I spent all day today with my oldest daughter, The Beansprout. She’s amazing. She’s one of my favorite people to spend time with; she’s enthusiastic about life, inquisitive about many things, and possesses an analytical mind of great strength for her age. The end result is that she asks amazing questions and understands the answers, and our conversations are great.

In addition to the more standard questions about how things work, she frequently asks questions about human behavior and moral philosophy. Why do people steal things? Why am I allowed to go to the park by myself but the boy across the street isn’t? (They’re the same age; in the same class, in fact.) What should you do if someone asks you politely for something but you still don’t want to do it? These kinds of questions take us on meandering journeys into philosophical questions, interspersed with sudden bouts of scientific curiosity such as “Why do some plants have thorns, but not all plants?” and “What keeps a car from exploding?”

What I’ve come to realize in my time as a father is that kids really only differ from adults in two large ways (besides, you know, being smaller):

1. They can do almost anything adults can do, just for shorter periods of time. My daughter is every bit as smart as me, she can carry on perfectly adult conversations and understand adult concepts, she just doesn’t have the attention span. When I see her in karate, her discipline is amazing and she performs feats of dexterity I’m definitely not capable of – for 10 minutes, and then the discipline breaks and she bounces. But it used to be 9 minutes, and 8 before that. Eventually as you age you gain the ability to stretch your discipline farther. But it’s only discipline they lack, not intelligence.
2. Kids are still curious. When I walk down the street, I see fences, lawns, cars, houses, birds, clouds, stones. What my daughter sees are mysteries, puzzles, secrets and jewels of hidden knowledge. It’s a wonderful way to look at the world.

Sometimes parents try a little to hard to speed up the Discipline process, and in turn don’t do enough to keep the Curiosity spark alive. The world will do a lot to snuff out that spark on its own; my job is to stoke those fires for as long as I can. And I can warm myself by that fire, and see the world through her eyes.

Yeah, this is going to be a geeky one, sorry.

So let’s say you have a product you sell with a user experience you designed. It sells 10,000 units. After the product has been out for a year or so, you engage with your user community on whatever platform you use, and you solicit some feedback about some element of the UX. Just call this element the “Z Function” for shorthand. You don’t get a lot of engagement back, but 8 people tell you that they don’t like the Z Function and want you to change it in some way, while 2 people respond and say they like the Z Function just fine and you shouldn’t change it.

Should you assume that 80% of your users don’t like the Z Function, and thus you should change it?

Absolutely not.

But I see companies do this a lot. They make the changes to the Z Function, and suddenly their sales aren’t as good, their old users abandon them, etc. What went wrong? Weren’t they just responding to their customer base?

Let’s examine the various problems. You can’t assume that the responses you get are representative. For one, people are more likely to complain than to compliment – if everything is fine, they just use the product. Most people don’t actively engage back with every company whose products they use. You shouldn’t say “wow, out of everyone that responded, 80% had complaints.” You should say “wow, out of everyone who used our product, only 0.08% had complaints.” Now, maybe the old adage is true that for every one person that complains, there’s 99 who have the complaint but don’t voice it. But that’s still only 800 people, or 8%. Worth addressing, perhaps – but still very much the minority. And if you change the Z Function to make those 8% happy, you run the risk of making the 92% unhappy.

The best indicator of the strength of your product isn’t how many people do or don’t complain. It’s how many people buy it. Actions speak louder than words, and most people don’t bother to buy a product and tell you that they love it. Buying the product is the compliment. A receipt is a love letter. And that huge, silent majority of people buying your product but not talking much about it – they’re the ones you have to keep happy, not the tiny minority that complain. If you can make that tiny minority happy, great – but if you do it by changing something fundamental about your product, you’d better be sure that your silent majority is still going to buy.

I often see company announcements like “You spoke, and we listened. We received dozens of complaints about the Z Function of our product, so we’ve completely changed it.” Dozens of complaints… out of hundreds of thousands of units sold. And the change is for the worse, and chases 20% of their user base to a competitor. And they’re scratching their head wondering what went wrong.

This isn’t advice saying you should ignore complaints. It’s advice saying you should know your statistics, recognize you can’t please everyone, and don’t give all your grease to the squeaky wheel if it’s making the other 3 fall off.

If you’re not sure what you want to do with your life, sell something. Not sure what to major in? Then don’t go to college until you decide; until then, sell something. In between jobs? Sell something. Want more social activity? Sell something.

It’s the universal skill set. “Sales” is just communication for commerce, but the “communication” part is universal. Short of living in a cave somewhere, pretty much all of your life choices will bring you in contact with other people, and all your goals will require them. Working together is essential. Sales is the skill of working together with a purpose. It’s leadership, even in a group of 2. It’s investigation and active listening and understanding. It’s psychology and research. It’s manners and culture. It’s the ultimate exercise in tolerance and respect.

In short, it’s all of life, condensed. And the best part is, you learn all this stuff really, really fast. You can get an incredible injection of knowledge and skill by spending even a single day selling stuff.

I used to have to drive this stretch of road north of Philadelphia every day for work. It was a crowded road with traffic lights every few hundred feet, but there were no other freeways that went where it went, so you were stuck on this commuter nightmare. And every summer day, there would be a person at every single one of those lights, selling cold waters and other soft drinks. There was a Costco or something nearby, and with a little effort you could go there, load up a cart with goods at bulk rates, and then sell them at traffic lights for a dollar a pop, making maybe 80 cents profit on each one. I would frequently buy them – and by the way, these hustlers had the best customer service you’d ever see, running out to your car as soon as you flashed the dollar in order to make 10 sales per traffic light cycle, always with a smile on their face.

One time, on my commute home after a 10-hour day, I saw the same guy I’d seen going in to work that day. So he’d worked longer than I had. I asked him how much he’d sold.

700 bottles. Seven. Hundred. At 80 cents profit per bottle. He would walk to the nearby store, load up a cart, and come sell until he ran out. Then he’d run back and repeat. That’s all I got from him before the light changed.

Think about that. A case of 24 bottles of water is around 4 bucks. It takes very little startup to do something like that – to buy something cheap and find a place to sell it for more. I ended up pulling onto the shoulder one day and talking to him for a while between light cycles, because I had to know more about him. He was just a regular dude, not much education and living in a part of Philadelphia that didn’t have much in the way of “normal” opportunities, and he decided selling water on the hot road was better than minimum wage somewhere. Can’t say I blame him at all. Apparently he’d work his butt off all summer and make close to fifty grand, and then just live on that the rest of the year when there was less demand for cold drinks, just doing odd jobs here and there and being happy. I made some remark about how his customer service was always amazing – he was polite, big smiles, would never approach a car unless waved over, etc. He said he had to – the biggest hurdle was if some jerk decided to complain about him the cops would come and kick him off or hassle him, so he made sure he was always incredibly polite.

All that knowledge and wisdom, and no gate-keeping. No boss, no credential. Just hustle and a smile.

My oldest daughter has gotten into the habit of chewing her fingernails, and is endeavoring to quit. Helping her through this and discussing it with her gave me reason to think a lot about habits in general.

When a little stream of water first starts running across the flat plains, its course would be pretty easy to change. Dig a little here, put a few rocks there, and bam – stream moves in a different direction. But give it a few thousand years to erode the land, carving it down deeper and deeper, and now changing the course of that river would take monumental effort.

That’s what habits are. Whether good or bad, when they start they’re easy to change. But over time they change you, altering the landscape of who you are. In time, they’re nigh-unchangeable.

That means they’re worth thinking about early. That’s why I make myself write every day, even if some days I don’t think I have anything worthwhile to say. I’m making this river change me.

A lunar eclipse occurs when the Earth gets between the Moon and the Sun. A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon gets between the Earth and the Sun. A terrestrial eclipse occurs when the Earth gets between you and the Sun. Happens once per 24 hours. An atmospheric eclipse occurs when an asteroid gets between…

Little Known Types Of Eclipse — Slate Star Codex

I have a weird fascination with demographics. I like thinking about how many people of a certain subset might exist in a larger population, and what kinds of factors might go into determining that.

(I think I mentioned I was geeky, so I hope you weren’t waiting for this blog to get cool.)

For example: What is the number of people per 10,000 that have a 50% or greater overlap in musical taste as me? What percentage of people in a given population would voluntarily sign up for a seminar I ran?

Being in sales taught me that success is just a matter of population size. If you’re looking for three sales, they’re out there – you just have to figure out how many times you have to hear “No” before you get to the “Yes.” What’s the minimum population needed for your goals?

It’s so, so easy to let “lifestyle creep” get the better of you. You make a little more money, but suddenly you have a few more expenditures, and the end result is the same. Too many people get caught on that treadmill.

There are two things that I can think of that will help:

1. Don’t be motivated by stuff. Think about your life right now – are you, for the most part, happy? Assuming you are, then if I doubled your yearly income, you could presumably put all the excess into savings and still be exactly as happy. Maybe even a little more so because you’d have the comfort of knowing you had a greater safety net. Surely you wouldn’t be less happy just because you weren’t spending that money – after all, you’re happy now and you don’t even have that theoretical extra money. Keep this mindset, and as your income improves, keep your expenditures.
2. Keep a small circle. We’re so easily tricked by things like relative wealth and status. Fancy toys are cool because other people have them; or because we can show them off to people that don’t. But if you only have a small circle of trusted, wise people who don’t care about what car you drive, you’re less motivated by shiny toys.

What other mental exercises can you think of to help you stop lifestyle creep?

(Epistemic status: Unsure on details) I. There is a national shortage of buspirone. Buspirone is a 5HT-1 agonist used to control anxiety. Unlike most psychiatric drugs, it’s in a class of its own – there are no other sole 5HT-1 agonists on the market. It’s not a very strong medication, but it’s safe, it’s non-addictive,…

Buspirone Shortage In Healthcaristan SSR — Slate Star Codex

Imagine you’re a cave man. You kill some animal and you want to eat it. Every calorie is a precious treasure in this environment; you’re eternally on the very brink of starvation. And yet instead of gorging yourself on your kill, you share it with little teeny tiny versions of yourself, despite the fact that they can’t help you with anything.

In one sense, you do it out of love, or maybe a biological imperative depending on your relative level of cynicism. But you also do it because it’s an investment – eventually if you keep feeding those little ones they’ll become big ones, strong and fast enough to hunt with you, and get even more food. Three people hunting together can bring in much more than three times the amount of food that one person alone can, so there are some very nice dividends here.

Humans create resources. We have amazing powers to transform our environment, turning raw matter into things useful to us. Sharing resources sometimes seems scary – “what if there isn’t enough for everyone?” – but ultimately resources invested in others pay huge dividends back to you, and to society.

The greatest breakthrough, then, came when we developed resources that you could give away but still keep. Knowledge, language, communication, music, encouragement – all these things provide real and tangible benefit to others, but take nothing away from you. As Thomas Jefferson said: “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

It’s possible that you could give someone a car, and as a result of that car they’re able to get a better job than they otherwise would, which lets them invest more money into their own development, which lets them command an even greater income in the future, and eventually this person is far wealthier than they would otherwise have been and they pay you back many times the value of the initial car in one way or another. But even if that were the guaranteed outcome, a car is a tangible resource that costs you money – unless you have a bunch of cars just laying around to give to people, it might not be feasible that you can do that.

But giving away knowledge – not only can that pay even higher dividends to you, but the cost of doing so is damned near to zero. (“Near to,” since of course time is still a resource to consider – but with modern technology, in the time it took Thomas Jefferson to send that particular piece of wisdom to Isaac McPherson, you could deliver the same quote to millions of people!)

So invest in the world. If you have knowledge, share it. If you can encourage someone, do so. If someone else can light their taper at yours, be honored – for you illuminate the world.

We spend a strangely large percentage of our lives building boxes around ourselves. These boxes limit us, and don’t seem to add any particular value to our lives.

Your career path is one such box. Can you name every industry on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ page? You probably could barely name a half a dozen of them off the top of your head, and there are hundreds of them. And that’s just categories! Really broad categories, within which are thousands upon thousands of different jobs. Even the same “job” could be wildly different in two different companies, in practice.

But most people really quickly put themselves into a tiny box of what they “do.” Society seems to encourage this to some degree – if your last job was as a welder and you decide you want to try copy writing, you get some strange looks.

There’s a certain age where you’re encouraged to try new things, but then there’s definitely an age – in my experience between 25 and 30, but your mileage may vary – where you’re supposed to stop trying new things, except maybe as hobbies.

People categorize everything. Sometimes it’s useful shorthand – if you mostly haven’t enjoyed seafood, romantic comedies, or prog rock then those might be useful categories for you. But we too often take what is useful shorthand and make it iron-clad law. It’s good to break out now and then. Try the shrimp, watch a Meg Ryan movie, listen to Dream Theater. And the next time you’re looking for a new way to trade value with the world, look outside the box.