Why WUPHF deserved to fail

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If you’ve watched much of the TV show “The Office”, you’ve likely heard of WUPHF. It was a company started by Ryan, where the app would send your outgoing messages everywhere all at once. I’m not talking about double-posting to Facebook and Instagram at once, but sending a direct message to a single person across literally every channel they use.

Here’s a quick clip that explains it:

The brilliance of including that in the show is that WUPHF almost seemed feasible, and kind of looked like where we were heading with social media. I’m so glad things never developed that way, because even small glimpses at WUPHF in the real world are just awful.

For example, most medical appointments now end up with me getting at least three reminders — a phone call, a text message, and an email. I get it, they’re trying to reduce no-shows, but it’s at my expense. It’s like they’re saying “Because some people won’t show up when they say they will, we’re going to bug you a lot even though you’ve never missed an appointment.“

Or a few days ago, I got a text from a business coach that I follow online. I already get his emails and follow him on social media a bit, but the text was completely automated:

“Hello from xxx, I would like to send you text messages from this number, would that be ok?

Reply YES to receive texts, and STOP to deny this request. MSG and data rates may apply.”

That was a very easy “STOP”, and now I have less respect for him. I indeed text with our current coach, but for someone I barely know to try to open up yet another channel (and do it automated) is simply not acceptable.

Back to WUPFH, can you imagine if something like that really existed? Someone could send me a single message and have it light up every device I own? That would just be so so bad…

For The Office, it was a creative and funny business for Ryan to start. In the real world, I hope nothing even close to it ever comes around.

It’s designed to wear out first

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It seems like the power cable for your phone wears out too quickly, doesn’t it? I know that we often are having to replace those cords. They must be poorly made, right?

That may be true, but those cable are intentionally designed to wear out. When you have friction in a connection like that, something is going to wear down — either the end of the cord, or the port on your phone. They’re designed so that the cable wears out, not the port on your phone, as it’s much easier to replace the cable than to replace the phone.

I hate having to buy new cables, but I’d much rather that than wearing out the ports on the phone.

reMarkable

It’s similar with the reMarkable tablet. To help make it feel more like pencil on paper, there is a bit of friction between the tip of the pen and the surface of the tablet.

As you might expect, the nib on the end of the pen is intended to wear out rather than messing up the surface of the tablet. It wears out slowly (every few months for most people), and the fact that it wears out is 100% intentional and actually makes the product even better.

Many things wear out on their own, and need to be replaced, but sometimes it makes sense to design something that will intentionally wear out, as that wear can make the experience better in the meantime.

Don’t try to be the best – just be better

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Striving to be the best at something can be a great approach in some areas. If you want to win a gold medal in the Olympics, you literally have to become the best at your craft.

For most of us, though, becoming the “best” isn’t attainable, or often even measurable. If I wanted our marketing agency to be the very best, what would that even mean? It’s not possible to even measure.

Instead, we always strive to be better. Adam Grant put it this way:

Striving to be the best is a mistake. It creates an illusion of an endpoint – and a delusion that you can only succeed by beating others.

Striving to be better shifts the focus from victory to mastery. You’re competing with your past self and raising the bar for your future self.

Adam digs deep into this concept in a recent episode of his podcast, which you can find here.

Ryan Holiday shares a similar perspective in his book “The Obstacle Is The Way” when he says to “Think progress, not perfection.”

We all have room to improve, and virtually none of us will be “perfect” in what we’re trying to do, so embrace the progress and keep moving forward.

Should you be scheduling more emails?

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A few years ago, Gmail added a nifty feature tucked into the main “Send” button to “Schedule Send”. Pressing that button will open a prompt for when you want to send it, and then it essentially hides the email and sends it at the appropriate time.

I use this feature occasionally, but an article from Deb Tennen lists some reasons why you might consider scheduling almost every email that you send.

Her core argument is based on these four reasons:

  1. You have more time to change your mind. You can “undo send” in Gmail for a matter of seconds, but scheduling an email for later in the day gives you plenty of time if you change your mind.
  2. You can hide your working hours. In some cases, it can look bad to send an email at 10pm, so this can make it look like you send it during normal hours. The idea here isn’t to be deceitful, but to encourage worktime communication with your clients and coworkers.
  3. You can respond immediately while avoiding the ping-pong. Respond right away, get that email off your plate, but know that it won’t be seen by the other party for a few hours.
  4. Save some stress from both parties. Many people clear out their inboxes on Friday afternoons, but that often means adding clutter to other inboxes. Send your email on Friday afternoon, but schedule it go out on Monday.

For me, my biggest concern is that a follow-up might show up in that same thread during the “sent but scheduled” window and it could make me look bad. For example:

  • Client: “Should we make this red or blue?”
  • My response: “Red would be ideal because of a, b, c” (schedule send for later)
  • Client, before my scheduled email goes out: “Actually, we discussed internally and we’re going with blue.”
  • My initial response finally goes through, and seems really weird in that new context.

I very well may be over-thinking this. Double emails like that are fairly rare, and there’s still a chance you would see the new message from the client and then edit or cancel your old response before it went out.

Deb also shares a few tips for improvement, including the idea to schedule those emails for random times. If they always go out at 9:00 on the dot, that could look weird. It’s kind of like the out-of-control email automation I shared a few years ago when every email showed up at 10:57am.

I can’t see using it as much as Deb suggests, but I do think I’ll start using it more often when it matches up with her four tips. Be sure to check out her full post for more.

How often do you use a “schedule send” feature?

Who should you accept criticism from?

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Whenever you do something in public, from writing to speaking to sports, critics will find you. When should you listen to them and when should you ignore them?

In his book “Limitless“, author Jim Kwik makes it really simple:

“Don’t take criticism from someone you wouldn’t take advice from.”

There are a lot of people in this world that I have a great deal of respect for. If they offer me advice or criticism, I’m going to listen.

On the other hand, if I hear from someone that has neither the credentials or relationship to have earned that respect, I’m less likely to heed what they have to say. I’d be foolish to ignore them completely (maybe they’re pointing out an obvious flaw, like a typo), but generally I don’t worry about their opinion.

Either way, if you need to offer a bit of criticism, take the time to wrap it in a bit of kindness and put in a bit of emotional labor to help the recipient have the best chance of appreciating what you have to say.

Where is your perimeter?

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It’s important to know what you don’t know. I shared last year about two “intermediate” website developers who are actually miles apart in terms of skill. One underestimated their skills, while the other overestimated theirs.

In the case of “Alex” in that post, he was someone that really understand where their perimeter of knowledge ended, and just how much was beyond it. It was a good example of Warren Buffett’s idea of the “circle of competence”:

“You have to stick within what I call your circle of competence. You have to know what you understand and what you don’t understand. It’s not terribly important how big the circle is. But’s terribly important that you know where the perimeter is.”

It’s ok if you don’t know something, as long as you know you don’t know it. I’d rather work with someone that has a small (but well-defined perimeter) over someone that knows more but doesn’t really know where the edge is.

In fact, someone that can clearly admit a small perimeter of knowledge in a given subject is a rare thing, as many people are taught to hide that info and pretend to know more. It’s like the idea of being wrong more often; if you know where your perimeter is, you can do work to expand it. On the other hand, if you pretend you already know everything, you’re in for a bad time.

The Furnace

I can point to areas in my life where my perimeter is very small. For example, if our furnace isn’t working I can tell the technician that the breaker is still on, power is getting to the unit, and the pilot light is lit, but that’s about it. The rest is beyond my perimeter, and I’m likely to make things worse if I start unscrewing more panels and try to “fix” it.

That’s not to say you need to rely on others every time. I’d likely just call a technician to fix the furnace, but some YouTube and Google wouldn’t be bad options either. As long you know where the perimeter, you can take appropriate action to try to expand it.

Spend time to establish your perimeter, and then the work you do to expand it will be much more efficient.

Can you do it again today?

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Years ago, I built a very popular website that showcased interesting locations in Google Earth. It took a lot of manual labor to find and categorize things, but it was a popular destination for a lot of users.

Could I do it again today? Not a chance.

First, technology is different. My manual labor of adding items to the database couldn’t be easily replicated in 2005. Today, that’s not a big advantage.

More importantly, Google Earth just isn’t as popular anymore. It’s still a great tool, but is roughly 10% as popular as it was in 2005. Here’s a chart from Google Trends that shows it:

This can happen in many areas of life, where you ignore the full set of circumstances that made something successful in the past, thinking you can still easily duplicate it today.

Warren Buffet put it this way, largely in reference to investing:

“The same mistake that a baseball manager would were he to judge the future prospects of a 42-year-old center fielder on the basis of his lifetime batting average.”

When I look at doing something that has worked well before, I try to think of reasons why it might not work as well today. Sometimes it can still work great, but sometimes the world has changed too much to allow it now.

Be willing to really look at the full circumstances for a past success, and dig deep into the “why it won’t work” ideas to help you avoid major pitfalls today.

Calm is contagious

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If you’re in a suddenly stressful situation, freaking out is likely to make things worse. It can be hard to control, but staying calm, particularly if you’re in a position of leadership during the event, can make a huge difference.

From Ryan Holiday’s excellent book “The Daily Stoic“, he shares:

There is a maxim that Navy SEALs pass from officer to officer, person to person. In the midst of chaos, even in the fog of war, their battle-tested advice is this: “Calm is contagious.”

Especially when that calm is coming from the man or woman in charge. If the men begin to lose their wits, if the group is unsure of what to do next, it’s the leader’s job to do one thing: instill calm— not by force but by example.

If you’re stressing out, others are apt to follow suit in that regard too.

Walk, don’t run

It’s similar to a practice I learned years ago about dealing with emergencies indoors. If you need to hurry to the kitchen because your child is crying, a brisk walk is a much better idea than trying to run. Running will save you perhaps a second or two, but will greatly increase your chance of running into something or falling down, either of which could make the situation worse.

It’s one of the reasons that you don’t often see paramedics running. Beyond the danger of it, walking quickly will help maintain a sense of calm, which can help the entire situation.

Keeping calm in a tough situation is always a good move.

Problem Solving versus Problem Finding

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Years ago, salespeople had all of the knowledge. If you needed information about a specific feature on a car, or a list of homes for sale in your area, there was no Google to help you out — you needed a human. The best salespeople were great problem solvers.

These days, much of that has gone away. You can go to a car dealership as well-informed (if not more) than the sales staff, so their information is no longer their weapon.

In most cases, customers that know what their problem is don’t need help solving it. Instead, they need more help finding the right problem to solve.

In a recent episode of Guy Kawasaki’s “Remarkable People” podcast, Guy interviewed author Daniel Pink who framed it like this:

And finally, and I think this is one of the most intriguing things, is that we used to be in a world of problem solving. So that you had salespeople who would say, “Ah, I’m not really in sales, I’m a problem solver.” And that’s cool.

It’s just that today, if your customer prospect knows exactly what their problem is, they don’t need you. So when do they need you more? They need you when they’re wrong about their problem, or they don’t know what their problem is. And so the skill shifted from the skill of problem solving to the skill of problem finding. Can you identify hidden problems, surface latent problems?

The key to unpacking those hidden problems often comes from asking the right questions. I’ve found some great resources lately to help uncover great questions (like this podcast episode and this PDF).

The right questions can help uncover the right problem, which is likely the best direction to go in many of your interactions today.

Is reading work?

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In episode 179 of The Long and The Short Of It podcast, hosts Pete and Jen argue that reading for knowledge should be considered “work”, and therefore it’s acceptable to do during the workday.

I don’t disagree, but it’s tricky.

I read quite a lot, and most of it is for the benefit of our business, but I do it almost entirely outside of the typical M-F/9-5 “working hours”. For me, it comes down to a few things:

  1. I need to be available when our team and clients are in order to get that work done. I can’t generally read through the afternoon, and then expect my team to hop on a call later in the evening.
  2. Part of it comes down to appearances. I think I’d feel like a slacker if I was kicked back in my office reading on my Kindle when one of our team walked it. Even if it really was “work”, it feels more like play and would look bad.

Pete puts it this way, which sums up how I feel as well:

I still grapple with this every single day, where if I have an hour in an afternoon free, I still struggle with the idea of using that to read a book because I guess that’s how society has conditioned me.

Golf

In a way, it’s similar to how I feel about golf. On one hand, it seems there are some people that golf all week long for seemingly dubious reasons (“just to get out of the office”). On the other hand, many of those types of people derive a huge number of sales out of those games of golf, so it’s really more business-like than it seems.

As my role continues to shift further away from “doing” and more toward “leading/growing”, I think this is an area that I need understand better so I can use it to the benefit of our team.

Magic Time

A related concept in that podcast episode is what Jen calls “Magic Time” — time that she specifically books on her calendar to help improve herself. It might be reading, or listening to a podcast, or going on a walk, or going to a museum.

For me, my mid-week tends to stay pretty full, but I could potentially see making some space like that on Monday or Friday. It’s a fascinating concept.

What do you think? Is reading considered to be work? Taking it further, would you be comfortable with your team knowing you were in your office reading while they were pushing to hit deadlines for your clients?