Hi, I'm Tim

The most interesting side note of this daily writing challenge is the challenge of not just idea generation, but good idea generation.

There comes a bad feeling midday when I know I need to publish something but I have nothing to say. Or I have something to say, but even worse, it’s no good. My process has been to go through my Evernote, my twitter bookmarks, notes on my phone. But eventually I'll hit the end of the road.

But there is one more solution, and that is just writing….

Just by starting ideas will flow and new ideas will sprout out of them and before you know it, there’s something there. I bet this can be extended further out to all other creative pursuits: what to paint, what project to start, where to invest. So much of what you end up doing is tweaking, learning, and pivoting your way into the final solution anyhow. There's endless stories on companies pivoting to a completely different idea after the first failed.

The ultimate solution lies somewhere between a tradeoff between how much you've got planned versus how much you can potentially figure out along the way. Seth Godin, the prolific creator and daily blogger, talks about this often, here is a great reminder of the best time to start.

So if you get too stuck, try just starting.

During our scaled customer success initiatives, we use messaging rules to ensure there's always a purpose for our messages. In any outreach, each message to a customer or user must have a purpose. Without a purpose, it cannot be tracked and measured adequately to ensure there's an outcome to be had.

Examples of these types of messages are: 

1. Goal: What is the goal of this message? Without a goal, how do you intend on tracking its effectiveness?
2. Actionable: Every message should contain an action for the end user.
3. Brief: All messages (aside from newsletters) are single purpose. There's just one subject to be discussed.
4. End User: who is receiving this message? Are you speaking with executives, technical teams, program owners?
5. Sender: Does the sender match the receiver? Entry level team members shouldn't outreach to executives without good reason
6. Method is the message: While we rely heavily on email, the medium is a very important in choosing your message

Engagement is what we're all competing for. In customer success, we are focused on keeping customers attention on our products, services, and the value were offering. Any drop in engagement can disrupt this focus, distract from business value, and lead to churn.

We're all so busy

The challenge with our engagement strategies is this: we're all so inundated. Just open your "social" or "promotions" folders in gmail. I bet it's littered with countless companies vying for your attention.

That's why is more important than ever to focus on the above messaging rules. If you  send a message to an end user, you better be sure it's clear, convincing, actionable, and within the right context. Customers or prospects become engaged when the messages they receive will help them do better at their job, are timely, add value, and apply to them.

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Messages delivered to everyone is meant for no one.

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Online learning is growing incredibly fast. Today there are more ways to find structured knowledge online than ever before. Meanwhile, as standard education costs continue to rise and the coronavirus continues to spread, parents around the country are reconsidering the value of higher education. Yet while online learning has begun to fill the gap higher education leaves behind, it still has big problems.

First, nobody finishes online courses. According to this study, MOOCs have completion rates as low as 15%. The research puts it as low as 10%. This guy started a successful company called LeadCraft, but killed it because nobody finished his (very profitable) $997 course.

The second reason is networking. Aside from collecting more information, the other major benefit from college courses are the connections you make. This is why why parents are hesitant to pay the $65,000 for online classes. Connections aren't just friends -- the connections you make as part of your education form your network and support system, and aid in your development, especially as a young and impressionable undergrad.

What people are really paying for is transformation. While I could argue the $50,000 spent transforming your hopeful 18-year old into a drunken 22-year old is questionable, online courses have their challenges as well.

Gaps to Fill

But there is continued progress in the online learning format that can bridge this gap. Tech has begun to understand the value of community building, not just as a go-to-market strategy, but as a way to keep and retain customers. But this is still very early and there's no standard playbook. Community building in tech will bleed into online learning as a means for ensuring positive student outcomes. For example, Product School not only  offer an online learning format, but also provides access to daily events, in-person conferences, a slack community with interviews with top product managers. This comes as students from early online programs, like Code Academy, complained of a lack of job placement. It's not enough to provide the courses anymore, but to ensure a positive outcome (job placement, starting a company). We'll see in a matter of time whether this has positive outcomes on completion and success rates.

Second is a change from the MOOC style learning. This comes in the form of live, cohort style learning. While MOOCs offer the flexibility to learn at your pace, that flexibility results in a lack of accountability. This intensive leadership program called altMBA, could set the precedent for this new online education format. It describes itself as, "The altMBA uses digital tools like Slack, Discourse and Zoom to engage with small groups of 120 students in an intense four-week process. Since it was founded in 2015, the altMBA has transformed the lives of more than 4,500 people in more than 70 countries around the world." Instead of cheaper on-demand course, this is a more intense, application-only, and expensive ($4,500) cohort style class. Would you send your kid here, among incredible ambitious students across the globe versus the standard MBA? For just $4,500 versus the ~$150,000 MBA, why not try it? 

A recent development is the partnership between co-founders of altMBA, Wes Kao and co-founder of Udemy Gagan Biyani, to create a new company in this format. They've raised ~$4M, so it is very early, but I would bet my money on its success.

We are in a fuzzy middle ground between the potential of new online learning and the unbundling of traditional higher education. A lot remains to be seen, but given the current high costs of college, the tenuous connection with outcomes, the incredible growth of online learning and its evolution of format, I'd bet on the latter.

I heard Adam Robinson state that there is a very bad loneliness epidemic in America, if not the world. He was quite alarmist by the concept that we Americans are lonelier than ever. Though I'm confident we'd all agree we have a phone addiction, work too much, have smaller families, and generally relax too little, are we really that lonely?

In a survey by Cigna of 20,000 adults, over 50% reported feeling lonely or isolated. In an often linked poll by YouGov, 3 in 10 millennials often feel lonely or isolated. Previously an affliction faced by the elderly, it now impacts our youngest generations. UK even created their first minister of loneliness.

What's really interesting is the word 'lonely' prior to 1800 only meant 'to be alone'. Only after the Industrial Revolution did the modern meaning take form. To be lonely is to be lacking connection with others. Before, it was more common to live in close quarters--to be alone was to be in solitude, a respite from others.

What happened?

Anecdotally, our lifestyles and philosophy towards what is important in life may drive us to be lonely. First, we place a heavy emphasis on remaining competitive in our individual careers. What we do is who we are. Even outside large, competitive cities, people are delaying marriage and kids due to careers.

Next, is materialism. In the rise of a consumer economy in the mid 20th century came an emphasis on consuming and credit creation. Studies has seen a connection between an emphasis on materialism and loneliness.

Lastly, for better or worse, the religious landscape has changed in America. Church attendance continues to fall. Meanwhile, the biggest contributor to a sense of community now leaves a very large gap to fill. This gap has only been filled with work and technology. Right now, the meaning in our lives and the sense of our community has not been adequately filled by the gaps left in church and family.

What can be done?

I used to be hard to get a hold of. I felt busy with work, caught up in the routine, focused on my job. On the weekends, I felt it was finally time for myself. I'd appreciate my solitude, but then regretted when people stopped contacting me. My network began to dwindle.

What I learned is that few people are active connectors. Aside from a few close friends, few actively pursue new connections and passively let networks come to them. Eventually they plateau or even stall altogether. From then on, I decided I would make an effort to stay connected: call frequently, make trips and plans, go out of my way, connect others. I've not always succeeded, but the mindset is there.

Work or career or side projects should never take over the role of friends, downtime, and family. Making an effort to spend that quality time each day or each week is worth the effort. And for the most part, your career is likely average, hence the popularity of early retirement.

In conclusion, it's important more than ever to be more active with our social networks. They will not happen for you. It's also important to be conscious about what provides a sense of community and meaning in your life, because facebook, the news cycle, and work won't cut it.

I've learned through this short process of writing daily is this: It's vital to have a healthy flow of ideas. Without a wide funnel of idea generation, it makes it that much harder to continue with a writing habit.

I thought I'd get my ideas from reading books, twitter, or the news. But that hasn't been the case. The biggest source of new ideas is through conversation.

A week ago I was in a house full of friends. Even throughout our daily routine we'd talk about all sorts of things: politics, trip logistics, food, health, planning, covid. All of these discussions create fresh sparks of insight into new and interesting things to write about.

It's even better if you are amongst a bigger or more diverse group of people. The varying topics and the differing viewpoints are all fodder for fresh ideas. It's not too surprising. This is what makes cities so innovative.

Another major benefit of conversation is the immediate feedback loop. Not only is it excellent for generating new topics, but it allows you test their value. When someone brings up a new topic, you know immediately how valuable it is by the response of the group. Not only can you test an idea, but through normal debate, you can test the merits of differing viewpoints. It feels like the articles are being written in front of you.

I suppose it's telling that in 2020 I am writing about the value of talking to people in person. Yet even pre-COVID, I think the value of even daily conversation as a vehicle for sprouting new ideas is underrated.

In 1999, Dany Livy and Ramanathan V. Guha of Netscape created the RSS web format. RSS, or, Real Simple Syndication, allows end users to access updates from websites in a standard format. Instead of having to navigate directly to a site with frequent changes, subscribing to an RSS feed allows end users to receive a site's latest updates.

But most people view it as an obscure technology, if they know it at all. RSS, which allows anyone to subscribe to a site's content directly, without a middle man, was a piece of the grand vision of the web as a decentralized network of individual personas. The vision of this internet is lost to us today.

Walled Gardens

Today, there is a monopoly on the distribution of information. If you have information to share, goods to sell, news to distribute, you must move through the walled gardens of Facebook, Google, and Twitter. What are walled gardens, exactly? From adpushup.com,

A walled garden is an organization which keeps its technology, information, and user data to itself, with no intention of sharing it. In simpler words, a walled garden is a closed ecosystem, operated by people within the ecosystem, without the involvement of an outside organization.

Today, Google and Facebook capture 59% of the digital ad spend on the internet. Add Amazon and it is 70%. How far we've come from the decentralized vision of the RSS readers: where everyone has an online persona and anyone can curate their own feed. Today our feeds are curated for us by Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Whereas with RSS feeds you must pursue discover and curate your own feed, on social media platforms, the algorithms written by others curate it for you.

Additionally, if you've seen Social Dilemma, you'll know just how gamed these gardens are in an effort at keeping you coming back to these platforms and making you stay longer. They prey on our cognitive biases. YouTube has become less a search engine to discover new information, and more a mirror reflecting your own biases. As a result, you end up in your own filter bubble, coined by internet activist Eli Pariser,

... [the social media 'filter bubble'] ... is a personal, unique universe of information that you live in online. And what’s in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do. But the thing is that you don’t decide what gets in. And more importantly, you don’t actually see what gets edited out.”

Internet Activism

As the internet continues to take over everyday life (esp. during this expedited COVID months), I believe how we use the internet will move from a geeky subculture to a mainstream topic of debate. The process is already underway. Recall the proposed changes in Net neutrality that created a large stir in online communities. Our democratic leaders intend to break up the big social media monopolies.

It feels geeky to say this, but I believe the promise of the internet comes from it's core protocols: email, HTML, FTP; and its standards: JavaScript, Accessibility, Audio/Video, etc. The RSS reader is long gone, but it's death portended future challenges facing the internet we face today. I think it's time we start to think about what version of the Internet we want today and start evangelizing for it.

Do we want the free and convenient gmail, facebook and instagram or a more private and protocol driven Fastmail, Brave Browser, and Wikipedia?

Naval Ravikant mentioned on his episode of the Knowledge Project, the idea that life is a single-player game and the harm of playing 'status games'. We're all likely aware of the downsides doing things for status, but I had not heard of it described in this way. From Naval,

Status games are multiplayer, zero-sum, hierarchical, judged socially. Get grades, applause, titles now — emptiness later. Natural games are single player, positive-sum, internal, judged by nature/markets. Pay in pain now — get wealth, health, knowledge, peace, family later.- Naval

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What does this mean?

The idea of zero-sum and positive-sum are terms in game theory. They refer to the outcome of resources when players desires are all factored in. In a zero-sum game, resources are finite. If I gain something then someone else must lose something. In a positive-sum game, resources are increased, and all players gain. Social games are zero-sum. Natural games (production, business, health, family) are positive-sum games.

Social games

Those who are competing for social status or political status are competing in a zero-sum game. This is because in order for one person's status to increase, another person's status needs to decrease. In order for one person to win, another person must lose. It's a battle of ego. You'll recognize this bidding of social status as "one upping", which is well described in this video: 

‍https://youtu.be/RN3eB29yuIs

Wealth Building

On the other hand, wealth building is positive-sum. This means when I create value, or wealth, it creates greater value for everyone. For example, when Willis Carrier invented the air conditioning, it didn't just make him wealthy, but raised the standard of living of millions of Americans. In fact, in economics, this is known as the "fixed pie" fallacy, that there is a fixed amount of resources and wealth must be transferred from someone else in order to be acquired. This explains why most of us live more comfortable lives than even the richest of those generations before us.

Single Player Games

This is important because it forms the type of mindset you develop. People who play status games must by definition "one-up" others. They are in a a battle for status, which turn them into combative personalities. As a result, they are always going to dislike those who do better than them.

Yet life is a single player game. Building wealth (either through creating businesses, saving money, or buying a home) does not take anything away from others. It builds a mindset that is focused internally, on one's own progress and improvement. This is also summarized by Warren Buffet's scorecard: 

The big question about how people behave is whether they’ve got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard. I always pose it this way. I say: ‘Lookit. Would you rather be the world’s greatest lover, but have everyone think you’re the world’s worst lover? Or would you rather be the world’s worst lover but have everyone think you’re the world’s greatest lover?’ Now, that’s an interesting question.

This is a good reminder that the pursuit of greater status has an impact on your mindset. An inner "scorecard", is a surer path to creating long-term wealth, health, and lifting up those around you.