Category: Opinion

In class one time a woman was complaining about how hard it is to recruit participants for her experiment. The professor told her that she just had to approach people who fit the profile she was looking for and ask them. She was clearly uncomfortable with this idea and protested “what if they say no?”.

I couldn’t help myself, so I made the observation that this would give the women in the class insight into what men go through when we’re asking women out on dates. Its an old chestnut, but I think there’s real value in the idea “half of life is showing up”.

Literally related to dating, I truly believe its a numbers game. I think anyone who is unhappily single just needs to go on more dates, and keep going on them until you click with someone. The love of your life isn’t going to break into your apartment to find you! Dating can be exhausting, but its part of the process. A women I worked with met her future husband when they were both waiting in cars for their friends outside a 7-11. He started chatting her up, got her phone number, and years later she was working with me, married to him and had two kids. He decided it was worth taking a chance on talking to the woman in the next car and it paid off for him big time.

The brother of a former professor of mine went to MIT. I asked him if his brother had astronomically high marks, and found out that he didn’t, he’d just gone down to Boston to visit some friends, got talking to people in the media lab, and they liked him well enough that they encouraged him to apply and fast tracked his application.

When I describe my brother’s job, people are amazed (some people have even asked if he won a contest to get the job 🙂 ). When there was an opening, a friend told him about it, he applied and he got it. Similarly I was on a reality TV show / documentary years ago. I enjoyed watching the show, so I applied for the next season and got on it (I joke with people that I’m the most minor celebrity in the world – I’ve been recognized by strangers a total of 3 times).

In the 4 Hour Workweek Tim Ferriss relates giving a talk to a group and offering a deluxe vacation to whoever could connect with the most famous person (all they had to do was get a personal note or e-mail back from them). He wanted to prove the point that if you just make overtures to people, sometimes they’ll respond. Ironically, he didn’t give out the prize because NO ONE applied! Supposedly tons of scholarships aren’t awarded every year because no one applied: everyone assumes they won’t be competitive, and take themselves out of the race before it starts.

I’m certainly not saying that all you have to do is desire something and you’ll get it (talk to “The Secret” nuts for that perspective). We all have desires that we don’t do anything about, and often the hardest part is doing ANYTHING to move us in the direction of achieving it.

Think about the things you’d like out of life, and consider if there’s something you could do in 1 hour that might (no matter how improbably) help you achieve it. Give it a try this week and see what happens!

What experiences have you had where you took a long shot and something big paid off?

Recently we went on a vacation which required a somewhat lengthy plane ride to get there – about 7.5 hours. Now this is not the longest flight I’ve ever taken by a long shot, however it was the first one with a 2 year old kid and a 2 month old infant.

Typically my wife and I are not “light” packers since we’ve only traveled in the car after starting our family. Our “car packing” method involves packing as much stuff as we can fit in the car. 🙂

Read 8 tips to avoid problems at the airport.

For the plane ride and subsequent trip we decided to “pack light” which is a theme we kept referring to as we packed to keep us in line. Our plan was to limit our luggage to one large suitcase, two carry-on bags and two car seats.

Here are some of the strategies and thoughts we went through when packing. Obviously your situation might be quite different especially if you have more or less kids but hopefully this will help if you are thinking of a similar trip.

Carry-on luggage

My attitude with carry-on luggage is that you should have as little as possible, unless that is your only luggage. It should only contain items you need for the plane ride itself and anything that you absolutely cannot lose. Things like passports, tickets, camera, cell phone (if applicable) would be in this category. Since we had the two small kids, most of our carry-on luggage was basically 2 diaper bags which contained the following:

• Diapers – we estimated that our son uses a diaper every 2 hours, so we ended up packing enough for the 7 hour flight plus a couple hours in the airport. Our daughter can go through 1 per hour so we packed more for her. We also needed a package of wipes as well. Make sure you have the right diapers – I had a bit of a scare at the airport because I thought my wife had only packed diapers for our daughter. I asked around, but there was no place to buy diapers at the airport, so it was fortunate that I had made a mistake when going through the diaper bags, otherwise I’m not sure what we would have done. 🙂
• Clothes – our newborn daughter is a rather prolific puker, so we packed an extra set of clothes for her along with an extra shirt for my wife. On the way back my wife got showered pretty good and unfortunately we forgot to pack any extra clothes for her so she had to endure an uncomfortable couple of hours in the plane.
• Food – without kids you really don’t need any extra food, although a sandwich can be nice. In our case using food as a distraction for our 2 year old son really helped get through the flight. Grapes, strawberries, sandwich meat, crackers all came in handy. Normally we try to give him healthy foods but if you are desperate, junk food is ok too.
• Toys, books – if you are traveling with young kids then don’t even bother bringing a book for yourself since it will never get opened. We brought a couple small stuffed toys for our son and two of his bedtime books with the misguided notion that we could get him to sleep on the plane. The stuffed toys came in handy, but the books were a waste of time.

Stowaway luggage

For the regular luggage we brought one big suitcase which had to contain most of the clothes, toiletries etc that we needed for the trip. We were planning to be staying in hotels for part of the trip and with relatives for the remainder. Since we could easily do laundry at the relatives, we only had to pack clothes for the longest length of time we would be staying in hotels which was three days. At first I assumed that I could use each change of clothes for 2 days (which is not my normal state of affairs) but when we were finished packing and had loads of extra room then I changed my assumption to 1 day per change of clothes.

Things to think about

• How long can you wear each item of clothing?
• How many pairs of shoes do you need?
• How often will you be able to do laundry on the trip?
• What will you wear on the plane?
• Can you buy items there?

You can buy items there

Unless you are traveling to the Antarctica, you should be able to purchase any items you need when you are traveling. Of course if you are going canoe tripping then this article is probably not for you.

Here are some things that we bought at our destination – some of them planned – some of them not.

• Shampoo – I’ve had nothing but bad experiences flying with shampoo so I never bring it.
• Shaving cream – see above statement about shampoo.
• Razors – if you have to buy shaving cream, you might as well buy razors too.
• Toothpaste – in the interest of saving space we brought a small tube along and purchased a larger one on arrival.
• T-shirts – I’m not sure what happened with my t-shirts, but I ended up with very few of them after a couple of days so I went and bought 3 cheap ones for about $10 each.
• Pack’n’play – we didn’t bring one of these because we knew our son could climb out of it. Our first night in a hotel was a nightmare because my son couldn’t get to sleep with other people in the room so he basically ran around until about midnight. The first relative we stayed at had a pack’n’play and he was ok sleeping in it (even though he could climb out). Once we left that relative’s house we immediately bought one for about $75. We ended up giving it to an owner of one of the last hotels we stayed at.
• Toys – we bought a toy truck for $10 which our son liked so much we ended up taking it home with us.
• Hairdryer – the one we brought cost $10 at Zellers and lasted about 5 minutes, so we went and bought one. We left it at the last hotel.
• Booster seat for eating at a table – this is one item we never bought only because we couldn’t find one, but we really needed it!!!

Summary

Well, there you have it – start with a desired amount of luggage, plan as best you can, bring money to make up for your mistakes/omissions and enjoy your trip! 🙂

 

When I was a kid a local convenience store offered a reward program that was a sheet that you got stamps to place on it (one stamp for every dollar spent). They said that the reward for a completed sheet would be announced later and started giving them out. Some friends and I started going to the store every night to buy a pop and a bag of chips, mainly to get a sticker on our sheet. I felt like I’d hit the jackpot when a man ahead of me one day looked at a long string of stamps he’d been given with disdain and offered them to me.

My mother found out about the sheet (and the nightly snack purchases) and told me what she thought of the whole thing (my mother is like Judge Judy, except she directs all her contempt at her children instead of white trash). Eventually the day of vindication occurred and they posted the prizes for complete stamps. The best of the bunch was half-price on a loaf of bread. I threw out my completed sheet.

Roger Williams wrote a great (supposedly) true story about his experiences gambling. One of his throw-away comments that I found quite interesting is that he was thankful he lost his first time at the casino, as it gave him a suspicion of gambling (and expectation that he’d lose), even after he’d had subsequent visits where he came out ahead. I think buying stock right before the high of the tech boom was probably good for me as an investor (it has me half expecting drops in value of 75%). This introduction to “reward points” made me suspicious of “Air Miles” and everything that has been offered to me since.

I’ll take lower prices or cash back at the end of the year thanks very much.

I found in most contexts, when a store offers you some sort of credit (up to and including prizes), you’re often the worse off for accepting it. Reward points, and other such loyalty programs, are designed to encourage us to spend more than we otherwise would at that location. Some people beat stores at their own game. Its damn hard to do.

The WORST game they play is when store credit expires. Either you buy a gift certificate or take some sort of foolish points or something, changing currency that can be used everywhere with no expiration date, for something that can only be spent at THAT STORE within a specific period of time. Bizarrely, we sometimes do the exchange on a 1-to-1 basis. I bought an aunt a gift certificate to a spa once and was horrified when they handed me the certificate and it had a 6 month expiry date on it. I asked them why it expired in 6 months, and their only explanation was “we found everyone would rush in to use it before the deadline when it expired after a year”. The solution of REMOVING the expiry date didn’t even occur to them.

A friend of mine has been filling out surveys, and usually does quite well at it. She recently got into a situation where a company gives her points that are expiring soon, and they don’t offer anything she wants. They’re going to lose a customer over it: why would she fill out surveys for them in the future? Its bad for the customer, and bad for them. It doesn’t even cost them anything to show her an ever increasing balance of “points”, and she may have kept filling out surveys hoping good prizes would show up later which makes it especially stupid on their part.

Some time back I went to a book signing that Kevin Smith was doing to promote his book “My Boring-Ass Life” . The plan was that I’d tell Kevin that one of his previous books was my first inspiration to lose 70 pounds (it’s true!), he’d ask me for details, and after chatting for a bit he’d invite me to hit the road with him. We’d chat and be best friends forever in between takes for the movies he’d be working on (it’d be like a Clerks movie that would last the rest of my life).

Sadly he was interested that I’d lost weight, but his reaction was simply “70 pounds? That’s great dude!”. Kevin himself (I can use his first name since we’ve met and are now such good friends) has written about how he tries to avoid meeting his heroes, as they often let him down.

More recently I saw a trailer for “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed“. I was excited that it was a project Ben Stein was associated with, as I find him wicked smart and funny. Once I realized the topic was the “unfair” treatment of people who try to bring religion into scientific curricula I had an unpleasant experience as Mr. Stein (alas, I have yet to meet him) was championing a cause that I find quite kooky.

As Superintendent Chalmers said “Prayer has no place in schools, just like facts have no place in organized religion”.

I have no problem reading articles or watching movies that present an alternative viewpoint from my own (I quite enjoy it). Mrs. Pillars (Mike’s wife) wisely pointed out at one of our get togethers that the best blogs to read are those that present views different from your own: they’re the ones that challenge you and help you grow. I love Michael Moore movies, even though I don’t buy a lot of his views on society. I’m looking forward to watching Expelled (but I’m not going to pay $10 to see it in the theater: it’s a renter).

It wasn’t that the movie was presenting a kooky idea that shook me, it was that Ben Stein was. I know what to expect from Michael Moore, but this took me by surprise. I’ve had similar experiences with bloggers who otherwise seem to be intelligent rationale people, but then they post one thing that seems to be way out in left field (or very poorly thought out). It makes me question their other ideas (past and present). Probably people have come across ideas I espouse and disagreed with them enough to become skeptical of other things I write. Every time we get together Mike says at least once that he’s “shocked at the depths of my ignorance”.

I wasn’t sure if the proper response was to re-think my position on the subject (intelligent design) or re-think my opinion on Ben Stein and the ideas he presents in various mediums.

In the end I came to the decision that Ben Stein is a human being. He has very clear, well founded ideas on many topics. He has goofy ideas on other topics. Different people will put his different ideas into different categories. Its probably good to never accept a source as an absolute authority. How much trust you put into someone’s ideas should be a continual evolution, and some skepticism should always remain.

Have you ever lost faith in a hero when you found out information about them or disagreed with a cause they supported?

I boycott companies often.

I don’t make a big stink about it (like picketing out front, setting up a website, or anything), but if I’m unhappy with a product or service and the company won’t fix it, I stop shopping there. I’m like the soup nazi as I’ll give different punishments for different crimes (sometimes I won’t patronize them for 6 months, sometimes for life). I’ll warn friends away from them if it comes up in conversation, but that’s about as far as I go.

I don’t pretend to believe that this hurts the company in a significant way, I’m sure they’re usually not even aware of it, but I view consumer activity as voting with your dollars, and I refuse to “vote” for companies that do a poor job. I certainly experience some schadenfreude when and if the company goes out of business.

One unfortunate side effect is a built-up black list of nearby businesses until I have to move in order to purchase the necessities of life. I live in fear that the moving company will piss me off one day. Sadly this is only a half-joke.

The things I boycott over are usually poor products or rude service. I won’t pay to be disrespected (enough people will do it to me for free). I realize that employees are individuals, and perhaps the company owner can’t control everything they do or say, but if you haven’t trained your employees to deal with customers in a civilized manner, I’ll shop somewhere where they have. I’ll sometimes boycott stores if they have a convoluted purchasing process – if it takes too much effort to shop there, I’ll go elsewhere.

I don’t boycott over expensive prices, but I probably won’t buy much there either if its pricey. I never boycott based on political / social issues that don’t affect me as a customer. If the owner of a cafe donates money to pro-life or pro-choice causes, how does that affect my latte? Society would be a pretty miserable place if we only did business with people who had the exact same world outlook as ourselves.

Meg at “The World of Wealth” recently wrote up her bad experience ordering sushi (I was sympathetic as I know what its like when you’re jonesing for sushi!). I’m 100% behind her to not order from a restaurant where she can’t interact with the staff (and which leads to order mix ups). I wouldn’t make the same choice she does about not eating at a restaurant that employs illegal immigrants.

How often do you boycott a company? Which company has treated you the worst, and what have you done about it?

Occasionally you come across an article that gives you an epiphany and shifts your view of the world. One such article for me was Tom Sloper’s excellent #1 lesson for aspiring game designers. While its interesting in and of itself (assuming that you’re interested in video games), I think the core idea extends to most areas of life.

It is: “Ideas are worthless, it’s implementation that has value”.

This flies in the face of a lot of deeply held beliefs many people have. I knew one man who spent his life coming up with ideas for inventions and trying to sell them to companies. He was retired and broke (late in life he finally tried to finance one of his ideas himself and lost his house). He was convinced that a clever idea pitched to the right person would make him rich.

The Google guys originally made the rounds trying to sell their PageRank approach to various companies for $1 million. They were turned away, and eventually decided to just do it themselves. The idea wasn’t worth $1 million, but the company they’ve built is worth over 100 billion.

The argument could be made that the value of their idea was unknown when they were pitching it, and that its worth more now that its been proven to be a better approach. I’m sympathetic to that view, but I really feel there’s more to it than that. You can read their original paper on PageRank and implement it yourself if you want, but your new search engine certainly isn’t going to be worth billions.

I think there’s an abundance of good ideas in the world. The easiest part of creating anything new is to think of an idea that would be an improvement on what is currently in existence. I think just about anyone can do this easily. The hard part is making that idea happen, and dealing with the hundreds or thousands of obstacles that stand in your path. This takes resources (including your time), in a way which brainstorming doesn’t, and makes it inherently more valuable.

In his article, Tom cites the example of a friend of Dune author Frank Herbert who suggested to the author that he tell him a great idea for a novel, Herbert write it, and they split the profits 50/50. Herbert refused, saying that writing is the hard part. Similarly, Craigslist is FULL of people trying to find a programmer to implement their “revolutionary idea for a website”. They offer to give the person who does all the work building it a share of the resulting site. How nice! I foolishly met with some of these wannabes in my younger days, and not only did they expect me to do all the work, their ideas were pretty lame (“its like MySpace, but cooler!”). Ideas for websites are the easy part, BUILDING them is hard!

I have over 20 ideas for innovative businesses that I think all could work. Implementing any one of these ideas (or even building something that wasn’t original, like starting a Subway franchise) would be FAR, FAR more valuable that a “portfolio” of ideas that never go anywhere. I’ve actually been tempted to start a series of posts detailing my ideas just in the hope that someone likes one and implements it: these ideas have so little value that I’m happy to give them away.

Starting a business is REALLY hard, which why I just yak about ideas instead…

I love free giveaways, and last Sunday Harvey’s (a Canadian burger chain) was giving away its original burger free from 10:30-3 pm. I swung by, looking forward to munching on the beefy goodness, and gave up when I saw the lineup was out the door and down the sidewalk. Not being willing to wait for 20-30 minutes for a $3 burger, I shrugged my shoulders and headed to my office to work.

Years ago when I was an summer intern at an Ottawa tech company, there was a big promotion at a local bar with free beer. Tons of young people went out for the night and if there was any free beer available, I didn’t get any of it. When I asked servers there, they kept saying “later, later”. Then suddenly it became “its all gone”.

The obvious defense if someone complains about something free is “well, do you want your money back?” Mike and I don’t charge visitors to our blog a dime, so there’s a limit to how much complaining we’d put up with from a visitor. HOWEVER, businesses that decide to do free giveaways do them for a reason, and I think they’re sometimes undermining themselves when they do them poorly.

In the case of Harvey’s and the bar, they clearly are saying to their customers: “Come try our product free, its so good you’ll become a regular”. However, in both cases when I went to sample their product, I was dissatisfied. So their free giveaway alienated a potential customer instead of converting them. I never went back to that bar, and my view of Harvey’s has shifted a bit to viewing it as a place with long lineups and slow service.  I’ll still eat there, but when I’m trying to decide where I want to go out to grab some grub, I’m sure it’ll factor into my decision on some level.

In both cases, if they wanted to give away a free sample, they should have tried to make the experience as good as possible, even if that means having more staff on hand, or more samples to give away. Otherwise why even bother?  I can’t see the point of teasing people with “we have something for free / cheap” then making it difficult for them to try it.

In terms of our blog, we’ve never hit the point where we stop listening to someone complaining (Mike always forwards the complaints with the most cursing in them to me – although usually we just laugh). Even though visitors to the blog don’t pay us directly, we like traffic and higher traffic translates directly into more options for monetizing. They may not be paying customers, but we want visitors to have the best possible experience.  If they complain, we welcome that as an opportunity to learn how to improve what we’re offering.

I recently came across two similar approaches to “becoming an expert” in a field. Both are somewhat similar, and both are in harmony with my experiences in life.

Two way to become an expert on any topic are:

1. Read a book every month on the topic for one year.
2. Study the topic every day for 30 minutes.

A father of a friend of mine suggested the first approach. The selection of books is important, if you keep reading “introductory” books on the subject, you probably won’t make much headway (although you might be in a great position to teach others the basics, in a sense you’d be an expert on the basics). Conversely, even if you read through advanced books on the topic, they won’t do you any good if you don’t understand them. A course of reading that progresses from the basics to the more advanced would be ideal (and a reading list from someone who already possess expertise in the field you’re interested in would probably be worthwhile).

Keep in mind that your book selection will also determine what you’re an expert OF. If you read a Robert Kiyosaki book every month for a year, I think you’d be an expert in the “Rich Dad” philosophy, NOT necessarily an expert at finances or making money. Similarly if you studied naturopathy for a year, you’d be an expert in naturopathic medicine, NOT necessarily in medicine or the maintenance of good health.

My childhood doctor complained to my father that with the ease of accessing information from the internet these days, most of his patients develop more expertise about their individual ailments than he possess. These same patients could have probably done this 50 years ago if they were willing to invest the time.

Also keep in mind, this would be a very academic form of expertise. Studying a book on tennis every month for a year would allow you to VERY knowledgeably discuss the players, game and history. It probably wouldn’t make you play very well. On the other hand, reading a book on chess strategies every month for a year probably WOULD improve your game, even if you didn’t play once during that time.

John T. Reed advocates the 30 minutes of study per day approach. In some ways this is a broader idea, as the 30 minutes a day COULD be reading books, but it could also be alternative approaches. I learned “Django” (a framework for easily constructing database driven websites) for a few projects a while back and at the time I was learning it, there weren’t any books available. There WAS a number of discussion forums and on-line documentation (along with using the system itself) which did allow me to become an expert.

In neither of these cases does expert mean “best in the world”. It means you’ll be “a person with a high degree of skill in or knowledge of a certain subject.” When the topic comes up in social situations, typically you’ll be the most knowledgeable person participating.

John T. Reed boldly claims that after 6 months of studying something for 30 minutes a day people in your region will seek out your expertise, and after 1 year people nationally will seek it out. This corresponds with his experience. Mike and I were referenced in the Globe and Mail after writing our blog for about a year.

Have you had experience becoming an expert using either of these approaches? What was the topic and do these time frames correspond with your experience? Do you think there are areas where this wouldn’t work? If yes, what are they?