How many times have you heard that you should “just do it”? How many times have you felt like you should just get over your various hangups and limitations and just get out there and kick ass? How many times have you tried? How many times have you failed?

Maybe for people who find it easy to accomplish things, “just do it” is somehow useful advice, because they’ve been holding back because of doubt, rather than a lack of willpower. Or maybe it’s the kind of hackneyed, useless advice that’s never really worth much to anyone, because the only people who can apply it are those who don’t need it.

Regardless, it doesn’t seem very helpful to me.

Surely even the superhumans among us who have discipline like steel would agree that it’s more complicated than “just do it”, that there is an element of strategy involved in self-improvement and accomplishment. After all, who would propose that it would be a good idea for a chronic over-eater to get a job in a donut shop? Who would suggest that a recovering alcoholic get a job as a bartender?

But do these tricks and strategies really make any difference in the long run for normal people? Or are we just avoiding the terrible truth that we’re simply lazy and weak?

Let me tell you about one of the most fascinating and terrifying research studies I’ve ever heard of. In the late 1960s, a psychologist at Stanford named Walter Mischel designed a series of experiments to understand delayed gratification in children. Almost 700 children participated in the experiments over a period of several years, which consisted of leaving a child alone in a room with a marshmallow or cookie or some other kind of treat, with the instructions that they could have the single treat now, or they could wait a few minutes and have several.

The researchers took footage of these children trying to resist temptation, and the various degrees of anguish displayed while they tried to avoid giving in. As you might expect, many of the children weren’t able to wait more than a few minutes before grabbing the treat; some weren’t able to wait more than a few seconds after the adult left the room before they gave in to temptation. But there were kids who displayed a penchant for restraint, waiting as long as 15 minutes until the adult returned to give them the reward of several cookies.

There are two interesting things about this study.

The first is that the kids who displayed the greatest self-restraint didn’t just sit there and stare at the cookie for 15 minutes. They employed some mental “tricks” to distract themselves from the temptation, tricks which seem to have been effective. Even something as simple as just not looking at the treat seems to have been effective. This skill of understanding how the mind works is called metacognition, and no one explicitly taught it to these kids. They just had it.

The second interesting thing about this study is that this wasn’t the end of it. Milschel (the psychologist) had recruited kids his daughter went to school with, and over the years he periodically asked her how the kids were doing as they grew up. He began to notice some patterns emerging.

Milschel was curious, so he put together a series of surveys and sent them to all the students who participated in the study, asking for info on what they’re doing, their grades, their SAT scores, etc. And he continued doing this over the next thirty years, tracking these people through their teenage and young adult years, right up to the present.

And here’s what he found: the kids who displayed self-restraint all those years ago tended to do better at…everything. They had better grades, fewer behavioral problems, better focus, better friendships, went to better colleges, had better careers, better marriages, a higher socio-economic status, better health, fewer addictions, etc. A kid who was able to wait the full 15 minutes (ten years ago!) had an SAT score, on average, 210 points higher than a kid who could only wait a minute. 210 points.

Let me tell you why this is terrifying: it implies two very, very important points:

1. Self-control supersedes raw intelligence

A related study has shown that ability to delay gratification is a better predictor of academic success than IQ. And that makes sense, because no matter how smart you are, you still have to put in some amount of work to learn the things you need to learn. But that’s not the terrifying part:

2. Self-control may be ingrained in our personality, even genetic in origin

That self-control supersedes raw intelligence is only terrifying to a super-genius, but that self-control may be outside of our control is more sobering. There’s an aspect of fatalism that these experiments reveal that really makes me uncomfortable. The behavior and self-control (or lack thereof) of these kids at the age of four had a strong correlation with their path through life, including their grades, careers, income level, health, even relationships.

So what if, like me, you’re not one of those people who would have done well in this test at the age of four? Is there any hope for us?

Honestly, it’s probably too early to tell how big of a disadvantage we’re at. But there are some bright spots that may provide some solace:

1. The variance isn’t given – The results of this study that I’ve read give the average performance of the subjects, but not the variance. So it could be that the kids who lacked self-restraint did worse as a whole, but there were individuals in that group who did much better. If so, maybe you can be one of those individuals.

2. Maybe we’re tracking the wrong things − It could be that these survey results are tracking all the wrong variables, and that the people who did not display delayed gratification are actually happier, despite being poorer, less educated, unhealthier, and more likely to abuse drugs. However, I think it very unlikely that this is the case. If it was just tracking income, then that might be a possibility, but tracking relationship status, health factors, and propensity to abuse drugs makes me think that there’s probably a pretty strong correlation between the survey results and overall happiness. But you never know.

3. This link between delayed gratification and performance at life wasn’t known to the subjects, but it is known to us. Now that we’ve observed this principle, perhaps we can change the outcome. Maybe impulsivity and self-control are things that we can learn to control: there’s evidence to suggest that willpower is a resource that can be depleted, just like a muscle. If that’s true, then perhaps like a muscle, strategic exercise of willpower over time can strengthen it. Just like the successful kids employed some mental tricks (metacognition) to overcome temptation, maybe we can learn more about how our minds work and surpass our baser instincts.

Who knows why some of us have trouble avoiding junk food, oversleeping, or saving for retirement? It might be the way we were raised or it could be simple genetics. Regardless, there seems to be some hope: Milschel has had success in teaching children some simple tricks to learn how to avoid giving in to temptation. And they work; after just a few minutes of coaching, the kids display a greatly improved ability to delay gratification.

So don’t give up; just keep learning how your mind works and devising strategies to trick it into submission. Maybe someday we’ll be able to match those amazing four-year-olds who could sit in a small room, alone, with a delicious marshmallow in front of them, and not budge.

Don’t look at that marshmallow!

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One of the quotes that stood out to me was this one from a teacher of Ms. Portman:

“I’ve taught at Harvard, Dartmouth and Vassar, and I’ve had the privilege of teaching a lot of very bright kids…there are very few who are as inherently bright as Natalie is, who have as much intellectual horsepower, who work as hard as she did. She didn’t take a single thing for granted.”

She didn’t take a single thing for granted. Here’s someone who had the start of a fantastic career and a clear road to stardom. The most natural thing to do with her academics would be to just coast. Or hire a private tutor to complete high school, like many underage celebrities do. But she didn’t do that. She pushed forward and accomplished as much as she could. She even published in a peer-reviewed journal while at Harvard (giving her an Erdős–Bacon number of 7).

She’s not alone though; many celebrities are incredibly smart, driven people off the screen as well. James Franco, nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in 127 Hours, apparently wasn’t satisfied with his film career and reenrolled at UCLA in 2006, receiving permission to take up to 61 (!) credit hours (as opposed to the normal 19) while still acting. He graduated in 2008 with a 3.5 GPA and moved to New York to simultaneously attend graduate school at Columbia University’s MFA writing program, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts for filmmaking, and Brooklyn College for fiction writing. Naturally, he also occasionally committed to North Carolina’s Warren Wilson College for poetry. He received his MFA from Columbia and is now a PhD student at Yale and planning on attending the Rhode Island School of Design as well.

How depressing

I could go on…check out Dolph Lundgren or Mayim Bialik (now playing Dr. Farah Fowler on the hit sitcom The Big Bang Theory).

These people had already arrived in one sense. They had every reason to relax and just enjoy their success in their field, but they didn’t. They kept pressing forward, learning new things, reinventing themselves.

This is a lesson I constantly have to remind myself of. (Warning: egotistical statement coming up)  I’m not a big success yet, but I’m doing OK. In the last five years I’ve seen my income more than quadruple and earned the freedom to work when and where I want, on what I want. And I’m in the process of separating my time from my income. But sometimes I catch myself slowing down, subconsciously thinking that I’ve arrived somehow. Nothing could be further from the truth.

As the Apostle Paul said:

“I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”

Paul is obviously not talking about his career here, but this isn’t taking his words out of context. I think that being on guard against complacency is a principle to be applied to every area of life. It’s a constant danger that we have to be aware of.

On the other hand, where does contentment fit in? There’s a lot to be said for being grateful for what you have, instead of always striving to have more. There must be a sense of balance in terms of striving to be our best and not holding ourselves to an impossible standard; we should be proud of our accomplishments if we worked hard and did our best. So where is the line between contentment and complacency?

After some reflection, I think the difference is in the distinction between what we have and who we are. None of us are perfect, so while we shouldn’t beat ourselves for our limitations, neither should we be satisfied with them. We should always be pushing ourselves to new challenges and opportunities for growth, whether that’s taking a full-time course load at an Ivy League school while being cast in an Academy Award nominated performance, or just applying for that management position that’s just a little outside our comfort zone.

Just keep pushing forward and never be afraid to reinvent yourself. Who knows what your wikipedia entry might read someday?

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One of the things pointed out to me was that a huge difference between a friend and an advertising network is that a friend has your best interests at heart, while an advertiser doesn’t. Ignoring the fact that this isn’t always true (both Ford and Fred would be happy for me if I bought a new truck, even though it would be a lousy financial decision), in a world of hyper-targeted and hyper-relevant advertising, would we see advertisers and consumers interests align more? Maybe much of the anger that’s currently directed at these types of intrusive advertising is because we’ve never had really hyper-relevant advertising.

Or have we? Enter Google.

One thing that I find really interesting in talking with people who are very vocal about their distaste for advertising (in general) is that many of them don’t seem to mind ads against their Google search results. In fact, for many tech people I know, ads on Google are literally the only ads they ever notice, let alone click on. Why is this? I think it’s because Google offers this hyper-relevant advertising experience to some degree, but in a slightly different context.

We find out about new things in two ways: either we go looking for it, or we discover it through serendipity.

In the first case, we have a problem or a question, and we use tools like Google and Wikipedia and a knowledgable friend to find the answer.

In the second case, we still have the problem or the question, we just don’t know we do. So the answer finds us. It could be from a friend, from a book we happen to read, a story overhead on the train, etc. But the point is that we weren’t looking for this information, it found us.

Google was really the first company to nail hyper-relevant advertising for the first scenario. We go to Google to search for things, and we expect to get an answer back. And while building a search engine like Google isn’t easy, it’s a hell of a lot easier to show a relevant answer (whether ad or organic result) to an asked question than to a question a user didn’t know they had.

How do you show users an answer to a question they don’t even know about yet? And more importantly, how do you do it perfectly, so that they always care about that answer? That’s not just hard, that’s almost impossible. But that’s what hyper-targeted advertising for discovery (instead of search) would look like.

The only way you could do this would be to create a near-flawless model of a person, their relationships, their tastes, their hopes and aspirations. And to do that, you need absolutely ridiculous amounts of information about them. You would have to follow them around day and night and record every tiny thing they did.

And right now, no one on the planet is better positioned for that than Facebook is. They have it all, gobbling up billions of datapoints per day about people’s tastes, relationships, habits, everything. Only Google comes close to having that much data, but they don’t have anywhere close to the amount of social data that Facebook has. And who we know and interact with matters deeply, so having that data is crucial.

This is why I think Facebook could be worth the valuation they’ve got now. They can build an advertising network that offers just a glimmer of the kind of hyper-relevancy that I’m envisioning. Imagine being shown a special discount on Zappos on a pair of shoes that you were discussing with a friend yesterday. Or a buy-one-get-one-free deal on Fandango for The Green Hornet because you like superhero movies AND because you and your cousin Joey are both big Seth Rogen fans and Joey’s going to be visiting tomorrow and you’re not working because you switched shifts with Sabrina, who is off to a spanish lesson that she booked because she’s always wanted to learn it AND she’s visiting Argentina with her friend Eric, who got a great deal on the hotel because he’s trying to bulk up and the hotel has a great gym and…

You get the idea.

Now, if all this sounds a bit dystopian, I understand. A perfect model of you in a computer that’s predicting what you will and won’t be interested in? Even if it is a long way off, the thought is downright creepy. But I’m honestly not sure if that’s because it genuinely is creepy (and always will be), or if it’s because we just can’t imagine such a world. It might just be that we can’t picture a world where advertisers interests are aligned with consumers and people enjoy ads because they’re always helpful and relevant. A world where advertising genuinely improves the lives of everyone it touches.

Nah. I tend to think it’s just creepy, but it is fun to think about. What do you think?

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As a result, my goals for my blog have shifted a little. I originally started blogging every day without a clear purpose, but as my income has grown and I’ve received more emails from users who have enjoyed my posts, I’ve decided to make blogging more of a priority. I’m not in any hurry to do it full-time or anything, but I now think that’s a probable outcome in the next few years, and I’m going to focus my blogging efforts in 2011 on that goal.

Now, if you’re reading this and you’re thinking that I’m “selling out” or that I should really just be blogging for fun, not to make money, you’re not alone with your concerns. I’ve wrestled a lot with this question, because I really don’t want to just be adding to the noise and writing purely for the sake of making money. All I can really promise you is that I’ll do my best to add value with every post. I’ll leave it up to you to gauge whether I’m successful, and unsubscribe if not.

Speaking of unsubscribing, one of the big things I’ve learned is that I need to focus on building my subscriber base. My initial traffic came almost exclusively from Hacker News, which is awesome, and I’m really grateful for that push. But I’m increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of being dependent on the Hacker News audience for all of my traffic and income. The community seems to be deteriorating in some ways, likely as a result of growth, and it’s becoming a lot more noisy. Building a relationship with a subscriber base means that I don’t have to worry about winning my audience all over again every single day. It also means that I can have a better conversation with the people who enjoy what I write, and ensure that I’m adding value for them.

I’ll talk in a later post about the specific methods I’m using to grow my subscriber base, but I’m really excited to see how things turn out. If you haven’t subscribed already, please do so now; I’ll be posting tons of great content in the coming weeks and months and you don’t want to miss out. Subscribe right now.

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In 1869, the GDP / person was $2310. In 2005, it was $37,600 [1]. I know what you’re thinking: inflation! Nope, both of those numbers are adjusted for year 2000 dollars. That means that the US produces 1500% more per person every year than it did 140 years ago. That would mean that the average person [2] is 1500% wealthier than they would have been 140 years ago. That’s pretty amazing. Where is this wealth coming from? We’re creating it out of thin air.

There’s a scene in the movie “Lord of War” where a cargo plane is emergency-landed on a dirt road in a poor country in Africa. In 24 hours, the plane has been completely stripped down to the carcass, as locals literally dismantle it and cart off the pieces. It reminds me of those old movies where an army of ants devour a dead bird or something.

Anyway, I was watching and I was thinking about how that scene is a good example of wealth destruction in practice. That plane had tremendous value as a cargo plane, worth millions. But by breaking the pieces apart, it was reduced to being used for makeshift shelters and other purposes that plywood and scrap metal would do for.

The same process is true in reverse: what’s the value of the raw materials that go into an Airbus A-380? I have no idea, but I know it’s a hell of a lot less than the $350 million that each one costs. By combining the materials in an innovative way, we’re creating true wealth.

The growth in wealth is because we’re creating wealth itself. Human creativity and ingenuity has incredible power and promise. Think of what life was like 140 years ago, and what it’s like today. Is it any wonder that we’re 1500% wealthier? And this process is actually accelerating; we’re building wealth faster now than at any point in history (the recession notwithstanding).

And it’s not like we’re getting close to the end; I firmly believe that by the end of the 21st century, we can build the global GDP per person to be more than $1 million. And that’s inflation-adjusted 2000 dollars. But it might not happen, and if it doesn’t, it will likely be for one or more of these reasons:

• We don’t invest in education like we should, and human innovation declines
• Wars or other mass casualty events destroy wealth faster than we can create it

After decades of gloom, it looks like poverty in Africa might finally be falling. If they have the chance, if wars and plagues and famines don’t wipe them out, if Africa stands up, can you imagine how much wealth the people of Africa will be able to create over the next century? I can’t, but I hope we get to find out.

And seriously, watch Lord of War if you haven’t seen it.

1. http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic448946.files/lecture_facts_growth.pdf
2. Note I said that the “average person” is 1500% wealthier. Not everyone is.

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Google’s international HQ is in Dublin, and fully 88% of Google’s international revenue goes through Ireland, which has fairly low corporate taxes. This is no accident: the Irish know that probably several percent of their workforce is only employed because international corporations are setup there for tax reasons. So lower taxes can be a great way to invite foreign investment, stimulate the economy, and most importantly: create jobs.

Big deal, right? Anyone who takes macroeconomics knows this. However, what I think is interesting is the long-term outlook for human employment over the next 50 years. In case you didn’t notice, technology is taking over. We have robots doing a wide variety of tasks that humans used to do, technology makes one human as productive as five used to be, and there’s a lot of industries where even fewer humans would be employed if it wasn’t for artificial barriers to progress (unions, for example). But eventually those barriers will fall as well, due to simple economics. I read somewhere that some economists theorize that many of the jobs lost during the recession will never come back. Corporations didn’t really need those people anymore, due to technological efficiency, and used the recession as a good excuse to trim the fat. Regardless, it’s not hard to see that as robots and other technological advances become more widespread, we’ll need fewer employees, particularly in the blue-collar industries.

So in the future, I think international competition for jobs will be fierce. So fierce, in fact, that it will dwarf the concern over social safety nets like free healthcare, retirement, unemployment, etc. No government will be able to pay for those things if half their workforce is unemployed, so they’ll be much more likely to cut taxes to attract foreign companies and create jobs.

Well, that’s what would make sense anyway. Then again, we just spent a trillion dollars (that we don’t have) to stimulate the economy. How’s that going for us? So yeah, maybe we’re all just screwed.

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Below are a few examples of what I mean. The average person might not understand how these things work, but I think they’d understand what they are.

“Online bookstore with largest selection”

“Auction off your stuff, online”

“Instantly search the entire web”

“Orbital rocket launches at a fraction of the cost”

“Send money to anyone with an email address”

“Solar panels that are 10x as efficient”

And my personal favorite:

“These cars drive themselves.”

Do you really need more of an elevator pitch than that?

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Dreaming with your mind alone gets you nowhere. Today is my 28th birthday, and for too many of those years, I’ve lived in a fantasy-land, dreaming of what I’ll do Someday. I make a lot of plans. I consider myself a person of great passion and vision. But after 28 years, that hasn’t taken me nearly as far as I thought it would. If you had asked me at 18 where I would be at 28, I would have probably been outwardly modest, but I thought I’d be running the world by now. So what happened? Somewhere along the way, I got really caught up in the idea of accomplishment. It become more about the end goal, the destination. I lost sight of the importance of the journey, of living well, of being a good man, a good husband. I thought those were byproducts of the destination, just more accomplishments along the way. But I’m starting to realize that they’re really the whole point. That life is more about the inputs, the journey, and who you are than it is about what you accomplish. And it’s really difficult to change who you are from inside your comfort zone.

Birthdays are usually full of angst for me. But this birthday has been different, somehow. It’s been a really good year so far. There have been disappointments and setbacks, but something is different. If I had to put my finger on just one thing, I’d say that I feel better about who I am than I ever have. I’m proud of my dreams for the future. But mostly, I’m proud of the fact that my dreams have escaped the prison of my mind, that I’m risking something, that I’m working harder than ever on building a foundation of character and discipline.

Aristotle said: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” I’d put the emphasis in that quote on the word “do”. You can’t reach for the stars with your mind. You can’t play it safe and hope that someday things will magically change. Ultimately, you have to step out, take risks, do the work, do something.

So don’t stop dreaming. Dream, and dream big, but dream with your hands.

Note: the title of this post comes from a similar phrase in this recent Corvette ad . I was surprised when I googled it and found absolutely no results, as I think it’s a perfect and succinct way of expressing a complex thought.

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It’s a nice ideal, and one that perhaps we should aim for, but here’s why it won’t happen for awhile:

1. The technology that’s widely in use just isn’t there yet. Many of MIT’s OpenCourseWare courses have only notes, no video, and the ones that have video often lack resolution to be able to read the notes on the board. Also, has anyone ever used Blackboard? It’s horrible. Unfortunately, Blackboard is basically a patent troll company wrapped in the guise of an online education software company, and their patent portfolio hangs like a dark cloud over this space, crushing a lot of potential innovations.

2. Not everyone has the tenacity to sit through four years of college classes and really learn something. Even fewer have the dedication to do it on their own, remotely, with no human interaction other than a webcam to guide them.

3. Schools such as MIT serve as a filter and a credibility indicator. They have great professors, of course, but anyone can obtain the raw knowledge they teach. What’s harder to obtain on your own is the stamp of approval that you’ve learned the material. Anyone who went to a top school will tell you that having it on their resume makes a difference in getting a response from a hiring manager. Many people look at such a resume and think: “MIT…must be pretty smart.” That’s the power of a credibility indicator at work.

4. The people that are needed to make such a huge shift happen are 1) parents, 2) government (for incentives), 3) existing institutions of higher learning, 4) employers (to hire these graduates). Aside from the organizational incentives for these groups, which also are not favorable to such a shift, the people who make up each of these groups are likely to have degrees that are granted using the current model, and thus none are likely to want to undermine their own education choices. What’s the incentive for them to break with status quo?

5. School isn’t just about what you learn…the best schools serve as a kind of bridging ground between childhood and adulthood. Perhaps there are better ways to accomplish this, but some kind of “GED for higher education” hardly seems to be a good solution. I’d rather hire employees who are smart and dedicated than knowledgeable. Most of what they need to know can be taught, but character and raw intelligence can’t be, or at least not easily. Getting good enough grades in high school to get into a great school and then doing well in that school indicate both mental aptitude and the perseverance that I want in people who work for me.

Let me be clear: I absolutely love iTunes U, OpenCourseWare, and all of the other really innovative online education options that we have at our fingertips. I’m just skeptical that they serve the same purpose as college, and even if they do, that our society has the willpower and foresight to be able to replace the college industry so easily. What are your thoughts?

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And that’s depressing.

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