The why of the sandwich

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A few weeks ago I picked up lunch for the family from Jersey Mike’s Subs. I ordered ahead, but they weren’t quite ready for me, so I sat and waited for a bit. All in all, it was a good experience and good food.

While I was waiting, though, I saw something interesting. A woman walked in with a Jersey Mike’s bag in her hand told them her problem (in a very polite interaction):

  • I need you to remake this sandwich.
  • It was made incorrectly.
  • It wasn’t supposed to have cheese on it.
  • My son is allergic to cheese.

She could have stopped after one or two of those points, but giving all four (the fourth being the “why” behind her ask) led to an interesting outcome.

While remaking the sandwich, the staff member mentioned to her that the bread they had chosen has cheese in it as well, and he wanted to be careful of the allergy. She agreed and changed breads. Kudos to the staff for being aware of that, but I also think the woman helped make this happen by sharing her “why”.

  • When she came in, if had simply asked for it to be remade, it would have had the cheese bread again for sure.
  • If she had mentioned that the sandwich shouldn’t have had cheese, the staff might have asked about the bread, but likely would have just made the sandwich the exact way it was ordered.
  • However, the fact that she told WHY she needed it remade gave the staff member more information and helped him uncover the other cheesy problem they had.

Commander’s Intent

It’s funny that this happened not long after my run of posts about mental models, because I immediately recognized it as an example of “Commander’s Intent“. Her supplying the “why” of her request helped the Jersey Mike’s staff change tactics a bit and help even more.

At the end of the day it was just a sandwich, but depending on the degree of her son’s allergy, it could have been a big deal. When asking for help, the “why” can really make a difference.

Determine the conditions to quit before you start

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Perseverance is a wonderful trait to have. If you can fight through obstacles to reach your goal, that’s an amazing thing to do.

At times, though, people will keep pushing at a dead end, and end up wasting time that could be put toward other ventures instead. The difference can be very hard to spot when you’re in it, so determining those conditions ahead of time can help.

In David Epstein’s book “Range“, he says:

“We fail…tasks we don’t have the guts to quit.”…knowing when to quit is such a strategic advantage that every single person, before undertaking an endeavor should enumerate conditions under which they should quit.”

Not just quitting

This applies to more than just quitting. As I heard recently on the Businessology Show, they talked about how almost no company wished they had waited longer to let people go. Instead, if they had trimmed their staff earlier it would have lead to healthier company for the remaining staff. It’s a difficult thing to do, particularly in the moment, so having the conditions determined ahead of time can be very helpful.

This is something that we’ve done a bit of work on at GreenMellen, but likely not enough. When COVID first started ramping up, Ali and I spent some time calculating our runway in various scenarios, and determining what actions would need to happen at certain checkpoints if things went downhill.

I don’t recall our exact strategy, but one checkpoint was something along the lines of “If we get down to three months of runway, we shut down the business“. The thought was that if we ran things down to zero, our staff would leave with nothing. By stopping a few months earlier, everyone would get a solid bit of severance pay to help bridge the gap. Fortunately, COVID didn’t affect our business much, and our runway is still measured in years, but it was nice to have that predetermined line to measure in case things got tight.

Not just money

It also doesn’t need to be about money. For example, we had one team member that told us she was going to retire when she had her first grandchild. Epstein says to “enumerate conditions under which they should quit”, and that was a clear condition that fit the bill and it made sense to all of us.

You can base your milestones on finances, age, clients, or grandchildren, but having some idea of what the end might look like will make your life easier if that time ever comes.

Mistakes and heroes are created in advance

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It’s human nature to judge a decision after the results have come in. I’ve talked about this many times, but the easiest example is the Seattle Seahawks at the end of Super Bowl XLIX. I maintain that they made a good decision that simply had a bad outcome.

In his book “Fooled By Randomness“, author Nassim Taleb looks at this tendency from both sides.

First, he discusses the idea of mistakes, like I shared above:

“A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in light of the information available until that point”

However, he also sees heroism through the same light. A hero may fail in their task, but it’s the effort that really matters:

“Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.”

It can be tough to look a decision that came out poorly and still feel it was a good decision, and vice-versa. If you can manage to do it, though it’ll help you to make better decisions in the future.

The slant pass from Russell Wilson that was intercepted in the Super Bowl is only intercepted 3.1% of the time. Even though it remains a statistically safe play to use, I would guess that teams foolishly use it less often because of one high-profile case where it went wrong.

Judge mistakes and heroes based on the information at the time, and it’ll leader to better judgement in the future.

Readwise is breathing new life into RSS

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I’ve been using the Readwise Reader app for a few months now, and it’s quickly becoming an indispensable tool for me.

You can learn about it on their site here, but for me it really just combines two things — the “read it later” functionality from tools like Pocket, and then the traditional RSS reading from tools like Feedly. However, the way they combine those two features is very helpful, and some of the new ideas they’re bringing to RSS are simply fantastic.

RSS like TikTok

So an RSS feed is essentially just a list of articles from sites that you’ve added to your list, like I have discussed here in the past. You can subscribe and unsubscribe from sites, and you get all of the content from those that you’re subscribed to. Most RSS readers do a fine job of letting you browse your list and mark things off as you go, but Readwise is using some inspiration from TikTok to help you get through them more quickly.

With RSS, most software has to juggle the ability to “show more content” with “let people get through it quickly” and this new solution does it well, particularly on your phone. It shows each new article as a full-page on your phone (image, headline, and a few sentence of text), but then you treat it like TikTok — tap on it to read more, or flick your finger to scroll to the next article. As you scroll though, they’re marked as read and you can get through your list rather quickly.

Unlike TikTok, there is no algorithm at play here, which is the core of why RSS is great. It shows you every article from every site that you subscribe to — nothing more, nothing less. I’ve used RSS for a few decades now for that reason, but this new interface makes it even better.

Always get full feeds

The other neat thing that Readwise is doing is that is essentially forces sites to supply “full feeds”. When you look at the settings for RSS on your site (which you likely have whether you know it or not), you can choose to publish a “full feed” or a “partial feed”. The full feed will publish the entirety of your posts, while the partial feed will publish a paragraph and then a “click to read the full post”. I always encourage people to publish full posts, but not everyone pays attention to that setting

Backing up a bit, the other part of Readwise Reader is their “read it later” functionality. This gives you a small button in your web browser, and every time you see something you want to read later, you tap the button and it saves it for you in Reader. It doesn’t just save a bookmark to it (though it does that as well), but they crawl the page, pull the text from the article, and then format it nicely for you to read later.

That’s essentially what their RSS reader does for partial feeds. If it pulls in a post that is only a partial feed, they then run out and crawl the full version of the post and bring that in instead, so when you’re reading your RSS feeds, you get the full content of every post. It’s a relatively simple concept, but I’ve never seen it done before and it’s brilliant!

RSS –> Read It Later

At the end of the day, the real power of Readwise Reader is the combination of RSS and the read-it-later functionality. If I’m reading something in my feed that is particularly noteworthy, I can tap an icon and it saves it in my long list of things to read later.

Even in that part of their app, they’ve done a little something that makes it more useful. With tools like Pocket, you have your list of things to read, and then you can “archive” them when you’re done. It works well, but Readwise adds another step — an inbox.

Ultimately, Readwise has three categories for read-it-later items: Inbox | Later | Archive

Whenever you add something to read later, whether from the browser tool or from their RSS reader, it drops it in the inbox. I work to keep that pretty clean, so I can read important items quickly or share them or whatever, and then move on. For most items, though, I take them from the inbox to the later and then dig into them when I have time to read and process. Archive is less important to me, but solid articles move there just for safe keeping. The extra step is nice, and allows me to keep a heavy list of things to read “later”, while letting me keep that inbox clean.

Readwise Reader is still in beta, and still has some bugs, but they’re doing the big things right and are doing an excellent job of bringing new features to an old technology. Check out their website to learn more, and if you’d like an invite to try it out, just reach out and I’ll get you connected.

What would it take for you to turn away?

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There are a lot of people that I trust, but very few that I trust unconditionally. When it comes to leadership in politics, there is no one that I will follow “no matter what”.

Some have been close. Mike Boyce was transparent, focused, and always did what he felt was the right thing, and I supported him fully. Even then, it wasn’t unconditional — if he did something morally corrupt, my allegiance would have changed instantly.

Lately, though, it seems like people are following leaders regardless of circumstance. Adam Grant said it well in a recent tweet:

I like his idea of considering what it would take ahead of time. Take Donald Trump, for example. What if it turns out that he is jailed for taking those classified documents to Mar-a-Lago? Or if his tax returns are released and they’re full of shady dealings? At what point would you turn away?

This isn’t about Trump, though — this is for any leader that you follow. I essentially have no full trust or allegiance to any national leaders, though I still have some with local leadership.

Even then, at all levels, there is no one that I will categorically support.

With the various elections coming this fall, what would it take for you to vote for “the other side” instead?

Buy the “gaming” stuff

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When people are looking to buy products for their business, they often ignore things that have the “gaming” tag on them. They want solid business tools, not toys for gamers. I think they’re often wrong.

Recently, my wife needed a new computer chair that had better back support, so we got her this gaming chair.

A few years ago I needed a new Windows laptop to have as secondary computer, and I ended up with “gaming” laptop. I don’t use it for games (I have other devices for that…), but I wanted powerful specs on the laptop and a gaming machine was the way to go.

Routers are often the same way. I personally just use a Google mesh router for simplicity, but if you want to squeeze out every bit of speed that you can, a gaming-focused router is the way to go.

Another area is headphones. I tend to use simple earbuds most of the time, but if you want very high-quality headphones, include the word “gaming” with your search and you’ll do well.

I talked a few months ago about how putting the word “reddit” in your Google searches can yield amazing results. Similarly, if you’re searching for a tech product for your business work, the word “gaming” might be the way to find what you really need.

What happens when content REALLY takes off?

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The pace of content on the internet already seems to be at a blistering speed. Twitter sees roughly 350,000 tweets per minute. Users watch roughly 4.5M YouTube videos every minute. Add in other social networks like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, and the numbers are unreal.

With that we haven’t even talked about web content. Sites are churning out tons of content, and roughly 250,000 new websites are created every day.

Despite those huge numbers, things are likely to skyrocket fro there in the next few years. I talked a bit about AI-generated art recently, but we’re also seeing a lot more AI-generated text, videos, and all kinds of content. As those systems smooth out and scale, content will be churning from everywhere you look.

So what can we do?

I’m not sure I have the answer, but I have some ideas. My first thought is that it may not be as bad as it sounds. Even if content goes 10x in the next few years, it doesn’t mean that you need to see it. I mentioned above that there are 350,000 new tweets every minute, but I only follow who I want to follow. If people are publishing too frequently for my taste or it’s just spam, I can stop following them. Scale doesn’t hurt me there.

A potential issue is the growing rise of “recommended” content on social media, but companies will have to keep that in check or risk losing users.

The same goes with web content. Sure there are tons of new sites coming up, but I can choose which sites I want to follow. I talked last year about how I’ve been adjusting my RSS feeds to focus more on people, and I continue to streamline from there. RSS is a bit messy at times, but it’s a way to get exactly the content you want, with no extra recommendations and no ads. It’s quite amazing.

Spam will be trouble

The biggest problem will likely be in two main areass:

Organizing information: Google will need to find new ways to determine what content is real versus written by AI, or perhaps allow AI-generated content if it’s high enough quality. It’ll be interesting to see what they do there. Social networks will have similar challenges, as bots will become more and more humanlike as time goes no.

Is it real? AI art, photos and movies will make it very hard to tell. We’re not far from people being able to create realistic video, with realistic voices, making it look like anyone is saying and doing anything they want. News organizations will have to find new ways to validate the truth, and I don’t know what that even looks like. This will be a real struggle in the coming years, and I’m excited to see what kind of technologies come along to help fight it.

What’s next?

Personally, I’m not too worried about how I’ll dig through the mess. I trust that social networks will keep things fairly tight (at the risk of losing users), and I’ll keep using RSS for much of my reading. My bigger concern is around fake content being passed around as if it were real, which we already see too much of today, so we’ll see what answers are created to stop it.

If you feel dumb, you just got smarter

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For most people, most of the time, if they find themselves in a situation where they feel dumb, they likely just got smarter. It can happen two ways:

First, it might be that you’re immediately corrected with more factual information. This happened to me a few years ago with a bit of info about Matt Lauer — I thought I knew the story, I was wrong, and became a bit smarter as a result of being corrected. It’s kind of like Adam Grant’s use of “my understanding”, leaving himself open to correction when needed.

The other way is if you simply feel uneducated about something, you’re likely to look it up later or try to learn it. You’re not necessarily smarter immediately, but the moment of “feeling dumb” led you to steps of becoming smarter.

Or maybe not…

On the other hand, there are two ways to feel dumb but not get any better.

If I’m talking to the guy fixing my furnace, I’m going to feel rather dumb and I’m not going to do much about it. However, the awareness of my lack of skills in repairing a furnace are of some value (I know not to mess with it and make it worse).

The other way this might not help is if you continue to fight against it. I see this a lot on sites like Facebook, where users are often upset by the fact-checkers that appear on the site. A common response I see is “if your post gets fact-checked, it means you’re close to the truth“. In reality, it generally just means you were wrong and you won’t admit it.

Be less wrong

I don’t aim to be wrong, but when I find out that I’m incorrect on a subject it simply means that I’m less wrong than I was before, which is a good place to be.

Learning is easier when you don’t have to rush

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I wasn’t a very good student in high school. I got decent test scores, but a pretty weak GPA. If I could go back and do it again, I think I’d handle things much differently. However, the way you need to learn in high school is much different than how I learn now, and I think I prefer the casual pace that I’m allowed to take today.

For example, earlier this year I decided I wanted to learn more of the periodic table. I wasn’t particularly worried about all of the details like the atomic number for each, but just keeping track of things like Cadmium=Cd while Calcium=Ca would be nice.

There are 118 elements, so learning them back and forth meant that it was 236 things to remember (“Ca is Calcium”, but also “Calcium is Ca”). There’s no test next week or anything, so I was able to take it slow and just work on two per day for about four months using Anki (and this shared deck) — it added virtually no time to my daily routine, and now I know all of those.

As I shared in my “1,000 days of Anki” post last year, this didn’t create a new task for me every day. Just in among my normal card review there’d be a couple of periodic table cards. As I shared before, “this” Mickey had the idea to learn the periodic table, but then I let the “other” Mickey have to do the learning. It’s a neat way to view things.

If I was back in school having to learn them quickly for chemistry class, I’d have to rush a bit more — it’s unlikely I could cruise for four months slowly picking up a few each day. At this stage in my life, though, it’s nice to be able to desire to learn something new, toss some cards in Anki, and magically have that new knowledge on hand in a few months.

The question is, what do I want to learn next?

What does AI-generated art mean for our future?

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AI-generated art is an area that is growing incredibly quickly. In most cases, these tools allow you to type in a short description of what you want and the system will create the image automatically.

A recent episode of the Cortex podcast got into it quite a bit, and it opened my eyes to some great tools out there. Marques Brownlee has a great video that walks through the DALL-E 2 technology, arguably the best software out right now:

While most of us aren’t able to access DALL-E 2 at this point, there are a variety of other tools available. The most accessible is one called Stable Diffusion, which you can install on a Windows computer right now with some effort, or with this simple installation on a Mac. It can be a bit messy to set up, but it works — mostly.

I’ve run a bunch of examples through it. Some came out very poorly, like “three men standing at a whiteboard”:

Or maybe “homer simpson as a disney princess”:

That one is still somewhat impressive from a logic perspective (that’s Homer dressed up kind of like Belle), but it’s a mess.

Some did a bit better, like a “happy dog wearing a suit”:

Or maybe “walter white in fortnite”:

Not yet…

Ultimately, the technology isn’t quite there yet, but it’s close. If you watch the video above, it can do some amazing things. So what does that mean for us?

In the very short term, I think it could be good for things like stock imagery. While my “whiteboard” example above wasn’t good, other tools can do it better and it’ll be a fantastic way to acquire stock images for anything that you need.

Not too much later, though, we’re gonna see this used for more nefarious purposes. DALL-E has intentional features built-in to avoid this (no specific people, no adult content, etc), but as these tools become more open source, that will change quickly. There’s already so much fake news out there, and when you can couple it with a very realistic-looking fake image, things will get much worse. Photoshop can already do it now, but when anyone can just type in something like “Donald Trump choking a man” and get a result, we could see a flood of those kinds of images.

Further down the road, perhaps in 3-5 years, we’ll see this technology move to video. It’s a bit slow for that now, but it won’t be too long before we can get a realistic looking video of anything you want, which has huge implications.

That opens up the need for tools that can help to verify images and video as being authentic, but I’m not sure how that would really work. It’ll be interesting to see what people come up with to counter these kinds of tools.

In the meantime, it’s worth playing with tools like Stable Diffusion to get an idea of what’s possible to better understand where we might be going.