Hoehn’s Musings

Oh, hey again.  I know, it’s been awhile.

I’ve been building up a large collection of random thoughts and sticking them in the reserves for future posts, but I truthfully haven’t had the enthusiasm to write on here for quite some time (many reasons, some of which I’ll lay out below).  It’ll be easier for me to just do one atrociously long, disorganized post that clears the slate, rather than reflecting and redeveloping thoughts I had months ago.  You have been warned.

For those who haven’t yet developed internet-onset ADD and can make it through this entire assortment of musings, I salute you.  Here we go:

• The most time-consuming project I have been working on over the last several months is Tim Ferriss’ next book.  It’s been a long and tedious process, but I’m extremely proud to have been a part of it.  Once it’s all finished and is about to be released, I’ll share some fun stories about the process of making it, as well as some of my results from testing.  But for now, all I can say is: (1) I have a deeper respect for any author who can stomach writing a big book and getting it published, and (2) I am beyond excited to see how it’s received.

• One of the reasons I stopped writing on here was because I revisited my archives.  My beloved readers (that’s you!) have been kind enough to sing this site’s praises, but frankly, I was put off by quite a few of the things I’ve written.  It was kind of like reading an essay that you wrote back in middle school.  A part of you enjoys the naive enthusiasm, another part of you thinks “Christ, this can’t be me… Is it?  Damnit, my name is on this.”  As a result of this evaluation period, I started noticing a lot of blogs that seemed more like jaded Yelp reviewers, writing about trivial nonsense.  And I saw a lot of myself in their writing.  I’m very privileged to sit around and talk about fun marketing and cool receipts at restaurants (Not that I’ve lost my enthusiasm for those topics by any means — my Twitter feed is a testament to this).  But going forward, I’m going to keep working on becoming a better filter of my own content on here.  The posts that have resonated most with me and others are the ones where I’ve been reflecting on the topic for months.  I want to try to maintain that personal level of quality as much as possible.  I’m not promising brilliance obviously; just a bit less impulse behind my writing.

• A few of my policies are changing this year.  First, I will be saying “no” A LOT more.  Up until now, I’ve jumped at damn near every opportunity that seemed like a fun / interesting / good learning experience.  It was well-intentioned yet semi-reckless behavior that finally caught up with me. Several months ago, I bit off way more than I could chew, and that lead to me feeling constantly overwhelmed and scrambling to get things done.  A big part of this has definitely been my approach, which has always been: feel the pressure, then get it done.  That mentality has reached its limitations, and I realized I’m definitely not as good at staying organized with a variety of tasks as I once thought I was.  And in spite of what several friends and colleagues have advocated, I’m not into outsourcing.  I prefer to do the things I’m hired for (a novel concept, I know).  But juggling too many things all at once has taken its toll.  So from now on, I’m going to tackle a couple projects at at time, not several.

• I did a little bit of consulting for awhile, but that is a no-go after this year.  I’m 24 for chrissakes, I’m still dumb in more ways than I can count.  I have a few solid experiences under my belt that I’m happy with, but it’s not enough to build a house on.  Plus, consulting sucks.  It really does.  You’re not learning, you’re just regurgitating lessons on what you’ve been lucky enough to succeed with or (even worse) talking about what’s worked for other people.  No more.

• Word-of-mouth is tough, but I still think it’s the best strategy to pursue.  If your product or service isn’t being shared, perhaps the problem doesn’t lie with the people you are chasing after.  Start asking yourself “Why isn’t this good enough” instead of “Why aren’t people eating what we’re trying to shove down their throats.”

• I could not be more bored by Facebook fans, Twitter followers, and Youtube views.  They do not mean anything.  They are low-hanging fruit, not metrics for success.

• My favorite passage from What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars was about how the greatest investors (Warren Buffet, Peter Lynch, etc.) all have contradicting advice on how to make money: “If imitating the pros was supposed to make you rich and not imitating them was supposed to make you poor, then each one of these guys should have lost all his money because none of them imitated each other.  They all should be flat broke because they very often did things opposite of each other.  It finally occurred to me that maybe studying losses was more important than searching for some Holy Grail to making money.”  So many of us search for the easy route to making money, then abandon ship when things get too hard.  There are countless ways to make a lot of money, only a few ways you can lose it, and no shortcuts to success.

• This may seem ironic, given that last point, but one of my favorite articles I’ve read this year: 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job by Steve Pavlina.  A related tweet from Nassim Taleb: ‎”The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”

• My single biggest turn-off: those who cannot laugh at themselves.  Not surprisingly, many of my closest friends and favorite people use self-deprecating humor constantly, and have no hesitation in telling embarrassing stories about their childhood.

• I’ve posted about this on Twitter a few times, but I will say it again: creating an emergency account is one of the smartest things I’ve done (thanks, Ramit).  Unpredictable emergencies have been some of my biggest expenses, and that “Black Swan fund” has saved me on multiple occasions.  Go to ING Direct, create a savings account, and start setting aside a chunk of each paycheck for emergencies.

• Speaking of backup plans, Ben Casnocha reminded me (a very long time ago) to back up your Delicious bookmarks.  For some reason, I’d never even considered it, but it’s a smart thing to do.  If you use it as much as I do, I highly suggest setting up a repeat reminder in your calendar to back up on a regular basis.  Just go to ‘Settings,’ click ‘Export / Backup bookmarks’ then email the file to yourself.  Done.

• RPGrad update: I’ve stopped publicly tagging a lot of the articles I’m reading for the future version of RPGrad, because I’m not planning on releasing anything anytime soon. A lot of the people who read it still run into trouble with creating free work opportunities, or are quickly lost after trying things out.  Perhaps my ideas are flawed or incomplete, or maybe most folks are in a much tougher situation than I give them credit for.  Whatever the case, I don’t want to take it too lightly and assume I know more than I do (I’m frequently guilty of this).  I also want to expand the scope to something bigger than “how to get free work!”  The more I’ve dug into the ideas behind RPGrad over the last year, the more I’ve become skeptical of the true state of this globalized economy.  I’m still confused about the recession and I’m attempting to wade through this sea of (mis)information, but I tend to believe that things are going to get significantly worse.  This is the beginning, and jumping to conclusions on anything right now seems shortsighted.  RPGrad will be a very long-term side project, and I want to make it extremely valuable.  That involves a ton of research, finding case studies, more experimentation, etc.

• A side project I’ve been working on for several months is an iPhone app that Ramit and I will be releasing this year.  I won’t say what it is just yet, but the goal was to create a very useful app on the cheap.  We’ve had two dozen testers try it out, and the average savings for the group was $168.  I want to dedicate a few posts to this project in the future, as it’s been a really fun learning process for me.  Stay tuned.

• Free idea: What if non-profits like DonorsChoose made personalized videos for each major donor?  Suddenly, the results of their donations would be in vivid color and sound, and they could truly grasp the impact they’ve made.  And they could share it with / brag about it to their friends!  It’d be more work for these organizations that are stretched thin as it is, but would ultimately lead to greater loyalty from those who contribute the most.

• One of my favorite people I had a chance to meet over the last several months is Noah Kagan.  While his career path is impressive (worked for Facebook in its early days, helped successfully launch Mint, turned down $100K salary from Yahoo because it wasn’t right for him), the thing I liked most is that he’s a very genuine and passionate person (which you can quickly see in this video).  He’s sharp and a worthwhile guy to follow, so check out his blog.

• The most amazing/humorous story I heard recently was from a guy who created a peer-to-peer network nine years ago and was sued for $250 BILLION by dozens of the world’s biggest media companies.  One person… being sued for $250,000,000,000.00.  After having his company auctioned off in court, he used his knowledge of P2P and created a new service that would benefit the same media companies that had sued him.  Six months later, 80% of them had become his customers.  Incredible.

• During my freshman year of high school, my friends and I were absolutely enamored with this gorgeous junior.  She would literally stop us in our tracks: we’d never seen a person in real life who’d been dealt a genetic royal flush.  Girls like her, we’d assumed, had a tremendously strong “bitch shield,” but she seemed to be a genuinely sweet and happy person who was well-liked by all of her peers.  A couple months ago, she committed suicide.  Time and time again, I’ve come to realize that we never see the full picture of anyone’s lives but our own — not even our family or our closest friends.  Sizing people up is awfully tempting, but a lot of us are hiding deep-seated issues that rarely see the light of day.  We are all flawed and insecure on some level that only we know about.

• Everyone seems to dread their 10-year high school reunion.  I suppose the fear comes from the idea that you’ll get to see how successful everyone is and compare them to what stage you’re at in your life.  Facebook is an everyday high school reunion, where you’re casually observing the life developments that your friends (or “friends”) are going through, except it’s on an unnecessarily detailed level that’s always filtered through our egos.  I’m not sure what the implications are, but I do think it’s strange how comfortable I am with saying to someone at a bar, whom I haven’t seen or spoken to in a year, “I saw that you got a puppy!”  It’s even stranger that this sort of comment is never met with a suspicious look.

• If you were able to make it this far, I’ll give you a special reward, and that is “How to win a Tim Ferriss contest.”  The first part of the equation: measure your damn results.  I’ve had to pick the winners a few times on posts like this one, and about 95% of the people who think they are competing automatically eliminate themselves because they write things like “I tweeted this out and posted on Facebook.”  Great, that tells me nothing.  The irony, of course, is that measuring your results is something that is emphasized over and over again on that blog, yet almost none of the people who leave comments do it.  It’s a lot easier to win these contests than you’d think.  The competition, although seemingly abundant, is minimal.  So use bit.ly to your advantage, and share your results.  The second part of the equation: do something different.  Literally everyone does the Facebook and Twitter routine, and that’s fine if you get some results.  But when people write that they were able to get the contest attention on a radio station, or they printed out 100 flyers, or started a separate related contest with their friends, we pay attention.  That may be less effective, but it at least shows that you put more than 3 seconds of effort into it.

And now, some videos!

• “The Unsettling Truth about Life” by Trey Parker and Matt Stone:

• This video is a highlight reel I made for Bill Dawes, the comedian who was with us on the I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell tour.  It’s pretty funny, check it out:

• I put this together when AwayFind released its gadget on the Google Apps Marketplace.  The 3-second time lapse at 0:07-0:10 took more than an hour to make.

• One of my biggest regrets over the last few months was not seeing John Butler Trio (my favorite band in college) live at Red Rocks.  Literally everyone I’ve spoken to who went — young and old — said it was, by far and away, the best live performance they’ve ever seen.  I’m still bitter at my decision to stay in that night, in favor of seeing another concert the following week.  Foolish, foolish, foolish.  Here’s their closing song from that night:

Whew!  That’s all for now.  Thanks again to all who continue reading, I truly enjoy the interactions I continue to have with you guys.  More exciting posts to come in the next few months!

Finding the most useful and relevant resources on the web is easy: just use Google… right?

Well, relying solely on Google will often bring you mediocre results and a lot of frustration.  For instance, if you search for “the best CRM tool,” the very first result will be this article.  It’s a top 10 list (punctuated by Google Ads, of course) with the phrase “Highly recommended” next to 8 of the 10 suggested tools.  You’re a bit wary of their recommendations because of how sloppy the site looks, so you move on to the second result: a top 5 list.  They don’t endorse any of the sites from the first article… Strange.  On to the third result from Google: “an insider’s guide” to finding the best deals on CRM software… that requires you to register before downloading it.  Ugh.

Thankfully, there’s a faster and easier way to find solid resources.  Just use delicious.com.  Here’s how:

Put http://delicious.com/popular/crm into the address bar.  The /popular/crm extension will show you the sites that have been most frequently tagged as ‘crm’:

Popular CRM bookmarks (Click to enlarge)

Delicious.com/popular takes a lot of the guesswork out of search by showing the number of people who have tagged those sites (see the numbers on the right side of the image).  You don’t have to determine if something is legit, because that’s already been verified by X number of users.  For this particular search, it’s fairly safe to assume that any site that’s been tagged by more than 2,000 people will be a good choice.

And just like that, you’ve found exactly what you were looking for: the best the web has to offer for CRM tools.

Now let’s say you want to get really specific and search for more than one keyword.  Easy: just use the /tag/ extension instead of /popular/, and add on keywords like so: “keyword1+keyword2+keyword3.”  I actually had to do this last night, so I’ll show you a personal example.

I was looking for an old Springwise article about a sports website that allows people to upload videos of themselves and receive personalized instruction from professional coaches.  Cool concept, but I couldn’t remember the name of the site or the particular sport they catered to, so I Googled “site:springwise.com sports video coaching.”  Nothing.  Then I tried Springwise’s internal search engine (powered by Google), just to see if something different might come up.  Still nothing.

Then I tried delicious.com/tag/springwise+sports (an even less descriptive keyword search than what I used for Google), and found the article almost instantly:

Delicious is great for finding useful resources because it can’t really produce fake or hacked results.  Many people have figured out little tricks that take advantage of Google’s ranking methods, which can lead to a bunch of scammy and irrelevant results.  Delicious results, however, are dictated by a collective pool of individuals, each of whom has decided that those particular sites were worthy of being bookmarked for future reference.  So you can be fairly certain that any site you find that’s been saved hundreds or thousands of times on Delicious will be relevant and valuable to you.

Of course, there’s an obvious bias that comes with Delicious: the users are particularly web-savvy, and don’t represent the general population, the scientific community, etc., etc.  But it’s a very minor flaw, and it’s one to be expected.

There are many other fine resources you can use for pinpointing and measuring the web’s best content (StumbleUpon, Alexa, Wikipedia, etc.), but I find Delicious to be the most efficient and consistently relevant.  So try using it to supplement your Google searches.  Eventually, you might find yourself (like me) using the service every day.

I love the movie “Groundhog Day“; it’s brilliant.  And oddly enough, I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.  I’ll explain, but first, some background:

As Phil relives the same 24 hours over and over, he makes minor tweaks in every interaction so that he can squeeze as much out of people as possible.  Eventually, his focus turns to Rita, whom he attempts to seduce.  Despite Phil’s ability to quickly lure other women into bed with him (particularly Nancy), it becomes obvious that Rita will not fall for Phil’s superficial efforts.  She cannot be deceived, no matter how much Phil learns about her and simulates rapport.  Even when he gets her in his bed, she stops him because she feels like he’s trying to cash in too quickly.  He hasn’t earned anything yet.

Phil becomes depressed after his countless failures with Rita.  He tries to kill himself numerous times, only to continually regain consciousness the next morning.  Eventually, Phil accepts that there’s no way out of his predicament, and he may as well make the most of it.

So he decides to spend his time improving himself and helping others.  He reads books.  He develops interesting skills, like ice sculpting and jazz piano.  He befriends everyone in town — not to take advantage of them the next day, but just for the sake of it.  He learns to be genuinely empathetic and compassionate, and focuses exclusively on improving the lives of those around him.

This, of course, ultimately leads to him winning Rita over.  Not from actively trying to seduce her, but by having tons of other people willingly vouch for him and confirm that he’s the real deal.  The seduction is seemingly effortless, even though it took years for Phil to finally put all the pieces together.

So… where am I going with this?

When you start a business, you get to decide who your customers will be.  You have two options.

The first option is people like Nancy, who will fall for all the right words and tricks.  They’re very easy kills.  If you know which buttons to push, you can reel them in almost every time.  Optimize this here, tweak the wording there, adjust the coloring, and voila – sale!  Nancy is easy, profitable, but frankly, she’s boring as hell.  You did nothing meaningful to earn her, other than cracking a code through trial and error.  It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

The second option is for you to focus on people like Rita.  They are not easily deceived.  Even if you get them up to Step 9 of 10, they will stop suddenly and say, “Wait a minute… you’re full of shit!” and storm off.   Rita is exhausting to win over.  But Rita is sustainable.  She pushes you to be better, and to hold yourself to a higher standard.  Paradoxically, winning Rita over cannot be accomplished if it’s the end goal; it can only be a byproduct in your pursuit of something that’s sincerely meaningful to you.

——

I’ve learned a fair amount about how easy it is to persuade most people into buying something.  At first, having that knowledge is pretty cool.  But after using it a few times, it becomes fairly monotonous.  Do this, do that, and Nancy will predictably hop in the sack.  Sigh.  There’s no meaning, and eventually, no real challenge.

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of trying to win over the Ritas of the world.  It’s a long term play, and you cannot win with tricks and deception.  It has to be difficult.  It has to be real.  You have to continually work on becoming the best version of yourself that you can possibly be.  And other people have to vouch for you, without solicitation.

It just seems like that’s how things should be done.