I’ve just started watching and I believe its produced really well – the format is divided between classic story line documentary in the first 30 minutes and then academic debate with critics in the second 30 minutes. You get a vivid picture of his ideas working in the real world and also opposing views and Friedman’s response to them. My understanding of economics is not comprehensive enough to form a critical opinion of his ideas, but I can tell from the debates and how Friedman argues, that he’s formed quite a rigorous and sophisticated view of his economic ideas. He speaks carefully, and often times you must realize what he has chosen not to say is as important as what he’s explicitly stated. You’ll see that a few of his critics do not hold themselves to the same standards and argue pretty sloppily and with imprecise language. In that sense, I find the series extra valuable for the demonstration of how to think clearly and effectively use thought-experiments to prove/disprove ideas.

A very cool and informative resource. All the episodes can be found here: http://www.freetochoose.tv/

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html

Video & more information: http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/794/

I’ve been reading a few biographies lately and one way I try to contextualize a person’s success is by trying to identify what factors were attributed by luck. How much of their ascent was based on things beyond their control? Throughout history, you’ll find plenty of self-made people, but they will likely also fall with in circumstances that are rare, ephemeral, or privileged. Some grew up wealthy, in a network of well-connected families and friends. Many prodigies had fathers/mothers involved in their same fields, and were able to groom their talents from an early age. Others were able to gain edge due to geography, and/or an advantageous economic period. While none of these factors cheapen a person’s success, it certainly should be accounted for if you try to follow a similar path.

But Ken Robinson approaches the topic of luck a bit differently. In fact, it made me question if I was making an error in framing such contributing factors in this way. There is certainly a survivorship-bias in retelling someone’s accomplishments. If you are aggressively networking with people, and eventually, after many many relationships that have gone nowhere, finally meet someone who can help you in a substantial way, that might be retold as a simple matter of happenstance.

I have found most biographies are written with a specific consistency, usually a theme or the title of the book influencing the retelling of history. Information that reinforces the thesis will be made more prominent than less relevant, yet equally important, parts of someone’s history. They are also told with an unnatural, linear-type fashion – the way history never unfolds in real-life. I presume that is to keep the reader’s interest, but its not a very realistic telling of facts. The point is, all these non-apparent and unrelated factors of highlighting person’s life affect our understanding of their success.

Here’s a quote from Ken Robinson’s interview that is particularly relevant:

The third bit is attitude, because I know a lot of people who will say to you, “It’s great for these other people, but they’ve just been lucky. I never had the breaks.” In fact, a lot of the people I’ve spoken to who you would consider to be very successful, often themselves say they’re very lucky. But luck is, I think, a bit of a cop out because it sounds like it’s all about serendipity. But you know from the work you do that you make your own luck; that luck is partly a matter of opportunity. It’s what you do with the opportunity. It’s not what happens to you, it’s what you make of what happens to you.

There’s a lot of very interesting research, and I have a chapter in the book called, “Do I Feel Lucky?” which looks at the psychology of luck. Luck is about seeing opportunities. Very many people will miss an opportunity because they’re not open to it. It’s seeing it and it’s taking it. That comes back to questions of personal attitude like, “Do you value yourself? Do you think you’re entitled to this and are you willing to overcome the obstacles?” There are a lot of obstacles to being in your element — other people’s disapproval of you and other people’s opinions of you. There’s a whole section on attitude.

The fourth bit is about opportunity. It’s about creating opportunities for yourself like you’re doing and like the people who watch this program. It’s creating something that wasn’t there, or going toward something that isn’t in your current environment.

While it is such a simple concept, it affected me in a strong way. There is definitely a psychological tendency to follow processes that work for the vast majority of people – after all, if many people have gone through a systematic process, you know it works, its reliable, and you can get help from others who have done the same thing. There are perhaps countless ways to get a particular job, yet how many people use the traditional application process?

Ken Robinson suggests those factors that can be considered “luck” should be framed as people seeking out their own particular advantages of their environment. He states part of it is holding that view, to seek out and maximize the opportunities that might be available to you. You do not need to have the friends or influence of a particularly successful businessman, but you do need to take advantage of the best and most unique opportunities that are available to you in your particular environment. The next obvious bit is being able to create or seek out these opportunities. But thats preceded by having an attitude that luck is something you create for yourself.

Some key quotes:

Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort.

I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men: when you’ve already won her heart, you don’t need to win every argument.

Modern society is anti-love. We’ve taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise. Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work – the only kind of work that I find palatable.

Its always refreshing to hear someone on the other side of the fence, whose established himself with a successful career, family, and optimistic view of his own life and the world around him.

But I also like to consider the flip side: how to get there, and how to mitigate risk and increase chances for success. Not every waiter in Hollywood will become an actor, yet they all view acting as “their talent.” Many entrepreneurs will fail. Mr. Tan says to avoid work; anything that you are compelled to do. But Mr. Tan was also lucky in certain ways – he had a talent and passion for work thats valuable in an established, stable, and common profession: law.

People might have talents in other areas, that are more risky ventures. Becoming an actor, or a professional athlete, has orders of magnitude more risk of failure, partly because so few of those jobs exists, and partly because the level of skill needed is hard to obtain. Being an entrepreneur is less risky, but still orders of magnitude riskier than a stable career such as engineer, doctor, or lawyer.

I’m interested in the relationship between pragmatism, expected value, and hack-ability of certain careers. Certainly a majority of folks would consider becoming a professional athlete impractical and improbable. They come to this conclusion by assessing what they consider the “average” person’s ability to become a professional athlete to be. If someone is physically fit, it might still be improbable, but their chances do indeed go up, certainly higher than the average person’s. And if you’re fit enough to hit the same numbers the college athletes do in things like the NFL Scouting Combine, it might not even be reletively all that difficult to break in. And that demonstrates how pragmatic something is a random variable: the riskiness/practicality of a venture varies based on how closely aligned your level of skills are with those already successful in that domain.

Expected value of a career is also varies, person-to-person, and in different circumstances. Someone with a family, mortgage, and paying his/her children’s college tuition might have a lower expected value in pursuing the same risky venture as someone who has nothing, or relatively little to lose. The potential downside (losing house, stress on family, debt) must been subtracted from the potential upsides of success – and so at different points in someone’s life, these values are in flux.

Lastly, hack-ability I’ll define as the possibility to short-circuit the process. Many careers might have a streamlined process for career progression. Being able to get around this, or reach a point faster/or with less effort is something worth studying.

HFM: I’m sure today I would never get hired.

n+1: Really?

HFM: Yeah, it would be impossible because I had no background, or I had a very exiguous background in finance. The guy who hired me always talked about hiring good intellectual athletes, people who were sort of mentally agile in an all-around way, and that the specifics of finance you could learn, which I think is true. But at the time, I mean, no hedge fund was really flooded with applicants, and that allowed him to let his mind range a little bit and consider different kinds of candidates. Today we have a recruiting group, and what do they do?—they throw resumes at you, and it’s, like, one business school guy, one finance major after another, kids who, from the time they were twelve years old, were watching Jim Cramer and dreaming of working in a hedge fund. And I think in reality that, probably, if anything, they’re less likely to make good investors than people with sort of more interesting backgrounds.

n+1: Why?

HFM: Because I think that in the end the way that you make a ton of money is calling paradigm shifts, and people who are real finance types, maybe they can work really well within the paradigm of a particular kind of market or a particular set of rules of the game—and you can make money doing that—but the people who make huge money, the George Soroses and Julian Robertsons of the world, they’re the people who can step back and see when the paradigm is going to shift, and I think that comes from having a broader experience, a little bit of a different approach to how you think about things.

http://nplusonemag.com/interview-hedge-fund-manager

A perfect example was finding psychological/behavioral insights while reading about investing. In Mark Tier’s “The Winning Investment Habits of Warren Buffett & George Soro,” I found the introduction of the book quite valuable in-and-of itself. I can’t say much about the rest of the book (I haven’t finished reading it yet), but I’d like to post some excerpts from the intro that I think are worth noting. If you want to read the entire intro, its available here (Google Books preview).

Tier explains that the difference between success and failure in most pursuits are in applying the right mental habits. Take, for example, poor spellers. Some people are poor at spelling. Teachers have a hard time dealing with these people because their attempts to improve their spelling usually imparts no change.

But these people aren’t dumb, Tier explains. What they lack are good mental strategies. The strategies good spellers use. Good spellers visualize. They copy words from memory, and are not even aware of this because it happens unconsciously and immediately. Poor spellers sound out words when spelling. That seldom works well in English.  If you teach a poor speller how to “look” for the word they want to spell instead of “hearing” it, the problem goes away almost immediately.

That’s the power of adopting the appropriate mental habits.

So why don’t teachers know this? Its because chances are, if you’re a good speller, you’re probably not even aware of what makes you a good speller. Its habit at that point. And here, Tier explains the very important and elusive structure of mental habits:

A habit is a learned response that has become automatic through repetition. Once ingrained, the mental processes by which a habit operates are primarily subconscious.

Four elements are needed to sustain a mental habit:

1. a belief that drives your behavior;

2. a mental strategy – a series of internal conscious and subconscious processes;

3. a sustaining emotion; and

4. associated skills.

Next, there are a few examples of this at work. One example is a scenario at the bar. There is a pretty lady sitting alone and two types of males present. One type he calls “IceBreakers” – people who can walk up to anyone and start a conversation. The other, dubbed “Wallflowers” – people who’d like to be social, but shriek from any opportunity to. IceBreakers have the ability to put people immediately at ease and build trust, and intimacy. He successfully piques the woman’s interest. The Wallflowers on the other hand, begins to approach the woman, but at the last minute turns around and heads toward the bar, where he sits for the rest of the night. Forever Alone.

Here are the mental habits an “IceBreaker” utilizes, presumably almost unconsciously.

1. Belief: They believe that everybody is interesting.

2. Mental Strategy: They hear their own voice inside their head saying: “Isn’t he/she an interesting person.”

3. Sustaining Emotion: They feel curious, even excited, at the prospect of meeting somebody new. They feel good about themselves, and their attention is focused externally. (If they’re preoccupied with some problem or feeling depressed about something- internally focused – they won’t be “in the mood” for conversation.)

4. Associated Skills: They establish rapport by making eye contact and smiling with their eyes. When they have a sense of rapport, they initiate a conversation with someone innocuous remark and maintain it by listening rather than talking, keeping eye contact and focusing their attention on the person (giving that person a sense of importance), and by wondering what’s going on in this person’s mind.

Compare this with the Wallflower:

The Wallflower, who ended up at the bar, had a very different mental strategy. After an initial flash of interest, he “ran a movie” in his head of all the times he had been hurt in a relationship, felt lousy – and went to have a beer to drown his sorrows. His emotional reaction was the expression of a subconscious, self-limiting belief that “I’m not good enough,” or “I always get hurt in relationships.”

These traits are charted, as well as another type, the Self-Centered person.

Beliefs:

IceBreaker (IB): People are interesting.

Wallflower (W): I’m not good enough/I always get hurt.

Self-Centered (S-C): Some people are interesting.

Mental Strategy:

IB: (internal voice) “Isn’t he/she an interesting person.”

W: Recalls previous relationships.

S-C: (internal voice) “Is this person interesting to me?”

Mental Focus:

IB: External

W: Internal

S-C: Primarily internal

Emotion:

IB: Curiosity, excitement

W: Hurt

S-C: Uncertainty

Skills:

IB: Rapport, good listener

W: N/A

S-C: Questioning

Now in the last bit of the chapter, Tier suggests that, like the Wallflower, an investor might also have self-limiting beliefs that override a conscious attempt to change or improve. But I found this examination of a particular mental strategy to be quite insightful, useful beyond the book’s investing focus. Belief, Mental Strategy, Sustaining Emotion, Associated Skills.

I most commonly try to change habits by addressing only one of the listed elements – the associated skills. If I learn how to do A, then I should be well on my way, right? No. This piece of text made me realize there is a bit more to it, and that beliefs, focus, and emotion are as critical as actually practicing skills, in building habits. You can learn to visualize words (the associated skill), but if you believe you’ll always be a terrible speller (belief), you won’t be able to sustain the energy required to shift into the right mental habits, to the point they become automatic.

Stephen Fry: What I’d wish I’d known when I was 18 – refreshing interview, stop thinking about yourself, travel more, the value of technology.

Extinction Burst – Why bad habits don’t change overnight,and in-acting change cold-turkey rarely works.  I recommend the entire site and not just this article. Amazing quality of insightful posts.

John Sculley on Steve Jobs (2010) – sculley holds no grudges, feels jobs should have been ceo, and gives insights to how jobs did it and still does. Its also a great example of someone being incredible honest with himself and humble.

Failure of the Last Mile -

Programming Interview questions

“The morning meeting is, as we call it, our morning cup of sadness, we get in around, uh, you’d be incredibly surprised at how regimented our day is and just how the infrastructure of the show is very much mechanized. You know, we come in and its not, people always think, “the Daily Show, you guys probably just sit around and make jokes” and uh, we’ve instituted, to be able to sort of wheen through all this material and synthesize it and try to come up with things to do, we have a very kind of strict day that we have to adhere to. And by doing that, that allows us to process everything and gives us the freedom to improvise. I’m a real believer in that creativity comes from limits, not freedom. Freedom, I think you don’t know what to do with yourself but when you have a structure, then you can improvise off it and feel confident enough to come back to that.”

“I love standup comedy, and the anchor desk to me feels more of artifice. The show as its done, I understand the practice of it. Performing the show is the last thing I think about. My day is writing and rewriting the show and a lot of times will be like “OK, lets go, write,write” and then you think about it. But that to me is artifice. I like the crafting of it.”

Considering its uniqueness as a format for a TV-show and its track-record for success, its unsurprising there is a formula to it. Stewart mentions in the above quote how he feels the actual performance is merely a facade for a larger body of work, which is the actual process of creating it. Something I took away from this interview is a reinforcement in my belief that behind the success of most things that requires creative execution, there is a strong authorship of process.

This is sort of like an execution strategy, an internal structure/DNA that must be designed within the existing constraints, and used to evaluate new ideas. Apple is hailed as the innovation king and I believe a lot of that, in addition to having great talent, is because they’ve authored a successful process for developing products. Depending on who you ask, the iPad was a risky bet that paid off or it was a well-thought out, and well rehearsed move in a direction Apple was confident things were going in. I’d be surprised if they didn’t have an evaluation process to systematically vet new ideas, short of launching them and making projections. And Apple’s had enough uniquely successful product launches to make this seem obvious. And if you take someone like Buffett, whose developed and followed a simple strategy on a personal level, he’s been able to constantly adapt to a changing investment environment, while still following his core principals. Its very interesting to think about and I find myself asking if I currently have develop the best process for achieving goals and success? Is it robust enough to allow me to evolve naturally as everything around me does? Does it keep me from making major, going-back-to-zero type mistakes?

One other meaningful point in the interview that resonated with me:

“I pride myself on never thinking about that. I never in my career have ever thought about “what the goal was”. The goal was always to be better than what I was at the present time, at what I was doing. For standup, my break in standup wasn’t on Letterman. My break in standup was at a place called Comedy Cellar… I went on every night and I learned the difference between impersonating a comedian and being a comedian. And that was my break, was learning how to be authentic. Not to the audience, but to myself. I developed a baseline of confidence and also insecurity. I knew how bad I was and I knew how good I was. And that is what helped me through a lot of the ups and downs.”