Beyond Rules

Few Try

There are two caveats when it comes to going beyond rules in your work and building an interesting life that suits you:

  1. Failure is under-reported. A success is a great story and will be covered in the news, shared in books and speeches far and wide. A failure won’t get any coverage at all, unless you’re talking to your best friend (or your counselor). Learning almost exclusively about success makes you biased towards trying, putting the availability heuristic into play – which gives you an inflated expectation of success.
  2. Here’s the flipside, though: Few try. Despite the availability heuristic, almost nobody actually stops doing what she’s expected to do and starts doing what she wants to do instead. Almost nobody even considers going beyond rules; even less pull through with it.

One more thing: While the availability heuristic does indeed matter, it entails another dimension: It is biased towards the superstars.

It’s extremely memorable to see how Paul Potts goes from mobile phone salesman to opera singer after a remarkable presentation on a horrible TV show, cashing in several million bucks. But you seldom see people who took a leap of faith years ago and are “merely” doing fine. They may not be rich, beautiful and famous. But they are making a living. They love their life. They have found meaning in it, and they live up to it.1

If this kind of people are introverts, they might never tell anyone outside their immediate families. They might just not think of it as a big deal. If you live in a little town or operate within a smaller peer group, chances are you’ll never hear about any of them – even though there are, indeed, millions!

So how about your specific area, your very own dream? Your plan to revolutionize the modern art scene with putty and polaroids? Won’t that be impossible?

Think about this: Even if you’d have to be “one in a million” to make it, that would still mean that there is a place for more than 7.000 people in this world doing that exact thing.

Few actually try to do it. How about you?

  1. To prove my point, who does know what Paul Potts is doing right now? That TV show happened about six years ago. I hope he’s still happy! [↩]

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Podcast

Join The International League of Creative Minds!

Mountain Shores LogoA few weeks ago, during covert communications between the UK and Germany, The International League of Creative Minds was formed.

Up until now this information has been Classified and on a Need to Know Basis only. The mainstream media were not informed, nor were the Whitehouse.

Information will continue to be transmitted at irregular intervals via the iTunes and Stitcher frequency bandwave. The League highly recommends that you subscribe to one of these methods in order to receive audio transmissions via your mobile computing device.

All roads lead to our base of operations mountain shores (dot) net where you can begin your initiation into the League.

This is only the beginning.

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(Un)Productivity – Idleness

Link: Relax! You’ll Be More Productive

In order to be more productive, I decided to relax and let Tony Schwarz write this article for me:

In most workplaces, rewards still accrue to those who push the hardest and most continuously over time. But that doesn’t mean they’re the most productive.

This is essential reading. Lots of studies pointing to the advantages of idleness, for example:

Working in 90-minute intervals turns out to be a prescription for maximizing productivity. Professor K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues at Florida State University have studied elite performers, including musicians, athletes, actors and chess players. In each of these fields, Dr. Ericsson found that the best performers typically practice in uninterrupted sessions that last no more than 90 minutes. They begin in the morning, take a break between sessions, and rarely work for more than four and a half hours in any given day.

Go read the whole thing!

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Friendly Business – On the Road

Life and Business Lessons from Colombian Street Vendors (3): What A Burger Flipper Taught Me About Expectations

Image CC-BY by Federico Racchi. Cropped by me. Original available under http://www.flickr.com/photos/46615774@N03/7272893854/

What do you expect when you go to a fast-food joint?

A) A filled belly.
B) Quick service.
C) Low price.
D) A tasty meal.
E) All of the above.

We’ll find out in this post of my “Life and Business Lessons from Colombian Street Vendors” series!

Burgers for Dromologists

“You think McDonald’s is fast? Brace yourself. I’ll take you to the fastest hamburger joint in the world”, Omar told us. A friend and I were visiting him in his home town of Bucaramanga. We had spent the evening drinking and exploring the area. After much walking around, hunger had become an issue – and Omar knew where to take us.

In Colombia, fast food works a bit different than in the US. While chains like McDonald’s exist and are quite popular, they aren’t the first choice when hunger strikes. Instead, most people prefer to support their local micro business on the street. They are normally closer to your home, less expensive, and the quality is better. A place like that was exactly what Omar had in mind.

The hamburger stand was located near one of Bucaramanga’s uncountable parks. It was a comparatively dark corner, but there was still quite a bit of movement. As we got there, we saw several taxis drive by. The cabbies would exchange a few words with the employees, get their burgers, and move on. Apart from us, some two dozen people hung around, apparently enjoying their meals.

Once we were placing our orders with the cashier, a second employee immediately got busy in the background. We ordered three different menus, featuring several special requests. (“Make that double cheese and no onions.”) To our surprise, we hadn’t even reached for our wallets when the burgers were ready.

I’ll be free to admit that I’m a bit of a naive person at times. But I’m not that naive!

I know how this stuff works!

Woe betide you, astute burger flipper, if I encounter onions on my burger!

…

But the employees were just smiling knowingly, happy to prove me wrong: Not only had the chef managed to serve all our meals exactly as ordered, they were also neatly packed in aluminium foil. What’s more, the price was incredibly cheap and the size of the menu large enough to satisfy a truck driver after pulling an all-nighter.

Alas, where there’s light, there’s shadow.

While the Colombians might not be well-known for their cuisine, their street food has a certain fame among deep-fry connoisseurs and grease enthusiasts. Unfortunately, I’ve definitely had many better burgers in Colombia than the one in Bucaramanga. While it was passable, I probably wouldn’t have finished it if I hadn’t been a little drunk. (Ahem.)

So how does it come that the place still had so many regular customers?

The obvious reason is, of course, that we don’t expect a filled belly and quick service and a low price and an extremely tasty meal at the same time when we grab fast food. Indeed, quality isn’t the main consideration for a place that caters drunk partygoers and taxi drivers that are short on both time and money.

But, as obvious as this is, how often do we – as aspiring entrepreneurs – try to please everybody, to be 100% perfect in all areas?

And how often does this prevent us from actually starting to make an offer, to put our goods out there – because the task just seems too big! Or, if we get started, how often does it lead to mediocricy in all areas?

I think here lies the main lesson from the burger flipper: You cannot be a jack of all trades if you want to be perfect. But you don’t need to, either.

Lessons Learnt for Life and Business

  • Life is compromise: Most probably, you won’t get flawless and obliging service, great quality, and an extremely low price at the same time. As a customer, you wouldn’t expect this, either.
  • So it’s all about expectations: A customer who isn’t stupid will be aware of the compromise he’s making – no need to freak out.
  • There is a place in the world for “quick and dirty”. I’d rather not take it, but I can understand it: Some people don’t really care about quality.1 They just want something that’s quick, inexpensive and “good enough”. (And they want to be sure there’s no onion on it if they don’t like onion.)
  • That said: If you underdeliver, your customer won’t return. He may not even pay his bill, and rightly so.
  • So decide on your most important areas, focus on them, and deliver!
  • One last thing: If you overdeliver on the expectations you set, you’re gold. Paradoxical as it may seem, this is exactly what the burger flipper in Bucaramanga did: He wasn’t just cheap and “good enough”, he was also friendly and extremely fast. As long as he continues to do that, he’ll always have a working business.

Thanks to Federico Racchi for the original image (from Uruguay, not Colombia!) shared under a CC-BY license. Cropped by me.

  1. See also the first part of this series. [↩]

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Personal Sovereignty

Link: Back online after a year without the internet

Here’s the story of a guy that leaves the internet for a year in order to solve all his problems:

“I’d read enough blog posts and magazine articles and books about how the internet makes us lonely, or stupid, or lonely and stupid, that I’d begun to believe them. I wanted to figure out what the internet was “doing to me,” so I could fight back.”

Surprisingly, it doesn’t work:

“As it turned out, a dozen letters a week could prove to be as overwhelming as a hundred emails a day. And that was the way it went in most aspects of my life. A good book took motivation to read, whether I had the internet as an alternative or not. Leaving the house to hang out with people took just as much courage as it ever did.

By late 2012, I’d learned how to make a new style of wrong choices off the internet. I abandoned my positive offline habits, and discovered new offline vices. Instead of taking boredom and lack of stimulation and turning them into learning and creativity, I turned toward passive consumption and social retreat.”

This story is a great example of how a few blinded ideologists can distort our perception. Whether they sustain that the web is the ultimate evil or our last hope for salvation, we have to understand this: Their shrill voices are overrepresented in the media, simply because they are being quoted by anybody who needs an “expert” to support his case. Any case, really. But media exposure ≠ truth.

From a personal sovereignty perspective, this is a good lesson: We all should remember to do some good research before jumping to conclusions. Our own research, specifically.1

[¶]

As for the web, I’d say it’s a task for each of us to learn how to use it wisely and in a self-directed manner. In recent months, I have made great experiences with blocking web access for several hours a day, especially in the morning. This allows me to focus on more important matters when starting the day.

Currently, I will normally be offline from 11pm to 11am, and then some hours during the day as well. SelfControl.app helps with this. As does living without a smartphone, as Milo correctly pointed out to me in Oslo.

Cutting it off altogether? No way! From the conclusions of the article quoted above:

But the internet isn’t an individual pursuit, it’s something we do with each other. The internet is where people are.

Well said. And that’s by far the best reason to be here.

  1. Also, a great reminder that life is seldom black-and-white. It’s the shades of grey that matter, not just in dubious bestselling book titles! [↩]

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