Lone Gunman

I’ll start with a story.

Last year my girl­friend and I watched the pilot episode of a new TV show and were imme­di­ately hooked. The pilot episode was refresh­ingly com­plex and forced us to guess miss­ing plot details con­tin­u­ously: it’s adven­tur­ous to make your audi­ence work so hard dur­ing a pilot, we surmised.

We later dis­cov­ered that, due to a tech­ni­cal glitch, we actu­ally missed the first fif­teen min­utes of the show (about 30%). The ‘com­plete’ ver­sion of the episode was less satisfying.

Last year Steve Yegge wrote about life at Amazon.com and what it’s like work­ing under Jeff Bezos. On the topic of pre­sent­ing to Bezos, Yegge gave this tip: delete every third para­graph.  Why?

Bezos is so god­damned smart that you have to turn it into a game for him or he’ll be bored and annoyed with you. That was my first real­iza­tion about him. […]

So you have to start tear­ing out whole para­graphs, or even pages, to make it inter­est­ing for him. He will fill in the gaps him­self with­out miss­ing a beat. And his brain will have less time to get annoyed with the slow pace of your brain.

Around the same time as Yegge’s post­ing, a Red­dit user known as Wadsworth pointed out that the first 30% of “nearly every video in the uni­verse” can safely be skipped. As such things go, this soon became a YouTube URL para­me­ter: just add &wadsworth=1 to skip the first third of the video.

This ‘law’ soon became known as the Wadsworth Con­stant. It works.

The per­sonal pro­nouns used by cou­ples dur­ing “con­flic­tive mar­i­tal inter­ac­tions” are reli­able indi­ca­tors of rela­tion­ship qual­ity and mar­i­tal sat­is­fac­tion, accord­ing to a study track­ing 154 cou­ples over 23 years. The study showed that ‘We-words’ (our, we, etc.) were indica­tive of a more pos­i­tive rela­tion­ship than ‘Me– and You-words’ (I, you, etc.) (doi).

Using We-ness lan­guage implies a shared iden­ti­fi­ca­tion between spouses, even when the con­ver­sa­tion is focused on an area of con­flict. Con­sis­tent with this, We-ness was asso­ci­ated with more pos­i­tive and less neg­a­tive emo­tion behav­iors and with lower car­dio­vas­cu­lar arousal. In con­trast, Sep­a­rate­ness lan­guage implies a greater sense of inde­pen­dence and dis­tance in the rela­tion­ship. Com­pared with We-ness, Sep­a­rate­ness was asso­ci­ated with a very dif­fer­ent set of mar­i­tal qual­i­ties includ­ing more neg­a­tive emo­tional behav­ior and greater mar­i­tal dissatisfaction.

Sim­i­larly, the per­sonal pro­nouns used by CEOs in their annual share­holder let­ters pro­vide a use­ful way of pre­dict­ing future com­pany performance. No doubt gleaned from the Rit­ten­house Rank­ings Can­dor Sur­vey, this is from Geoff Colvin’s book, Tal­ent is Over­rated:

Laura Rit­ten­house, an unusual type of finan­cial ana­lyst, counts the num­ber of times the word “I” occurs in annual let­ters to share­hold­ers from cor­po­rate CEOs, con­tend­ing that this and other evi­dence in the let­ters helps pre­dict com­pany per­for­mance (basic find­ing: Ego­ma­ni­acs are bad news).

via Bark­ing Up the Wrong Tree (1 2)

Ryan Hol­i­day asks a very good ques­tion: why do we extend patience and tol­er­ance to strangers, while simul­ta­ne­ously treat­ing those clos­est to us less graciously?

It’s an inter­est­ing ques­tion with some equally inter­est­ing pos­si­ble answers (is it a sub­con­scious and inef­fi­cient way of attempt­ing to ease our daily lives by telling those we spend the most time with how we want to be treated?). I like the con­clu­sory piece of advice: we should give every­one “the gra­cious­ness of meet­ing them fresh each time”.

Some weirdo says some­thing to you in the gro­cery store and you smile and nod your head, “Yup!” Just to avoid a scene right? You have a meet­ing with a sales rep and indulge the friendly but point­less chitchat even though you hate it. But a friend mis­pro­nounces a word and we leap to cor­rect them. Your girl­friend tells a bor­ing story and you’ve got to say some­thing about it, you’ve got to get short with her. What kind of bull­shit is this? We give the ben­e­fit of cour­tesy to every­body but the peo­ple who earned it.

Think of how much patience we have for total strangers and acquain­tances. But what a short fuse we have for the actual peo­ple in our life. In the course of our every­day lives, our pri­or­i­ties are so very back­wards. We do our best to impress peo­ple we’ll never see again and take for granted peo­ple we see all the time. We’re respect­ful in our busi­ness lives, casual and care­less in our per­sonal. We pun­ish close­ness with crit­i­cism, reward unfa­mil­iar­ity with politeness.

This is a great exam­ple of why I read Ryan’s work: he’s adept at point­ing out the every­day hypocrisies that we rarely notice.

In 2007 Vini­cius Vacanti quit his highly-paid job in finance to take on life as an entre­pre­neur. In a short post describ­ing his rea­sons for doing so, Vacanti says that most of us haven’t faced the pos­si­bil­ity of real fail­ure, and entre­pre­neur­ship is a way to test your lim­its by attempt­ing to cre­ate some­thing of real value:

A scary idea started creep­ing into my thoughts: what if I could build some­thing? Wouldn’t I always won­der? Wouldn’t I regret it? Wouldn’t it eat away at me over the years?

And, that’s when I real­ized that I didn’t actu­ally know if I was good enough because I hadn’t really failed in life (at least not pro­fes­sion­ally). Most peo­ple don’t really fail. We tend to take the job that we think we’ll suc­ceed in. We are hes­i­tant to reach. And, if we do reach and suc­ceed, then we don’t reach again.

The only way to know how good you might be at some­thing is to fail try­ing it.

And, that’s when I decided it was time to test my lim­its. It was time to really reach. It was time to quit my safe job and walk straight into almost cer­tain startup failure.

There’s noth­ing mind-blowing here, admit­tedly — I just love how Vacanti phrased this.

One con­stant that con­nects us all in some way is that–at the end of our day–we lie down and slowly slip into a state of reduced or absent con­scious­ness and become at the mercy of our fel­low man. Every day we fall asleep: we have done so for mil­lions of years and will con­tinue to do so.

This hum­bling thought was inspired by David Cain’s short dis­qui­si­tion on how the act of sleep­ing is some­thing that unites us together, all around the world. David’s post didn’t quite take the route I was expect­ing after read­ing the (won­der­ful) excerpt below¹, but is still def­i­nitely worth a read.

It’s an inter­est­ing quirk of Mother Nature — that she insists on tak­ing us down to the ground like that, every day, no mat­ter who we are. For all of us, the act of leav­ing con­scious­ness is the same, it’s just our set­tings and sit­u­a­tions — which book­end that uncon­scious­ness — where we differ.

via Link Banana

¹ I was expect­ing the post to con­cen­trate on the first sen­tence (leav­ing con­scious­ness), rather than the sec­ond sen­tence (sleep as a connector).