It takes a lot of effort to look effortless

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We see it in all walks of life — people that make things look effortless. This could be someone giving a talk, an athlete, a musician, or any number of others. They all have one thing in common: they put in a lot of effort to make things look effortless.

In a recent episode of the Founders podcast that was focused on Steve Jobs, they covered a bit about why his presentations were always so amazing. Part of it was the amazing products that they unveiled, part of it was the simplicity of the slides, but a big part of it was preparation. They say that for every hour that you will be presenting, you should spend 90 hours preparing, and Steve Jobs almost certainly hit that mark. His time in preparation made the talk seem effortless.

I saw this for myself recently when I saw Kevin Paul Scott giving a talk. The room was set up in such a way that the screen was behind him and he had no monitor or any notes in front of him. Despite that, he repeatedly would click to the next slide and read a quote word-for-word without even glancing at the screen. Was this magic? It kind of felt like it, but we all know that it was preparation. He had practiced this presentation dozens (hundreds?) of times, and as a result he just made it look simple.

I see this when I golf with folks, too. I’m not a particularly good golfers, but it’s frustrating because great golfers make it look super easy. They just walk up the ball, give it a smooth, easy swing, and it goes pretty much exactly where they intended.

In the business world, Apple is the king of this. Their products are generally the easiest to use, but also are some of the most powerful. That combination is incredibly difficult to pull off, but they make it seem effortless.

Lastly, this points back to the idea of “calling someone talented is an insult“. In most cases it’s not “talent” that you’re talking about, but rather “skill” — and skill comes from practice. If someone is very good at what they do they likely have a bit of natural talent in there, but it’s combined with a huge amount of practice. From there, it seems like what they do is effortless.

Work-life balance versus simple tolerance

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Work-life balance is one of those things that can be interpreted in many different ways. Generally speaking, I find that balance not to be in a perfect 9-5, 50/50 kind of way, but in balancing the various parts of your life as needed.

Last year I shared Rory Vaden’s thought on this, where he said:

“Balance shouldn’t mean equal time spent on equal activities. Balance should mean appropriate time spent on critical priorities.”

More specifically, I find the idea of “intentional imbalance” to be a great way to live, where you build your day around the things you need to get done, which might mean your work day isn’t 9-5, but is instead it’s more like 8-10, 12-4, and 6-8. Whatever works best for you is generally the right way to do it.

In a recent podcast episode from GaryVee, he attacked the traditional 9-5 workday even harder, saying:

“Work-life balance to me is happiness on all equations.

When I hear my friends or acquaintances or people in social media say things like, I worked nine to five Monday through Friday. I had great work-life balance. And you ask them, do you like your job? No, no, no, I don’t like it at all.

I’m like, you don’t have work-life balance. You have 40 hours a week every week that you hate. That’s not balance, that’s tolerance.”

There are times in life when we all need to tolerate the work that we do, but hopefully it’s been short-lived for all of you. I worked at Hardee’s for a little while in my teens, and it was an awful job, but it’s what I had to do until I could find a job that was more fulfilling.

If you work 9-5 at a job that you hate, that’s a tough thing to try to “balance”. The more you can find a role that aligns with your strengths and desires, the more the balance can become intertwined with your day in a way that leads to Gary’s idea of “happiness on all equations”.

Productivity versus activity

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An interesting article recently came out about Wells Fargo firing more than a dozen employees who were faking their work. From the article:

“The staffers, all in the firm’s wealth- and investment-management unit, were “discharged after review of allegations involving simulation of keyboard activity creating impression of active work,” according to disclosures filed with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.“

While those employees deserved to be fired, it makes me question Wells Fargo even more. How is it that they didn’t notice that work wasn’t be completed, and only found these people after (presumably) the IT department was able to detect the tools being used to fake the work?

As I was digging into this a bit more, I found a couple of comments on Reddit that summarized it quite well.

  • Good managers measure productivity. Shitty managers measure activity.
  • This is their metric for getting work done?? Mouse moving and keyboard taps? What kind of shitty company is this that doesn’t have a way of checking your work?

It makes me question a lot of what’s going on over there. As the second comment said, how does Wells Fargo not have a decent metric for actually tracking productivity?

This ties into a previous issue at Wells Fargo, where employees opened millions of fake accounts on behalf of their customers without authorization in order to meet sales goals from their superiors.

Goals or activity?

It seems to me that Wells Fargo previously had created goals for employees to hit, so employees did whatever they could to hit them (which is why measures are bad once they become a target). When that didn’t work out, Wells Fargo apparently gave up trying to track actual productivity and now just watch to see if their employee’s mouse and keyboard are active for a great enough period of the day.

Wells Fargo has over 200,000 employees, so I can’t begin to think of a way to properly motivate and understand what all of those people are doing. I would hope that the management structure would help keep an eye on things, but clearly that’s not working either.

This is by far my favorite thing about having a small team (there are nine of us as of this writing). I know roughly what people are working on, and we can all see what’s getting done and what gets missed. We don’t need to track their physical activity, and even if we did it would be of little value since I know a lot of our team references handwritten notes, lists, and sketches as part of their process.

Employees absolutely shouldn’t be using mouse jigglers and other tools to fake their activity, but if that’s the best measure you have for how much work is being done, that’s a far greater problem that needs to be addressed.

The Sunday Summary: Line By Line, the Simple Stick, and forgetting that we forget

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In an effort to help me keep up with everything I post each week, here is my latest “Sunday Summary” of my posts from the week.

Mon, June 10: Understanding doesn’t mean agreement
“By taking steps to understand another person’s Path to Action, we aren’t promising that we’ll accept their point of view. We are promising to listen.”

Tue, June 11: Learning Line by Line
If you want to remember a short speech, a poem, or some other bit of text, LineByLine helps walk you through it.

Wed, June 12: The Simple Stick
“If you made different versions of anything, Steve (Jobs) would hit you with the simple stick until you simplified it down to one.”

Thu, June 13: Write about what you don’t know
“I’ve always hated the advice of “Write what you know”, which puts a fence around people.”

Fri, June 14: We forget that we forget
“Go back and reread the books that you’ve read before years ago and it’s amazing.”

Sat, June 15: Personalized advice coming from noreply
My general feeling is that if a company wants to reach out to send me information, they should be willing to accept an email response back from me to dig in deeper. If the content they sent to me isn’t important enough to be worthy of a response, then why send it in the first place?

I hope you found some value in this. If you ever have questions, ideas, or disagreements regarding anything I write, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Personalized advice coming from noreply

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I’ve shared my distain for emails coming from “noreply” many times on this blog. My general feeling is that if a company wants to reach out to send me information, they should be willing to accept an email response back from me to dig in deeper. If the content they sent to me isn’t important enough to be worthy of a response, then why send it in the first place?

I’ve recently moved our GreenMellen CRM back to Pipedrive, and it’s a fantastic product. If you need a platform to help you track your leads and clients, it’s a good one to consider.

That said, they recently sent me an email encouraging me to “unlock Pipedrive’s potential with personalized advice”, and it came from a noreply address. Included in the message was the line “our team is genuinely enthusiastic about helping you get the most out of Pipedrive.“

No, they’re not.

They’re nice enough folks, and it’s a great product, but you can’t say you’re “genuinely enthusiastic about helping” while also sending an email with the implied message of “don’t email us back; you’re not important enough for us to spend time reading your message”.

It’s that simple. If you are honestly genuinely enthusiastic about helping, then do it. Actions speak louder than words, and denying an email reply is a pretty clear action.

We forget that we forget

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I do a lot of things to try to remember the things that I read and watch. Using a book as an example, I might write some blog posts about it, maybe share it on a podcast, and see quotes in my Readwise reviews. Even then, if I reread the book a few years later, tons of it will feel like brand new information.

This idea was brought up to me again (because I forgot that I forgot about it) in a recent episode of the Founders podcast. The episode was focused on Steve Jobs (and it was excellent; listen here), where the host David Senra shared this thought:

“Go back and reread the books that you’ve read before years ago and it’s amazing.”

This is even more astounding coming from someone like David, who studies books far deeper than I do. The fact that someone with his study process can go back and learn more from books in the future means that all of us can.

The problem is in the first “forget” in the statement he shared. When I think of a book, I feel like I remember it pretty well! I have my quotes, I’ve talked to folks, and I get it. The problem is that I don’t know what I’m forgetting, because I forgot about those sections.

It’s like I talked about a few weeks ago with “Repeat versus fresh content” and my constant tweaking to find the right balance. I always want to consume new content, but there is a lot of gold in the stuff that I’ve read in the past — even if I’ve forgotten about it.

Write about what you don’t know

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As you may know, I’m writing on here every day to try to help myself. I share these learnings in the hope that they’re of benefit to you as well, but they’re largely to help me unpack new ideas and concepts that I learn about.

A recent episode of Adam Grant’s “ReThinking” podcast with guest Rebecca Solnit had some fascinating insights. When talking about writing, Rebecca said this:

“I’ve always hated the advice of “Write what you know”, which puts a fence around people.”

The advice she shared came from the angle of writing content for others, like a book. If and when I decide to write a book, it will be filled with things that I know. For now, though, not being focused on “what I know” is a wonderful thing for this blog.

There are certainly times when I write about what I know, but I try to largely use this as a place to share things that I don’t really know. Sometimes the act of writing will help me get to an answer, but often that “answer” is just one possible solution. Your comments and feedback (whether here, on social media, or via email) are always welcome, because I often learn quite a bit more from those.

The topics I share tend to be somewhat open to interpretation (like this one), so even when I “know” the topic it can still be eye-opening for me to hear other perspectives.

I’ll write what I know, I’ll write what I don’t know, and I’m hopeful you’ll reach out to me when my thought on the topic doesn’t line up with yours so that we can all get a little bit better.

The Simple Stick

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Of all of the things that Apple is known for, a major one is simplicity. It seems weird to say it, particularly when talking about complicated, powerful devices like iPhones and Macbooks, but everyone knows that it’s true. When compared to competing devices, Apple’s are almost always simpler to use.

This wasn’t just due to luck — it was due in large part to Steve Jobs and his “simple stick”.

I first heard about this in a recent episode of the Founders podcast, where they said:

“If an idea was not distilled down to its essence, Steve would reject it.

If an idea took a turn when it should have traveled in a straight line.

If you made different versions of anything, Steve would hit you with the simple stick until you simplified it down to one.”

In the case of Jobs, it wasn’t about the quality of the work but simply that it was too complicated. In a post on The Daily Coach a while back, they shared this anecdote:

“The suspense is killing me,” I said. “How’d it go this morning?”

“Well,” he said, “Steve hit us with the Simple Stick.”

Translation: Steve had rejected their work — not because it was bad but because in some way it failed to distill the idea to its essence. It took a turn when it should have travelled a straight line.

In this case, it hadn’t even been the creative effort that bothered Steve — it was the project itself. The person leading the project had directed the team to create packaging for two versions of the same product. Steve had decided this was brain- dead. “Just combine them,” he said. “One product, one box.” There was no need to explore the idea of a second package.

Simple wasn’t the only thing; it’d be impossible to create a device like the iPhone that was “simple” all the way through. That was the magic of Steve Jobs; they could take a wildly powerful and complex device like the iPhone and make it seem simple.

In the unveiling of the iPhone in 2007, Steve took careful steps to make the phone appear as simple and easy to use as anything you could imagine. For example, if you start around the 15:20 mark of his 2007 keynote, watch how slowly and deliberately he shows actions such as sliding to wake the phone, and using the home button to always get back home.

I suspect the “Simple Stick” has been used quite a lot at Apple over the years, and other companies would do well to introduce it in their workflows as well.

Learning Line by Line

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One of the new apps that I’ve added to my morning routine is a very simple one called “LineByLine” (I say “app”, but I think it’s just that website – no mobile app).

While Anki is fantastic for learning atomic pieces of data (countries, names, facts, etc), it’s not great for memorizing long pieces of text, and that’s where LineByLine comes in. If you want to remember a short speech, a poem, or some other bit of text, LineByLine helps walk you through it.

Suppose, for example, that you wanted to memorize the US Pledge of Allegiance. We’d start by pasting it in, paying careful attention to line breaks, as those are treated as separate chunks of text. I’d do it something like this:

Now, when I go to review it, it’ll start by just showing me what’s there with just a few letters missing, like this:

Over time, it removes more and more from each section:

Eventually, it just walks you through with blank lines. If you make any mistakes, just let it know and it’ll help you work on that section.

Use cases

To be fair, I’m not using it for very much yet. So far I’m learning the Preamble of the Constitution (“We the People of the United States…“), the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths to be self-evident…“) and George’s great story from Seinfeld (“The sea was angry that day, my friends…“). The last one is silly, but why not?

The app is free to use, but only remembers you on a single machine. If you want to sync across computers, it’s a grand total of $5, one-time, and you’re good for life. Quite a deal!

If you have something that you need to memorize, check out LineByLine.

What will you put in there to start to memorize?

Understanding doesn’t mean agreement

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Understanding can be a powerful thing. Whether it means understanding people on the other side of the political aisle or just sonder in general, more understanding leads to better outcomes for everyone.

In the book “Crucial Conversations“, the authors offer a similar take, saying:

“To keep ourselves from feeling like sellouts while exploring others’ paths—no matter how different or wrong they seem—remember we’re trying to understand their point of view, not necessarily agree with it or support it. Understanding doesn’t equate with agreement. Sensitivity doesn’t equate to acquiescence. By taking steps to understand another person’s Path to Action, we aren’t promising that we’ll accept their point of view. We are promising to listen.”

I work hard to understand the ideas of others, and I try to leave myself open to agreeing with them, but understanding and agreement are two different things.

If you don’t agree with someone, that’s fine. If you choose to fail to at least understand them, that’s foolish.