Thank you and…

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Giving thanks for a gift that you’ve received is always a good thing. However, it’s even better if you can take it a step further.

In Seth Godin’s classic book “Linchpin“, he offers some examples:

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. Thank you and here’s a record my band and I recorded last week. Thank you and you made me cry. Thank you and I just blogged about what you did.

I love hearing back from someone that received a gift, but it’s far more valuable if they include the “and”.

There is similar advice with how you praise your staff, and expanding the why behind the praise. Announcing in front of the team that “Elena did an excellent job on that project” is great, but expanding to “Elena did a great job on that project because of the way she was able to pull in the brand colors on the resources page without sacrificing accessibility” is more valuable for everyone involved.

Give thanks, for sure, but including the “and” will make your words far more impactful.

The coming trade-offs with smart glasses

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I’m really liking my Meta Ray-Ban glasses, and I suspect I’ll always have some form of smart glasses going forward. Specifically, my next pair will almost certainly have screens in them, as there are a lot of options coming out soon that include them. This video from “Mr. Mobile” shows some of what’s on the horizon:

The challenge is that some will have screens, some will have cameras, some will have solid battery life, and I’m sure there will be other features.

It reminds me of the early days of smartphones. Do you want a camera? Or a big screen? Or certain apps? Or a big battery? Phones today essentially have everything you need in every model (the difference between a Samsung and an iPhone is really quite small), but for a long time you needed to choose one feature and be ok missing another.

My next glasses will be the same. Do I really want a screen in them if I have to charge them every four hours? Is the camera more useful than a different feature?

It’ll be a somewhat frustrating few years as the various glasses work their way toward parity, but I’m excited to see where we end up in the future!

The Sunday Summary: Memorization, trust, Pebble, and how did you find us?

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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, January 27: Memorize anything
Some thoughts on a little app I made to help people memorize blocks of text more easily.

Tue, January 28: Asking “how did you find us?” almost never works
It’s still probably worth asking this question, but your customers usually aren’t very clear on how they found you.

Wed, January 29: Trust is not transparency
Trust and transparency feel like very similar things, but they’re often not.

Thu, January 30: Pebble is coming back
The Pebble smartwatch is coming back and I’m looking forward to it!

Fri, January 31: It’s time to stop using text messages and iMessage
The security risks are piling up, and there are much better options out there.

Sat, February 1: Convenience or trust?
When a company offers convenience, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they deserve your trust.

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.

Convenience or trust?

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I hadn’t really considered it before, but I often think of convenience and trust as being very similar things when in reality they’re not.

This came up on one of Adam Grant’s recent podcasts where he was discussing the idea of trust with Rachel Botsman. From the show, Botsman explains the difference:

“So I do this thing sometimes when I’m speaking to audiences and I ask the audience to clap for the brand that they trust the most. And 99% of people clap for Amazon. And the reason why, when you ask the audience, they start talking about how, well, you know, Amazon delivered the packages on time and it’s really easy to return these things. And then I say, well, is that convenience or is that trust?“

It’s a great point, and Amazon is a perfect example. They’re a company that provides amazing convenience, yet they deserve very little trust.

I think this can apply to many (all?) of the big tech companies, with Google likely topping that list. Some of their services are wildly convenient, but Google as a company deserves almost no trust.

That’s not to say that a company or person can’t have both, but just because they have one doesn’t necessarily mean they get the other.

It’s time to stop using text messages and iMessage

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Generally speaking, I trust Apple more than the other major tech companies, though that’s admittedly a pretty low bar to reach. That said, Apple’s historic reluctance to let iMessage play nice with other systems is starting to have a real impact on your security, and it’s time for a new solution.

Right now, if you send a message from iPhone-to-iPhone or from Android-to-Android, it’s encrypted and secure. However, if you send one from iPhone-to-Android or Android-to-iPhone, your message has a high likelihood of being intercepted. This isn’t necessary a huge problem most of the time, when your messages are along the lines of “don’t forget to pick up bread on the way home”, but when any message is potentially at risk it becomes a different conversation.

There are a few ways Apple could have solved this over the years, but they’ve chosen not to, so moving to a new platform that works for iOS and Android is the way to go.

Signal

Fortunately, there are simple solutions at hand. Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp are both encrypted so that no one can read your messages, and I’m moving over to Signal (which is another similar app). All of those apps look and feel like text messages, but your content inside of them is very secure.

A big reason that I prefer Signal is that your message is end-to-end encrypted by default, and that it’s not owned by Meta. Using Signal, even Signal themselves literally cannot read your message — only the sender and receiver can. The same is true of WhatsApp, but Facebook Messenger only works that way if you manually set end-to-end encryption on every message. Really, though, any of those solutions are far better than normal text messages.

A little bit of everything

At the end of the day, I’ll still be sending messages a bunch of different ways. My family will use Signal, and I’ll use it with others when I can, but I’m sure I’ll have plenty of text messages (along with LinkedIn messages, WhatsApp messages, etc) coming and going for years to come.

Every little bit helps.

Pebble is coming back

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While I’ve had a lot of smart watches over the years, the Pebble is the one I enjoyed the most. It had a great mix of battery life and features and was a fantastic device. Even though it was first released in 2013 and then discontinued in 2016, I was still using it as my main watch more than a year later.

While Pebble did well for a few years, they were purchased by Fitbit in 2016, and then Fitbit was purchased by Google, and the Pebble smartwatch was dead. However, Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky has been pushing for Google to open-source the software behind the watch and they just did.

As a result, Eric has announced plans to produce a new watch using the Pebble software, and intends to make it as similar to the original as possible. He said:

“No one makes a smartwatch with the core set of features I want. I had really, really, really hoped that someone else would come along and build a Pebble replacement. But no one has.”

We’ll see what happens. Even though he’s done this before and now has the code to do it again, it’s a long way from “let’s do this!” to actually shipping a product, so I hope he’s able to succeed.

You can find more information and sign up for updates over on his new website repebble.com.

If he’s able to get it shipped and I get one, I’ll certainly share it here when the time comes. I hope he can pull it off!

Trust is not transparency

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It’s easy to link the ideas of trust and transparency, and they certainly go together to a degree. However, real trust comes from other areas.

In his podcast interview with Rachel Botsman, Adam Grant shared this brief summary of their conversation:

“My biggest takeaway from Rachel is that the key to trust is not transparency. It’s integrity and reliability. There’s nothing more important than following through on your commitments and making it clear that people can count on you when it counts most.”

Transparency can be fantastic and it can certainly help to build trust, but integrity and reliability are what really count.

These words both came up while I was reading “The Challenger Sale”, with a very simple statement behind both of those words: you either are or you aren’t.

As I mentioned in that other post, there isn’t a lot of grey area with these. Think of the people you know, and you can put almost all of them into buckets of “are reliable” / “aren’t reliable” and “has integrity” / “doesn’t have integrity”. There’s very few people that fall in-between.

Both take a long time to build up, and can be lost in an instant, but if you want others to really trust you, it’s the path you need to take.

Asking “how did you find us?” almost never works

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It’s common in business to ask your customers “how did you find us?”, as it can be very helpful as you work to understand where to put your future marketing spend and effort. The problem is that the answers you get are almost never accurate.

It’s not that people are lying, but they simply can’t accurately tell you what happened. Rand Fishkin at SparkToro recently shared a great video where he laid out the two main problems.

  • If you give people a list of options to choose from, the items at the top of the list (no matter what order they’re in) get picked the most.
  • They did a test where a company put in a fake answer that sounded realistic (“Did you come from this popular Youtuber?”) and a lot of the respondents chose that as the answer, even though it literally couldn’t have been the case.

He goes on to share the bigger problem; you can ask your customers how they found you, but what about the people that don’t know about you? How can you position yourself so that they can find you as well?

There is a similar problem when you dig into keyword research for search engine optimization. You can run reports showing the keywords that people typed in to find your site, and that’s great! The problem is that you really want to know what keywords people are typing in and not finding your site, and that won’t show up on any report.

I encourage you to keep asking your customers “how did you find us?”, as it’ll certainly give you some degree of insight, but just beware that the information you get is unlikely to be very accurate. Check out Rand’s video for more.

Memorize anything

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I’ve been working a lot on improving my memory lately, and it’s led me down quite a few roads. I’m trying some new techniques for remembering names, learning some interesting patterns for remembering numbers, and I’ve just build a new web app for helping to remember blocks of text.

The idea of this app is to teach yourself to memorize a chunk of text through a series of increasingly difficult reviews. This could be good for remembering:

  • Poetry
  • Scripture
  • Lines for a play
  • Information for a test
  • Other text that could be useful

Here’s a short video that shows how it works:

You can find the app and set up a free account at memorizeit.net. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on if something like this would be valuable to use or not.

The Sunday Summary: Red flags, making art, smart glasses, and lots of jabs

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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, January 20: Connectors require facts
“And if you were a fact collector, that made you smart and respected. And now I think it’s much more valuable to be a connector of dots than a collector of facts that if you can synthesize and recognize patterns, you have an edge.”

Tue, January 21: Early lies are an easy red flag
“When you lied to me on the call, theoretically, this is the best our relationships ever going to be. We’re still in the pre-honeymoon phase. It’s courtship right now. And if you’re gonna lie to me during the courtship, what’s gonna happen when I give you money and I have no more leverage over you?”

Wed, January 22: If you can write it down, AI will be able to do it
“There are no longer any great jobs where someone else tells you precisely what to do.”

Thu, January 23: You can make any kind of art
“I don’t believe that you are born to do a certain kind of art, mainly because your genes have no idea what technology is going to be available to you. Cave painters, stone carvers, playwrights, chemists, quantum-mechanic mechanics—people do their art where they find it, not the other way around.”

Fri, January 24: The Meta Ray-Ban Glasses
So far I’m quite happy with them! This tech will be changing quickly, and the next version will almost certainly have some kind of display on the frames so that you can see notifications and other items. Until those come out, these are proving to be a great purchase.

Sat, January 25: Jab, Jab, Jab
12 years ago, Gary Vaynerchuk wrote an excellent book called “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook“. The idea was pretty simple: your social media content should consist primarily of “jabs”, where you’re sharing value-added content to make life better for your followers, with just the occasional “right hook” thrown in with your call-to-action.

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.