Category Archives: musings

Managing the fear of loss

Scientific studies have shown that psychologically, loss is twice as powerful as gain.

This is a crazy thing, and IMHO, causes poor decisions as well as a poor mindset in general.

Why is this?

The expectation of gain is hope. Hope does wonderful things for humanity and society. Is it only with hope that we can create a vision of the future, plot out a course towards the vision, and the put in the blood, sweat, and tears that are necessary to get things done. Hope drives progress. Hope drives innovation. As an entrepreneur, I am fueled by hope. Without it, I wouldn’t get anywhere. As a society, we all need hope to exist; the more cumulative hope we have in the world, the better off we are for it.

When we give in to our natural fear of loss, we give our fear twice the power it should have to squash our hopes and dreams. It is irrational, and it causes people be motivated by fear instead of hope.

The only way to manage this fear is to be aware of it.

The first thing you can do is to work to mentally treat loss and gain equally. That is already a huge step because it removes the 2x multiplier that loss usually gets. Realize that the $1 lost as the same value as the $1 gained.

However, in many cases (I would argue that in most cases), you can do much better than this: you can zero out the loss.

The trick is to manage your expectations. Ask yourself a few simple questions. What matters to you in life? Are you still alive? Do you have the basic necessities? Do you still have your friends and family? Can you pay rent/mortgage and find a way to eat? If so, what else do you need? How important is the actual loss?

Obviously, there are larger forms of loss. And there are important losses; especially the loss of loved ones. However, most of the loss we deal with in life are not these important losses. They are little (potential) losses that become large within our minds, and then cause us to make bad decisions and squash our hopes. Don’t give the little (potential) losses this power.

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P.S. This is post number #60 in a 100 day blogging challenge. See you tomorrow!

Follow me on Twitter @alexshye.

Or, check out my current project Soulmix.

Don’t just masturbate

Masturbation is healthy and normal. And it can be good.. to a point. But, no matter what you do, or how often you do it, it isn’t the real deal. At some point, you’ve got to just do it.

Yes, I mean sex. But not just sex.

I’m a personal development nerd. It provides great food for thought, and it feeds my soul. But only to a point. Without action, the thought is worthless. It is simply emotional masturbation.

I used to be an academic, and let me tell you, it is can be an awesome life. You live in a world of novelties and possibilities. You publish your ideas and travel to talk about them. However, these are only ideas and words. When they don’t touch the real world, they become relatively useless. Instead, they become a form of intellectual masturbation.

I’m now an entrepreneur. I write on this blog. I read many other blogs, the new USV, Quibb, and Hacker News. I meet interesting folk. Through all of these things, I’m exposed to many interesting ideas/thoughts, and I learn a lot. But it isn’t enough. I need to get shit done. I need to hack, work on product, figure out what works and what doesn’t, work on what may become a future team, and pivot on the idea when necessary. And at some point, it needs to touch the real world. Without this, everything else that I do doesn’t matter. It purely entrepreneurial masturbation.

There are many form of masturbation. We all do them.

As mentioned above, masturbation can be healthy and good. Just don’t overdo it. At some point, you need to translate the thoughts and ideas into real-world action. That is where real satisfaction is.

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P.S. This is post number #58 in a 100 day blogging challenge. See you tomorrow!

Follow me on Twitter @alexshye.

Or, check out my current project Soulmix.

What kind of CEO do you want to be?

ceo

Most groups of organized people have a chief executive officer (CEO). Even if there isn’t anyone with the title of CEO, there is usually someone acting as the CEO.

The CEO’s job is to be the chief leader and decision maker. The CEO is directly responsible for the whole organization. These responsibilities include:

  • Determine core company values, and personify these values
  • Create the company culture
  • Set the purpose and meaning of the organization
  • Set short and long term goals
  • Evaluate progress
  • Re-evaluate core values, goals, etc.
  • Make the tough decisions
  • Communicate clearly, internally and externally
  • Watch the finances and budget
  • …and more!

This is one heck of a demanding position. But it is very important. A good CEO can make a company, and a bad CEO can easily break a company.

Most people will never be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Most will never be the CEO of any company, large or small.

Does this mean can write off having any CEO responsibilities?

Nope.

You are still the CEO of a one-man organization: yourself. No one will do this job for you, and no one can do this job for you.

So how are you going to run your life?

  • What are your core values?
  • Do you personify these values?
  • What are you short and long term goals?
  • What do you intend to do with your life?
  • How will you know you are on the right track?
  • How will you re-evaluate your values?
  • How will you re-evaluate your goals?
  • How are you managing your relationships?
  • How are you managing your money?

A good CEO can make a company, and a bad CEO can easily break a company.

What kind of CEO do you want to be?

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P.S. This is post number #57 in a 100 day blogging challenge. See you tomorrow!

P.P.S. This post is kind of a cheat post. It is from an old blog that never got off the ground and I deleted. But I like this post and am giving it a new place to live on the web.

Follow me on Twitter @alexshye.

Or, check out my current project Soulmix.

Blurred lines: The problem with Facebook’s social sharing model

Sorry, the picture has nothing to do with online social sharing, but it is entertaining, no?

OK, onto business 🙂

I’m starting to come to the conclusion that with web/mobile products, it is best to have a  simple social sharing model.

Here are the three possibilities that I know of:

  • Private: Email is a great example here. So is SMS, chat, and Facebook Messenger. With private conversations, shared data stays within the few people who are in on the conversation. This isn’t always the case. People can forward email to whoever they would like, but the general expectation is that of privacy.
  • Group privacy: Here, privacy is expected within a group of people. This group may grow or shrink, but at any time, whoever is in a group can see everything shared to the group. This is how Facebook started. Each person and their group of friends was a group. Any posts to a person’s wall was visible by that group. Google circles work in a somewhat similar way where people create explicit groups that bound the limits of sharing.
  • Public: With public sharing, there is no expectation of privacy. Twitter and Pinterest are great examples here. When I share, I expect the data to be in the public domain. There may be followers, but they don’t change my expectations for privacy.

Private and public are the simplest because they require no work. Group privacy is a bit more work because you need to create your groups. But all three of these have something in common. They are pretty simple and clear. You don’t need to think very hard to understand who gets to see what.

As I mentioned above: Facebook’s sharing model started out simple. You only had friends and then a wall. Anyone you connected with as a friend could see your wall, and when you posted on someone’s wall, you were sharing something with them that because visible to their network of friends.

Over the course of years, the social sharing lines began to blur on Facebook.

It began when they started lifting posts off of the wall. They implemented wall-to-wall, which allows you to see conversations with people. Then they added in the feed of recent wall posts. There was nothing wrong with these changes. As far as I could tell, they were just helping me access data that I should have had access to. It was purely convenience.

Once the feed became standard, we gradually began to forget that the posts were limited to a person’s wall (and their social circle). Instead of viewing walls, we learned to interact with Facebook by processing a stream of information.

The Like button is when things began to get fuzzy for me. Once you liked something, it would be shared with your friends. It was as if you could take any of your friend’s data, and they share it with your own social circle. This begged the question: where does it stop? If a post is liked by everyone, do you have any expectation of privacy?

As Facebook grew, people began to like more and more. They also began to like artists, bands, movie stars, businesses, etc. Each of the posts they liked by one of my friends ended up on my news feed. On top of that, they began to serve ads into the news feed.

The news feed eventually became an uncontrollable firehose of information.

To throttle the news feed, Facebook got intelligent with each share and each like. Now, they look at all kinds of information for each post such as who shared it, whether you view their posts, whether you’ve liked their posts, etc. Now, for your convenience, they work to surface the posts that are most relevant to you. The byproduct here is that each of your shares and likes are actually only shown to a small fraction of you friends.

Do you see the problem here?

Now, when I share a post, only a fraction of my friends will see it. If a friend happens to like my share, their friends will see it. And if their friend’s friends like it, it propagates to other random people.

The lines for social sharing are completely blurred now. I can’t guarantee that my friends see my shares, and I can’t guarantee that random strangers won’t see my shares.

There is nothing simple or clear about Facebook anymore.

Perhaps there is more to it. To be honest, I haven’t gone through all of the constantly changing permissions. There may be settings that I don’t know about. But, I am pretty tech-saavy compared to the average American. So if I am confused, I’m fairly sure a lot of others are also.

As far as I can tell, Facebook is a special case on the web. Most products have one of the three social sharing models I listed above. Facebook started with one of them also, and over time, they switched things up on us. I wonder how things would have worked out if they started out by blurring the lines of social sharing. Has there ever been a (reasonably successful) startup that began with blurred lines? I can’t think of one.

How do you feel about it? I would love to hear your thoughts.

Personally, I’ve found myself gravitating towards the two ends of the spectrum. I either use apps like email/messaging where I expect privacy, or apps like Twitter when I expect zero privacy.

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P.S. This is post number #56 in a 100 day blogging challenge. See you tomorrow!

Follow me on Twitter @alexshye.

Or, check out my current project Soulmix.

How do I find the best content?

Last week I wrote a post asking: what happens to old content on the web? This post continues from the thought process in that prior post.

When a person searches for information on the web, they only care about one question: how do I find the best content?

Because most of the best content is old content, the question often becomes: how do I find the best old content?

It gets more complicated. What does ‘best’ mean? What is best is often subjective. Suppose I am looking for relationship tips. You can’t really find a best set of tips. It may depend on many factors including my age, sex, cultural background, maturity, outlook on life, etc.

So the question really is, how do I find the best old content for myself?

Search.

As of now, search is probably the best option. Search relies on the fact that that over time, the structure of the web points towards the best pieces of content. That is, the best content has the most and best incoming links.

Search looks for the one best set of results across the web. As I said above, for many queries, there is no one best set of results. We are all different people, and the best set of results will differ between people.

This must be one of the big reasons Google cares about social. Personal information enables personalized search.

How good can personalized search get? Who knows. Even if you have a lot of information, as Google does with Gmail and G+, it must be tough to develop the algorithms to automatically determine the best results.

Recommendation engines.

Many startups are working on being the best recommendation engines. Usually, the challenge is the find the most relevant new content to present a user. But, it doesn’t have to be that way. For example, Pandora is great at finding old music that you might like.

I’m not well versed in the recommendation engines that exist, so it may mean that there is no clear winner for general content yet. But, it could be interesting for an intelligent recommendation engine to suggest the best old content.

Social.

It is possible to discover great old content via social feeds and social networks. Usually people don’t search for content on social networks though. Instead they stumble across good content. Most of the time, this content is new content. However, people occasionally post great out stuff. And if you were so inclined, you could ask your social network a question and hope for pointers to the best content.

A big problem with finding great content on social is that not all content is shareable. People share what they are proud about, but won’t share what they are more ashamed of. For example, if someone is searching for the best data on sexually-transmitted diseases, or birth control, they most likely wouldn’t broadcast this out on their social networks.

Aggregators/communities.

Aside from social, there are great link aggregators/communities that are largely anonymous. The largest that springs to mind is Reddit. Through anonymous aggregators, you could find great content on almost every niche of the web. On Reddit, simply search all of the subreddits and you’ll find communities on all kinds of obscure and dark niches on the Internet.

Similar to social feeds, you tend to stumble across information on these aggregators. And most of the links are new links. But, if there is a social discussion component, things may work out. If one was searching for embarrassing information, the best bet would be to find the right subreddit, and ask. Because you are anonymous, the people won’t know you, but if you ask the right way, you may find the best old content for your query.

Curation.

Recently, curation sites such as Pinterest have popped up. On these sites, people manually curate their favorite content. A big plus is that if you can find a person with your tastes, you may find the best content on the web specific to your liking. The downside is that you need to find the right set of people to follow. This takes upfront investment.

Also, with curation sites, you aren’t really asking a question. Instead, you follow people and stumble across what they have curated for you. The one X-factor here is that large curation sites provide a great data set for search. For example, I’ve recently started using Pinterest search for finding recipes. It is surprisingly good. Of course, Pinterest search doesn’t cover all verticals, but it is interesting that can be useful as a search solution.

So, how do you find the best personalized old content?

There are many ways to start going about it, and there are a bunch of startups tackling parts of this. Still, as a consumer, I don’t have a great solution.

The opportunity seems large enough that solving a sliver of the problem would make a great startup. And solving more than just a sliver? That would be huge.

If you have some thoughts, I would love to hear them!

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(Photo credit: Mark Probst/flickr)

P.S. This is post number #54 in a 100 day blogging challenge. See you tomorrow!

Follow me on Twitter @alexshye.

Or, check out my current project Soulmix, a site for sharing the best of the web.

Building for consumer web? Tap into an existing user need.

Since I’ve been building for consumer web, it has been interesting to study past products and piece together characteristics of successful products. To date, I’ve written on simplicity and unboundedness in consumer products.

A third common characteristic is that they fulfill existing user needs. This may seem obvious, but isn’t always an easy thing to realize; especially for an ex-academic who likes to think up of novel things.

I spent the first 12-13 months of entrepreneurship trying to figure out how to get people to spend more time thinking about their life purpose, goals, and values. This sounds like an awesome mission, but there is a huge problem here. At the end of the day, reflecting on one’s life purpose, goals, and values isn’t a common user behavior. It isn’t something people need during their day. Thus, building a product for this user behavior was always an uphill battle.

In consumer web, it is best to plug straight into an existing user need. Novelty is OK, but in many cases, it is unnecessary. You want a simple solution that solves the user’s problem and then gets out of the way.

Here are a few behaviors, and startups that address them:

  • Need for information: Google, Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Yelp
  • Need for connection: Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat
  • Need for expression: Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, Instagram
  • Need to collecting things: Pinterest (could be information too)
  • Need for entertainment: Youtube, Pandora
  • Need to purchase/sell: Amazon, eBay, Craigslist

Most of the large consumer sites tap right into an existing user need. These are all needs that many people have on a daily basis. In fact, we will pay for them. We will pay for access to information, better ways to communicate/connect, tools for expression, etc. The best products tap into this existing need, and make it easier for the user to satisfy their need.

If you are building a consumer web product, ask yourself:

  1. What specific need am I solving for the user?
  2. How important is this need?

You need to be honest with yourself with both of them, but especially question #2. I made the mistake by answering question #2 with how important I thought the need was. The user doesn’t care how important I think it is. They only care about how important they think it is. Big difference.

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(Photo credit: Mark Probst/flickr)

P.S. This is post number #53 in a 100 day blogging challenge. See you tomorrow!

Follow me on Twitter @alexshye.

Or, check out my current project: Soulmix.

Confidence or delusion?

Being an entrepreneur and/or founder requires confidence. You must believe in yourself. You must believe in your ability to get shit done. And, you must believe in your idea. If you don’t believe, then who will?

When this confidence hits reality, nasty things happen. 100% of startups begin with confident founders. You wouldn’t quit your job unless you had confidence in yourself. And, you wouldn’t get started in an idea unless you believed you could make it work.

Yet, the majority of startups fail.

What is the deal here? Is it false confidence? Or is it just delusion?

I can’t say I have an answer here. I merely write about it because I have noticed it within myself, and within the ecosystem, and would like to throw it out there.

How do we deal with confidence and our own psyches when startups have such high failure rates? How do we maintain the confidence? And more importantly, how do we determine when our confidence is actually delusion?

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P.S. This is post number #49 in a 100 day blogging challenge. See you tomorrow!

Follow me on Twitter @alexshye.

Or, check out my current project: Soulmix.

The actual School of Life, and two awesome videos

I’ve spent a great deal of time in my life pondering how we as a society can teach ourselves to live better lives. Recently, I wrote a blog post about this, and how we need some sort of school for life.

Well, it turns out that it already exists. In 2008, Alain de Botton and Sophie Howarth began The School for Life, a social enterprise in London. What they are doing blows me away. It is still relatively new, and relatively small, but I hope it becomes a movement that spreads.

With that, I’ll leave you with two awesome videos that I stumbled across yesterday by Alain de Botton. If you haven’t seen them, and have the time, give them a watch. The first is on redefining success, and the second is on how atheists really could learn a lot from religions. I could try to explain them more, but wouldn’t do them justice. Alain does such a great job, that I’ll let him take it away.

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P.S. This is post number #48 in a 100 day blogging challenge. See you tomorrow!

Follow me on Twitter @alexshye.

Or, check out my current project: Soulmix.

Google, Marvel, Lost.

Q. What does Google, Marvel, and Lost have in common?

A. I love all of them.

OK. Aside from my love, there is a better answer: they all have/had long term visions.

Google is the defining company of the Internet era. It has also always acted with a long-term vision from before the IPO through their 2004 founder’s IPO letter describing their long-term decision making to public shareholders. And it continues with Google Glass, self-driving cars, Project Loon, etc.

The Marvel comics have always told epic stories through their comics. Most recently, they’ve moved into movies and are doing something I haven’t seen any other movie makers do: plan a span of movies that may take decades to finish. Each of their movies tell their own story, but are weaved into the much larger vision encompassing the entire Marvel universe.

As long as I’ve been alive (or at least watched TV), there hasn’t been a series like Lost. The first seasons felt like an introduction to each of the characters. There is no way the first season could stand on its own (IMHO), but it was never meant to. It  was the beginning of an epic story, and that is much better.

As people get older, they always seem to lament the fact that society is losing its long term focus. When I was younger, I heard parents talk about this. It was usually about how TV and video games was killing our attention spans. Now that I am getting older, I hear friends saying it. Usually it has to do with the crappy apps and social networks that kill our time.

Yet, with each generation complaining about the loss of long-term vision, and the loss of long-term attention, it seems that it isn’t true.

The world is as it should be. We get better at creating distractions, but we also get better at creating epic art.

As a consumer, I can choose both distractions and epic art if I’d like to. I can watch 7 seasons of a bubble gum pop show as easily as I can watch the 7 seasons of Lost. It doesn’t take me any less time, and there is a time and place for both.

As a creator, things are different. Creating something epic takes time and dedication. By nature, it seems mutually exclusive with working for the short term. You don’t get to choose both. So, which do you choose? Just remember that it is still the epic art with a long-term vision that has the best chance of standing the test of time.

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P.S. This is post number #46 in a 100 day blogging challenge. See you tomorrow!

Follow me on Twitter @alexshye.

Check out my current project Soulmix.

Entrepreneurship and life

When I first created this blog 18 months ago, I randomly named it “On startups and life”. Turns out that although it sounds like two topics, I’ve started to find that they often blend together.

Startups/entrepreneurship is a great analogy for life. In general, we often define life by the challenges that we face. Hopefully, we face them head on, and figure out how to overcome them. When we don’t, we learn a lot, and strengthen ourselves for the next challenge.

Entrepreneurship and startups are the same way; especially early on. No matter what any early entrepreneur tells you (and possibly older ones also), they don’t know what the hell they are doing. If they did, they would succeed much faster, and with much more predictability than they are right now. Instead, we face our challenges head on and hope to tackle them. When we don’t, we learn a lot, and then hope that we have enough in the tank to keep moving on. Sometimes it means money. Sometimes it means emotional will and strength.

In the end, what matters is figuring out how to create an entity that has some kind of value in the world.

With life, the question is how do I create myself as a person of value? In entrepreneurship, it is how do I create something of value? The questions are almost one and the same. And so it helps me make sense of the blog.

As I think about (and write about) life and startups, I’m really just writing about life.

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P.S. This is post number #44 in a 100 day blogging challenge. See you tomorrow!

Follow me on Twitter @alexshye.

Check out my current project Soulmix.