And so we started to sprint, digging hard with our paddles. This in turn flexed Challenger K2's hull even more, which made the hiss lounder, which made us paddle faster. An endless loop of panic, desperation, and fear. The waterline crept up towards our hips. The race was on.

5 tense minutes later, the Challenger K2's rubber hull crashed up onto the beach. Two grown men leapt out, devoid of shame, and kissed the ground. We had made it; The Challenger K2 had tested us, and we had passed. We had summited Everest. Kind of.

"Hey Kenny?"

"Yeah?"

"How do we get back to the other side?"

"Shit."

Many small steps vs one giant leap

I've had a huge knot in my stomach for the last week. I'm nervous because I know that there's one issue, really just two paragraphs, in my 2015 strategy that is going to take over every conversation it's in. It's the landmine in your product.

Every product has these. Something sucks, but it's easier to pretend it doesn't exist than it is to deal with it. You can't even have a logical conversation once this topic comes up; the conversation's just totally derailed.

Dealing with landmines is hard because they're typically not logical rejections; they're emotional ones. It's our brains' natural defense mechanism reacting to something we know needs thought, but which we don't or can't think about right now.

Defusing these issues isn't about getting the right answer, it's about putting the right pathway in place for us to think about it. We don't want to overwhelm our brains by jumping straight to the answer; the big jump in thought from 0 to answer is exactly what's making this so dicey in the first place. What we want to do is chop up the thought process into smaller, more digestible, more attackable steps and walk through them slowly.

For my problem, that meant that I couldn't just lay out the problem when talking about my strategy - I also had to immediately following with the small steps we were already taking to defuse people's alarm bells. "We're going to the moon" needs to be immediately followed up with "We've already created the initial prototype rocket, and our best engineer is leading the project". Still scary, but at least we have a solid next step to build on. You might get a lot of knee-jerk reactions to the grand statement ("Mooooooon!"), but shrinking that down to a concrete step ("Prototype") will ease a lot of fears.

Angst

It was like an atom bomb had exploded in the middle of my Facebook news feed. Everyone seemed to know it instantaneously. The flood of panicked, anguished posts came quickly. "Why you?" they wondered, "Why wasn't it anyone else?".

Yes, the Forbes 30 under 30 list came out this week.

There are a few common triggers for an existential crisis. A death of a close friend, for example, or getting laid off from your job. Or realizing that your five year reunion is coming up and everyone is going to judge you based on what you've accomplished and oh my god did that guy I had art class with just sell his company for $500 million dollars?!?!? Fuck him and everything about him and his success and his smug smile and damnit he was a nice guy but $500 million dollars nice?

Angst.

Putting pen to paper

I'd like to start writing more. Not anything too long and dense. Just putting some pen to paper.

Looking back at the past year, so much has changed in my life. I've picked up new skills, met new people, and done things I never thought I'd be able to do. It's a whole microcosm of amazing experiences, distributed amongst my brain, my phone, and my calendar.

But how much of that can one person really remember? Not much. I've been listening to the Serial podcast (who hasn't) and it's really hammered home the temporary and fickle nature of memory. Really big things feel easy to remember, but there's a thousand little things that we forget every day. Where were you at 2:31pm on this day? Why did you make this phone call? Was there a phone booth at that Best Buy? Forgive the stretch of an example, but these little things really do tend to end up important.

What a paradox: the things that seem important never have to be remembered, and the things that are actually important almost never seem important in the moment. So what to do?

Write more of it down. Little, unconsequential, droll nuggets of wisdom.

Now, if only there was a way to make this searchable...

What is the P-value of decency?

While evaluating new tech startups' products, I keep my feedback on a piece of paper with two columns, creatively labeled "helpful" and "unhelpful". It's useful not just for organizing my thoughts, but as a reminder not to be a hypercritical ass, which can be easy for an analytical person like myself.

But recently, I've had to start adding in a new column: "Creepy". Creepy tends to be:

Helpful... but unsettling in a way that's difficult to quantify

Done with good intent

Rarely used by the founders/developers

Driven by data

Let's look at an example of creepy:

Exhibit A: LinkedIn's Who Else Might You Know

LinkedIn has a marvelously efficient on-boarding process - every little step is focused on getting you set up and connected with people as quickly as possible. It makes sense for a social network: I'm sure the analytics says that once someone makes 7 or 10 or whatever connections, they're 50% more likely to stick around, so everything is funneling you towards making new connections.

Take for example the "Who else you might know" feature. This helps you quickly get a few connections by suggestions people you might be connected to; on a recent experience, it helpfully suggested that I connect with several of my housemates. Awesome, right?

The only problem was that I was using a randomly generated test account: no personal information, a clean email account, and generic login details.

Indignation flooded my thoughts as alarm bells rang loudly in my head: how did they know who I was? Are they tracking my web activity? How the hell are you getting this information?

I'm sure there are perfectly reasonable explanations. They probably cross-referenced that IP I logged in from with other members in the database. They probably couldn't care less about my extensive web history of procrastination. They're probably doing things that are just par for the course for any highly data-driven company. But the immediate impact I felt was that of disgust, indignation, and violation. Certainly not the things you'd like a new user to feel.

Data Driven, not Data Only As the "Big Data" meme continues, I fear that this trend will grow. Being able to pinpoint those fractional improvements in conversion or betting on the statistical correlation between mouse position and LTV will only make this worse.

Even in my own small-scale tests, I found it hard to argue against treating your users like idiots because the data clearly shows that it makes them convert better. How could anyone at Groupon argue against sending even more daily-deal emails with millions of data points definitively linking more emails to more dollars? How could anyone at Zynga argue that they were pissing off new users with relentless game-spam when they were signing up new users like gang-busters?

How can you possibly argue against something that works but feels wrong? What is the P-value of decency?

#analytics

It is social aptitude, not intellectual brilliance or parental social class, that leads to successful aging... That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.

What Makes Us Happy? - Joshua Wolf Shenk - The Atlantic

treedance

Gray Lady’s getting a facelift.

Read through and you can see some of the front-end changes they’re making. The majority of it is cleaning up the clutter and bringing more contemporary UI and navigational schemes to the site.

They’re also relocating comments to the side of article articles “so you can read them in context” and bringing the swipe to tablets as a way to go from article to article.

ryanlchan

There's been some really mind-blowing UX development going on at the NYT. Their snowfall project was a first glimpse at what articles could be in the future!

Sorting Arrays by multiple criteria in Ruby with sort_by!

This just saved me so, so much time debugging an insane sort chain. Instead of chaining #sort! methods together, you can create an array to sort by using #sort_by! Using #sort_by! on an array will compare each item in the array sequentially, using an ascending sort on the block that you pass in.

The wonderful Marc Andre-Lafortune explains this best:

By your original criteria, you would have: a < b < c < a. So, which one is the smallest??

You also want to do the sort at once. For your <=> implementation, use #nonzero?:

def <=>(other) return nil unless other.is_a?(Post) (self.category <=> other.category).nonzero? || ((self.date || AGES_AGO) <=> (other.date || AGES_AGO)).nonzero? || (self.position <=> other.position).nonzero? || 0 end

If you use your comparison criteria just once, or if that criteria is not universal and thus don't want to define <=>, you could use sort with a block:

post_ary.sort{|a, b| (a.category <=> ...).non_zero? || ... }

Better still, there is sort_by which you can use to build an array for what to compare in which priority:

post_ary.sort_by{|a| [a.category, a.date || AGES_AGO, a.position] }

Besides being shorter, using sort_by has the advantage that you can only obtain a well ordered criteria.

Notes:

sort_by! was introduced in Ruby 1.9.2. You can require "backports" to use it now though.

I'm assuming that Post is not a subclass of ActiveRecord (in which case you'd want the sort to be done by the db server).

#programming #ruby

When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up. Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience. You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way?

My highlights from Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling

bjk5

ryanlchan

Ben Kamens discovered a tiny quirk to the Amazon menu which I've always noticed but never even thought about implementing. Thisis fantastic UX thinking.

The hover effects on Amazon’s big ‘ole “Shop by Department” mega dropdown are super fast. Look’it how quick each submenu fills in as your mouse moves down the list:

It’s instant. I got nerd sniped by this.

musubimail-blog

ryanlchan

I just wrote a new post for Musubi on the science of networking and making friends. My favorite bit when doing research for this was learning how important face-to-face interactions are; it's not just better because you can instantly respond to the person. Our brains are actually hard-wired to look for subtle inputs like body language, shared touches, and even little micro-smiles when meeting new people. It's a rapid feedback cycle that confirms the "I like you" signal in our subconscious.

Robin Dunbar, the sociologist famed for postulating the maximum number of meaningful relationships a person can have, has done extensive research into how our relationships are formed. One of his most striking findings is that how you interact with a friend is closely linked to the strength of your friendship: in Dunbar’s research, the average friendship cannot maintain “closeness” beyond 6-12 months without a face-to-face meeting!

For more on the science of networking and how we make friends, check out the post here.

#networking #musubimail #career

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