Tyler's Toolbox

This is my 100th post on this blog.  While I’ve written several blogs over the last 5 years, I wasn’t smart enough to migrate posts over when I switch blogging platforms, so… I’m back at lucky number #100!

Humans like to evaluate at round numbers, we find milestones give good reminders to review behavior.  So, why do I blog?

Here are the 5 reasons I came up with:

1. Shaping my own thoughts – writing makes you clarify. Someone once said: “If you can’t write something, you don’t understand it.” Spot on.
2. Sharing ideas – I think often about topics outside of my expertise.  I share these thoughts because I probably won’t be able to follow them (focus is about saying no).  Also: you help me evolve the ideas, that which is deprived of sun does not grow.
3. Sharing best practices – I am helping establish the best practices of social marketing. I learn everyday from people who are kind enough to blog about the things they are knowledgeable about, I’d like to share my knowledge, like this and this.
4. Define myself – If you are meeting me, it will be helpful for you to know who I am, how I think, how I talk, what I like.  My twitter, tumblr and this blog give you a good idea.
5. Recognize amazing achievements, important thoughts, or other significant moments – The attention economy works because we like sharing significant ideas or moments with each other. We should all recognize when people make awesome things.

So, what will my 100th post be about?  Mostly #4 above this line, and #5 below this line.

I read “The five things I’d tell my entrepreneurial self” by Jon Bischke today.  Jon gives a 5 pieces of advice that are lessons best learned early, and one of them was so good I wanted to share it here:

Simply put, if you want to succeed, surround yourself with people who (a) are succeeding and (b) expect you to do likewise. That simple piece of advice will do more to put you on the path to success than anything else I can think of. [Read more]

I’ve been thinking more about systems for success recently.

Adopting a framework is generally the best path to success.  In building a successful startup, you can holy-war over what the framework should be (e.g. Viability, Feasibility, or Desirability), but at the end of the day any framework is better than no framework. Building a successful life is no different.

This thought is something I’ve discovered while I’ve been exploring a framework for personal success the past few months (standards project), and I’ve executed some experiments in quantifying my life:

1. In Iceland I tracked a ton of personal stats about our trip, all food/drink we consumed, how many steps we walked, etc.
2. I tried Facet of Life to track data through email.
3. I added health goals to my standards project, to keep track of promised outcomes.
4. I used dailyburn/iPhone to track sleep, caloric consumption, stress, weight, exercise and energy levels on a daily or more frequent basis.

I like these experiments, I also really like tracking things — it appeals to my inner data-geek[1]. I’m competitive, so I feel a need to improve what I measure; I now unconsciously optimize for: Diet, Energy, Sleep, Exercise. Yep, pretty good list.

Experiment #3 above taught me a bit about how to build a framework that utilizes my own nature to increase the likelihood of good outcomes.

• I’m competitive, so I feel a need to improve what I measure.
• I’m also “lazy” — meaning I like to conserve energy.

I realized that my tracking can be difficult when I don’t have control of food preparation. Standardizing my intake around a core group of meals would greatly help me spend less time concentrated on tracking. So I just choose 6 meals and ordered enough food to make them for 2 weeks from safeway.com — this wasn’t a difficult decision, it was an efficient one. It also improved my health. My framework made it easy to make a limiting choice that was positive on my health.

Lesson learned for my standards project: I will focus more on frameworks that utilize a desire to be awesome + a desire to conserve attention to encourage efficient/scalable improvement.

[1] It also offends my sense of uniqueness, none of us like to feel like we’re robots, and I feel a certain elegance to living life unpredictably. But, at least for me, growing up is about accepting that choosing to put yourself in a routine isn’t the same as having a routine thrust upon you.  Embracing chaos means remaining ever-vigilant, that’s hard. Choose routines that conserve energy, and use that energy for chosen moments of chaos embracing.

*Update* video of this talk (10min) is now up at http://www.vimeo.com/9584353

I’m writing this at San Diego State University, where I’m about to give the last talk at the BILPIL conference (an un-conference version of TEDMED, an event that celebrates conversations on innovative health and medicine). I’m officially the least qualified person here — and seemingly the only one not involved with healthcare, but one of the organizers recruited me to speak after reading my post from last month, “A plausible future of health care.”

I readily agreed, because the speakers are unreal talented (Joe Trippi, Aubrey De Grey, Dr. Ben Goertzel, Dr. Philip Steven Low, and Jen McCabe).  The schedule today opened with Dr. David Rosenman from the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation and closed with me.  Yep, that’s how I like to roll.  :)

Lately, when it comes to healthcare, I’ve been thinking a lot about Dr. Jay Parkinson‘s focus on creating a market-based solution for better doctor-patient relationships without accepting the handcuffs of working with insurance companies. He seems to have given up on public reform — in face of the immensely bad odds public reform faces, I don’t blame him, but I have arrived to the conclusion that public reform is still necessary.  This presentation is my effort at exploring both of those tracks (private market solutions and public reform) and figure out how they work together.  I’m still learning this stuff, so please give me your feedback!

I had a good conversation this afternoon with a friend who works at Google, and we touched on ideas about how the world of search and the world of social might collide.

We agreed that no one’s going to beat the established players in search, and if/when an entrant does beat Google, it will be with a disruptive technology that uses a very different method of information discovery. Executives at Google have all read Innovator’s Dilemma and they are rightly concerned that real-time search and social search (and soon, geotagging) could represent this disruptive technology within search. The company is focused on how those movements might interact with search and have experimented with including real-time content in search results.

I’ve got several ideas on how real-time and social data could affect search, in particular, the conversation reminded of an email chain I had contributed to this summer; I’ve pasted my bit below:

Here’s a more complete description of the search idea I mentioned to you today.  Aside from some of the interesting strategies available to the big 3 search providers, I think Facebook has an opportunity to play an interesting role in search by offering a service adding social data to search results.

Facebook could offer a Facebook Connect implementation specifically for search engines that allowed them to check URLs against a database of friend’s posted links.  This would allow the search engine to enhance relevancy. Think of it like this (forgive the quick/ugly mockup):  http://skitch.com/tylerwillis/bswcr/presentation2

This could help Facebook move the needle on three strategic goals: increase engagement, increase ubiquity of graph availability (connect), and user growth.
- Offers a quick/easy way to gain influence in a new area of user’s habits, namely search.
- Easily the biggest Connect implementation to date if done with Bing, Yahoo, or Google. Huge legitimacy marker for Connect’s capabilities.
- It offers a large, visible step towards FB becoming ubiquitous, which would have a positive effect on new user signups.

It would be great to make a launch partner of a top-notch engine (Bing or Google). Biggest problem would probably be building something that served results fast enough for Search Engines to actually use.  Only real question I can come up with is whether Facebook would be willing to be part of a search solution of companies they see as competitive (Google specifically) – IMO, the benefits laid out above outweigh the costs of propping up a future competitor’s current solution.

Bottom line: John Borthwick sees an oncoming verticalization of search; my answer to Borthwick’s claim is the part of my argument I hold most tenatively, but, for most people, I believe that content isn’t interesting just because it is now, social, or nearby; our information discovery platforms must still apply good filtering and context to it’s content/results to meet a user’s needs. Anderson’s Vanishing Point Theory alone isn’t enough to build a universally interesting news application — one has to apply other metrics to judge it’s interest to a reader. Innovator’s Dilemma has shown us that the disruptive technology will get there soon enough (Individual services building upon their success with consumers who care a lot about now/social/nearby and getting better and better at relevance for the mass market), but it’s also shown that large organizations can adapt to disruptive technology by either buying a smaller organization that’s kept independent and encouraged to continue growth (Youtube, attempted with Twitter) or by pushing an corporate shift despite likely stiff internal/organizational resistance. Google failed to buy twitter, therefore it has to push forward with the latter option.

Using the type of UI displayed in the rough mockup I included in the email (link), Google could add social (or realtime or location) data as a contextual meta-layer. I can tell that Google is already thinking of this meta-layer, because it’s exactly the layer that sidewiki is writing to (conversations occuring about information found at a website address). But, Google has misstepped with Sidewiki by trying to own the input. Our conversations are fractured, and occur all across the web, Google should instead focus on indexing and storing data from other services (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and using that information to display that content as a meta-layer on top of search results and/or to reorder search results. Luckily for the goog, they’ve got some experience with indexing and displaying content from disparate locations.

This idea is complimentary to my opinion about bit.ly being a great asset for a search engine to pickup.

We’re going through some hiring right now, and every time we do a round of hiring I learn something new. Acting as a hiring manager (especially if the hire will report to someone else) gives you a rare opportunity to view both sides of the problem (what am I looking for from the perfect candidate and what would make the perfect candidate excited about our company and our process). The first time you lead a serious hiring process, you learn a lot about yourself and the path your career is on — it represents the quickest accumulation of knowledge towards career development (in my humble opinion).  I’d love to write a lengthier post on what I’ve learned through hiring (I’ll add it to the list of topics), but today I’m in the thick of reviewing resumes and I’d rather share some tips on how to get past the first stage and how to communicate with hiring managers.

1. If the job listing gives a specific way to contact the company, follow it to a tee. The more specific the instructions, the more this applies. ~50% of applicants are “spray-and-pray” job hunting. I want to avoid hiring these people at all costs. This is as simple as throwing a very easier curveball into standard application procedure (my favorite is to ask for PDF attachement of resume and the cover letter printed in the body of the email with a specific subject line such as “EA Position Inquiry.” Miss any of those? You will not be getting an interview 99.999% of the time.
2. Always, Always go above and beyond if you think of a way to be helpful to the hiring manager. I had a candidate recently say “I know you requested a resume, and you may find it attached, however I’ve always found LinkedIn profiles to be easier to read than attached PDFs, so I’ve included that as well: www.linkedin.com/in/yadayadayada.” This let’s me know the person thinks beyond instructions (yet still follows directly laid out commands), and is capable of placing themselves in others shoes.
3. Don’t show off flowery writing. I’ver written published poetry, I have a love for witty turns-of-phrase, and I’ve read some beautifully written cover letters that I stopped reading halfway through. The world of business rewards clear, succinct communication. Save the pontification for your blog (why do you think I write this damn thing?)
4. The previous point is if you are a great writer. If you’re a mediocre writer DO NOT try to use large words or clever phrases to prove your intelligence. Be thankful that, in most cases, the business world only requires general clarity and not fanciful method. With all the time you’ve saved looking up words in the Thesaurus, go back and delete 30-70% of the words you wrote without altering the meaning.
5. Answer any questions clearly and upfront in the cover letter (eg “I know I’m over/under-qualified, but here’s why I am applying”).
6. List relevant skills/positions (no more than 2-3) in the cover letter.