It seems so simple, but the fascinating thing about life is that the things and people we encounter so rarely do cut through the noise.  Instead it seems like most endeavors of consequence are messy, complicated and hard, and it’s not always clear why.

When you approach almost everything with the mentality of “how do I cut out the noise?” life becomes a very magical experience where a little effort in the right place can yield big results.

I think can think of at least 3 areas of my own life where cutting out the noise yielded big results.

First up is playing the piano.  I took traditional piano lessons for about 8 years and spent literally thousands of hours learning, practicing, and occasionally performing.  But for all my hard work, if I heard a cool song on the radio, the idea of playing it on the piano without every note written out was hopeless.  I could play these amazing, technically difficult, beautifully written classical pieces, but I couldn’t play the simplest pop song.  What the hell?

So I bought a bunch of books like “how to play the piano despite years of lessons”, Jamey Aebersold jazz lessons, the Jazz Piano book, DVDs on playing by ear, learn to play Gospel Piano, and a few others I can’t remember.  I learned a little from each of those courses, but the one course that really shined through was the cheesily-marketed “learn to play by ear in under 20 hours” course.

This course dispensed with all but maybe 5% of music theory, disregarded scales, and ignored just about everything else from “traditional” piano teaching methods and focused instead on a few key principles: to figure out a song, start with a few notes, then figure out the chords but you know it’s only going to be 1 of 4 chords for this reason, use a few different variations with your left hand, and a few other nuances and that was it.

Earlier tonight, I was playing off a chords-only version of Hallelujah by Jeff Buckley, my wife heard me play it, asked me to teach her, and so I shared the play by ear method with her.  She also had taken about 10 years of lessons and got a lot out of it but was left helpless against pop songs without the music, too.

The amazing thing was that in about 15 minutes, I was able to teach her enough information about the method that within another 30 minutes, she was playing that song plus 2 others by ear pretty well!  With a minimum of effort, she got a huge amount of improvement and is excited to practice now because she sees exactly what to improve to play even better.

I claim to be no piano teaching genius, and admittedly my wife has years of lessons to draw on, but the key point here is that based on all the methods I studied many years ago, I knew which one cut through the noise for me, and sure enough it did the same for her.

The second example is learning to speak foreign languages.  Like every other American high school student I took at least 2 years of foreign language study (4 years of Spanish in my case).  Four years and thousands of hours of study — again! — this time left me helpless against a native Spanish speaker.  It’s one thing to be helpless against a native Japanse speaker when you’ve never learned Japanese, but to study something for 4 years and be completely and utterly ineffective by every measure is without a doubt an education failure.

But I love learning foreign languages and so I hunted around for some third-party courses.  Everyone now knows Rosetta Stone, of course, because it’s extremely well-marketed.  Everyone’s heard of Pimsleur for some reason.  I tried those and others and found just more of the same — subtle variations on rote memorization.

But then I discovered a course that was marketed as the “language teacher of the stars” and which claimed to get you conversational in as little as 10 hours.  Like the “learn to play by ear” course it seemed incredible, literally not believable.  But I figured it was worth a shot.

So I tried out the French course.  At the time, I happend to be dating a girl who was fluent in French so I also had someone to practice with.  Amazingly, within 10 hours, I was able to conduct complete conversations in French.  I didn’t know everything obviously, but I knew the 70% of what mattered and so was able to communicate.

In fact, the course even makes the point that the English language has over 200,000 words but if you count all the words in a single edition of the New York Times, you find I believe less than 2,000 unique words.  So, you can literally cut through the noise in this situation by focusing on the 2% of words in any language that are used regularly.

Anyway, the course was absolutely amazing and cost all of $80.  If you’re interested, check out my foreign language hero, Michel Thomas, for more info.  Sadly, Michel Thomas passed away in 2007, but his courses are still available.  A very cool documentary on him is also available on Youtube.

Again, we see the power of cutting through the noise.  Four years and thousands of hours of Spanish left me helpless in the face of a simple conversation, but 10 hours of focused work enabled me to be almost fully conversational in French.  Wow.

My third and final example is business.  One thing I have learned about starting and growing a company is that you don’t don’t always know what you should focus on.  In such situations, you make an informed guess, check with colleagues and your instincts, and then make a decision.

But there are just huge amounts of uncertainty in business.  In fact, it seems that whenever there’s high uncertainty between going from Point A to Point B, you take a lot of wrong turns until you ultimately stumble on the path that gives you the clarity of being able to cut through the noise.

In business, cutting through the noise means understanding what feature of the software will make a big impact on sales and customer satisfaction but maybe requires little investment of time and energy, or what marketing approach to take, or where to sell your product, or how to position it, or any other one of a million things.

The reality is that if you knew the optimal route to build, market, and sell a product from day 1 you could do it in a third of the time it takes to bring a new product to market.  But the reality is that you will make countless wrong turns along the way, course-correct, and get back on the right track.  Only in hindsight do you develop perfect clarity about how to move ahead on things.

So there it is:

• Most endeavors of consequence involve high degrees of uncertainty in going from Point A to Point B
• Uncertainty = lack of clarity = lots of noise to cut through
• Cutting through the noise is hard and non-obvious, but once you’re able to do it, the results are spectacular

A frame is basically the set of beliefs, contexts, and assumptions that implicitly sit behind everything you communicate.  The author argues that when two people meet, their frames eventually “clash” and that only one frame can win out.  This concept was also discussed in The Game by Neil Strauss, but it was presented there in the context of attracting girls, not clients.

Anyway, after I finished reading Pitch Anything, I have been blessed with a special insight into how I and others think, and to the social dynamics underlying most business transactions.

Take sales, for example.  When I first started out doing sales, my mentality was always about understanding what the client was saying as precisely as possible and, to the greatest extent possible, providing him with exactly what he requested.  But it turns out that’s not the best way to do business.  Often times, I’ve found, people respect when you challenge them because they see it as an opportunity for growth.  I realized one day that with myself, when someone challenges me head-on, I find them really interesting and then start engaging about why they disagree.

So, basically, I stopped unconditionally accepting the frame of my client, and started to present my own frame.  I don’t have to “win” the frame discussion, but at least today I get to mentally decide what I want to do and recognize what’s happening.

Another example is when I was out raising money for Omedix.  In that context, the frames concept was ESSENTIAL.

I don’t know why, but somehow when you’re asking for money from someone the default view is skepticism.  The objective is not to reinforce your already esteemed reputation, but to challenge the notion that you in fact have no idea what you’re doing and are stupidly pursuing a worthless idea.

And there it is again, the frame game.  Either I agree to accept the investor’s frame — that I’m actually quite clueless and would be a terrible investment — or they eventually come around to accepting mine — that I’m special and they’ll be very happy a few years from now that they invested.

I remember one investor in particular — for whom, incidentally, I have great respect and have learned a lot! — told me that he thinks our market is too crowded and too mature, and there’s just no opportunity left.  That was an assumption with more assumptions and beliefs underlying it that had to be challenged before we could do business together.  In that case, I was able to respond in writing, and so I took the time to deeply think through all the reasons I disagreed.  Ultimately, I’m happy to say that story had a happy ending.

I think the final context in which the frames concept shows up in business is when I’m meeting with other CEO’s.  I remember about 3 years ago I went to the Health 2.0 conference and met a CEO of a health content company.  They were a growing company, profitable, and making revenues in the millions at the time.  My company was — at least in my mind — very small by comparison.

I was curious about his business model since it was all based on advertising and I’d been reading recently that advertising as a primary business model was starting to die (a trend I think which never really bore out), but anyway, I decided to approach him and ask him his thoughts.

Me: “So I understand you guys are basically an advertising model, and your job is really to attract more traffic to your site to have more impressions for advertisers.  I’m curious if you see yourself sticking with that business model long-term?”

Other Dude: “Are you kidding?  Of course we are.  Thanks for your question.”

And with that, he turned away and started conversation with someone else.  And what did I do?  I hung my head down and walked away, too.  In that situation, I let his frame of “I am a savvy businessman, highly successful, and don’t need to explain myself to anyone who dares to insult my company” dominate my frame of “I’m curious about other company’s business models.”  It’s a silly, trivial example, but at the time, I just didn’t have the confidence to stand up and push back.

Today, when someone throws that kind of attitude my way, I interpret that in terms of frames, and start making mental calculations about whether I choose to accept his frame or challenge it.  It’s a wonderfully empowering concept.

Anyway, my summary points on all this are:

• The concept of frames is very cool.
• They come up in business all the time.
• It’s okay to disagree with people and assert yourself and your frame.
• Sometimes people even respect you more for it.

Thrashing n. To expend a disproportionately high amount of energy relative to the quality of output you receive

When I was younger and looked at successful companies, I simply could not for the life of me understand how they ever went from NOTHING to what they were today. The modern equivalent would be like asking “How did Jamba Juice launch hundreds of stores across the country? How did that start?” It made sense to me that if you raised a massive amount of money and then immediately bought all the capital equipment and hired all the people you needed then you’d at least be capable of serving all the customers, and that the massive revenue from the customers would balance out your massive expenses…but how did it all come to be from NOTHING? It seemed like magic to me.

And from this line of thought I embarked on what I believe is the fundamental fallacy of entrepreneurial thinking: asking the question “what does a company need to do to succeed?”

What’s wrong with that rather innocent question? Well, it’s missing a critical component that ultimately matters more than anything else.

Time.

If I were speaking to my self from 10 years ago today I would make a very important point of clarifying that the real question is not how can you grow a company to be successful. The real question is, how can you learn to be successful in the shortest possible time?

A college professor once told me: “Given enough time, every single one of you could completely master the subject I’m about to teach.  But the problem is you don’t have enough time and neither do I.  So you’re going to have to figure it out in one semester while you take all your other classes, too.”  What a perfect example of the same phenomenon.  When you go to school, the question isn’t “what can I do, no matter the cost, to get the highest possible grade in this one class”, the question is “how can I get the best grades in all my classes this semester while still having lots of time for fun?”.

I would say for myself that I have experienced more personal and business growth in the last 12 months than in the prior 3 years combined.  One of the fundamental differences?  I’ve started imposing more constraints on myself than just “learning how to be successful.”  I think about how I spend my time on each of my days.  If I feel like I’m thrashing a little bit (see definition at the beginning of the article), then I know something’s wrong and I invest some time to assess what’s going on.

I think one of the main differences for myself is that in the past year I’ve been fortunate enough to find some amazing mentors.  These are people whose accomplishments I am blown away by, who I have a great personal relationship with, and who are willing to give me input on ambiguous issues that come up.  After enough conversations, you basically start to pick up the same patterns of learning and the lessons that they accumulated over a lifetime.  Mentorship, I’ve come to realize, is literally the primary mechanism through which society evolves itself.

I mean, think about it.  If you didn’t know how to write but you knew how to speak, how ridiculously hard would it be to invent this concept of an alphabet, which combines different “letters” together to form “words” which are expressed in “sentences” which are organized in “paragraphs” and annotated by “punctuation.”  Writing is such a basic thing and yet figuring out writing from scratch would take probably a millennium.  But learning writing?  Well, a few years in school.

That’s how it feels since I’ve been fortunate enough to find mentors.  The “learning on my own” process is shortcut by about 99%.

When I think about how much thrashing I’ve done at different periods in my business career, it just makes me sad.  As Mark Cuban says, you can make as many mistakes as you want in business as long as you don’t make a really big one.  So, yeah, I avoided a really big mistake, but I think about how much time I spent on some things that one great conversation with the right person could have saved me from.  I mean, really, think about it.  The idea that a single 1-hour conversation could save you months of work?

And that’s really what it comes down to in the end.  The enemy of entrepreneurial success is not failure.  The real enemy of entrepreneurial success is thrashing.  What would you rather be?  Moderately successful at age 30 where you have another 70 years to apply the lessons you have learned, spend money, earn money, love, live life, grow, etc.  Or ultra-successful at age 80 where you’ve spent the bulk of your life learning how to actually figure out how to be ultra-successful.

Life, of course, rarely presents such black & white choices and the greater point here is really about how given enough time, sure, just about anyone could learn to be as successful as they wanted, but that time is precious, and scarce, and should be spent thoughtfully and purposefully.  A day spent making awesome progress on something you care about is infinitely more satisfying than a day spent thrashing.

“We are hugely in favor of the technical founder. We will generally focus on companies started by strong technologists who know exactly what they want to build and how they are going to build it.”
- Marc Andreessen

I’ve always prided myself on being a “technical founder.” Basically, it means that if I were hired as a dedicated software engineer I could make a pretty meaningful contribution to a software product, but that my primary role is to guide the growth of the company as CEO. I used to think that being a technical founder was an absolute advantage over non-technical founders since not only could I do the business thing, but I could really understand at a deep technical level how viable something is, and I also know what’s possible, which enables me to come up with product ideas and visions that non-technical founders might not be able to.

But life has this funny thing where our biggest strength can also be our biggest weakness. The trick is being honest with yourself about what they are.

On the positive side, being technical is wonderfully empowering. When I talk with our development team, we review details down to the database diagrams and how that will ultimately affect the product vision. I know with confidence at a deep technical level how powerful our software is and how that power can be leveraged in the future. I can formulate ideas for products based on knowledge of our database schemas, recognize problems that have high value to a client and are technically less challenging, or have an appreciation for those problems — like online registration, for example — that are actually quite complex and require considerable thinking.

I realize I love technology so much that these conversations are pure joy for me.

On the negative side, though, loving technology so much means you think in terms of technology. During engineering or product development meetings that works great. But when it comes time to put on the CEO hat, a mindshift is required. Because in CEO mode, those technical details are not empowering. In fact, they’re the opposite, they just get in the way.

Earlier today I had the opportunity to speak with an accomplished healthcare IT entrepreneur who could probably reasonably consider himself technical as well (MIT graduate). As I reflected on our conversation, I realized that there were moments in our conversation where he asked me questions that had a business — not technical — spirit behind them, yet I answered as if I were an engineering consultant, not a CEO.

The problem? My technical mind interprets his question first and foremost on a literal level and launches into a literal response! And sure enough that’s exactly my comfort zone! Comprehensive, technical responses.

But the funny thing is when I’m surrounded by businesspeople who only want to speak in high-level terms and I absorb their high-level mindsets for a small amount of time, I find I quickly adapt to the high-level thinking. Questions asked with a business spirit are answered in a business spirit, even if they have a technical element to them.

And this is the domain of the CEO. You step outside of the trees and speak only in terms of forests. You use the background technical information as minimally as possible, calling on it only when the situation makes a special request for it. You transfrom from being precise and comprehensive — a critical trait when designing software — to being loose and general.

Sometime this year it finally dawned on me why the CEO has to speak and think in these terms: because no one else cares about your details. They only listen to what your “proposition” is and then make a decision about whether you appear legit or not. The details simply aren’t important.

And sure enough we see this phenomenon in other spheres of life, too. I was SHOCKED to discover that one of the worst ways to sell software is to show it. Instead, the more you talk about it and the less you show it, the more inclined people are to buy it. Why? Because most people don’t care about details.

To summarize the conclusions in this post:

• Being a technical founder is awesome
• But watch out for situations where it gets in the way

Ultimately, I’ve found that different people respond to different styles. But if there is a “default style,” I believe the conductor who empowers the musicians to perform the music in their own style while providing subtle yet meaningful guidance on context, feeling, and intent produces the most beautiful music.

http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/sep2008/sb20080916_288698.htm

I feel these kinds of counterintuitive moves have a deeper wisdom in them.  Conventional wisdom says “why would ever induce someone who we just spent 4 weeks training to quit?”  A more zen approach says “we only want to work with people who really want to work with us, and we believe if they take ‘the offer’ we all saved ourselves the heartache of what would have been inevitable.”

The offer above isn’t perfect and does have its drawbacks, but it’s certainly a concept worth pondering.

Well, evolution has given us many wonderful things, but as my man Thoreau once said “You never gain something but that you lose something.”  In other words, when humanity discovered the car, we gained all kinds of wonderful things like being able to travel long distances, but we also lost the joy of just walking to get where we needed to.

And so it is with the Internet.  We gain incredible knowledge, access, communication, and most amazing of all rapid sharing of information and ideas.  But now we’ve lost the simplicity that prior generations had.  Distractions are literally assaulting you all day long.

The purpose of this post is just to admit the problem and link to a new book by Leo Babauta (whom I’ve previously read and enjoyed) on the subject of simplicity in a world full of distractions.  The book is simply called “Focus” and you download a PDF that is completely free (and amazingly uncopyrighted).

Enjoy!

I long ago realized that the value proposition of Starbucks is much more than just coffee.  Howard Schultz’s original vision was not to “make premium coffee and earn a profit,” but to transport the community-ness of espresso cafes he saw in Italy to the USA, where he felt our society had only grown more isolated over time.

Abstract as it may be, I think the stores do ultimately deliver on that concept.  I don’t go to Starbucks solely because I like the taste of my drink.  I go with a colleague, we know the baristas, we see people we know, it’s close by, it takes about 15 minutes…and so on.  Basically, it’s just kind of a nice way to take a break!

Nevertheless, I needed to cut down the frequency.  So here’s the strange part.

Not knowing my intention to reduce the Starbucks visits, one of my colleagues and closest friends independently suggested that I buy a $50 Starbucks card and use that for all my purchases.  The main rationale was that it’s a reasonable business expense since we’re often working late and the card has certain benefits.

That did seem to make sense, but $50 on Starbucks?  Well, I did buy the card and here’s the Starbucks Paradox:  Now that I have pre-paid credit I can use to buy Starbucks drinks, I’ve cut my visits from 4 per week to 1 per week — a 75% reduction.

My friend and I laughed about this because, it turns out, he experienced the same thing!  He bought a Starbucks Card for $50 and now he hardly goes. What’s going on here?

I think this is actually an example of how psychologically, certain decisions appear to be so insignificant that they fly under the radar.  Should I spend 5 bucks on a drink?  Eh, sure.  Should I buy a new computer for $1,000…whoah, I need to think about that one.  So, basically, each Starbucks visit is just cheap enough that it doesn’t give you too much pause.

But the $50 card changes that.  $50 can buy many wonderful things in modern society.  Is $50 on overpriced lattes really the best way to spend it?  That’s what the Starbucks Card has done.  It serves as a constant reminder that when that card is used up I will have spent $50 on lattes.  That makes each purchase almost painful since each one brings me closer to the $50 of decision-making defeat.

After thinking about it, I realized the “some decisions are small enough to fly under the radar” phenomenon exists in business, too.  Except this time the numbers change.  At Omedix, the least expensive website package we sell is called the “Basic Package” and it runs $2,000 – $5,000 depending on a few options.

For some groups, that is so cheap as not even warrant a group decision.  One or two people make it and that’s that.  But when we quote anything over $10,000, we enter another world where committees of multiple people must ponder, evaluate, and ultimately make an official decision (sounds intense) on what they’d like to do.  Is this the “Starbucks Card” of websites and patient portals?

I maintain the same forces are at work.

I love taking simple phenomena from everyday life and seeing how far you can extend out the implications of it.  Looking forward to writing about it the next time it happens!

It sounds awful even just writing all that! Actually, the obsession with “I personally” is ultimately I think the completely wrong attitude when it comes to growing a company, but that’s the topic of another post I’ve been germinating lately.

Anyway, one unfortunate side effect of being the bottleneck is that it creates a feeling that I’m never finishing everything I want to, which is stressful. In school, we were always taught that finishing 100% of our homework was a good thing. You worked and worked until you finished what you had to do, and then you go have fun.

But what if you’re in a situation where you will literally NEVER finish all your work?

That was by far one of the most frustrating aspects for me of entrepreneurship. I was never “done”; I was never “caught up”. My personal productivity was always less than the amount of things that needed to be done.

So what do you do with a situation like that? Do you just raise the white flag and mentally adjust to “I’ll do the best I can”? Do you enlist the support of others to lighten the workload? Do you try to alter the whole dynamic of it all (stepping “outside” the problem)? Well, yes.

I actually have adjusted my attitude on this to three Key Ideas:

(1) I can only ask of myself that I do my best.
By definition, I can’t possibly do better than “my best.” So it stands to reason that all I can expect from myself is my best, and anything beyond that is simply unreasonable. This was a pretty helpful realization because it relieved me of the stress of trying to get everything done and instead made me realistic about what COULD be done.

(2) Enlist the support of others.
If I want our company to increase revenue by 5x this year, can I work five times as many hours? Can I work fives times as productively. Well, no. And yet there are companies that have grown by more than 5x in a single year. Where does the magic come from? It can only be through leverage: by enlisting the support of my colleagues, by enlisting the financial support of investors, by squeezing more juice out of the oranges our vendors send us, by capitalizing on the relationships we have with our clients, etc. I’m still not nearly as good at this concept as I’d like to be, but I’m starting to realize it’s the ONLY way that great companies are ever built.

(3) Make the mental choice: Is your life a series of stresses or a series of adventures?
And finally, after a long talk with my Dad one day, he summed it all up for me so well: “You can either choose to view life as a series of stresses, or life as a series of adventures.”

Wow.

It’s so true. I realized after he said that that there will ALWAYS be something to stress about. Those stresses don’t get in the way of life; they are PART OF life! And so, when the next stressful event comes up, we can choose to be stressed (which is natural, and often healthy even), but we can also choose to see it as a fun little adventure. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, here in the USA most of us have our safety, a roof over our heads, and food in our stomachs, not to mention friends and family. At the end of the day, whatever we’re stressing about isn’t really life or death most of the time.

So those are my three big Key Ideas. I don’t practice them perfectly yet, but at least when I go to the office tomorrow and realize yet again I won’t be able to get to everything that I want to, I’ll have some perspective on it!