As we all know, sounds can be deceiving. Just ask a foley artist. But a new campaign from the David Lynch Foundation skillfully shows how even the most everyday sounds can trigger trauma in war veterans.

Created by Paris-based agency Herezie Group for the film director’s organization that focuses on treating trauma of all types, the spot gives us a glimpse of the world from a vet’s point of view, and the effect of sound on their lives.

I feel like I’ve stepped into a kind of Willy Wonka’s factory. But instead of magical candy, people here are dreaming up imaginative shoes.

I’m at Cole Haan’s innovation center, tucked away in the middle of farmhouses and seacoast communities in Greenland, New Hampshire. The space is filled with 3D printers, mood boards, tables littered with leather samples, and wooden benches strewn with cobbler’s lasts. Employees are quietly talking about improbable shoes: high heels that feel like sneakers, leather Oxfords that are virtually weightless, shoes that fit the foot like socks.

Over the last five years, Cole Haan has evolved from its roots as a purveyor of classic New England dress shoes into a brand known for pushing the boundaries of footwear. Every year, it releases new collections as part of the “Grand” line that meet a set of criteria that includes excellent cushioning, breathability, durability, and lightness. At the same time, the company has held on to its 89-year heritage by focusing on craftsmanship and high-quality materials.

Last September, we covered the launch of the GrandRevølution Wash­­ington, a $400 men’s dress shoe with a pliable sole and leather that is able to stretch for a full range of motion. According to the company, this model brought in the most revenue within the dress category last season. This year, it launched the GrandPrø Tennis, a set of leather sneakers weighing 5.6 ounces, which ended up being the most successful launch in the brand’s history, selling more shoes within in the first month than ever before. Much of the creativity that went into these new shoes began here, at the company’s New Hampshire innovation center.

One of the masterminds of this laboratory is Scott Patt, the company’s VP of design and innovation, whose background includes stints at Armani, Nike, and Converse. Two years ago, he was instrumental in building out the procedures at work here. He believes that maintaining some degree of discipline in the midst of creativity is key to making the innovation center as effective as possible. “Many innovation centers are just a bunch of brilliant people, huddled in a corner, coming up with random ideas,” he says. “I just don’t think that’s the best use of talent. I’d rather have my team focused on solving specific problems. Within those guardrails they can go crazy, but you need to have method in the madness.”

Human-Centered Innovation

The process here begins by plotting out the lifestyle of their typical customer. This means thinking about their trajectory over the course of a day, a week, and a year. This might mean going from the gym to work to dinner; from the office to weekend hikes or errands or going from summer sandals to winter boots. The team thinks about the existing pain point throughout this experience, such as the need to switch from dress shoes into sneakers on the commute by foot to an office, or the exact parts of a woman’s foot that hurt after 12 hours in four-inch heels, or the discomfort of wearing heavy winter boots to deal with the elements.

The team goes wild, imagining the kinds of shoes they might invent if they were not constrained by either science or convention. This is how the brand came up with the idea for a line of shoes that are essentially Oxfords on the top, but sneakers on the bottom. On first blush, this may seem like a whacky idea that defied the rules of fashion. But over the course of iterating and tweaking prototypes, Cole Haan developed a hybrid shoe that has become very popular.

“Shoes impact the entire experience of a person’s day,” Patt says. “The work we do here is driven by the belief that the work we are doing can improve people’s lives.”

Talent From Everywhere

Patt is proud of how diverse his team is. As I walk the floor of the innovation center, I stop by the desk of someone who used to be an animator for a video game studio building dynamic 3D models of shoes. Across the room, there’s someone trained in industrial design, who can talk through the molecular difference between materials. Another works with plaster and a sewing machine to quickly put together rudimentary prototypes. The company partners with university biomechanists who do scientific studies on the impact that a shoe has on the body. And given that Cole Haan began as a dress shoe company known for excellent craftsmanship, the company also works with traditional shoemakers who have been working with leather for decades.

I see all of the pieces of the puzzle come together in the construction of the women’s pumps. Many women wear high heels every day, but even though creative new styles flood the market every season, there hasn’t been much innovation when it comes to the structure of the pump.

Jeff Mokos, a director at the center trained in industrial design, has been tasked with making the pump more comfortable. In the development process, he worked with scientists to create heat maps of where exactly a woman feels pressure as she is walking with heels. There’s often pain in the toe box, since the foot is sliding down; there’s discomfort in the arch if the shoe is not exactly molded to the curvature of the foot; the heel is likely to ache since the entire weight of the body is being supported by the minuscule surface area of the heel.

Mokos worked to fix many of these problems with the Grand pump collection. The line has extra cushioning throughout the footbed, but especially in the Achilles area. It uses flexible leather that is able to promote natural movement and not chafe against the skin. And the heel itself has been imperceptibly moved forward to improve the center of gravity. “With high heels, there is so little real estate to work with,” he says. “But at the same time, little tweaks, such as moving the placement of the heel by a few millimeters, can totally alter the wearing experience.”

Pick your perfect autumn pump. Women’s new #GRANDREVOLUTION Suede Pumps are available through the link in our bio. #ColeHaan

A post shared by Cole Haan (@colehaan) on Sep 14, 2016 at 3:05pm PDT

Perfection Is A Process

The problem with setting up the goal of crafting shoes that perfectly fit into the customer’s lifestyle is that there’s always room for improvement. Mokos had come up with several prototypes of heels that would eventually become the Eliza Grand and the Antoinette Grand pumps, but he wanted to keep tinkering to find ways of making the shoe even more comfortable. At a given point, however, it was time to pass on the shoe to the rest of the team, so it could go into production. The very next day, he was back at work, seeing whether he could make the next iteration even better.

The innovation team must balance bringing new products to market with the feeling that there is still more left to be done. It helps to have a clear set of goals from the outset, so that employees can tick off what they were able to accomplish in each round. In the end, Cole Haan tends to approach shoes the way a tech company approaches software: Each new season brings an opportunity to create updated versions of shoes. Two years after the company released its ZERØGRAND line, designed to mimic the movement of the human foot, it came up with 2.ZERØGRAND full of tweaks to make the shoes even more dynamic.

“The thing about innovation is that you never get to that point where you can sit back and think, “Wow, we totally solved that. Good job, us!” Patt says. “There’s always customer feedback coming in, helping us get to the next version.”

At a new laundromat in the center of Rome, no one needs quarters. The Pope Francis Laundry–opened by the Pope himself–is a place where homeless people and others struggling with extreme poverty can wash and dry a load of laundry for free.

The laundry is meant to “restore dignity to so many people who are our brothers and sisters,” Archbishop Konrad Krajewski said in a press release from the Vatican. “One of the greatest difficulties for those who live on the streets, along with that of finding food, a place to spend the night and public baths, is to wash and dry the clothes they wear, in many cases the only ones they own.”

Inside a former hospital near the Vatican, run by the Rome-based Community of Sant’Egidio, the facility has six washers and six dryers donated by Whirpool, and a free supply of detergent from Procter & Gamble. A barbershop, showers, and health care facilities will be added on-site later.

The new laundry is one of a handful of projects that try to address the challenge of clean clothes for homeless people. In the U.S., volunteers from an organization called Laundry Love partner with local laundromats to offer free services at certain hours to people in need. The project started after founders asked a homeless man what he needed, and he said, “If I had clean clothes I think people would treat me like a human being.”

During a Laundry Love session, which typically lasts two to five hours, volunteers either pay for someone’s laundry or, in some cases, the laundromat offers the free use of a machine or two. Other laundromats donate the proceeds from particular machines to the nonprofit. While people wash and dry their clothes, volunteers get to know them, and also often offer services such as tutoring for children or assistance with a job search.

“Dignity is built,” Laundry Love co-founder and national director Greg Russinger tells Fast Company. “Relationships are built…all you have is free time inside a laundromat.” (One of the organization’s supporters,  Los Angeles Episcopal Bishop Diane Jardine Bruce, says she shared the idea with Pope Francis, which may have been part of the inspiration for the new Roman laundry).

In Australia, a nonprofit called Orange Sky Laundry engineered a washer and dryer that can fit in the back of a van. Volunteers drive the vans–now a fleet of 11–on streets in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, and other Australian cities, offering homeless people free loads of laundry.

Still, it’s a basic necessity that many people struggle to afford–and may be even more difficult to access for people who are on the verge of homelessness or not yet connected with other homeless services. In the 14 years that Laundry Love has operated, it has seen clear evidence of the need: to date, the program has helped nearly 750,000 people do a million loads of laundry.

“We have a large constituency of people who are going through the wringer,” says Russinger. “They’ve lost jobs, they’ve lost houses, they’re in their cars or low-income hotels, nobody knows about [their homelessness] because if they shared about that, they could lose whatever job they might have. There’s a large constituency of people . . . that most people don’t see and think about. That’s who we see.”

Pope Francis’s new laundry might inspire others to also help. “I just appreciate the fact that he’s jumping on and recognizes that clean clothes matter to people, whoever they are, wherever they come from,” Russinger says. “I think it matters.”

Over the last couple of decades, coffee has gone from being a plain, watery drink to an often-luxury staple available in endless combinations. You can now pay an incredible $18 for a single cup in Brooklyn. And millennials are said to be more discerning about quality, origin, and preparation than their predecessors. Sales of espresso-type coffee have tripled since 2008, driven largely by younger tastes, the National Coffee Association says.

This discernment, while sometimes annoying, does have the benefit of producing changes in the wider supply chain. The “premiumization” of coffee pays for accreditation standards, greater traceability, and investments in enabling technology in developing countries. An example of the latter: a blockchain-enabled coffee grading machine aimed at smallholder farmers.

Developed by a startup called Bext360, the Coinstar-like kiosk combines artificial intelligence with a way of time-stamping coffee “cherries” (the fruits containing coffee seeds or beans) as they begin their journey from remote village to New York cafe. That offers traceability to end buyers and helps the farmers win better deals for their produce, says Bext360’s CEO Daniel Jones.

Small farmers in developing countries–who produce 70%-80% of the world’s coffee supply–are often at a market disadvantage, Jones says. Middlemen decide on the quality of the crop (and have an incentive to downgrade it), set prices, and decide how, and when, farmers get paid. The kiosk, on the other hand, gives objective feedback on coffee, and pays farmers immediately.

Farmers pour in their crop. The machine automatically grades beans for color, size, and other characteristics, comparing a generated image of the cherries against a library of different types. Bext360 has spent the last 18 months training its algorithms to identify dozens of cherry details. The unit makes an offer for the produce, and the grower decides whether to accept. If the answer is “yes,” the money is wired there and then to their cell phone. Coffee buyers, meanwhile, need to empty the kiosks as they reach a limit of about 70 pounds. Jones says automation makes this a smooth process: once full, a signal can go out from the machine to a driver, saying when the machine needs attention.

Inside the machine is software from Stellar.org, an open-source blockchain protocol for distributing and converting money. Its digital wallet exchanges currencies between buyers and farmers, and can even be used to set up an independent currency. A coffee co-operative could create its own monetary unit–say “cafe pesos”–that would circulate within the local area (this might offer more security than using real money). A local bank could then convert the currency when farmers needed it.

Stellar’s blockchain system also offers an indelible record of when the crop enters the chain and what quality the kiosk judges it as reaching. That means someone down the line–like, say, a coffee snob in Brooklyn–can ensure that what they’re drinking is what the coffee shop says they’re drinking. Bext360 is another example of how blockchain–which was first used to authenticate and track Bitcoin transactions–can be used to stamp out product fraud.

“A lot of importers want the ability to trace and track their coffee. They have a picture of the community on their websites. But they don’t truly have that last-mile connection to the actual origin of where the coffee is,” Jones says. The blockchain creates a transparent system of trustworthiness, where the record is distributed across computers. It makes it harder for a someone to intervene in the chain of custody and claim that a less high-quality batch deserves a premium price. Thus, says Jones, it encourages farmers to produce better quality cherries, because they know they’ll be rewarded for their effort.

For-profit Bext360, which is currently at the advanced prototype stage, recently raised $1.2 million in venture funding. Jones plans to test the first machine this summer with coffee farmers in California before introducing the first fully-functional units later this year, probably in the Democratic Republic of Congo and somewhere in South America. He expects the kiosk to cost about $1,500 a time.

Jones hopes to sell the machines to community co-operatives or through NGOs. Jones sees an opportunity for banks or donors to offer loans through the kiosks themselves, with repayments being deducted from the crop sales. “The machine has a wallet of its own,” he says. “If there’s a loan on that machine, it could make a loan repayment every week based on the amount [of cherries] the machine collects.”

MapLight is a nonprofit organization that reveals the influence of money in politics.

A campaign finance watchdog said today that chief White House strategist Steve Bannon may have illegally benefited from spending by a pro-Trump super PAC while he led Trump’s presidential campaign.

The Campaign Legal Center believes Make America Number 1, a super PAC that backed Trump, may have improperly subsidized Bannon’s salary. In a letter to regulators on Wednesday, the Campaign Legal Center argued that details in Bannon’s recent financial disclosure give “reason to believe” the Trump campaign and the super PAC may have violated federal election rules.

While Trump initially criticized his Republican opponents for their close ties to super PACs and disavowed outside groups that sought to support his bid, his team embraced outside help during his general election race against Hillary Clinton and pushed the boundaries of federal election rules as much as any other 2016 candidate—testing regulations meant to ensure that super PACs operate independently from campaigns.

Bannon’s disclosure, filed March 31, confirmed his financial connection to Glittering Steel, a film production company that was involved with Bannon’s Clinton Cash documentary about the Clinton family, and Torchbearer, which starred Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson.  

Make America Number 1 paid the film production company nearly $1 million during the 2016 election cycle, with payments starting in July 2015 and continuing after Bannon became the Trump campaign’s CEO. The Trump campaign never paid Bannon, who previously was the executive chairman of Breitbart News, a right-wing news site.

We reached out to Bannon and the White House for comment but did not get a response.

The filing says Bannon resigned from Glittering Steel and stopped receiving monthly consulting payments from the company in August 2016, when he joined the Trump campaign. But the form indicates Bannon kept an ownership interest in Glittering Steel, worth at least $100,000. Bannon’s report says he’s trying to sell his stake in the company.

“As a result, as Bannon worked for the Trump campaign without pay, he continued to benefit, directly or indirectly, from the estimated $267,500 in payments that Make America Number 1 made to Glittering Steel LLC after or around his officially joining the campaign,” wrote Campaign Legal Center lawyers Larry Noble and Catherine Hinckley Kelley.

The Campaign Legal Center first filed its complaint with the Federal Election Commission in October. It’s unclear if the agency has decided to investigate, as the FEC doesn’t comment on investigations until they’re completed. Its commissioners have frequently deadlocked on whether to pursue apparent election law violations.

Overall, the FEC has done little to ensure that super PACs remain independent from candidates in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which allowed companies and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections.

Super PACs and politically active nonprofits spent almost $1.5 billion during the last election cycle, with much of the money coming from ultra-wealthy individuals like billionaire Robert Mercer—the conservative hedge fund executive who financed Make America Number 1. His daughter, Rebekah, led the super PAC, which originally backed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in the Republican primary race.

The Mercers pressed Trump to hire Bannon to lead his campaign, according to the Washington Post. Over the years, the Mercer family has funded Breitbart News, as well as the Government Accountability Institute, a conservative investigative nonprofit led by Bannon. Bannon and the Mercers founded Glittering Steel together, the Post reported.

The Mercers are also major investors in Cambridge Analytica, a data firm that worked for both Make America Number 1 and the Trump campaign. Bannon received monthly consulting payments from Cambridge Analytica and served on its board. Though Bannon’s financial disclosure says he resigned from the firm when he started working for Trump, he still has a stake in the company, worth over $1 million, that he’s planning to sell.

The Campaign Legal Center said that there’s reason to question whether Bannon did in fact resign from Glittering Steel and Cambridge Analytica in August.

Bannon’s financial disclosure says he resigned from Breitbart News then, but Breitbart’s CEO, Larry Solov, recently told the Senate Press Gallery that Bannon resigned from Breitbart in November, days after Trump’s victory.

The relationship between Bannon and Breitbart News, which gave Trump favorable coverage throughout the campaign, has generated controversy in recent weeks. Bannon has reportedly maintained contact with Breitbart editors about the site’s coverage. That news prompted a liberal watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, to request an investigation into whether Bannon has violated his White House ethics pledge.

Newsreports suggested last week that there’s a growing rivalry between Bannon and Trump’s son-in-law and advisor, Jared Kushner, and that Bannon could be on his way out the door, after Trump removed Bannon from a position on his National Security Council.

Not too long ago, most consumers were satisfied that simple fitness trackers, not smartwatches, were a good way to enter the age of the “quantified self.” Sales of Fitbit’s trackers flourished, and the company held a successful IPO.

But times have changed, the numbers show. More fitness-minded people are moving to smartwatches, mainly the Apple Watch. Fitbit, which is now working on a full-fledged smartwatch of its own, may find this a dangerous era in which to live.

In the run-up to the launch of the Apple Watch back in 2014, Fitbit CEO James Park got the same question a lot: How are you going to compete? The assumption was that Apple would deliver a beautiful device that did everything a Fitbit did and much more.

Park didn’t seem concerned in the least. He argued, rightly at the time, that fitness trackers and smartwatches were different things, and that there was lots of room in the market for both.

After launching in April 2015, Apple Watch didn’t exactly set the world on fire sales-wise in the first year. Apple didn’t disclose numbers, but most estimates put the number between 10 million to 15 million units. Many consumers continued to be happy with fitness trackers that did a small set of things (like counting steps and monitoring sleep) and that cost well under $200. Fitbit sales remained strong heading into the company’s June 2015 IPO and beyond.

But now, a quarter and change into 2017, Fitbit’s situation isn’t looking as good. Sales began to soften during 2016. The company cut its full-year revenue guidance back 8% midway through the year. It also reduced its unit sales forecast for the 2016 holiday quarter (its stock taking a hammering), and ended up selling 6.5 million trackers during the period. Revenue fell 19%. Meanwhile, the Apple Watch has its biggest quarter ever, selling an estimated 5.6 million devices.

CEO Park attributed the lull to the mass market adoption curve: “. . . we have successfully captured a large portion of the innovator and early adopter segments in tracker market,” he said during a recent earnings call. “We believe the early and late majority segments of the tracker market represents an additional significant target opportunity of between 40 million to 80 million new tracker customers.”

Apple made some important choices in last fall’s Apple Watch Series 2 to promote that mind-set. It noticeably shifted both the feature set and the marketing of the second version of the Watch to target the fitness crowd: The new device became officially waterproof (for swimmers) and added GPS (to track runs). There was even a new Nike+ Watch with special fitness bands and additional run-tracking software on board. The Watch’s message notifications and other communications features were downplayed.

The migration from pure fitness trackers toward smartwatches is nothing new to Fitbit. Like its competitors, the company has gradually added smartwatch-like features to its trackers, such as smartphone integration features including message notifications and music control. It introduced heart-rate sensors to its devices beginning with the Charge HR in early 2015.

What should Fitbit do now? Well, if it buys the argument that the gravity in the wearables space is heading toward the smartwatch, it should release a real smartwatch, with all the trimmings, ASAP.

Voila! Company executives acknowledged late last month that they are indeed building a full-fledged smartwatch to compete for the same consumers who might buy an Apple Watch. The device reportedly offers GPS, heart-rate monitoring, mobile payments, four days of battery life, a color display with 1,000 nits of brightness (like the Apple Watch 2), and a $300 price tag.

That’s all great, but the context in which Fitbit is doing all this is, well, not ideal. The company is trying to grow from a fitness tracker company into a smartwatch maker just as the Apple Watch is gaining strength and as Fitbit sales are slowing. While Apple has successfully positioned the Watch as a fitness tracker that’s also a full-on smartwatch, Fitbit is just now trying to build its first real smartwatch. I’d much rather be Apple in that scenario.

An April 11 article by Yahoo Finance‘s JP Mangalindan cites sources saying Fitbit wanted to release its new smartwatch this spring but has delayed launch until the fall because of production problems. From the report:

“In one of the more final prototypes, the GPS wasn’t working because the antennae wasn’t in the right place,” one of those sources told Yahoo Finance. “They had to go back to the drawing board to redesign the product so the GPS got a strong signal.”

Yahoo Finance‘s story also reports that Fitbit is having trouble making the device waterproof, as the Apple Watch 2 is. It’s still unclear if Fitbit will be able to get these issues solved before it’s time to launch this fall.

“Regardless of whether Fitbit manages to make it waterproof, I think they have to release the watch later this year,” one of Yahoo Finance‘s sources said. “It’s literally sink or swim time for them.”

First Generation vs. Third Generation

If Fitbit launches its first real smartwatch in the fall, it will probably debut at roughly the same time Apple will announce its third smartwatch—likely called the Apple Watch Series 3. And based on the Yahoo Finance report, it sounds like Fitbit, in the best case scenario, will be releasing a smartwatch with a feature set comparable to that of last year’s Apple Watch 2.

And finally, Yahoo Finance’s sources say the Fitbit smartwatch will use the same squarish hardware design as last year’s aesthetically challenged Fitbit Blaze. Competing with Apple on hardware design is already a daunting challenge; if Fitbit recycles a lackluster design from last year for its new device, it suggests to me that the company has chosen to simply cede the beauty crown to Apple.

Fitbit stock fell 2% on the Yahoo Finance report of smartwatch production delays. But these technical hiccups are just a small symptom of a much larger challenge. Fitbit, which is now 10 years old, may be dealing with the growing pains of becoming a smartwatch company.

Suzy Bátiz remembers the moment because of the chill she says it put in her body. “I felt with certainty that this was an idea that needed to be born,” she remembers.

It happened at a family gathering, her brother-in-law had wondered aloud at the table if there might be some way to trap toilet odor. Most of the other guests had politely ignored the musing, but in a flash Bátiz thought of aromatherapy oils.  It wasn’t the aromas, per se; it was the nature of the oil itself. “Oil floats on water, and I realized it could create a barrier that would trap the odor in,” she explained. “In that moment, I knew I had discovered the answer.”

She immediately responded that not only could it be done, but she would figure out how to do it. Her brother-in-law scoffed. By 2016, she would sell 22 million bottles of her odor trapping oil, which she calls Poo-Pourri.

Which Wich CEO Jeff Sinelli remembers his moment like a smack in the face. He was standing in a receiving line at a conference to meet one of his heroes, Container Store CEO Kip Tindle. Sinelli was wearing, as he always does, a polo shirt with a company logo.

When it was his turn, he pressed his business card into Tindle’s hand. “‘Some people want to make superior sandwiches. Some people want to make the world a better place. We want to do both,’” Tindle read off the card. “‘So, Jeff,'” Tindle asked Sinelli, “what are you doing to make the world better?'”

Sinelli didn’t have an answer because the statement was just a tagline. “There are a few defining moments in your life,” Sinelli says. “This was one. I said when I get back to Dallas, I’m going to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and give them out to the community.” This year, Sinelli says the company will give away its 1 millionth free sandwich. He says the program has given his company a purpose, and that has allowed Sinelli to stay energized through rapid growth. He says it keeps employees engaged in the often grinding work of making fast-food sandwiches. “I had been searching for 10 years until that moment pulled this purpose out of me.”

In interviewing more than a hundred entrepreneurs over the past two years, I’ve found the belief in aha moments like these to be nearly universal. They also tend to undergird the now famous “bias toward action” of Silicon Valley, in which an entrepreneur gets inspired then acts extremely quickly to bring an innovation to the world.

These moments occupy such an exalted position in the entrepreneurial mind-set. But is the perception of such moments a quirk of human psychology, an indulgence of our tendency to craft neat little stories when we look back on complex events? Or are these moments actually instructive in building a successful business? Do insights really appear in a flash, dependent on the lucky experience of stumbling on to the right question or problem, or do they incubate over time and only seem to pop into existence when they are ready?

My conversation with Bátiz, the odor entrepreneur, helped me connect the dots that provide an answer. At the time of her discovery, Bátiz had already experienced several major entrepreneurial failures, one which had led to bankruptcy. She had promised never to take a business risk again. But she says: “I had an experience in my body where I felt I had to do this. There was no question.”

Ongoing research attempting to demystify human intuition explains a lot about what Bátiz was experiencing. And it provides a major clue as to what these aha moments are all about.

Psychological researchers point out that our brains take in and process an enormous amount of data from the environment. The vast majority of it is hidden from our conscious view, but is still very present in our brains and constantly being processed in the background. When thinking entrepreneurially, our brains process this data in search of pattern recognition. Three or four well-known pieces of information are combined to create something new. When we use analysis, we’re applying pattern recognition to the information in our conscious awareness. “Intuition” is what we call pattern recognition applied to a much larger reservoir of information in our subconscious. It is often experienced as a flash of knowing, and it is often transmitted to our conscious attention through older parts of our brains, specifically through emotion and bodily sensation.

So when Bátiz had the realization that she could combine her knowledge of aromatherapy oils with her brother-in-law’s challenge to trap bathroom odor, her first experience was both emotional and somatic. The experience was the aha moment. It seemed to come in a flash but was actually dependent upon Bátiz’s years of experience with aromatherapy, and working with essential oils was a passionate hobby.

If the invention had simply been a thought, Bátiz says, she doesn’t know if she would have stuck with it through all the early failures she experienced. But, she says, she’s learned to trust her intuition implicitly. “I grew up in a very dysfunctional household,” she says. “A raging, alcoholic father. My intuition became my survival mechanism.”

Indeed, research now indicates that the more uncertain an environment, the more we are forced to rely on intuition while strict analysis loses relevance, be that in an unstable home or rapidly evolving marketplace. But intuition isn’t magic. Researcher Robin Hogarth cautions that it can easily spot false patterns if it’s not being fed good information. Entrepreneurs, he advises, should constantly be exposing themselves to wide-ranging and relevant data, brain food for their subconscious processes. Contrary to popular belief, Hogarth says, we can intentionally train our intuition.

This seems to be the strategy behind Sinelli’s strange habit of always wearing his company logo on his chest. He says that often when he sits down on a plane, his neighbor will see the logo and start talking about their favorite sandwich or offer complaints. Sinelli says that collecting all these anecdotes gives him intuitive confidence about when to listen to market data and when to ignore it.

This close contact with the stories behind the brand, he believes, is what’s allowed Wich Which to thrive as a privately held, founder-driven company where many private equity-led chains have floundered. The company is set to open its 500th Wich Which franchise.

So our aha moments are not pure myth or magic. We can multiply such experiences by being ready for them. We can increase the odds of our entrepreneurial success by increasing the amount of interesting, unexpected, and relevant experiences we expose ourselves to (even when such encounters float at the edges of our attention). And this raises questions about the conventional wisdom on bias toward action. Although true insight might seem like a flash followed by a rush to act, that flash often takes months or years of subconscious data gathering through play, learning, and exploration. That comes only from the kind of openness to experience that we don’t have time for when we rely too heavily on a bias toward action. Perhaps more important than a bias toward action is a bias toward interaction with the widest possible world.

Without a doubt, when we experience one of these aha moments, whether they feel like a chill, a slap in the face, or a deep sense of knowing, we should spring into action, taking first steps to bring our insights out to the world where they can be cheaply tested and refined. But if we want to experience these moments in the first place, we need to do more than act: We need to cultivate a bias toward feeding and listening to our intuition, a practice that for many has been lost.

“My body is my tuning fork,” says Bátiz. “I spend a lot of my day asking, ‘Does this feel right?’ That’s not talked about in most workplaces. It should be.”

Less of the Same is a series of stories about leaders who have learned to challenge and change themselves when they’ve needed it most. These leaders share their mind-sets, techniques, and failures along the way so that we all can learn from their journeys.

Jonah Sachs is a cofounder and partner at Free Range, a purpose-driven design and innovation firm. He is the author ofWinning the Story Wars, and his upcoming book, Unsafe Thinking, will be published in spring 2018.

Picasso paintings have sold for hundreds of millions of dollars in recent decades, but that wasn’t always so. In fact, one of the jewels of New York’s Museum of Modern Art—his 1907 cubist masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon sat in storage for years after it was originally derided as immoral.

By the 1920s, however, the genius of what Pablo Picasso was doing on canvas started winning fans. A French collector paid $1,300 in 1924. Months later, he sold Les Demoiselles for 10 times that. And then, in the late 1930s, in preparation for a major exhibit of the artist’s work, MOMA plunked down $24,000 (the equivalent of about $340,000 in 2017 dollars).

Today, the work is thought to be worth untold millions—it’s not for sale. But if it is any comparison, Picasso’s Women of Algiers sold at auction for $179 million two years ago.

What if there was a way to get a piece of that action without owning any artwork? To know in advance that your investment will bring you handsome returns? An innovative startup called Arthena is striving to do just that—to “democratize,” in its words, the buying and selling of fine art, which has long been the playground for the super rich.

Most investors put their money in quantitatively driven funds that buy stocks and other securities based largely on mathematical formulas. Think your 401k. Fund managers use historical data and information about company performance to pick stocks that seem like bargains, betting prices will rise and their investors will profit.

Arthena, founded in 2014 and with offices in New York and the Bay Area, is applying those same quantitative investing principles, using an algorithmic approach to build funds that let investors add art to their portfolios.

“We believe we are building the next big asset class,” says cofounder and CEO Madelaine D’Angelo.

Arthena mines a dataset of millions of historical sale prices and dozens of other attributes to locate art likely to gain in value at a rate of about 20% per year. It then lets investors contribute to funds that buy and sell that art that is then safely ensconced in an art storage facility—and potentially made available to museums for loan and, if all goes well, ultimately sold to return a healthy profit to investors.

While investors don’t get the intangible benefits of directly owning art, like being able to show a beloved collection off at a cocktail party or lend pieces to a favorite museum, they also don’t have to deal with the hassle of storing and preserving individual pieces, and insuring them in case they’re stolen or damaged by a clumsy houseguest.

Arthena raised $20 million in investments for a new fund investing in a mix of art from the modern and postwar eras and the present day while participating in startup incubator Y Combinator’s recent winter round, and is attracting interest from people who haven’t previously collected or invested in art, says D’Angelo.

“Most of the people investing are completely new entrants to the market,” she says.

The company also offers a variety of funds emphasizing different eras of recent art history, but for investors the choice is as at least much about taste for risk as it is artistic taste. Funds focusing on established masters of the Modern era—illustrated on Arthena’s website by Picasso’s Girl before a Mirror from the 1930s—are advertised as a stable store of wealth; and funds buying familiar artists from the postwar period are dubbed “blue chip artists” for those with a “moderate risk tolerance.” For more aggressive investors, Arthena offers funds investing in “rising emerging” artists of recent years, perhaps the art equivalent of investing in a rising tech stock.

For now, the ability to put money in an Arthena fund is limited to SEC accredited investors—generally individuals with annual incomes of $200,000 (or $300,000 for a couple), or $1 million in assets, who are considered to have the resources and sophistication to invest in less-regulated securities.

If Arthena’s approach can continue to attract new funds to the art market—and D’Angelo says she’d like to one day see the company’s funds open to a less restricted set of investors—that can ultimately mean more money to support working artists and the galleries that exhibit their works.

“Adding volume is something the art world has talked about for decades,” D’Angelo says.

Still, Arthena’s approach may not be for an investor looking for a purely data-driven investment, because there’s still a level of subjectivity inherent that is not usually part of the equation for quantitative investments in purely financial markets—like input from experts on trends, buzz, and their gut instincts.

Arthena has been able to run analyses like computing which artists’ works best correlate with each other in terms of sale price, something that’s more complicated than just seeing which participated in the same movements or worked in the same era, she says. And since art investments are ultimately in individual works, not artists—investors and collectors can only buy individual pieces, not 50 shares of Pablo Picasso or five ounces of Georgia O’Keeffe—the company also tracks how aesthetic factors, like the size and color of individual works, can influence prices.

“Things like certain colors from certain artists do better than others,” says D’Angelo.

The company has made clear that it won’t robotically rely on data and algorithms to make investment decisions and that “traditional appraisal” is also a part of its methods. Human analysts study art that’s up for auction and can adjust machine-generated price and growth estimates based on their findings and “knowledge of the art world,” as well as non-numeric data like formal reports of artworks’ condition, the company says.

D’Angelo emphasizes her own background in the art world, a certified appraiser with a master’s degree from Harvard and experience working at the Smithsonian Institution and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Her brother Michael D’Angelo, who studied applied math and machine learning at Stanford, is the company’s CTO.

Arthena says it’s the first company to build a quantitative approach to building art investment funds. But it isn’t the first company to put together pools of investors to speculate in art: a report issued last year by Deloitte and the London art market research firm ArtTactic estimated the global art fund industry had about $1.2 billion under management in 2015, though the authors cautioned there are likely other, private pools of money investing in art as well.

“There’s a lot of a little more private, under-the-radar sort of vehicles,” says Anders Petterson, founder of ArtTactic. But in general, the report estimates that the art fund market is down from a peak of $2.1 billion under management in 2012, partially as a result of what Petterson says is limited investor demand.

Art funds are often too small to woo big institutional investors like pension plans. And the funds can rise or fall based on how easily their managers can find the right works to invest in at the right price in what can be a tricky art marketplace. Unlike stocks, or commodities like oil or gold, individual paintings or sculptures aren’t neatly interchangeable, and they can’t always be immediately bought or sold.

And private art dealers sometimes make sales and set prices based on considerations other than immediate profit. One consideration might be the boost to an artist’s reputation of having works in a particular private collection, Petterson says, perhaps not too different from the benefits to a tech startup of winning an investment from a prominent incubator or venture firm.

“This might change in the future, but [an art] fund doesn’t really add much to the artist’s reputation,” he says.

And some investors, particularly younger ones, have shied away from the market because of the lack of available data. Only about 40% of art sales take place through auctions, leaving many other transactions hidden from public view, says Andrea Danese, CEO and president of Athena Art Finance, a New York company offering loans using art as collateral.

As The New York Timesreported last month, even expert estimates of the size of the art market in a can vary by billions of dollars from year to year. That uncertainty has repelled many wealthy millennials used to up-to-the-minute stock quotes and a web full of data on other investments, says Danese.

“They’re absent because they’re used to the complete transparency and access to information in the age of the internet,” he says. “They hate the art market because it’s not transparent.”

Longtime market participants still rely on their gut instincts when visiting art fairs or getting a sense of the buzz around an artist, as much as they have access to spreadsheets of historic prices and other data, says Suzanne Gyorgy, global head of art advisory and finance at Citi Private Bank.

“I think that there’s a frustration in the inefficiencies and people want to correct it, but because it’s part of what the market is and what people like about collecting art, I don’t see it necessarily being corrected,” she says. The art market may rely on private dealers and behind-closed-doors sales, inefficient or not, even after person-to-person securities trades on stock exchange floors are a distant memory.

Arthena has drawn some derision for its more-or-less purely financial approach to the art world.

“We were voted as the ‘best way to suck all the joy and humanity out of art’ by the Village Voice this past December,” says D’Angelo.

Many artists have long approached the more mercantile aspects of their profession with mixed feelings but that is changing, says Roderick Schrock, director of Eyebeam, a New York nonprofit supporting artists working with technology. particularly in recent decades as the market for trendy works has grown.

“I think that over the last ten years, as the art market in some ways become even hotter than we had thought was being possible ten years ago, as that happens it does tend to create a sense of necessity around self-commodification around artists,” he says. That is, artists have a natural tendency to tweak their work to cater to the demands of the art market and the buyers who ultimately pay the bills. And that’s a tendency that may well grow if art prices begin to be shaped by digital rules as much as shifting tastes.

“I think as more algorithmic and machine-learning processes are implemented in the market, that will probably intensify,” Schrock says.

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Inside a new type of truck, there are no seats and no windows. The vehicle—which founders call a “T-pod”—is the first truck to be designed to never have a human inside. The driverless design makes it possible, the startup says, to run fully on electric power in a way that can compete with diesel semis on the road today.

Without windows or a separate cab, the truck looks essentially like an aerodynamic white box with wheels.

Since a truck hauling 20 tons of freight needs a lot of energy to move, it has to stop fairly frequently to charge; the T-pod can make it 124 miles before it has to plug in again. For other electric semis, charging time is a bigger deterrent, because it’s also wasting a driver’s time.

“If you have to stand still maybe one-third of the time to actually charge, that makes the business case for having a truck driver in a battery-powered truck not that good,” says Robert Falck, CEO of Einride, the Sweden-based startup making the T-pod. “But if you remove them and create a system where the truck driver drives it remotely and controls a fleet, you overcome that problem.”

While the pods are on a highway, self-driving technology handles the vehicle, but the remote operator can intervene if needed, with one operator monitoring an entire fleet. When the pod reaches a city and moves onto smaller roads, each vehicle is assigned its own remote operator, who controls it for the rest of the journey. (This is in contrast with some competitors like Otto, Uber’s self-driving truck, which can’t be driven remotely on local roads).

Without a cab for a driver, the vehicle is cheaper to build than it otherwise would have been, and it can also be smaller. Like other electric vehicles, it will be nearly silent, and like other self-driving vehicles, it’s expected to be safer than human-driven trucks. It also won’t pollute.

“The system as a whole will reduce CO2 pollution to almost zero,” Falck says. Most trucks run on diesel, pumping out exhaust that causes both local air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Living near a major truck route–like the freeways leading out of the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach–can make someone more likely to get asthma or heart disease. In the U.S., even though heavy-duty trucks make up only about 7% of road traffic, they represent 25% of total fuel use, and emit around half a billion metric tons of carbon dioxide a year.

Einride plans to test its prototype on Swedish roads in the summer of 2017, and test its first fleet in 2018, traveling between the cities of Gothenburg and Helingsborg. The founders say that although current laws haven’t been tested for self-driving vehicles, there is nothing technically illegal about using the trucks on Swedish roads. (Sweden has also proposed progressive legislation to allow testing of self-driving vehicles, and though the law may not be in place by this summer, companies can apply for permission to start testing early.)  To scale up, the company will also have to build a full network of charging stations. Einride aims to have a fleet of 200 pods by 2020.

“We have a really big mission here,” says Falck. “What’s driving the company is the belief that we can make a difference . . . [Society isn’t] reliant on oil, we’re reliant on the system that we have today, and Einride is solving that.”

There was a period of time when I received roughly 1,000 emails per day. They weren’t pure spam. Instead, my inbox was jam-packed with emails from (mostly) actual humans who wanted me to hear about their startup, try their app, or check out their new iPhone case. I ended up setting up a series of elaborate filters in my inbox to surface the 20 or so emails in that thousand that were relevant to my interests–hint: It’s never iPhone cases–a technique that helped, but sometimes resulted in me missing out on messages that I did want to see.

While my 1,000-email problem was atypical, most business professionals have to deal with unexpected emails, be they from a designer who wants to update your website, a college senior looking for an internship, or a friend from high school looking to reconnect. Some of them you might be okay with, others may seem like a waste of your time. Now a startup called Nextio thinks it’s come up with a better way to wrangle them.

“Our belief is that with life-changing opportunities, a lot of them come when you reach outside of the boundaries that you currently have,” says Nextio cofounder and CEO Anoop Gupta. He thinks that it’s important that you’re able to reach people outside your network and they’re able to reach you. But when it comes to contacting you about something you’re not particularly interested in receiving messages about, you should have an incentive to respond. A monetary one.

“We think money is a good proxy of saying ‘I really want to reach you’,” says Gupta. Users set their own pricing for receiving messages (think something like $.50 or $1). They also set what topics they’re interested in hearing about. Messages about things you’re interested in are free for other users to send. If someone wants to message you about something else, they’ll have to pay. Money only exchanges hands when you respond. You can take the cash for yourself, or choose to have it go directly to a charity like the ACLU or code.org. You can also cap your inbox for the week, so you only receive 10 messages instead of 50.

The idea is that you’ll post your Nextio contact information in places such as LinkedIn and Twitter rather than sharing an email address. You’re opening yourself up for unexpected email, but also adding a layer of friction to ensure that the people who are messaging you really want to chat and aren’t just blasting the same message out to a lot of people at once.

Paying to send email isn’t a new concept. LinkedIn is already a place where many people go to message someone outside their network, and requires users to pony up for a Premium subscription if they want to reach non-connections. That means that instead of blindly sending emails, some choose to try to connect to you instead, causing a whole different kind of spam problem. And those dollars for Premium accounts end up in LinkedIn’s pocket, not yours. (Nextio takes a 20% cut of any money you make from responding to unexpected emails.)

Résumé Insights

Beyond its pay-to-play messaging, Nextio is also a career site, pulling in listings from the Indeed job-listing aggregator. Gupta says that Nextio has also collected millions of résumés from people all over the U.S. with information about where they went to school, what skills they have, and what their career path has looked like after college. “We can tell you for any role where do people go next, what do people look like, and how compatible you are and what skills you might develop,” Gupta says.

That means if your dream job is to become a software engineer at Twitter, or even an astronaut, Nextio can tell you where people who have held those positions went to school, what previous jobs they held, and where they went afterward (if they’ve moved on). If one of the skills you need is something like Java programming, Nextio might also link to a site where you can learn the coding language to make yourself a better candidate for the position. You can also see all of the types of positions available at a specific company, and what their average salaries are.

If you have a dream job, Nextio lets you analyze your current career trajectory and decide if you’re on the right track. “We show you this compatibility report,” says Gupta. “It shows you where in your résumé things match or what skills are missing. In some of the cases the pieces that are missing are things that you know, but you just haven’t added them [to your résumé].” That erroneously missing item could mean the difference between getting called in for an interview or getting passed over for a position.

Aside from having to pay to send messages, Nextio is free. Gupta hopes that the payment aspect will encourage users that might have otherwise kept their contact information hidden from the public to make themselves available.

“We wanted to create a place where people can connect to each other and have useful conversations,” he says. “We’ve gotten so used to closing ourselves. When you open yourself you create value for the community.”

When we think about an innovative person, our focus is often on their achievements: How they’ve changed their industry, how their big idea is disrupting the landscape that they’re operating in, or the scale and impact of their innovative practices.

What we don’t normally consider is the thought process they went through. We hear a lot about why we need to innovate, but not how we can actually do it.

Victor Poirier, a professor at the Institute of Advanced Discovery & Innovation at the University of South Florida, recently published a research paper in collaboration with nine of his colleagues that looks at the thought process behind innovation. The paper argues that innovation is a series of steps, and that innovators possess certain characteristics. Every individual possesses some of those characteristics—though to varying degree—and Poirier’s work looks at what those characteristics are, and how we can “awaken” them in order to unleash our own innovative genius.

According to Poirier’s research, here are a few things we can do to help train our brains to be more innovative.

Don’t Wait For Inspiration To Strike, Create It

A-ha moments don’t just appear out of thin air. They follow five steps:

1. Inspiration
2. Creativity
3. Motivation
4. Entrepreneurship
5. Innovation

Inspiration can strike systematically or spontaneously, but it often occurs after someone has already thought about whatever it is that inspires them. For example, you might be having trouble finding a solution to a problem you’re facing at work. Say you’re responsible for organizing the monthly meeting for your big team, but you find yourself spending a lot of time flicking between calendars, because there’s always a last-minute scheduling conflict. You talk to your colleagues, and then a few days later you realize that the best solution would be to get your whole team to download the Slack scheduling bot that automatically syncs everyone’s calendars and schedules meetings for you. 

This solution didn’t appear out of nowhere—you let your brain “brew” the information and thoughts and then were able to tap into your creativity and arrive at a solution. In the paper, creativity is defined as “the ability to think about the world in new ways, to think from a clear, open perspective, and to be unencumbered by existing knowledge.” Sometimes a little bit of time is needed to have this perspective, because being too close to the problem can prevent identifying obvious solutions. 

Related:  7 Essential Lessons From The Harvard Innovation Lab

Of course, ideas without actions aren’t all that useful. So the next step requires you to implement the solution and see whether it provides the value you thought it would—the way an entrepreneur validates their business ideas by testing the market. When the group that you’re trying to help “accepts” your solution, it becomes innovation. Going back to the scheduling example, it’s on you to get your team to download the Slack bot, and also to make sure that you obtain feedback from your team and assess whether it does in fact save you time. If the feedback is positive and you find yourself with more free time as a result, your small solution becomes “innovation.”

Cultivate Your Innovative Traits

Like creativity, there’s a belief that innovative people are just born that way. That’s not necessarily true, according to Poirier.

He tells Fast Company, “Almost everybody [has] innovative traits. Some people use them, some people don’t. [I did this research] to make people aware of what traits people do have, wake up dormant traits that they don’t even know they have, and prove the utilization of those traits.”

Related: Three Lessons On Innovation I Learned During My 12 Years At Apple 

Some of these traits, which Poirier lists in his research paper, include the ability to think abstractly, having deep and broad knowledge, curiosity, openness to risk, grit, and dissatisfaction with the status quo.

Poirier believes that working on cultivating the traits that already exist in an individual can lead to a greater ability to be innovative. Poirier and his colleagues at the institute are currently testing and developing ways in which they can teach individuals to do this.

If you see any of the above traits in yourself, you can deliberately seek out experiences to put those traits to use. For example, if you think that you possess grit but want to strengthen it, make it a habit to work on a project or goal from start to completion, and be ready to identify alternative paths if your current one isn’t working.

Put Yourself In Environments That Are Conducive To Innovation

It’s probably no surprise that your environment plays a major part in developing the innovative characteristics you possess, and determines how often you use them.

Poirier notes, “It depends a lot on your background and where you grow up and what you’re exposed to. If your parents are very intelligent, you will probably have more traits, and utilize those traits.”

Of course you can’t change the circumstances of your upbringing, but as an adult, we have more of a choice in the kinds of people that we surround ourselves with.

You’ve probably heard the saying that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, and this idea also applies in innovation. When you surround yourself with others who possess high levels of innovative traits and constantly use them, you yourself are likely to do the same.

Have Some Ego, But Not Too Much

Ego is often viewed negatively—after all, we’ve seen too many examples of entrepreneurs who lost their way as a result of excessive ego. 

But Poirier believes that a little bit of ego can be helpful in creating innovation. “Ego makes people do things that they wouldn’t normally do. For instance, if a group of individuals are trying to solve a problem or create a solution, ego can motivate you to concentrate more, to work hard, to do better than the people around you. They really take the extra effort just because it makes them feel much better and superior to other people.”

Poirier notes, however, that there is a point at which ego stops being beneficial. “You can go to the other extreme, and think you’re great when you’re really not.”

Innovators might be born, but they can also be made and trained. Thomas Edison trained himself to be innovative by testing out all the ways to make a light bulb that didn’t work before finally landing on a method that did, and we can train ourselves to be innovative by cultivating certain characteristics and surrounding ourselves with the right people in the right environment.

Five years ago, physicist Austin Russell saw better laser sensors as essential to make self-driving cars a reality. That was early in the autonomous vehicle industry’s history, and early in Russell’s career. Actually, he was still in high school at the time.

Now 22–and having skipped college–Russell is founder and CEO of Luminar, a startup backed by PayPal and Palantir billionaire Peter Thiel (among others) that just formally unveiled itself and its new laser scanner for self-driving cars. The startup is going against big players like Velodyne and Quanergy in the market for lidar technology, which is something like  radar but with infrared laser beams instead of radio waves.

Along with the scanner, Luminar announced $36 million in funding that will allow it to open a factory in Florida to build 10,000 scanners this year. They will go to automakers and other tech companies for autonomous car research, though Russell won’t say who these “strategic partners” are.

Lidar is a prerequisite for self-driving cars, says Russell, as his system can perceive distances down to a few millimeters and works in anything from bright sunlight to pitch black conditions, things that a standard camera can’t do. The lasers in Luminar’s sensor scan in front of and sometimes behind a vehicle out to at least 200 meters (about 600 feet); the time it takes the signal to bounce back off an object is used to calculate distance.

Lidar technology goes back to the 1960s. Luminar hasn’t invented anything fundamentally new, but it claims to have gotten performance up and costs down by custom-building every aspect of the system. “We’ve built this sensor from the chip-level up,” says Russell. “We’re making our own lasers, our own receivers, our own scanning mechanisms, our own processing electronics—all from scratch.”

Within a few seconds of talking to Russell, I begin to forget about his age. (He just turned 22 on March 14, Pi Day.) He has a level of composure well beyond the self-important arrogance of peers who just landed entry-level engineering jobs in the Valley. Physical stature—he stands 6-foot, 4-inches tall—a deep voice, and a full reddish beard lend a smidgen of gravitas. Russell betrays his youth, though, with occasional fits of goofy giggles during our conversation. For instance, he talks about the danger of lower-end lidar technology, “if they increase the power any more or try to get more range or resolution out of it, they’ll start frying people’s eyes—hahahahahahaha.”

Squeezing Into Cars—And Budgets

Russell’s system uses infrared wavelengths of 1550 nanometers, instead of the common 905nm wavelengths in less-expensive systems (all the way down to range finders used by golfers), which can irritate people’s eyes if the signal is too strong. The eye can’t even focus a 1550nm wavelength, so the power can be much higher—40x greater in Luminar’s case—without posing a hazard. A silicon-based receiver can’t pick up the longer 1550-nm wavelengths. Instead Luminar needs a pricier material called indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs).

Again, none of this is new, per se. Luminar’s claimed advantage is in getting the price for advanced lidar way down. Russell wouldn’t utter a word about what his system will cost, but an investigation by Bloomberg said Luminar is aiming for under $1,000, vs. up to tens of thousands for current top-of-the-line systems.

Cost is especially important because a fully autonomous car needs at least four lidar sensors, one at each corner of the vehicle, to provide a 360-degree view, says Russell. Unlike the big drums atop research cars like those designed by Alphabet’s Waymo division–which is currently suing Uber for allegedly stealing its lidar technology–Luminar’s sensors are just a bit bigger than a Nintendo Wii and fit into the car’s bumper. “Long term we are making sure this can be efficiently made and affordable to be [installed] on everything from a Honda Fit to a Bentley,” says Russell.

A car that uses lidar just to assist the driver in spotting obstacles or other dangerous conditions can get away with one scanner in the front bumper—a setup Russell shows me on two Luminar test cars, a Tesla Model S and a BMW i3.

A Clear View

Like any self-respecting startup, Luminar claims that it has the greatest technology out there—and it has attracted a lot of money from people who feel the same. The numbers are impressive. The system has a range of over 200 meters, versus, for instance, 120m for Velodyne’s hulking high-end HDL-64E unit. Quanergy’s S3 sensor is much smaller, similar to Luminar’s, but it can measure just a half million location points per second. Russell says that Luminar’s can measure “millions” per second.

Most of the talk around autonomous cars has been about artificial intelligence, with chip giants like Nvidia and Intel releasing compact supercomputers that are being tested by auto companies including Audi, Mercedes-Benz, and Tesla (Nvidia), and BMW (Intel). Luminar is making the case for providing cleaner data for the AI to munch on. “Because of such poor-quality data that the processing has to deal with, a lot of [the work] has shifted over to processing,” says Russell.

To impress me, Russell and his chief technology officer Jason Eichenholz start with a simulation of how they claim a lower-quality but still expensive lidar system views a cavernous, 235 meter-long stretch of warehouse space that runs along Pier 35 in downtown San Francisco. On a large LCD screen, sporadic wavy lines, like those on a topographic map, form a series of concentric arcs propagating off to the horizon. The lines are color-coded to indicate increasing distances—one of many visual niceties for the human viewers that the computer itself doesn’t need. Their colleague is riding a bicycle back and forth about 20 meters ahead of me. On the lidar screen, he appears as a few errant squiggles among those topographic lines.

Switching the system into high gear, the on-screen image changes to a detailed psychedelic rendering of the warehouse. I can make out the posts and beams holding up the roof, clear outlines of cars parked inside, and a cartoonish rendering of the bicyclist, with even the spokes of the wheels sometimes visible. That makes the computer’s job easier, says Eichenholz. “It’s less computationally intensive to figure out it’s a bike when it looks like a bike, versus, it’s just a bunch of dots,” he says.

Later Russell shows me a similar before-and-after comparison on a nighttime drive along the San Francisco waterfront. In high-res mode, I can make out clear outlines of cars, people, and the palm trees along the Embarcadero boulevard as if they were all wrapped in multicolor glowing El wire for some Burning Man exhibit.

From an initial run of 10,000 sensors this year, Russell hopes to gear up quickly. “We’ll start looking at making hundreds of thousands or millions of units starting in early 2018,” he says. That’s all in line with ambitious promises by carmakers to have autonomous vehicles on the road by 2021. “They are just depending on the fact that something can come along to solve their problems,” he says, “hopefully we can help save the day on that.”

True crime documentaries may be having a moment right now, in the wake of Serial, The Jinx, and Making a Murderer, but they’ve been Berlinger’s beat for decades. The Emmy award-winner was ahead of his time when he released Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills in 1996. That documentary proved highly influential, not only on future filmmakers—the Making a Murderer crew are avowed fans—but on real-life events, helping to eventually free the accused killers. Now, as the genre becomes more popular than ever, and millions of people are aching to make a difference, it seems the times have caught up to Joe Berlinger.

How Documentaries Can Make a Difference

The main aim of a cause-focused documentary is to raise awareness and generate support. Sometimes, however, they can do a lot more than that. They can change viewer’s minds, prolong investigations, and sometimes even smoke out a credible witness who never came forward.

“Documentaries can demonstrate problems that authorities will then take notice of and do something about,” Berlinger says. “Sometimes, they also bring private citizens into the action who want to help and donate money and take charge, which is what happened with Paradise Lost.”

That film, which Berlinger started shooting in 1993 with his creative partner Bruce Sinofsky, followed the arrest of a trio of teenagers for the murder of three children and continued throughout the subsequent trial. National hysteria over devil worship at the time played a role in convincing jurors these metalheads–nicknamed The West Memphis 3–committed the murders in a satanic ritual. When the film came out and showed how flimsy the case actually was, it created a huge groundswell of support from people convinced of their innocence, and attracted celebrity supporters like Eddie Vedder, Johnny Depp, and Natalie Maines. A support group called Free the West Memphis 3 sprang up. All this pressure ended up raising money to reinvestigate the case, which is when DNA evidence came forward to help exonerate these guys–along with two more films in the series.

“We stuck it out over 20 years and finally the state of Arkansas released these guys,” Berlinger says. “It was an imperfect ending because they were released under an Alford plea, this rarely used legal maneuver where you basically stand up in front of a judge and explain that the prosecution has enough evidence to convict you and for the purposes of a court procedure you plead guilty to a lesser charge. So all that public support helped a guy on death row and two guys serving life without parole accepted a lesser charge and be let out of prison.”

Why It’s a Golden Time For Documentaries

The age of ultra-affordable video equipment has coincided with an enormous surge in activism.

“We’re entering into an era of profound concern for American democracy,” Berlinger says. “A lot of people in my business are upset about the direction of the country, what’s happening in politics. For example, if the president has his way with the budget and we gut the EPA regulations, and we cut protections for the small guy on every level, I just think it’s an environment ripe for the need to tell these kinds of stories.”

The timing couldn’t be better for talented filmmakers and neophytes who embark upon filming a documentary: not only is there an urgent appetite for this sort of content, there are also more outlets for it than ever. Digital players like Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu are snapping up documentaries at the major film festivals, and they join premium channels like HBO, Showtime, and the vast expanse of cable overall. Not only that, but the uptick in interest comes at a time when independent documentarians are seen as particularly trustworthy.

“Most of the television networks are being controlled by a handful of corporations and there are certain stories that won’t be touched because they’ll offend advertisers and that’s just the way of the business in the television model,” Berlinger says. “With the gutting of print journalism because of the internet, there’s been a tremendous decrease in old-fashioned print investigative reporting. So I think the documentarian has stepped in as the guy and maybe has a more important role than ever in terms of investigative reporting.”

Last month, LinkedIn unveiled a new Trending Storylines feature aimed at turning the social network into more of a daily habit by raising the visibility of some of the most interesting conversations happening on it. Today, the company is taking another step to keep you coming back more often, by upgrading its Messaging feature.

Prior to this launch, Messaging has seen a 40% year-over-year growth in terms of engagement, the company reports, growing to over 60 million interactions each week. More than 50% of LinkedIn’s active members use the feature each week, accessing messages from the a tab at the top of the page. But if you’re browsing for a job and need to message a connection that works at a particular company, flipping over to Messaging can get pretty cumbersome.

Starting today, LinkedIn lets you send such a message right from that job listing page, or any page you happen to be on within LinkedIn. Rather than navigating to a specific location, your inbox is in a small window in the bottom right of the page, similar to a chat list on other social networks like Facebook. Click on the window, and you can have an instant conversation.

“In building this we wanted to have a messaging thread through all of what you do on LinkedIn,” says Sammy Shreibati, senior product manager at LinkedIn. That means that no matter where you are on the site, that messaging window will come with you. If you get a response from someone while you’re logged in, it will pop up at the bottom of the page similar to a traditional instant message.

That window isn’t just a connections list. As you navigate around, it gets updated to highlight specific individuals you might want to ping based on what you’re looking at on the site. For instance, if you’re reading about job opening at Facebook, the app might show a friend who works there at the top of your messaging window. If you don’t know anyone at Facebook, it could suggest connections of yours who do know people who work there, so they can make an introduction. The feature also works if you’re looking at a particular individual on the site and want to ask a friend for an introduction.

“We’re really excited about how we’re using the contextual insights to help members start conversations,” says Chris Szeto, director of product, messaging at LinkedIn. “When you think about messaging normally you see lists of people or lists of conversations. What we’re doing is we’re making it much more dynamic, and based on what you’re doing across the sites we’re surfacing people that you can talk to or should talk to in order to get something done related to what you’re trying to do.”

That doesn’t mean the Messaging tab is going away. You’ll still see messages there just as you always have. Instead, the instant messaging feature is meant to be used while you’re actively using the site, bringing conversations to the forefront of everything you do.

The company has been beta testing these new instant conversations with some users and says that they speed up the pace with which people respond to queries on the service. “We’ve seen an increase in one-minute reply rates by 10% and five-minute reply rates by 8 or 9%,” says Shreibati.

The feature will start rolling out to most global members Thursday, and will be available for all LinkedIn members, both free and paid, in the coming weeks.

Deloitte revamped its performance management system in 2015 after discovering that it was spending nearly 2 million hours a year on its review process. Last year, Adobe calculated that its 2,000 managers were investing 80,000 hours into performance reviews. Accenture learned that 75% of its review process was devoted to talking about employees, leaving only 25% for actually talking to them. And that’s before you consider the bias issues long known to plague an already unpopular corporate ritual.

It’s no secret that performance reviews have been on deathwatch in recent years. Companies big and small have taken wrecking balls to their own performance management efforts, while others are just trying to make the review experience fairer and more human. Here’s a look at what some of them have done after turning the traditional performance review sideways or ditching it altogether.

Rethinking Ratings

It’s easier to toss something out than to decide what to put in its place. When Accenture got rid of ratings altogether in 2015, chief leadership and HR officer Ellyn Shook‎ says employees worried they’d no longer know what criteria would determine their pay. Those fears were assuaged once employees received their bonuses and raises in December, after completing the new review process. Even at companies that scrap rankings, Shook points out, employees may still get judged behind closed doors. One thing she’s heard from her peers in the HR field is that while companies have “thrown out rankings and ratings, they kind of do it in the back room anyway.”

That’s one reason why Facebook stuck with a more formal, biannual review process, after an HR audit a few years back, in which ratings are directly tied to pay. The process starts with a self-evaluation, then every employee can nominate three to five peers to review them. Next, managers write up the performance review and come up with a rating by comparing evaluations for employees in similar roles and levels, to “normalize for people who may be hard graders or easy graders,” says Janelle Gale, Facebook’s VP of HR business partners.

Once the rating is in, the manager has no control over compensation, Gale says. Employees get paid a predetermined sum associated with each rating—a system that applies not just to base pay, but also to bonuses and equity. This helps spare employees from getting “black box” ratings by the powers that be, without any say in the matter, Gale explains.

At PwC, which has also stuck with a rating system, managers rate employees on five qualities, each on a one-to-five scale—but they so do on a rolling basis, whenever employees request it through a companywide app that was introduced in 2016. Chief people officer Mike Fenlon says employees like that this gives them a quick overview of how they’re doing; the app overlays a visualization of the results of past evaluations on their latest one.

Not everyone is rethinking existing ratings systems, though; some are even adding them for the first time. Education startup Quizlet added them in 2016—more than 10 years after the company was founded. Quizlet raised $12 million in Series-A funding in 2015, leading to a slew of new hires; the company’s headcount shot up from 15 to more than 50. Suddenly, employees who’d been around awhile were clamoring for performance reviews, hoping it would add some clarity to their career paths at the company.

“It was pretty shocking for me to hear that people were asking for a formal performance management process and wanted to make sure that their progress and growth in their roles was documented,” Aisha Stephenson, VP of people operations, said. Quizlet’s team had no trouble getting behind the idea, Stephenson explained, but wanted to make sure it wasn’t too “corporate.” So they put in place a combination of self, peer, and manager reviews instead of the standard, once-a-year-by-your-boss model.

Making Peers More Powerful

Facebook is hardly alone in turning to peer reviews. Mobile commerce startup Button and fraud detection company Sift Science both added them to their performance review processes recently. Button cofounder Stephen Milbank says he’s heard many calls from employees for more regular feedback, “but I don’t think that peers necessarily take the time to give that feedback.” So Button decided to simply mandate it in 2016, as part of a review process it dubbed “Kaizen,” the Japanese word for “continuous improvement.” 

Berlin-based education startup CareerFoundry took that idea and ran with it, making its review process exclusively peer-based. (In pursuit of complete transparency, the company eliminated manager roles, putting all employees on equal footing except for its two cofounders, then made salaries transparent, too.) After a round of Series-A funding last year, CareerFoundry grew rapidly from about 15 to 50 people, and it was then that employees actually requested reviews. The company’s peer review process occurs twice annually, and reviewers evaluate each other based on six questions. In addition, CEO Raffaela Rein and her cofounder fill out evaluations for all their employees.

Rein has found that people were more inclined to take input from peers seriously. “They are the ones working together every day, so there’s no hiding,” she says. “Sometimes, if only the manager gives feedback, then you only work hard while he’s there.” Facebook has discovered much the same thing. Peer reviewers aren’t obligated to share their input with the person they’re evaluating, but Gale says 70% of employees still choose to do so.

Untying Reviews From Promotions And Pay

Not many companies have totally divorced performance reviews from compensation and promotion, but a few have tried to keep them a little more distinct. CareerFoundry conducts “peer promotions” in a process separate from peer performance reviews. Employees simply vote on who they’d most like to see promoted, and while this process has only been in place for the last two quarters, Rein says she’s already promoted the most voted-for nominees—eight in total—without hesitation.

“I think people were like, ‘Wow, we’ll handle that responsibility with honesty and integrity.’ It was very positive,” Rein says. “If I promote somebody, it’s actually less meaningful than if your entire team decides that you deserve to be promoted.” And since peer promotions take place at CareerFoundry every other quarter, employees have a shot at getting promoted twice each calendar year. When I mentioned that it sounds like something that could turn into a popularity contest, Rein stressed that while she was initially worried about that, the process had actually promoted more introverted employees, including the sole CareerFoundry employee who didn’t speak English and had trouble communicating with many of the other non-German employees. Still, this approach may not work at a larger company, where employees might self-segregate and cast a vote for their friends, or punish unpopular peers, even if their work merits a promotion. 

Sift Science requires performance reviews to take place at least once a year, but teams can choose to do as many of them as they like whenever they want; the goal is to keep promotions separate from the review process. Health marketing agency Klick Health started doing something similar after CEO Leerom Segal swapped performance reviews for weekly feedback sessions as early as 2013. Promotions and compensation now get addressed individually in yearly meetings.

“Our philosophy is that [promotions] should not happen at any one particular point,” says Sift Science CEO Jason Tan. “It could be driven by a performance review, but it shouldn’t have to be.”

Making Informal Feedback More Meaningful

Companies that throw out performance reviews don’t always find that informal check-ins lead to fairer, better feedback. “The goal is very admirable,” says Rebecca Zucker, executive coach and partner at leadership development firm Next Step Partners. In theory, she agrees that “feedback shouldn’t be an event in and of itself.” But scrapping reviews doesn’t always lead to effective “ongoing conversations about performance.”

As Zucker explains, giving and receiving good feedback is a skill—one that takes time to develop. Without it, “feedback either doesn’t happen or doesn’t happen well.” Many of the people I spoke to said they hired leadership coaches like Zucker for exactly this reason, knowing that without skillful feedback swapping, replacing formal reviews with informal check-ins wouldn’t make a difference.

Since Sift Science only requires a yearly performance review, the company tries to keep tabs on how often employees get regular feedback. “One of the things we’re doing pretty regularly is meta-feedback: It’s feedback about feedback,” Tan said. “It sounds silly, but I think it’s really important. We poll a team member and ask, ‘How often do you get feedback from your manager?’” Tan says the Silicon Valley dogma of “radical candor”—being both compassionate and candid—actually matters in a context like this.

Zucker insists that “feedback applies in all directions—upward, downwards, and sideways,” but employees often hesitate to critique their superiors. Warby Parker recently came up with a workaround for that issue: its biannual review process lets employees give managers feedback outside of the company’s monthly feedback meetings where doing so might feel uncomfortable. Facebook has a tool in its performance review system that lets employees submit feedback at any time; the official review process also requires Facebook employees to give feedback on their managers.

Warby Parker is also known for its weekly happiness ratings, where employees rank their happiness during any given week on a scale of zero to 10, a process that forces conversations between managers and employees. “I joke that feedback is a gift,” Warby Parker co-CEO Neil Blumenthal says. “It’s the opposite of revenge—it’s best served hot.”

Every year, a new crop of “best places” lists emerges. There are best places to live, places with the best opportunities for job seekers, and even top cities for millennial entrepreneurs. If you’re job seeking or thinking about starting a business, these lists might offer tempting options to move to a market rich with opportunities.

But before you start packing, there are a few things you should consider to decide whether that hot city for startups or new jobs is the right fit for you, says Lauren Herring, CEO of Impact Group, a career transition and move-coaching company. And while some of the things that can make or break a move to a new locale are pretty obvious, other things that matter might not be what you think they are, she says.

“People in California, for example, think they’re happier than people in Cleveland, but generally, they’re not. It really comes down to who you’re spending your time with and what you’re doing with your time. If you can fill your life in the right ways in those two main areas, I think most people can find happiness in a lot of different areas,” she says.

Here are five key steps to take before you make your move.

Prioritize Personal Versus Professional

If you’re focused on growing your career, sometimes personal sacrifices need to be made to get to where you want to go, while other times, it’s all family (and friends) first, Herring says. Your first step is to get clear on the reason behind your decision.

If you have a spouse or significant other and children, it’s a decision that should probably be made together, and you also need to think about the needs they’ll have. For example, will your spouse be able to find work, and will you be able to secure the schools and other resources you need for your family? What will you do if your spouse can’t find work or if you have trouble building a new social life? Are you ready to tough it out until you begin to put down roots in your new home?

Take A Time Inventory

Consider how you like to spend your free time and what your new region has to offer, says moving expert Ali Wenzke, author of the blog, The Art of Happy Moving. If you’re a big Broadway show buff and move to a suburban area with no theater scene, you’re probably going to miss it. If most social activities include activities like hiking and camping, but you’re not that outdoorsy, you might feel out of place. Wenzke suggests making a list of how you spend your free time and researching the region to find out if it has offerings that will satisfy your leisure preferences.

Consider Cost Of Living

An area’s cost of living can affect your lifestyle and even your job progression, says career coach and recruiter Suzanne O’Brien, founder of career advancement consultancy LevelUp Careers. She says San Francisco is a good example. She says she has seen people come to Silicon Valley and spend six months looking for a job, only to realize that they really can’t afford to be there and have to move again.

If you’re moving to a lower cost-of-living area, you may be facing lower salary prospects. If you’re moving to an area where the cost of living is much higher, then you may find yourself strapped and unable to take advantage of networking opportunities. “If you miss out on the opportunity to go out with the director of your department because it’s a pay-your-own-way situation and you can’t afford it, you’re potentially losing an opportunity to get the project that they start talking about that night and comes up the next day in a meeting,” she says. “It matters.” There are a number of cost-of-living calculators online that can help you determine how far your salary will go.

Tap Your Networks

O’Brien suggests tapping your personal and professional networks as well. Chances are you know someone familiar with the region—or who knows someone else who is—and can clue you in. Is there a college or university alumni group in the area? Are you involved in a church, civic, or political group? If so, check out affiliates in that area, both for prospective contacts who can give you information, but also to be sure that the organizations important to you are located there.

Sleuth Online

While it’s a good idea to visit an area before you decide to move there, it’s tough to get the real nitty gritty on an area from a short trip, Wenzke says. Even though online forums and message boards may seem dated, she says they can be a wealth of information, especially if you scroll back through archives. Locally focused social media like Nextdoor, Topix, or community-specific Facebook pages can also be good resources. In addition, check out Meetup to see if there are any active groups in the area that might offer an opportunity to make new friends.

On Friday, the Department of Labor announced it had been investigating Google for paying women employees less than men. Google has disputed the allegations. But because this news made headlines around the world, and Glassdoor sits on a massive salary database comprised of millions of salary reports shared directly from employees themselves, we asked the question: Does Google have a gender pay gap problem?

While the federal government didn’t disclose how it concluded that Google pays women employees differently from men, Glassdoor is uniquely positioned with thousands of salary reports from Google employees to shed some additional light on this issue.

Below, I’ll show how we find no statistical gender pay gap in Google salaries, at least according to Google’s pay data shared by employees on Glassdoor. While pay gaps can be analyzed in a variety of ways, we believe the most thorough way to do so is to control for important variables that allow apples-to-apples comparisons. We outline this below.

Related:Google’s Hardest Moonshot Will Be Debugging Its Race Problem

How To Analyze The Gap

As the chief economist at Glassdoor, I published an “employer’s guide” this month, with example code and data, that lays out a step-by-step process for how companies can perform their own gender pay audit.

Our guide uses the same econometric methods you’ll find in academic journals in labor economics. It’s the way most expert economists, including economists at the Department of Labor, would almost always analyze payroll data for a gender pay gap.

We’ve published a major study showing how to apply this methodology more broadly, and even applied it to Glassdoor’s own company payroll data. If there’s really a gender pay gap at Google, this method is how to correctly document it.

Google Salaries On Glassdoor

To analyze the gender pay gap at Google, we pulled a large sample of salaries shared by current and former Google employees on Glassdoor. Here’s the sample we looked at:

• U.S. Google base salaries from 2006 through 2017, shared on Glassdoor as of April 10, 2017;
• We looked at full-time employees only (no contract workers, interns, etc.);
• We looked only at workers who reported base pay between $30,000 and $250,000 per year (to exclude outliers).

Below is a table summarizing our sample data. There are 1,967 Google salaries. The salaries are 78% male—Google’s own self-reported data show the company is about 69% male—and the average age of employees is 34. About 54% have bachelor’s degrees, 33% have master’s degrees, and 5% have PhDs. The average years of experience for these workers is 5.8 years.

In this analysis, we only looked at base pay as reported on Glassdoor’s salary survey. That’s because we wanted to use our most reliable data. We don’t examine total compensation—which would include bonuses, tips, equity, commissions, and other forms of pay—because many people don’t report them correctly or consistently.

Google’s Pay Gap

To analyze Google’s gender pay gap, we applied the same methodology from our guide. As we explain there, it can be misleading to simply compare male salaries as a group to female salaries as a group. Men and women often work in different roles and have different types of education and experience. Those things affect pay in the labor market, and have little to do with gender bias in compensation policies by any single employer.

To correctly analyze the gender pay gap, you need to use regression analysis to control for observable differences between men and women, to see whether there’s really a pay gap once you’ve made an “apples-to-apples” comparison of men and women working in similar jobs, in similar locations, with similar education, performance, and experience.

Below are our results. The gender pay gap in Google salaries is shown in the first row of the table. It shows the percentage pay advantage for male employees compared to females, both before and after adding statistical controls to compare similar workers.

In the first column, we find an “unadjusted” pay gap—which is equivalent to average pay for men as a group compared to women as a group—of 16.3%. Adding controls for education, age, and years of experience, in the second column we see the gender pay gap shrinks to 13.1%.

Finally, in the third column we add all statistical controls for year of the salary report, state of employment, and job title to assure we’re comparing men and women working in similar roles. This is what we call the “adjusted” gender pay gap. In that column, we see the pay gap shrinks to 1.6%—and is not statistically significantly different from zero.

Once we make an apples-to-apples comparison of male and female workers at Google, it turns out that there’s no statistical evidence of a systematic gender pay gap—at least not in the Google salaries employees have shared on Glassdoor.

Conclusion

The Department of Labor hasn’t shared their data or methodology showing how they came to the conclusion that Google has a gender pay problem. In this post, we show that men on average do earn about 16.3% more than women at Google.

But that’s not a complete or fair comparison, as it compares software engineers and marketing associates as if they’re in the same pay bracket. Instead, when we make an apples-to-apples comparison of workers with similar jobs and backgrounds, that 16.3% gender pay gap largely disappears.

We find an “adjusted” gender pay gap at Google of about 1.6%, which is not statistically significantly different from zero. Put differently, there’s no evidence in salaries on Glassdoor of a systematic gender pay gap at Google.

A version of this article originally appeared on Glassdoor. It is adapted with permission.

This weekend, the Golden State Warriors will begin their first-round NBA playoffs series against the Portland Trailblazers, and you can bet that Stephen Curry will be thinking about redemption, after last year becoming the first NBA team ever to lose the Finals after leading the series 3-1. But it won’t be panic or desperation that drives the reigning MVP. It’ll be determination and focus. How do I know this? The pod.

See that thing? Looks like some Mork and Mindy science, sure, but it’s a vital part of Curry’s training regimen that doesn’t involve shooting hoops, dribbling skill or stamina. For healthcare company Kaiser Permanente’s new “Train the Mind” campaign, Curry opens up about how he mentally prepares for big games and the rigors of pro basketball in general. And part of that involves the pod.

Created by agency Translation, the first ad in the campaign gives us a peek into how the sensory deprivation chamber helps Curry focus, calm his mind, and prepare for what’s to come. But perhaps more interesting is the Q&A-style videos that accompany the ad. While the spot looks great, and gets the story across stylishly, it’s the context provided by Curry’s frank discussion that takes it beyond just another cool sports commercial.

Translation’s chief creative officer is John Norman, an ad legend who’s work spans brands like Nike, Coke, HP, Adidas, and Gatorade, across agencies like Wieden+Kennedy, Goodby Silverstein & Partners, and TBWA/Chiat/Day L.A. Norman says Kaiser Permanente asked how they could leverage their NBA sponsorship platform to talk about the mental game in sports.

“Our response was to use the sports insight–game performance is more than 80 percent mental preparation,” says Norman. “You’ve heard coaches say it all the time: ‘Get your mental game right,’ ‘Get your head in the game,’ ‘Focus!’ If you are mentally prepared for a sport, as in life, you can pretty much do anything.”

After they found out Curry uses the deprivation tank, they started to wonder how the upset in last year’s Finals affected him. Despite being one of the most loved athletes, his game was being questioned with a lot of naysayers and negative banter. “That must mentally be hard, we thought, and when we discussed it with him, he talked about the importance of mentally blocking out the noise and not letting it get to you,” says Norman. “When the idea was presented, he with a smile said, ‘Thanks for not having me dribble a basketball.’ 

We took advantage of that idea creatively. We utilized and combined a shared value: KP’s advocacy of proactive mental health prevention, and Steph’s attention to a strong mental basketball game. He is one of the league’s top scorers, lives the preventative health lifestyle, and holds the same values as Kaiser. His use of deprivation tanks helped to make a storytelling device. The water then became a narrative, a noise for him to ‘Overcome’ and conquer.”

Not all athletes can pull off a confessional-type ad in convincing fashion, in a way that’s more real talk than hard sell. Norman says that’s because Curry is the real deal.

“He really does live his life this way, and was able to talk about training the mind–he’s willing to talk about this because he really does practice what he preaches,” says Norman. “He’s an honest, open person about it. The strategy is that we wanted people to hear from him. He socializes a lot, has conversations with his fans, inspiring others to use and practice with tools to prepare their minds and stay in the game, whatever game they play.”

As interesting as the campaign is, it’s a bit of a curveball coming from a healthcare brand, an industry we’re more accustomed to marketing with white lab coats, reliability, and friendly bedside manner. Taking a page from another mundane industry, this is a conscious effort from Kaiser and Translation to differentiate the brand from its competitors.

“Geico changed the way car insurance was talked about forever. They didn’t go by the advertising rules–they took a business value proposition, romanced it, and did something clever and fun, and they’ve done legendary work over the past two decades,” says Norman. “

Healthcare, especially personal healthcare, needs things like what we did with Curry because it needs to be disrupted. 

Taking sensitive and sometimes very mundane things that people need–like health care or car insurance–and creating a story or concept that has an unexpected device or smart twist can make for memorable and emotional connections to the audience. To make people care about healthcare, you have to entertain, provide emotional, provocative messages with insightful narrative.”

There’s no shortage of brain teasers, training tools, and even pills you can take that claim to improve cognitive functioning and allegedly make you “smarter.” There is a certain logic to this. For one thing, our brains operate better under some conditions than others. For another, practice really does improve our performance on just about everything, at least up to a point.

But asking whether such cognitive “improvements” actually work is missing the point. The better question is whether task-related gains in performance (for instance, at Sudoku, chess, or a video game) can carry over to another task, and other areas of life: Does becoming better at X also make us better at Y or Z?

The answer is that instead of trying to get “smarter,” you’re probably better off pursuing one of these three goals instead.

1. As You Get Older, Focus on Knowledge and Expertise

Although there’s some debate as to whether we can significantly enhance our raw mental capacity, most of the scientific evidence suggests the answer is no. Scores on fluid intelligence tests, which represent the best single measure of our abstract reasoning and learning ability, remain quite stable over our lifetimes. In fact, there’s strong evidence for age-related decreases in this form of intelligence after our late 20s, which means that even if there were some exercises to boost our brain power, the best they can do is slow our decline.

On the other hand, as we grow older we can afford to rely less on our learning potential and more on what we already know. So you may be able to stay sharp (or even get sharper) overall simply by deepening your knowledge base over time, for which age is clearly advantageous. Expertise—and therefore performance—doesn’t just depend on intelligence, it’s also a function of our curiosity and motivation, which can make up for slower brain power as we age. Unsurprisingly, age typically confers higher levels of knowledge and expertise. As psychologist Daniel Kahneman noted in the New York Times in 2011, “True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes”—which also means 
remaining well aware of your limitations.

Imagine you have to pick between an experienced surgeon in her 60s who’s performed thousands of operations and a 26-year-old rising star in the same field. Or between a sharp young pilot who’s flown 20 flights and a seasoned 55-year-old pilot who’s flown thousands of times. Most people would pick the older, more experienced professionals—and rightly so. While you can become “smarter” by boosting your knowledge at any age, older individuals have an advantage simply because of the wider range of experiences and opportunities they’ve had.

2. Skip The Brain-Teasers And Practice Your People-Skills

Most real-world problems are ill-defined and require dealing effectively with other people. While the personality characteristics that determine how well you get along with others are partly a matter of genetics, there are still habits you can practice to get better at social interactions.

For example, getting feedback on how other people see you can enhance your self-awareness, which really comes down to how well you understand the way your behavior affects other people. It generally involves being more other-focused than self-focused—or at least seeming that way. As Mark Twain noted, “Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.”

Likewise, being aware of your stress triggers can keep the dark side of your personality at bay—those less-desirable qualities that get in the way of building healthy relationships. Contrary to popular belief, the most likable people are not authentic; they just manage to come across as genuine enough, while paying close attention to how they’re perceived. In other words, they’re just expert reputation managers. This may sounds controversial, but while we tend to be wary of those who seem “fake”, the reality is that we’d much rather deal with them than with people who clearly show they don’t care about social norms and good manners.

3. Shift Your Focus From Smarts To Success

Efforts to get “smarter” often stand in for another desire—which is just to be more successful. There are millions of self-help books dedicated to this subject, and most of the strategies they lay out work better than intelligence-boosting gambits. The downside, of course, is that the glut of success formulas out there tends to inflate people’s hopes.

Perhaps the problem is that we keep searching for a simple, universal solution where none exists. If you look at the most successful people around, there aren’t too many generalizations you can draw from their experiences; those you can extract aren’t easily replicated. As academic reviews (and my latest book) point out, there are really only a few core ingredients to career success: ability, likability, and drive. More specifically, if you can persuade other influential people—those who make decisions that affect your career—that you possess those qualities (whether or not you actually do), you’ll probably be successful.

The problem, though, is that—like intelligence—ability, likability, and drive aren’t all that easy to fake. It’s hard to fool all the people who matter, all the time. Likewise, if you’re obsessed with chasing success, others will catch on (Henry David Thoreau was right to say that “success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it”). Still, it might make more sense to take a broader view of what’ll make you succeed, and fixate a little less on how smart you are, or would like to become.

In the grand scheme, it’s one of the smartest things you can do.

The relationship between Star Trek and real-world science is long and distinguished (how many NASA engineers have claimed to owe their careers to the adventures of Captain Kirk and crew?). And just as Star Trek’s Communicator inspired the flip phone, and its mobile computer PADD influenced the iPad, now comes a Tricorder-like diagnostic device.

Five years after it launched, the Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize has awarded an American team of scientists and engineers a $2.6 million first-place award and a Taiwanese team a $1 million second-place prize for developing consumer mobile devices that non-invasively diagnose 13 medical conditions without assistance from health professionals. An initial 312 teams entered.

“Creating technology breakthroughs in an industry as complex as healthcare is quite a milestone,” says Qualcomm executive chairman Paul Jacobs. “What these teams accomplished is a great stepping stone to making mobile health care a viable option across the world.”

Removing the Doctor

Accuracy and ease of use determined the winning design after six months of testing by nearly 400 consumers focusing on diagnostic, vital signs, and user experience at the Altman Clinical and Translational Research Institute at the University of California, San Diego.

The devices partially cull the list of possible diagnoses through a medical questionnaire, then guide the user through more tests before offering a final determination and course of action. Both employ reconfigured existing technology such as finger meters, imaging, and wireless sensors to measure five vital signs, and diagnose 10 core conditions and three elective ones.

Artificial intelligence enables the systems to learn and increasingly tailor them to users.

For the elective conditions, Final Frontier’s device tackles pertussis (whooping cough), hypertension, and mononucleosis, while Dynamical Biomarkers addressed melanoma, shingles, and hypertension. Final Frontier’s device uses data analysis from actual patients, while Dynamical’s pairs diagnostic algorithms with analytical methodology controlled through a smartphone app.

Betterment of Humanity

The XPrize Foundation is a 21-year-old Los Angeles nonprofit run by executive chairman Peter Diamandis and CEO Marcus Shingles that runs incentivized competitions to foster innovation that helps humanity. There are 16 past and present competitions, with another 13 in active development.

The first and best-known of the contests, The Ansari XPrize, was a $10 million award for a reliable, reusable, privately financed manned spaceship. Breakthroughs from this competition lead to a private space industry worth over $2 billion. The Paul Allen-backed Mohave Aerospace Ventures won it in 2004, and Richard Branson licensed the technology to create Virgin Galactic. It’s most recent competition, Avatar XPrize, launched in December.

Contest rules dictated the device weigh less than five pounds and be user-friendly. Teams had to trade-off weight with functionality, processing power, battery life, screen resolution, AI engine location, diagnostic capability, and cost.

“It was a rigorous process,” says Tricorder XPrize lead Grant Campany, who oversaw competition operations and testing. “The devices were dropped off and given to testers to operate without help from medical professionals.”

Further Development

The remaining prize purse will fund continued development, consumer testing, and commercialization of Tricorder prototypes, with FDA support and $1.6 million from The Roddenberry Foundation towards adapting the devices for the developing world.

“Now is the hard part,” says Harris. “We’ve passed the structure of the XPrize competition. Now we have to get the devices through the regulatory bodies.”

Adds Peng: “No matter which team wins the grand prize, we’ll both continue on. We’re also interested in collaborating with each other and all the entrants.”