The Miyoo Mini Plus

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I recently turned 49 years old, and for my birthday my wife got me a gift (as suggested by Robert) that a 9-year-old would love — the Miyoo Mini Plus. It’s fantastic.

In short, it’s a handheld video game system (not unlike a Game Boy), and it has the ability to play virtually all of the video games from the past. It takes some work to get it set up, as it doesn’t come with any games preloaded, but once it’s set it’s a fantastic little device.

You can’t tell from the photo above, but the screen fills virtually all of the space at the top, with very small bezels. It’s a small device, but they make great use of the space. Here’s a photo with a game loaded so you can see how well they utilize the space at the top.

As I mentioned above, it takes a bit of work to get things set up. It’s not particularly difficult, but it’ll take an hour or two to get it set up like I have it. In my case, I’ve loaded it up with games from the Nintendo Game Boy, the NES, SNES, Genesis, Game Gear, PlayStation, and a few others. I literally have thousands of games in there. The battery (charged via USB-C) will last about 7 hours, and it all runs very smoothly.

This video is an excellent walk-through on how to load everything up:

It’s not a perfect device, but for just over $60 it’s an incredible deal. Offhand, I can’t think of another electronic device for $60 that has nearly this kind of value. If you’re into retro gaming at all, I encourage you to check it out.

Weighing your words against the labor of ink

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I recently listened to the “Shell Game” podcast series, hosted by Evan Ratliff. He describes the show like this:

What would happen if you created a digital copy of yourself, powered by AI, and set it loose in the world? Evan Ratliff, longtime tech journalist, decided to find out. He combined a clone of his voice, an AI chatbot, and a phone line—many phone lines, actually—into what are called “voice agents.” Then for the six months, he sent them out… as himself.

It was a fascinating show, and I highly recommend that you give it a listen.

In the final episode of the show, Evan references a 100-year-old article in the New York Times (view on NYT, or view Google Doc) about a shopkeeper who resisted getting a telephone for as long as he could, but he finally relented. It’s not a long article, at right around 1,500 words, so it’s worth giving it a read.

The focus of the article is about keeping humanity in business and “who are in revolt against the mechanisms of the city“. In the article they share a bit about why the slower pace can be advantageous, saying:

“If you use machines, you write a hundred letters where one will do, but not if each word is weighed against the labor of spreading out a drop of ink.”

It feels like something I say a lot on here (such as these thoughts from Blaise Pascal and Woodrow Wilson), though I’ll admit that the concept of a daily blog largely runs counter to that idea. If I were hand-writing all of these posts, they’d certainly come out a bit differently. Even so, I work hard to keep my thoughts concise and I weigh them carefully against the time needed to read them.

I may not always succeed, but keeping in mind the “labor of spreading out a drop of ink” is a valuable idea for all of us.

Draw attention to the flaws

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Trust is one of the most valuable assets you can have in a business relationship, and a great way to build trust is by pointing out some of your own flaws. This can happen a few different ways.

First, as I shared a few years ago, is the idea of sharing weaknesses that the audience is already aware of. In that situation, you’ll earn a few trust points without having to give away any new information. From Robert Cialdini’s book “Pre-Suasion“:

“The tactic can be particularly successful when the audience is already aware of the weakness; thus, when a communicator mentions it, little additional damage is done, as no new information is added—except, crucially, that the communicator is an honest individual.”

The other way is to point out flaws that people were otherwise unaware of. In David Ogilvy’s classic book “Confessions of an Advertising Man“, Ogilvy shares this example:

“I always tell prospective clients about the chinks in our armor. I have noticed that when an antique dealer draws my attention to flaws in a piece of furniture, he wins my confidence.”

This is something that I consistently work to do. For example, when people ask about how we measure marketing metrics I share all of the powerful tools that we use and how they work, but I also share how proper attribution is becoming harder to measure. I’m not happy about that, but it’s the state of the world we’re in, and I’m not ashamed to admit that weakness in the system.

Carefully sharing flaws can be a very powerful way to build trust.

Thinking through your fingers

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I’ve shared a number of times on here that I write in order to think. To quote E.M. Forster, he once said “How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?“.

Or when Blake Stratton shared 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.

This came up again because I recently heard Blair Enns share a similar thought on an episode of his podcast, when he said:

“I think through my fingers, I have to write to fully understand and arrive at some sort of cohesive point of view on it.”

Related is the fact that his new book came out (“The Four Conversations“) and it’s fantastic. Blair is clearly someone who thinks through his fingers and has found fantastic success by doing it. I’ll keep using this platform to talk think through my fingers and hopefully get a little bit better every day.

Repetition is persuasive

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I’ve shared my love for repetition quite a few times on here, from two different angles, which I shared here a year ago. The two basic ideas are:

In an episode of the “Founders” podcast that I recently heard, the host shared a great insight that compared repetition to faith, simply saying:

“Repetition does not spoil the prayer”

If you are someone of faith (or know someone of faith), you’ll know that a well-worn Bible is seen as a good thing. The person that constantly revisits their Bible and marks it up with highlights and notes is generally a person that knows the scripture better than others.

You can extend that analogy to when someone references a book that is like “the Bible for x”, referring to a book that is incredibly important to a particular business. I always understand that to mean “an important book for the business”, which is true, but now I also see it as “a book that you should probably read, re-read, mark up, and consume”.

In all of this, repetition isn’t just acceptable, it’s required. The more you re-read and dig in, the better.

Repetition doesn’t spoil the prayer.

The Sunday Summary: Smart glasses, short emails, and compassionate emptiness

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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, February 3: The coming trade-offs with smart glasses
I love where smart glasses are today and I’m excited for the future, but it’ll be a weird few years as they get features smoothed out across the various companies.

Tue, February 4: Thank you and…
If you appreciate a gift, consider saying, “thank you and . . .” Thank you and I dog-eared forty of the pages. Thank you and I told your boss what a wonderful thing you did.

Wed, February 5: Short emails are a good thing
If you use AI to make your email longer, and then I use AI to summarize it, what are we really accomplishing?

Thu, February 6: Compassionate Emptiness
The two words seized me and would not let go. Compassionate emptiness. To me that meant a state of nonjudgmental receiving. I thought: “I will try to be in that state when people come to me to recount their burdens.”

Fri, February 7: Fear versus regret
Live life in such a way that you work to avoid regret, but don’t ignore any regret in your past as it can teach you some amazing lessons to improve things going forward.

Sat, February 8: Leadership is serving those in your charge, not being in charge
Most leaders think everybody works for them. No, you work for the people in your organization. It is your responsibility to take care of them, make them feel safe, and they will naturally want to cooperate and work hard and give you their blood and sweat and tears to advance your vision.

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.

Leadership is serving those in your charge, not being in charge

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A few years ago Marie Forleo interviewed Simon Sinek on her podcast and they discussed “The Environment Good Leaders Create“. It was a short (12 min) fascinating discussion, and you can listen to it here.

Here are a few things that I pulled from it:

“Most leaders think leadership is about being in charge. No, it’s not. It’s about taking care of those in your charge. Most leaders think everybody works for them. No, you work for the people in your organization. It is your responsibility to take care of them, make them feel safe, and they will naturally want to cooperate and work hard and give you their blood and sweat and tears to advance your vision.”

Related, he also added:

“Leadership is the practice of putting the lives of others sometimes ahead of our interests.”

The last piece from the podcast that I’ll share reminded me a lot of the concept of Sonder; the moment when you realize that everyone around you has an internal life as rich and as conflicted as yours.

“So practicing leadership is like driving to work in the morning and someone wants to cut in your lane. Do you go forward or do you pull back? That’s leadership. Like, we don’t know. Maybe they’re running late for a big interview and they’ve been unemployed for six months. Maybe their boss is an ogre and they left late because their kids had trouble getting out to school today.”

Taking time to understand what might really be going on behind the scenes of someone else can make a huge difference in your outlook on the world. Using the car example in that last quote, I intentionally let people get away with all kinds of stuff when I’m driving, as it keeps me safer and keeps my stress levels down. All told, it makes my trips in the car last like 10 seconds longer because someone cut in front of me. I really don’t understand why people let things build up to the point of “road rage”.

Take care of those around you, understand that everyone has a full and complicated life, and things will go better on every front.

Fear versus regret

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The concept of regret is an interesting one. Most thoughts around regret simply say “avoid it”. Do the thing now so you don’t regret it later. For example, in Seth Godin’s book “Linchpin” he says:

“There’s a popular brand of clothing with a huge slogan plastered on it: NO FEAR. I think this motto is either disingenuous or stupid. Of course you should have fear. Riding a bike without a helmet may be fearless, but it’s not smart. Lava surfing might be fearless, but it’s not smart. Swallowing fire without training might be fearless as well, but we can all agree it’s not smart either. So what’s smart? Living life without regret.”

So he’s saying that fear can be wise, but regret is problematic.

On the other side you have Daniel Pink’s popular book “The Power of Regret“, where he shares the benefits that regret can bring to your life. Specifically, he says:

Regret is not dangerous or abnormal, a deviation from the steady path to happiness. It is healthy and universal, an integral part of being human. Regret is also valuable. It clarifies. It instructs. Done right, it needn’t drag us down; it can lift us up.

The purpose of this book is to reclaim regret as an indispensable emotion—and to show you how to use its many strengths to make better decisions, perform better at work and school, and bring greater meaning to your life.

So which is it? Is regret a good thing or a bad thing?

Generally speaking, I agree with Godin that regret is something to avoid if we can. Pink’s point is that if something goes poorly and you regret it, don’t run from that emotion. In fact, people that don’t feel regret at all may have something chemically wrong with them. Again, from his book:

However, one group didn’t feel any worse when they discovered that a different choice would have produced a better outcome: people with lesions on a part of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex. “They seem to experience no regret whatsoever,” neuroscientist Nathalie Camille and her colleagues wrote in the journal Science. “These patients fail to grasp this concept.” In other words, the inability to feel regret—in some sense, the apotheosis of what the “no regrets” philosophy encourages—wasn’t an advantage. It was a sign of brain damage.

Live life in such a way that you work to avoid regret, but don’t ignore any regret in your past as it can teach you some amazing lessons to improve things going forward.

Compassionate Emptiness

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Compassion often requires work on the side of the person giving it, but sometimes the best work is to do nothing at all. Similar to the idea of avoiding the trap of “we have to do something“, compassion can sometimes be best served by becoming an empty vessel.

The book “Orbiting the Giant Hairball” shared a deep insight into this that really struck me. From the book, they said:

Compassionate emptiness. The two words seized me and would not let go. Compassionate emptiness. To me that meant a state of nonjudgmental receiving. I thought:

“I will try to be in that state when people come to me to recount their burdens.”

From that day on, whenever somebody would come by to pour out their company woes, I would listen. In silence.

I would imagine myself to be an empty vessel only to receive. As fully as possible. Without judgment.

This is something I tend to not do well with, as I like to see myself as a problem solver. How can you solve a problem if you’re listening in silence? Many times, that silence might indeed be the very best way to help solve the problem.

Short emails are a good thing

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There may be rare circumstances where a flowery email is appropriate, but 99% of the time you’re better off just getting to the point. Thanks to AI, many people are writing a short email and then using AI to unnecessarily expand it to make it more “professional”.

On the receiving side, more and more people are using AI to “summarize this email into bullet points”. Its reminds of this comic from Tom Fishburne, which is becoming shockingly accurate.

The end result is wasted effort on both sides, and likely a degree of miscommunication. It’s kind of like using Google Translate to translate from text from English to German, and then translate it back again. It’s likely going to have the same overall sentiment, but some things may get lost in translation.

Don’t be curt with your colleagues, but don’t feel the need to make emails unnecessarily long. Share what you need and move on. Short emails can be a great thing.