mistakes were made
Compare and contrast -
In the startup world, failure is a badge of honor. An honest postmortem of mistakes made along the way is greatly appreciated by the community. For example:
- Eventvue
- Lookery
- Untitled Partners
- neotis wissensmanagement GmbH
- GameClay
- BricaBox
- MyCarpoolStation
- [unfunded idea]
The comments on each of those posts are overwhelmingly sympathetic, admiring and supportive. Celebrating failure in context is a distinguishing aspect of our business culture versus many other countries.
In contrast, when the President of the US admits mistakes, the national and international coverage seems to imply that the admission itself its newsworthy and perhaps unwise. Comments are largely vitriolic and incoherent.
Now, I think that failure can be overrated as an indicator of future success. But I firmly believe that the openness to failure in business is one of the things that makes this country truly great. It’s ironic and sad that this cultural gem does not extend into our political arena.
the few honest people
p. 64:
Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.
There are so many reasons why Nick’s ’suspicion’ here is probably false, even though it is an assertion about himself. He’s an unreliable narrator: self-admittedly distracted, occasionally drunk, absorbed in his own career and love life and ego. His statement is boastful no matter how mild the language, and immodest claims of high character are usually false.
But of all the reasons to doubt Nick’s self-assessment, I’ll highlight this one: He’s only a few days shy of his 30th birthday. That’s too small a percentage of an expected lifespan to judge one’s own possession of a cardinal virtue. Think about the changes that people make in the years after 30: wild partiers become sedate homemakers, stable careerists become out-of-control addicts, atheists find a higher power while the devout renounce their gods.
We can’t know yet whether Nick deserves to stand with the few honest people in the world. We don’t have any reason to believe that he’s ever been tested, and we have every reason to believe that the final judgment of his character will take many more years to make.
Finally (and pedantically), honesty isn’t even one of the cardinal virtues . . . which I suppose should have been the first thing to tip us off to Nick’s (self-)deception.
know thyself
I am fascinated by a concept I recently came across in Eating The Dinosaur. Author Chuck Klosterman and documentary filmmaker Errol Morris discuss whether people have “privileged access” to their own minds.
Privileged access is a weighty philosophical matter that is popularly stated as a question of whether a person has special access to his or her own thoughts that other people do not have. An intuitive answer is, “Of course I know my own thoughts better than anyone else does!” But this isn’t simply a question of what you are thinking at any given moment; it’s about whether what you think about yourself is more accurate than what any other people think about you.
Here’s a thought experiment: Do you know what you would do if you found a paper bag containing $10,000? What amounts would lead to a different decision, and why?
I think I would keep it. I would rationalize this action (which is probably illegal) by noting that there is almost never a legitimate reason to carry around that much in cash in a paper bag – this is almost certainly drug dealer money, and why should I give drug dealers a chance to recover it?
I would definitely keep, say, five dollars – maybe I would give it to a panhandler, maybe I would buy a sandwich, but I wouldn’t leave it on the ground. Unless someone nearby might have dropped it, I wouldn’t consider trying to find the owner, or turning the money in to the police – no one will ever come to claim $5. In contrast, if I found $100,000, I would definitely turn it in. When that much money gets lost, someone will look for it hard enough to make me uncomfortable – I don’t want to end up in jail, or worse, facing the guys who stole this money before I did (these guys would give up on $10K, but they would seek $100K with violent diligence). Even more complicated, I think that I would turn in $5000. There are plenty of legitimate reasons that a law-abiding person could be carrying that amount around, and I would want that person to have every opportunity to recover that money.
So in short, I think I would make a risk and fairness assessment, and act with a mixture of pragmatism and greed. (Don’t get me wrong – none of this is what I want to do. I want to believe that I would ignore any amount too small to turn in, and turn in any amount too large to ignore. But I’m not so self-deluded to think that I always live up to my ideal self-image.)
This thought experiment has one more part: If you polled a dozen people who know you best on the same questions, what would they say you would do? Who is likelier to be right, them or you?
I think the majority of this group would say I would turn in the $10K. In fact, I would guess that a plurality of people would say I would keep or ignore any amount under $100 and turn in any amount over $1000 – their assessment would be closer to my own ideal self, which I feel quite certain is not accurate. Their reasons for my choices would vary broadly, much more broadly than the pragmatic greed I expressed, and would include reasons that I would not expect.
Is this group likelier to be right about me than I am myself? I can’t answer that with an intuitive “I know my thoughts – I know myself – better than anyone else.” There have been too many times when I have been surprised to discover that someone was a better predictor of my actions than I was.
Now, I don’t think that I have particularly poor self-knowledge. In fact, as this post perhaps deplorably illustrates, I can examine my own navel to exacting excess. But where does that leave me if the fact that I know myself particularly well only means that I am especially aware that I don’t know myself any better than other people do? Makes my head hurt.
it takes two
p. 63:
‘It takes two to make an accident.’
Here is the page where we really get to know Jordan Baker, the other woman at the center of the novel. Daisy is the one who has become legend, the unforgettable golden girl for whom all was dreamt and all was lost. But I always liked Jordan better, not least because she is revealed here to be an incurable liar.
When Nick scolds her for being a careless driver, she first lies that she is careful, then lightly insists that she doesn’t have to be careful since other people are. Nick points out that she’ll be in trouble if she meets someone as careless as herself, and she deftly turns the conversation to their relationship, declaring her affection for solid, careful Nick.
Nick knows this lovely girl is a liar, but ‘Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply – I was casually sorry, and then I forgot.’ Is a thing truly forgotten if it’s remembered well enough to write down later? Jordan’s not the only one with a loose concept of the truth. It takes two.
the way we were
“The Streisand Effect” refers to an attempt to censor a piece of information that backfires because it brings more attention to the information than would have occurred without the attempted censorship.
At the risk of Streisanding the hell out a minor comment, I’ll talk about something I’d rather censor. Noting the rather dated news of my departure from my prior company, an anonymous commenter to an anonymous blog post recently said:
Thank goodness they finally got rid of this guy. He was the worst hire the company ever made.
Here’s what I have to say about that: I like to think it could very well be true.
I like the idea that there are some people who took a good hard look at the history and said, ‘Yep, this guy was terrible, he almost destroyed the place, good bye and good riddance!’ Because that would mean that I was in a position to make some important decisions, and that I made decisions at the risk of being unpopular – that I did much more with the opportunity than just quietly collect a paycheck.
Now, please don’t misunderstand this: I’m not saying that the critics are wrong, that they don’t understand, that I was both righteous and right. Even my own review of my Linden tenure welcomes ambiguous judgment. Obviously, I think and I hope that I did good things, but I could certainly be wrong, I could certainly be delusional.
But the one thing I don’t want to be is simply in the middle. I don’t want anyone’s assessment to be, ‘Well, he was neither among the worst nor among the best, he was just there and he didn’t do a damn thing.’ To me, that’s a lot worse than being the worst.
So, if you had any opportunity to think about my work, and you thought I was the worst, then I thank you. Let me give you my special gift in return:
- your statements are posted exclusively by you on a blog open to anyone with Internet access; and
- you post with your real name; and
- the blog accepts comments from anyone; and
- the post in question prominently links back to this blog post.
Simple enough, yes? Forget Streisand, I call this the Safety Dance.
And you can act real rude and totally removed
And I can act like an imbecile
most affectations
p. 62:
most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don’t in the beginning
Here’s another casually sharp insight into human nature. From time to time, everyone pretends to be something they’re not. And sometimes this pretense is just a costume, worn as if for a holiday party, to be discarded and forgotten after the festivities of the moment expire. But sometimes the pretense is aspiration in disguise; the costume turns out to be not a drapery over skin, but a layer emerging from underneath.
privacy matters
What is going on with Facebook’s constant gyrations about privacy policy? Does anyone really care?
A little while ago I suggested that online privacy concerns are best addressed by free market solutions, not governmental regulation. I’ve discussed the topic with quite a few entrepreneurs, investors and professional marketers, and the overwhelming view in that group is that regular consumers just don’t care about online privacy. ”They” say:
- privacy is too complicated a topic for consumers to understand
- no one reads privacy policies
- consumers can be distracted from privacy concerns with the offer of just about any shiny object
Much of that might be true – but I also took the time to talk to a bunch of “regular” consumers. And these things are definitely true:
- consumers know that their privacy is being compromised by many online services
- consumers do not like being taken for granted
- consumers will avoid services that abuse their information, and will seek services that use their information properly
These two sets of “truths” are not mutually inconsistent. To me, they add up to: Online services can gain a competitive advantage by giving consumers the most sensible default choices along with the right advanced options for privacy – make it simple, but make it right. I think Facebook believes this, and that’s why they keep tinkering with their policies. They understand that a lot of their initial attraction was a result of making different privacy assumptions than more open services like FriendFeed and Twitter. They know that even if no one ever reads their privacy policy, if they make the wrong choices about privacy, they will lose users. As they saturate their available audience, they have to figure out how to strike the right balance among their different demographic bases, all the while competing with the advantages that more open services have.
These are extremely nuanced choices, but getting them right makes the barrier to competitive threat all the more defensible. And these are product choices; this is something that many I’ve talked to misunderstand: people think that this privacy stuff is just legal mumbo jumbo or regulatory mishmash. That’s plain wrong – laws and regulations are just the cart behind the horse. In a social product where community is paramount, policy choices are product choices.
a short affair
p. 61:
I even had a short affair with a girl who lived in Jersey City and worked in the accounting department but her brother began throwing mean looks in my direction so when she went on her vacation in July I let it blow quietly away.
Nick reveals a lot about himself by how little he explains about his life outside his own definition of the story. On this page, he’s trying to convince us that his summer in New York wasn’t dominated by all things Gatsby. A short “affair” (whatever that means, in his day) might be cause for several pages or even a chapter in a more conventional account of Nick’s life. But this sentence is all he says about the girl, because he isn’t here to tell you about himself, the ostensible story is supposed to belong to Gatsby.
But I’m curious. Just what does an affair mean to Nick? What sense of honor or cowardice allows a “mean look” to alter his pleasurable pursuits, whether frivolous or serious? Is the description “blow quietly away” an accurate account from the perspective of our Jersey girl?
None of this gets any exploration. Instead, later down the page Nick devotes a substantial narrative to an aimless fantasy of following a romantic woman in his mind’s eye. She’s a New Yorker – he begins his account with a statement familiar to all transplants to the big city: ’I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye.‘
As he goes on to imagine what it would be like to spot a woman in the crowd on Fifth Avenue and follow her home for nothing more than a smile, we realize that this romantic fantasy captures the essence of what he wants but didn’t get from Ms. Jersey City. He gave the real “girl” a cursory sentence, and devoted a fulsome paragraph to a fantasy woman – and in that contrast told us more about himself with omission than he could have with description.
google killer
By my own admission, I’ve become a complete hack, for using the term [blank]-killer. A lot of people are asking whether News Corp would really block its content from Google’s index, and make a deal with Microsoft for exclusive search access. And if they did, and others followed, would this represent a serious threat to Google?
The tech-über-alles crowd would have you believe that “de-indexing” from Google would be suicide for any publisher. The assertion there is that Google drives the majority of web traffic, so if you’re not findable through Google, you might as well not be on the Internet.
But that assertion flies in the face of another observation from the technoscenti – social media like Facebook and Twitter are becoming increasingly important as traffic drivers (though this importance may be overhyped). We may be heading towards a future where the links are shared through social media are more valuable than search links.
More importantly, and against the prevailing wisdom in some circles, content still matters. People use media services because of the content on it. Other factors are important too: the features must be complete, the UI has to be easy, the price has to be right, yadda yadda yadda. But would any of those other factors make up for terrible content? No, content is, if no longer king, still the jewel in the crown.
If Bing is able to be the exclusive search partner for the right content, Google is dead. Of course, what’s “right” can vary quite a lot from person to person. For me, it’s as simple as two publications: If the New York Times and Wikipedia are de-indexed from Google, I’m going to stop using Google in favor of the search engine that has those two. I might think it’s unfair, I might think it’s a triumph of soulless MBAs over tech heroes, I might think it’s the desperate grasping of dying empires. But I want the content I want, and those principles aren’t enough to prevent me from switching.
Bing doesn’t have to make deals with every content provider, just a dozen or so critical ones that will cause another 40% market share gain (they’re at 10% now). Sure it’ll be expensive to acquire the best content, but Microsoft’s got more cash than Google. Once it’s 50/50, it’s anybody’s ballgame but the advantage goes to the one who has the content.
I’m pretty sure that Google is not going to sit back and smugly assume that Murdoch’s gambit will fail. They’re going to get involved, they’re going to try to start locking down their own partnerships. If I were them, I’d start with Wikipedia, one of the most important search result destinations on the web – it’s in the top five results of just about any search you do. Sure, they’re a non-profit, but non-profits need money too.
