Attunement versus Empathy

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I talk about empathy on here quite a bit, but the exact definition of it can still get a little fuzzy for me. The book “To Sell Is Human” talks a bit about empathy versus attunement, and I thought it was an interesting comparison:

Attunement means understanding what others are thinking, and should not be confused with empathy, which means understanding what others are feeling.

The two are closely related, but the difference matters a lot. Depending on the context, I think if you can clue into either one with someone, that’s a gateway to get to the other.

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With all of the division we’re seeing in the world lately, empathy is becoming vitally important. It’s worth taking time to put yourself in someone else’s shoes to see how they’re feeling.

To get a productive conversation out of that, though, you need attunement as well. Once you know how they’re feeling, you can learn why they’re feeling that way by understanding what they’re thinking.

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From there, the conversation can go 50 different directions, all of which have the possibility to be productive. You can have sympathy for their situation, or help them troubleshoot it, or even help them celebrate the big win they just experienced.

It takes intention and it takes effort, but it’s almost always worth your time to get there.

User engagement doesn’t impact your search rankings

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Keeping users engaged on your website is vitally important, but Google says it doesn’t affect your rankings. I suspect they want it to, but they don’t have a good way to tie your site engagement to the rankings.

The problem for Google is two-fold:

  • If you have Google Analytics on your website, which captures many of those engagement metrics, it doesn’t feed that back to Google for search rankings. Google has stated repeatedly that your data from Analytics doesn’t impact rankings.
  • While Google Analytics is used on a lot of sites, there are millions that don’t use it. Google wants the rankings to be the best they can be, so if they gave more of a boost to sites with Analytics on them, that could make for a worse user experience.

Secondary benefits

While Google doesn’t use engagement metrics directly, you can still gain in the rankings if users are highly engaged. Those highly engaged users are more likely to search for brand-related queries in the future, and they’re also more likely to link to your site and reference it from other places on the internet, which can have a big impact on your rankings.

Really, though?

There are some people that don’t believe this, and think that Google must be using Analytics data at least a little bit. While I’m convinced that they don’t, I certainly don’t have any hard proof so there’s always a chance.

Similar to my “Facebook still isn’t listening to you” post, I’ve done my research and I’m happy with my conclusion, but there is a chance I’m wrong and I’m willing to listen. If you find info that shows how Google might be using engagement to directly impact rankings, please let me know.

Until then, keep working on your website engagement, but consider it mostly a separate task from any search engine optimization work that you might be doing.

Leadership means you do more

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As people grow in their roles, the thought is often that they’ve earned the right to do less work, and perhaps that’s valid. However, simply having the ability to work less generally isn’t the right thing to do if you’ve moved into a leadership role. While your work may largely shift from manual tasks to more thinking and planning, the amount of work itself shouldn’t dip.

As your role (and salary) grows, it often makes sense to have people lower on the chart do more of the manual work. It’s just good sense to have someone making $20/hr doing simple tasks instead of people making $100/hr doing them. How far should you push that, though? I can think of two very different examples.

First, I was recently talking to a business owner that absolutely doesn’t touch anything that someone earning less should do. For him, it’s pure math and he measures every minute of what his happening in his organization.

On the hand, you have stories like Dan Cathy (the former president and CEO of Chick-Fil-A) taking time to clean up their parking lots when visiting stores. That’s undoubtedly “beneath his pay grade”, but the impact that makes to his staff is hard to measure.

I think Simon Sinek said it best in his book “Leaders Eat Last“:

“Leadership is not a license to do less; it is a responsibility to do more.”

You might have the ability to start doing less, but you owe it to your team to start doing even more.

Distractions can help you learn

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When you need to dive deep into your work, banishing distractions is an essential thing to do. In many cases, though, distractions can help you learn a subject even more deeply.

In Benedict Carey’s book “How We Learn“, they talk about using distractions to help better remember certain types of data. If you’re in a very controlled environment when studying, and then the test environment is a little crazier, that can have a big impact on your ability to recall information.

In the book, two quotes stood out to me:

“the science suggests that interleaving is, essentially, about preparing the brain for the unexpected.”

“And we will show that some of what we’ve been taught to think of as our worst enemies—laziness, ignorance, distraction—can also work in our favor.”

An example of this with my own habits involve the Anki flashcard app. I have various groups of cards that I study (people, geography, quotes, Biblical, etc), and for a while I kept them in separate decks and would study them sequentially. This wasn’t wise, because I’d get too focused on those groups. Instead, I combined them all into one big deck so I have no clue what type of card is coming next and the lack of context helps with memorization. As I said a couple of years ago, combining them led to two advantages:

  1. There is some science that shows better memorization when you have recall the cards out of context, because it better mimics the real world.
  2. It can cause some interesting (random) correlations to develop at times, when two unrelated cards appear after one another but you can make a new connection between them. This is similar to the reason I’m using Roam Research for most of my note-taking these days.

I’m still going to fight distractions in many areas of my life – there’s no need for me to reach for my phone to see the latest Facebook update while I’m trying to read. However, knowing when to intentionally introduce some distractions can help your learning become more successful.

The right question is more important than the right answer

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I work hard to come up with the right answer to questions that are put in front of me. However, if the wrong question is being asked, the answer to it is worthless regardless of accuracy.

John Tukey put it this way:

“It is better to have an approximate answer to the right question than an exact answer to the wrong question.”

This also extends to sales. Giving the right answers to your prospects is very important, but asking the right questions will go even further. In his book “To Sell Is Human“, author Daniel Pink simply says:

“In the new world of sales, being able to ask the right questions is more valuable than producing the right answers. Unfortunately, our schools often have the opposite emphasis. They teach us how to answer, but not how to ask.”

You’ve likely noticed this in many conversations over the years, whether they were casual or business — the people that asked you the best questions came across as being the most interesting. Asking the right question requires a degree of empathy, so that you’re able to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and see where your gaps about them might be. When you see the world from their perspective, but you don’t understand a particular aspect of their view, that becomes a fantastic question to ask.

If you can find the right question, the answer is usually easier to find as well.

I write and therefore I know

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In a recent episode of the “Focus on This” podcast, host Blake Stratton shared something that I found very interesting.

The topic was about journaling, and how it can lead to clarity. Blake took the idea of externalization and put it like this:

Usually you think, “Oh, I know and therefore therefore I write,” it’s not always the case. A lot of times it’s, “I write and therefore I know.” We don’t just learn by consuming, we learn by then trying to articulate what we’ve consumed and put it into our own voice and into our own words.

As I’ve said on here before, that’s my basic idea for publishing this blog. It’s not that I know all of this great stuff that I want to share, but it’s that I come across ideas that might be great and then I use this blog as a way to process and externalize them to help me learn more.

Interestingly enough, in researching a few other thoughts on this post, I dug back into my old Blogging Beats Journaling post — which it turns out was also inspired by a journaling-focused episode of the “Focus on This” podcast.

I still maintain that blogging is better than journaling in many cases, since it forces you to better summarize your thoughts before sharing them, but this latest episode of their podcast has helped me to see the benefits of pure journaling a bit better. Check it out when you have a chance.

Being the best talker doesn’t mean you have the best ideas

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This is something a lot of organizations struggle with – the loudest and/or best talker in the room often gains the approval of those around them, based solely on their manner. They may happen to have the best ideas, but those two things don’t necessarily go together.

In her book “Quiet“, author Susan Cain sums it up nicely:

“There’s zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.”

Of course, learning to speak more clearly and confidently isn’t a bad thing at all. In fact, this is something I frequently work on for myself.

Just be careful not to put too much trust in someone solely because they were able to present their argument in a confident manner.

It can be wise to make sure the quietest voices are heard, because they’re often taking everything in and may have a great insight to share. I’ve seen in various meetings where Ali will do a fantastic job of noticing that quiet voice, encouraging them to share their thoughts, and it often brings a profound insight to the group.

Work on your speaking skills and polish your presentation skills, for sure, but make sure you have solid ideas to back it up.

Taking an idea from a car thought to a blog post

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Seth Godin has said repeatedly that “writer’s block is a myth”. He said it’s really more like “I have a fear of bad writing”, as he explains in this short video:

However, I tend to disagree. When I sit down to write, I’m not afraid of bad writing, but I often just don’t know where to start. For me, the key is having some ideas ready go to, and I usually do. For most of my posts, they go through three phases.

Capture

Many of my ideas pop up while I’m driving. Perhaps it’s from a podcast that I’m listening to, or maybe my mind is wandering and idea shows up. Either way, I want to capture it for later. In my case, I just use Google Keep for that. I tell my car “Hey Google, take a note” and then leave the note with my voice. Case in point, the idea for this post came in the car, and here is the Keep note that was waiting for me when I got home.

The other big source of my post ideas is from reading, which I unpacked quite a bit here.

Processing

The next step is to move it from Google Keep, or Kindle highlights, or wherever the idea is and get it into Roam Research. You could do the same into Evernote or almost any kind of note-taking app. For this post, it looked like this:

Every idea for a blog post that I have goes into Roam like that, so I always have a steady supply of small nuggets of ideas that I can build out. For this post, that’s all I had to work with, but it was enough.

Writing

Finally, I write the post. I simply head into WordPress, use the title from Roam, and start putting it together. Sometimes I have a lot of notes to work from, sometimes it’s just a few bullets (like this one). Either way, I work it all out in WordPress, and when it’s ready I figure out where it fits into the upcoming schedule via the WordPress Editorial Calendar plugin.

Enough in the queue?

With the daily streak I have going, I’m always a bit nervous that I might run out of ideas and break the streak. That concern isn’t when I have very few posts in WordPress ready to go (though I’m not a fan of that situation…), but it’s when I have too few ideas in Roam that I can build out.

If I can keep Roam topped up with ideas, this streak will be easy to maintain. The more easily I can get an idea out of my head and into Roam, the better I’ll be, and things like Google Keep really help make that easy to do.

Selling versus hustling

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For a while in the early years of our company, I didn’t like the idea of selling. I wasn’t against doing it, but the idea of it just felt kind of sleazy. My experience with salespeople had been for things like cars where it always felt like they were trying to hustle you.

Over time, I learned that sales can be a win-win for both parties. As I talked about last year, customers are looking for a value imbalance in their favor, and you can give it to them. If they can get more value out of your product than it cost them, and you can still earn a profit against your costs, everybody wins.

Hustle

Years ago, Seth Godin talked about the idea of the two kinds of hustle. There’s the hustle of working hard and putting in the hours, and then the hustle I was talking about above; the kind of person that “will cut corners if it helps in getting picked.”

Proper selling is far different than hustling. It’s about meeting people’s needs, and providing exceptional value relative to their cost. As long as I know that the services we sell are worth far more than the client needs to pay, selling becomes easy. I’ve heard others say that when you hit a point where you’re very confident that the value of your product far exceeds its cost, then failing to sell it is actually doing a disservice to those that could benefit from it.

In his book “To Sell Is Human“, author Daniel Pink puts it this way:

Be sure you can answer the two questions at the core of genuine service. If the person you’re selling to agrees to buy, will his or her life improve? When your interaction is over, will the world be a better place than when you began? If the answer to either of these questions is no, you’re doing something wrong.

Keep selling, but don’t try to hustle.

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Knowledge is depreciating faster than ever

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Learn wide or learn deep? It’s a question that I struggle with frequently, and likely will wrestle with for quite a long time to come.

On the one hand, you have the idea that wider study helps, even in narrow fields.

On the other hand, you have thoughts like this one from the book “Thank You For Being Late“, where author Thomas Friedman essentially states the opposite:

“As the world speeds up, stocks of knowledge depreciate at a faster rate.”

So who is right? They both might be. I think the angle to consider is what was shared in the post I mentioned above about wider study from the book “Range”. Even those that study wide generally have a specific field of expertise, and keeping up with that niche is the challenge. How deep should you go there?

The leads into another problem, which is understanding when to try to learn something versus when you can let it go and know that Google will provide the answer when you need it. For example, I study geography a good bit because I know it’s a weak spot of mine, but is that a solid use of my time? It’s a tough question.

Ultimately, I think the smartest people tend to have the greatest number of mental models about a given subject. Charlie Munger, long-time business partner of Warren Buffett, put it this way:

Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. You’ve got to have models in your head.

Website development models

I can see this in myself a bit with website development. While my day-to-day development skills aren’t as sharp as they used to be, simply because I write very little code these days, my history of development allows me to see things from a wider perspective and still offer some value to our team in that area of work. Our developer can absolutely smoke me when it comes to writing code, but I can still contribute to tough problems because of the models I’ve built over the years.

Mental Models 101

With that in mind, expanding our mental models seems to be a wise direction to head, but it’s easier said than done. You can’t just pick up a book called “Mental Models 101” and learn them, but rather you’ll pick up them up along the way, between your reading and your work.

James Clear has a great essay about mental models, and this quote from him sums it up:

We should continuously upgrade and improve the quality of this picture. This means reading widely from the best books, studying the fundamentals of seemingly unrelated fields, and learning from people with wildly different life experiences.

Back to the idea of a “Mental Models 101” book, Clear has a list of the mental models that he’s found most beneficial, and I encourage you to check out and read through his full list here.