Your Daily Tao

Adam’s research demonstrates that leaders and employees who keep both personal and prosocial interests in mind do better in the long run than those who are 100 percent selfishly motivated. For instance, Adam once asked municipal firefighters, “Why are you motivated to do your work?” He then tracked their overtime hours over the next two months, expecting firefighters who were more motivated to help others to demonstrate the greatest grit. But many of those who were driven to help others worked fewer overtime hours. Why? A second motivation was missing: interest in the work itself. Only when they enjoyed the work did the desire to help others result in more effort. In fact, firefighters who expressed prosocial motives (“Because I want to help others through my work”) and intrinsic interest in their work (“Because I enjoy it”) averaged more than 50 percent more overtime per week than others. When Adam asked the same question—“Why are you motivated to do your work?”—of 140 fund-raisers at a call center for a public university, he found nearly identical results. Only the fund-raisers who expressed stronger prosocial motives and who found the work intrinsically engaging made more calls and, in turn, raised more money for the university.

Grit is not something that just manifests itself inherently all the time. Sometimes, achieving better performance also requires the work to be intrinsically engaging and motivating for us. Understanding the nature of what we do, and how what we do helps the organisation/people in the bigger picture can go a along way to unlocking the effort in us.

Sports psychologist Jean Côté finds that shortcutting this stage of relaxed, playful interest, discovery, and development has dire consequences. In his research, professional athletes like Rowdy Gaines who, as children, sampled a variety of different sports before committing to one, generally fare much better in the long run. This early breadth of experience helps the young athlete figure out which sport fits better than others. Sampling also provides an opportunity to “cross-train” muscles and skills that will eventually complement more focused training. While athletes who skip this stage often enjoy an early advantage in competition against less specialized peers, Côté finds that they’re more likely to become injured physically and to burn out. We’ll discuss what Bloom calls “the middle years” in the next chapter, on practice. Finally, we’ll plumb “the later years” in chapter 8 when we discuss purpose. For now, what I hope to convey is that experts and beginners have different motivational needs. At the start of an endeavor, we need encouragement and freedom to figure out what we enjoy. We need small wins. We need applause. Yes, we can handle a tincture of criticism and corrective feedback. Yes, we need to practice. But not too much and not too soon. Rush a beginner and you’ll bludgeon their budding interest. It’s very, very hard to get that back once you do.

While it is good to love what we do, and it makes it more likely for us to succeed, you might not necessarily enjoy the process even if you are “chasing your passion”. Sometimes to improve, one needs to work on deliberate things, that might be extremely boring. Say a footballer working on the same muscles everyday to improve their acceleration, or a basketball player shooting the same shot at the exact same location hundreds of times a day.

These processes of deliberate practice are usually not enjoyable and boring, but having the resilience and patience to work it through these hours of practice will help maximise your chances of success.

Sports psychologist Jean Côté finds that shortcutting this stage of relaxed, playful interest, discovery, and development has dire consequences. In his research, professional athletes like Rowdy Gaines who, as children, sampled a variety of different sports before committing to one, generally fare much better in the long run. This early breadth of experience helps the young athlete figure out which sport fits better than others. Sampling also provides an opportunity to “cross-train” muscles and skills that will eventually complement more focused training. While athletes who skip this stage often enjoy an early advantage in competition against less specialized peers, Côté finds that they’re more likely to become injured physically and to burn out. We’ll discuss what Bloom calls “the middle years” in the next chapter, on practice. Finally, we’ll plumb “the later years” in chapter 8 when we discuss purpose. For now, what I hope to convey is that experts and beginners have different motivational needs. At the start of an endeavor, we need encouragement and freedom to figure out what we enjoy. We need small wins. We need applause. Yes, we can handle a tincture of criticism and corrective feedback. Yes, we need to practice. But not too much and not too soon. Rush a beginner and you’ll bludgeon their budding interest. It’s very, very hard to get that back once you do

The benefits of not specialising too early from a young age. Most of might intuitively think that we should work on something specific to get as good as possible in it from a young age. However, even then, building out a breadth of skills might be useful and will help in specialising.

We can find some examples in the athletic world (i.e Kobe Bryant crediting learning football in his early days when young). It also probably makes sense in whatever fields that we might choose to do, and also why education might tend to be generalised in our early ages until we choose to specialise when we grow older.

Is it “a drag” that passions don’t come to us all at once, as epiphanies, without the need to actively develop them? Maybe. But the reality is that our early interests are fragile, vaguely defined, and in need of energetic, years-long cultivation and refinement. Sometimes, when I talk to anxious parents, I get the impression they’ve misunderstood what I mean by grit. I tell them that half of grit is perseverance—in response, I get appreciative head nods—but I also tell them that nobody works doggedly on something they don’t find intrinsically interesting. Here, heads often stop nodding and, instead, cock to the side. “Just because you love something doesn’t mean you’ll be great,” says self-proclaimed Tiger Mom Amy Chua. “Not if you don’t work. Most people stink at the things they love.” I couldn’t agree more. Even in the development of your interests, there is work—practicing, studying, learning—to be done. Still, my point is that most people stink even more at what they don’t love.

This book is the OG on the topic of grit, from Angela Duckworth who coined the concept and is the world’s leading expert on it.

We all know what grit is, and that it is the fact that is most highly correlated with financial success. In this passage, grit isn’t just something that manifests intrinsically, but it has a much better chance of showing when people are doing something they enjoy or love. Someone can be highly determined and resilient in 1 field but completely lost and lackadaisical in the other.

As much as academic institutions may seek earmarked funds from government, they discourage the earmarking of funds from donors, so as to leave themselves freer to spend the money entrusted to them for whatever they feel like spending it on. When both campus amenities for student and faculty research are subsidized by government, the taxpayers are in effect paying for academic institutions to compete against one another for relative prestige, an essentially zero-sum competition. While the results of some research is valuable to society at large, many knowledgeable people inside and outside the academic world have complained that much—perhaps most—of the research is of little value to anyone beyond those who must pad their résumés to advance their careers. Since so much of this research is subsidized by government, foundations, and other outside sources, there is little check or limit on how far to carry the research, such as would apply in the case of a business which had to make sure that the return on its investment in research covered the costs of the research. There is also little economic constraint on a university’s output of students with degrees, since the inability of college or university graduates to get jobs in some fields is their problem, not the problem of the institutions that awarded their degrees. In a number of fields, complaints that students receiving their Ph.D.s find it difficult to get jobs in their professions have been made for years—sometimes decades—without any reduction in the numbers of Ph.D.s awarded by universities to accommodate supply to demand. At one time, there were more than a hundred applicants for every teaching position in history, and even more in English and philosophy.

On one hand, there is always the argument that without funding of institutions, things like the internet wouldn’t have happened. For instance, the famous anecdote is that the internet (at least part of the building blocks) was created by government researchers in the United States.

On the other extreme hand, I don’t think its unreasonable to assume that universities can kind of end up in a “dick measuring contest” when competing against others in terms of prestige to attract the best students. Just imagine how much donations your university (even our local ones) constantly ask for to build bigger and better facilities. However, how much do these facilities actually contribute to the quality of our education and how much are just for posturing to attract the best students.

That is why I think we shouldn’t bound ourselves too tightly to any specific ideologies, and recognise incentives and the limits of human rationality in various situations. It is possible that without government funding, some form of the internet wouldn’t have been created. Obliquity is when indirect positive outcomes can happen when we’re in pursuit of certain goals. It is also the case that without commercial incentives, the internet wouldn’t have been what it is today. (Though some might argue that social media has brought about more social bad then good, but that’s an argument for another day.)

The main reason why women still get paid less on average than men is not that they are paid less for the same jobs but that they tend not to climb so far up the career ladder, or they choose lower-paid occupations, such as nursing and teaching. That is confirmed by other studies. Among the jobs where women with college degrees earn at least as much as men are computer engineer, petroleum engineer, and a variety of other engineering occupations, as well as journalist, portfolio manager and medical technologist. But in most of these jobs, especially most engineering jobs, there are fewer women than men. The most important reason why women earn less than men is not that they are paid less for doing the very same work but that they are distributed differently among jobs and have fewer hours and less continuity in the labor force. Among college-educated, never-married individuals with no children who worked full-time and were from 40 to 64 years old—that is, beyond the child-bearing years—men averaged $40,000 a year in income, while women averaged $47,000. But, despite the fact that women in this category earned more than men in the same category, gross income differences in favor of men continue to reflect differences in work patterns between the sexes, so that women and men are not in the same categories to the same extent.

A quote from this book with regards to the gender pay gap. Beyond my personal, narrow anecdotal experience where I have seen some slight forms of sexism in the workplace, I’ve always wondered what are the statistics on this. It also doesn’t help that engineering jobs (especially in software) are some of the fastest growing jobs (in terms of salary increases) and way more men gravitate towards that industry.

Lower hours spent working, leading to lower pay, could be a choice of the woman herself, or could also be a “forced choice” due to parenthood and pregnancy. The thing is, many factors confound the data and that’s probably why we have such diverse opinions on this topic.

History can be looked at another way, in terms of when pervasive government regulation of housing markets began and when housing prices skyrocketed. Since these were mostly state and local regulations, the beginnings of stringent housing regulations have varied somewhat from community to community. By and large, however, the decade of the 1970s marked the beginning of severe government restrictions on the building of houses and apartments. That same decade marked the meteoric rise of housing prices in those places where the restrictions were particularly severe, such as coastal California. While many cities and counties in California, Oregon, Hawaii, and Vermont created restrictive housing laws and policies during the 1970s, many other places did not or did so at different times. Housing price rises reflected those differences. An economic study of housing prices concluded: In most cases, the decade in which housing markets became unaffordable closely followed the approval of state growth-management laws or restrictive local plans.The same high correlation between government intervention and sharply rising housing costs can be found in other countries as well, where housing restrictions are particularly severe, under a variety of politically attractive names such as “open space” laws or “smart-growth” policies. An international study of 26 urban areas with “severely unaffordable” housing found 23 of those 26 to have strong “smart-growth” policies. The results belie the phrase.

Most books on economics that I have read have tended to be on the political left, so gave this book a go. Its author tends towards the political right.

The above passage is evidence for the simple understanding that restricting supply of housing by zoning areas or preserving areas will naturally lead to increase in prices.

Note that there is a paradox built into the way people perceive time: unfilled time is perceived as lasting longer than filled time at the time of the experience, but when later recalled, unfilled time is perceived as being shorter than filled time. So which should be given to customers? The way to answer the question is to realize that what truly matters is the total experience. Although short waiting times are to be preferred to long ones, if the time is filled with interesting activities, then at the time it is experienced, it is perceived as going quickly and enjoyable. Later, when the activity is being remembered, the events will dominate, and as long as those events are pleasurable, the end result can be positive: “Yes, we had to wait for a long time in line but the wait was fun.” Any place that has numerous people waiting for extended periods could follow this practice. But note that this only works if one’s place in line is assured. Here is a case where an attempt to make an experience more pleasant can have the opposite effect if it is accompanied by worry about missing an event or losing one’s place in line. Some complexity has to be added to simplify the experience: number assignment, reservations, or targeted admission times will help. Even so, people have been known to miss their flight because they were so distracted by the available activities at the airport.

The psychology of waiting. Having things to do, and knowing the progress of your wait can make a significantly longer wait much more enjoyable than one without any activity. Something to keep in mind when queues are set up for your customers.

Amtrak asked design firms to submit proposals for redesigning the interiors of the trains to attract more riders. IDEO’s response was to say “no.” That is typical of design companies, by the way. IDEO was practicing what designers call “design thinking,” which means, among other things, to start by first determining what the real problem is. I often explain it this way: Never solve the problem the client has asked you to solve. Why? Because the client is usually responding to the symptoms. The first job of the designer, sometimes the hardest part of the entire task, is to discover what the underlying problem is, what problem really needs to be solved. We call this finding the root cause. In the case of train service, because riders and nonriders alike complained about the experience, Amtrak assumed that this meant that the interiors of the trains should be redesigned. This description tries to solve the symptom, not the cause. The proper solution requires a systems approach, not just the redesign of one of the many parts, such as the train interiors. Amtrak, to its credit, agreed with this analysis and allowed a complete reconceptualization of the entire service experience, a task that IDEO was happy to work on. IDEO and its partners, Oppenheimer and Company Brand Consultants (O+CO) and Steelcase, recommended that Amtrak treat the travel experience as an integrated system, starting with the decision to travel by train rather than airplane or car and then continuing on through all the stages of the trip: purchasing the ticket, the experience at the station, both on departure and arrival, and the experience on the train. They identified ten steps to train service: Learning about routes, timetables, costs Planning Starting Entering Ticketing Waiting.

Most of the time, what we really think is the problem might just be the symptom of what is actually wrong. So the solution to this “problem” would be always to look for the root cause no?

If only life would be so simple! In many cases, sometimes, the root causes are not clear or may never be apparent. Sometimes, they only reveal themselves after many months or years of hard work on solving the symptoms.

What we can do is to be more mindful whenever something goes wrong. Toyota used to adopt this system for manufacturing called, “5 whys”, which is basically an interrogation system where you keep asking “why did this happen” (5 times) which is a good heuristic to help you get closer to the root cause.

What really puzzles me, though, is that when a manufacturer figures out how to automate an otherwise mysterious operation, I would expect the resulting device to be simpler. Nope. Here is an example: Siemens developed a washing machine that, to quote its Web site, “is equipped with smart sensors that recognize how much laundry is in the drum, what kind of textiles the laundry load comprises, and if it is heavily or lightly soiled. Users only have to choose one of two program settings: hot and colored wash, or easy-to-clean fabrics. The machine takes care of the rest.” Hurrah, now the entire wash can be automatic, so only two controls are needed: one to choose between “hot and colored wash” and “easy-to-clean fabrics,” the other to start the machine. Nope. This washer had even more controls and buttons than the nonautomatic one. “Why even more controls,” I asked a friend who works at Siemens, “when you could make this machine with only one or two?” “Are you one of those people who want to give up control, who think less is better?” asked my friend. “Don’t you want to be in control?” Strange reply. Why the automation if it isn’t to be trusted? And yes, actually, I am one of those bizarre people who think that less is better. It appears that marketing won the day. And I suspect marketing was right. Would you pay more money for a washing machine with fewer controls? In the abstract, maybe. At the store, probably not. Marketing rules-as it should, for a company that ignores marketing is a company soon out of business. Marketing experts know that feature lists influence purchase decisions, even if the buyers realize they will probably never use most of the features. Notice the wording: “pay more money for a washing machine with fewer controls.” An early version of this material was published in Interactions, the magazine for professionals in the field of human-computer interaction. The editor flagged the sentence as an error: “Didn’t you mean `less money’?” she asked. Her question makes my point precisely. If a company spent more money to design and build an appliance that worked so well, so automatically, that it only needed an on-off switch, people would reject it. “Why does the simple one cost more than the more powerful, complex one?” they would complain.

We all have a desire to be in control. And with products, sometimes we are always impressed by those that have more features when even, in the case of the washing machine, the extra features actually meant less automation and less saving of your time. Interesting anecdote on how marketing demands can affect the development of the products we use.