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Be a great self manager. Don’t coast up

“Great managers are never satisfied with only a gradual, slow, natural improvement curve. They want and expect, and measure, and verify noted improvement in certain areas. The kind of improvement that cant happen without specific, narrow effort, and a sustained bit of attention, and 3, 6, 9 months worth of work to improve oneself. You’re not going to coast upward if you’re working for a highly effective manager.”

-Manager Tools The Management Trinity Part 3

Coasting upward is not really something you hear about a lot. Certainly in physics, things slow down if they’re coasting uphill. But real life isn’t physics. You can improve yourself by coasting. If you’re in school, you can stroll into a 2.0 GPA and by the end of the semester you’ll be more knowledgeable. Not a lot, but you’ll know more than when you started. Where will this get you? Not to your dreams, that’s for sure. Everyone talks about their dreams and goals and how awesome it’s going to be when they get there, but a small percentage of them put in the specific, narrow, sustained effort and they’re the ones who are changing the world. You can coast up into maybe 10% of your goal, but nobody gets excited about that.

In school, you are your own manager. At the end of the day, the amount you improve is up to you. You need to demand of yourself marked growth. Luckily, there’s a pretty easy way to track this in academia: grades. If you generally average a B, then an A shows that you’ve effectively managed yourself and grown faster than you would naturally. Don’t fall into the trap of making “Graduate with at 3.5″ your only goal, though. Write out your life goals and find out what you need to do to get there. Chances are that they’ll require a bit more than a diploma. Take the breakdown of those goals and find ways to measure it so you can keep yourself on track.

Manage yourself well! Be demanding! Give yourself feedback! Sit down and reassess your progress regularly! You’re not going to be who you want to be if you don’t, and nobody else is going to do it for you.

Slow in, fast out

The comparison below is of two laps within half a second of each other around Suzuka driven by the same driver.

Just looking at the throttle position, brake position, speed, and steering wheel angle traces, the laps seem nearly identical. But the variance channel tells a different story. Variance is the time difference at certain points on the track. Note that the x axis is track distance, so at the cursor (at about meter 2626 of the lap), the slower lap is 0.345 seconds behind the faster lap. But then something interesting happens. Right after the blue cursor, the slower lap gained a lot of time. If you look at the track map in the lower right corner, you’ll note that this major dip in the variance trace is during the hairpin. It wasn’t well gained time, though, as it’s clear that in the faster lap, the driver got a better exit from the hairpin and the pulls away from his slower lap.

So what caused this deviation?

As the driver entered the hairpin, he was faster in the slow lap, leading to a huge gain in time. He got on the brakes within a 10 centimeters between the two laps but got off in very different manners. On the faster lap, he started getting off later but was fully off earlier. Overall, he slowed down more on his fast lap. A slower car allowed him to steadily navigate the middle section and set the car up for a fast exit.

When you’re approaching a challenge, think ahead. Do your prep work well so that you can focus during the task and position yourself for a great finish.

I’d also like to plug Rackspace Cloud here. They have the most responsive customer service of any company I’ve ever dealt with. I’ll be hosting this blog with them soon, but for now check out www.rootsurge.com/blog for updates on our progress on Dodo!

Cloud Computing and Cloud Hosting by Rackspace

I’m tired so my world might end

There’s never been a question so subtly important than “How are you?” When you consider that the first interaction with someone that day will probably start with something like this, the you give answer is huge because over time builds your image in someone’s mind. If every time, you answer with “Tired” or “Busy,” you invite whoever you’re talking with to your pity party. Why would anyone want to create a relationship with someone who’s mood is always based off of their stresses and sorrows? Attitude is what differentiates the successful from the not, so make sure you’re projecting something positive. I want to work with the people who are consistently positive because I know that they can look toward the future they’re making instead of resigning to their current situation.

Another thing to keep in mind is that when the person who asked you the question has had half as much sleep and worked twice as many hours as you this week, your invitation to your pity party will fall on deaf ears. Worse, you look incapable. Everyone’s busy and most are tired. Differentiate yourself from the crowd and focus on the bright side!

Keep bringin’ it

Sometimes you get hit. You underperform. You come up against a major obstacle. Your project has a major setback. You step back to reassess your position and your approach. After all, you just got feedback of the most real, gut wrenching type and need to find out what went wrong and fix it.

Fix it.

There’s not a “bring the goal down a notch to make it reachable under the new circumstances” clause in there. You set out with a goal when you started and if you let every glitch knock it down a bit then you’ll get to the end and wonder where the real product is. It’ll take more work and it’ll be tough going, but how else do fantastic results  happen? Don’t let your goal lose its luster in the struggle to get there.

Not new to me

Media Hacks #19 is out! It’s been a while and I’ve missed my favorite podcast dearly. As always, it got me thinking. This time, the topic of thought is Mitch Joel’s response to a review of his book Six Pixels of Separation that suggested there was nothing new in his book.

I posit that we generally consider “new” content to be content never before published. A book contains new ideas if nobody’s ever written them down before. But how new can something be? Most of the theories behind new actionable content are not what I’d consider to be recent discoveries. Several times I’ve heard internet marketing and the “new” way of doing business compared to the ye olde times when people bartered and worked with people they knew and lived close to. The way people interact, the way business gets done, and the way you get repeat customers is the same as it was hundreds of years ago! Here’s where “new” gets a revised definition. For content to be considered new when it’s based on old theories, it needs to contain actionable bits that pertain to the new tools available.

But this is what’s really on my  mind: what if you can trick yourself into thinking something’s not new because you already came to the same conclusions on your own? I remember enjoying Tribes by Seth Godin. When I got done, I realized that instead of a new outlook on the world, it had given me  more confidence in the outlook I already had. Most of the tips Seth wrote I already knew because they were observations about how the world works that I had already made. Could I criticize it for not being new enough? I think newness is up to the individual to decide.

Fortunately, it’s not just the newness factor that makes content valuable. The formulation of the ideas is what makes a good author. It’s how well it’s written that sinks it into your brain. If two people publish books with the same concepts but the second one you read is the one that sticks, it doesn’t matter that it wasn’t new.

Filters

It’s always been about filters. The yellow pages were a filter. They took local businesses and listed them in a logical order so that we could find a plumber or a pizza place. Then relevance changed. We’re not just searching for local businesses anymore but people and businesses around the world. Today and tomorrow’s filters have to be robust enough to filter the deluge of data while expanding our horizons past what we define. But the issue is a compound one because the relevant media changed as well. Iterations of text, image, video, audio vary enough in form factor, purpose, audience to be classified as different forms of media even within their own categories. So how do you get the data you want in the form you need in a timely manner? More important, how do you keep from rejecting valuable content if you don’t know it exists?

And what happens when a new way to publish content comes out? Most of the time, this content isn’t new, just newly available. The publisher is the same person with the same thoughts, capable of producing the same content, but now he has a way to do it. But we don’t know how to find it because it wasn’t available before now. What filters do we use to find content we can use? Let’s start from the top

Passive filters don’t require an action to put into place. They are based on a persons’s current status, possessions, and location.

Intrinsic filters. Some content is filtered because you don’t have the means to consume it. If you’re on the west coast, you can’t listen to an east coast radio station. If you don’t have an email account, you can’t consume newsletters, direct mail, notifications. If you don’t have internet access, you probably don’t have a filter problem.

Immediate filters. There are filters that you have no choice but to accept immediately. Classified information, restricted access data, premium content. Some of these filters can be removed with money, some require positions of authority, some can’t be removed at all.

Active filters are what count. These we choose to put into place and these are what need to be fine tuned.

Search. Depending on what filters come before this, search is either a way to find new content and sources or sort through a known collection. The quality and type of results of a search depends on the method used and your inputs. Search can be at the beginning of filtering content, in the middle, or at the end. You search through the Web to find blogs and podcasts to subscribe to. You search through your music library (which has already gone through a ton of filters because you picked everything in there) to find a few songs.

Subscriptions. After you’ve found a source that regularly creates content valuable to you, you can give them permission to send you their content. RSS feeds, magazines, and newsletters are obvious ones. Also in this category is everyone you follow on Twitter, all your friends on facebook and MySpace and LinkedIn,

Alerts. The perfect combination of search and subscription, you can set up alerts so that you don’t have to search every term you’re concerned about every day.

People. One of the best ways to filter content is to get it through trusted sources automatically. When your friend uses all of his filters then sends you the cream of the crop, you benefit from his effort. Unlike the rest of the active filters, this one is created through reciprocal actions. You’ll get the most content sent to you from the people who get the most value from the content you send them.

The masses. It’s always good to know what an entire population is interested in and that’s where sites like Digg come in. It’s a good idea to keep a lookout for pages in your industry that get a few hundred Diggs and the corresponding massive number of views. If everyone else is interested in it, you should probably know about it.

I’ve found that it’s a lot more fun to set up a bunch of filters so that the ratio of amount of content you’re interested in to the amount of content you’re exposed to is high than to spend all my time finding stuff to be interested in, but I never to make them too tight or else I never expand to new things!

People can conclude the world if you give them few enough words

I was reading a great blog the other day and one of the posts was a one line quote. The amount of people who liked that quote was about the same as the other three of the four  most recent posts combined. Do people like this because it’s catchy? Because it’s thought provoking? Because it means you have to come to your own conclusion instead of reading the writer’s? Does it bode well for humanity that if you say a few words that sound good together, everyone eats it up. If the few words grab your attention, will more people believe it than if you had written an article on it? Maybe the question is will they believe themselves? After all, you didn’t offer an explanation, so they to come up with it themselves.

The usability lightbulb just went on

The last two weeks built up to an epiphany two days ago.  I dove deeper than I ever had before into Linux, web servers, and the command line interface in order to set up a server for an iPhone application RootSurge is about to launch. I’m not scared of these, but it needed to get done quickly and I’d never really experimented with any of it. Learning and troubleshooting everything as fast as I could made me realize one thing: the intuitive, usable graphic user interface is one tremendously important invention.

But then I recognized that that realization isn’t just about the GUI. Back in the day (oh, say, a few thousand years ago) there wasn’t a piece of technology that someone couldn’t fabricate with a little elbow grease and some practice. Today, the number of people who can even tell you how something like a computer or a car works is small and the number who could design and fabricate one is minuscule. In spite of this, we continue to demand more customization,  more control, but with more usability, more speed. We’ve grown to expect that we can get the most out of whatever we use without spending the time to learn what makes it tick.

Amazingly, it’s delivered time and again. The smart people who know how to communicate set up these fantastic interfaces that give you control of complex servers. The same kind of people build in understeer, traction control, stability control, and anti lock brakes so that you can feel like a race car driver without getting yourself in too much trouble. Does this make us less capable individuals or a more productive society? Taken a case at a time, nobody is really capable of doing everything they want or even understands what they’re doing. Taken overall, individuals use their skills to build tools that help others do what they want.

Just make sure you’re building something that allows someone else reach their goals.

Lots of talk about free

Everywhere I’ve turned in the last week, people have been discussing free. This article from Entrepreneur highlights the two extremes but, as with any spectrum of opinions, both extremes have flaws. Interestingly enough, if you insert some logic into the flaws and look at the bigger picture, the extremes compliment each other.

Logic: you can’t make money if you give away your product and you can’t make money if you don’t sell anything. Therefore, you need to gain people’s trust so that they are comfortable paying for your product. Nobody gambles real money on businesses they aren’t confident can deliver. Entrepreneur says “Anderson maintains that free is simply the best form of marketing” but doesn’t define what you’re giving away. For the guys at 37Signals, giving away free software won’t fit into their business model and it certainly shouldn’t, so they’re up in arms because they think Anderson is asking them to make it fit. They assumed that free was defined as giving away your product and they don’t support that. But they can’t say they don’t support free. They host two blogs that cost them time and money to make, but don’t cost you a dime to follow. It’s crucial to step back and look at the big picture. Segment your business plan and see where free fits. It’s impossible to build a company without offering something first.

Giving away your product is poor business. Giving away insights into your company is good marketing.

Related: The myth of free and other weird pricing issues

http://www.entrepreneur.com/magazine/entrepreneur/2009/october/203404.html