Business moves at the speed of trust. - Stephen Covey

Trust is one of the many things, it seems to me, that is best understood and appreciated by experiencing it in its failed state.

Ah, failure. Until you've failed as an entrepreneur, it's hard to appreciate the entrepreneurial process. Until you've hired a wrong person, it's hard to appreciate the importance of hiring the best. Until someone has been reckless with your heart or you with theirs, it's hard to appreciate the criticalness of fidelity and honesty in romance. And so on. Like most cliches, "You learn more from a failed outcome than a successful one" reveals a terrifying truth.

Until someone has broken your trust, it's hard to appreciate the essence of being trustworthy yourself to others.

When does trust break down? Sometimes trust is lost over time, a series of small divots adding up. But sometimes trust is lost in a flash: a single, meaningful lapse of judgment. What takes months and years to develop between people can be eroded in a matter of hours.

It's not just the single lapse of judgment -- say, the stressed CFO who unethically fudged the numbers the night before the earnings call, or the husband who had a one-night affair. The actions themselves cause some but not all of the damage.

What proves most damning in the end is the imagination of the injured: the retroactive ("Has employee Joe been fudging the numbers all along?") and future suspicion of his activities and candor. Once this door of suspicion creaks open, it's hard for it to close all the way and hard for trust to be established anew. (Though it's not impossible -- I have a couple relationships which have emerged stronger, in the end, after a rupture.)

I've let people down before. I've done things that have endangered the bond of trust I had with a person. What I've learned is that when I proactively and swiftly acknowledge that I fucked up, I can re-build the bond. When the other person finds out second-hand or if I shirk from responsibility for own actions, it's much harder to repair.

Bottom Line: See the silver lining in failure. When someone breaks your trust, in the short term there's pain and self-doubt about your own ability to size up character. In the long term there's an opportunity to learn from the failure, deepen your own capacity be trusted and become wiser still in choosing who to trust in the future.

Wyatt Mason, over at the book blog of Harper's magazine, does a close, literary reading of a few sentences of a writer struggling with the impossibility of saying anything new about 9/11. The sentences and analysis are a pleasure to read. It's also a pleasure to discover the name of the author under the microscope, a man you've undoubtedly heard of. Writerly types should check it out.

A few friends have told me they want to get on the speaking circuit. While I do some paid speaking on the side, I'm not a "professional speaker." As always with this blog, lack of qualification doesn't stop me from offering thoughts! Here are some assorted nuggets for those looking to pursue public speaking in a professional capacity:

1. Wanting to do paid speaking is similar to wanting to write a book: it sounds like paradise until you become familiar with how the industry works. My friend Penelope Trunk wrote a great post called 5 Reasons why you don't need to write a book. Many authors echo her advice. A similar dynamic holds in the speaking industry. To outsiders it sounds glamorous -- you get paid a bunch of money, flown first class to an exotic city, speak in front of thousands of people. For the top tier it's like this. But most start at "free" and over several years work their way up to $2,500, then $5,000, then $7,500, and maybe $10 or $15k a speech if you're good but still relatively unknown. Your clients will mostly be in small towns and your mode of transit will be regional jets that fly once a day.

2. Paid speaking rarely exists on its own. If you write a book, speaking is the natural follow-on. Or if you have some other product to sell, speaking works in tandem. Or if you are a consultant, speaking can help drive business to your consultancy. The point is it's unusual to do paid speaking on its own -- it's usually a single product in a portfolio of products and services.

3. It doesn't scale. You don't scale. You can only be in one place at one time. This creates a ceiling on how much money you can make. If money is driving you, this should represent the greatest drawback.

4. The best speakers "do" something by day. People who speak for a living (ie, full time) don't do anything else day to day which makes them less credible and interesting. They are usually "motivational speakers." Standing on stage and issuing opinions is not very hard. By contrast, if you're a professor, or run a business, or otherwise have a professional job that requires you to interact with the world on a regular basis, and then allows you to draw upon such real world experience in your speaking, you are more credible.

5. There are speaking bureaus and agents. Here's how most work. They field phone calls from event planners looking for speakers and then, in reactive fashion, propose a few speakers from their database. The event planner will pick one and the Bureau will handle some of the ensuing logistics. In return for it all they take 15-25% commission off the speaker's gross fee. (As a speaker you don't pay the bureau unless they book you.) It's easier to get listed with a speaking bureau than be represented by a literary agent, but it's not a slam-dunk. Bureaus receive 15 speaking proposals a day and only choose to "represent" (ie, list on web site and reactively offer to event planners) a small portion of those. Note that some bureaus represent speakers exclusively. Others will represent you non-exclusively, meaning that you can work with other bureaus or book engagements yourself. Unlike literary agents (with whom you have a high likelihood of selling a book) with a speaking agent there's no guarantee you'll be booked for anything. Literally all it means is you show up on their web site.

6. Before you can do paid speaking, you gotta do free speaking. Unless you have some extraordinary professional experience that will make you instantly in demand on stage, you must establish a track record of inspiring or provoking audiences successfully. Then, slowly but surely, you can begin asking for expense reimbursement and then charging for the keynote itself. Like anything it takes time to work your way up the ladder. Subjugate your ego. Volunteer yourself at schools. Gather friends in a conference room and do your spiel. Are you in it for the long term?

7. The thrill of being on stage. I don't mean to be too negative. There is an undeniable thrill of being on-stage, the center of attention, with 60 minutes to articulate your ideas and messages. An in-person presentation can move people in ways text cannot. The skills you learn -- how to establish a kinesthetic connection with an audience, how to craft slides that are visually appealing, how to organize ideas, how to field questions -- are hugely valuable. Plus, it's fun!

8. Toastmasters. I've never been, but I have friends who swear by Toastmasters as the single best way to improve your public speaking.

Take a deep breath. Focus on your breath. Breath.

So have advised everyone from Eastern spiritual gurus to basketball coaches before the big game. Focusing on the breath, they say, grounds you in the present moment. Easier said than done, but I try to follow this wisdom as much as I can.

My brother pointed me to a scene from the 2000 movie Cast Away that articulates this spirit. For those who haven't seen it, Tom Hanks' character is the sole survivor of a plane crash that leaves him stranded on an island for four years. He survives thanks to some supplies in the plane and more importantly the memory of his girlfriend Kelly with whom he was in love. One day, the tide washes ashore the remnants of a portapody which Hanks uses to build a raft and ultimately get rescued.

He returns to Memphis to the shock of his friends and family who had held a funeral for him years ago. His girlfriend had mourned but then married another man and had children. In the below three minute clip Hanks talks about what he did, the sadness of losing Kelly all over again, and how he needs to just "keep breathing." Here's a shortened clip with only the end part.

There's elemental wisdom in those last words: "And I know what I have to do: I have to keep breathing. Because tomorrow the sun will rise, and who knows what the tide could bring?"

Parents of young children often say they're moving from a city to the 'burbs because "Suburb X is a good place to raise a family." I would guess the real reason sometimes is, "Suburb X is less expensive." Though suppose cost were irrelevant and we evaluate the parents' reason at face value.

It's a good place to raise a family. What does this mean? At its core this usually means it's safe, i.e., in the suburbs the kids can play outside at night and we don't worry. (Sometimes parents say it's for the schools but suburban schools are not widely better than urban ones.)

There's a flip side to an ultra-safe environment: it's less interesting. The interestingness of a place is inversely correlated with its safety. Somewhere, there is an optimal point, but parents seem to sometimes forget this tradeoff.

I'm biased. I grew up in a neighborhood ( Haight-Ashbury) in San Francisco that at the time was fairly rough-and-tumble. The full range of human impulses were on display. My childhood activities were extremely urban: city parks and playgrounds, streets and noise and pollution, dodging crime-inclined juveniles.

While there were some less pleasant run-ins with homeless people or the neighborhood gang, in total, I think the diversity I got exposed to contributed positively to my upbringing. All the sights and sounds around me made me more interested in how those things came to be. It exposed me to a wider range of lives and behavior. It made me more curious.

Bottom Line: Life's about tradeoffs. Safety is no exception. I'm not sold that suburbia is usually a better place to raise a family, if safety and stability are proffered as the reasons why.

Aaron Swartz lists the blogs he wished existed, and includes this:

I agree this would be a hilarious and perhaps educational read. Someone should take up the task. We can't, for example, let gems from Lee Siegel fade into the abyss.

The best decision making tool I know of, and the framework within which I try to make most of my decisions, is the cost-benefit analysis.

The cost-benefit approach breaks down when you don't have enough information to weigh all of the costs or benefits, or when the future costs or benefits are uncertain.

So my second framework is what I call "regret aversion." My interest in the notion of regret started when I turned 18 and asked a few dozen adult friends what they regret not doing when they were 18. Interestingly, the #1 regret was not traveling more when they were younger. The regret question elicited an interesting set of responses and I followed up this idea with my post on asking questions in the negative.

Essentially, I have come to believe that many older people are haunted by the question "I wonder what would have happened if..." And that active 40 or 50 somethings regret not trying more things when they were younger. The regret can be as profound as "I regret not going to college" or as simple as "I wonder what would have happened had I mustered the courage to call that CEO I really respected and asked for help."

While it's no good being consumed with regret over a past you have no control over, it's similarly no good to ignore the past and not try to learn from your decisions. Devoting an optimal amount of attention to the past is an elusive task indeed -- I'm not convinced that complete detachment from the past is the best way to live. Most of the people I respect are reflective enough to have thought about their past and honest enough to harbor some regrets.

So, I regularly deploy the "regret aversion" rule of thumb: When in doubt, say yes. This will not eliminate regret from my life, nor is it a hard and fast rule (surely there are times when "No" is the right answer). But by doing more things, even relatively random things, if it doesn't work out, at least I'll know I tried (no "what if?"), and sometimes it actually does work out.

Let us remember in closing:

We regret the things we don't do more than the things we do. - Mark Twain

When seeking information from busy people via email the little things matter. Quick, minor tip: use a question mark if you're asking a question. Compare the following cases:

Case A: Do you have any feedback for me on this point?

Case B: I would be interested in hearing your feedback on this point.

The question mark in A will yield a higher response than the passive Case B. Another example I learned when doing sales:

Case A: Will you be in town on Nov 5th for a meeting?

Case B: If you're in town on Nov 5th, I would love to meet.

Again, I think the question mark yields a higher response. When I receive an email from someone I don't know, I immediately search for the question mark.

Bottom Line: If you want a response, use question marks. Present active not passive questions!

Scattered, mostly trivial musings. Just need to get these thoughts out of my head and out of my "drafts" folder....

• An audience member gets nervous if he senses the speaker is nervous. Hence, as a speaker, the best way to put the audience at ease is to yourself be and appear at ease.


• Annoying: people who talk slowly most of the time. Talking slowly at times can be a great way to emphasize something, or to occasionally come across as profound, but a default pace of slowness I find insufferable.


• Without wanting to further the "brilliant guy who hasn't showed in three days" stereotype...men I know who are metrosexual or spend lots of time thinking about their fashion / grooming are usually not very smart. Similarly, people who make spiritually a big part of their identity tend to be fuzzy thinkers. (I know, I know, generalizations are dangerous, plenty of exceptions, etc etc.)


• Like every other sentient being, I find excessive name-dropping annoying and a sign of insecurity. But I'd be lying if I said it wasn't effective at conveying success or importance -- someone's proximity to power does usually mean something.


• Why do pilots always announce the direction of the wind? Any regular flyer knows what I'm talking about: the pilot comes on with about 20 minutes left in the flight and says, "We're about 20 minutes away from San Francisco's International Airport. It's a beautiful day there, about 68 degrees and winds out of the west at 6 miles an hour." It's always those two facts: the temperature and the wind. Why do they say the wind? This is irrelevant to the passengers. I understand why the pilot wants to know this info. But passengers, inasmuch as add'l info is going to be given, would be more interested in tomorrow's forecast, temperatures of other neighboring cities, what the weather has been earlier in the day, or chance of precipitation. Anything. Wind speed and direction, not so much.


• Side projects needn't make money. The experimental value alone is worth it.


• People with learning disabilities should get extra time on tests but their special status ought to be known by the evaluators of the results. Currently, a college does not know which SAT scores came from an extra-time exam.


• Gossip is a form of social bonding. To tell someone a secret, or something juicy, is a way to build closeness with the person. Of course, it's an awfully lazy way to bond!


• Why don't people wear shorts in India or Ecuador? In both places, even on hot days, no locals were wearing shorts when I was there.


• How the hell do people deal with time zones on their calendar? I schedule all events in local time and keep my computer time zone on Pacific Time. If I schedule a meeting in Denver next week, I enter it under the setting Pacific Time but at the local time the actual meeting is happening. E.g.: 2 PM MT meeting on Tuesday goes in my calendar as 2 PM and I don't change my time zone as I travel (otherwise all entries would be knocked up an hour).


• Ever had this happen: you describe your position to somebody you respect, and they reply, "I agree!" and go on to "reinforce" your argument...except that you discover during their reinforcement that they don't actually agree. They misunderstood you. Do you correct them and say, "No, actually, wait, you don't agree" or simply move on? Oh, the high stakes of social interactions!


• Many big companies interview potential candidates by having 5-6 employees interview the candidate for a half hour or hour each. If a candidate has a set of talking points, he can dish them out each time. I prefer one trusted person going deep with the candidate for a couple hours.


• Even in this advanced state of civilization, when I'm on the road, I find my days animated by the primal hunt for food, water, and a bathroom. I feel I'm always hungry, thirsty, or needing to pee. And yes, I understand these things are connected!

In this post I'm going to do something I've been meaning to do for a long time: express gratitude to my parents and articulate some of the things I've learned from them during my brief existence. Why now? First, Thanksgiving will be soon upon us and expressing thanks is the name of the game. Second, when Tim Russert tragically died a few months ago, there were plenty of touching articles about his relationship with his father (documented in his book Big Russ and Me) and on that day I vowed to write this post. Third, over the years my mentor Brad Feld has written movingly about his father and mother and inspired me to do the same. What follows are informal comments which seems appropriate given that the learning is not over!

Dad

Dad has taught me the value of hard work. So many people talk about hard work. Yet actions speak louder than words. There's no better way to internalize the hard work habit than to witness it first-hand as a kid every day growing up. In building a successful career and life for himself, Dad embodies the value of focused perseverance.

In addition to work ethic, Dad's writing and speaking skills have taken him far, and he's shared those gifts with me. Dad taught me how to write. In the early days of my fledgling business career, I showed him literally dozens of drafts of business plans, memos, brochures. On each page, he deployed his red pen to suggest ways to make the writing more economical and precise. Dad prized clarity above all, and so from age 12 on I have been pushed to articulate my thinking in as straightforward a manner as possible.

I've also learned from Dad what it means to be serious about something. You can't be "serious" about everything, so choose wisely which things deserve your focus and then hold yourself to high standards when pursuing them.

Dad's taught me intelligence matters but effectively communicating the fruits of your intelligence matters more, that dreams and imagination are nice but one must be grounded in the messy realities of life, that most any scenario can be analyzed by evaluating options, costs, and benefits, and that, through it all, you must never surrender your sense of humor. Seinfeld, after all, was the one TV show that we were encouraged to watch growing up.

Dadbensandiego_small (Dad and me in San Diego, December 2005.)

Mom

Mom was the central figure in my childhood. As a kid I went to museums and parks and the library with her. Throughout the adventures she imparted valuable life skills. She taught me how to shake someone's hand and look a person in the eye. She taught me how to sit at a dinner table and be courteous. The little things.

When I began expressing business interests, Mom didn't push me back to "normal" activities, but neither did she irrationally cheerlead like many moms I see. She was happy if I was happy, a sentiment that's easy to talk about but extremely hard to believe, let alone convey, as a parent.

Mom has taught me about frugality, about doing more with less, about how to use coupons at the supermarket and find wearable clothes at Goodwill.

An intellectual through and through, Mom has showed me the pleasures of unleashed natural curiosity. She reads more than anyone I know and brings to bear an outstanding command of history, art, and literature. As a student, she lived overseas and through her example I took an interest in traveling, now one of my greatest passions. Together we delight in the mysteries of other cultures.

The life of the mind aside, above all, Mom has taught me that heart is more important than brain and that who you are matters more than what you know or do. She's taught me that a rich interior life can sustain a person through stretches of solitude. And that a strong family is the best way to feel a little less alone in the world.

Dad, Mom: I love you. Thanks for being there for me every step of the way for my first 20 years on this planet.

Momandmejapan_blog  (Mom and me in the Japanese alps, June 2006.)

I'm in the (freezing) midwest this week to keynote a couple of events and see friends. During Q&A someone asked whether I feel confused about what's happening on the macro-economic and political front and how that affects how I plan for the future. Here's the essence of what I tried to say:

I distrust anyone who says he can predict the future or anyone who is overly certain about anything. I am uncertain about most things that are going on around me -- especially at a macro level, but also on a personal level, where almost daily some of my intuitions about what will happen get mugged by reality. I plan and think about the future a great deal, but no matter how much I plan, shit happens. As Mike Tyson once said, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face." I think we lie to ourselves about how in control we are. Chaos rules. Randomness rules. Emotions grip us. I'd like to think I posses a kind of inner calm that helps me make rational decisions day-to-day. I know I'm stable and confident (sometimes too confident) and, most of the time, relentlessly optimistic and happy. But I'd be lying if I said this amounted to a high degree of certainty about where the world is headed or even what in God's name I'll be doing in five years. I suppose I see the more enlightened among us as having achieved a certain comfortableness with uncertainty / confusion.

I would add that if you don't regularly feel utterly confused, if you don't occasionally feel like you're treading just above water, if you don't ever feel misunderstood, then you probably aren't living in life -- you're just observing it.

The "living in life" concept comes from Joan Didion, whose quote to this effect I reproduce in the Introduction of my book. It's from her UC Riverside commencement address:

I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is ncessarily part of the package, I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.

Just finished Gladwell's latest book Outliers. It was a fun read but not sure I would have bought it on my own (I read the pre-pub galley).

I would say more but I cannot match Tyler Cowen's very interesting review, do go read it.

Here's my delicious tag for Malcolm Gladwell.

It's astonishing how effective pharmaceuticals are today with only very minor side effects.

But there's one side effect yet solved and I suspect it's the most potent for some drugs: the identity confusion of whether the you on drugs is really "you."

For drugs that deal with personality issues or depression, I imagine even a successful patient must grapple with whether their newly improved state is artificial. (Artificial in a more serious way than the effect of myriad everyday things like coffee.) Am I really happy or is it just the drug that's tricking me into thinking so?

If the goal is to have people take medication that can help them while also minimizing in their own minds the fact that they're on medication, maybe these drugs could induce temporary amnesia immediately after swallowing the pill? The problem is that you need to know you've actually taken it!

Bottom Line: We've made remarkable progress in eliminating the biological side effects of anti-depressants and other mind-altering drugs, but still have to figure out how to deal with the assorted identity and self-understanding issues that can bedevil medicated patients.

(Note: I have never been on any these drugs so I'm speaking from observation not experience.)

Always fun to read about the day-to-day operations of the White House, including the extraordinary security apparatus around the President. Here's just one of many interesting nuggets:

The President-elect will also have to get used to handing his glass to a Secret Service agent every time he has a drink outside the White House. The agent carries a small bag in which to pop the glass and later he destroys it. The idea is to ensure that no unauthorised person has access to the Presidential DNA, but it is not clear how an enemy would use it.

The most interesting four paragraphs I read over the weekend, from Robin Hanson (emphasis my own):

We use belief conformity to show loyalty to particular groups, relative to other groups. We rarely bother to show loyalty to humanity as a whole, because non-humans threaten little. So we rarely bother to try to conform our beliefs with humanity as a whole, which is why herding experiments with random subjects show no general conformity tendencies.

Our conformity efforts instead target smaller in-groups, with more threatening out-groups. And we are most willing to conform our beliefs on abstract ideological topics, like politics or religion, where our opinions have few other personal consequences. Our choices show to which conflicting groups we feel the most allied.

You just can't fight "conformity" by indulging the evil pleasure of enjoying your conformity to a small tight-knit group of "non-conformists." All this does is promote some groups at the expense of other groups, and poisons your mind in the process. It is like fighting "loyalty" by dogged devotion to an anti-loyalty alliance.

Best to clear your mind and emotions of group loyalties and resentments and ask, if this belief gave me no pleasure of rebelling against some folks or identifying with others, if it was just me alone choosing, would my best evidence suggest that this belief is true? All else is the road to rationality ruin.

Truth. I especially like his sentence about enjoying your conformity to a small group of "non-conformists" -- forging one's identity as the embattled minority is a well-established tack for activist or contrarian types. The sentence about our willingness to conform beliefs on politics to conform to a group identity also rings true. Involving yourself in a political group is a surefire way to harbor increasingly irrational views about politics.

A friend and I were guessing the percentage of people who met their spouse in school (high school, college, grad), work, or in some other social context. I figured a Google search would point the way to a broad study on the question: Where do people meet their spouse? Surprisingly, I came up empty. Anyone know of a study based upon a large data set instead of anecdotes?

My Googling did, however, reveal a few other data points about marriage. This page said the median age for marriage for American men is 27 and for women 25 -- lower than I expected. I suspect higher socio-economic classes / higher educated folks marry later in life. Also learned that 40-50% of marriages end in divorce in the U.S. Again I suspect it's lower among higher educated folks.

The issue that seems to be most hotly contested on marriage data sites is around cohabitation -- whether premarital cohabitation affects the longevity and quality of a marriage. This study suggests that premarital cohabitation "has consistently been found to be associated with increased risk for divorce and marital distress in the United States." Why? The inertia of living together causes a couple that would not otherwise marry to marry. Interesting and somewhat counterintuitive.

The folks at Venture Hacks just updated their 35 slide presentation A quick and dirty guide to starting up. There's some great stuff here and it doesn't take long to click through. I recommend it for anyone interested in entrepreneurship or starting their own company.

One of the slides has the following Hugh Macleod quote. Not sure I agree or even think it's relevant to entrepreneurship but I found it provocative:

The price of being a wolf is loneliness. The price of being a sheep is boredom. Choose one or the other with great care.

The self-improvement industry rests on the proposition that with concerted effort you can become a better version of yourself and enact real change in your life. The cynic responds, "Oh come on, people don't change! Go to your high school reunion -- nobody's changed."

Both views are right. In some ways, a person will never change. Assholes at age 12 are usually assholes at age 30. Personality and core behavioral traits are largely heritable.

But in other important respects, people can absolutely change. Steven Pinker has suggested that if genes can explain 50% of complex human behavior, there's another 50% attributable to a person's "unique environment." One's environment is always changing -- especially if you are young. Youth are more plastic, both biologically and in terms of their ever-evolving circumstances and adventures. Hence I never box in a person under age 30.

If I had to pick a side, I am on the side that people can and do change over a lifetime. This doesn't always mean, in the face of dissatisfaction, I want to wait for it to happen -- any entrepreneur will tell you, "Hire the right person on day 1, don't try to change a person to fit the job." True. But there are other times when investing in someone's life as they evolve, grow, mature, age, can be enormously fulfilling. For example, it's fascinating to see someone endure adverse conditions and as a result become more resilient, or sympathetic, or hardened, etc. There are also countless extraordinary examples of people who have turned their life around when it seemed they were stuck in the depths of misery (drug addiction, for example). This reason alone should force us all to be open to the possibility of someone changing in big or small ways.

We've heard a lot from Obama about America striving to become "a more perfect union." I also think that within each person lies a capacity to better himself. This struggle to remake ourselves, to adapt to changing conditions, to develop new interests, to soften our edges and strengthen our cores, is a beautiful and uniquely human thing.

Bottom Line: Believing "people don't change" simplifies the world but ultimately can sell short the experience of living even a basic life. The collision of one's natural impulses with the dynamic, chaotic, unpredictable world of events can produce, in a lifetime, meaningful emotional, physical, and intellectual change.

I'm a huge fan of Tobias Wolff. I loved his novel Old School and his memoir This Boy's Life is a classic of the genre.

I just finished his memoir of a young manhood fighting in Vietnam called In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War. It's terrific. Virtually every sentence is rhythmic and supple. Here's one sentence I underlined:

I know of no other living American writer with as deft a touch. Newsweek says, "He's a hell of a writer...he writes such spare, whistling prose that you'd follow him anywhere, even into battle."

I highly recommend Wolff's memoirs and novels.

...you know you're a true American. In this late October profile of libertarian candidate for president Bob Barr, it's revealed that Barr's home, office, and cell phone numbers all end with 1776. If that's not a commitment to defending the timeless values then articulated, I don't know what is.

###

Here are some of my recent "tweets" on micro-blogging service Twitter. Assorted quotes, links, and quick thoughts. Chronology is only organizing principle:

• Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder: some of the best f-bomb usage in 40 seconds I've ever seen in modern cinema: http://tiny.cc/M1an4
• Receiving a nice compliment from someone you care about feels good. Anyone who says they're unmoved by a flattering comment is lying!      
• Unfortunately, the African American vote that came out for Obama also is the most homophobic -- and seems to have voted yes Prop 8 in CA.
• MLK was shot only 40 years ago. I simply cannot imagine what people who were alive then must be thinking right now. Simply inconceivable. 
• Though I voted for Bob Barr, I'm very proud to be an American tonight (Nov 4). No matter who u supported, America has re-invented itself once again.
• India is the default country named when referring to "cheap outsourcing place" but for most super cheap things India is too expensive.  
• Overheard: "I'm not going to the election party. For me, watching election results is like watching porn: I want to do it alone." WTF?
• My jeans are "Made in Jordan." This is the first pair of clothing I've ever worn that claims Middle East origin.
• San Francisco Proposition R seeks to re-name a sewage treatment plant in honor of George W. Bush.
• Casually open up to Genesis 19. Let's see...little bit of gang rape, God blows up couple cities, some incest. The usual Old Testament fare.
• "It's more likely you will be killed in a car crash en route to the voting booth than your vote actually making a difference." - G. Tullock
• Always amusing to see people do the fake hand-wash in public bathrooms: turn water on for 2 secs, no soap, no dry, walk out. 
• Marveling at Tobias Wolff's prose. Is there a living American writer with as deft a touch?  
• Only at In-N-Out Burger do you find in the parking lot a Jaguar, Prius, and Civic next to each other. All walks of life love da doubledouble. 
• There's a direct correlation between the # of times someone refers to him/herself in the third person and that person's ego.
• "There is such a thing as a pornography consumed exclusively by women ... it is the romance novel." - http://tiny.cc/ElREh  
• "The economy" has become the preferred catch-all excuse for any sort of inaction.
• Absolutely horrifying Yes on 8 ad from the religious nutjobs who are behind this campaign: http://tiny.cc/cH211    
• "National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement." - Richard Rorty      
• Happiness is having "Billy Jean" by Michael Jackson come on on your iPod at minute 9 on the treadmill. 
• I find fascinating the mental jujitsu undergone by people who are against gay marriage but not, supposedly, against homosexuality.
• I admire s/he who can defuse potential in-person goodbye awkwardness btwn man/woman by proactively hugging or putting out the firm hand.    
• The Wall Street Journal has one million (!) more subscribers than the New York Times.  
• Imagine if this happened at your wedding (40 sec YouTube): http://tiny.cc/y9oo7  
• “The one thing you need to know about sustained individual success: Discover what you don’t like doing and stop doing it.“ - M. Buckingham  
• People who give you advice by starting, "Let me give you some advice," are usually assholes. (Obviously tone matters.)
• "The crucial diff btwn those who write non-fiction vs. fiction is that fiction writers have a sense for / talent around music." - C Hitchens
• Crude summary of the Old Testament: Don't mess with God. He'll fuck you up.  
• I call support, enter in all my account info on touch pad phone, then human rep asks me for it all over again. Yay CRM/IVR technology!
• "It's next to impossible to get someone to think hard about why he's not interested in something. The boredom itself preempts inquiry." -DFW
• "When John McCain chose Sarah Palin he told the United States of America to go fuck itself." - Leon Wieseltier, lit editor of New Republic   
• I admire people who can authentically use "chief" is casual convo. E.g., "How ya doin' chief?" It's hard to do right
• Someone sent me a book on leadership lessons via childhood toys. E.g. "What Mr. Potato Head Can Teach You About Communication." I kid u not.
•  Apparently you're not allowed to bid AdWords that are the name of your competitor.  
• Love the liberal bias in media. Article this morning: Obama's education plan is better because...he will spend more $ on education.
• Virgin America rocks. "B group, you are bold and beautiful and you chose VA, so go board the plane!" Even cheesy enthusiasm works.  
• October weather is about 300x better than August weather in NYC. Makes a big difference.  
• There are 70k more antelope in Wyoming than people.    
• Don't you love it when hotel rooms have an alarm clock left un-touched by housekeeping from prior guest that goes off in middle of nite? 
• Guy on plane says to flight attendant couple (husband/wife): "Look me in the eye and tell me you haven't 'done it' in the bathroom."
• Changing into my conception of "cold weather clothes": Giants fleece and shoes/socks not sandals. I cant handle weather east of Cali.
• Who came up with the idea for cold mini-corn in salad bars? It's my favorite topping.
• Peter Thiel on Charlie Rose: Human capital has been vastly misallocated - part of the crisis - too many people in real estate, finance, etc.
• Dear Person Coughing: Please cough into your arm and not your hands, so as to limit spread of germs. Love, Person Trying to Not Get a Cold    
• Who do u respect more, the person indifferent on an important issue or the prson on the wrong side of the issue but at least has an opinion?
• JS Mill on the importance of doubt / debate: "As soon as mankind have unanimously accepted a truth, does the truth perish within them?"
• If you were to ask me whether I am eating crunchy peanut butter right out of jar (real men only eat crunchy), I would reply, "No comment."
• "Strategies don’t move mountains, bulldozers do.” - Peter Drucker
• Once again, loyalty to my name precludes me from ordering any type of breakfast other than Eggs Benedict. I'm so helpless.
• "I view pride and self-image as the most important features in predicting the quality of an individual choice." - Tyler Cowen. Interesting.
• "Either your kids are at the center of your life, or they're not." - Calvin Trillin
• I wonder whether Americans will ever take to saying "mobile phone" like the rest of the world instead of "cell phone."
• ""There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it." - William James
• I'm positively inclined to those who know that the word "data" is plural and "none" is singular.
• The $$ in Bay Area is crazy. 265k+ households have net worth of $1M+. SF highest wealth density in world outside D.C. http://tiny.cc/sZVGN
• Men: Does anyone actually pee through the buttoned hole in the front of boxers? I don't and find it in general a useless feature.
• Watching a fat person stuff himself at a buffet is one of life's less pleasant moments.
• Employees forced to use a corporate email account for work should demand "lifetime forwarding" to personal address after they leave the co
• Frequent and/or high profile sushi consumption is not only about the food. It's a way to signal wealth and status.
• Most of the female P.E. teachers or athletic coaches I know are lesbian.
• People who preface replies to questions/requests with "Happy to do X" are usually trying to make it obvious they're doing a favor.
• It's obvious when someone is trying too hard to be casual / laid back. Either it's natural or it's not. I say, Just be you!

In the weeks ahead there will be many postmortems analyzing where McCain's campaign went wrong. For me, I stopped considering his candidacy after he selected Sarah Palin as his VP pick. Aside from her policy views, Palin's hatred of elites and insistence that small town America is "real America" rubbed me the wrong way. Palin will be part of the political scene for years to come. Below (and below the fold) I offer expanded thoughts on Palin in the context of a wonderful essay I just read - " On Liberty" by John Stuart Mill. Mill was a champion of eccentric elites and his view on this issue is worth considering and juxtaposing with Palin's.

In a recent issue of The New Republic, Noam Scheiber notes how common it’s become for politicians to one-up each other in expressing their distaste for “elites.” From George W. Bush and Mitt Romney blasting the overeducated and entitled, to Hillary Clinton famously remarking that she wasn’t going to “put [her] lot in with the economists” during the gas price spike (she’d rather listen, presumably, to “real Americans,” whoever they are), conveying your common-man bona fides is essential to winning an election in America.

While both sides of the aisle shoo-shoo condescending elites, Republicans have championed this mode of rhetoric more in the last few elections. David Brooks recently observed that over the last 15 years most conservative pundits think “the nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.” At the Republican convention in Minneapolis Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, both coastal, well-to-do men, blasted the cosmopolitanism of liberal elites who are out of touch. It’s this constant rhetoric around “Two Americas” (contra John Edwards this bifurcation is between the coasts and the heartland), Brooks argues, that’s causing entire voting groups to turn blue -- tech executives, lawyers, doctors, the west coast, northern Virginia, etc. In other words, any geographic region or profession where a cultivated mind and taste for fine wine is nothing to be ashamed of.

No fact captures the contemporary Republican party’s distrust for urban elites better than their christening of Sarah Palin. Her arrival on the national stage (a stage she will be on for many years to come) represents the ultimate celebration of everyday America. Her resume boasts no fancy degrees and instead a small town mayorship and rural state governorship. Her passport, empty of stamps. Her accent is defined by a folksy twang. Her debate style involves winks, home-town shoutouts, and phrases like “doggone it” and “say it ain’t so Joe.”

What’s so wonderful about Palin is that it’s almost all real. (That this is remarkable says something about our current politics or at the least the cynicism of a generation whose introduction to D.C. came in the form of Bill Clinton lying about an oval office blow job.) Unlike Hillary Clinton, whose pathetic attempt at relating to small-town folk led her to down Crown Royal whiskey and pizza at a campaign stop, Sarah Palin can credibly drink Coors Light, watch a Nascar match, and shoot a gun. If Hillary and Sarah were to face off at a Town Hall meeting, and a questioner asked about gun-rights, it’s pretty easy to imagine Hillary becoming entangled in a wonkish explanation of the 2nd Amendment, with a chirpy Sarah responding, “Hey now, don’t ya think every old shmuck like me (wink) oughta be able to have a gun to keep the psychos of our lawns?”

Certainly, some portion (though as we learned on Nov 4 not most) of the population responds favorably to the latter style of answer. But others shrivel up – like me. Her overbearing folksiness rings hollow. Then again, I’m not her audience. By Palin’s calculus, I’m one of the coastal elites who’s too stuck up to listen to a hockey mom. A deep-rooted class resentment has been part of Palin’s worldview and identity for as long as she’s been in the public eye.

The larger question to ask about Palin and her style and history is whether it’s the only way to engage Nascar-loving middle Americans. By picking her, the Republican party seemed to think so. Their losing 2008 playbook read: extol the virtues of the common man, celebrate the simple life of the marginally educated, and insult pointy heads’ polysyllabic phrases. I, for one, find it patronizing to think that a factory worker will respond only to relentless plain speak and not an even mildly cerebral argument. But there’s a deeper concern beyond the condescension of party strategists who underestimate (and indeed create a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy around) the mental horsepower of someone who works with his hands and reads the Bible: it is the disregard of the idea of intellectualism and the work of professional intellectuals.

John Stuart Mill can defend these disregarded intellectuals better than anyone. Mill more than most cherished the contributions of geniuses, of eccentric personalities, of original thinkers. Mill more than most sounded the alarm at societal pressures to “normalize” these types rather than harness their energy for broader good. And so it is Mill more than most who would be dismayed at Palin’s near-proud anti-intellectualism and the Republican party’s broader elevation of the everyman-over-refined-man strategy.

Is the world of business intellectually stimulating? This is something I've struggled with and continue to contemplate.

How about a more concrete question: If you wanted to give your brain a work-out and also have a good time, would you rather hang out with professional academics or professional business people?

In an email exchange, Arnold Kling, who's been both an internet entrepreneur and an academic, writes to me:

I think that business people live more interesting lives. They face more interesting decisions. They deal more directly with incentive systems. They have much more challenging interpersonal issues. They have to handle a wider range of people and issues. The have to adapt more quickly. They make more frequent and dramatic changes.

Academics also tend to hyper-specialize, and hyper-specialists tend to be less interesting.

If you had to put me in a cocktail party, I'd opt for a group of business people who have unusual range and intellectual curiosity over a group of academics who are unusually grounded in real world events.

Fuchsia Dunlop in the weekend FT nails it:

I'm an experienced solo diner. If the setting is right (ie, you don't feel self-conscious), then a casual meal with a magazine can be quite relaxing.

During solo portions of my travel abroad, I became well accustomed to wandering the streets of a random city and settling down to eat. One of my favorite memories is in Rome, my last night there. The heat all week had been oppressive and the lack of traffic laws raised my blood pressure significantly any time I tried to cross a street. (Here's my funny travel blog post on crossing a Roman street.) Tired but happy to be alive, I walked to a local restaurant, sat down by myself, ordered as much mozzarella cheese as I thought I could eat, and enjoyed watching the Italians at tables next me take hand gesturing to a whole new level.

In Margaret Talbot's thoroughly interesting New Yorker piece on why so many evangelical teenagers are having sex, there's this nugget about teens who pledge abstinence:

Fascinating. Underdog status really does matter.

Tyler Cowen once suggested that if you want to find out what someone really believes, ask him what he thinks everyone else believes.

A slight re-frame can elicit the information you're looking for.

Here's a re-frame I thought of: If you want to find out what someone really does for a living, ask him what he does "on a day-to-day basis."

Usually, when you ask someone, "What do you do?" you get a grand, idealized vision of what their job is supposed to be. Hence, I follow this question with, "Interesting. So what does that entail on a day-to-day basis?" This question reveals a more concrete and helpful description.

Breaking down time into micro-chunks is also helpful for evaluating happiness. It's hard to contemplate the present-tense question, "Are you happy?" in the abstract. Past and future tense also fail. Looking back in time, we rationalize. Looking forward in time, we make terrible predictions about what will make us happy. So, one of the most famous and effective studies of happiness involved participants who carried around pagers and, several times a day in the heat of a moment, took note of how they were feeling. The researcher then evaluated the aggregate of these momentary entries.

Bottom Line: The best inquires about one's work and life are rooted in day-to-day activities and feelings.