“Zuckerman’s discovery is known as the Matthew effect, after Matthew 25:29—“For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.” This was the name Robert Merton, a far more eminent sociologist, gave Zuckerman’s findings. Zuckerman discovered the effect, then experienced it: the credit for Zuckerman’s work went to Merton.”
Kevin Ashton continues:
“Merton gave Zuckerman full acknowledgment, but it made little difference. As she’d predicted, he had recognition and so was given more. There were no hard feelings. Zuckerman collaborated with Merton, then married him.”
My thoughts of Outlive by Peter Attia revolve around two 80/20 ideas.
First, 80% of health outcomes derive from an absence. Don’t smoke. Don’t be overweight. Don’t under sleep. Don’t be sedentary. Avoid environmental contaminants. Avoid sunburns. Regardless of what someone does do, if they don’t do those things their health will mostly be fine.
Then 80% of the remaining 20% is about what people do do. My rough prioritization:
Exercise, make it easy. Do enjoyable things. Do accessible things. Design it!
0-80% of the effect is from avoiding the really bad things.
81-96% of the effect is from doing the basic good things: get stronger, eat better and less, sleep well.
97-99.9% of the effect is from optimization: finding spring water, taking metformin, and so on.
But, being a loss averse human being I don’t do any of the optimization. The chance it helps in a meaningful way is so small compared to the chance it mucks things up.
Full Fee Agent is written for real estate agents but it’s a book that applies to anyone is sales. It covers a lot of ideas we tread over but includes something I’ve undervalued over time. That is relationshipsmatter a lot. Our outcomes are some mix of what and who we know. The bridge for each of my career changes was a person, not a subject, degree, or work-sample. Salespersons have known this a long time and Voss’ book emphasizes that.
Here is a summary: build empathy with people by seeing things from their point of view and understanding its importance. Done well, this builds trust and supercharges someone’s willingness to partner. Trust is inversely related to CAC. Finally, with trust, the deal terms (Full Fee) become worthwhile.
The biggest ideas is legibility.
Home owners see dollar sign 🏷️
Agents see actions ☎️
But these aren’t actually that important.
The illegible connective tissue is empathy and trust.
Agents who misunderstand spend time and money 🤑 on people who aren’t actually going to be clients 🤮. Don’t confuse the counts of dollars, calls, and miles driven for meaning within empathy and trust.
Full Fee Agent is written from the point of view of an agent, here are four tactical steps:
🙉 Listen, listen, listen, not location is the key part of real estate. Use tools like mirroring and labeling (‘that sounds stressful, that must have been agonizing,…’). In all caps Voss writes: “Your primary job as a real estate agent is to cultivate relationships”.
🐘 Get the elephant out early. Build trust by pointing out flaws. Not only does this build trust, but it brings up deal stressors. 😬 Bracing is one way to do this: “I have some bad news”. Often what people hear is not as bad as what people think.
👣 Cross the street to see things from their point of view. Rather than you-you-you, think about what the clients want. “The first step toward your goal of having your influence stick is to learn what’s really going on inside their heads. Not the pro/ con, profit/ loss calculations but the emotions that so often override logical reasoning.”
🎯 Calibrated questions. Rather than salesy talk, get customers to lead the way. ‘What would success look like to you’. “Never forget,” Voss writes, “people will die over their autonomy.”
How Glen Powell ended up with the role of Hangman in Top Gun: Maverick.
How Estée Lauder ended up in Harrods.
David Senra tells the story in Founders #217. First Lauder goes to Harrods. No one talks to her. So, she thinks a little media attention will help. She does some interviews, goes back to Harrods, no one talks to her. She returns to America.
Lauder returns a year later. She asks. ‘No’. More media, she asks again, ““she talks to the same buyer. This is a year later. She was not as quite as hostile, but she says, let me tell you, I have no room here as I told you before, she said, but perhaps I could take a tiny order and put it in with the general toiletries.”
More media, and the customers started to show up.
How Kind Bars ended up in Walmart.
Daniel Lubetzky’s path to starting Kind was long, wandering, and full of two-steps forward one-step back moments. One was the first time Kind got into Walmart. It wasn’t in the bar section. It wasn’t in the health foods. It was in the candy bar section.
This was disappointing but a blessing in disguise. Kind lacked the organizational structure required for serving large customers. The bars took a long time to take off – which was good. Once they did Walmart and Kind ended their partnership. It was too much too soon – but a lesson in what the company needed next.
Everyone is a genius in a bull market, but is it easier to choose bull markets than be a genius?
The stickiest idea from How Minds Change by David McRaney (and I hope I’m understanding this correctly) is that idea that we don’t actually know anything. We only have feelings.
There are fifty states in America. Cook chicken to an internal temperature of 165 degrees. Increase your weekly running mileage by 10%, or risk injury.
These are all things I used to consider facts. Now, I don’t know.
According to McRaney, there’s a subconscious level. On this level are our feelings. We don’t know about states, cooking temperatures, or running programs – we only feel what is right. We evolved (using memes) to survive. A crucial piece of survival is group membership. Status games are a feature, not a bug.
So what we think about facts, rooted in our subconscious, is the need for group membership. We believe in the number of states, in the temperature of chicken, and the weekly mileage rule of thumb because they let us belong.
Don’t bring an educational solution to a design fightfits this theory. To change people’s minds you have to change their feelings. And to change their feelings you have to understand their group survival dynamics – which operate on the subconscious level. Design works because it defaults to group survival. Things are this way because people like us to things like this.
“We are a tribeless nation hungry for tribes,” opens Wright Thompson in his book, Pappyland. Much of McRaney’s book, How Minds Change has this thread too. We want to feel connected. And that wanting is subconscious.
“So how do I convince women to buy their own perfume? How could I get the American woman to buy her own perfume? I would not call it perfume,” David Senra quotes from A Success Story by Estée Lauder.
In the 1950s and 60s women didn’t buy themselves perfume. Instead, it was a gift and is an example of JTBD’s customers or consumers dynamic.
In Jobs Theory, producers have to solve the job for both the customer and consumer. No one gets fired for buying IBM articulates the customer angle – but leaves out the consumer. Does IBM serve the job for users (and later, investors)? ymmv
“I would call it Youth-Dew, a bath oil that dubbed as a skin perfume. That would be acceptable to buy because it was feminine, all American, and very girl next door to take baths, wasn’t it? And so think about the difference in size of bath oil, how many ounces you would sell compared to the size of like a perfume or cologne.
We created a mini revolution in the whole world. As I saw it took on a fresher, more stimulating aspect. Instead of using their French perfumes by the drop behind the ear, women were using Youth-Dew by the bottle in their bath water.
It doesn’t take a graduate school of business to figure out that that meant sales, beautiful sales. In 1953, Youth-Dew did about 50,000 worth of business for us. In 1984, that figure was over 150 million dollars.”
“I’ve got a big day tomorrow,” is a resistance free approach to drink less the night before. “My financial advisor says that’s a bad idea,” is a resistance free approach to answer financial questions.
In this quote, Voss’ client explains her new pitch:
“First and foremost, I’m a full-service, full fee agent. I charge 6 percent, keep 3.5 percent, and give 2.5 percent to the buyer’s agent. I’m going to encourage you to price the property so that it will sell quickly, and that might very well be a price that’s less than what you’d like to see. I’m going to encourage you to invest in preparing it for sale, and you’re going to need to stage it. The last thing is that I don’t work 24/7. You’ll never need me and not get me, but you won’t need me at 10 p.m.“
Wow, that’s a lot of conditions, Voss’ client counterparty said, to which she replies, “I actually prefer to think of them as standards”.
Conditions are negotiable, fungible, and flexible.
But standards? That’s something else entirely.
Voss resonates so much because his approach is similar to JTBD.
JTBD and Voss emphasize finding what’s important not (necessarily) what is legible. Price, cost, dollars, numbers(!) are legible and value / jobs-to-be-done are less so. But the reverse is what’s important. It’s the outcome we want, and the price which could be nice.
Jobs theory isn’t a condition for business, it’s a standard.
“Tell me about training in general,” asked Rick Rubin, “How did, how was your training different than other hockey players from the time that you started?”
“I was ahead of the curve,” said Chris Chelios, ““because back then, even the guys that were supposedly in the best shape, all they did was bench press and jog or stationary bike. That was it in the early 80s.”
That’s good.
He saw results.
“And my skating improved so much and my strength and endurance. And unfortunately, TR got so many clients that became known throughout the league. And then he was training guys like Rob Blake…And then he wins the Norris Trophy, which is the best defenseman in the league. And I’m like, that’s not fair, TR. So I wouldn’t train with anybody else anymore…I needed another edge.”
Alpha erosion happens everywhere. If something is accessible (like finding the same trainer, paying, doing, etc.) people find it and the edges disappear.
Hard work isn’t an edge. Novel work is, for the moment, because alpha erodes.
An older story but still good and still important.
Doug Dietz spent the last two years designing a new MRI machine and he goes to the hospital to see check on it.
“I noticed a father lean down and tell his daughter, ‘Remember, we’ve talked about this, you can be brave.'”
Doug follows the family into the room, with his new machine. “And she just freezes.”
The walls. The lights. The machine. The warning signs. “The little girl just starts to cry.”
Jobs to be done implores creators to create things from the perspective, needs, goals, and wants of the consumers, not the suppliers. From Doug’s angle, the hospital is the supplier. *Make something bland, generic, efficient.* There’s no flare – that’s expensive.
Yes, the consumers want some things that the hospital also wants: Make people better.
But these parents also want their daughter to stop crying. They don’t want her to be afraid. They want to her smile. They want the same thing we all want for our kids.
After seeing this scene, Doug got back to work and made this MRI machine next.
The Waiter's Pad 