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Supported by Greenhaven Road Capital, finding value off the beaten path.

Today’s audio post is about two questions. What kind of a life do you want to live, and what can you change to live like that?

Our story is from the Frugalwoods who achieved financial independence and retired early to rural Vermont – but they are just characters in a universal story.

It’s about how to live.

We live this way and not that way because of our point of view. Stand over here and see one solution, stand over there and see another. Politics is an easy but vapid example. Instead, listen to the podcast and chew on these:

“At some point, we lose the ability to have clarity about what we know.” – Charlan Nemeth

“The most important thing Alan taught me was that it wasn’t about me – it was about the client.” Roz Hewsenian

At Harvard, Teddy Roosevelt wrote that he was, “comfortable, not rich.” In his final two years, he spent $2400 on clothes and club dues. A family of four could live on that much for six years.

Lastly, our point of view can be literal. “I’m 5’2” and there’s a whole world of apparel that’s not relevant to me.” Katrina Lake.

Thank you for reading and listening.

Supported by Greenhaven Road Capital, finding value off the beaten path.

Jim DeCicco of KITU super coffee joined Aaron Watson in New York City to talk about building a coffee brand.

First, a sidetrack.

Why is coffee more fragmented than soda? Why is sugar-water different than coffee-water? Coca-Cola is a huge brand while Starbucks is smaller. Maybe Coca-Cola is the anomaly? My guess is that Coca-Cola’s ‘growing season’ was akin to Google or Apple’s. A Coke and an iPhone are sister products, separated by 100 years. They are products of their time.

Onto the notes.

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From appearing on Shark Tank to podcasting with Aaron Watson, Jim DeCicco has worked hard to create a successful coffee brand. While there are plenty of startup missteps, DeCicco and his brothers have done at least a few things well.

The very first thing is to make something people want. At the Going Deep Summit, Aaron Watson like the Mocha flavor of coffee. Others do too. But product doesn’t need to be perfect, only good enough.

In Cass Sunstein’s book, The World According to Star Wars he writes about the Music Lab experiments. When different groups of people were randomly sorted and asked to rank the same songs they came up with different rankings. And it wasn’t based on what was ‘best’. If a song is good enough its final ranking depended on the social cues.

As Ryan Holiday put it, great marketing can’t save a bad book. J.K. Rowling/ Robert Galbraith is one example.

DeCicco and his brothers made something – originally in a dorm room – that was good enough. Now they’re marketing it. The next question is; will people buy it?

“Before we had a business plan and a logo and a marketing strategy and all those things, we said, let’s sell this and see if people want to buy it.”

With great luck and good fortune, a founder will get it right the first time. For everyone else, they need to press the flesh.

“For the first six months, we would make our own product, make the deliveries, pour out samples. Once we had traction we were eventually able to get into a co-packer.”

DeCicco added, “I’ll be pouring samples till the day that I die.” That’s a great business strategy. Ron Shaich started out much like the DeCicco brothers. He started with a generic cookie recipe, so generic it was on the chip bag. It may have been French.

As Schaich passed out samples on the sidewalk he solicited feedback. Cookies led to croissants, croissants led to slicing, slicing led to the aha moment. We should sell sandwiches. And with much hard work Panera was born.

This approach is the same one that IDEO uses, only they have a much more modern-SF-design vibe. From west to east, if you don’t talk to your customers your business won’t survive.

Some of the situations and suggestions will seem simple. Too much, too little, etc. Some things are more complicated. Successful entrepreneurs don’t have the answer but they believe they can find them. The answer may be in the next internet search or cold email.

“Jordan reached out to Seth Goldman (of Honest Tea) who said, ‘Guys this is awesome, read my book (Mission in a Bottle) and if you have questions let me know.’ It was there we were first introduced to the idea of co-packers.”

Breadcrumbs are in every Google search. That’s what Trish and James Higgins did. “We just went on to Google and we were like ‘How do I buy a small business?'”

With a search, the DeCicco brothers have also found the VC model. “It’s a weird business model. We’re building our dreams with other people’s money. We’re growing super fast. We’re not at a point where we can sacrifice growth for profitability, which is why we need to raise capital.”

VC money is a tradeoff. It’s (hopefully) a smaller piece of a bigger pie. But as we talked about with Stakeholders, if you pocket VC money, you don the VC model. That means growth. If you aren’t willing to grow – or pivot to grow like Stewart Butterfield – don’t take the money.

Thanks for reading.

Supported by Greenhaven Road Capital, finding value off the beaten path.

Ben Thompson spoke with Shane Parrish on The Knowledge Project podcast. Their conversation covered Ben’s start, tech today, and one of my favorite topics – strengths as weaknesses and weaknesses as strengths.

This is not our first post with Thompson’s takes. In Exponent 108 we looked at technology and jobs, inverting problems and questions, and winners and whiners.

Onto Thompson’s podcast with Parrish.

1/ See it to believe it. “For me, the most obvious outcome was I would go work in academia. That was something that was visible to me and accessible, but even then, my world was very small.”

Thompson had a stable youth. But he never thought of moving to Taiwan (where he lives now) or applying to Ivy League schools. Thompson’s curiosity combined with a good education was enough of a glimpse to see what exists beyond the horizon. And sometimes a glimpse is all you need.

Lee Child was fired from television at the worst time, late in his career. The network said he was too expensive. He didn’t know what to do next. His wife joked that he could be a supermarket ‘reacher’, helping old ladies and small children get things from the top shelves. Luckily for us, that’s not what he did. Child become a writer because he saw it could be done.

“(John MacDonald) made me think it was possible. I could see how it could be done. I love to see how things work on a granular level.”

There’s a difference, said Paul Rudd, about recognizing something in the abstract and as possible:

2/ POVs “I think to the extent my viewpoint is unique, the starting point is different. I start from business models.”

New views show new news.

Thompson likes basketball so much he has a Twitter handle just for ‘no tech’, @notechben. In the same way that Thompson is insightful because his new point-of-view, one of the NBA’s most outlandish basketball players succeeded because of his literal point of view.

This player was so good, he often played against kids who were bigger and stronger. So our future NBA star played guard. In a book about his career the author wrote, “…and this was crucial to the breadth, depth and originality of his eventual style; he became the quick little man who brought the ball up.”

This experience was formative because, “Most big men in basketball have always been big, which means they have always played as big men and seen the court as big men.” They developed one point of view. But our player, “by contrast, developed a guard’s view of the entire court, and he could, as few centers could, see an entire series of moves even before they developed.” Our player? Bill Walton. Our author? David Halberstam.

These advantageous POVs are disadvantages too. Strengths have a weakness and weaknesses have a strength. Thompson, for example, reflected that he’s not so good with the granular.

“I’m a strong believer that anyone, their strengths are their weaknesses and one is the same. If you’re super strong, one day you’re inevitably going to be weak in a corresponding area. I think my talent, such that it is, is this ability to view things systematically and to see very clearly and quickly how a business model flows through to product decisions.”

Andy Rachleff agrees, “One’s greatest strength is always one’s greatest weakness.” Bill James (of Baseball Abstract) too, “Every form of strength covers one weakness and creates another, and therefore every form of strength is also a form of weakness and every weakness a strength.” Jocko Willink advances flanking exercises, which exist as a weakness because of a strong front.

Here’s Thompson on Microsoft:

“They didn’t miss it (the smartphone). They just were fundamentally unequipped to compete in it, and that’s what happens. That’s how disruption happens, and the stories of companies moving seamlessly from one paradigm to another are basically nonexistent because all the things that make you strong and competitive in one paradigm make you fundamentally ill-equipped to be in the next one.”

3/ Where to work from? “…on a day-to-day basis to not be in San Francisco, to not be immersed in tech in an environmental basis, but to be living abroad, living in a different country, talking to people who mostly aren’t really interested, or don’t really care, that much I think is tremendous.”

Yes, there are downsides, Thompson said, but, “being on the outside looking in brings, I think, a lot of clarity and skepticism, probably more than anything.” This is another strength as weakness and weakness as strength.

Ken Burns said that he loves living, as Thompson does, away from it all. ” I live in a tiny village in New Hampshire, which permits us to do the deep dives, to do the necessary research and keep the sanity in the course of a 10-plus-year project.” Michael Mauboussin guessed that a smidgen of Warren Buffett’s success is due to being away from New York City. William Thorndike guessed this too, “This distance helped insulate them from the din of Wall Street’s conventional wisdom.”

Josh Koppelman said, “There’s a real benefit to not being in the valley echo chamber….to see how the rest of the world views technology is really compelling.”

Other times you gotta be where the action is. Jenna Fischer‘s advice is to get to NYC, Chicago, or LA if you want to be an actor. There are some things you have to do in person. There are some things you only discover in person. Poor Economics is a book about discovery. Esther Duflo wrote, “References to a certain old-fashioned sociological determinism, whether based on caste, class, or ethnicity are rife in conversations involving the poor.” She’s advocating for factfullness. It’s finding, what Jan Chipchase wrote, is Hidden in Plain Sight: “Every new technology put out on the market is introduced with assertions and assumptions about how it will be used, but it’s only through actual experience that “use” is defined.”

Thompson covers technology strategy. He’s not in Tawain to avoid San Francisco’s fog, he’s in Tawain to avoid San Francisco’s hot air.

4/ Rapid fire. A few more ideas and links.

Malcolm Gladwell’s Ketchup Conundrum. Thompson said, “Well, I think you just said it. I think the internet has a barbell effect where there are returns to the biggest and returns to the smallest, and if you’re stuck in the middle, it’s just a very dangerous place to be.” Heinz, he said, should listen to Warren Buffett and dominate the B2B areas. The barbell is a helpful mental model; whether it’s reading habits like Marc Andreessen or investing angles like Roz Hewsenian.

No one will dominate Google. But the next Google, “will come from someone being in a garage who latches onto the next paradigm shift that makes it impossible for the powers that be to compete.” It’s about being different and being right.

Why does Stratechery’s subscriptions work the way they do? “I wanted the feeling of paying to be a positive feeling, where you’re going, ‘This is such great stuff. I want more. Can I pay to get more?'” Our Rory Week was all about feelings mattering too.

What about writer’s block? “Well, I think the most common misconception people have about what I do, especially given the amount of things I write about, is it’s not like every day you’re starting from nothing and scratching together an opinion on stuff that goes on.” Robert McKee suggested a trip to the library to cure writer’s gap. Anne Lamont would agree, “The word block suggests that you are constipated or stuck, when the truth is that you’re empty.”

Do give it a listen, the episode goes to 11.

Thanks for reading.

Supported by Greenhaven Road Capital, finding value off the beaten path.

Roz Hewsenian joined Ted Seides for a summary of her career – and summary of many of the themes we write about here. If decision hygiene were a thing, Hewsenian would be like Steph Curry. And like Curry, Hewsenian had to put in a lot of work to get there.

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“If you know you’re going to try to convince somebody who has a different point of view of a point you want to make, you’ve got to start out with, what is this person’s point of view, why do they believe what they believe, what are their priors and bona fides. You gotta start there.”

Normally we see empathy touted by marketers like David Ogilvy or designers at IDEO but it’s part of any sale.

In her ILTB podcast, Bethany McLean explains how she brings empathy to her interviews. You have to “turn over every stone” and “even if you see that they’re skewed in their point of view, ask, why is it skewed?”

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“I went into the MBA with the idea that I would continue my ‘helping orientation’ and I would go into human resources. That’s what I thought until I walked into my first finance class.”

Sometimes it’s only exposure that brings awareness. This is what’s possible. Those kinds of multidisciplinary experiences lead to new paths, at the end of which, are new solutions.

Lee Child seeded the Jack Reacher series with four pounds (￡) of writing supplies and one idea. Child said, “He (John D. MacDonald) made me think it was possible. I could see how it could be done.”

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An early boss at Kraft taught Roz a lesson that’s lasted her entire career.

“The first thing he taught me about management is that when I did something wrong, the first question he asked me was, ‘What didn’t I do for you to be ready?’”

She learned about extreme ownership. Besides EO, Jocko Willink also advocates for a decentralized command. Hewsenian said, “I allow the staff to follow their natural curiosity.”

How so? At a Monday meeting, she said they were going to focus on China. “I never said to them, ‘long-only hedge funds,’ instead I said, ‘think about this.’ I allowed them to go out and find the best managers they could.”

Mike Reiss was an early Simpsons writer and showrunner. Reflecting back on the series’s success he wrote, “The true secret to The Simpsons’ success is the valuable input of network executives. We don’t have any.”

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Roz moved from Kraft to Pepsi to Dimensional Funds. There she focused more on investments and emphasized optionality.

“I never adopted this all or nothing attitude. Life isn’t that black or white or cut or dried. If you keep your eye on the bigger picture, you can figure out how to get there with virtually any investment.”

Hewsenian had options because she had career capital. Judd Apatow said you’ll write something for anyone who writes you a check. Michael Caine agrees, telling actors to first choose the roles that fulfill your dreams, if those aren’t available, take the ones that fill your belly. When asked about Jaws 4, Caine says he never saw the movie but saw a lot of the house he bought with its check.

Hewsenian’s elastic optionality comes from decades of hard work.

…

Besides a culture that values options, runs decentralized (to a point, always to a point),  and insists on extreme ownership, Hewsenian also argues well. “We staff every manager who’s undergoing a deep dive for due diligence with a sponsor, a skeptic, and a director.”

Ben Horowitz suggested some tension, “…but not so much tension that you hate each other.” Horowitz’s sparring partner, Marc Andreessen said, “The way I think about is this; it’s more important to have a successful partnership than being right on any particular issue.”

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An early lesson for Hewsenian was to never say ‘No’ to a client. “You figure out how to give them some of what they want so that you show them you heard them, which is ninety-percent what the issue is.”

Here’s an example from Annie Leibovitz and Puffy.

Thanks for reading.

Supported by Greenhaven Road Capital, finding value off the beaten path.

Derek Thompson spoke (March 2017) with Barry Ritholtz about a stew of ideas from his book Hit Makers. I enjoyed the book and it will make further appearances here, but we’ll just focus on Thompson’s talk with Ritholtz.

Prefer to listen? iTunes, Overcast, or Soundcloud.

Ready?

Barry quotes the book, “Content may be king but distribution is the kingdom,” and asks Thompson to explain.

Content is king is, “so obviously not true. Some of the biggest hits in music and movie history depended overwhelmingly on distribution mechanisms to get out to the public.”

In the book, he cites the greatest show of all-time and brings up their run-up bump up.

We get dated graphics and a timeless lesson. It is both the sizzle and the steak that matter. For better and worse.

Jonah Goldberg lamented to Russ Roberts, “Part of the problem is the corruption of mass media where these politicians know they can keep their jobs with a good media campaign rather than writing legislation.”

Legislators do a better job selling us about their job than legislating for new jobs. This is part of all jobs, only the degree changes. Lee Child said that after a new Jack Reacher book comes out he’ll have dozens of fans come up to him and say I’m your biggest fan, when is the next book out? To which Child responds, Last week. “Eighty percent of marketing,” he told Andy Martin, “is just reminding people that the book is out.”

Josh Wolfe emphasized that selling and building are crucial elements for entrepreneurs. Bethany McLean noted, “This idea of storytelling in business is amazing because of the power that you can create something from nothing with a great story.”

In 2018 it’s the story of Elon Musk. How much of Tesla is sizzle? How much is steak? Jim Chanos isn’t biting:

“I think the Tesla stock might not be worth anything. To us, it is one of the bellwethers of this market. It is a hopes and dreams stock. Investors have pinned their hopes and dreams on this stock and on this CEO, who has done a very good job promoting that vision. The problem is that it is an automobile company.”

In his book, Thompson used novel stories and new studies. There were few socio-anthro-psycho-logical retreads on the tires that move his book.

In one study, Stanford professors looked at Reddit successes. They found images which were shared about seven times each, but who only ‘took off’ once or twice. What happened if you kept the pictures the same but changed the title?

Their finding is one of Thompson’s key points. Things need to be different but not too different. Or, things need to be the same, but not too similar. There is a goldilocks zone for what people want. For example:

Bad titles for this Civil War caricature were, “I’m not sure I quite understand this picture,” and “So I was looking for a picture of a bear…” Those titles are cold. They are bad fits for the community. The hit? Naturally, “‘Murica.”

Though that’s not the end of the story for laser-eyed-Abe. This picture’s score rocketed a second time with the title, “God bless whoever makes these..,”  Good titles are like good jokes; not too short and not too long and landing with the audience.

How does something land? Ritholtz asked, “What do you do to make things people want to talk about?”

“When I write an article, for that article to go big, it can’t just be appealing to my first audience, my first level of readers. They can’t simply say, ‘Ok. Cool.’ Click out, and never talk about it again.’ I need a handful of them to want to pass it along because they think that passing along that article will make them – my readers – look smart, morally in touch, surprisingly counter-intuitive about what is true about economics.”

“To create something that your consumers feel will make them look good if they pass it along.”

Thompson wants his readers to signal something. Whether it’s explanations from Geoffrey Miller, Rory Sutherland or Robin Hanson, we all signal. Kayak founder Paul English wanted to create a purple Swatch that cost ten thousand dollars. The money would go to charity, but people could still signal.

Maybe hits are more important than ever. Thompson’s examples mostly come from what Brian Arthur called the two economies.

• The innovation economy which is defined by increasing returns, positive feedback, heavy on know-how and light on resources.
• The optimization economy which is defined by bulk processing, genteelism, and heavy on resources and light on know-how.

Arthur wants managers to be aware of their economy. Innovative economies require commando units who can move fast and break things. Optimization economies require hierarchy and baby steps. Thompson points out that Reed Hastings of Netflix is really a venture capitalist.

Maybe that’s why Marc Andreessen enjoyed their conversation so much. Can you tell who said what?

1. “There’s this counterfactual universe where Netflix got disrupted by some other company that created streaming and made DVD rentals irrelevant.”
2. “We don’t need to be associated with just one type of content/investment.”
3. “As we grew we tried to have less rules, not more rules.”

What Marc and Reed are trying to do is be different. Everybody is a contrarian is one of Ritholtz’s favorite quotes. Life of Brian, one of his favorite moments.

Tweet and repeat, we are all individuals. Life of Brian uses comedy to define the absurdity. Being funny shows a deep understanding.  Jason Zweig said about writing The Devil’s Financial Dictionary, “The ability to define a term in such a way to be cynical or funny is a measure of your own skepticism.” That is, you understand both sides. B.J. Novak said, “You really learn something when you parody it.”

Rory Sutherland takes it from entertainment to sales.

“Behavioral economics is to some extent, the study of differences between, how we think we choose and how we really choose. Comedy seems a close relative. Not all, but some is partly about context, it’s about the extraordinary effect of context on how we behave. In one context twenty dollars can feel like fun and in another a monstrous extravagance.”

“The comedian is a bit like the anthropologist, they have to be this kind of alien outsider who’s capable of observing things at a distance, with a degree of detachment.”

A final quote that struck Ritholtz from the book. “A reader both performs the book and attends the performance. She is conductor, orchestra, and audience.” Thompson replied that “…books are ours. They belong to us in a way that movies don’t.”

Blog posts are like that too. Thanks for reading. The three quotes went; Andreessen, Hastings, Hastings.

Supported by Greenhaven Road Capital, finding value off the beaten path.

We’ve focused on the Simpsons and used them to show the endowment effect:

Today we’ll highlight Mike Reiss; writer, showrunner, and jack-of-all-trades for The Simpsons. In Springfield Confidential Reiss admits that he wasn’t the funniest staffer (but definitely in the top ten) and tells many great stories.

The Simpsons were expected to fail. In a writer’s room survey every writer said they thought the show would last six weeks, except for one. He guessed thirteen. “I took the job but didn’t tell anyone what I was doing,” Reiss wrote.

With this attitude, they made something new. “Maybe that’s the secret of the show’s success: since we thought no one would be watching we didn’t make the kind of show we saw on TV; we made the kind of show we wanted to see on TV.”

Much like Alice Waters, this was something that no American enterprise had ever done.  Investor’s know Mark’s maxim to be different and be right, but how does someone go about this? Reiss’s career is a clue.

“Although we bounced from job to job (Airplane 2, Alf, Johnny Carson, Sledge Hammer, It’s Garry Shandling’s Show) and took whatever came our way, all these sitcoms taught us valuable lessons that we were about to use on The Simpsons.” Reiss and writing partner Al Jean also wrote for the Harvard Lampoon.

Actors like Arnold Schwartzenegger and Jenna Fischer advocate for reps, reps reps.  Brian Koppelman’s does too. Jim O’Shaughnessy said that to understand art, “you want to look at tons of art.”

One kind of art is graffiti and former NYPC officer Steve Osborne wrote, “To normal people, graffiti looks like some nonsense written by a two-year-old child with a crayon, but to the trained eye it contains a wealth of knowledge.”

An investor or writer can figure out if something is good if they develop “a cold eye to the work.” Koppelman said of this objectivity, “If you want to be a screenwriter read a thousand screenplays and watch a thousand movies and then you will have a frame of reference for the work if you’re honest enough with yourself.”

Reiss built a reservoir of experience. At The Tonight Show, he wrote sixty jokes a day. He learned, “night after night, one out of every three jokes would bomb.” Reiss also learned to find secrets.

Both Peter Thiel and Ben Horowitz have addressed the value of secrets. On the a16z podcast, Horowitz told this story about Brian Chesky:

“He wondered why there were even hotels. He researched hotels and finds out that hotels have only been around a hundred years. Before hotels, there were inns and beds and breakfasts. You’d roll into town and there was some old lady who would rent you out a room.”

“The reason why that starts to lose out to Hyatt, Hilton and those guys was that you didn’t know what you were going to get at the inn.”

“So Brian said, with the internet, I could rate every room, every air mattress, and every house to a finer degree than the Hilton can. I can get the best of beds and breakfasts and hotels in one product.”

“That was the secret he learned along the way.”

Reiss’s learned secret was the punchline.

“I’m not a spiritual man. I don’t believe in ghosts or astrology or reincarnation. And if the Dalai Lama is so godlike, why does he need glasses?… I have only one supernatural belief: No matter what the setup, there’s always a perfect joke for it. It may not be a great joke, but it’s always the right joke for the moment: it’s there in the universe waiting to be discovered.”

With Reiss’s attitude and experience, The Simpsons succeed. They also had a good culture. Reiss reprimands the reader, “if you want dirt, dig a hole.” Except for a hire or two, the show had very few assholes. Even better, they had fewer executives.

The problem with television executives is that they step outside their circle of competency and violate a decentralized command structure. Reiss wrote:

“When Homeboys in Outer Space premiered, the Los Angeles Times called it ‘the best new comedy of the season.’ And then the executives got involved: they shot down every story pitched to them and assigned us a supervisor who told us, ‘I come from soap operas. I don’t get comedy.'”

“The true secret to The Simpsons’ success is the valuable input of network executives. We don’t have any.”

Beyond the stories in the book, Reiss repeatedly address the question Why/How did The Simpsons work? Reiss repeatedly gives the same answer; a variety of reasons. Their great writers. There were no actors (“Actors in live-action shows get bored doing the same role week after week.”). There was a meritocracy, (“The writers’ room is a democracy where you vote with laughter – like a kibbutz, only more Jewish.”)

Thanks for reading.

Supported by Greenhaven Road Capital, finding value off the beaten path.

This pdf, or podcast; iTunes, Overcast, or Soundcloud, offers examples and stories about thinking about stakeholders.  If you like the blog, you’ll like this. It’ll take about 20 minutes to read.

From the introduction:

A stakeholder is anyone or anything you commit to. Stakeholders take many forms but are denominated in one currency; time.

Financial costs are stakeholders. Each month of Netflix requires some amount of work, which you get paid for because of the time you’ve spent training.

Relational costs are stakeholders. Each mother or brother or spouse or neighbor is a relationship and relationships grow or whither when watered with time.

Experiential costs are stakeholders. Each job or hobby has travel time, participation time, preparation time, recovery time, and so on.

Hopefully we – mostly – choose our stakeholders. We pay for Netflix. We select a partner. We pick our jobs. What this ebook will attempt to do is enhance our point-of-view regarding stakeholders.

One weekend morning my ten-year-old daughter wanted cereal. I told her ‘sniff the milk’ before she poured it. What?
‘Sniff the milk!’ What’s that?

She didn’t have a frame of reference for spoiled milk. With a swift sniff, I showed her.

That’s what we’re going to do here. Instead of milk, we’ll think about stakeholders. Subscription magazines that pile up, unread. Weeks go by between watching Netflix (or HBO). Timeshares expire. Some stakeholders are treacherous. Some stakeholders are happy tradeoffs.

Thanks for reading.

Supported by Greenhaven Road Capital, finding value off the beaten path.

Jenna Fischer, Pam from The Office, has written a book, The Actor’s Life: A Survival Guide. Fischer is another overnight success that only took eight years. Sam Walton deflated the overnight success cock-and-bull story like this, “It’s true that I was forty-four when we opened our first Walk-Mart in 1962, but the store was totally an outgrowth of everything we’d been doing since Newport.”

Walton started his career as a franchisee, and only after a leasing miscue started Wal-Mart. This journey is more work for more reward with more uncertainty. It was the same for Fischer, who advised the reader:

“I had an acting teacher who used to say, ‘If you can think of anything you’re passionate about besides acting, do that. Your life will be better for it.’ And while it may sound harsh, I actually think that’s very good advice.”

On one level, Fischer’s book is a how-to, hands-on, up-close manual for someone who wants to be an actor. On another it’s about a formula for success; skill + perseverance + luck. Fischer wrote:

“The journey to become a working actor is a long and difficult one that requires a lot of hard work and perseverance. But it also requires something more obscure and out of your control: luck. Without a little luck on your side, you can be the most talented actor in the world and not achieve success. That’s the hard truth about this profession.”

That’s why Fischer, like Sam Hinkie, the Houston Astros, and Amelia Boone focus on the process, not the outcome. Fischer wrote that this may be the most important bit of advice:

“Your job as an actor is to create a consistent body of work. It’s not to book jobs. It is not to worry and beat yourself up over every job you didn’t book. Those decisions are out of your control. What is in your control is your approach to auditioning.”

While hard work on valuable skills + perseverance + luck may not be the right variables for all jobs, it was right for Fischer. Let’s see how.

Hard work.

“If you just want to be famous, become a reality star. If you want to be an actor, study acting.”

Fischer’s first job was in a commercial for the UCLA Medical Center. Her first line was, “Protection? Protection from what?” But everyone has to start somewhere. “I needed credits and this was a credit. Even better, it was real on-camera experience with a lot of dialogue.”

Fischer’s a fan of Steve Martin’s advice to be so good they can’t ignore you and (probably) also likes Cal Newport’s academic follow-up.

Newport’s advice is to pursue excellence, not passion. “Put your head down and plug away at getting really damn good,” Newport wrote. Once you’re good you have career capital, in Michael Caine’s words, these are the great roles.

Fischer needed ones that paid the rent.

But she kept improving. She graduated with a degree in theater. She moved to Los Angeles, and then after a year of waiting for her break, (it never came), she acted in anything that came along. She also took more classes.

“Training is not just something you do when you are first starting out, either. It should be an ongoing commitment. Professional athletes train in the off-season. So should you.”

…

Perseverance.

“The trick to surviving the big move and your first year as an actor is finding the secret value of shitty situations.”

Though Fischer is funny in The Office, the book is not. But it’s not supposed to be. If an aspiring actor read this, compiled a checklist, and followed it — it just might work.

Fischer does tell some stories, some of them are funny, and with hindsight, each had a silver lining. Crappy catering jobs fed her. Temp work was flexible. Secretarial work, well, that was perfect.

“I spent that year (after college, before Los Angeles) working as a secretary/receptionist in a small business that specialized in selling marine audio equipment. I made coffee, answered the phones, helped the salesmen with their PowerPoint presentations, did the filing, processed invoices, and handled customers returns. Essentially, I was Pam.”

Elizabeth Gilbert had this realization in advance. “I need to write what I know, but I don’t know anything…I created – really intentionally – my own postgraduate MFA program.” Gilbert worked in a diner, collecting more character quirks than generous tips. Then she would hit the road and travel. One trip led to her Wyoming working as a trail cook. That turned into her first published story.

But it won’t be easy. Fischer wrote:

“In addition to talent, training, and hard work, living the life of a working actor requires a very special emotional constitution. You must have a strong will, you must be determined, and you must be able to withstand countless rejections without becoming depressed, cynical, or self-destructive.”

Perseverance is what Ken Burns attributes his success to, “I’m sure there are a lot of more talented filmmakers than me, with really great ideas, who just haven’t followed through.”

…

Luck and serendipity.

Luck, wrote Michael Mauboussin, cannot be changed yet luck changes our lives. Reed Hastings said that his lucky break was serving coffee, where he saw a new style of computer architecture. “That changed my life,” Hastings said.

So if luck is some uncontrollable variable what do we do? Fischer’s advice is to increase your serendipity.

“…you’re much more likely to be in the right place at the right time if you’re busy doing showcases, plays, and taking classes. Chances are you won’t be in the right place at the right time if you’re spending your days eating Lucky Charms your couch. Trust me, I tried.”

She had to get out there. At first, this was hard. She came to Los Angeles to be an actor, not to sell tickets for other actors or build sets for other actors or support other actors. But it was the other things, getting drawn into new groups and growing in new ways that were the real start of her journey.

Scott Adams writes that life is like a slot machine. Eventually, there’s a payout but you gotta be in it to win it. Only, Adams notes, life is even better, all it takes is time and effort to play the game. It takes hard work and perseverance then a little bit of luck. That’s Fischer’s story.

Thanks for reading.

Supported by Greenhaven Road Capital, finding value off the beaten path.

“The cost of one modern heavy bomber is a modern brick school in more than thirty cities.” When Dwight Eisenhower gave his farewell address in 1961 he warned against the military industrial complex and vividly laid out what else we might spend the money on.

In the paper, Opportunity Cost Neglect a trio of Yale professors and two others commend Eisenhower for his language. Most people are vaguely aware of opportunity cost, and its calculations aren’t difficult, yet unless the costs are vivid and explicit we won’t weigh the decision.

One of the paper’s authors wrote:

“This customer was frozen in indecision between a $1,000 Pioneer and a $700 Sony, and the salesman intervened, framing the choice as follows: ‘Well, think of it this way—would you rather have the Pioneer or the Sony and $300 worth of CDs?’ Remarkably, the decision that seemed so difficult just moments before was no longer even close—the Sony was at the cash register moments after the word CDs escaped the salesman’s mouth. A big pile of new CDs seemed far too steep a price to pay for the Pioneer’s slightly more attractive speakers.”

In a recent podcast, Rory Sutherland put it this way:

“I made the decision to underspend on property on the grounds that nearly everybody else was effectively maxing themselves out. The default behavior of housing was to buy as much as you can borrow. That assumes the greatest return on happiness comes from property expenditure. No one really looks at the opportunity cost. If you’ve got a massive mortgage there’s a holiday you can’t take there are children you can’t educate.”

When considering a purchase try to be creative when what else you could buy.

• It’s not just Apple or Samsung.
• It’s Apple or Samsung or ‘dumb’ phone and two-months of groceries.

Actually, the authors note, if the alternative isn’t exciting or enticing people tend not to choose it. A better comparison might be a ‘dumb’ phone and a new television.

Thanks for reading and watching.