Ideas for Impact
There’s a difference between the data you’d like to have to decide and the data you’d need before you can make a decision.
When you get to a point where any further data may serve to make your decision better-informed but wouldn’t really change your mind, it’s time to stop deliberating. Make that decision.
Be willing to act on adequate data.
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We wish you all a healthy and prosperous 2021!
During a Q&A at Vanderbilt University in 2013, lifelong Billy Joel fan and piano player Michael Pollack plucked up the courage and stood up to ask his childhood idol a question.
Pollack, an 18-year-old freshman at Vanderbilt, asked to accompany Joel in a performance of “New York State of Mind,” Pollack’s favorite song: “I was very fortunate to play with Richie Cannata [Joel’s saxophone player] many times in New York City, and I was wondering if I could play it with you.”
With just a hint of hesitation, Joel said, “Okay.”
Joel gave a remarkable vocal performance to accompany Pollack’s piano skills. The crowd applauded.
“Remember that name,” Joel told the excited audience. “Guy’s got chops.”
An online video of the performance quickly went viral.
Pollack took a risk and traded the possibility of embarrassment and rejection for a lifetime of memories and a huge payoff.
Before long, Pollack signed publishing deals and began collaborating with other musicians. After graduating from Vanderbilt, he wrote dozens of songs for celebrity musicians. This year, he achieved his first U.S. Top 40 radio #1 with Maroon 5’s “Memories.”
Most folks know that the key to getting what they want is merely asking for it. But they’re too wimpish to speak up.
Take a chance. A little bit of courage can open doors for you. Feel the fear and do it anyway.
Ask for what you want. You sometimes won’t get it, and often the rejection will be painful. But when this works, it works surprisingly well.
Try something today that has a small risk and a huge payoff.
Self-confidence, so often peddled by the self-help genre as the panacea for low achievement, can indeed cause it. Beyond a moderate amount, self-confidence is destined to encourage complacency—even conceit. You’ll never reach anything better with that attitude.
Paradoxically, conceding your insecurities—and having a certain amount of humility about your capabilities—-is usually to your advantage.
Deep down, some of history’s greatest icons—from Abraham Lincoln to Mahatma Gandhi—regularly worried that they weren’t good enough. That’s what kept them striving harder.
Face up to your self-judgment. Low self-esteem is present only when your self-appraisal is more acute than reality.
Channel that nagging voice in your head that keeps saying negative things about you. Don’t be self-defeatingly vulnerable. Don’t worry yourself into perfection, anxiety, or despair.
Engage that little “sweet spot” of insecurity to motivate yourself to exert the additional effort required to seek a better self. For example, ignore anyone who tries to calm your nerves by telling you to “just be yourself” or “who else could be better suited” before a job interview.
Idea for Impact: Satisfaction can be deadly. Lasting self-confidence derives from your ongoing effort, not by virtue.
One way to accelerate innovation is to undertake low-risk experiments.
Failures in the innovation process can be costly and time-consuming. It’s often wiser to try low-risk, low-cost, high-payoff experiments than ruminating endlessly.
Make your experiments cheaper. You don’t need to create a full-scale concept to test it. Find low-cost ways to test your assumptions. It may take time and iteration to find what works for you.
Idea for Impact: The worst way to fail is slow and big. Don’t eliminate failure. Only reduce the cost of failure.
Streaming startup Quibi is shutting down barely six months after going live. The Wall Street Journal reports,
Founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and Chief Executive Meg Whitman decided to shut down the company in an effort to return as much capital to investors as possible instead of trying to prolong the life of the company and risk losing more money.
Quibi (short for “quick bite”) was a late entrant into a crowded marketplace, and its short-form serial format aimed at short attention spans failed to get traction with teenagers and young adults amid the pandemic. The Week was puzzled by Quibi’s decision to not allow people to watch it on their television:
Among the early criticism directed at Quibi was the fact that it was mobile only, and users couldn’t watch the app’s original shows on their TVs. This was especially problematic at a time when many people were no longer commuting to work due to the COVID-19 pandemic and were, therefore, not in need of short content to watch on the go.
At heart, Quibi was just another fast food joint with the same menu as the rest. The Guardian wondered if anyone would give Quibi the time of day:
Quibi’s content felt less revolutionary than underbaked, slapdash concepts sledgehammering the viewer with abrupt hits of celebrity. The overarching theme was of celebrity names without thinking through what they would be doing that is interesting or novel. It offered little marginal benefit to the free celebrity fare on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, or TikTok. Why pay for Quibi, when “if you want snackable Chrissy Teigen content, her social media provides that for you without this sort of hackneyed, first-thought courtroom set-up.”
Quibi’s only bona fide USP was its potential to piggybank on Katzenberg’s deep connections in the Hollywood establishment for content.
Idea for Impact: Investing money, energy, and time into something that’s not working is dreadful to admit, but it’s essential to come to terms with things that don’t go as planned, and your high hopes are dashed. Don’t hold on to an idea that doesn’t pay off soon enough. Best to cut your losses early—you’ll have the least sunk costs and the fewest emotional attachments.
American engineer and entrepreneur Wilbert L. “Bill” Gore (1912–86) was the founder (with wife Genevieve (Vieve)) of W. L. Gore & Associates, the maker of such innovative products as Gore-Tex fabrics, Elixir guitar strings, and a variety of medical products.
Gore’s open and creative workplace emphasized autonomy, fairness, commitment, and experimentation. He instituted a mental model for risk-tolerance called the “Waterline Principle.”
Gore compared the level of allowable risk to the waterline on a boat.
Commenting about Bill Gore and his Waterline Principle, business consultant Jim Collins noted in his How the Mighty Fall (2009,)
When making risky bets and decisions in the face of ambiguous or conflicting data, ask three questions:
- What’s the upside, if events turn out well?
- What’s the downside, if events go very badly?
- Can you live with the downside? Truly?
The Waterline Principle encourages prudent experimentation and conscientious risk-taking by lowering the risk waterline.
Idea for Impact: Risk analysis and risk reduction should be one of the primary goals of any intellectual process. Invite your team to identify risks that can sink the boat and those that can cause survivable damages.
Israeli historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari’s bestselling 464-page Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015) retells the 13.5 billion years-long odyssey of human evolution from the Big Bang to the near-future. Harari accounts for how Homo sapiens (the ‘wise man’) overcame the most extraordinary odds and numerous arbitrary inevitabilities to dominate the world the way we do at present.
Harari’s narratives span the cognitive revolution (70,000 years ago,) agricultural revolution (11,000 years,) scientific revolution (500 years,) industrial revolution (250 years,) and information revolution (50 years.) The first of these epochs, the cognitive revolution, coupled with a genetic mutation, was the real game-changer: Homo sapiens didn’t evolve efficiently from stooping apes to standing individuals. There were previously no less than six distinct homines, of which Homo sapiens came out top.
Sapiens argues that what made Homo sapiens special was our ability to develop networks and communities and tell stories, i.e., to organize and build large, connected communities around “shared fictions” or narratives—religion, nationalism, capitalism, trade groups, social institutions, for example. It was only through such intangible beliefs—not biological realities—that Homo sapiens were able to get the better of the physical world.
Language made it easier to dwell upon abstract matters and flexibly cooperate in ever-larger numbers. Harari’s examples cite how Homo sapiens—from our ancestors all the way up to today—are so willing to create and believe in such conceptual paradigms that have been the key to our success and the key to our problems.
Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation—whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe—is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.
Harari’s inquiry is extensive. His scholarship is rigorous, and his interpretation creative. Yes, most of the book restates familiar facts and theories. Harari does an excellent job synthesizing a lot of information. What makes Sapiens exceptional is it gives culture a starring role in the human drama—something that many in science and sociology are hesitant to do, instead preferring to depict culture as transient, nebulous, and “soft.”
Harari builds on some provocative ideas about Homo sapiens, but sets out his anthropological interpretations with vim and vigor:
.jpg "'Sapiens' by Yuval Noah Harari (ISBN 0062316095)")
Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015) is a must-read. It is a brilliantly executed examination of who we are and of our behaviors. Notwithstanding the seeming overstatements and the occasional drift to sensationalism, Sapiens is extremely interesting and thought-provoking. It is written elegantly, in a clear and engaging style, with a skeptic’s eye and irreverent—and sometimes-sarcastic—sensibility.
We are more powerful than ever before…Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one.
Harari is implacably cold and literal, abstaining from political correctness and pro-Western predispositions. Sapiens concludes with spine-tingling predictions about the future. Perhaps as a cliffhanger to his subsequent Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016,) Harari contends that we’re the primary destructive force.
Homo sapiens are sowing the seeds for our own destruction. The forthcoming biotechnological revolution, Harari speculates, may signal the end of sapiens. Bioengineered “amortal cyborgs” may replace us. These post-human organic and inorganic organisms won’t necessarily be immortal but, absent an accident, can live forever. Homo not so sapiens?
As the Presocratic philosopher Xenophanes proclaimed, “All we have is but a woven web of guesses.”
The physicist Richard P. Feynman often talked about how doubt informs critical thinking and learning. In a 1964 lecture on “What Is and What Should Be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society,” published in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1999,) Feynman warned,
A scientist is never certain. We all know that. We know that all our statements are approximate statements with different degrees of certainty; that when a statement is made, the question is not whether it is true or false but rather how likely it is to be true or false. … Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.
.jpg "'The Meaning of It All' by Richard P. Feynman (ISBN 0465023940)")
Science produces ignorance, and ignorance produces more science, reminded Feynman in a 1963 lecture on “The Uncertainty of Science” published in The Meaning of It All (1999,)
To solve any problem that has never been solved before, you have to leave the door to the unknown ajar. You have to permit the possibility that you do not have it exactly right. Otherwise, if you have made up your mind already, you might not solve it.
When the scientist tells you he does not know the answer, he is an ignorant man. When he tells you he has a hunch about how it is going to work, he is uncertain about it. When he is pretty sure of how it is going to work, and he tells you, “This is the way it’s going to work, I’ll bet,” he still is in some doubt. And it is of paramount importance, in order to make progress, that we recognize this ignorance and this doubt. Because we have the doubt, we then propose looking in new directions for new ideas. The rate of the development of science is not the rate at which you make observations alone but, much more important, the rate at which you create new things to test.
The Czechoslovakia-born Israeli American scientist Itzhak Bentov formulated the so-called “Bentov’s Law,” reiterating that science produces ignorance both deliberately and unintentionally. In Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On the Mechanics of Consciousness (1977,) Bentov wrote,
One’s level of ignorance increases exponentially with accumulated knowledge. When one acquires a bit of new information, there are many new questions that are generated by it, and each new piece of information breeds five-ten new questions. These questions pile up at a much faster rate than does accumulated knowledge. Therefore, the more one knows, the greater his level of ignorance.
Learning the boundaries of your knowledge—the shortcomings, caveats, hedges, and the standard deviations toward everything you think you know—hones decision-making.
In other words, to get to the right answers, you first have to ask the right questions. So the first thing is to ponder about is what questions to ask and how to ask them. What are the things you don’t know, and how can you reach out into these areas that may be new to you to uncover somethings about the world and yourself?
Once you discover the answers, you’ll realize that approximate statements and varying degrees of certainty will require you to think probabilistically. Your inquiry shouldn’t be, “Will I be right, or will I be wrong?” but rather “What is the probability of this scenario versus that, and how does this judgment impact my choices?”
Leave room for doubt, even in your highest conviction ideas. If not, you’ll risk becoming smug and self-satisfied.
Stoic philosophy recommends a practice called premeditatio malorum (“the premeditation of evils,”) i.e. intentionally visualizing the worst-case scenario in your mind’s eye.
The first point is to acknowledge that misfortunes and difficulties could, rather than certainly will, come about. The second is to envisage your most constructive response should the worst-case scenario transpire. For instance, if you’d lose your job due to coronavirus, what resources could you rely on, and how could you handle the consequences?
The direct benefit of premeditatio malorum is in taming your anxiety: when you soberly conjure up how bad things could go, you typically reckon that you could indeed cope. You’ll not dwell in the negative thoughts. Even the worst possible scenario couldn’t be so terrible after all.
Another surprising benefit of negative visualization is in raising your awareness that you could lose your relationships, possessions, routines, blessings, and everything else that you currently enjoy—but perhaps take for granted. This increases your gratitude for having them now.
This Stoic exercise has an equivalent in Buddhist meditation-based mindfulness practices that encourage nonjudgmental awareness of unpleasant sensations (the vedanā.)
Your emotions, sensations, and events are in flux. They arise and pass. You’re merely to regard yourself as the observer of these thoughts and feelings, but you’re not to identify with them. You are not your thoughts … you are not your feelings. The Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield writes in The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology (2015,)
Thoughts and opinions arise but they think themselves and disappear, “like bubbles on the Ganges,” says the Buddha. When we do not cling to them, they lose their hold on us. In the light of awareness, the constructed self of our identification relaxes. And what is seen is just the process of life, not self nor other, but life unfolding as part of the whole.
Idea for Impact: Could you benefit from reflecting on how you think of potential negative events?
An awareness of the possible—and the self-determining attitude—can be quite liberating. Premeditatio malorum is a surprisingly useful technique, if only with a scary name.
“What then should each of us say as each hardship befalls us? It was for this that I was exercising, It was for this that I was training,” as Epictetus philosophized in Discourses (3.10.7–8.)