Talk about "lifelong learning" often doesn't include what it takes to shake off obsolete ideas and ways of doing things.
There's something missing from the conversation about lifelong learning. Many of us already know we'll need to absorb new knowledge and pick up new skills in order to stay competitive in the future job market. But it's still easy to forget that that will mean forgetting—or rather, unlearning—the skills, habits, and ideas that got us where we are. This is a process psychologists call "proactive interference," and while you may have no trouble forgetting where you left your house keys, unlearning old data and ways of doing things isn't quite so automatic. Here's why, and what discarding old habits really takes.
I have to think twice about which political party Americans are referring to when they talk about "red states" and "blue states," since coming from the U.K., I learned those colors in reverse: red for Labour, blue for Conservatives. You've likely had similar experiences. After swapping your desktop for a notebook, you may have found yourself reaching for a mouse or using the track pad incorrectly, at least for a little while.
Maybe you've struggled to drive a stick shift after being used to an automatic. Or attempted to learn French for work after being taught Spanish in school, and ended up spouting "Franish." When older knowledge interferes with the brain's ability to accept new information, learning doesn't always happen as quickly or easily as we're often led to believe.
"Unlearning" is a bit of a misnomer, though. It's more a case, as some academics say, of "deliberately discarding" obsolete, redundant knowledge that no longer applies. Once you've realized the limitations of an outdated skill and take up a different practice, the new response will eventually wipe the old knowledge from memory. But that's not always straightforward, either. As Southern Methodist University business school professors David Lei and John Slocum point out, "The more disruptive the new technology, the harder it is to unlearn existing product-development approaches and business models."
The same holds true in our careers. Holding on to stubborn, outdated beliefs and mistaken assumptions can make you obsolete in a business or industry without ever knowing why. To become (and remain) a strategic, lifelong unlearner, you need to consciously challenge what's worked in the past. These three techniques can help.
In describing how he navigated the doubt and uncertainty of scientific experimentation, award-winning theoretical physicist Richard Feynman wrote: "We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress."
That's wise advice for all professionals, not just professional physicists. What's more, simply thinking to yourself, "Could I be wrong?" doesn't cut it; our brains' natural tendency toward confirmation bias prompts us to look for evidence to support our existing ideas. A better way to test our assumptions is simply to expose ourselves to information that may contradict them, potentially undermining what psychologists term the "coherence" of our present views.
Continually questioning assumptions is something Julie Friedman Steele, board chair of the World Future Society and founder/CEO of the 3D Printer Experience (3DPX), says she's benefited from in her work.
"When I launched 3DPX, I had to constantly unlearn things I assumed would work," Steele tells me, "like imagining a 3D printer in every home—before learning about the dangers of toxic particle emissions." Shifting your perspective in the face of frustrating information isn't easy, she says. "It's uncomfortable finding out that what you once considered true doesn't hold up. That's why there's a bigger shift in digital manufacturing by people like me. It was because of my ability to unlearn things that don't work and embrace the new that I could fly right by others with a traditional manufacturing background."
There are many reasons why coworking hubs are thriving, but one of them is the intermingling perspectives of designers, engineers, entrepreneurs, marketers, programmers, and others that can lead to innovation. These interactions may help challenge "habits of mind" that would otherwise stay fixed—something that's vital to unlearning, according to University of Texas at Austin associate professor of educational psychology Andrew Butler.
"There are many ways in which we acquire misinformation and inaccurate mental models, including from books and movies," Butler says. "Instead of relying on what you think you know, you should gather information from a wide variety of trusted sources."
Many of us imagine that our sources of news, ideas, and expertise are pretty reliable, so we stick to a comfortable handful of them—sometimes for too long. But the more time we spend in our roles and the further we get in our careers, the more crucial it becomes to broaden our approach to getting information. Butler says he made it a point to do this as he shifted from being a postdoc to an assistant professor:
I asked different people what I needed to do to be successful. Each helped me gain clarity on different aspects of the role, like teaching, researching, getting grant funding, and mentoring students. All jobs evolve. The more complex and less defined your future role, the greater number of diverse people you need to guide you. Gone are the days when it's a case of "I've got it now."
Adeo Ressi, CEO of Founder Institute also helps people transition from corporate jobs to entrepreneurial roles. In his experience, Ressi tells me, "It takes three and a half months to wipe away a lot of bad conditioning and recondition former employees with attitudes and behaviors that lead to entrepreneurial success." He often uses using fear as a motivator for completing this transition more quickly. In one exercise, Ressi has aspiring founders to set up a website, attract 2,000 people, and sell 50 products in a limited amount of time—an experience many find deeply uncomfortable at first.
But "most people who think that's impossible" at the beginning, he says, "achieve far superior results as they unlearn the perceived limitations of their potential," says Ressi, who believes that businesses usually teach people instead to "maximize to the minimum, as in, 'What's the minimum I need to do to achieve this outcome?'"
This suggests that instead of simply trying to discard redundant skills in favor of new ones, a faster and more effective approach is to question and test how little we may believe we're capable of—targeting our mind-sets and beliefs about our abilities and ourselves, not just the knowledge and expertise we possess.
There are three stories every manager and entrepreneur needs to be able to tell, says this Silicon Valley and Marine Corps veteran.
At Facebook, Don Faul and his team faced one of the more goliath tasks anyone in tech has ever faced. It was his job, as VP of online operations, to ensure a good experience for the site's hundreds of millions of users—including responding to reports of abuse, flagged content, and other bad experiences. This boiled down to supporting his intrepid team members—sometimes spending entire days dealing with the toughest of human issues—to do their best work and stay motivated against overwhelming odds. The skill that made the critical difference: Being able to tell good stories.
It's not something that came naturally to him either. He had spent the first five years of his career as a platoon commander in the U.S. Marine Corps, an environment that didn't exactly encourage emotional vulnerability. It was only through his work at Google and then especially Facebook where the importance of empathy and admitting failure took hold, and he poured hours of practice into relaying his experiences to inspire others.
"Whenever I meet with new leaders, I always talk about their responsibility to inspire people—to tap into that intrinsic motivation to be there and work hard," says Faul. "We're fortunate to work in an industry where meaningful work is getting done, and people badly want their work to be meaningful. Stories connect the two. It's the skill every leader needs to learn."
Here Faul shares the nuts-and-bolts tactics of influential storytelling he's learned at Google, Facebook, and as head of operations at Pinterest (he's the first to admit he's still learning)—and the three types of stories every manager and startup founder should be able to tell fluently.
No one will give you money or agree to work for you if you're bad at storytelling. Every pitch—whether it's to a VC or a sales prospect—is a story, and the best ones have compelling narrative arcs that connect listeners to a higher purpose, says Faul. Today, he's the COO of performance sportswear maker Athos, and this is critical to building the company every day. The number one factor for success: enthusiasm. Can you raise the hair on the backs of people's arms? Inspiring confidence is all in your delivery.
In most cases, a story succeeds when you connect a smaller idea or action to something bigger—a purpose, a movement, an emotion. This is how you get people to follow you on a journey, whether they're a customer following you through your product, or an employee agreeing to grueling startup hours to be a part of your vision. This skill becomes essential as soon as you have even one employee, says Faul. It's your responsibility to keep them connected to the dream of what you're building together—through the hardest of times. You have to look at it as an integral part of your job, just as or even more important than your product, engineering, or design skills.
Connecting to mission. The undercurrent of every story you tell as a manager has to be your company's purpose. At Facebook, Faul felt that his job managing the user operations team started with the organization's drive to connect the world in positive ways. He knew a thread had to run directly from this central company purpose to every single individual on the team. Every person had to be able to relate to the company's purpose, and their work had to have a clear and understandable impact on this purpose. In many cases, especially as companies grow, this becomes less and less clear. People's work becomes increasingly narrow and niche. Stories are vital for clarifying ties between people's every day and the long-term objective.
"People's intrinsic motivation comes from feeling that they're doing something important. Their work moves people. It powers a vital part of the company," says Faul. "Every single place I have been, there have been difficult times, and tapping into this drive was the most important reason we retained talent and made it through. When I was in the Marines, we had a lot of unimaginably hard days. The leadership had to make us feel confident that our work, and therefore our commitment to the work, mattered."
Amplifying emotion. In addition to underscoring purpose, good stories evoke emotion—real, raw human emotion. What happens in those moments where you feel yourself on the edge of crying? Or you feel your heart expand? Or you smile involuntarily with joy?
"In these moments, really think about what is happening to trigger these feelings. How can you create experience with this type of resonance in the lives of your employees?" Faul says. "When people look at their work through the lens of human emotion, everything changes and they better understand the gravity and importance of their work."
He often tells managers on his team that he wants every single person to feel excited to talk about their work at weekend parties and after-work cocktails—because what they're doing is meaningful. When you look at the anatomy of this feeling, it's a combination of pride, conviction, and happiness. What events and behaviors cause you to experience these emotions?
Perhaps it's overcoming an obstacle, expressing genuine gratitude for a teammate, appreciating high-quality work. When these things happens at your company, you can double down on the impact by pausing and reiterating what just happened. Really take time to soak it in and celebrate it. If you don't, your team won't. Everyone's default is to move on to what's next.
Remember also that people attach emotion to individuals. They love rooting for people. They love experiencing the world through others' eyes. The more you can tell stories about actual people that connect to the broader purpose, the more your audience will feel and not simply hear what you are trying to tell them.
For example, you might highlight the work of one team member in particular, and explain how it nudged the entire company closer to an important metric. You might emphasize the level of craftsmanship they brought to their work, how they assisted a teammate in need, how their depth of belief in the company led to something incredible. When you talk about the genuine feelings one person has, you're leveraging social proof to help others reach the same emotional place.
Being in service. Practice will make all the difference to the quality of stories you tell. "The people in my life who tell stories that give others the chills—they work harder than anyone I've ever known to do it," says Faul. "They practice hundreds, not just dozens, of hours."
Faul remembers when he first started focusing on storytelling at Google, he often came off as dry and not very inspiring. He had to invest hours and hours in becoming an a natural at narrative. But he couldn't have done this without finding his own drive—and that came from being in service to the people he was managing.
I firmly believe that leaders at companies need to be in service to their people. They need to ensure they have everything they need to succeed," says Faul. "One of the most critical needs they have is a complete picture of why they should show up and pour their heart into their work every day. It's not a nice to have, it's a basic need."
If you're having trouble prioritizing storytelling at your company, he recommends reframing the skill in this way. It's a service you're rendering to your employees—more important than lunch catering or great equipment. Give it the time that level of importance merits.
Putting yourself in their place. Your employees will be energized by any story that shows that you've been where they are before, and that you—as their leader—understand their experience, says Faul. This is true for a host of reasons. They want to know that the people shaping strategy and making decisions see the impact it will have on people. They want to know they're on the same path to success. They want to be able to feel safe and heard and valued. The more you can make it clear that you've been in their shoes, facing the types of challenges they face, the more effective you will be.
This means really inhabiting and feeling the frustrations, fears, stress, and disappointment that your team encounters along the way. These aren't positive emotions. They're hard to weather and relive. As a manager, it's easy to want to be teflon, to have all the answers, to seem effortlessly successful (and therefore credible). But real credibility comes from accepting how hard things really are and providing a roadmap for others to survive and grow stronger from similar challenges.
"At Facebook, I worked for a guy named Dan Rose who was really, really good at this," says Faul. "In 2012, we faced a number of tricky situations, and Dan would tell us stories about his time at Amazon and similar struggles he faced there. He was open about having the same anxiety we were all feeling at the time. Because he shared that so freely, we trusted him when he explained how he'd navigated through those tough times. It gave people a level of comfort that we'd find a way to work through it."
By empathizing and making himself vulnerable to criticism, Rose built trust and confidence. It feels counterintuitive to let down your guard. You think it will have the opposite effect, but you have to lean into that tension and discomfort. As much as you can, you have to put yourself in the place of the people on your team so you can authentically relate.
When asked about the best leaders he's ever observed, Faul immediately cites General James Mattis, who replaced David Petraeus as head of United States Central Command. He recalls one particularly cold, harrowing night in Afghanistan when the Marines needed to defend an airfield in the middle of hostile territory. The general spent hours standing at a post side-by-side with a 17-year-old soldier, talking to him to understand what his experience in the Marines had been like, how he was feeling, how things could be better. Here was a man in charge of all of the forces in the region, and he made it his business to fully comprehend the life of one soldier, Faul says.
Obviously, running a tech startup is different, but the principles of good leadership are strikingly similar. If you don't have a past experience you can use to connect to your team's current plight, get familiar with what's happening for them now. Listen to their stories, so you can eventually tell one that will speak to people and make them feel seen.
This degree of empathy is closely tied to the first of three different types of stories Faul believes every manager should tell frequently and deliver compellingly. Read on to learn how to develop each of these narratives and tell them in a way that moves people.
"Being vulnerable is one of the most powerful things you can do as a leader because it shows you're genuine. Being genuine builds trust. Trust is the key to getting anything done," says Faul. "If you're willing to tell everyone on your team about your mistakes, your shortcomings, what you're currently working on to get better, you seem more human. It's easier for people to connect with you. They have an easier time believing what you say, and that you're taking their well-being into account."
It also gives people permission to take bigger risks in their own work. If your team knows about times you tried to do something and failed, they will also see that you recovered and went on to succeed. They won't feel hard-pressed to be perfect or place small bets so they always win. When you're at a startup, you can't afford to play it this safe.
"At Facebook, Sheryl [Sandberg] used to talk very publicly and encourage other leaders at the company to talk very publicly about things they tried that didn't work and what they learned from it," says Faul.
She would tell specific stories about the smartest people she knew, how they had stumbled, and how they had worked through failure. The way she told these stories, the people were very real to us. The feelings they experienced when they failed were very real. But the idea that the company was learning and moving forward was also very real. She made it clear these experiences were the foundation of Facebook's culture and something to take pride in.
Faul remembers when he first started leading people in the Marines, being vulnerable was very difficult for him in the same way it's hard for many new tech managers. "You don't want to show any sign of weakness because you want to convince everyone—maybe mostly yourself—that you're there for a reason, you're not a fraud, you don't have any doubts," he says.
His attitude toward vulnerability and sharing failure didn't start changing until he arrived at Facebook and saw the example set by Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg. Now he feels responsible for modeling this approach to the managers on his own team. It's one of the most powerful ways to pass these skills along to more people and strengthen your entire organization. Says Faul, "I saw firsthand the way my relationship with people changed once I started talking about mistakes. The entire environment of my team changed. Everyone started sharing more openly."
One of the key failure stories Faul shares draws on his time at Pinterest. Early on, he worked on major projects related to the company's culture. "I know there were many pieces of this I approached the wrong way. I made some bad decisions, including one that didn't get the response we wanted at all inside the company—it just didn't land," he says. "It was my first big, visible failure as an executive, and I knew it reflected poorly on me. I had to work through that, acknowledge the failure, apologize for it, discuss it over and over again. It was incredibly hard for me to do."
Instead of sweeping the episode under the rug, he now tells this story again and again. Whenever his team confronts a similar situation or makes a mistake, he recalls it. Because the truth is, he did get through it. His team at Pinterest not only survived but went on to other successes. Knowing that recovery is possible on this level generates productive psychological safety for everyone involved.
There's another story in this genre Faul tells that almost everyone working at a startup will relate to at some point. After he was at Facebook for a while, Sandberg—his manager at the time—hired someone new to take over a large part of his job. "This was honestly one of the hardest moments in my career—one of those big moments where I felt like a failure, like I wasn't moving forward," he says. "When we talked, she told me that it was because the company was scaling and this is a normal function of scale. Now I can see it was 100% the right decision, but at the time it felt awful."
Fault's told this story 100 times, he says, to make it clear to people on his team that this is something even the best employees will go through at fast-growing companies. It's important that he admits the depth of the emotion he felt, and even that he questioned what was happening and doubted himself. Because this is what he knows people he manages will experience.
"I can tell people, 'I've been through this and I legitimately know that you're going to make it through this and be fine, be better, do more,'" he says. "Now I have three or four stories over the course of my career like this that I tell to soften these hard moments for the people I work with and give them the confidence to endure and stay excited."
Let's say you're new to management, new to storytelling, and uncomfortable with being this open. If this is the case, start small, Faul says. For instance, if you're a founder, and being vulnerable with your whole company feels impossible, start by being open with just one of your first employees. The more people you try to reach this way initially, the more pressure you will feel, and it can break you. "Being vulnerable doesn't weaken your authority," Faul adds. "It strengthens everyone else around you."
You want to get some success under your belt. Open up to just one person, or two people you really trust. See how they respond and how it changes their work style and ethic. Chances are, you'll get a positive reaction, he says. Plus, it will give you a chance to strike your own balance between vulnerability and confidence. You don't want to share messy, doubting, fearful emotions without some resolution. Don't leave people scared about the direction and future of the team or the company. Instead, use vulnerability to fuel your conviction in the path you're charting now.
The second tactic for nailing failure stories: Choose your words carefully in advance. "When I feel people getting worried around me or not taking the big risks, or trying to rebound from a mistake, the first thing I do is sit down and write out the story I want to tell them," says Faul. "It's so important that I find the right language that will make it clear I know what their feeling and that there's a solution. I'll even practice with my wife. I don't think people should expect to be good at this spontaneously. And it's so important to get right."
When he prepares what he wants to share, he always asks: Is my message clear? Is it simple? Does it evoke emotion? Is it the type of story that members of your team will tell your friends in a conversation about why they love their job or the company? The answers all have to be yes.
Don Faul (left) talking about his experiences in the Marines in front of an audience at Facebook.[Photo: First Round Review]
One of the best stories to encourage great work, behavior, actions, etc. is a story exalting an individual who has exemplified these traits.
"Stories are incredible tools for reinforcing the quality of work you want to do or the type of behavior you want people to exhibit," says Faul. "Especially when you're trying to help your team live the company's cultural values, giving them lots of rich examples of people doing it already makes a huge difference."
For instance, Faul has continually noticed how hard it is for people to offer feedback to managers, particularly those a couple tiers higher in the organization. As a result, leaders often get the least amount of constructive advice for improvement, when they should probably receive the most. People are afraid. They're intimidated. They don't want to offend or burn bridges. Telling people it's important to offer this feedback isn't enough. The only thing he's seen work is telling stories that champion this behavior.
"At Facebook, there was a well-known story about an intern who, when given the chance to ask a question of a top executive, offered constructive feedback about a television interview the person had recently given," says Faul. "That story has been told now dozens of times to show how important it is to speak your mind if you think leaders can get better. To show that that type of courage—to say something difficult to help boost performance—will be rewarded."
You want good-example stories to become part of company lore. This is how values truly become the fabric of your startup—not by posting them on the walls or repeating them during an all-hands. "There are now thousands of Facebook employees who can probably tell you some version of the intern story," says Faul.
Repetition is your key to success here. Even if people memorize your mission, vision, value statements—they probably won't internalize them. Stories about other people living these words are the best way to make them meaningful.
"At Pinterest, CEO Ben Silbermann did this extremely well," he says. "He would start every all-hands meeting with a customer story—a different customer every time—and how different people within the org had made success happen for the company and that customer. He's always deliberate and crystal clear. Everyone got to see our mission and the way we want to work in action through these stories every other week."
Getting good at this is vital for early stage companies. There's so much going on, so many needs, so much fast action required, that communication ends up being very ad hoc and fragile. It's easy for people to lose track of what's going on, company priorities, why the work is important. Telling stories about people doing good work that maps to your highest priorities will align everyone around what they should be doing.
This solves another common issue, too. "Most startups don't spend nearly enough time recognizing people," says Faul. "Most people need to know their managers and org leaders see their hard work and value it. They're hungry for this type of acknowledgment. When you tell a story about them, you kick their motivation into hyperdrive, and you make them a model for the rest of the team to follow their lead."
One of the best ways to build a good example story is to slowly zoom out. Faul gives customer operations as an example. Perhaps a support team member had an incredible win and saved an account for the company. You'd start by explaining what this person did objectively and what they achieved. Then you use what they did to explain why the customer support function is so invaluable to your company strategy. From there, you can talk about the level of service you want to provide company-wide and what this looks like. And finally, you can touch on how this will power the overarching mission.
Another example: Instead of telling everyone how important it is to hit deadlines, or castigating a team over a missed deadline, you can take every opportunity to acknowledge the people who excel on time. You can use their experience to explain why timely work is so important, what it makes possible for customers, how it changes the way the company is perceived, and how it helps everyone deliver on the promise they've made to the market.
With one narrative, you can fuel a top employee, set a positive example for an entire functional area, underscore company values, and connect the work of individuals to the bigger picture. This is what makes the good example story indispensable. It's incredibly versatile and effective.
"You have to treat things like quality and discipline as core competencies your organization needs to win," says Faul. "At Athos, we're trying to build the most sophisticated strength and conditioning training system on the planet. To do this, we need everyone to know how high-quality our products are and how aspirational our brand must be. If we can't get this across, it won't matter how good our product actually is. So everyone needs to be pushing for this all the time."
The stories he and his fellow executives tell are about people who believe every tiny detail matters and act accordingly. The people who are immediately responsive over email to customers. The people who think through more graceful packaging solutions. The person who decided to use a certain color thread in Athos's garments to give them their premium look and feel. These stories get told repeatedly over email and in meetings, until everyone automatically connects these actions to the long-term vision of the company.
That connection between individual employees and the broader purpose of your organization is very delicate and one of the first things that breaks during scale if you're not very careful. Inspirational stories serve as the glue making sure these separations don't happen. As a founder, it's important that you not only invest in telling these stories, but also in your managers learning and being able to do it, too.
Telling an effective inspiring story starts with psychologizing your audience—and, to an extent, building an audience you know will be receptive to your message. For instance, at Athos, Faul knows that employees are passionate about athleticism, about helping athletes achieve better performance.
Many of them have a background playing sports or doing yoga or strength training. He himself was heavily involved in high school and collegiate sports. Based on this knowledge, he knows the company's mission to build better athletes will resonate, and that telling stories about how Athos is actively strengthening athletes will incentivize excellent work.
"You want to tell these same stories in your recruiting process and watch carefully to see how they land with candidates," he says.
This is how you can select for people to enter your mission who you know will care about it. These people will always do better work than those that choose to be there for the money or the brand association, or even because they think the product is cool or the problem is interesting. As you build an organization, you want to draft people who will not only be bought into what you're doing, but the stories you tell to drive people forward.
Inspiration requires even more rehearsal than the other types of stories. Whenever Sandberg needed to rally people behind a project or cause, they would dedicate hours to refining their language, practicing and infusing their words with the emotion they wanted people to feel.
"Trying to be inspiring and missing the mark is painful and damaging," says Faul. "I know because I tried to do it a many times before I was ready. Now I take the time to think through every inch of these stories. I feel that I owe it to my team. It's one of my biggest responsibilities."
Knowing what you want to say is a good start, but you really need to have the right structure. You want to sit down and outline. What information should come first? Who are the protagonists people can relate to in your story? What is the arc of the narrative that makes the story new, interesting, different, counterintuitive, resonant? When you practice in front of people, what grabs them? When do you see the emotion on their faces? How can you double down on those remarks? Sometimes, Faul's team members will see him apparently talking to himself in his car in the parking lot. But he's not. He's practicing stories.
"You have to figure out what works for you. I personally don't like memorization because it doesn't feel organic, and my delivery can be a bit stilted. Some people love memorization," he says. "Some people want note cards with the four bullet points they have to hit. The real advice here is to do whatever makes you feel and act comfortable. That's all that matters. And know that it will definitely feel uncomfortable the first few times you do it. That doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. Remember, an inspiring story is a service you're providing for people you care about."
There are several components most inspiring stories share.
First, they're aspirational. They touch on what the future could look like. Actions your team could take. Quality you have the ability to deliver. Stretch goals are motivating. People want to tackle new things so they can learn and grow. The suspense adds drama that moves people to be their best. There's positivity in accomplishing a leap, of course. But don't discount the positivity that comes out of trying, failing and learning too. Don't be afraid to set the bar high.
Competition inspires. People instinctively want to be the best. But you don't have to be talking about competition with another company or a common enemy. You can talk about competing with last year's numbers, last month's customer pipeline, etc. People want to compete with themselves. But if you don't frame things in this way, you're missing out on that source of motivation.
Express the confidence you want people to have in themselves and the organization. Act as if it's already been earned. You know something they don't. You see the successful outcome already. According to Faul, this was another strength of General Mattis.
Shortly after 9/11, Faul found himself in Kandahar listening to Mattis give a speech to 300 Marines. "I remember, we were all extremely nervous but not admitting it. Candidly, we were scared and we had no idea what was going to happen," he says. "The general didn't ignore this. He talked about the sacrifices he knew we were all making, and how natural it is for humans to feel fear. But then there was a turn and he shared, plainly, how confident he was in each and every one of us. He reminded us about our training, how prepared we were, and how he was certain that we would triumph."
That speech touched on so many of the great storytelling mechanisms: He empathized with how he knew the Marines were feeling. He held up the example of those that had excelled in training. He challenged them to rise to the higher purpose they were serving, and he expressed unqualified confidence in their abilities.
"I remember feeling this incredible level of strength and optimism after hearing that speech," says Faul. "I had probably exchanged three words with this man, but the story he told about us and our training made me trust him and trust myself. I remember thinking how the right words can be so powerful. They can make you feel like anything is possible."
This article originally appeared on First Round Review and is reprinted with permission.
The common thread in all types of distraction is that they have the potential to keep us from living the lives we want.
Is the world more distracting? Sometimes it seems that way. With our devices perpetually buzzing, it seems that more events need our attention right away and more things try to entertain us while we're trying to focus.
Distraction is hardly a digital phenomenon, though. More than 2,000 years ago, Socrates and Aristotle debated the nature of akrasia" (pronounced "uh-crazy-uh"), our tendency to act against our better judgement. To the ancient Greeks, mere mortals were prone to distraction due to our weakness of will. Still, many of us feel we're living in a golden age of distraction, and we're more unsure than ever as to what it takes to stay focused. So we blame our puny attention spans and the devices we suspect are shortening them every day.
But while it's true that products affect our attention, it's not exactly the case that all technology is equally addictive or distracting. To understand why, it helps to look at your own relationships with your own gadgets to see if they're as toxic as you may fear.
I decided to use myself as a guinea pig, and plotted certain products and services on the matrix below. And for the sake of comparison—in order to see how my digital devices stack up against more basic commodities—I didn't limit myself just to tech. On one axis is the question of whether the product is harmful to my life. On the other, I asked myself whether I could stop using the product if I wanted to, or whether I was dependent.
It's a subjective measure, to be sure, but it helps you begin to quantify how you use certain products and the impact they have on your life. With this two-by-two tool, you can begin to classify certain products and decide how to put them in their place.
The top left quadrant is an easy one. Things that aren't harmful and I can easily stop using are what I call "Goods." The vast majority of the products and services I use fit into this category. Goods are not problematic. In fact, some of these things, like my gym membership or water bottle, I wish I used more often.
In the upper right are "Necessities." These things aren't harmful, but I can't stop using them without serious consequences—food, clothing, and shelter all fall into this bucket. As much as I might wish I didn't have to shove nutrients into my face-hole to stay alive, or that societal norms permitted public nudity, unfortunately, neither are the case. I can't realistically stop consuming these things even if I wanted to.
You could also argue that having a connection to certain technologies like an email account or Google have also become a necessity. Disconnecting won't kill you, but neither would walking around the office in the buff. Rather, society expects certain things of us (like being web proficient and accessible through email) and we would find it difficult to live, work, and sustain personal and professional relationships without these services.
It's interesting to note that this category can become harmful, though, depending on the degree of use. For example, eating too much food or spending too much money on clothing can have negative consequences, but there's nothing inherently bad about these products when used properly.
To make sure we don't overdo it, we set budgets, try to listen to our bodies telling us their full, and generally just set limits. The key is to monitor and moderate our usage. And when it comes to necessities, self-regulating is relatively easy. It's the next category of products that presents a bigger challenge.
I love sweets, I love Facebook, and I love YouTube. But as much as I love these things, they don't love me back. For me (but not necessarily you), these products are harmful. Your harmful distractions might include other indulgences, like being a sports fanatic, a romance novel reader, a Netflix binger, a political news junkie, or worse—in any case, it's not for me (or anyone else for that matter) to point fingers at whatever poison you pick.
What all distractions have in common, however, is that they have the potential to keep us from living the life we want. When I think about what I want to accomplish with my remaining time on this planet, certain things just aren't helping me.
If I could wave a magic wand and no longer want to use these products, I would. Unfortunately, there's no such craving-killing spell. Like it or not, the reality is that I do want to consume these things. They're fun! They're entertaining! They're delicious! But they're also sources of akrasia. The tendency Socrates and Aristotle warned us about lives right here, too.
So the question is: Why do we do things against our better interests in the first place? For the most part, when a product doesn't give customers what they want, they stop buying it. You wouldn't keep buying apples at a grocery store that sells rotten fruit. But distractions are sneaky. We use them despite knowing they aren't doing us any good. Distractions trick us into hurting ourselves by dulling our awareness of the price we're paying. They feel good now, but we feel bad later.
Yet as seemingly sinister as distractions might be, the responsibility to quit them is on us. Though I'd like to say I'm powerless against the pull of Facebook, YouTube, or sweets, that's not really true. "Distractions" are defined as behaviors that harm us but that we can stop doing, if we choose to. And the way to do that is straightforward: realize and reduce.
The first step is to call these products what they are: distractions are bad habits. For me, a scroll of the newsfeed, a sweet snack after a meal, or a video binge after work are all things I do "just 'cause." By definition, habits are impulses to do a behavior with little or no conscious thought. So bringing consciousness to an otherwise unconscious act is the first step toward ending it. And when I finally asked myself, "Is this product serving me? Does it help me do what I really want?" I answered with a sheepish, "No."
Over the past several years, I've dissected what makes products habit-forming and discovered that they all take users along four basic steps that keep them coming back for more:
a trigger
an action
a variable reward
an investment
It's not that candy makers and tech companies are evil; it's that the market rewards them for making products people want. By and large, that's a good thing. However, the result is more engaging Facebook feeds, more engrossing YouTube videos, and more delicious desserts.
In a world where the features that make a product better also makes it harder to resist, the answer is to be able to spot these hooks and deliberately break them where they don't serve us. When we understand how products hook us, they lose some of their power. Getting unhooked starts with removing the triggers, making the action more difficult, delaying the rewards, and consciously not investing.
For the specific techniques I used to unhook myself from technology, see this video:
Our world is full of products designed to hook us, but only we can decide if they serve us. Once we divide helpful products from harmful, our distractions can be dealt with and controlled. Unfortunately, there's one category of product that people can't control.
When a product is harmful and users want to stop using it but can't, the product is more than a distraction; it's an addiction. A relatively small percentage of people suffer from true addictions, but the consequences of these compulsive behaviors can be serious. Whether it's an addiction to gambling, pornography, video gaming, shopping, or alcohol, people caught in the cycle of abuse tend to harm themselves and, often, those closest to them.
The defining characteristic of addictions—that the user is unable to stop despite the harm caused—points to something deeper. It's not just that the product is designed to hook the user, it's that despite knowing the consequences, users can't put it away even when they try. The user is no longer in full control; without help, it's nearly impossible to quit. Recovery usually involves understanding the deeper psychology driving the addiction—a task most addicts find difficult, if not impossible, to resolve on their own.
Addictions are serious. And it's important that we don't trivialize the experience of somebody struggling with actual addiction by comparing it to our Facebook or sugar habits (unless, of course, you truly are addicted to those).
In the meantime, it's worth remembering that for thousands of years, people have struggled with distractions that keep them from leading the lives they'd like to. And while it's true that people today find themselves attached to their smartphones, history shows us that it's only the latest in a long list of hindrances. Just a few decades ago, people complained about the mind-melting power of television. Before that it was arcade games, the telephone, the pinball machine, comic books, the radio, even the written word.
Not only is distraction here to stay, it will likely become harder to ignore as technology continues to make things even more engaging. But that's not necessarily a problem—in one sense, it's progress! We want products to improve, but we need to stay vigilant, asking whether "better" products bring out our better selves.
On average, humans are pretty good at assessing each others' characters, but those who aren't still tend to think they are.
Most people won't admit it, but we size up other people's characters all the time. In fact, research suggests that it takes just 30 seconds to make up our minds about someone's intelligence and personality (we make other assessments even faster) and that these evaluations are surprisingly accurate.
In one study, researchers showed participants short videos of different couples interacting, and participants were able to detect which individuals had cheated on their partners. Likewise, observers watching videos of randomly selected speed daters were able to infer participants' level of romantic interest. Even when the people being evaluated are children, observers can infer their character with a similar degree of accuracy than the children's parents do. So the idea that you can't judge a book by its cover is inconsistent with the evidence: People, it seems, are fairly transparent and we can see through them pretty easily and accurately.
That said, not everyone is equally competent at judging others' character. Like any other talent, the ability to read other people is what researchers would call "normally distributed" in the overall population, which means that most people are average, some people are really good, and others are totally clueless.
And although people who are good at this are generally aware of it, too many people in the average and clueless groups think they are good at it, too—a circumstance that's consistent with the finding that most people overestimate their social skills, especially when they're really poor. So how then can you work out whether you're as good a judge of character as you think you are? Here are three key factors to consider.
Contrary to what many people think, emotional intelligence (EQ) is a personality trait. And people who have more of it tend to be cool-headed, optimistic, and altruistic. They worry less and are generally less disrupted by stress. The essence of EQ is being more agreeable, emotionally stable, and extroverted, and people with these characteristics tend to be better at examining other people's characters—perhaps because they're less focused on themselves.
Conversely, no matter how insightful and observant people with lower EQ may be, they have a tendency to pay less attention to the people they interact with, especially in stressful situations. It's also worth noting that lower emotional intelligence tends to enhance the negative feelings we experience during social interactions, further hindering character judgments.
When it comes to evaluating others, the ultimate measure of accuracy isn't whether the person you evaluate agrees with your assessment of them but whether it predicts their future performance. This makes sense. It's often said that we are what we repeatedly do, so when you grasp somebody's essence, you're more likely to know how they'll behave in the future.
Our brains intuitively create implicit models of personality to predict people's behaviors, but not all brains are equally effective at this type of model building. And not all people are equally predictable.
Think about the people you know best—your partner, your close relatives, your best friends—no doubt they're pretty predictable to you. You can work out when they're going to show up late, when they'll be interested in something, and how they'll respond when you ask them something important. The proof that you know them is that you can predict them.
So you can apply this same rule to your evaluations of others—work colleagues, distant friends, and even social media contacts you may know less well. If you're an accurate forecaster of those folks' behaviors, too, you're more likely to be a good judge of character overall.
Ultimately, our characters exist in the public domain—they're the basis of our reputations. We're generally all hired, fired, married, and promoted according to what other people think of us, and how much other people trust depends on their perceptions of what we do and who we are, rather than what we actually do.
This is why aggregate character evaluations—consensual ratings, by a group of people—are the most powerful predictor of what we will do in the future (as opposed to one-off assessments by individuals). If the most advanced knowledge you can have on somebody is to predict what they'll do, then the average opinion that everybody has on us may better reflect who we are than our own opinion does. Or as David Bowie once put it, "I guess I am what the greatest number of people think I am."
So one way to evaluate whether you're a good judge of character is to see if you can infer what most people think of someone. For instance, you may introduce a new acquaintance to your group of friends and try to predict how well they'll like them—or, while you're at it, try and predict the results of political elections or forecast the arc of a celebrity's reputation.
Needless to say, each of these factors also apply to others when they're trying to understand you. There are clearly instances where this can hurt our own interests, for instance when we're trying to conceal our intentions or influence people. Still, more often than not we benefit from letting others know who we are, what we want, and what we stand for.
And when we aren't sure, others may be able to tell us.
Exclusive albums are an increasingly potent weapon in the streaming wars. But are they good for artists and fans?
This weekend, I had a brief, uniquely modern conversation with somebody as we both stared into our phones together.
"The new Frank Ocean is out."
"Oh damn, really? Let me pull it up."
"It's only on Apple Music."
"No, look, here it is on YouTube."
*Pitch-shifted audio of Frank Ocean singing like a chipmunk*
"Oh. Weird. I guess I should sign up for Apple Music."
"Yeah, there's a free trial. Or you could just torrent it."
For those of us who follow technology news and the constantly evolving music industry, the exclusive arrival of Ocean's Blonde on Apple Music on Saturday came as no surprise. After Rihanna's Anti, Beyonce's Lemonade, Kanye West's Life of Pablo, and Chance the Rapper's Coloring Book, we've come to expect big names to drop new albums with restrictions: This one's only on Tidal. That one's only on Apple Music. Want to buy the album in a record store? Fat chance. This is 2016. If you're lucky, there might be a pop-up shop, though.
Frank Ocean—Blonde
This year's string of high profile, platform-exclusive online album releases is beginning to condition everyday consumers to this new reality, but for many, the concept remains confusing, if not frustrating. You mean I have to sign up for a $10 per month subscription just to hear this new album? Why? This is a bit like telling N'Sync fans in 2002: Sorry kids, this one is only available at Tower Records. You might live near a Best Buy or prefer Sam Goody, but it doesn't matter. For now, this music you and millions of others have been waiting for is a Tower Records exclusive.
"Why?" is a valid question. After all, the big-name artist streaming exclusive is a new feature of the music economy that has cropped up as the relationship between artists and their fans is once again being renegotiated. Consumers have a right to wonder why their dollars are being lured in new directions, especially now that the internet has spoiled us into expecting to call the shots and, for better or worse, access our culture at little to no financial cost.
Fortunately, the question has an answer: You can only stream Frank Ocean's new album on Apple Music (for now) because Apple said so. More to the point, it's because the company has enough cash in its reserves—and deep music industry relationships, thanks to its absorption of the Beats Music leadership—to get early, exclusive rights to albums like Blonde and Chance The Rapper's mixtape Coloring Book. It's the same reason Tidal had the latest records from Kanye, Rihanna, and Beyonce before anybody else did. And even though major labels are reportedly having second thoughts about the platform exclusivity strategy, Blonde certainly won't be the last one.
As streaming becomes the dominant way we listen to music and the competition in the subscription market heats up, these short-term exclusives are one of the few ways that music services can truly compete against one another. In effect, rich men are using access to culture as a competitive weapon against one another in the battle over the future of how the music business works.
The exclusive access strategy is good for those wield the sword each time and bad for those standing at the other end of the blade. Imagine the anguish at Spotify, for instance, every time they see massive spikes in searches for "Frank Ocean," "Kanye West," or "Radiohead" and are forced to show listeners that painful blurb of copy in the UI: "Frank Ocean's new music is not available on Spotify yet. We are working on it, and hope to have it soon."
Exclusive releases are undoubtedly good for Apple. They tie the company's brand to coveted works by beloved musicians and presumably lure many people to its new subscription service, helping (along with its three-month free trial) Apple Music amass 15 million users in just over a year. But if Apple succeeds in the streaming-music market with strategies like this—and by reportedly offering higher payouts to the major labels—it's succeeding less by innovating and more by virtue of its size and willingness to throw its economic weight around.
For streaming companies, the pros and cons of exclusives are clear. But tech companies are hardly the only stakeholders here. What about artists? What about fans?
For musicians, the impact of exclusives is debatable. Chance the Rapper's Coloring Book became the first record to chart on Billboard's top ten based entirely on streams. But while the temporary exclusivity of Chance's mixtape didn't prevent it from charting, the question is begged: If it was also available to Spotify's 100 million listeners for those first two weeks, could it have hit number one?
This question may be one reason that big labels are already rumored to be rethinking the exclusive release strategy altogether—but it's also because of real-life scenarios like Universal apparently being snubbed by Ocean, who released the brief visual album Endless at the end very end of his label contract and then, days later, when his contract was expired, dropped Blonde on his own. In the long run, Ocean's move may be seen as a liberating moment for artists eager for freedom from the tyranny of record labels. But for now, most artists still need labels for incubation and marketing muscle. And let's not forget: Labels still own the rights to the expansive music catalogs the streaming services need to survive.
Former Apple employee Sean Glass argues that exclusives are good for artists because Apple invests heavily in them and even collaborates creatively on things like videos, often supporting artists in a way that labels are increasingly unable. Still, as Glass points out, the exclusive release approach overlooks indie labels and smaller artists. Such a strategy may well work out for massively popular artists deemed worthy of such partnerships, but the scheme—designed to drive hordes of people toward the streaming platform's "subscribe" button—likely wouldn't work with smaller artists. If there happens to be a trickle-down effect from blockbuster exclusive releases for middle class artists (more users on the platform mean more potential ears for smaller artists), it's too early to tell.
Frank Ocean—Blonde (alternative cover)
So far, these exclusive deals are having at least one consistent effect: They're sending people who don't want to sign up for a second streaming subscription scurrying back to torrent sites, threatening to counteract the promise of streaming music to thwart piracy. For Kanye West, limiting Life of Pablo to Tidal (which has vastly fewer subscribers than Spotify or Apple Music) led to a surge in illegal downloads of the album. Unsurprisingly, Frank Ocean's new album (along with the mini "visual album" that preceded it just days earlier) quickly found its way to file lockers, Reddit threads, Google Drive links and torrent sites as frenzied fans scrambled to finally hear it.
For fans, it's nearly impossible to argue that the exclusivity wars have any benefit. It's not like springing for both Hulu and Netflix, as DJ Skee argues in a recent op-ed, because unlike those video platforms, the overwhelming majority of the content on music services is exactly the same. If you pay $10 a month for Spotify but want all the latest releases from the likes of Drake and Rihanna as soon as they're available, you're looking at doubling (or potentially tripling) your monthly investment in music while only gaining a tiny fraction of additional content, however beloved much of it may be. For listeners, this equation makes no sense. And as the exclusivity war rages on, no single service is going to have a comprehensive offering of new music. Increasingly, new releases are fractured across services. And as the music industry knows all too well, a free torrent is still just a few clicks away.
This new reality differs from the one we were promised. Back in 2005, academics David Kusek and Gerd Leonhard envisioned an almost utopian world in which we would access "music like water," essentially paying for access to music just like another monthly utility bill. At the time, their book, The Future of Music: Manifesto For The Digital Music Revolution, may have sounded radical, coming as it did two years before Spotify or even the iPhone. But indeed, the rise of streaming services has put tens of millions of songs into the pockets of listeners for a monthly fee. And while no streaming service will be completely comprehensive (SoundCloud and Bandcamp are excellent, essentially freemium ways to augment the libraries of Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music with newer, more under-the-radar artists), fans have a reasonable expectation to be able to conveniently access new, popular music without jumping through hurdles or switching between services. The problem is that it's one thing to sign up for Tidal because it offers the back catalogs of Prince and Neil Young. It's another to regret the decision because Apple scored the exclusive rights to the next Drake album. It's a bit like if one phone company let you call everyone except your best friend, while another let you call everyone except your mother. That's not how utility companies work.
With Blonde, Frank Ocean fans are at least able to buy a download of the album for $9.99. But that's little consolation to consumers who are weaning themselves off of downloads and know that for the same price, they can access millions of albums for a month. Or perhaps they're already signed up for another service, gritting their teeth and wondering where the next hot new release will land.
The country music legend talks about her new album, Pure & Simple, and why you should stick to your crazy ideas.
Dolly Parton has spent more than 50 years with the things she loves, whether it's a career in country music that has spanned over 40 albums and numerous awards or her husband, with whom she recently celebrated 50 years of matrimony by renewing their vows. Parton is famous for her supreme ability to tell stories through her music, her movies, and her life—the ultimate rags-to-riches story about growing up in a small East Tennessee town (and modeling her style after "the town trollop"). She has since become a star as celebrated for her songwriting as for her business acumen (her nonprofit, Dolly's Imagination Library, has donated more than 40 million books to children across the U.S.)
Parton took some time out from her busy life to speak with Fast Company about her success, creative habits, and new record, Pure & Simple, which was released on August 19.
Pure & Simple is your 43rd album, which is incredible. Your first solo album was just over 50 years ago. What has changed for you since then about how you approach putting together an album?
Dolly Parton - Pure & Simple
Well, actually, nothing much has changed in how you do it. Every year or so, I know I need to put together something and I try to figure out what it's going to be. And then I get devoted to that project and I follow it all the way through once I decide if it's going to be story songs, or a mixture of gospel or love songs. This particular time, I kind of went along with what was going in my career and life at the time. For this one, as you know I was married 50 years on May 30 on Memorial Day and it seemed a good year to do an album of love songs. And I didn't have a lot of time to do an album and it can take quite a bit of time. And so I thought the best thing I know how to do right now in my life is write love songs. So I wrote some and pulled together a few other outside ones that I'd had in the past and polished 'em up a bit. And then I just went next door here to my recording studio and put it together in short order and stripped down the band on the stage. We didn't overproduce the album, it's simply produced and the stage show is simply done, just four of us on stage, flopping different instruments around. The whole basic tour and the album this year, the feelings, the emotions, it's pretty pure and simple. It just fell right into place.
I really think several reasons. First of all, I think people have missed those family-type shows like Little House On The Prairie, The Waltons. I know I have. With everything so high-tech and so extreme in action-packed stuff and craziness of The Walking Dead. That's all very entertaining, but I think people didn't realize how much they'd been missing something basic and family-oriented. And another reason is that people love that rags-to-riches story and I think I've represented that through the years and people relate to it. People knew me by that little story for so long.
We're doing a sequel since it did so well, Christmas of Many Colors , premiering on November 30. And I have an illustrated Coat of Many Colors children's book where all the proceeds will go my Imagination Library, so Coat of Many Colors is the gift that keeps on giving.
Looking back on your extensive career, all your accolades, projects like Dollywood and your production company — what are you most proud of career-wise?
I'm just proud that I got to see my dreams come true. I wanted to be known as a singer and songwriter, I wanted a hit record, I wanted to travel and do TV and movies. So I've gotten to do everything. Some of the highlights are when I became a member of the Grand Ole Opry in the late '60s and the Kennedy Center awards, being put in the Country Music Hall of Fame—all those things are great, but I'm so proud I've gotten to do many things in my life and my career.
I read that you write something every day, whether part of a song or an idea. What did you write yesterday?
Instead of writing songs yesterday I was working on a couple series I'm working on putting on television. I'm actually going to produce some stuff, I'll be in a series, might even do my life story as a series. I have some other things I'm going to put on different networks that I'm just producing and creating and developing for TV. So I was writing on a couple ideas for some shows for other people. And that's what I'm doing today as well, as soon as I finish with you. And then at some point I'll get working on some new stuff, onto a new phase. I'll wear this one out and then get onto the new one.
I was watching your University of Tennessee commencement speech, where you said you never wanted to retire, that you wanted to be onstage until the final moment. How do you make each performance new for yourself? How do you keep challenging yourself creatively after all this time?
It's funny, you don't think about those things until people ask you that question. So I'm like wow, I never thought about that. Every audience is different, it's like every person you meet is different, each person stirs something different in you. Audiences are like that, there's a certain type of energy to each one that creates a certain energy and spark in you. I just play off the audience and it feels like it's all new to me each time. Even though I tell the same stories, I'll reword and feel different each time and maybe add something new. I play off the moment. I'm very comfortable with my audiences, I look out there and it's like a family reunion and see faces I love and know. Everybody reminds me of somebody—my brother, sister, aunt, uncle or cousin, my best friend. I see people I love out there. Life and love are always new to me, that's why I can write about it so often. Because you're like "how many words can you write about love?" But there are millions of ways, trillions of ways—I've done it through the years. With Pure & Simple it's reminiscent of old stuff I've done, but you always come up with a new idea, like I'm 16, I'll never not love you. There's always some new way to think about it.
You've said that your theme park in East Tennessee, Dollywood, was this crazy idea you had, and it turned out to be so successful. How did you learn to trust your crazy ideas?
Well I don't always think they're crazy, I think they're workable. People think I'm crazy for thinking something is going to work. It's that old gut feeling, my daddy always said, "You go with your gut and you'll always be alright." And I know that's true, even when you go against certain things because you love somebody too much or there's someone you want to give a chance. When you bend too far you'll mess up, so you have to be tough [and stay true to your ideas] or else you'll have to pay the price. But nothing is ever lost, even when certain things don't work out the way you wanted. You take that and apply it to something else and then you tell yourself, "Well, I'm not doing that again. I won't make that mistake again." So you just have to learn as you go. And you don't ever need to, what they say, put all your eggs in one basket. You need to always keep something just for yourself. Always keep something for you, in a romance or a love affair or a business, always keep a card close to your vest. And if something doesn't work you have a little left to start over with.
Data science interviews are notoriously complex, but most of what they throw at you will fall into one of these categories.
Data science interviews are daunting, complicated gauntlets for many. But despite the ways they're evolving, the technical portion of the typical data science interview tends to be pretty predictable. The questions most candidates face usually cover behavior, mathematics, statistics, coding, and scenarios. However they differ in their particulars, those questions may be easier to answer if you can identify which bucket each one falls into. Here's a breakdown, and what you can do to prepare.
Similar to any other interview, these questions are meant to test for your soft skills and see if you fit in culturally with the company.
Example: What have you liked and disliked about your previous position?
The intent here is to identify whether the role you're interviewing for suits your personality and temperament, and to identify why you're moving on from a previous position.
Don't overthink it or imagine that the key here is really any different from any other type of interview: Just understand the role well, avoid talking about issues you've had in the past with specific people, and be professional when describing what you disliked and why. A data science role may call for an analytical mind, but hiring managers still want to hear what makes you passionate.
Data scientist roles where you're expected not only to implement algorithms but also tweak them for specific purposes will usually come with mathematical questions.
Example: How does the linear regression algorithm determine what the best coefficient values are?
The point is to see how deeply you understand linear regression, which is critical because in many data science roles you won't just work with algorithms in a black box; you'll actually put them into action. This category of question tests how much you know about what's actually happening beneath the surface.
So this is one of those "show your work" moments. Trace out every step of your thinking and write down the equations. As you're writing out the solution, describe your thought process so the interviewer can see your mathematical logic at work.
It goes without saying that a strong grasp of statistics is important for solving different data science problems. Chances are you'll be tested on your ability to reason statistically and your knowledge of statistical theory.
Example: What is the difference between Type I error and Type II error?
Proving your mettle requires showing you understand the fundamentals of statistics. But more than that, interviewers also want to see whether you're capable of using the technical language and logic of statistics to grapple with ideas you may not often approach that way—and still communicate them clearly. So be no-nonsense in your response. Use the relevant statistical knowledge to arrive at your answer, but be as direct as possible about whatever you're asked to define.
A big part of most data sciences roles is programming to implement algorithms at scale. These questions are similar to the ones candidates face in software engineering interviews; they're meant to test your experience with the technical tools a company uses and your overall knowledge of programming theory.
Example: Develop a K Nearest Neighbors algorithm from scratch.
Showing you can write out the thinking behind an algorithm and deploy it efficiently under time constraints is a great way to demonstrate your engineering skills. This kind is usually posed to data scientists who have a knowledge both of algorithms and their technical implementation, or data engineers who are given some context on what the algorithm is.
In any event, this type of question tests your understanding of matrix computation and how to deal with vectors and matrices. So start by going through a sample set of inputs and outputs, and manually work out the answer. As you do, keep an eye on time/space complexity.
Last but not least, scenario questions are designed to test your experience and knowledge in different fields of data science, to find out the practical limits of your abilities. Demonstrate your applied knowledge as thoroughly as you can, and you'll come off well in any case analysis.
Example: If you were a data scientist at a web company that sells shoes, how would you build a system that recommends shoes to visitors?
This question is meant to see how you envision your work delivering products or services from end to end. Scenario questions don't test for knowledge in every field; they're meant to explore a product's life cycle from beginning to delivery and see what limits the candidate might have at each stage of that process. But these questions also evaluate holistic knowledge—for instance, what it takes to manage a team to deliver a final product—to determine how candidates perform in team situations.
Here, too, the usual job-interview advice applies: Be honest about where you can add a lot of value, but don't be shy about where you expect to get a little bit of help from your teammates. Try to relate how your technical knowledge can help with business outcomes, and always explain the thought process behind your choices and the assumptions that guide them. And don't hesitate to ask questions that can help you suss out an interviewer's intentions so you can better tailor your answers.
Data science interviews can be tricky straddling acts—you're challenged to program and come up with technical algorithms on the spot, but you're also measured by much the same criteria for nontechnical roles. Your statistical and mathematical knowledge will be tested, as will your ability to lead a team, communicate, persuade, and influence.
So instead of trying to prepare for every imaginable question, prepare for these five types of question. You can't anticipate every question that's thrown at you, but you can pretty accurately forecast what a hiring manager's needs and expectations might be—then set yourself up to meet them.
Roger Huang heads up growth and marketing at Springboard. He broke into a career in data by analyzing $700 million worth of sales for a major pharmaceutical company. Now he writes content that compiles insights from Springboard's network of data experts to help others do the same.
The company says machine learning and natural language processing can make financial research dramatically more efficient.
For the casual internet user, a quick Google search is often all it takes to find plenty of information on any particular topic.
But for specialized financial research, analysts often find themselves laboriously searching proprietary databases, regulatory filings, and paywalled sources that aren't even indexed by the big search engines, says Jack Kokko, the founder and CEO of financial search engine company AlphaSense.
That's why he and cofounder and CTO Raj Neervannan created AlphaSense, which applies natural language processing and machine learning techniques to let users find relevant information in financial documents.
"It started from my first job out of college as an analyst at Morgan Stanley, where I was, as every analyst, going through these huge piles of paper on my desk and trying to find information very manually—nights and days spent toiling through that information and still fearing that I'm missing a lot," Kokko says.
The San Francisco-based company takes in information from thousands of licensed data sources, as well as public web sources like news reports, and automatically processes them to extract meaning on a sentence-by-sentence level.
"When a company's talking about building a semiconductor fab in Shenzhen or just production growth in China, those two mean the same thing, even though the words are very different," he says. "We have clustering algorithms that are able to understand that those topics mean the same thing."
That lets corporate customers search for information on esoteric topics and find results substantially faster than they would by looking for the data by hand, or with the individual search engines built into specialized databases. AlphaSense says it counts more than 450 companies as customers, including financial services firms with a total of more than $3 trillion assets under management.
In one case, Kokko says, representatives from a big Wall Street firm receiving a demo from AlphaSense tried searching for information on an obscure corner of the Japanese electric power industry, and happily discovered their firm had already researched the topic.
"Our system found a whole bunch of research by that top firm on that topic that even that firm themselves didn't know about," he says. "You can't rely on people to know everything about their own internal content or the content they produce, let alone thousands of others that are offering and producing content."
For Kasandra Davis, a senior manager in investor relations at Applied Materials, which supplies tools to computer chip manufacturers, AlphaSense's tool makes it easy to search for information on the semiconductor industry—and quickly organize information about what the company's own executives have said at conferences on particular topics without laborious searches through individual transcript files.
"I would have to go into the transcript of each one of those conferences and search for those words," she says. "You can imagine what that would have been like from a time perspective."
And, she says, she recently used the tool to locate information comparing video sizes for ultra-high-definition TV versus virtual reality. That's something that was hard to find through a nonspecialized search engine.
"I did use Google to do that search on VR file size versus HD file size, and I couldn't find anything to do [with] the comparison," she says.
To ensure the tool continues to find relevant information, AlphaSense uses a mix of completely automated clustering processes and human-supervised machine learning, says Kokko. Company experts can tag sample content to train the search engine to understand, say, when a report is expressing positive or negative sentiment, and when it's talking about the past or making a prediction about the future.
"We constantly refine and have the algorithms get better by comparing to what humans are doing," he says.
Part of what makes processing all those documents practical is the rise of on-demand cloud computing services, letting AlphaSense activate servers to churn through documents and run those statistical models only as needed, rather than build a huge data center of its own, says Kokko.
"Before Amazon [Web Services], we really couldn't have done this: The processing capabilities would have required a very, very big company's resources," he says. "Now, we were able to start small with a startup's resources just focusing, using computing resources for minutes and shutting down, launching and shutting down thousands of machines, and being able to afford it, instead of owning those resources."
And for better or worse, he says the search engine similarly lets its clients do research they couldn't have previously done without hiring scores of human analysts.
"We've got some one-man shops that can do the work of 20 analysts that they don't have to hire," he says. "Or, they can actually just elevate the level of research that each person can do."
That hiring manager or business partner may not be ready to act, but you'll want them to remember you when they are.
Entrepreneurs and job seekers both live or die by the relationships they build—with new clients, contacts, recruits, investors, and partners. But as any successful relationship builder can tell you, timing isn't always on your side: Your dream client may not have the budget for your services right now, or maybe a strong candidate for a senior position just had a baby and isn't ready for a move to a new company yet.
In other words, not everyone you meet will be ready to act on an opportunity at the same time you are. Your job then becomes positioning yourself at the forefront of their long-term memories, so that when they are ready to act, you're the first person they call. Here's how to do that.
The psychological process by which short-term memories become long-term memories is called "consolidation." Simplified a bit, it involves neurons in the brain organizing and reorganizing themselves in response to stimuli so that a pattern emerges, helping long-term memory develop over time. Now, you can't control time, but with the right approach you do have the power to be in the right place at the right time in the consolidation process.
When I was 6 years old, my sister taught me the "Cabbage Patch Kids" theme song, and she'd make me sing it any time her friends were around. They found this really entertaining, which means that at each recital I was prodded into, they were highly engaged. I'm 32 years old, and not only do I still remember every word of this song, but my sister and her friends do, too—in vivid detail. By consistently engaging my audience over time, I earned a place in their long-term memories.
Most of us have a song from our childhoods that we remember—lullabies, sing-alongs, Disney soundtracks, etc. But the same idea applies to business and building relationships. If you can continue to engage that client who can't afford your services yet, or that investor who's in the middle of a heated acquisition, you can carve out your place in their memories. And when the time is right, you'll be on their mind.
To do that, you've got to get comfortable helping others without the expectation of getting anything in return. Aside from being a generally valuable life practice, this is also good for business and your career. We tend not to trust people who only look out for themselves and scheme to get ahead. But people who are helpful and generous with their time build more solid relationships.
A couple of months ago, a friend of mine asked me to write a testimonial blurb for her book, and I took the time to write something thoughtful, no strings attached. This month, I met with Casey Ebro, a senior editor at McGraw-Hill, about my own book. It just so happened that my friend's book was being published by McGraw-Hill, and the blurb I'd written for her came up in one of Casey's interactions with her team.
Within the next week or so, my own project was up for review, so in a somewhat serendipitous way, my name came to mind at the perfect time—right when we were working out the terms of our relationship. Prior to that, I was probably just a flicker in their short-term memories. But afterward, I started to earn a place in their long-term memories, an outcome I couldn't have anticipated by writing an endorsement for my friend's book.
That's exactly why everyone should be interested in the practice of evolving from short-term to long-term memory. When you're cemented in someone's mind in a positive way, it increases the likelihood that when an opportunity arises, it will come to you.
As a leader, you've likely spent a lot of time planning how to grow your business. But if you communicate with people in a way that signals sales and growth are all you're thinking about, your relationships will suffer.
Take a step back and think about your habits when you communicate with others. Whether written or verbal, are you sharing an insight or idea or just focused on the sale? Here's a simple litmus test: Ask yourself if you're thinking first about what's valuable to others and putting your needs second. If you're not, pump the brakes on the sales pitch, and offer to educate them instead.
By positioning yourself as a trusted resource rather than a pushy salesperson, other people will associate you with what you've taught them and how you've helped them out—and that's memorable.
If you can switch your mind-set like this (and do it consistently), you'll become more likely to transition into the long-term memories of the people who matter most to you and your business. And that means you'll be more likely to land a great opportunity when the time is right for them, too—not just for you.
John Hall is the cofounder and CEO of Influence & Co., a company that specializes in expertise extraction and knowledge management that is used to fuel marketing efforts. He is the author of the book Top of Mind, forthcoming from McGraw-Hill (April 2017).
Mentoring arrangements can become a waste of time for both parties if you don't take a few key steps.
You took the first step and asked someone to be your mentor. Congrats! Whether you chose this seasoned pro to help you hone specific skills or to give you long-term career advice, it's up to you to drive the relationship—so you get the most out of the time you're both putting in.
"When you work with a mentor who can give you a lay of the land, support you when you're faltering, and help keep your goals on track, you'll get from A to B faster and more intelligently because you learn how to avoid common pitfalls and stay dedicated to your process," says Gerard Adams, cofounder of media company Elite Daily, entrepreneur, and self-made millionaire.
Sounds like a pretty sweet deal, right? It's a give and take, but with these tips, you'll be able to maximize your mentorship and jumpstart your career.
If you're the type of go-getter who's upping your job game with the help of a mentor, you're probably a motivated, driven and accomplished person yourself. But in this role, you've got to remember that you're the student, and he or she is the teacher. So relax and allow yourself to be taught. That means respecting your mentor's opinion, considering everything they say carefully, and ultimately, taking your ego down a notch.
"In mentorship, it's important to be a good listener," says Adams. "Many people don't take constructive criticism well and can't manage their ego that tells them they're always right. Know that you are always going to be learning, and be willing to listen when advice is brought to the table."
Chances are, your mentor is extremely busy. He or she hasn't gotten where he or she is by slacking off. So be respectful of your mentor's time by scheduling your meetings in whatever way is most convenient for him or her.
"Students can get the most out of their mentorships by setting a consistent meeting schedule with their mentors and using every minute of those meetings to their best interests," says Greg Stahl, vice president of marketing at Varsity Tutors, a live learning platform based in Boston. "These check-ins could be in-person, via Skype, over the phone—whatever allows the mentorship to fit seamlessly into the mentor's schedule."
Too often, and especially in mentorships with younger people, mentees know they want a mentorship but don't know what they want out of it. That's why coming to each meeting with guiding questions, based on what you want to accomplish, is key to a successful relationship—plus, it saves you from wasting time figuring out what to focus on.
"If you're still a student, questions could relate to how you can prepare for your career path, how to balance remaining schoolwork with making decisions about your postgrad plans, how to effectively make these decisions, and so on," says Stahl.
You should also learn why your mentor has made certain professional decisions. It's helpful to become familiar with your mentor's career arc and how he or she has achieved professional success—but it's even more useful to understand why your mentor made such decisions. That way, you can apply a similarly discerning thought process to your own professional choices.
"Try to learn how their mind works," says Susan R. Meyer, president of Life-Work Coach in New York City.
Create a series of short-term and long-term goals—and check in periodically with your mentor so you can track your progress. This will not only help keep you focused and accountable, but it will also show your mentor that his or her advice is valued.
"Demonstrate that their investment of time, effort, and expertise in you was worth it via a disciplined focus on key milestones you commit to," says David Nour, CEO of The Nour Group, a consulting firm based in Atlanta. "They have to see you improve, grow, and become a stronger professional. Otherwise, they'll lose patience and you'll take the wind out of their sail to want to continue to help you."
Usually, mentors don't owe you anything. They're taking you under their wing under the goodness of their hearts (and they see potential in you). And their investment in you can and often does lead to real results.
Ashley Hill, CEO of College Prep Ready, a Cincinnati-based scholarship firm, remembers how influential her mentor was in finding career success (she was a graduate assistant in her biological sciences degree program).
"She took time after class and outside of office hours to help me understand the class material as well as give career guidance," says Hill. "This relationship led to a $10,000 internship and allowed me to discover my love for research. As a result, I am in a very fulfilling career that is using those research skills to assist students in leveraging talents and achievements to find and win merit scholarships to pay for college."
Someday, you may find the roles reversed, so it's important to be grateful, especially after you've found success.
This article originally appeared on Monster and is reprinted with permission.
The Silicon Valley icon's startup began shipping its newest offering this summer. I took it to the ultimate judge: My barber.
I have a complicated relationship with electric trimmers.
I typically use the devices to tidy up the edges of my hair line, including my beard and mustache. (The little that I can get to grow, that is.) But here's the thing: I've purchased the same pair of trimmers—the T-Outliner by Andis—at least three times over the past eight years or so. Crazy, I know. But even though the T-Outliner overheats (not fun on the skin), requires a screwdriver to adjust or change the blade, and has no cordless option, it is powerful and delivers a precise cut. When I've tried alternatives at comparable price points ($50-$60), none have even come close. Until now.
Walker: "J.J., Nas just mentioned us in his new single!"
Me: "Nice! Where the trimmers at, tho?"
The company finally started shipping the pre-ordered Bevel Trimmer in July—barely past the company's cushiony "Spring 2016" promise to customers—and since I've been in the market for a new trimmer for quite some time, I was excited to get my hands on it.
The trimmer marks two important milestones for Walker & Company: It's their second product offering—a subscription-based shaving system, which combats razor irritation, was the first—and manufacturing it required electrical engineering expertise. Critics have questioned whether or not Walker & Co., which is based in Palo Alto, qualifies as a tech startup. The Bevel Trimmer should answer that question; it is mostly superior to its rivals.
It was shepherded from concept to finished product by Mir Anwar and Mari Sheibley, Walker & Company's director of operations and creative director, respectively, along with some help from the design firm Bone & Black (whose founder, Martin Bone, currently serves as creative director at Eileen Fisher and previously worked at Philips's men's grooming unit). The Bevel Trimmer costs $199 and is marketed as a vast improvement over its rivals.
Whereas some cordless trimmers lose power when unplugged, the Bevel Trimmer claims zero power loss. Its blades have a special coating that repels oil and water to prevent residue buildup—I'm too embarrassed to show you my Andis blade—and it also snaps off to reveal a "Bevel Dial" (patent pending) underneath, which can simply be rotated left or right to adjust sharpness—no toolkit required.
Since the trimmer is marketed as a "pro-sumer" device, for both the average Joe and his barber, I decided to first let my ear-lowerer, Lester Greene at De Lux Hair Gallery in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, give me a shape-up using the product. Greene has been cutting my hair for a little more than two years now, and we often discuss new haircare products and techniques I should try—along with work, socio-economic issues, relationships, and all the other sundry topics overheard in primarilyblack barbershops. It has always been obvious that Walker knows this familial relationship well: Walker & Co.'s online lifestyle publication, Bevel Code, features profiles on Kanye's and President Obama's barbers, as well as a "Find Your Barber" platform for readers looking for Bevel-approved styles. This relationship is a crucial cross-promotional tool for selling Bevel Trimmer units. For example, I first started using the Andis T-Outliner because a former barber did.
Lester Greene, who works at De Lux Hair Gallery in Brooklyn, has been a barber for more than 20 years.
Greene, 42, had never heard of Tristan Walker or Bevel—but as we unboxed it, a younger, 30-ish barber visiting from next door ran over with wide eyes: "Oh, is that that new Bevel?!?" We flipped open the lid of the box and were thanked (via a hand-signed note) from Walker and the musician Nas, a company investor, for our patronage, and were greeted with the words "Welcome To The Bevel Fam" in big white letters under the lid. Though the paper wrapper with the boring product details / certifications was a bit tough to remove, the actual product casing was a delight to open. There was the slow-open, air-tight effect that is most associated with the packaging of Apple products.
Right away, Lester loved the design of the trimmer, and started to resemble a kid with a new toy, twirling it in his hands, admiring the grip provided by the faceted surface. Lester said he was in the process of finally going cordless, and was intrigued. "It's futuristic," he said, as he directed me over to the chair. "It's very modern, compared to the basic design we've been accustomed to for the past 30 years."
He continued to shower the trimmer with compliments as he started in on my hairline, fantasizing about how much time he could save with the snap-off blade. He switched between using the cord and going cordless, and said he couldn't detect any power loss (though the device was a little loud, either way).
Then I noticed that he kept switching back to his standard trimmer, made by Wahl. "Is it giving a close cut?" I asked him. "Uhh…not the sharpest," he replied with hesitation, and said that he was having to do twice as much work with the Bevel Trimmer than with his old faithful. After a few more minutes I heard him say to the Bevel in his thick Trinidadian accent, "Yeah, I had enough of you," and he finished the rest of the shape-up with his old standby.
Greene wasn't happy with the Bevel Trimmer's sharpness, and compared it to the "finer teeth" of his Wahl Detailer (above, right). I realized later that the Bevel Trimmer's blade was on the wrong setting.
I was a bit surprised—how could my barber not like the Bevel Trimmer, which had just gotten a ringing endorsement from DJ Khaled on Snapchat? (Major key!) I left the barbershop puzzled, and it wasn't until I reached out to the company did I realize the issue: The Bevel Dial, which my barber had tinkered with before commencing the cut, wasn't turned all the way up to the sharpest setting. (In barber speak, this is called "zero-gap." Some people prefer duller settings to accommodate different types of designs, or soft or sensitive skin.) In Lester's defense, the knob on the dial is a tad small and hard to turn—neither his hands or mine are exactly Donald Trump-sized—and it's easy to imagine that he thought the knob was turned completely to the right.
My barber ended up finishing the job using a combination of the Bevel Trimmer and his trusty Detailer.
Aside from that design tweak, though, Walker & Co. should also consider a more hands-on selling approach for first-time Bevel Trimmer users, since it's so drastically different from other competitive products (neither Lester nor I even thought to check the Bevel Dial as he complained about its non-sharpness). Though Walker & Co. is still a small company, it has already demonstrated that it understand and appreciates the value of "doing things that don't scale," as the Silicon Valley adage goes. Whether this takes the form of in-person sales reps or producing how-to videos, barbers and consumers won't be able to unlock the Bevel Trimmer's superiority if it feels too foreign. Another adage that applies: Show, don't tell. (That also means ditch the stubborn paper wrapper, since much of the info on the wrapper is already in a little insert inside the box, and make the instructions more visual)
Finding the correct setting for the Bevel Trimmer's blade also unlocked the lit-ness of my hairline.
A few days after my trip to the barbershop with the Bevel Trimmer—and after the company rep helped me get the setting right—I decided to freshen up Lester's work. The trimmer was still charged, the strokes were quick and clean, and my forehead was not cauterized. And my Andis T-Outliner? Finally, in the trash.
This entrepreneur learned (the hard way) what it takes to tame an unruly board and build one that actually works.
There was the board member who tried to vote me out. There were the ones who insisted "this will never work." There was even the one who joked (I think) about having me hit by a bus in order to get rid of me.
For growing startups, a board of advisors can be either your best ally or your worst enemy. It took me a long time to figure out that the difference between the two can be razor thin. It's possible to turn a hostile board into a supportive one and a rival into a champion. And it comes down to things that are as radical and hard to achieve as they are almost stupidly obvious: trust, transparency, and open communication.
But let me back up. All corporations require boards. If you're a small company, the founders are often the only shareholders there are, so they determine the board's composition. It's when outside investors are brought in that things change. VCs usually earn a seat as part of the terms of their investment, so that they can keep an eye on things.
That isn't necessarily a bad thing. But the truth is that putting together the right board is complex, and losing control is far from unusual: A study by Harvard Business School found that by the time companies were four years old, just 40% of founder-CEOs were still around. My brushes with near-eviction made me hyperaware of how a good board should function—at a time when mine wasn't functioning all that well—and what it takes for a founder to play a proactive role. For entrepreneurs struggling to assemble and unify their own advisory teams, here are three key considerations I've learned the hard way.
Like the people you grew up with, you may not get to choose your board's members but you still have to make things work. Technically, boards have a fiduciary responsibility to make sure management is doing whatever it takes to maximize shareholder value. In reality, though, some board members are so focused on their individual interests as investors that they can't see the big picture. You may not get to choose these people as CEO, but you have to find a way to bring them together.
When I first discovered that board members were talking behind my back, it shocked me. Eventually, though, I realized I was also at fault for not being open to conversations we needed to have. For me, the key to working through these conflicts ended up being radically open communication. This isn't always easy, of course, but the CEO can set the tone.
If you share your problems openly, showing vulnerability and asking for counsel directly, board members are more likely to reciprocate. The posturing and bravado falls away, and so do the power struggles. It's the board members who refuse to get with the program who often find themselves on the outs.
For board members you do have the power to choose, look past pedigree. Yes, it's important that prospective board members understand your business from a technical standpoint. But it pays to focus at least as much on their values as on their credentials. Do they believe in the type of company you're trying to build, or are they paying you lip service? Will they support that vision down the road, or are they just in it for a short-term payout? You want to find board members who are willing to ask tough questions but who do so without ego or an ulterior motive.
It's also a good idea for prospective board members to have actually seen the movie beforehand, so to speak, and have a sense of which scenes are coming next—that they've got firsthand experience with the kind of rapid-growth company, or dynamic industry, that you're dealing with. With this kind of experience comes the insight to understand what's actually needed to take things to the next level.
In my case, it was a former board member who had the perspective to know what world-class talent looked like for a company like ours—and the honesty to tell me that somebody I was considering for a job just didn't fit the bill.
Conflict doesn't always spell doom—at least, it doesn't need to. I've found that productive tension is actually key to an effective board. That's why I try to assemble a diverse group of people, both in the demographic sense (young/old, male/female, etc.) and the philosophical one. You want board members to share fundamental values, but at the same time you need a range of experiences represented in order to avoid groupthink and have tough conversations.
An effective board shouldn't always be a comfortable place; facing challenges, along with teamwork, is crucial for success. It can also be dangerous to put too high a premium on experience—fresh perspectives are valuable, too. Many countries, such as the U.K., are now experimenting with the idea of mandatory term limits—anywhere from eight to 12 years—to make sure new blood becomes part of the mix on corporate boards. A stale board, at any rate, can fail to see obvious problems just as much as it can overlook novel solutions, which is why I try to bring in new members regularly.
Building a high-functioning board is one of the more important things you can do to grow your company. But for many CEOs, it's almost an afterthought. That's a shame because the right board can help you spot some of the curves and potholes along the road ahead that you can't see on your own. It can guide your company and, at the same time, make you into a better leader and entrepreneur.The wrong board, on the other hand—one riven by infighting and self-interest—can end your journey a lot sooner than you think, either by crashing your company or by throwing you to the curb. So choose carefully.
Jeff Booth is cofounder and CEO of BuildDirect. Follow him on Twitter at @JeffBooth.
One writer was surprised by the productivity boost that came from tracking what she'd done, not what she still had to do.
I live and die by my to-do list. Jotting down everything that needs to get done is often the very first thing I do when I sit down at my desk in the morning. It helps me to feel focused, organized, and like I have a decent plan of attack for my day.
But despite the fact that my planner has the capability to make me feel like some sort of productivity prodigy, it also has a sneaky way of swooping in and making me feel downright unaccomplished.
You know the feeling: You start your morning by scribbling down all sorts of different tasks and projects—you feel motivated and confident that you're about to put them all to shame, despite the fact that (in reality) it would likely take you three days to complete everything you've written down. You're blinded by your own optimism.
Suddenly, the end of the workday creeps up, you glance down at your beloved list, and over half of those items remain completely untouched. "What the heck have I been doing for the past eight hours?" you ask yourself in between sobs and sighs. You're left feeling frustrated, discouraged, and disheartened.
Unfortunately, this situation is all too familiar to most of us. Yes, in some cases, writing your to-dos down is great for keeping you on track. But there are also far too many times when it only serves to make you feel plain ol' crappy. Even if you put in a solid day's work, you're forced to focus on all of the things that you didn't manage to get done—and you completely forget about anything you actually did get accomplished (particularly if it wasn't on your calendar to begin with!).
This is a trap I've fallen into far too often. So needless to say, I was intrigued when I read an article about the "anti–to-do list," a productivity concept established by Marc Andreessen. And, as I'm sure you could guess, I was all too willing to jump in and give it a try.
If you're unfamiliar with the concept, I can't blame you. I was too until I stumbled across that article. Basically, this strategy works backwards from its traditional counterpart. Rather than writing down things you need to do, you write down the things you've already done—whether they're big projects or little action items.
By implementing this method, you end your workday with a list of all of the things you accomplished—rather than a daunting roster of all of the things that are still left to do.
The whole thing sounded simultaneously encouraging and terrifying. On one hand, I liked the idea of focusing on the positives. But, how could I possibly function without my to-do list? I'd never tried to make it through a day without one, and I was certain the entire experiment (which I decided to implement for one entire workweek) would be a recipe for disaster.
However, surprisingly, nothing too detrimental happened. And, the whole process actually illustrated a few helpful lessons. Here are three major things I learned by using only the anti to-do list, and kicking my tried and trusted list of duties to the curb.
As I mentioned, the mere thought of forgoing the standard approach was enough to break me into a cold sweat. It was the crutch I leaned on to get me through my day, and I was sure that neglecting it as soon as I sat down at my desk would result in my career crashing down around me.
I think we all have the tendency to react this way. To-do lists have become such an oft-repeated element for productivity, that the idea of not making one entirely sounds like a surefire way to get nothing done.
But if there's one thing that this experiment made clear, it's that I don't trust myself enough. Even though I was letting go of the plan that I had come to rely on so heavily (in favor of creating a list of my accomplishments instead), I was still able to move throughout my day and my workload with relative ease and efficiency. And nothing terrible happened, to boot.
No, I didn't have that trusty roster sitting right next to me on my desk. But with the combination of my inbox, my calendar, and—gasp!—my very own brainpower, it really wasn't too difficult to keep track of what needed to get done.
Alright, perhaps this lesson is a little too predictable, given that it's the entire point of the experiment. But it was significant, so I figured it was worthy of note.
With a traditional to-do list by my side, I usually ended the day in an emotional funk. The days when I managed to cross everything off it were few and far between, which led to a lot of feelings of inadequacy when the end of my workday rolled around. Even if I spent the entire past eight hours whizzing around like the Tasmanian Devil, it still never quite seemed like enough.
So, it's no wonder that this is one of the key benefits of the anti to-do list. It forces you to reflect and think of all of those things—big and small—that you did manage to accomplish. Whether it was something that I had set out to get done or a fire that cropped up and needed to be put out, I could wrap up my workday feeling like I had made great use of my time—rather than constantly feeling like I came up short.
While this feeling obviously helped me to head into my evening without a crabby attitude, I was surprised at how much it impacted my productivity as a whole. Day after day, I sat in front of my computer feeling driven and encouraged, instead of feeling this weight of everything that was left unaccomplished pushing down on me.
In turn, this actually made me more productive. The cliché sentiments you hear time and time again are actually true—your overall attitude and outlook can really improve your efficiency and your motivation.
As I'm sure you can discern, I really liked this method—and I'm sure my loved ones appreciated me strolling out of my office without being a total downer day in and day out.
So, it's definitely something I plan to continue to implement. However, that doesn't necessarily mean I'm ready to bid adieu to a standard to-do list forever. Instead, I'm going to try to merge the two different philosophies to reach a happy medium that works well for me.
I plan to maintain two lists: One that's traditional, and one that acts as a reminder of my accomplishments. I'm hopeful that this will help me achieve the best of both worlds—including recognizing and celebrating the things I got done that weren't necessarily on my original radar to begin with.
I think that this adjusted approach presents an important lesson for everyone. There are tons of different hacks, tips, tricks, and methods that you can try. But the important part is to find an approach that works best for you (and not necessarily everyone else).
So don't get so wrapped up in how things are supposed to be done and instead make any necessary adjustments until you land on something that makes you your most positive and productive self. In the end, that's the true recipe for success.
This article originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is reprinted with permission.
If you dislike every choice you've got, you'll look for one to reject rather than one to prefer—subtle difference, big consequences.
You've heard by now that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have higher "unfavorables" than "favorables," in pollster parlance. In other words, more U.S. voters seem to dislike the two presidential candidates than like them. In the latest Quinnipiac poll, for instance, Clinton's favorable-to-unfavorable scores clock in at 41% to 53%, respectively, and Trump's at an ever more lopsided 33% to 61%.
So it's fair to assume that, on average, voters aren't exactly selecting a candidate they're excited about—many are simply picking the one they dislike the least. And when we see our options as presenting us with a choice between the lesser of two evils, it subtly changes how we decide.
When people are dissatisfied with all of their options, research suggests that they often focus on finding reasons to reject one over the other rather than reasons for preferring one. This may sound like the flip side of the same coin, but there's a crucial difference: When we adopt what psychologists term a "rejection mind-set," we home in on negative information about our options and fixate on the one with the smallest potential downsides.
A "selection mind-set," on the other hand, makes us assess our choices according to opposite criteria: we focus on the positive information at hand, searching for the option with the greatest possible upsides. How we feel about our options, in other words, alters what we think it is that we're choosing—in our minds, anyway, it changes their very substance.
That may help explain why so much information about the candidates this election cycle is so markedly negative, with reports of alleged scandalsand corruption dogging both Trump and Clinton in arguably greater proportion than coverage of their policy proposals. So while part of that, as some have noted, comes down to editorial choices by media outlets, it's also a pretty accurate reflection of the type of information large chunks of the electorate seem to demand in order to guide their decision.
So while it may be true that there's been less substantive coverage of either candidate's proposals, it's probably wrong to assume that means voters don't care about the actual policies at stake. It isn't that people are totally uninterested in how either candidate would actually govern if elected, it's that they're likely paying closer attention to the proposals and ideas they disagree with than to those they support.
And the sharply negative campaign messaging observers were predicting months ago probably isn't just a self-fulfilling prophecy on the part of the news media. It's also a conscious choice by both campaigns, which are responding to voters who are more likely to be animated by reasons to reject their opponent. Just last week, amid a fresh round of questions about her emails and practices at her charity foundation, Clinton grabbed headlines by charging Trump with spewing "racist lie[s]"—meanwhile, a glib New York magazine headline said, "Clinton Just Gonna Run Out the Clock on This Email Thing."
The prevailing rejection mind-set may also have implications for how the eventual winner will be perceived after being elected.
Studies have explored the way people determine their satisfaction with a choice once the decision is made. Findings suggest that when people choose primarily based on the negative features of their options, their level of satisfaction hinges on whether they reflect afterward on what they selected or instead on what they gave up. If they think about the drawbacks of the option they chose, they're likely to be dissatisfied. If they think about the drawbacks of the options they didn't choose, they're likely to feel relieved that they went with the less-bad of the two.
Sounds intuitive enough, right? This matters, though, because it means that the candidate who wins is going to have a hard time swinging public opinion in their favor—and not just for political reasons, like the polarization of the electorate. By November 9, the focus will be on the new president-elect. And at that point, lots of people—including many who voted for them—will still have serious concerns about the winner's downsides. The best hope of minimizing the fallout will be to focus on the road ahead and the work to be done, but that will be tough to do on the heels of a campaign season so dominated by negative messaging.
Lastly, it's worth pointing out that these "lesser-of-two-evils" thought patterns occur in contexts that force people to reject options rather than find the most desirable ones. This election season is certainly one of those situations. In other scenarios, though, including in the workplace, we're much more in control over whether we approach decision-making through a "rejection" or a "selection" mind-set. We get to frame our choice, in other words, not the national political climate and all the people and institutions that shape it.
So whenever possible, it's useful to encourage yourself and your colleagues to consciously select an option rather than reject one. In their lives and careers, people reframe decisions all the time—with a little deliberate thought, it isn't difficult to do. But it can make a huge difference not just in how you ultimately decide but how you feel about your decision later.
Volunteering for a disaster-relief effort taught one executive valuable lessons in crisis management.
Sloane Menkes is no stranger to crises.
The former U.S. Air Force first lieutenant and current global crisis center leader for PricewaterhouseCoopers helps clients deal with situations that disrupt business as usual, advising them on how to identify and gather the resources and knowledge necessary to respond.
Menkes recently spent some time in Nepal helping to rebuild homes destroyed in a pair of 7.3 and 7.8 magnitude earthquakes in 2015 that killed more than 8,000 people and left another half a million families without homes. During her time in Nepal this past April, Menkes witnessed the resiliency of the local population as she assisted in the rebuilding effort.
"Crises can have many definitions and come in many different forms," she tells Fast Company.
Here are a few lessons her experience in Nepal taught her about managing any business crises.
Menkes explains that during a crisis everyone wants to contribute something to the relief effort, but without clearly defined roles those resources will overlap or otherwise not be used to their fullest extent.
"When clients are in crisis everyone wants to pile on and solve the problem," Menkes says. "I try and help clients understand the importance of the roles that they play in a crisis," she explains, "and disentangle those roles so people can make decisions and weed out misinformation and have respect for what each person can contribute."
Sloane Menkes
For example, Menkes said that many of the villages in Nepal had elected a project manager, who was responsible for checking the quality of each home as it was being built. A village elder prioritized whose homes were to be built first.
"I think back to how the local villagers managed and prioritized who would get the homes, and then in a crisis how you're prioritizing and managing different people's activities, I see that inspiring what I do for my clients," she says.
When the Nepalese began rebuilding following the earthquakes of April 27 and May 12, 2015, they used the resources that were most readily available. Since that time, over 2,750 homes have been built using bamboo, a small amount of aluminum sheeting, and 18 buckets of mud.
"18 buckets of mud changed these people's lives," she said. "That was one of the key things that I took away and use in my professional life," says Menkes. Getting clients to understand that sometimes they already have resources available to make things happen doesn't have to be a challenge, she says. "You may not have to look too far, if you're creative, to find those resources," Menkes asserts.
When a crisis hits, you don't want to be caught unprepared, without any predefined roles, or considerations of how to move forward, says Menkes. She advises organizations to prepare a crises management plan that identifies all of the resources they have readily available, as well as where to find those that aren't.
"Do they know who they will rely on should a crisis hit?" she asks. "Sometimes that's the resources and talent they have in-house, and sometimes they need to look beyond," Menkes says. "Crises simulations (tabletop exercises that simulate a crisis) allow the client to exercise their response plan, but also helps clients see the importance of respecting those roles the same way I saw that happening in the villages."
In spite of having those plans readily available, however, Menkes warns that a crisis, by its very nature, will require some on-the-fly adjustments.
For example, Menkes explains that the bamboo and mud homes that were being built in Nepal had to be adjusted in some of the 14 hardest-hit districts to respond to their unique climates.
"The villagers modified the design without having to modify the materials in a large way," she says, explaining that the villagers had to use the equivalent of a sealant to strengthen the bamboo in certain districts. "Your best-laid plans may not survive reality," she admits. "You have to rely on your plans," Menkes adds, "but be ready to modify them so that in the midst of a crisis you're still able to respond and recover."
Though there were many lessons Menkes brought back from Nepal, what stuck out to her the most was the resilience and perseverance demonstrated by the villagers as they adjusted to life following the disaster.
Though buildings, homes, and monuments lay in ruins, Menkes says that the local population learned to adjust, and carried on living their lives among the rubble.
Menkes says that she'll never forget the pride and spirit of the Nepalese she encountered when she arrived. "When clients encounter crises, they have to get back to business as usual or get back to the new normal that exists on the other side," she observes. "It's kind of like living among the rubble of what has happened, and figuring out a way to survive and thrive."
Fitbit is releasing updated versions of both trackers, adding new features that make them even better fitness tools.
Last Thursday, former volleyball star Gabby Reece worked out with a bunch of tech journalists on a rooftop in downtown San Francisco. I only made it through half of the 20-minute workout, which says something about my personal fitness level or the workout's difficulty, perhaps both. The event was to show off some of the features of Fitbit's new devices. One of those features, a new Cardio Fitness Level function, is actually to determine whether I'm as fit as I should be for someone my age. With it, I can confidently say if it was just a hard workout or I'm a bit out of shape. Spoiler alert: The problem is definitely me.
When you think of fitness tracking, one of the first products that likely comes to mind is Fitbit. The company has come a long way since its launch in 2007, evolving from a small wearable tracker that simply counted steps and burned calories, to devices that can now handle much of the same functionality as a smartwatch and track everything from your sleep to your heart rate. Today, it's updating two of its newest devices, the Fitbit Charge and Fitbit Flex, announcing the second generation of both as well as a new app experience to help you get more out of the devices.
If you're already Charge owner, then the first thing you're likely to notice about the new version is its display. The new Charge has a display four times larger than the Charge HR, a design change that allows it to add more notification options, as well as a number of clock faces that allow you to customize the look of the device. Bands on the device are also now interchangeable, so you can swap out colors, or replace a band that's become damaged without having to spring for a new device.
The star of the new device is the Cardio Fitness Level functionality. With it, you're able to determine how fit you are with a personalized cardio fitness level and score. The score is determined by estimating your VO2 Max, something typically done in a lab at a doctor's office. With that knowledge, Fitbit can tell you whether you're as fit as you should be for someone your age, and make actionable suggestions on what you can do to improve your fitness over time. As a result, I've learned my fitness level is "fair" but there's definitely (a lot of) room for improvement.
Along those same lines, the new devices include Guided Breathing Sessions. Think of them as like a tiny meditation session of sorts. Reece went through a two-minute demo of these at the event (the app offers two and five-minute options), and I was a champion at breathing. They're short enough you can do them between stressful conference calls at work, and the display shows animations and visual cues to help you lower your heart rate and calm down.
Fitness-wise, the device has multi-sport modes that automatically trigger when you've done something like ride a bike or hit the elliptical for 15 minutes. A new connected GPS feature uses the GPS in your phone to better track your pace and distance on a run and create a map of your route, and an interval workout mode can help you alternate between periods of high-intensity workouts and recovery times.
The Charge 2 also adds a new Reminders to Move feature, which encourages you to walk 250 steps every hour to stay active and keep your metabolism going.
The Fitbit Flex also got an upgrade today. The new device is 30% smaller than its predecessor, and is now swim-proof, which means you can take it lap swimming or on a trip out on the ocean without worrying about damaging it.
LED lights on the front of the device display your progress toward daily goals, and gentle vibrations can alert you when you're getting a new text message or call. Like the Charge 2, the Flex 2 automatically recognizes workouts like runs (and now swims) when you do them for 15 minutes, and it also has a Reminders to Move feature designed to keep you active during the day.
For the fashion conscious, the Flex 2 will have a number of different designer collections available. Tory Burch, Public School, and Vera Wang for Kohl's will all be offering stylish bands and accessories for the device. Fitbit also has its own pendant and bracelet option, which will be available in gold, silver, and rose gold.
The Fitbit Charge 2 will be priced at $149.95, and the Flex 2 will be $99.95. The new Charge goes on sale in September, while the Flex will hit stores starting in October.
If Leonardo da Vinci were alive today, he'd be a Burner. And this is what it took to bring his Vitruvian Man concept to life at Burning Man.
Deep inside a dark tractor trailer in the middle of North America's most remote piece of desert earlier this month, a doomed Man lay strapped down, waiting to be taken outside, mounted and spun around for all to see, and eventually be burned in front of hordes of screaming, ecstatic people.
Fear not: We haven't returned to the days of torturing witches and heretics, at least not in the United States. This is the Man, the centerpiece and namesake of this week's Burning Man arts festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, where he will be a true sight to behold, a 43-feet-tall, 20,000-pound modern-day interpretation of Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, suspended 50 feet in the air, rotating 360 degrees perpendicular to the ground, all thanks to a whole lot of manual labor.
In short, a very impressive feat of building and engineering in a desert location where there is no power, no lighting, no water, no nothing, except during Burning Man when 70,000 people from all corners of the planet will flock here for a week to create one of the most vibrant urban environments on Earth—Black Rock City—and then, not long after the Man is burned to the ground, disappear with nary a trace.
The Man's torso and head, packed in the back of the truck.[Photo: Daniel Terdiman]
In mid-August, though, with fewer than 500 people on the playa—as the Black Rock Desert is known—Andrew Johnstone looked at the Man jammed in the back of that truck and, deadpan, summed up precisely what was going on.
The Man's lead designer, Andrew Johnstone[Photo: Daniel Terdiman]
"He's like the star of the show," Johnstone, the lead designer on the Man project told me, "on the back lot, in his trailer."
Before we get all into engineering concepts and counterweights and the vagaries of building a giant rotating contraption high in the air in the brutal, unforgiving desert for the entertainment of 70,000 Burning Man attendees, we have to travel to Florence, Italy, where our story begins.
Last fall, fresh off his second year as the Man's chief designer, Johnstone, a short, jovial, 54-year-old professional artist with a headful of curly hair, a thick mustache, and a delightful Scottish accent, was vacationing with his family in Florence when word came from on high—Burning Man founder Larry Harvey—that the theme for the 2016 event was to be Da Vinci's Workshop.
Every year, Burning Man, which turned 30 this year, has a theme, which is intended as somewhat of a guidepost for artists to use as inspiration for their projects. Some do, many don't. Some years, like 2013's Cargo Cult, it resonates. Other years, like 2012's Fertility 2.0, perhaps not as much.
Da Vinci's Workshop, though, seemed full of potential from the get-go. After all, Da Vinci was, to quote Wikipedia, a "polymath whose areas of interest included invention, painting, sculpting, architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, writing, history, and cartography," many of which are foundational elements of Burning Man and its creative community of artists, musicians, and engineers.
Johnstone has no doubts: "I think if Da Vinci was around, he'd be a Burner. He'd have his own camp, and he'd be hassling Burning Man for" an artist's grant.
When the theme was announced, it was explained in terms that, hopefully, the community would understand, or at least relate to, given how many Burners—as attendees are known—come from San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
Two members of the Man build team working on the Man's head at The Gate 510 in San Leandro, California.[Photo: Daniel Terdiman]
"Our story will focus on the republic of Florence, for it was here, in a city-state of about the same size and population as Black Rock City, that humanist ideals, a rediscovery of science, and funding from a newly moneyed class of entrepreneurs fueled a revolutionary cultural movement that redefined Western civilization," the Burning Man organization wrote in announcing the 2016 theme. "Five centuries later, we will attempt to recreate this potent social alchemy by combining Burning Man art, maker culture, and creative philanthropy to make Black Rock City the epicenter of a new renaissance."
Sitting in a large communal space at The Gate 510, the art, tech, and maker space in San Leandro, California, where the Man and many of its related components were constructed, Johnstone recalled being in Florence and finding out that Harvey had settled on the Da Vinci theme. Though the painter of the Mona Lisa was from Florence, it was pure coincidence that Johnstone was there.
"The trip [instantly] turned from tourism to research," Johnstone remembered. "All of a sudden, I wasn't just looking at the architecture, I was trying to download it."
Over Burning Man's 30 previous years, the Man itself has taken many different forms. More precisely, the base on which the Man is built has often morphed, while the Man himself has had only two or three main flavors. In its earliest years in the desert—the event began on San Francisco's Baker Beach in 1986, and moved to the playa in 1990—the Man was built directly on the ground. From 1996 to 2000, he was mounted atop piles of hay bales.
Fire-spawned dust devils, said to be the spirits of the Paiute Indians, are one of the most beautiful elements of the big burns at Burning Man. Until Burning Man 2001, when the Man was placed atop a large wooden platform, no one had seen them before.[Photo: Holly Kreuter]
The modern Burning Man era began in 2001 when the Man was erected on top of a 30-foot-tall wooden tower. The burn that year was monumental, resulting in what have ever since been known to Burning Man veterans as "ancestors," gorgeous fire-spawned dust devils that spin off the conflagration one after another and that are said to be the spiritual descendents of the Paiute Indians that once populated the area around the Black Rock Desert.
The 2013 Man, standing atop the "flying saucer" at night.[Photo: Daniel Terdiman]
Suffice it to say that at an event where the bar is raised year after year on the scope and scale of art projects, the Man base has been no exception. While the Man himself has almost always been 40 feet tall, no previous year better exemplifies that trend than 2013, when the Man stood proud atop a massive, 55-foot-tall, 117-foot wide, classic 1950s sci-fi flying saucer. Well, except maybe 2014's Man, Johnstone's second as lead designer, which for the first time since 1995 stood directly on the playa. Whereas every previous Man had essentially been a skinny, skinless skeleton, 2014's was 105 feet tall, and appeared thicker, and to be wearing clothes. He looked like he'd grown up.
By that measure, last year's Man project was actually somewhat tame. Although the effigy itself was 60 feet tall, it was mounted on a large, wide (and just 9 foot tall) maze, meaning his head was nearly 40 feet lower than in 2014.
Clearly, it was time to step it up.
Harvey's initial idea for 2016 was inspired by Da Vinci's famous Vitruvian Man, which "depicts a man in two superimposed positions with his arms and legs apart and inscribed in a circle and square."
The idea is audacious, yet fairly simple: Groups of burners will manually turn a giant wheel at ground level inside the Man's base. That, in turn, will rotate a set of complex gears which will ultimately rotate the Man, framed by a giant wooden circle and suspended 50 feet in the air.
A model demonstrates how the Man will rotate in mid-air.
Although the Man will appear to be quite similar to Johnstone's two previous designs, this year's will be a "little beefier," said Jason Wilkinson, a lead builder on the project. "We steroided him out" because the design called for a stronger Man.
It was a "flippy Man, the idea of him cartwheeling," Johnstone recalled. "It took [Harvey] four or five seconds to utter, but it's taken the better part of a year to figure out how to engineer and build it."
Being in Florence afforded Johnstone up-close access to the Da Vinci Museum, which in addition to things like his diving suits and tanks that may well have been hundreds of years ahead of his time, also houses a number of miniature models based Da Vinci's writings, known as the codexes.
"It was very, very useful," Johnstone told me while we sat on dusty couches during a break from building the Man base on an extremely hot Black Rock Desert day earlier this month. "Seeing something in 2D in red chalk is one thing, but to see it physically, built out of wood, is a different experience. It gets your gears going and all of a sudden an idea presents itself."
Da Vinci himself had come up with all manner of designs for mechanical lifting using gear systems, and it's clear from comparing photos from the museum in Florence that Johnstone incorporated the same look and feel in the giant wheel-like gears that will rotate the Man.
The base on which the Man will be mounted is huge, and it seems extremely complex. But in a way it's fairly simple—not least because there are no electronics involved. Everything is people-powered.
As groups of Burners turn the ground-level wheel underneath the Man, the wheel spins a long thin rod, atop which is a second wheel adorned with vertical gear teeth. As those teeth spin, they rotate a vertical gear that, long story short, turns the Man itself.
Looking at the plans for the project, it all seems very rigid and engineered. But Burners will actually see the artistic version of this, with Florentine-style painting on the outside walls of the structure, as well as a frieze on the ceiling of the base building that depicts a series of images of the Man interacting with various Da Vinci inventions.
"If I can be so bold, I wanted to do it in a way that would make him proud," Johnstone said. "I hope he'd be very honored by what we're doing. I think he'd be absolutely delighted by the cleverness, this mixing of art and engineering."
The 2014 Man, with a crescent moon in the background.[Photo: James Addison]
Designing this Vitruvian Man is one thing, building it is something else altogether.
For that, Johnstone turned to Joe Schwan, otherwise known at Burning Man as Joe the Builder.
The Man's lead builder, Joe the Builder[Photo: Daniel Terdiman]
Schwan has been the lead builder on the Man project since 2009, and over the years has led a number of different Man build teams. Like many things in the Burning Man world, there are politics involved. In 2014, the longtime Man Krewe was suddenly disbanded and largely replaced with newcomers, a decision that still rankles people on or close to the previous team.
Nevertheless, Schwan is still in charge and by all appearances inspires loyalty from his current crew of between two and three dozen, some of whom wear "Joe the Builder Fan Club" patches featuring the Man's head, Schwan's signature black Stetson and handlebar mustache, and a clown nose.
Sitting in the small shed on the build site that is his office, Schwan recalled Johnstone coming to him with the concept for the Vitruvian Man and asking if it could be built.
"I look at it for a few minutes, and in those few minutes, I have to be able to build in a couple of different ways in order to say yes," he told me. "So that's what I did. I sat and looked at it, because...working out here [in the desert, far from civilization] is not like working in town where you have everything at your disposal."
To be sure, there are other factors at work beyond the accessibility of tools and parts. The Black Rock Desert is one of the harshest environments in the world, with weather that can veer in minutes from blazing hot and calm to hurricane-like wind conditions, along with rain, thunder, and bitter cold.
Given the thousands of pounds of structure and Man the base has to support, along with the extreme wind dynamics and the fact that the Man will be rotating 360 degrees perpendicular to the ground, it's no wonder that any builder, let alone the man constructing the event's centerpiece, would want to have a backup plan in case his initial idea didn't pan out.
Indeed, it might not occur to anyone else, but to Joe the Builder, the concept was clear: Treat the ring encricling the Man as the project's foundation, and then build the rest of the building to support that foundation and the accompanying forces and opposing forces.
"It is a challenge, you have no idea," Schwan said. "Because the forces are moving, and he is not like a bicycle wheel. He is top heavy, so when his force comes down, he wants to move all on his own."
In ideal conditions, he would have used electronic or electromagnetic brakes to keep the Man's rotation to a manageable speed, but the playa doesn't allow for that. That meant relying on a friction brake that will limit the Man to no more than 2 RPM, no matter if the groups of people spinning the wheel below try to go faster.
As we spoke, the event was still several weeks from opening its gates, and not only was the Man still strapped down inside the truck, but the building of the base had only just begun.
That meant that Schwan still had to be prepared with modifications in case his plan wasn't up to the realities of bringing Johnstone's design to life in the Black Rock Desert.
"I've already got them designed," he said, "but they're in my head. I didn't want to put them on paper, because that means I admit they're real."
Making modifications doesn't only happen on the playa. Schwan said that not long after beginning the construction process, he realized that his original design couldn't handle the load or the forces to which it would be subjected.
"I realized we needed a bigger building," he said, "so we expanded the size of the building, which nobody would complain about because it's just more firewood. But we needed it for the structure to make it safe."
More firewood indeed. One would think that that would just contribute to a bigger fire and more happy Burners. But it's also possible that the result would be that the Man takes longer to fall.
Ideally, explained Dimitri Timohovich, one-half of the husband-and-wife team that has been in since 2001, the Man falls in 20 or 30 minutes. But in both 2014 and 2015, perhaps thanks to Johnstone's beefier Man design, it took well over an hour, leading to a certain amount of frustration on the part of spectators, emergency services workers, volunteers, and others who had to wait.
The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the Man has to be built to exacting standards.
"Because the Man is a public structure for the time the event is open, it has to comply to building codes," Timohovich said. "Then we have to come in and burn down something that's not supposed to burn."
The build crew is taking certain steps to try to ensure a speedier burn this year, including fastening Duraflame logs throughout the Man's body and utilizing as much non-fire-retardant wood as possible.
Still, Johnstone shrugs when asked about whether or not the Man will fall quickly, noting that the design has to withstand winds of up to 90 miles an hour.
"There's a pyro crew and that's their problem," Johnstone said. "We hand it over to the pyro crew and they have to figure out how to burn it."
The 2016 Man was built at The Gate 510 in San Leandro, California, before being trucked to the Black Rock Desert, where it, and the Man base, are completed.[Photo: Daniel Terdiman]
Using a middle-of-the-night lunar eclipse as a diversion, he climbed the Man, set it on fire and ran, only to be quickly captured, arrested, and subsequently convicted of a crime.
But before anyone could stop the fire, the Man was engulfed, ultimately charred far beyond salvation.
While it usually takes weeks to build and construct each year's Man, that episode in 2007 was a testament to the skills and commitment of the Burning Man community.
"The build crew was there, and said, We know what to do, the lumber's already ordered and on its way," Johnstone recalled. "That became a teachable moment—a crisis, and not only a crisis, but a crisis in an impossible environment. But it was a good example of what to do when things get bad. You don't throw your hands up and quit. You order more lumber and get to work."
The crew finished the new Man in 30 hours and the official burn went off exactly as planned.
Man Timeline: A chart showing the growth and changes in the Man design between 2010 and 2015.Chart: courtesy of Burning Man
Burning Man is unlike almost any other festival. While there is some infrastructure built by the Burning Man Organization—the Center Camp cafe and the on-playa headquarters for a number of volunteer departments—almost everything else is built by the event's participants themselves.
The Man, of course, is also built by the Org. But it has a completely different base every year, and so, as Johnstone put it, the project is "always a prototype."
Essentially that means that every year, the build team has to figure out where the weak points in the design are, and solve as they go. It always seems to work, because it has to. But there are certainly moments when doubts creep in. This year is no exception.
"It's going to be a relief when that thing starts turning," Johnstone said. "But I have no doubt that it will."
Susan Karlin contributed to this article.
Note: The author is a longtime Burning Man volunteer.
With its Charge 2 band's cardio and breathing offerings, Fitbit is putting its years-in-the-making PurePulse sensor to work in new ways.
Behind a wall of privacy dividers in a common space at Fitbit's San Francisco headquarters, a young man in a surfing T-shirt and shorts—and an oxygen mask—is running on a treadmill. Its speed keeps increasing, compelling him to pick up his own pace.
"Let's go! Let's go!" barks a female observer by way of forceful encouragement, while another man monitors the runner's progress on a PC hooked up to the oxygen mask through a boxy piece of scientific equipment.
Twelve minutes and 40 seconds after this exercise begins, the runner—smiling, but flushed and sweaty—is finally allowed to end this strenuous workout. Sitting comfortably nearby, I'm impressed by his accomplishment, and glad that it wasn't me.
What he's been doing is getting a VO2 max assessment, a measurement of the maximum volume of oxygen that someone can use while exercising. It's expressed as a numerical score that's useful for benchmarking athletic performance—how you're doing against personal goals and compared to other people.
As I've just seen, getting your VO2 max score via traditional means is physically demanding. It can also cost about $250. That's why these evaluations have been the province of serious atheletes rather than those of us with a less all-encompassing interest in physical fitness.
"Once you've felt the pain once, there's a certain group of people who want to do it again, because they're crazy," says Fitbit human innovation research group director Scott McLean, whose past gigs included helping the Cleveland Browns and Cleveland Cavaliers keep tabs on their performance. "But there are others that don't."
The Fitbit Charge 2 offers a variety of color options
With its new Fitbit Charge 2—one of two fitness bands it's announcing today—Fitbit aims to let health-minded people get the benefits of such an assessment without feeling the pain even once. A feature called Cardio Fitness Level calculates a VO2 max equivalent by monitoring your heart rate during exercise and then combining that data with other information Fitbit knows about you, such as your weight.
The $150 Charge 2 is a significant upgrade to Fitbit's best-selling model, the Charge HR, with a display that's four times larger, swappable bands, and other improvements. For now, the Cardio Fitness Level feature is exclusive to the Charge 2, as is a new guided breathing feature. Both utilize the band's PurePulse continuous heart-rate monitor, a technology that first shipped in Fitbits early last year.
Simply being able to see your heart rate at a glance, when you're at rest or working out, and track it over time, is a valuable capability. (And a competitive necessity for Fitbit, given that other wearables such as the Apple Watch also offer it.) With the new cardio and breathing features, the company is using heart-rate data as an ingredient for more ambitious offerings, designed to set the Charge 2 apart from its rivals and get its owners doing a lot more than counting steps and measuring calories burned.
That was the long-term plan for PurePulse all along, explains Shelten Yuen, Fitbit's VP of research, who joined the company in 2007, well before it shipped its first fitness tracker. "The first thing you need to do is get the sensors out in the world," he says. "Then you can start to get more meaning out of the data."
In April 2011, when Fitbit's R&D team started working on the technology that became PurePulse, people who wanted to measure their heart rate while exercising generally futzed around with chest straps. In theory, it seemed plausible that a wrist-worn gadget might flash light to detect blood flow under the skin, using a process called photoplethysmography. But it wasn't entirely clear how you'd make it work accurately and reliably—and continuously, without the wearer having to do anything.
"We basically got RadioShack-type parts, and we just stuck them together with duct tape and strapped them to our arms and started running next to a oscilloscope to see if it was possible to get a heart-rate signal," says Yuen. It was. Then the company poured effort into turning this science project into something small and power-efficient enough to build into the backside of a fitness band, where it could stay in contact with your wrist throughout the day and night.
Along the way, Fitbit dealt with such intricacies of consumerizing the technology and engineering the fitness band so that it automatically disabled the PurePulse sensor if you removed the band from your wrist. That was important not only to conserve battery life but also to avoid the sensor's flashing green lights being a room-illuminating irritant if you put the band on your nightstand before retiring for the night.
The Charge 2's new features as seen in the Fitbit app
The origins of the Charge 2's Cardio Fitness Level feature came when Fitbit's researchers pondered the VO2 max test, which has been around for decades, and asked themselves if it would be possible to approximate a score based on the data a Fitbit could collect. "We have a bunch of sensors now," says senior research manager Subbu Venkatraman. "We have heart rate, we have GPS, and we have a bunch of other information about the user. We know your age, we know your gender, we know your weight. Can we use all of this information together to give you a good estimate of what your cardio fitness looks like? That's what we built." And in part by performing almost 100 conventional VO2 max tests like the one I witnessed, the company found that the scores it could generate using the Charge 2 band were indeed comparable to what you'd get if you put on an oxygen mask and ran yourself ragged on a treadmill.
The idea of a wearable device synthesizing a VO2 max score isn't altogether new: Some Garmin sports watches can do it when coupled with a separate heart-rate monitor, and Microsoft's Band 2, which shipped last year, offers its own VO2 max feature. But it's still an emerging concept, with challenges ranging from collecting the data to calculating the score to figuring out how to present the bottom line in a way that makes sense to people who have never heard the term "VO2 max."
The last thing Fitbit wanted to do was make the whole process feel like a test. "There are a variety of ways in which you could do this experience on a Charge 2," says Yuen. "You could say, 'User, you can now get a VO2 max assessment, a cardio fitness assessment. All you have to do is run this distance at this escalated pace,' very similar to what we're going to see on a treadmill."
"Instead, we just say, 'Go out and run like you're going to run—just make sure it's 10-minutes long, and we'll give you an estimate.' That's really all it comes down to. I think trying to find ways to make it as easy as possible for a user, while still maintaining accuracy and precision in the measurement, is part of the art that goes into these devices and these experiences."
"We spent a lot of time thinking about how to take this rather technical term and make it really approachable and understandable to a large fraction of our users," adds Venkatraman. Rather than throwing the term "VO2 max" around, the Fitbit app calls it a "Cardio Fitness" score. For additional context, the company also drew on research about VO2 max results for different groups of people to give each user's score a word rating—such as "Good" or "Excellent"—that compares it against the people of the same gender and age range.
As for the Fitbit Charge 2's new guided breathing feature, it has plenty of company, from an array of breathing apps for iPhones and Androids to a capability that Apple will soon add to the Apple Watch. In all its variants, the basic concept is similar: You get get guided through a restful, meditative session of deep breathing, in and out. But as Fitbit considered how to implement the idea, it concluded that it was less of a commodity than it might seem.
"Someone who's not done this before, if you set a really slow pace for them, they have a really hard time matching that pace," says Venkatraman. "Whereas, someone who's been into yoga for five years, you set that pace for them, and they're like, 'This is stupid, that's too easy for me; I want to do it at a much slower pace.' It very quickly became obvious to us that this needs to be personalized."
The Charge 2 sets the duration of each inhale/exhale step based on data about the user's heart rate collected by the PurePulse sensor. Then it also monitors heart rate to give real-time feedback during the breathing session. "We think of heart rate as a constant number, usually, but that's not true. It actually varies a lot as you breathe deeply," says Venkatraman.
As a low-pressure way to indicate that a user is managing to breathe at the personalized pace that the Charge 2 has chosen, Fitbit shows a sparkly little animation effect on the band's display. "You don't really want to see a score while you're trying to calm down." Venkatraman says with a laugh.
Even as Fitbit built these new cardio and breathing features atop the Charge 2's heart monitor, it was also refining the PurePulse sensor itself. "We wanted to get the electronics a bit smaller and more power-efficient," says Yuen. "We actually had to redesign the entire electrical circuit for PurePlus going into the Charge 2 in order to meet those requirements." The less power-hungry sensor helps the Charge 2 maintain a five-day battery life, even though it uses a smaller battery than previous models.
"If you look all the way from the beginning of Fitbit's history, we wanted to smash a bunch of different technologies into a really small thing that would have a long battery life," Yuen says. The vision has kept the company busy for almost a decade, from the era when it wasn't doing much more than counting steps to today's PurePulse-enhanced features. And with around half of the company's research efforts going into "blue-sky investigations," the Fitbits of the future could incorporate capabilities that currently look as daunting as heart-rate monitoring did a half-decade ago.
Data from 10,000 Pebble users doesn't lie: Here are hacks to make your workplace culture happier and more productive.
In the 1960s and '70s, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi gave pagers to study subjects, ranging from motorcycle gang members to sheepherders. When the pagers buzzed, the participants' job was to record their happiness levels. These studies ushered in the modern era of happiness research (and gave birth to an idea you've probably heard about—the times when productive hours float by like minutes in "flow").
Recently, the smartwatch company Pebble built an app that did largely the same thing—except thanks to its install base, the scale was massive, with 10,000 people recording their moods and energy levels over the course of the week. The study is no doubt biased toward the tastes of Pebble users—youthful urbanites who readily adopt wearable technology—but the statistically significant findings support severalpreviousstudies. We tapped Susan Holcomb, head of data at Pebble, to walk us through the findings, and offer her best back-of-napkin advice on how we might exploit them to design happier, more productive workplaces.
If you've ever felt miserable sitting with colleagues around a conference table, you aren't alone. Because in someone's entire day, at home or work, "people were saddest when they were in meetings," says Holcomb. "The meetings-driven culture is really toxic. It's not just because meetings are unproductive, it also creates stress around people."
Some workplaces have recognized the problem. They have relaxed seating arrangements, rather than big boardrooms, for people to chat casually rather than meet formally. Others arrange complete, meeting-free days, scheduled every week.
Holcomb offers up another alternative: to mix the most miserable part of your job (the meeting) with one of the happiest parts of your day (lunch).
Lunchtime and 7 p.m. are, quite depressingly if you think too much about it, the times people report as their happiest parts of the day. But Holcomb suggests that taking your lunch hour and making it a lunch meeting might neutralize the misery. "There's probably not a [strict] mechanism to this," says Holocomb, "but maybe lunch is going to lunch with a coworker, so you're talking about ideas for your job."
From 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., people report a cascading slump in energy, which is why it can be so hard to stay productive in the afternoon.
Holocomb thinks it's a good time to try yoga or general exercise, both of which gave study participants more energy directly following the activity—and a greater boost than reported from caffeine. In this regard, there may be something to all those Valley-style businesses that host yoga classes on-site. There's just one catch: "Some of the perks we're familiar with in Silicon Valley can work if you can get people motivated to take advantage of them," says Holocomb. "I think it's important to have some mechanism to allow people to get motivated in that." In other words, it's one thing to host a yoga class at 2 p.m. It's another to properly encourage employees to go. It's worth it though—people didn't just report more energy after yoga, they were happier, too (an effect that has been shown in other studies).
In terms of happiness, alcohol offered the single, greatest boost in people's day—outpacing yoga, exercise, and socializing. "It is maybe not the message Pebble wants to promote, but it makes sense—alcohol brings a sense of euphoria," says Holocomb. "It's a short-lived but real thing."
So there really is something to the idea of a "happy hour." Note that happy hours don't start at noon. They're an end-of-day thing. Alcohol may boost your mood in the short term, but it also sucks your energy (and, of course, it isn't associated with long-term happiness).
"Social events" also ranked high on the list of when people reporting being happiest. Overall activities like yoga ranked higher than socializing, but when Holocomb looked at the data of individuals, many were at their happiest interacting with people they liked.
"The biggest driver for happiness is about relationships. You can have all the organized yoga activities at your workplace you want, but if you don't have a culture fostering positive relationships between different people working there, you're not going to see the kinds of results you want," says Holocomb. "That's nebulous feedback, but one of the most surprising things to me was how important relationships are. Given that we spend the bulk of our time at work, fostering good relationships is critical."
But how? Aren't friendships with colleagues easier said than done? Maybe not. Holocomb, ever the data scientist, actually came up with a clever way to foster person-to-person relationships when her team suddenly expanded and everyone was working with strangers. She built a scheduler into the company's database that would pair people on her team up randomly to go get coffee together.
"It really made us feel more connected," says Holocomb. "People would get that chance to go talk about things that had no relation to work at all, but people built relationships." Indeed, if we're all going to have to work our lives away, anyway, we might as well enjoy the company we keep in the process.
Related Video: Can You Really Design Happiness? Yes, If There Are Puppies Involved.
If you don't spend money on a garage, there's lots of extra cash to add bike-friendly amenities to a new building.
A new apartment building in Sweden doesn't have any parking spaces. Instead, the developers invested the money that would have gone to a parking garage into creating an ideal place to live for people who don't want to own a car.
"The strategy is to look at why people have to use cars, and substitute bikes for the cars," says architect Cord Siegel, one of the principals at Hauschild + Siegel, which designed the seven-story building, called Cykelhuset ("bicycle house").
Recognizing that people often drive when they're shopping, the architects included huge delivery mailboxes that residents will be able to use to shop online instead; the mailboxes can also be used for returns. If someone needs to pick up a heavy load in town, the building will have a stock of cargo bikes that can be borrowed. The bikes are also big enough to substitute for a station wagon, and can haul several kids to school or day care.
Because the building is close to the city center—just a few minutes by bike to the central train station—it also will be easy for residents to get to work. The building will offer commuter bikes for people who want to use a folding bike on the train. The building also offers a "mobility subscription" that includes car pools, a bike repair service, and credits on the bus or train to use when the weather is bad.
Inside, the elevators are wider than usual, so a cargo bike can fit inside. The elevator doors open on both sides, so someone doesn't have to struggle to turn the bike around when they reach their floor. There's parking both downstairs, in a bike garage, and in front of each door. Bikes also easily fit inside the apartments.
"You can come with the bicycle directly to your apartment," says Siegel. "If you buy something you can transport it in front of the fridge."
Even the visual design of the building is bike-inspired; the round windows are a reference to bike wheels.
Each apartment has a balcony with self-irrigated planters, and there's a shared greenhouse on the roof that can be enjoyed in the middle of bleak Swedish winters. "We have this so people can make a holiday at home," he says. "It's easier to stay home and have the feeling of nature, so you maybe don't take these holidays that are not necessary."
On the first floor, the building will have 31 lofts that can be rented by the night. Like a motel, you can pull up directly to the door—but on a bike. When guests arrive at the nearby train station, they can rent bikes from the company that runs the building, and then use the bikes throughout their visit.
Cykelhuset is under construction now and plans to open in December. Streetfilms documented the building in a recent visit to Malmö.
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