Author: Daniel

  • “15 Lies Women Are Told at Work” by Bonnie Hammer

    • (the lie/the truth)
    • Follow your dreams / Follow the opportunities
      • Recognize when dreams hold you back
      • Your worth is ever changing
      • Ask where your dream came from
      • (They often come from guardians in our lives)
      • Stay curious
      • Distinguish between what you want to be vs what you want to do
    • Know your worth / Work on your professional worth
      • Your work worth is different from your personal worth
      • “…so is work. There is a reason we don’t call it play.”
      • Starting from the bottom gives good perspective
    • Have friends in high places / Find truth tellers in all places
      • Let mentorship grow organically
    • It’s what’s on the inside that matters / What’s on the outside matters too
    • You can have it “all” / You will have choices
      • All does not exist
      • We have choices today that did not exist before
      • We are all allowed to change our minds
      • Own your choices
    • Fake it ’til you make it / Face it ’til you make it
      • “Imposter syndrome” is different from “imposter phenomenon” (the common feeling that most feel they are inadequate)
      • Faking is living a lie
      • “Are you out of your depth or just afraid of heights?”
    • It’s a man’s world / Even if it’s not
      • Leverage your gender
      • “Care like a woman”
      • Know what you’ll compromise on and what you won’t
    • Talk is cheap / Talk is a valuable currency
      • The absence of “yes” is not “no”
      • “Use your words” and “ask for what you want”
      • “There are always receipts”
    • Good things come to those that wait / Great things come to those who act
    • There’s nowhere to go but up / Success has multiple directions
      • Diagonal movement lets us gain more depth
      • Change perspective before changing location
    • Trust your gut / Check your gut
      • Your gut prefers the status quo
      • Decision making
        • Analyze, meditate
        • Brainstorm
        • Compare
        • Devil’s advocate
        • Expertise
        • Gut
    • Don’t sweat the small stuff / You should sweat all the stuff
      • If you do not manage the small things, why would should you be trusted with the big things
      • Sweat, but don’t stress
    • The winner takes all / Nope, winning isn’t everything
      • When you mess up, apologize quickly
      • Read the room
    • Don’t mix work and play / All work and no play makes everyone boring
    • If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it / If it could be better, it might be broken
      • The status quo is always at risk at being disrupted
      • Keep eyes forward to what comes next
      • Ask, Answer, Address
    • The only constant in life is change
  • “Misbehaving” by Richard H Thaler

    • Brainpower is a limited resource so we use things to be more efficient, such as heuristics
    • We notice changes more than facts; but the changes need to meet a perception threshold
    • Sunk costs (money spent that cannot be retrieved) drives our consumption
    • Consumption related to Sunk Costs dissipate over time
    • To an “econ”, money in fungible and budgeting is irrelevant
    • When we are losing, we favor small bets with long odds over larger bets with better odds
    • We tend to diminish the value of future pleasures (“Ice cream now? Yum! Ice cream next year? Meh.”)
    • “Theory-induced blindness” is being blind because you have a reasonable theory
    • Self-control is about conflict, conflict takes two to exist
    • Behavioral solutions are good for behavioral problems
    • Windfalls should be reallocated rather than splurged
    • People do not make large purchases often enough to gain useful experience
    • The 2008 housing bubble was so painful because people were leveraged against their equity; the 2000 tech crash was much less painful because few had leverage their paper gains
    • We get very defensive when we start losing money
    • “Secret sales”–unadvertised sales–are bad for revenue because the customer was willing to pay full price when they walked in
    • People think about rebates differently than a discount
    • “… the perceived fairness of an action depends not only on who it helps or harms, but also on how it is framed.”
    • Removing discounts is usually perceived as more fair than raising prices
    • “Unfair” maneuvers are less noticeable so are not well noticed when competition follows suit
    • “Paradigms change only once experts believe there are a large number of anomalies that are not explained by the current paradigm.”
      • “Inside views” lock our perspective to the team’s optimism
      • “Outside views” let us reference other, similar projects
    • It is important to reward people for making good decisions based on the information available at the time, regardless of subsequent learnings
      • (This is really important in business and with children. Punishing either for not knowing something damages confidence.)
    • In the “beauty contest” game, it is important to ask who the other players are so you can guess at their beauty standards
    • Stock market trading volumes should be lower if everyone is rational
    • “But nothing attracts attention more than a good fight.”
    • “When people are given what they consider to be unfair offers, they can get angry enough to punish the other party, even at some cost to themselves.”
    • Fallacies of decision making:
      • People are overconfident.
      • People make forecasts that are too extreme.
      • The winner’s curse. The auction winner is the one who most overvalued the object.
      • The false consensus effect. People tend to think that other people share their preferences. (“Everyone is just like me”)
      • Present bias.
    • People become risk seeking when they are way ahead (“house money”) or way behind (“breakeven”)
    • People are more risk adverse in public than in private
    • It is more common to lie through omission than commission
    • “By convincing his fellow contestant that picking split would be his only hope of getting money, Nick ensured that he wouldn’t be alone in choosing the split ball.”
    • Softening risks can be more beneficial than boosting payouts

  • “The Thing with Wings” by Noah Stryker

    • Birds have been known to follow roads
    • Birds can hear infra sounds and smell really well
    • Most pigeons do not get lost, they either die or go home with someone else
    • Starlings track their seven nearest neighbors, Starling of metric distance
    • “Was math invented or discovered?”
    • Vulture defecate on their legs to disinfect them
    • Hummingbirds
      • Smallest warm blooded animals (except some shrews)
      • Aztec God of War
      • Beaks are very flexible
      • Go into suspended animation for sleep because they cannot get enough to eat to stay alive
      • Are not social and do not flock
      • Can become too heavy to fly
    • Most animals live for one billion heartbeats
    • Fear invokes a range of responses, not just Fight or Flight
    • Water fowl spoke easier and flee further during hunting season
    • Penguin ditch circadian rhythms in the summer but keep them in the winter
    • Vocal mimicry is a limited in animals
    • Chickens
      • Have a strongly enforced pecking order
      • An egalitarian coop tends to be more violent because no one knows their place
      • Have better color vision than us
      • Are insighted to violence when they see red
    • Art and utility used to be synonyms
    • It is best to be nice in the wrong run
    • Cooperating sometimes benefits the kids and sometimes the parents
    • Generosity satisfies a primal need
    • Albatross
      • Mate for life
      • Can lock its shoulders to hold it’s wings without using muscles
      • Fly an estimated four million miles in its life
  • “Smart Brevity” by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz

    • “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter. So, I wrote you a long one.” Mark Twain
    • Short, not shallow
    • Core Four
      • Muscular tease (6 or fewer words)
      • One strong sentence or lead (tell me something I don’t know or want to know)
      • Context (explain why this matters)
      • Choice to learn more (on their time)
    • Listen to the readers and the data
    • “All you can do is the next right thing.”
    • What we want to say vs what they need to hear
    • Write to someone in particular
    • Say what you want to get across. Then stop.
    • Guide
      • 6 words tops for the subject line
      • 10 words or less for the reason you are writing
      • Active verbs always
      • Trumpet one big thing
    • Answer the question: What is this? Is it worth my time?
    • Tips
      • “Why it matters?”
      • “It’s hot, I’m going inside”
      • “Who doing what”
  • “The Book of Boundaries” by Melissa Urban

    • Boundaries are for managing our responses
    • “This is the limit of behavior that is acceptable to me.”
    • Boundary setting is not mean
    • In order to set the boundary, you need to spell them out
    • “Clear is kind”
    • Make an “incoming boundary” sound to signal a change in the conversation to add some distance between the offense and setting the boundary
      • “Uh”, “huh”, “opps”
    • Do not be afraid to ask to circle back to correct inappropriate behavior
    • Healthy boundaries come from the self; they do not seek to control others
    • “Unearned guilt” is feeling guilty for not behaving like someone else wants
    • Avoid oversharing or excusing why you are creating the boundary
      • (It is also easier to negotiate the conditions or satisfy them, which is often not what you want.)
    • Avoid setting consequences when you first set the boundaries
    • Be okay to adjust boundaries over time as things change
    • Periodically ask yourself if a boundary is still needed
    • Be sociable on your time to be proactive
    • Communicate your feeling clearly and accurately, expect your partner to do the same
    • Boundaries are not replacements for communication
    • Try having tasks being owned end-to-end (recognition, conception, and execution) so no one has to nag and to avoid splitting the cognitive load
    • Put chores on a schedule
    • Consent must be respected without excuses
    • Outline and emulate boundaries that of the behavior you want to see
    • People can feel bad about what they are doing
    • “I don’t talk about food over food.”
    • “I’m not drinking right now.”
    • “The Ring Theory”
      • Grief flows out
      • Comfort flows in
      • People at the center of an event have no obligation to comfort those outside their ring
    • Give people space to save face
    • Be graceful when people come back
    • Provide face time to talk
    • Accept the boundary and follow up later
    • Provide face time to talk further