Familiarity helps you to discern

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I mentioned yesterday that as your expertise grows, the options that you see tend to shrink. Instead of viewing all possible options for a given situation, you’re able to quickly narrow down to the most likely.

Related is your ability, primarily in your area of expertise, to notice small changes that others might miss.

A good example is graphic design, where I tend to have a pretty poor eye. A few years back, our team had a website pulled up on our big screen, and our graphic designer immediately said “why do those two paragraphs have a different font?“. I literally couldn’t see a difference between them, but she was right — there were two very similar but slightly different fonts being used on the site. It would have taken me a while to track that down, but her deep familiarity with fonts helped her to quickly notice a problem that would have taken me (and many others) far longer.

The complexity of the WordPress dashboard

I noticed a similar phenomenon on a video call with a client last week. They were sharing their screen related to a problem they were having with their website, and I immediately saw the source of the issue. This wasn’t some intellectual triumph, but just the fact that I’ve seen the WordPress dashboard hundreds of thousands of times; I tend to glaze over most of it, but I can notice right away when something is amiss.

In their eyes, there were dozens of links and options and craziness on the dashboard, and they were right. To me, though, most of it looked perfectly “normal” and I tuned it out, and the issue is what jumped out right away.

This can apply to almost every profession and it’s what makes solid people worth paying for. If my furnace went out, I could conceivably find the right manual and spend a few hours going through part-by-part to try to figure out what’s wrong. However, if I called a pro to take a look, they’d likely notice within seconds “hey, it looks like your thermocouple is misaligned” and we’d be good.

Familiarity can be boring, but can make you better at what you are. The more time you spend learning something, the less you need to spend fixing it and the greater value you can be to those you serve.

Options shrink as your expertise grows

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If I’m driving along in my car and I hear a “thunk” as it sputters to a stop by the side of the road, I’ll likely have very little idea what happened. Other than knowing that it had a fresh oil change and a half-tank of gas, the possibilities for what happened are endless — I could probably conjure up 100 different reasons for why it might have stopped.

However, when the car gets to a proper mechanic, they can likely narrow down the possible cause to a handful of reasons in matter of seconds.

Or suppose I have a sharp pain in my stomach. With a little help from WebMD, I’ll quickly find thousands of deadly ailments that might out to kill me. An educated doctor, after just a few questions, can likely narrow down the possible causes to 2 or 3 in a couple of minutes.

As Shunryn Suzuki said: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.“

This is clearly a good thing.

If I take my car to the shop and they say “Well, we have 500 things we look at to see what’s wrong, so come back in three weeks and we’ll see what we found”, that’s problematic. Instead, they can dig into the few ideas they already have, figure out what’s wrong, and give me an estimate very quickly.

The same holds true for your expertise. In my case, if your website stops working, I can probably figure out the reason within a couple of minutes so we can get to work fixing it. There are skills that you have that are equally beneficial. Perhaps you can diagnose a broken air conditioning unit, or figure out why a power outlet suddenly isn’t working.

Maybe it’s bigger than that, and you can troubleshoot a complex banking software issue quickly, or determine the best way to help recover a politician’s reputation after a gaffe.

Learning to cut the possibilities when problem solving is a hugely valuable skill, so work to improve where you are in your field and help everyone get results more quickly.

Who wants to hear your message?

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As time goes on, I’m becoming increasingly annoyed with unexpected interruption-based marketing. I’ve mentioned before that I’m fine with ads during TV shows, podcasts, and other areas where I expect it. I don’t like them, but I recognize that it’s part of the deal and it’s my “payment” for the content. Fair enough.

However, as cold email becomes more and more prevalent, it seems that many view the solution as simply pushing their message even louder and more frequently. It’s a cycle that is spiraling in the wrong direction, and I hope that you aren’t part of it.

The better way is to find people that actually want to hear from you. Not “I have this great product that they’ll love, so let’s spam them”, but people that genuinely respect what you have to say.

Seth Godin recently put it this way:

“Selling to people who actually want to hear from you is more effective than interrupting strangers who don’t.”

It’s more effective, for sure, but it’s also a lot more work. Buying email lists and randomly messaging people on LinkedIn can feel easier, but taking the time to provide real value and build a faithful audience will work much better in the long run.

Honest skepticism

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If you disagree with something I post on here, or something you read elsewhere, or with a position that a political candidate holds, that’s great! You shouldn’t (and really can’t) agree with everything out there, so holding your position is very important.

However, what if you later realize that you were wrong? If you said that you disagree with something for a particular reason, and it turns out that your reasoning was inaccurate, then what?

In a recent post, Seth Godin put it like this:

if the data ends up meeting the standard of proof we set for it, we have to change our minds and spend as much energy supporting the idea as we did opposing it.

As I’ve said before, when I find new information to adjust my views, then I change my mind. It should be an easy decision to make, but it’s stunning how many people refuse to do it.

That’s part of the reason I have this blog — it’s a history of where my mind is at various stages of my life. I’ve been wrong quite a bit, and here are just a few of them:

  • I wrote a lot about how Roam Research was the best tool for note-taking, but I’ve changed my mind on that a few times.
  • I used to believe iPhone was the best mobile operating system, and now I don’t. That’s likely to to change again at some point in the next few decades as technology changes.
  • I was a big supporter of Google Stadia, but it didn’t take off like I thought it would.
  • My specific political views have morphed a good bit over the past few years, though I largely keep those off here, and I suspect they’ll continue to change as time goes on. I don’t know if that’s just me “changing with the times” or if I’m really “disagreeing with my past self”, but either way, it seems that holding on to old political ideas simply because they’re what I used to believe in seems very silly.

If you watch those around you, it’s easy to tell who is truly being an honest skeptic and who is just trying to push some buttons. I love listening to the insights from honest skeptics; even if I disagree with them, their ideas hold a much stronger place in my mind because I know they’re coming from a place of truth.

A good decision versus a good outcome

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I’ve talked about this idea a good bit on here, but it’s one that I continually struggle to understand myself. Much of this comes from Annie Duke, with thoughts like:

Don’t be so hard on yourself when things go badly and don’t be so proud of yourself when they go well.

An article in Psychology Today from a few years ago lays it out very nicely. Their entire article is fantastic and worth reading, but their main point is:

To ascertain whether a decision is good or not, the focus should be on the decision-making process, not on outcomes.

It’s interesting to me while I write this, because I have a football game going on the TV at the same time, which tends to lend itself to a lot of decisions. It’s so easy in sports to decide on the quality of a decision once you’ve seen the outcome, but a good coach can’t look at that way. If your kicker shanks a 28-yard field goal, it was still likely a good decision to try the kick. If you see it as a bad decision, will you opt not to take the next short field goal opportunity that comes your way?

That’s not to say you can’t learn from decisions that go poorly. Perhaps your kicker has a pulled muscle, and you really shouldn’t try the kick next time. Your first decision was wise, based on the information you had at the time, but now your next decision can learn from it.

Don’t base your next decision solely on the the outcome of the previous one, but you can certainly use that data to influence what you do next.

What is your service really worth?

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Last year I shared the idea of “perceived value”, as that’s really what matters in a business transaction. You certainly need to provide actual value, but it’s how your customer perceives it that really matters.

In a TEDx talk, Casey Brown shared a similar story about charging what she’s worth. She had the same conclusion as David Salyers did in the link above – perceived value is the key.

Casey’s talk is fairly short (around 8 minutes) and I encourage you to check it out here:

As Casey mentions, it can be difficult to “toot your own horn”, but your value needs to be clearly seen by your potential customers. Ideally your work will speak for itself, and your clients will tell their friends, but make sure that your value is easily visible by anyone looking.

There are a lot of people and companies out there that provide tremendous value that is hard to recognize, and they pay the price for it. If people can’t easily see and appreciate the value you bring, it will greatly diminish the growth that you’ll be able reach.

Go to bed smarter than when you woke up

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I love this simple quote from Charlie Munger: “Go to bed smarter than when you woke up.“

In the case of Munger and his business partner Warren Buffett, the easiest way to do that is to read — a lot. Buffett famously spends 80% of his day reading and thinking. While most of us aren’t in a position to do anything like that, it’s an interesting angle to consider.

Going further, many people to struggle to find any time to read in a given day. One way would be to sell an hour of your time back to yourself. In his biography “The Snowball“, Buffett shares this story:

Charlie, as a very young lawyer, was probably getting $20 an hour. He thought to himself, “Who’s my most valuable client?” And he decided it was himself. So he decided to sell himself an hour each day. He did it early in the morning, working on these construction projects and real estate deals. Everybody should do this, be the client, and then work for other people, too, and sell yourself an hour a day.

Of course, reading isn’t the only way to become smarter. Pay attention to what others are doing. Watch videos on a subject you’re curious about. Try a new recipe and see how it works out. It doesn’t take much, but if you can go to bed a little smarter every night, the long term effects can really add up.

Interpersonal versus social empathy

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I talk about empathy on here quite a bit (there’s a whole category for it), as it’s a skill I’m working to improve in my own life. The more I read and learn about it, the more my skill of empathy slowly improves.

Until now, though, I’ve largely thought of empathy as a personal thing — trying to understand the thoughts and feelings of a particular person. That’s not wrong, but that’s not the whole story.

In her book “Social Empathy“, author Elizabeth Segal lays out two different kinds of empathy:

Most people find it easy to be empathetic on an individual level, but social empathy takes some work. It means considering the wider context of other people’s lives and the social and historical circumstances that shaped the present. But once we understand the blocks to empathy, we can take steps to overcome them and build a better society using social empathy.

It feels to me like both of those fall under the idea of “interpersonal empathy”, as things like “social and historical circumstances” still are what makes the person, but by taking a step back you can see things through a slightly better perspective.

Another way to look at it is that interpersonal empathy helps you understand what a person is feeling, and social empathy helps you understand why they feel that way. Elizabeth’s book digs much deeper into this, and I encourage you to check it out.

Moving from Obsidian to Tana?

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When I moved my notes database from Roam Research to Obsidian earlier this year, I expected I’d stay there for quite a while. Obsidian is a great tool, and I spoke about the reasons for my move in that earlier post.

Now, more quickly than I expected, I’m moving everything over to Tana. What is Tana, and why would I do that?

At its core, Tana is another note-taking app, but it does it in a way that hasn’t really been seen before. Until Tana came around, there were really three types of note-taking apps:

  1. Simple note apps, like Google Keep and Apple Notes.
  2. Graph-style apps like Roam Research and Obsidian, that helped to interconnect your notes.
  3. Data-focused apps like Notion and Airtable that let you build powerful tables and charts.

While Google Keep will likely be my “quick notes” app of choice for years to come, Tana is the first great app I’ve seen that tries to combine the graph and data types of notes. There are a lot of videos out there that show how it works, but this one from Shu Omi is a solid overview:

Ultimately, Tana can handle everything that I was doing in Obsidian with books, people and blog posts, and then allows me to do a lot more. It’s easier for me to research quotes from books, track daily workouts, and just have an easier way to connect my thoughts. Ultimately, it should help me have a slightly easier time putting together my notes for posts on this blog, so we’ll see what happens.

Tana is invite-only for now, but if it interests you at all I encourage you to visit their site and put your name on the waiting list. As Shu mentioned in the video above, the product hasn’t been officially released yet but already feels incredibly polished.

Whether or not I stick with Tana in the long run, I’m very excited to see the direction these apps are taking and the benefits they can bring to all of us.

What is the real goal?

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Goal setting is essential to help move forward in a meaningful way, whether we’re talking about health, business, or any other skill you want to develop. A key to it, though, is to understand the true underlying goal.

For example, a goal might be for your business to finally reach a million dollars in annual revenue. That’s great, but why? Perhaps that level of income will allow you to pay down some debt, or to hire more staff, or various other things. Earning a million dollars doesn’t do much for you, in and of it itself, but it opens more doors to take your business higher.

In her book “Blind Spots“, author Madeleine Van Hecke gives the example of taking your family to the zoo. What is the goal behind that trip?

Maybe it will hit you that you’ve been acting as if the goal of the outing was to “cover every inch of the zoo,” rather than to “have fun and see some interesting animals,”

When we went to Disney World a few year ago I saw this quite a lot — people dragging around exhausted and miserable children because they “had to do everything”, rather than relaxing and just having a good time.

It’s a tough balance, for sure. With something like Disney World, you’re spending thousands of dollars to be there and you want to make the most of it. At the end of the day, though, do you want to be able to say “we saw everything” or “we had an amazing time”?

Chase after your stated goals, but try to stay focused on the real goal behind the scenes.