Tag: book

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.

TTID: Submariners

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And, finally, in what was easily the most emotional aspect of the trans-formation, Rickover made it clear that  most of the officers who had previously served in diesel submarines (the same officers who had just popularly “won the war in the Pacific” were not welcome in nuclear submarines.

David Oliver, Against the Tide

Our this time is different series builds on the idea that system changes dictate when things are different.

Ask, Have the rules changed?

Nuclear submarines were different from their diesel counterparts, writes Oliver. In the Pacific theater, during WWII, the diesel submarines got “within rock throwing range”. That strategy and “the stress of war distinguished the ducks from the drakes in the submarine officer corps”.

Those captains were cowboys.

Which is what Hyman Rickover did not need.

Nuclear submarine captains needed to be smart and prudent. They had to be wise and calculating. They needed less gung-ho and more ho-hum.

This time was different because the system of war had changed.

The Psychology of Money (book review)

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The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel is a book of twenty money lessons but really it’s about two things.

Thing 1: How the world works.

There is the world and there is how we think about the world. The more these ideas overlap the happier more calibrated the person. People follow stories (chapter 18), pessimisms sells (17), and tails drive everything (6) are all explanations about the world.

It’s through a combination of evolution, social pressure, and a history of this-worked-for-me that we drift. Sure, we think, Tom lost so money in crypto but he didn’t listen and get in when I told him the candlestick fed cycle jump was coming (luck, chapter 2). When something bad happens to us we’re unlucky. When something bad happens to them they’re idiots (1).

Things 2: How you work.

So it’s not just outside that we misunderstand. It’s inside too. We move the goalposts (3), confuse consumption (8), and aim for the rational rather than reasonable (11).

Asking what do I really want out of this big trip is not easy.

So we don’t.

Thankfully Housel is here to help. Think of time as freedom (7), just save (10), and don’t confuse consumption for wealth (9).

–

The Psychology of Money is a difficult book to review because it’s personal. It’s how you see the world and understand yourself. Oof.

While the chapters are short, don’t spend little time on them. Read them. Stop. Think. Reflect. Note. The book is a refreshing break from the digital cycle. You’ll read this and think: Oh yes, this is a breath of fresh air and one I needed.

That “start young” advice

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“If you want to do better as an investor, the single most powerful thing you can do is increase your time horizon. Time is the most powerful force in investing. It makes little things grow big and big mistakes fade away.”

— The Psychology of Money

Start investing young was the advice I got. At 22 I opened a Roth IRA.

But there was a nuance I failed to note. It’s not just about time horizons but also how to get there.

Young Mike opened a Roth knowing it should compound for a long time. But he didn’t think about how that might happen.

Save 3-6 months of living expenses was another piece of advice. This is an average lie. It’s not enough or too much. We should call them “repair funds” because emergencies are not covered.

Emergencies need a year or more.

–

In Nomadland, Jessica Bruder writes about “house-less” Americans. With RVs and campers, these ‘nomads’ travel the country for work. Do you know how busy Amazon gets at the holidays? It’s these people working there. Seasonal National Parks? That’s them too.

Generally, four events precede someone becoming nomadic: health, house, job, spouse. Mary Smith or her significant other lost their _____ and now she’s nomadic. Three months of savings for that? Get out.

But that’s tough. So much time horizon is eaten up by savings accumulation – which an individual may never need! In hindsight I see all of Young Mike’s mistakes. But he didn’t think they were mistakes at the time.

This balance is what makes Morgan’s book so good. It’s not black and white numbers. It’s messy. It’s color. It’s holistic, it’s an ecosystem. You never do just one thing.

I didn’t read The Psychology of Money when it came out because I’ve read a lot of Morgan’s memos, followed him online, and written about personal finance. But the book is good. It’s not about money as much as it’s about morals.

Outlive (book review)

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What’s the point of reading this book?

Peter Attia’s Outlive starts with the medicine: biology, physiology, chemistry and so on. There’s an excellent explanation on arterial plaque. I did not know that cardiovascular diseases were caused by the body trying to heal itself from within, dealing with LDL cholesterol as best it can. There’s also good explanations about our synapses and cancers.

But what’s the point?

Information does not change action.

–

Attia’s book is about the four modern horsemen of human mortality: cancer, heart disease, type two diabetes, and neurodegenerative diseases.

Like other areas of discovery, medicine follows the pattern: identification, react, ‘proact’. The Ghost Map tells the story of choleras identification in 1854. Covid-19’s cadence meanwhile was within a year: sequence, treatment, and bundled with the flu shot.

According to Attia, there is a lot more room to proactively address the four horsemen.

Channeling Michael Pollan, switching from hundreds of pages to a few words that address the action, the advice might be:

Get stronger. Eat your best foods. Sleep well.

–

The book is thick. Parts are dense. Even now, days later, I can’t explain parts.

But that’s okay.

The main point of the book is to be intentional. Like the vegetarian experiment and as good bayesians we should tinker. Attia is rarely absolute: Do this but not that! Instead it’s about you getting to this point of heart rate or insulin sensitivity or sleep.

One takeaway from Covid-19 was our heterogeneity (see: The End of Average). Outlive fits in this line of thinking. It’s your healthspan, it’s your lifespan, it’s your choice.

So get stronger, eat your best foods, and sleep well.

Visualizing Tradeoffs

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In Uncommon Service the authors note that customers want businesses to suck at something. It’s a Never Split the Different vibe. Or in terms of a karaoke bar: Play the hits!

A visualization from the book:

Restaurants have different attributes: food quality, pacing, pricing, ambiance, and so on. For a celebration, people are willing to trade price for service. This is the sort of “context” at the heart of JTBD.

“Our business,” listings read, “has 100 years of combined experience.” Well, that sounds like a lot. But is it two people with fifty years or ten people with ten? Then again, is fifty years of experience good? Do you want a doctor who went to medical school in the 70s?

20,000×1 != 1×20,000

There’s no answer, it’s all contextual.

But we do make trade-offs and must be honest about what they are and what that means.

How to Fly a Horse (book review)

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How to Fly a Horse is one of the best books you haven’t read. It’s part inspirational (like Rosling) part instructional (like King) and part historical (like Dan Carlin). 

Simply, we are capable but more importantly, we are responsible for the world we want. “Everything around you that you call life,” Steve Jobs said, “ was made up by people that were no smarter than you.”

But this ain’t influencer stuff. 

Everyone has creative potential, Kevin Ashton writes, but it takes work. “Time is the raw material of creation.”  As Steven Pressfield noted, put your ass where your heart wants to be. 

That’s just Insta-advice. 

The world does not want creation. The system is designed against it in two ways. 

A me problem. 

We block our creations. There’s the genius myth: Creation is for a select few. That’s just not right. The End of Average explains this nicely. ‘Genius’ (or ‘athletic’ or ‘industrious’ or ‘lazy’ and so on) are collections. There’s no genius metric because there’s nothing to have. 

Ya got it or you don’t is not true. 

But this isn’t enough. It takes work, work, work. For a species designed for ease, work is hard. 

There’s a paradox too: The better we get at something the more efficient we get and the less likely we are to see novelty. Think of “expertise” Ashton writes, as “efficiency”. There is nothing more deceptive, wrote Arthur Conan Doyle, than an obvious fact. Tyler Cowen calls this “once and for all-ism.” Experts have been rewarded for seeing the world a certain way, why change? 

The solution to the paradox is to bring experience but not beliefs. To have a light identity footprint. To see the unexpected, expect to see nothing. 

A them problem. 

They, the others, those folks don’t want to see it. Or they can’t see it. It’s helpful to remember Demings, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” People don’t randomly red-pill, laissez le bon temps rouler!

The status quo is humanity’s default (this is an assumption of JTBD). 

‘Different is bad’ is evolutionarily good. Our ancestors were the ones who didn’t try the new berries. 

Rejection, hesitation, and reluctance are good things. First creators must expect it. Knowing first drafts suck, progress is slow, and TK takes the sting out. Second, creators must use this for guidance. Feedback presents the soil to sew, the path to plan for, the itinerary to travel. Ashton advocates for the creator to utilize not internalize rejections. Ask, okay, so how could this be better?

–

The book is full of pithy quotes. Let’s end with two: 

“We sell our soul when we waste our time. We drive neither ourselves nor our world forward if we choose idling over inventing.”

“The math of time is simple: you have less than you think and need more than you know.”

–

This book was mentioned in Bob Moesta’s Learning to Build.

Learning to Build (book review)

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Rather than a traditional review, think about Learning to Build in the context of jobs to be done. 

We believe there’s no such thing as a bad book so much as bad timing. In some version of the multiverse, you need any given book right now! 

Similarly, jobs theory is about finding the pushes and pulls, habits and anxieties, and contexts for when people act. 

In that spirit, here are the Jobs books for this multiverse. 

Learning to Build is an introduction to someone who wants to learn more about Bob Moesta’s work. It introduces the five skills: empathetic perspective, uncovering demand, causal structures, prototype to learn, and making tradeoffs. 

Demand Side Sales is for someone in sales who wants a fresh idea. Never Split the Difference, Start with No, and The Sandler Rules also build the “talking to people” skill. 

Competing Against Luck is for someone with a strategic angle. It’s for someone asking: What should we do here? The Mom Test is a faster, less academic path with similar idea vistas. How to Fly a Horse is a bigger and wider picture, with more history. 

How Will You Measure Your Life is for someone who’s seen these ideas and needs a fresh – and personal! – perspective. 

26 Jobs to be Done is my short e-book about grokking jobs. 

Keep learning. Keep building. Keep growing.