An Introduction
Let’s start with the most important stuff (an invocation so to speak). E.B. White said that the role of the writer is to lift people up, not to lower them down. I learned about this quote from a commencement address by Maria Popova. Popova writes Brain Pickings, which is “An inventory of a meaningful life.” The summary of her ideas over the first 10 years is more useful than anything I could write — so you should just go there instead of reading this. Oh, you’re still here. Thanks! Taking White’s cue, let’s start off with some uplifting things on this New Year’s Day:
- Choose the most respectful interpretation. It’s always best to assume people are doing the best that they can and give yourself a break and realize that you’re doing the best that you can. For example, if someone cuts you off on the highway, it’s best to assume that they REALLY needed to get somewhere fast — instead of holding on to the anger
- This is just a great video about creativity and imagination from Disney World. When I was a teenager, there was a great pre-show movie in Epcot about imagination and creativity. The movie ran from 1995-2003. A few years ago, some people re-created the video based on the original movie
- The poem If I Had a Daughter by Sarah Kay is inspiring to me as a father. Like many great poems, she must have spent years getting this one just right
- Don’t be afraid to love the little things in life. Here was a great book review from a serious author about How a Book About Grover Revealed to Me the Wide World of Literature
- Anil Dash had an amazing Twitter stream in early December asking Who is a person (not counting family) that opened doors for you in your career when they didn’t have to? Anytime is a good time to show gratitude!
I wanted to thank everyone I was able to meet up with this year. I learned about a few great tools from friends:
- Avi Eratapalli turned me on to the Five Minute Journal which is a quick and easy way of keeping a gratitude journal. I use it and like it a lot
- Heski Bar-Isaac pointed me to the Farnam Street blog which is an awesome resource on how to think. They describe their goal as “We will work to better synthesize, connect, and explain timeless ideas that help you make better decisions, avoid stupidity, and kick-ass at life”
- Quentin English from Quentin’s Friends shared the Way of Life app with me that helps me make sure that I’m doing the important things every day. It’s also a great way of implementing Marshall Goldsmith’s Triggers
- Philip Ryan showed me NextDraft, the best daily summary of the news
I’ve realized that I need a better way to keep track of my writing. I had some free time this year and created a proper website using WordPress where I can more easily post my thoughts. Depending on your browser, you may see a little video clip playing from my New York Tech Meet Up talk earlier this year. Here are some highlights:
- The Big Thing I Wrote On Schlaff.com was about the process of learning. In an age where we can Google the answers to everything, why should we learn things? In short, it’s because Google can provide you with bits of information but can’t create the framework for how things fit together. Take this example: “Daddy, what is the meaning of life?” says the child. “It’s complicated,” says the dad. “Why don’t you ask Google?”
- Non Transitive Dice are 4 dice that given any one die, you can find another die that will on average beat the first die. However, there’s no “best” die. It’s like the game rock, paper, scissors. Warren Buffett and Ed Thorpe are both fans of non-transitive dice
- The great book on operations, The Goal, by Elihu Goldratt, has an excellent audio version. And there’s a video clip of Herbie’s hike
- This year there’s been a lot of debate on the topic of free speech and renaming monuments. Scholars at Yale have done a lot of work thinking through these issues and provide a helpful framework for making decisions about them
- Why companies provide free coffee to employees
- There are a few forwards to books that I really liked. One is from the great book Nurture Shock by Po Bronson about how difficult it is to see something even when it’s right in front of you. Another is the forward to Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, which talks about the books 1984 and Brave New World. 1984 warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. In Brave New World, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think
- I wrote this little piece about how our genes underlie who we are. For example, they can tell us why we like cheesecake even when it’s bad for us and tell us if humans are monogamous or not
Work Stuff
This year I’ve moved from Citi to AIG. I’m a Product Manager doing Agile Development. Some definitions:
- Product Manager: Product Managers are the owners of products, setting the goals of products and ensuring they are met. We manage the product, not the people (i.e., the coders). It’s common for the business to need one thing and technology to deliver something else. The product manager is there to ensure that the technology team effectively meets the needs of the business. For a non-technology example of miscommunication of business needs take a look at this cake or this one
- Agile Development: People used to think that you should build software like you build a building. You make detailed plans and then take years to build it. However, we’ve realized over the years that we can solve most key business problems without building the whole software project — we just build the parts that matter. Also, people can start using the software before it’s done — which lets us revise the plans on a regular basis as we see how it’s used
Some resources:
- A product manager is like the producer of a film. Building on that idea, I’ve extracted a number of product management lessons from Pixar
- A great short video from South Park on the importance of planning. First, we steal the underpants … third, we make a profit.
- At big companies, it’s important to communicate the value that a product manager is bringing to the organization to avoid having others take the credit
- Here’s a couple of thoughts on what to build first:
- Overviews
- Cracking the PM Interview is a great book for people looking to get into the field
- Jeff Patton’s book User Story Mapping is extremely helpful in understanding user needs and breaking them down into pieces that can be built
- Mike Cohn has some useful videos to get you up to speed on Agile. They’re a few years old from the Norwegian Developers Conference
- Some great resources to keep you up to speed: Ken Norton’s Bringing the Donuts, Mind the Product’s Prioritized Newsletter and AlphaHQ’s large set of useful resources
How the Cyber World is Merging With the Real World
A decade ago, you had the cyber world and you had the real world. Today, they are becoming increasingly meshed together. Take the company KeyMe. In order to make a copy of your key you just take a picture of your keys and then, if you’re locked out, you can have a key made. This means that any person who could take a picture of your keys (e.g., a valet parking attendant) could break into your house.
Here’s a couple of interesting news stories that show how these worlds are colliding:
- By buying a piece of Madonna’s intimate items, you’d have some of Madonna’s DNA and would literally own part of Madonna. “It is outrageous and grossly offensive that my DNA could be auctioned for sale to the general public,” Madonna says in court papers
- The Internet of Things is great, except when it opens you up to hackers. Last year a couple of hackers took over a car while people were riding in it. Or my favorite hacking story of the year How a Fish Tank Helped Hack a Casino
- North Korean hackers stole $81M (and almost stole $1B) from the Bank of Bangladesh’s account at the New York Federal Reserve. One former British intelligence chief estimates the take from its cyberheists may bring the North as much as $1 billion a year, or a third of the value of the nation’s exports
What I Read / Listen to Everyday
- Next Draft by Dave Pell is a daily email that covers the most important articles of the day in 10 short snippets. It’s my favorite daily news source
- New York Times Morning/Evening Briefing is a morning and evening briefing to summarize the news of the day. It’s a great way to stay up on the news without feeling overwhelmed
- “The Daily” Podcast from the New York Times is a great way to get behind the scenes of the news. It’s fascinating to listen to the actual tape that James Comey “leaked” to Benjamin Wittes or an interview with Derek Black, former white supremacist and David Duke’s godson. BTW, if you want to listen to some great tape, you might want to listen to the infamous Scaramucci tape from the New Yorker Podcast
For the Kids
- Free Range Parenting is a great movement against helicopter parenting
- There’s a profile of Lenore Skenazy, the head of the movement, in the New Yorker and a clip of her on The Daily Show. She current runs Letgrow.org which is a great site on Free Range Parenting
- 50 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do seems like a great book with a similar sensibility. I really want to try some of this stuff out
- Audiobooks
- When it’s hard for the kids to get through a book, we bought an audiobook and a print copy of the book (or borrowed them from the library) so they can follow along. One great set is the Ramona Quimby Collection narrated by Stockard Channing
- You have to get the audio versions of Dr. Seuss books narrated by celebrities. They’re just amazing
- Math
- Festival of the Spoken Nerd and Stand Up Maths are great science and math shows for adults. Take a look at this amazing video of spreadsheets to see what this is all about
- Math Antics is a great YouTube channel on K-12 math topics
- A Math Love Poem
- Blake really likes the games Chemistry Fluxx and Math Fluxx. These are really fun (and somewhat challenging) card games that have a STEM twist. I found out about this from the Holiday Gift Guide from The Kids Should See This which is an awesome video site “for kids of all ages”
- If you want to mesmerize kids with innocuous videos, try dominoes falling down
- Benny’s Rules is a famous math education paper, part of a set of “Disaster Papers,” on how individualized instruction measured in an automated way can go horribly wrong
Tweets and Quotes
- Today’s the day! Archive ready to leave KW, heading for @BeineckeLibrary Yale. Safe journey old friends. — Judy Blume on sending her archives to Yale
- I don’t have a wife or a daughter so I’m really having trouble comprehending how bad sexism is — Rachel Lacker, a very funny woman from the Yale Record humor magazine
- The Movie 2001 today: “Open the pod bay doors, Hal.” “I’m sorry, Dave. I didn’t understand the question.” “Open the pod bay doors, Hal.” “I have a list of eBay results about pod doors, Dave.” — The Economist on the current state of voice recognition technology
- A good team does a lot of friendly front-stabbing instead of backstabbing. Issues are resolved by knowing what they are — John Maeda on killing the elephant in the room
- I’d much rather have a kid with nine fingers than a resourceless kid — Jeff Bezos on letting his kids use power tools
Great Videos:
- What if Millie Dresselhaus, female scientist, were treated like a celebrity. Dresselhaus was the first woman to secure a full professorship at MIT and was awarded the National Medal of Science, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (bestowed by President Barack Obama), the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience, the Enrico Fermi prize and dozens of honorary doctorates. She died earlier this year right after the commercial came out
- A wonderful video that uses Facebook Live’s time delay to build a song from its component tracks
- Google’s DeepMind can learn to play video games just by playing games and having no other training. Here’s a video of it learning to play Breakout
- Chad saves the world is a great Saturday Night Live spoof on how a millennial might respond to an epic quest
- A great joke on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt on Apple’s planned obsolescence
- The HBO show Silicon Valley did a great joke on Mansplaining. The only issue I have is that the real Silicon Valley is probably a lot like this
- People are Awesome is an amazing YouTube channel compiling amazing things that people do. Here’s the best of 2017
- OK Go makes some amazing videos. My favorite recent one is One Moment. They also have a great TED talk about how they come up with their ideas
- Yakov Smirnoff hasn’t been a household name for 20 years but his standup is really funny. Ben Stiller did a funny parody of Yakov’s fall after the fall of the Soviet Union
Great Stuff To Read
- John Hughes (of Brat Pack Fame) wrote the short story “Vacation 58: If Dad hadn’t shot Walt Disney in the leg, it would have been our best vacation ever” which became the basis of his movie National Lampoon’s Vacation
- The toy fad of 2017 was fidget spinners. The Economist has a great overview of the fidget spinner craze
- The title says it all for this one: This Is The Science News Essay You Want To Read
- Michael Schur came up with some very funny names on Parks and Recreation and The Office
- This is the most important word in the Trump’s communications playbook is whataboutism. It’s actually one of Russia’s favorite propaganda tricks
- Donald Trump may be the best example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. The term comes from the article “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” It’s a scientific description of someone who is too dumb to know it. Here’s John Cleese with a video explanation
- Here’s a really interesting image of how people distribute themselves in a park. It’s called a Voronoi diagram and it shows how each person tries to maximize their own space
Cool Tools
- A couple of versions ago, iOS added a Trackpad mode that let you more easily move the cursor around a text field
- Fakespot is a wonderful tool that lets you understand whether an Amazon product is packed with fake reviews. It’s great for understanding which “5 Star” Chinese startups are really making quality products
- This app lets you set the colors on the top of a couple of NYC skyscrapers. Talk about mixed reality!
- My Fitbit Alta HR is an awesome alarm clock. It’s nice to be woken up by a vibration rather than a sound and it’s personal so I can get up without waking up Abigail. Also, it automatically tracks if I wake up in the middle of the night (somewhat useful) and tracks different sleep modes (unclear how useful this is). Either way, there’s some pretty cool graphs of my sleep pattern
- McDonald’s was selling a Chicken McGriddle sandwich in New York earlier this year and it was amazing. Fried chicken between two pancakes infused with maple syrup that you eat with your hands. Then they took it off the menu. But there’s still hope. To order a Chicken McGriddle today order 1 Crispy Chicken Filet and 2 McGriddles after breakfast is over (they don’t have the chicken at breakfast)
- Evergreen Popup Stores: There are a few wonderful stores in NYC that change every month or so. My favorites are Story (a completely new store every month), Sony Square (focuses on a new element of Sony) and Samsung 837 (which varies it’s Virtual Reality lineup significantly every few months). There’s also a number of cool ways to experience Virtual Reality
- Recommendo is a weekly email overview of 6 Cool Tools by the editors of the Cool Tools website.
Thanks for making it through all of this! I wanted to end with something special this year, kind of like the special treat at the end of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Earlier in the year, I made my own business cards. So I wanted to give one to you:
It’s true my friends! You’re Awesome. Let’s Talk. I look forward to catching up with you in the new year.
Rob