You train an animal, you teach a person

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

With the rise of AI and robotics, the need to “train” a person is fading quickly. Jobs that can be easily trained are quickly being replaced by machines, while jobs that require deeper insights and skill continue to grow.

Sol Price, the founder of Price Club (which became Costco) said it simply:

“You train an animal, you teach a person”

Or as Seth Godin said in his book “Linchpin”:

“There are no longer any great jobs where someone else tells you precisely what to do.”

Related is a quote from Jim Sinegal, one of the other cofounders of Costco, who said:

“If you’re not spending 90% of your time teaching, you’re not doing your job.”

Training is what we needed in the last century, but things are very different today. A few years ago, Seth wrote and shared a long post about the purpose of school and how things need to change. For decades, the purpose of school was to train obedience so that students would become good factory workers. That worked well for that stated purpose, but it’s no longer the goal. Training students to be obedient is training them for jobs that no longer exist.

Seth also did a TEDx talk years ago with some great examples from the post, which you can watch here:

If you feel like you have to “train” your employees, you have roles that aren’t going to be around much longer.

Change your mind or prove that you’re right?

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I write quite often about the value in changing your mind, largely because it’s something that I work hard to do. I don’t want to change my mind simply for the sake of mixing things up, but rather to avoid holding an incorrect position simply because it was something that I used to believe.

In her book “The Charisma Myth“, author Olivia Fox Cabane shares this thought on changing your mind:

Why do split-second impressions last for so long? One reason is that, according to economist John Kenneth Galbraith, when “faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”

Behavioral research has since proven him right. Once we’ve made a judgment about someone, we spend the rest of our acquaintanceship seeking to prove ourselves correct. Everything we see and hear gets filtered through this initial impression.

As Galbraith says, this is something that we all tend to do to some degree or another. If you don’t intentionally seek to change your mind, your default will be to defend your position even when that’s a bad move to make.

Sadly, I see some folks moving in the other direction. Seven years ago I shared about my friend “Joe” and how he often did a great job of sharing both sides of political situations. I didn’t generally agree with him, but he was influential in my eyes because of his ability to share the good and bad from every angle. In the years since then, he’s shifted from that to simply “getting busy on the proof” and making wild claims that seem out of character. In an effort to prove that his side is right, he’s instead forcing people away.

It’s easy for all of us to slip into that mode, but everyone is better off if you’re willing and able to change your mind when the information calls for it.

Credentials are the easy part

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

As recently shared by Seth Godin, there is a big difference between credentials and expertise. They might overlap a lot, sure, but they don’t always.

As Seth says in his post, “credentials are awarded to folks who are good at being awarded credentials“. If you’re a good student you’ll have an easier time earning a degree, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have much expertise.

Personally, I appreciate the value in someone earning a college degree as it shows that they know how to buckle down and work, but that’s about it. When we’re hiring someone, we barely glance at their credentials and instead dig directly into their expertise, habits, and personality.

  • Do they have the skills for this role?
  • How will they continue to improve those skills?
  • How will they work with a team?
  • How do they respond when they make a mistake?

If they have credentials that will help in that role that’s certainly a fantastic thing, but it’s among the pieces that matter least.

The BOOX Note Air4 C

by 2 Comments

Reading Time: 2 minutes

As time has gone on, my wife and I have felt a stronger and stronger pull to distance ourselves from Amazon. There is a huge list of troubling things about their company (how they treat their employees and vendors, how they steal ideas, various political concerns, etc). They make things very easy to buy, making them hard to completely separate from, but we’re giving it a shot.

Not buying products from Amazon is easy enough. It’s a bit more work, but buying local has many advantages and we enjoy helping out local businesses. The trickier one is the Kindle; I’ve been using one for about 15 years (most recently with the Kindle Scribe), and my wife has one a few years longer than that.

Boox, Kobo, Nook, Supernote, reMarkable…

While leaving Kindle may be tough, there is no shortage of options on the market today. You have dedicated readers from Kobo and Nook, and other e-ink devices from Boox, Supernote, reMarkable and many others. Which to choose?

We were able to narrow it down quite quickly. The reMarkable is great for notes, but not for reading. Kobo and Nook have great devices, but they’re tied to their individual stores. That essentially left the Supernote and Boox devices, as they allow you load multiple apps on them, and Boox seems to have a better focus on reading.

The Boox tablets run a version of Android, so you can load various apps on the tablet. I’ll likely be purchasing most of my books going forward from Kobo, but the fact that I can also run the Nook app (as well as Libby, BookShop, and many others) is fantastic. Plus, I can load the Kindle app on there to still have access to all of the books I’ve purchased over the years.

Which Boox tablet?

Once we decided on Boox, we had to choose the devices that we wanted most. They have a lot of options! I knew I wanted a large tablet with a pen and a backlight, and my wife wanted one similar to her smaller Kindle Paperwhite. I ultimately went with Note Air4 C the and my wife with the Go 6.

There are a lot of videos to walk through the Note Air4 C, but this one is a fairly short (yet comprehensive) overview:

After a few weeks of use, my hunches on the good and the bad (when compared to the Kindle Scribe) were pretty accurate.

  • The Boox has a lot of great apps to choose from. I’ve loaded up the Kindle, Kobo and Nook apps, as well as apps like Readwise, Shortform, and Blinkist. It really is the ultimate reading device!
  • Perhaps too many apps? I need to be careful not to load distractions on there (like social media), because I certainly can.
  • It’s a bit trickier to use. The Kindle just reads books, and now I need to deal with apps and settings and such.
  • The reading experience in the Kindle app on the Boox is about 90% as good as on an actual Kindle device. I knew it wouldn’t be 100%, but I’m quite pleased with how well it works.
  • The battery life is not nearly as good. With heavy use, the Boox will last a few days whereas a Kindle would last weeks. This is a consequence of a more robust operating system.

All in all it’s been a good move! We can support smaller book publishers and now I’m using a more capable device.

If you use an e-ink tablet other than a Kindle, what are you using?

Our brains are all messy

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I see images like this on social media from time to time, usually with a caption of something like “this is how messy my brain is”.

The truth is, we’re all similar to that by default — it’s just how we’re wired. Memory expert Ron White shared a video along the same lines, showing thoughts and memories coming in like sheets of paper getting piled up on the floor.

As he shares in the video, though, it doesn’t have to be that way. Some people thrive in that kind of chaos, but most of us wish that memories stayed a bit more organized and easy to access.

There’s no simple solution, but things like memorization apps and memory palaces can help quite a bit. If you want to take the time to organize your brain, you can do it.

Another good example is Sabrina Cruz. In the video below she explains how truly awful her memory is for day-to-day things, so she worked to improve it and eventually memorized the first 3,141 digits of pi! This wasn’t some gimmick or secret trick, but simply a skill that she worked to develop over the course of a few months. It’s a very interesting and well-done video.

I’m not suggesting that you go memorize 3,141 digits of pi (I mean, you can if you want to), but just know that your “messy brain” and “terrible memory” are things that we all experience. Don’t use those ideas as excuses, and know that you can choose to improve them if you decide to put in the effort.

The power of memory palaces

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The idea of a “memory palace” has been around for centuries, and I’ve been loosely trying to use them for a few years. Like many things, though, just trying to use them a little bit meant that I really wasn’t using them at all. I’ve finally cracked down and dug in, and I’m finding some amazing uses for them!

Memory palaces are best for helping you remember a list of items. There are other techniques for remembering text word-for-word (like the app I shared a few weeks ago), and other techniques for remembering names and faces (which I’ll share in the coming weeks), but memory palaces generally focus on lists.

If you’re not familiar with a memory palace for remembering things, the overall concept is fairly simple:

  • Think of a place that you know well, like your house, a friends house, or even an area from a video game or movie that you know very well.
  • Pick one, and slowly walk through it in your mind. Look for large items (chair, refrigerator, TV, etc) as you go through it. Walk it a few times in your mind until you have a consistent pattern (in the front door, notice the chair, then go to the sofa, then to the TV, etc).
  • Now write it down and number the items.

That’s a memory palace! Now, to use it to actually remember some items, you need to walk back through it in your mind but assign items to each place.

Here’s a short video of me showing how it could be done with “The 6 Principles of Persuasion” and The Ten Commandments:

How many palaces?

As I’ve been digging into this, the question of “how many palaces should I have?” or “is it ok to reuse a palace for multiple lists?” show up, and the answers are varied. My thoughts are:

  • Create a bunch of palaces. Once you get going, it only takes a few minutes to walk through, find some items, and make a list.
  • Don’t reuse them very much, if ever.

I struggled for a bit to come up with other ideas for palaces, so here are some that I’m using:

  • My house
  • The house I grew up in
  • My mother-in-law’s house
  • My business partner’s house
  • Our office
  • Our previous office
  • Various restaurants that we visit
  • Various business meeting facilities
  • The high school where I mentor a student every Friday
  • The school district office where I have a meeting every month or two
  • Church
  • The UPS Store that I’m at far too often

Beyond those, you could try:

  • Locations from a video game that you frequently play.
  • Locations from a movie or TV show that you’re very familiar with.
  • Driving down a specific street.
  • A local park
  • A museum or stadium

The list is endless! The key is to choose locations that you can imagine in your head very clearly, and then briefly write down the path you walk through it. For example, the first five items when I walk into my house are:

  1. The table my the front door.
  2. The french doors that lead to my office.
  3. The old doorbell box on the wall.
  4. A tall wooden mirror.
  5. The bannister that leads upstairs.

For most locations, I just have 5-10 items total, but for my house I’ve done five in every room, so I can build a huge list in there if I need to.

This is one of those things that takes a lot of work before you see any results, but once you get it going it can be magical! Have you ever done this before?

Thinking through your fingers

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

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

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

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.

Connectors require facts

by 2 Comments

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The state of learning (particularly memorization) is at a weird place in time. Since the launch of Google 25 years ago, and steadily increasing as things like Wikipedia, smartphones, and AI came along, the need to memorize information has become less important. However, it’s becoming increasing important to develop the ability to connect information to make new insights.

In a recent podcast from Adam Grant, where he spoke with OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Grant seemed to somewhat disagree, saying:

“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.”

Between Adam and myself, I think we see “connectors” in a few different ways:

  • Connecting facts and ideas. For example, this could be learning systems like “Traction” but also learning systems like “The 12 Week Year” and pulling the best pieces from each. You can’t notice those differences unless you understand both systems.
  • Recognizing patterns, such as various mental models that you can learn and apply, which relies less on facts stored in our heads.

Related is another concept from “The 12 Week Year” regarding knowledge and making use of it, where they shared:

“You’ve no doubt heard the saying knowledge is power. I disagree. Knowledge is only powerful if you use it, if you act on it. People spend lifetimes acquiring knowledge, but to what purpose? Knowledge alone benefits no one unless the person acquiring it does something with it.”

Regardless of the way you acquire knowledge, whether it’s learning and memorizing up front or making efficient use of technology to find answers as needed, the application of that knowledge is where the true value lives. Becoming a “connector of dots” will make you indispensable to any organization that you wish to serve, and you can only connect the dots that you already know.

Sit in the third chair

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Being able to see things from another person’s point of view can be powerful. Gaining attunement (to know what they’re thinking) and empathy (to know what they’re feeling) can be a great place to start, and understanding the strengths of the “other side” will give you a massive upper hand.

In Seth Godin’s book “Linchpin” he shares the idea of seeing clearly from the perspective of a “third chair”. From the book:

“Seeing clearly means being able to look at a business plan from the point of view of the investor, the entrepreneur, and the market. That’s hard. Seeing clearly means being able to do a job interview as though you weren’t the interviewer or the applicant, but someone watching dispassionately from a third chair. Seeing clearly means that you’re smart enough to know when a project is doomed, or brave enough to persevere when your colleagues are fleeing for the hills. Abandoning your worldview in order to try on someone else’s is the first step in being able to see things as they are.”

It’s much easier said than done. As Godin shares, you need to abandon your worldview in order to gain this perspective, and many of us have a hard time doing that. If you can, though, the view from that seat will be the most helpful you can ever take.