Starting

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

Jodi found my blog thanks to Seth’s incredibly nice post earlier this week, and she sent me an email in response to Tuesday’s post that ended with:

The biggest thing you’ve inspired is the project I’m starting today: Be rejected by 100 people in the next 7 days.  I will be pitching potential donors (for 5 full ride nursing school scholarships for my friends in Blanchard, Haiti).

Cool.

If you want to make sure Jodi has the chance for the full 100 rejections you can wait until next week before checking out what she’s up to and why she’s raising the money, or you could go ahead and do it today.  Jodi and he team are already two-thirds of the way there, and they just need to raise $2,500 more to hit their goal.

We come across interesting ideas all the time, risky ideas some of the time, ideas that scare us every now and then.

We cross a line when we go from “that looks interesting, I might want to try that,” to “that looks interesting, I’m doing it today.”

Jodi Sagorin

 

I See That You Sound the Best

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Related to yesterday’s post about quality versus quantity and how we learn new skills, I came across an academic paper (thanks Gabriel) that looks into how we judge the quality of musical performance.  Through a lifetime of playing classical piano I’ve come to believe that there are clear objective measures about the quality of musical performance, about excellence.  But what really goes on, even at the highest levels, when we try to make objective judgments?

To figure this out, Chia-Jung Tsay at the Department and Science and Innovation at University College in London designed an experiment to understand whether we use our ears or our eyes to judge the quality of musical performance (full article here).  To test this, she asked experimental participants to guess, in just six seconds, which of the top three finalists in 10 international classical music competitions won the competition.  Obviously that’s hard to do, so one would expect that untrained listeners would guess right 33% of the time.

The experiments worked as follows: participants either listened to a six second recording of the musicians, watched a six-second video of the musicians without sound, or watched a six-second video of the musicians with sound.   Not surprisingly, when they just heard a six second recording they only guessed the winners 25.5% of the time.  More interesting was that they guessed right 52% of the time when they could watch videos without sound.  That’s right: six seconds of silent video allowed them to guess right more than half the time.

Perhaps the experts would do better?  Alas, no, they had essentially the same results: 25% identified the winners when they could only listen to the sound, 47% when they could watch silent video clips.  When they could watch video with sound they were right 29% of the time.  Put another way, the only way that experts or novices could do better than chance in this experiment was by not hearing the music.

Classical music is a funny beast – it is subjective, it can be opaque, and the degree of difference between the three top finalists in any competition is likely pretty small.  So these experimental findings could be pretty narrow, and if I take a step back I find myself not too surprised at the finding that we, fundamentally visual creatures, are susceptible to all sorts of bias based on visual cues (in who we hire, who we like, who we vote for).

But as I reflect on yesterday’s post and think hard about what holds me back from jumping in, from just starting, I realize that part of the baggage I carry around is the notion of expertise: that in most domains you can figure out what is best and what is good and what is only OK.  And certainly the experts can make all sorts of informed, refined judgments about quality…

Unless of course they can’t.  Unless they’re kidding themselves and kidding us at the same time.

If so, that puts a whole new twist on where we’re headed, on the impact of moving to a world where the experts have less power, where gate-keeping has become radically democratized, where it’s no longer someone else’s job to pick us because we need to pick ourselves, it’s so easy to quietly believe that we’re losing something in that exchange, that based on some objective standard quality will have to fall.

What objective quality standard?  Where?

I’m not suggesting that some things aren’t better than others, nor that it’s impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff.  But maybe today’s world is one of multiple winners, lots of “best” things, and our opportunity is to hone our craft, create our art, do our best work based on our own true and honest take on what “best” means to us.

And that one step in getting there is to truly let go of the notion that there is someone out there whose job it is to tell us that what we did was good enough.

Fifty Pounds of Clay

~ Sasha ~ 13 Comments

I’ve just started reading The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything…Fast  by Josh Kaufman to gain more insight on how effective skill acquisition happens.  Kaufman begins the book with a list of ten principles for rapid skill acquisition, the 10th of which he illustrates with an excerpt of Art & Fear by David Bales and Ted Orland:

A ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups.  All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right side solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” groups: fifty pounds of pots rated an A, forty pounds a B, and so on.  Those being graded on “quality,” however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an A.

Well, come grading time a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.  It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work and learning from their mistakes, the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Kaufman’s conclusion is that, “Skill is the result of deliberate, consistent practice, and in early-stage practice, quantity and speed trump absolutely quality.  The faster and more often you practice, the more rapidly you’ll acquire the skill.”

It’s a familiar pattern in human-centered design – rapid prototyping to get your hands dirty and learn by doing.  It’s how the strongest marshmallow towers are built.  Yet it’s easy to separate that approach from how we imagine our own goals of becoming better  at ________ (building Excel models; finding answers by ourselves online; becoming better public speakers; learning to fundraise).

Indeed my mental model of how to learn and practice started way at the other end: having played classical piano seriously for two decades, I had spent literally thousands of hours focused on the last 20% or 10% or even 3% of getting a piece “perfect.”   So it has felt completely counterintuitive for me to think that “just starting” is an effective strategy for anything but the most rudimentary of tasks.  And yet, through a deliberate process of unlearning, accelerated by plenty of healthy kicks in the pants from mentors, I’ve tried this other way, and over time I’ve started to rewire myself towards a different mindset: that I can learn new skills, and that the approach to take centers around starting first, being willing to feel like a fool at the outset, and sticking with things long enough to get out of that first, terrible phase.

(My first day on a snowboard, 13 years ago, I must have hit my head HARD against the mountain at least fifty times.  I was very close to walking away.  It’s only because I’d been warned that the first day is painful, and that the second day isn’t, that I stuck with it).

Imagine, then, that your job when imagining something you’d like to learn involves just two steps (not 10, not yet):

  1. Breaking that skill into its smallest component parts
  2. Practicing just one of those skills relentlessly

For example maybe the component parts of fundraising are: getting the first meeting, finding new funding prospects, holding engaging meetings, storytelling, listening, , learning to build from one meeting to the next, comfortably asking for money…. (there are more).

If you were to decide today that you’re a terrible fundraiser (by the way, you’re not) BUT you wanted to become a good fundraiser a year from now, data from the ceramics class would teach us that spending as much time as possible practicing just one those eight component parts (and I’m sure there are more of them and each could be narrower) for two weeks would get you much further along than spending two or three or four weeks reading books on prospecting and getting the first meeting.   This is why, for example, deciding to get rejected 100 times works – it is concentrated effort on a specific task, one that unavoidably gets our auto-correct mechanism to kick in an teach ourselves better ways to do things.

We know all of this in principle, but it’s a lot easier to say “fail fast” than it is to actually jump in first.  I find that imagining a giant heap with 50 pounds of finished pottery, some of it beautiful, helps me get out of neutral.

One moment

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

There’s a chance, in each passing interaction with someone, to say “thank you.”

Not a “thank you for this thing you’ve just done” (gotten me a coffee, given me my ticket to board this flight) said automatically.  Rather, a chance to look someone squarely in the eye and acknowledge in a deeper way that you see that person, that they see you, and that we have a shared humanity in this crazy world we live in.

“Thank you.”

It used to be

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

It used to be that you could go to a meeting, or a job interview, without having really prepared in advance: without looking up the details of who someone is, what they’ve done, and where they’ve worked; without checking out their organization, the role they play, and who they work with; without skimming their LinkedIn profile, reading a few of their blog posts, and watching a video of them speaking; without seeing who they’ve helped along the way, or checking out the interesting, generous things that they’re involved with in their free time.

Now, skipping those steps is not allowed.  Now, it’s a sign that you’re unprepared and care less.  Now it’s a missed opportunity to have a conversation that’s more relevant to both of you.

The other side of this coin, lest we forget, is that just like you’re using The Google to figure out who you’re meeting and what their story is, people are doing the same thing before meeting you.

It used to be that them discovering nothing about you other than the boxes you’ve checked was enough.  It used to be, but it isn’t any more.

Don’t take it personally

~ Sasha ~ 5 Comments

Jonathan Lewis’ recent blog post and accompanying video on fundraising hits the nail on the head: “The best fundraisers don’t fundraise.  Instead, they teach people to take realistic – and unrealistic!  – risks in the service of a better world. “

“Teaching” and “risk-taking” in service of a better world.

Maybe if we used that language more often we would have more great people getting into fundraising, more people in fundraising with the right mindset and orientation, and more funders taking risk.

I’m with Jonathan all the way until the closing paragraph, where he says, “Infuriating indeed is the patronizing ‘don’t take it personally’…If you believe in your mission and if you are giving it your all, then it’s always personal.  Every committed social entrepreneur takes organizational rejection personally!”

As I told Jonathan, I don’t think this is quite right.  Of course I feel it personally when I am rejected, when someone doesn’t share my passion or, worse, when my explanation of what we are trying to do at Acumen fails to capture the imagination of someone who I know is aligned with my passion and vision (in which case, shame on me).  I don’t think I would be human if I didn’t feel it; indeed, if the day comes when I stop feeling it I’d have to question my own passion and sense of commitment.

But when I let the rejection feel personal, and when I see other fundraisers do the same thing, I think that’s a big mistake.

The person I’m meeting with came into the meeting with a worldview, with ideas, with momentum in a certain direction…and so did I.  I feel like my job is to listen, explore, connect, tease out alignment, and then to inspire action (aside: the “inspire action” bit is really important and not easy to get right.)

But when that alignment isn’t there and I end up feeling personally rejected then I believe I’m misdiagnosing what just went on in that meeting.

When someone says no, it could be an execution error on my part: maybe I handled the meeting poorly, didn’t listen enough, was off my game, didn’t have a real and compelling ask, didn’t tell compelling stories, or didn’t articulate how Acumen could help the funder realize their vision.  Hopefully, after fundraising for nearly seven years I make fewer and fewer of those mistakes, but I’m sure I do make them plenty.  When this is what’s gone wrong,  I need to use a rejection to figure out how I can get better, how I can hone my craft, how I can turn “no’s” into “not now’s.”  Taking these sorts of rejections personally places blame in the wrong place: I didn’t do my job well, plain and simple.

And when what I’m fundraising for doesn’t inspire a funder or align with their vision, then something entirely different is at play.  That’s a question of worldview, a question of where they are in their journey.  It’s about lack of alignment of vision and values and aspiration.  What they’re looking for is not what I’m selling.

(Note that it’s easy to see, when I’m selling database software or consumer copiers, the difference between being turned down because the person isn’t buying anything right now, buys from my competitor, or decides to buy productivity software and a high-end color printers instead.  In philanthropy what we mostly see is the person giving or not giving to us, so everything gets much more muddled).

Almost always, it’s not personal.  I have not been rejected.  The moment I take rejection too personally is the moment I lose forward momentum, the moment I begin to question myself at a more fundamental level, the moment I forget that real long-term partnerships happen because of a deep sense of alignment, not because someone chose to buy what I’m selling.

Time’s passage – Tom Hussey

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

Tom Hussey old youngI found these Tom Hussey photographs arresting.   They are images of Alzheimer’s patients taken 50 years apart.

Perhaps it is because time’s clock is ticking, because the days are long and the years fly by, because the oldest of my three kids just went off for a month of sleepaway camp and, even though it’s still a long way off, his being out of the house for a few weeks reminds me and my wife that one day he will actually BE out of the house, moving on and living a whole life elsewhere, hopefully visiting us from time to time.  And, eventually, so will my other two kids, even our baby girl.

Inexorably, I will, if I’m lucky, continue to live life, experience joy and sorrow, and, I hope, continue to gain wisdom and perspective as I grow older.

All the while I will continue to look in the mirror each morning, and one day (no doubt sooner than I expect it) I will be surprised at the person I see in the reflection.  When that day comes I will talk to younger people and they will make the same mistake that I surely have made countless times: not understanding that I old was once young, vibrant, reckless, inexperienced, and brash.

American culture scores low marks in terms of respect for our elders, and I suspect it is because, in the absence of a strong set of norms around how to treat one another, as individuals we routinely forget the arc of the lives that others have lived.  Perhaps most of us lack the capacity to see a wizened, cracked face, or a body that moves more slowly than it once did, and see the full life that person has lived.

Yet if we’re lucky, time will pass for all of us and we will grow old.  Of course.  I sometimes wonder, though, if our inability to truly understand this simple fact is one of life’s biggest practical jokes.   I know that if we all felt how precious and fleeting our lives are we’d often act differently.

Seeing such vivid, beautiful images of time’s passage doesn’t make me fearful, but it does help me remember to live now, to experience the richness of life and love and family now, to be courageous in what I do now, because time really is flying, and my chance to make a difference is people’s lives is today, not tomorrow.

If you can’t take the heat

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

A little while back I decided to make breaded, baked zucchini “chips” at home.  My mother has made them a bunch of times, and when she makes them they rarely make it to the dinner table because everyone (including the kids) nibbles away at them like they’re French Fries.

It’s a very simple recipe: slice zucchini thin (like coins), dip them in eggs, then dip them in seasoned bread crumbs, then lay them out on a baking sheet and bake them at 425 degrees for about 30 minutes.  The clunky bit, I discovered, is the painstaking, one-by-one dipping of the zucchini.  I started doing it one slice at a time, and was going well at first.  Then the bread crumbs started to get messy, and I started getting cement-like globs of egg-and-breadcrumb mixture on my fingers, nearly doubling the size of my thumb and pointer finger.  Frustrated, I started experimenting with different approaches: dipping five zucchini slices in the egg at a time, then dropping them in the bread crumbs, then shaking the whole thing around a bit.  That sort of worked, but it made more of a mess, the breading was inconsistent and I’m not sure it sped things up much.  I kept on fiddling with my approach, but nothing seemed to make much of a difference.  Mostly I was slow, messy, and either got too thick or thin a coating of bread crumbs on each zucchini slice.  It took me nearly a half an hour to get through three zucchini’s worth of chips (filling up two full baking sheets) onto the pan, and I’m sure that someone out there could do what I’d just done in one-fifth the time.

“If you can’t take the heat…” is a phrase that is at least 50% metaphor: professional kitchens are hot, sure, but that’s as much about the intensity of cranking out each dish quickly, all night long, as it is about the actual temperature back there.   Kitchens are a (high-class, sometimes) assembly line, and all new cooks learn that the quality of what they’re able to produce is meaningless if they’re too slow and they mess up the line.  If they can’t produce at a high quality, with a high degree of consistency and a high speed, they won’t last long.

In professional environments there’s little talk of how fast people do things.  Yes, there is vague hand-waving around the notion of an 80/20 rule (that you can accomplish 80% of what you need to with the right 20% of the work), which is an acknowledgment that what you choose to work on is the most important leverage point you have.  But we rarely talk about how long it took to produce ______ (that email, that document, that strategy)?  Or, likely a more productive question, are you getting better at taking the core parts of your job that aren’t going away and doing them as efficiently as possible, to create space for yourself for the non-repetitive, value-added work where you’re really going to make a difference?

It seems somehow belittling of the important work we’re doing to ask how long it took us to do it.

In a kitchen, the chef stands over you and barks out orders, tells you what’s wrong and right.  Your speed and quality of workmanship are both out in the open.  In an office, only you know how long it took you to get that email just right, how much you dawdled before picking up the phone to make a cold call, how many hour-long meetings could have taken 20 minutes if you and your team had approached them differently.

I’m not advocating for rushing all day long – indeed the point is to be fast in some places so you can be slow in others.  But when I watch the demands on many of the top professionals in today’s world, I see that in order to survive and create space to do the real work, they have to get really good and really fast in areas that might seem like they should be hard and slow.  That requires nothing short of mastery – you get neither good nor fast at things if you don’t do them often and if you don’t focus on getting them right (and getting them fast).

The catch is that it’s going to be rare for anyone but you to have enough visibility into your day and your workflow to help you set a new standard for the pace of your work.  It’s also up to you to figure out what needs to be faster, what needs to be slower, and what work you’re simply not doing because your day is too full of everything else.  I’d just encourage you to remember that fast is your friend, when you apply it in the right places.

 

(Addendum: not only did my chips take forever to make, they also came out a bit dry and salty.  I later revived them by throwing them into a lasagna the next day.  Nothing wrong with salvaging a failed first attempt.)

Grand Central Station

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

I spotted this beautiful Billy Collins poem on the subway yesterday, likely part of the commemoration of Grand Central Station’s 100th anniversary.

Grand Central Station

Commuting on the train every day has its ups and downs.  I vastly prefer it to spending a similar amount of time in a car, but it’s still a long haul from door to door.

One of my daily joys, though, is getting to come through Grand Central Station.  It is a New York City landmark breathtaking in its scope and beauty and yet bustling every day as one of the world’s biggest transit hubs.  The $196 million restoration from 1991 to 1998 restored Grand Central to its former glory, removing 80 years of accumulated grime and restoring Grand Central to its former glory.  The station has more than 100 secrets, a whispering galley, and a secret platform build for FDR with an entrance directly to the Waldorf Astoria hotel.

But mostly just love that I get to go through there every  day, I love the morning moments when I remember to look up and see the light passing through the East Side windows just so, I love the bustle on a Friday afternoon when you can barely walk two feet because of the bustle and energy as people line up to get away for the weekend.  It reminds me of what great urban spaces can be.

Microsoft iPod Pro 2005 XP Human Ear Professional Edition

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I hadn’t seen this video until now.  It’s a 2006 spoof/thought experiment about what would happen if Microsoft designed the 2005 iPhone packaging (Step 1: rename it to “Microsoft iPod Pro 2005 XP Human Ear Professional Edition (with Subscription).  The final reveal comes at 2:30 in the video, but it’s the build that really packs a punch.

We hear all the time that we can’t delight anyone if our products are created by a committee.  Indeed, we nod knowingly at how everyone else falls into that trap.

But do we have one person whose sole job is to cut away absolutely everything (everything!) that’s unnecessary to achieving the vision, to delighting the customer?

N.B. there are two non-negotiable prerequisites in the prior sentence:

  1. Knowing who the customer is
  2. Having a vision of what you want her experience to be

Of course in the long term you don’t need just one virtuoso or visionary, but you do need a first time when you put out a product that makes a lot of important people within (or outside) your organization upset, because you’ll have put something out into the world that isn’t for everyone.

(And yes, sometimes we – you, me – end up being the committee.  Oops.)

Microsoft iPod Package