February 14, 2023
Dear Leland and Everett,
I have more reasons for writing these letters that I can track, and certainly more than would make for an interesting letter. I’ve decided to work in my reasons as I go, starting today.
My biggest motivation for writing these letters, by far, is a desire to pass along important lessons that I have learned. I have lived an interesting life thus far, and have learned more useful life lessons than I could teach in any reasonable allocation of time.
Perhaps more importantly, teaching requires two things: 1) a willing teacher, and 2) a curious and motivated student. My hope is that by writing (as opposed to, say, lecturing) I will enable you to access these lessons when they are of use to you (as opposed to when they occur to me). You are young today, so there is little point in sharing these lessons with you now. Hopefully, as you mature, you find them useful.
One thing I’ve learned as a manager (I’ve had the good fortune to manage a number of folks thru my career) is that people generally don’t like being told what to do. Another is that concepts are retained poorly, unless they are attached to some story to provide meaning. The most effective technique to guide people I’ve found is to offer my personal experience as an example, along with the lesson I learned for myself. This empowers the audience to decide what from the lesson applies or resonates, but also to discard what is less useful. We all must blaze our own trails, but we all benefit from learning the lessons of those who come before us.
I also want you to see that I am ‘eating my own dog food’, as it were. I want you to see how I am applying these lessons in my own life, and to what effect. If I am applying useful lessons effectively, we should be able to look back in a few months or years and see tangible results.
I offer one example from today, just to underscore the point: I decided to do an hour of cardio today. I had no trouble going to the gym (I’ve already made that a habit, conquering the hardest part of exercise). I had no trouble starting the workout (after all, how hard is it to take the first few steps on an elliptical machine). After a few minutes I looked down to see my progress: 6 minutes. In that moment, demoralization hit. I was already feeling a little tired, and yet I was only 10% finished. I still had 54 minutes to go. Would I be able to finish? Did I still want to do this? Why am I doing this? The self-talk became defeating.
From there I started parsing the workout into more manageable chunks. One thing I’ve learned is that momentum matters: once I complete half a workout, I am unlikely to quit. I believe this relates to what economists refer to as the ‘sunk cost fallacy’, which stipulates that we tend to overvalue items in which we have already invested (and that the more we have invested, the more we are likely to overvalue something). I am therefor purposely leveraging this ‘fallacy’ to my benefit: I know that if I make it through half the workout, I am almost certain to finish, because I wouldn’t want to ‘waste’ the effort I had already put in. So now my goal has changed: instead of finishing a 60-minute workout, my goal is simply to make it to the 30-minute mark.
Aside: I travelled to Costa Rica in my early 20’s. My friend and I took an all day horse ride because, believe it or not, riding a horse took less time than taking a car to our destination (due to the mountainous terrain). The trip had the side benefit of being unbelievably scenic and memorable. Anyway, I distinctly remember that the horses had almost no interest in carrying us early in the trip; we routinely had to cajole our horses into moving forward. As we approached our destination, however, our horses became increasingly motivated to finish. By the end, we had to aggressively restrain our horses to keep them from running at full gallop. If memory serves, one middle-aged woman was thrown from her horse, he was so determined to finish the journey. Point being: the apparent dichotomy between a reluctance to start and a motivation to finish a long journey is far from unique to me; I suspect it is universal, and not just among humans.
I’ve also learned that ~5-minute increments intuitively feel imminently doable to me. I often say to myself: “I can do anything for 5 minutes”. The idea being that I can suffer almost any discomfort for that amount of time. And I also know that workouts often find a rhythm at some point, where I stop struggling and lose track of time in the rhythm of the monotony. So I decided to just aim for the next 5%, or 3-minute interval. I figured if I could make it to 9-minutes (or the next 3-minute interval), that would be 15%. I could then focus on the next 3 minutes, to get to 20%. Sure enough, somewhere around the 17-minute mark I stopped looking at the time, and got lost in the rhythm of the workout.
Of course, the second half of the workout wasn’t ‘easy’. But I kept focusing on my 3-minute increments, with increasing satisfaction that I was approaching the end, and increasing confidence that I would in fact finish.
My former company mastered this approach at scale. I often joke that they figured out how to take a 26-mile marathon and turn it into a series of 100-meter sprints. We spent very little time focused on the ultimate destination. But each Monday we set aggressive targets for the end of the week, and then ‘sprinted’ (translation: worked like hell) to hit those targets by Friday. After a few months, we turned around and marveled at how much we’d accomplished on a relatively compressed timeline.
As I write this, the rest of the world wonders how my former employer generated hit product after hit product, year after year, becoming arguably the most successful company and admired brand in the world. I submit that a cultural mastery of turning marathons into a series of sprints is probably the most underrated aspect of my former employers’ success.
The lesson: any time a worthy goal feels unmanageable, divide it into manageable pieces. Focus on setting 1 accomplishable goal, then achieving it. Then repeat.
I love you,
Dad
Letters to Leland 