December 2019 Archives

If you threw a party and invited everyone you knew, you would see the biggest gift would be from me and the card attached would say, “Thank you for being a friend.”
— Theme Song from The Golden Girls

In Judaism, the word minyan refers to a group of 10 adults that come together to pray. For certain prayers, most importantly prayers of mourning, a minyan must be present. It’s a struggle to find 10 Jewish men and women on a Sunday morning at our shul. On one cold day, I volunteered and was the 8th adult there. Not convinced we’d get to 10, we started the service. I was wondering why we had this arbitrary number of 10. Why are we dragging some people out of bed who don’t want to be there? Just then, surprisingly, the 10th person showed up and in a palpable way, and we were transformed. We went from praying as individuals to praying as a community. I felt like we were the lions forming Voltron.

It made me think about friendship. Friendship is about being there for one another. Anyone can celebrate with you when it’s convenient. A true friend is always standing by you ~~even when~~ especially when things are tough.

Who is Robert Schlaff?

I’m a devoted husband and father to an awesome family. For work, I’m a Product Manager who looks at the goals of the business and uses technology to deliver those business and customer goals. I’ve driven transformational change at Citi, AIG, and Amazon Web Services. For more information about what I do at work, please visit my LinkedIn profile.

About This Site

I collect stories. There are so many amazing things happening every day. I need to spend some time writing them down before they slip away. Madeleine L’Engle said that every writer needs to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. But some of this stuff is too good to keep to myself. So I’m sharing it with you.

When I’m writing, I picture having a conversation with some of the world’s smartest and most interesting people — you, my readers. I picture us all sitting around a table telling stories and having fun. I’d like to think we’re a digital version of the Algonquin Round Table. Throughout the 1920s, some friends would meet daily for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel in New York. They included the founding editor of the New Yorker Harold Ross, the playwright George S. Kaufmann and the writer Dorothy Parker. This group, called The Algonquin Round Table, would meet to tell stories and share quips in a bustling city that was finding its place on the world stage. They were the original raconteurs of New York, getting together to share stories that would enlighten and entertain. In an age when we no longer have two-martini lunches, I wanted to humbly bring that sensibility online.

Highlights

Life Lessons

How to be Happy — Yale’s Most Popular Class. Yale’s most popular class ever is on how to be happier. Now it’s available online.
Capture Better Memories Without a Camera. How technology is preventing me from building great memories and some techniques I’ve come up with some ways to use my brain to capture special moments instead of my phone.
Thank You for Being a Friend. Friendship is about being there for other people. Anyone can celebrate with you when it’s convenient. A true friend stands by you when things are tough and just be with you.
Carpe Diem! How to Live Like an Emperor. I realized that no matter where I am or where I go, I can live like an Emperor by seizing every moment.
Fiction is the Lie That Tells the Truth. When dealing with really difficult problems in life, I’ve realized that fiction often has the best answers.
In Praise of Humility — The Forgotten Story of Edward S. Harkness. While we say we praise humility as a virtue, we rarely remember the people who practice it.

Product and Design

How Much is That Really Worth? The Mother-in-Law’s Guide to Valuation. A product gets its value from the job that they do. When I look at things this way, I can found that something like a crushed penny from a Penny Crushing Machine can be surprisingly valuable.
What a Wonderful Word. As a Product Manager, it’s important to understand what populations have in common and how they differ. Even though there are unique words in different languages, there’s a strong commonality across the human experience.
Alexa and Google in Our Home. How Alexa and Google work with our family (vs. phones that work against it). I also have a post on specifically how kids interact with Alexa.
How Airbnb Changed the Meaning of Hotel Branding. In the past, trusting a hotel brand meant trusting Marriott or Starwood. Now it means trusting Airbnb.
The Hidden Thirteenth Floor. How my children found the hidden number 13 in our elevator.

Art and Writing

When a Book Gets Caught Up in the Story. The Art of the Book in the Digital Age. I picked up a book at the New York Public Library with a big purple stamp that read, “The Author of This Book Committed Suicide.” I quickly discovered that this book doesn’t just tell a story, it’s part of a larger conversation.
When Millions of Eyes at Amazon Were Wrong. How I fixed the punctuation on Amazon’s 14 Leadership Principles.

Technical

How I (Re-)Built My Favorite T-Shirt. When I was in college I saw a T-shirt that was attractive, geeky and protested government policy. No one had produced it since 2000. So I recreated it.
The Mother-in-Law’s Guide to Cloud Computing. I explain Cloud Computing through an analogy to retail checkout lines.
The Mother-in-Law’s Guide to Software Testing. I write about two different ways to test software for errors.
The Mother-in-Law’s Guide to Chaos Engineering. A guide to how Netflix and others plan for failure. I also dig a bit deeper into how software needs to be built to solve human needs — not just optimized for machines.

Human Behavior

“Saving Money” by Paying More for Netflix. With subscription pricing, some people feel like they’re getting a deal when they are actually paying more.
What Do You Mean by “Film?” An interview with kids about film cameras from 2010. Spoiler alert: They’re confused.
Prospect Theory: Losing Feels Bad More than Winning Feels Good. An example of how our biases in interpreting gains and losses cause us to make bad decisions.

Math and Logic

How Numbers Work in the Real World. In school, we were taught that math is linear; however, in the real world, distributions are more likely to be exponential.
Why Today Can’t Be an Opposite Day. How the statement “Today is Opposite Day” is mathematically inconsistent.
Game Theory for Parents. Game theory provides some interesting lessons on how to equitably share a piece of pie.