Tag: book

“and the bonanza ended”

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Money was scarce and no one scorned pennies. Seeing the perspiring WA workers in the streets (created by presidential order in 1935, “Works Progress Administration” was the largest of FDR’s New Deal programs to provide useful work for the unemployed), I borrowed a nickel and bought a packet of Kool-Aid, from which I made six glasses that I sold to them for a penny each. I continued to do this and found that it took a lot of work to earn a few cents. But the next winter, when my father gave me a nickel to shovel the snow from our sidewalk, I hit a bonanza. I offered the same deal to our neighbors and, after an exhausting day of snow removal, returned home soaked in sweat and bearing the huge sum of a couple of dollars, almost half of what my father was paid per day. Soon lots of the kids were out following my lead and the bonanza ended-an early lesson in how competition can drive down profits.

Edward O. Thorp

A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market

The Matthew Effect is a Matthew Effect

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From the book How to Fly a Horse.

“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.”

Outlive (book advice)

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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:

  1. Exercise, make it easy. Do enjoyable things. Do accessible things. Design it!
  2. Sleep better. Put the phone away through design choices.
  3. Continue the birthday cake diet along with tasty vegetarian foods.
  4. Poop in a box. It’s relatively costless and early prevention of colon cancer seems to matter.
  5. Avoid sunburns, especially in Florida!

To be accurate rather than precise the thinking looks like this:

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.

Summary: Full Fee Agent

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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 relationships matter 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.”   

Full Fee Agent isn’t a great book. Never Split the Difference, Uncommon Service, The Sandler Rules, and Start with No are all better. But sometimes mimicry (if you’re an agent, or in sales of the real estate variety) makes a difference. If so, the book will help.

There are no facts, only feelings

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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 fight fits 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.

Not demands, standards

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“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.

Let’s add another. This one from the Chriss Voss (we’re fans!) book Full Fee Agent.

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.

Chess Forks

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In the 2023-2024 school year I was back in the classroom. It was a successful year. There were ups and downs, but the setbacks provided chances to grow and the successes led to further advances.

During the last eight days, after exams and projects, we played chess. It was a blast.

I’d last played this much chess in middle school. A friend brought a rolled up board to lunch and we would play over peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, apple slices, and potato chips. Among our lunch table I was about average. I’m still about average. My strategy is winning by accident.

For instance, I didn’t know about “chess forks”:

From ChatGPT: In chess, a fork is a move where a single piece attacks two or more of your opponent’s pieces at the same time. This puts your opponent in a difficult situation because they can usually only move one piece to safety, leaving the other piece (or pieces) vulnerable to capture. Knights are particularly known for creating forks, but any piece can perform a fork. It’s a clever tactic to gain an advantage by threatening multiple pieces simultaneously.

To prevent forking, a player needs to stay out of trouble, unlike Amina.

The best selling fantasy adventure story The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi is one fork after another. Amina, our buccaneer hero, faces one tradeoff after another. Unlike my chess skills, she wins not by accident but…., well no spoilers.

Does this happen in real life? Go to a meeting and deal with obstinate coworkers or skip the meeting and be left out? Have a difficult conversation with your loved ones or let the issues fester? Sell an investment for a loss or continue to psychologically carry the burden? Waste more time in a job or face the unexpected prospects of starting over?

One solution comes from Shane Parrish’s book, Clear Thinking, where warns against two-dimensional solution sets. This or that. Burgers or dogs. Good or bad. Day or night.

But, Parrish prods, get creative. Ask: what would it take for one of these options to be good? Can you empathize with the obstinate coworker? Can you have a hard talk with the goal of one step backwards two steps forward? Can you sell an investment as a tax-loss? Can you side-hustle while staying in the job?

Chess and fantasy adventure novels are too strict for this sort of Alchemy.

But life is flexible. It’s malleable. We should avoid getting forked. But if we do, maybe with a little work, there are 3D chess moves to make.

Even governors use JTBD

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From Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Be Useful.

It was November 10, 2005. I’d been governor of California for two years, and I’d just had my ass handed to me in a special election that I had called against many people’s advice, in order to present four policy ideas to the voters that I couldn’t make headway on by working with the legislature.

The issues?

Teacher tenure. State spending limits. Union dues and political contributions. Even redistricting reform failed to connect with them.

…

Simply put, I’d filled the bucket with a bunch of shit that most Californians weren’t interested in wading through at the time. It was my fault, and I wasn’t going to do that to the people ever again.

Arnold was speaking in terms of supply rather than demand. Customers won’t wade through anything – unless they really want it. Unless they understand and value it.

And you know what the key was to selling that infrastructure package to the people? Having learned my lesson from 2005, I rarely ever used technical words like “infrastructure” by themselves. Instead I talked about needing to fix our old roads and build new ones so parents wouldn’t be stuck in traffic for so long and miss their kids’ soccer practices so often.

People don’t care about the roads, they care about their time on those roads. That was the job to be done.

Clear Thinking (book review)

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Comparison is the thief of joy, this is how Shane Parish closes his book, Clear Thinking.

But it’s how he should have started it.

Maybe that’s another book, but we have to want the right things first. What’s important?

My gripe is that this book was not a daily devotional. It could’ve started with wanting the big things , enforce that each day, and given specific tactics, ideas, and questions. 

We want actions, but what are we acting towards?

Comparison is the thief of joy. We have to be careful about our wants. It is easy to want the wrong things. Many celebrities have noted that the downside of fame – the things we don’t see! – do not balance the upside.

And this is where the book could have started. Making sure we use clear thinking on the important things. 

It’s a good book, even though it isn’t a daily devotional. It’s broken down into two big ideas.

First, do we have the right mindset. Does someone have the right person on their shoulder, whispering in their ear? Do they have the right feelings in their heart? Do they have the norms, customs, culture, habits, in their life that leave them to the things they want?

The ways we act. The things we say. How we compose emails. How quickly we respond to text messages: and with what emojis. That’s how our norms. It’s the slope of our line (y=mx+b). There’s only so much we can do, but we need to have something helpful there.

Second, the systems we can design around our mindset. We aren’t always going to be humble, or getting after it, or on top of our game. In those situations, we rely on the systems we design around us.

The four enemies we face are emotion, ego, social pressure, and inertia. These are the enemies that rise up and whisper to our mindset. They are louder than the normal voices in our head. They steal our heart, they infiltrate our culture.

What may look like discipline often involves a carefully created environment to encourage certain behaviors. – Shane Parrish

The good news is, these enemies are not that strong. For example, Shane writes that it is easier to go to the gym seven days a week than three. Objectively this doesn’t make sense, but it uses the principle of a inertia to our advantage.

A tactic to avoid the social enemy is to have personal rules. I don’t drink on Thursday nights. I always sleep on it before signing a deal.

The influence of monger, the stoics, and the many others of Shane‘s parish run through this book. So much of it is about avoiding mistakes. It’s about avoiding these enemies, not through choice, but having good design and the right mindset.

The book also includes a section on decisions in action. It offers incredibly helpful specific questions for decision-makers to ask. I won’t spoil them here. 

Tribeless

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“The day-trippers wear gangster suits and outlandish patterns and hats inappropriate to the latitude, temperature, or setting. It’s amateur hour. They hold liquor like ninth graders. The homogenization of America has left people wandering the land in search of a place to belong. We are a tribeless nation hungry for tribes. That longing and loneliness are especially on display in early May in Kentucky.”

From Pappyland.