The odds don’t feel right

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There are times in our lives when it feels like something should happen more often than it does, but the math proves that it’s actually on track.

For example, the Atlanta Braves made it to the postseason 14 straight times (1991-2005) but only won the World Series once. It feels like if you make it 14 years in a row, you should probably win 3-4 championships in that time, right? In actuality, with eight teams making it each year, they should have won just 1.75 championships in that time. So yes, their solo championship was less than expected, but even two championships during that 14 year run would have been more than they mathematically should have earned.

Coin Tosses

It’s like tossing a coin. If you flip it five times and they’re all heads, what are the odds of heads on the sixth toss? 50%.

As Joseph Bertrand has said, “the coin has neither memory or consciousness“.

I wish the Braves would have won more titles during that run, but they weren’t as disappointing as it seems at first glance. All things being even, they had a 12.5% chance of a championship each season, so I’m glad one of them worked out for them.

That happens too often

On the other hand, you have events that are seemingly very unlikely yet occur far more frequently than you’d expect because there are tons of opportunities to come up. If there is some feat that only happens “once in a million”, and a million people try it, odds are someone will beat those huge odds.

It’s like playing Powerball, where the odds of winning are 1 in 292,201,338, but yet people win all the time. How do people keep beating those odds?

In the book “Seeking Wisdom“, author Peter Bevelin put it this way:

We underestimate how many opportunities there are for “unlikely” events to happen. Surprises and improbable events happen if they have enough opportunities to happen.

Lottery odds can be fun to look at. I might guess that the next drawing will pull the numbers 1 2 3 4 5 6, and that looks like a silly bet to make. However, it has literally just as good a chance of coming up as a more random mix like 2 11 34 45 58 9, even though the latter set feels more likely.

Cards have never been sorted like that before

If you properly shuffle a deck of cards, the odds are essentially 100% that the order of cards you just created has never been seen before and will never be seen again, simply because the odds are so drastically low.

It doesn’t feel right, but it is. This video explains it a bit more:

My hope is that if the Braves get on another run of postseason appearances they’ll win more often then they did last time, but I already know that it’s unlikely to be true.

In the meantime, I’ll enjoy the fact that they won it all last year and they’re the reigning champions for at least the next few months.

Backups for your backup

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At GreenMellen, we use Google Workspace for much of our work, including Google Drive for all of our files (totaling 173,405 files, 627,810 emails, together taking up 391 GB of storage). Google Drive is great, because it’s essentially an automatic backup of your files. If something goes wrong on your end, Google will still have a copy of the files.

You likely have a similar automatic backup using Dropbox, OneDrive, or a similar solution.

But what happens if you can’t get to them at all? Perhaps you get hacked, or Google disables your account, or Google has some giant unexpected problem. Those are all fairly rare occurrences, but they’re entirely possible. Given that our entire business is on there, having an extra backup is a very good idea.

Takeout

I started simple. I bought a fairly large external hard drive and would manually back up our entire Google Drive once a month or so. Thanks to Google Takeout, you can export your data from all of your Google applications anytime you want. It’s simple and excellent. However, it was still a pain to be downloading and moving that much data every month.

Afi

I’ve now moved that process over to Afi. I’ve just been digging in, but it seems pretty awesome. If you’re on Google Workspace or Office 365, it can back up all of your data from those services daily, quietly, and inexpensively. For $3/user/mo, it will back up your entire Drive, email, contacts, calendars and various other things.

For us, with a team of 8, that’s $24/mo for daily backups, unlimited retention, and no more messing around with the external hard drive. That’s hard to beat.

This isn’t an ad for Afi. I’m not an affiliate or anything, and there may be better solutions out there. I simply encourage you to think about the repercussions of suddenly losing access to your cloud storage, and if a solution like this might be a wise move for your business as well.

An overwhelming number of inputs

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We have a lot of things being thrown our way. In a typical day, most of us will have to deal with requests coming via email, text messages, social media, to-do lists and a variety of other places. It can be a lot!

As Khe Hy said in a recent post, many of us often have three problems:

1. I never have enough time
2. I have a futile fixation of getting it all done
3. I’m overwhelmed by the number of inputs in my life

There’s not an easy solution to this, but a few small shifts can help.

First, “never having enough time” is often something put on us by others. If you find yourself with too little time to get everything done, the issue may be more with your priorities than your available time.

Second, getting a tight grip on your inputs is essential. I laid this out in-depth in The Digital Efficiency Framework, but you really have three kinds of inputs coming at you:

  • Controlled Inputs, where you have tight control of everything in there. This is generally things like your daily flashcards and your consumption list (such as apps like Pocket).
  • Variable Inputs, where you have some control with things such as email, RSS feeds, and the quick notes that you leave for yourself (which may be inspired by things that others tell you to do). The key here is that all of those have a solid ending and can be worked to zero.
  • Uncontrolled Inputs, like social media and news sites. They’ll go on and on and on as long as you let them.

The solution is simple in theory, but hard to pull off; have more controlled inputs and fewer uncontrolled ones. Add great articles to Pocket instead of browsing Instagram. Follow people you respect via RSS instead of Facebook. Little things add up.

Depending on your role you may or may not be able to impact it much, but I’m trying to sort my life around controlled inputs as much as possible to help keep the “overwhelming” inputs at bay.

Efficient isn’t the same as effective

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I strive to be a very efficient person, as evidenced by the well over 100 posts in the “productivity” category of this blog. I try to be careful, though, as efficiency has very little to do with being effective, and the latter is far more important.

Kevin Paul Scott laid this out beautifully in a recent blog post of his, where he summed it up like this when discussing remote/Zoom meetings vs in-person:

We take work that would be accomplished more effectively if done together, and instead we opt for efficiency and do it alone.

When it comes to things like Zoom, it’s certainly a tough balance. There is no doubt that it’s more efficient to meet via Zoom, but also that it’s more effective to meet in person.

At the end of the day, simply facing that question will help you to make wise decisions. While in-person is more effective, there are certainly many cases where meeting via Zoom makes more sense for all parties.

I’m as guilty as anyone of just defaulting to remote meetings, even when getting together might make more sense. It’s certainly something I’ll be chewing on, and I suspect I’ll pivot more of them away from Zoom in the future.

What type of problem is it?

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The best way to start to solve a problem is to first understand what’s really being asked. In David Epstein’s book “Range“, he says:

“Whether chemists, physicists, or political scientists, the most successful problem solvers spend mental energy figuring out what type of problem they are facing before matching a strategy to it, rather than jumping in with memorized procedures.”

It’s much easier said than done, particularly when clients come with a proposed solution in mind.

For example, someone might say “we need more website traffic to get more sales“. That might be true, but it might not be. Perhaps they’re getting too many of the wrong kind of visitor, and fewer/better visitors to the site would increase sales. We’ve had clients before that built a new site and saw their traffic drop, but sales saw a sharp increase. More traffic wasn’t their problem, but rather it was the messaging and user experience.

If you go in simply trying to drive more traffic, you may end up increasing your traffic but reducing your sales even further.

Finding the real problem can be tough, but a possible solution is the “5 Whys“, which I shared last year. You simply ask “why?”, get the answer, and then ask “why?” a few more times.

One way or another, digging to the real problem will help you come up with the best solution.

Important stuff can be hard to measure

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I’m a big believer in using data to help inform decisions. From Google Analytics to our weekly scorecard, we measure as much as we can, and then take appropriate action based on the data.

That said, some of the most important numbers can be the most difficult to obtain. As Albert Einstein has said:

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts”

As time has gone on at GreenMellen, we’ve slowly gone deeper and deeper into our client’s numbers. From web visits to form submissions to CRM data to sales to revenue, there is a long path you can follow. The further you go, though, the murkier it can get.

For example, our marketing efforts might send 10 great leads to a client and they close on eight of them, but what does that really mean? Were eight of those leads amazing ones to send and easy to close, or is the internal sales team for that client really solid? It’s very difficult to know for sure.

Charlie Munger had some longer thoughts on that, and while his angle comes from investing, the overall sentiment holds true for many of us:

“You’ve got a complex system, and it spews out a lot of wonderful numbers that enable you to measure some factors. But there are other factors that are terribly important and there’s no precise numbering you can put to those factors. You know they’re important but you don’t have the numbers. Well, practically everybody overweighs the stuff that can be numbered, because it yields to the statistical techniques they’re taught in academia, and doesn’t mix in the hard-to-measure stuff that may be more important.”

It can be tough to avoid overreliance on available numbers, because it makes the math easier. Keeping the weight of your number accurate can help a lot, even if the “best” numbers are impossible to compute.

That was a dumb decision, right?

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We all make bad decisions from time to time, though it’s often a good thing. Thomas Edison failed on nearly 6,000 types of filament for the light bulb, including some crazy tries like hairs from a friend’s beard, but that’s what helped lead to his genius invention.

When I make a seemingly dumb choice, there are two quotes that help me keep it in the right frame.

First, as Fyodor Dostoevsky has said, “everything seems stupid when it fails.” If something goes wrong, hindsight makes it super clear where it failed, which will often make you regret your decision. Of course, good decisions can have bad outcomes, so perhaps you made a good decision that simply didn’t work out well.

Second, failing in the right way can still look alright. J.M. Keynes said:

“Worldly wisdom teaches us that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.”

It’s like the old quote “nobody gets fired for buying IBM“. They’re considered a safe choice, so if things go wrong you can show how you tried to play it safe.

I like to think I fall into the “succeed unconventionally” group, but it certainly has more risk. Buying from IBM is one thing, but if you buy from a new startup and it goes sideways, you could find yourself in a world of hurt.

I’ll make plenty more dumb decisions in my life, but I hope I can become wise enough to recognize the difference between a bad decision versus a good decision that happened to end poorly, and take the correct lesson away for next time.

Early objections come from premature solutions

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One thing I’ve really been working on for the past few years is listening. Listening to clients, staff, friends, leads, etc. More listening tends to lead to better results for everyone.

A place I’ve really noticed this is when talking to potential clients. The more I can just sit back and let them talk, the better our proposed solution is likely to be. There are often times early in the conversation where I think I haver an answer for that specific part of the problem, but wrapping it in a more comprehensive solution tends to work out better.

In his classic book SPIN Selling, author Neil Rackham touches on that a bit. He says:

“If you’re getting a lot of objections early in the call, it probably means that instead of asking questions, you’ve been prematurely offering solutions and capabilities.”

It’s a tough balance. I work hard to learn from experience so that I can recognize patterns and come up with solutions. However, jumping in too quickly is still a bad idea, and defaulting to “listen longer” never goes wrong.

Routines versus practices

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Having strong daily practices can be a great way to get ahead in life. With solid practices you can consistently work to become healthier, smarter, and more well-rounded.

When I was using the Full Focus Planner regularly, it focused a lot on daily practices (which they call “daily rituals”) and it got me to reconsider mine.

As I thought about it, though, I think there’s an important difference between a daily routine and daily practice.

Routines

Routines are things you do every day, but generally because you just have to. This is things like showering, eating, brushing your teeth, etc. They’re important, no doubt, but it’d be weird to announce that you are “starting a new practice to shower every day”.

Practices

I see practices the other way – these are things that you don’t need to do every day, but if you can they’ll be likely to improve your life.

For me, those are things like blogging on here every day, working on Anki flashcards, practicing Duolingo, reading, exercising, etc. I’m better about some of those than others, but those are the types of practices that can help move me forward.

I’m frequently adjusting my daily practices to focus on areas that need more help, or adjusting them to fit available time in my schedule. The act of simply recognizing what those practices are is a huge first step toward making them part of your life.

What are some good daily practices that you follow?

Define what you don’t know

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If you run a business, it’s important to be aware of the things your company intentionally doesn’t do. For example, at GreenMellen we build amazing websites, but we don’t take on large eCommerce projects. Those are a different beast, and require companies that can focus on those. By knowing that we don’t do those kinds of projects, it helps us keep focused on what we’re best at.

Similarly, it’s important as individuals to try to define what we don’t know. That’s easier said than done, as it’s tough to even recognize where those areas might be. If you can find them, though, it can be a huge advantage.

For example, I don’t drink much alcohol, so if someone wanted me to buy drinks for an upcoming party I would likely do a poor job of knowing which types, which brands, and what quantities to purchase. By recognizing that shortcoming, I can get the proper assistance and advice to make the purchase.

Investing

This stems from a quote from Warren Buffett about investing. A lot of people know a lot of things about a lot of companies, but those that recognize their blind spots generally perform best. From Warren:

“What counts for most people is investing is not how much they know, but rather how realistically they define what they don’t know. An investor needs to do very few things right as long as he or she avoids big mistakes.”

I talk a lot on here about the beauty of making mistakes, but in some areas (like investing), mistakes can be very expensive. Find your blind spots, and treat them accordingly.