I'm Ryan Waggoner. I build things. I blog about how to work harder and smarter to build the life you want. You should subscribe.
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Everyone is on their own journey

Posted in Goals, Posts by

I read this post a long time ago by a popular productivity / personal development blogger (don’t remember who now) where he basically eschewed setting goals. This was a major departure from his previous philosophy, so I remember being pretty surprised. What surprised me more was that it appeared to me that much of his success in changing his life over the previous years was due to…goal setting.

I get that things change, and we need to change with them. But it was odd because I don’t remember much focus on how goals weren’t really for *him* anymore, but rather that goals weren’t really that useful in general. This seems disingenuous. It’s like someone carefully budgeting until they’re very wealthy and they don’t have to budget anymore, and then announcing to the world that budgeting isn’t really important, because look how they do fine without it.

Sometimes I get frustrated because I’m not doing some particular thing as well anymore, or I’m not seeing the same benefits from a habit or change that I once did. But I try to remember that this is a journey, not a destination. There will be times when I have to hammer hard on a particular habit or goal, and then maybe a few months or a few years later, I’ll drop it completely because I just don’t need it any more. The whole point of personal development to me is change, but I have a tendency to view it as a tool to align myself with a mythical standard. But there is no single standard, at least that I’m aware of. Everyone is different, we all have different starting points, different paths, and different ending points. And as we travel along these paths, we ourselves are constantly changing. The struggles we have, the temptations we face, our motivations, our fears, they’re constantly in flux. To expect the tools and techniques that we use to remain static in the face of such change is unrealistic.

So don’t be afraid to shake up something that used to work for you, or try something completely new. If you’ve worked hard to become an early riser but you’re just not seeing the productivity in the mornings that you once did, maybe try becoming a night owl for awhile.

Whatever you do, remember that the tools you’re discarding as no longer useful may have had some value once, and probably still do for others. Any life changes you’ve discarded (or still do) that I might find valuable?

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Who are you to squander such a gift?

Posted in Achievement, Goals, Inspiration, Posts by

There was a fantastic article in Esquire magazine a couple months ago about a man who was wrongfully imprisoned for thirty years before being cleared by DNA evidence and released in 2010. As our technological abilities have increased, this type of story has become increasingly common. The man’s name is Ray Towler, and while reading his story, I was struck by two things (other than general horror).

First, Ray’s attitude is incredible. I can’t imagine the urge to react with anger and bitterness towards a system, a society that stole three decades of his life. But reading his responses to the interviewer’s questions, he doesn’t come across that way. The only thing that comes across is gratefulness for the time he has left. The past is the past, don’t let it screw up the future as well.

Second, to some degree, too many of us share his fate. We aren’t spending our lives behind bars, but we’re still no more free. Or at least we’re not living like we are. We stumble around in a daze, devoid of purpose or meaning.

Ray Towler spent thirty years of his life behind bars, time that is forever lost. I wouldn’t wish Ray’s fate on anyone, but maybe part of the reason he appears so grateful is that he is grateful, grateful for a freedom that most of us take completely for granted.

Ray didn’t have a choice in what happened to him, but most of us do. Don’t wake up in fifty years, old and full of regrets for the life you spent behind bars. You only get one life; who are you to squander such a gift?

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Expect the worst of people

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Inspiration, Posts, Social Media, Technology by

I’ve been doing freelance web development for four years, I was a product manager at a major Internet company before that, and I’ve been building products of my own for the last five years. I’ve also spent a ton of time exploring products and ideas that fellow entrepreneurs have launched. So I’ve spent a lot of time working and looking at technology product ideas, whether they belonged to friends, employers, clients, or myself. And the sad truth is that most of these products, mine included, suck. Big time. They have no hope of any real traction or success. I thought I’d share a piece of advice that I think would be helpful to solve 95% of the product problems that I see.

When thinking about user behavior, expect the worst of people. Expect them to be stupid, lazy, greedy, cynical, and impatient. Because for the most part, they will be. Not in general, but when compared against the idealistic “User” that many would-be entrepreneurs seem to picture in their mind. In general, people are busy and overwhelmed, and have very little time or energy to check out something new. And even when they do, they’re constantly being bombarded by new things from entrepreneurs. Why are they going to check out yours?

The problem is that most entrepreneurs are optimistic people by nature. You have to be to invest the time and money that it takes to start a company. But optimism can be really dangerous to a fledgling business. It can subtly convince you that the unlikely is likely. It can convince you that people will go out of their way to buy what you’re selling.

Fundamentally, virtually every new startup is asking people to change their behavior in some way, whether large or small. As a general rule, people do not like change, so you must make this change as compelling and painless as possible if you have any hope of success. And optimism will lead an entrepreneur to believe that the pain of the changes they’re asking users to make isn’t really that bad.

The optimistic entrepreneur believes that users will fill out their 15-field registration page to check out the amazing new product. The pessimistic entrepreneur knows that 99% of users will leave and won’t ever come back, so she works really hard to make it easy to try the product and get hooked.

The optimistic entrepreneur puts share buttons all over the page, thinking that users can’t wait to share their new discovery with their friends. The pessimistic entrepreneur knows that he has to appeal to the user’s self-interests, and offers a bonus or other benefit for users who share the site with a friend.

The optimistic entrepreneur thinks that what they’ve created is so compelling that people will return. The pessimistic entrepreneur knows that the average person remembers 7 URLs, plus or minus 2. The pessimistic entrepreneur knows they can’t expect people to remember to return to their site.

I’ll give you an example of that last one: woot.com is a daily deal site that offers a great deal on a particular item every day. They sold last year to Amazon for $110 million. Huge win, right? From 2009 to 2011, another daily deal site (Groupon) went from $0 to a $6 billion offer from Google. There are tons of differences between the two models, but I am absolutely convinced that Woot could have been bigger if they had taken a page from Groupon’s book and focused on building a mailing list to offer their deals to. I first saw Woot years ago, but I’ve been back maybe twice. I just don’t remember to go check it out every day. But I never forget to check my email, so I always see what Groupon has on offer. And yet the Woot.com homepage still has no place to sign up for an email notification of their deals.

You get the idea. The challenge is that you have to be an overall optimist, and you definitely don’t want to grow to hate people, but you kind of do need to expect the worst from them when actually designing your product.

Of course, creating a great product is only half the battle; you also have to market it well. But that’s a post for another day.

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Don’t accept no from someone who can’t say yes

Posted in Achievement, Education, Entrepreneurship, Goals, Misc, Personal, Posts by

I’ve been meaning for some time to write a post about my experience in the Navy and what it’s meant for my life. This isn’t that post, but I was recently reminded of something that a senior non-commissioned officer told a group of us once about navigating bureacracy. Being a large government organization, the Navy has its fair share of bullshit and nonsense, which makes it difficult to get anything done. Especially anything out of the ordinary. So here’s the advice I got about trying to get something done:

“Don’t accept no from someone who can’t say yes.”

This stuck in my mind and has served me well ever since. Bureaucracies are built on the back of rigid rules and hierarchical structures, but even the most rigid systems need room for exceptions. But empowering individuals at all levels to make those exceptions is the antithesis of what bureaucracy stands for, so these organizations only give the exception-making ability to those at the top. But the hapless victims of the bureaucracy constantly want more exceptions than those at the top have time to handle, so the solution is simple: have the minions at the bottom just turn down any requests for exceptions to the rules as a matter of course. It doesn’t matter that those minions couldn’t approve the exception if they wanted to, because the victim asking for the exception probably won’t push it.

But if you do push, even a little, you can often get what you want. I left the Navy with about a year’s worth of college credits, across a hodge-podge of subjects. They didn’t fit the requirements for my degree at the University of Colorado, so they told me I’d lose some of them and have to take other classes instead. Unacceptable. So I fought and cajoled and bugged them until I got the decision-makers and got them to accept every last class. I didn’t lose a single credit.

Another example of this is customer service call centers. Roughly 90% of my interactions with customer service agents are negative, because I avoid calling unless there’s a problem. And they almost never solve the problem to my satisfaction. So I request to speak to their manager, at which point they balk and explain how there’s nothing better that can be done, that’s their policy, blah, blah. About 50% of the time when I get the manager on the phone, they offer me a better solution than the customer service guy at the first level did. If that’s still not good enough, I go to *their* boss, which is almost always very difficult. They very often just refuse to connect me, in which case I have to do some digging and cold-calling. But when you get that person on the phone, they’re completely empowered to solve your problem, and they often do. Kind of sad that corporate America has this kind of relationship with their customers, but that’s another story.

So decide what you want and ask for it. And don’t stop when they tell you no, especially if they’re not able to tell you yes.

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What the $1.5 trillion Federal budget deficit taught me about time management

Posted in Achievement, Entrepreneurship, Goals, Personal, Politics, Posts, Time management by

I was listening to NPR today and they talked to a writer from Newsweek (whose name I didn’t catch, unfortunately) about this year’s $1.5 trillion Federal budget deficit. Everyone says we should fix it, but we can’t come to any sort of agreement on how. Since the vast majority of the population receives some benefit from the Federal government, either in the form of services or in tax benefits, balancing the budget necessarily involves pissing off very large constituencies, which is why few politicians seem to do more than talk about balancing the budget.

Then the Newsweek writer said something very interesting: large budget deficits are what you would expect to see in a democratic society that lacks a strong sense of priority and purpose. Instead of making the tough choices about what to fund (and what to NOT fund) based on what’s really important to us, we try to fund everything, and end up doing it all halfway and running up a huge debt.

I instantly thought of time management: don’t many of us play this same tired game with our time? We don’t want to make tough choices about what to cut from our time budget, so we juggle too many things while trying to “have it all” or “do it all”, and end up doing a bunch of things poorly, falling into mediocrity, and running up a deficit of time, money, or both. Just earlier today before hearing this story, I was contemplating my attempts to juggle too many projects and struggling to know which, if any, of them I should give up. This idea made it much easier.

I don’t want my life to resemble the current Federal government: an on-going war of different priorities and interests, vying for attention, and creating a dystopian clump of mediocrity. So I cut two projects from my life today. Maybe they’ll come back someday, but they’re officially on ice for now, and I’m down to three projects or areas that I spend my time and mental energy on. I hope to cut another by the end of the year, but that’s all I can say for now.

Does excellence require focus? Are there counter-examples? And if it does require focus, why is it so hard for some of us to just do one or two things?

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Back like jack with lesson learned: taking time off is often a mistake

Posted in Achievement, Blogging, News, Personal, Posts by

I’m back! I’ve been blogging daily for the last year or so, but I took a few weeks off in April to pursue another endeavor, and a few weeks turned into the whole month of April. Then that turned into May as well. So I decided June 1 was the new plan, but that came and went. I finally decided today that enough is enough.

Here’s the lesson: momentum is everything.

I see this in a lot of areas in my life; blogging is just the latest one to bite me. It comes down to focusing on your successes. If you’re doing something and it’s working, double down. Don’t start looking around for something else that you can do as well. Build on your current success; it’s working for a reason!

And be extremely careful about taking a little time off. The last time I did that it took me three years to start my daily blogging again. No good, and that’s why I’m forcing myself to get back into it today, even though starting up after not doing something for awhile is rough. My writing just feels rusty in my head, so it may take a week or two to hit my stride.

It’s 10x as hard to create something new as it is to optimize something you already have that’s working.

Have you experienced this? I can’t be the only one :)

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Life and death

Posted in Inspiration, Personal, Posts by

Warning: the blog post by Derek that I refer to below can be found here. It’s incredibly sad, so don’t read if you need to be upbeat today :)

A friend sent me a link yesterday to a blog post published earlier this week by a man named Derek K. Miller. It’s entitled “The Last Post” and was published posthumously. Derek died earlier this week from cancer. He was 41. He left a wife and two young daughters behind. I didn’t know Derek. I didn’t know of his existence until he was gone. But reading about his death has caused me to evaluate some things about my own life more carefully.

When you’re young, you have the luxury of carelessness with your time. You assume that you’ll have the time you need to do all you need, and want to do. It feels like your primary challenge is determining what you want out of life. You don’t realize that from the moment you’re born, a clock is ticking and you have the briefest of windows to do whatever you’re going to do.

Life is so short. So incredibly short. Even if you live to be 100, that’s still just a tiny blink of an eye. And we may not have that much time. We all know that on some level, but reading the last blog post written by a relatively normal guy not much older than me drives it home. He was diagnosed in 2007, just four years ago. So short.

Anyway, I’m sure all of this seems cliche, and it is. The tendency to grabble with the truth of our own mortality is probably the most universal trait of humanity. But you should read Derek’s last post. And then think about the fact that someday, probably sooner than you’d like, definitely sooner than those who love you would like, you too will die. This is truth. Regardless of what happens after that (if anything), the universal reality is that you will cease to be a living, breathing human being.

How will you live in the meantime?

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Who cares if you were born this way?

Posted in Misc, Personal, Posts by

Lady Gaga is blowing up the charts again with her new single, “Born This Way”, which “celebrates” a variety of different types of diversity, including race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. I’m going to sidestep the central controversy this song was written to exploit, and instead point out a stupid and dangerous idea that this song promotes:

What difference does it make if you were born this way or if you chose to be this way?

What annoys me about this song is that it overemphasizes the role of nature in diversity, and chooses to celebrate and praise a variety of forms of diversity that are (arguably) pre-determined at birth, like race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. (This also ignores a long list of very not-nice types of “diversity” that are likely just as predetermined at birth, like predisposition to addiction, schizophrenia, antisocial personality disorder, and pedophilia.)

Provided that you’re not harming someone else, why should we celebrate diversity in race any more than diversity in fashion styles? Do you only have the right to be proudly different in ways that you were born to be different?

The anthem of “born this way” strikes me more as a whiny excuse from someone trying to explain why they’re different: “Don’t blame me, mister, I was born this way!” This appeal to fatalism offers a haven for the victim, but a cowardly and ultimately fragile one. Cowardly because it attempts to shift the responsibility for identity to random chance instead of personal choice, and fragile because it might turn out that some of those supposedly predetermined traits aren’t quite as inescapable as we thought.

So rather than celebrating “black, white, or beige”, how about we celebrate diversity in all its (non-evil) forms? Except for hipsterism, of course. Hipsters should always be shunned.

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Behavioral feedback loops

Posted in Goals, Posts by

We’ve all heard that horrible screech from a PA system that results when you get the microphone too close to the speakers. It’s called a feedback loop, and it happens when the current output of an event can impact the future iteration of that event. On a PA system, a sound from the speaker is picked up on the microphone, amplified by the system and output by the speaker, now louder. And the microphone picks it up again, sends to the system for amplification before being output by the speaker, and so on. The result is that horrible screech.

Audio feedback loops are perhaps the ones we’re most familiar with, but I was thinking the other day about how a number of things can be considered behavioral feedback loops. Basically, anything that each time you do it, it becomes easier (or harder) to do in the future.

Whether a feedback loop is a good thing or a bad thing is usually dependent on which side of the loop you’re on.

For example, compound interest can be thought of as a good feedback loop: each payout of interest adds to your balance and increases the amount of interest you’ll earn in the successive period. On the flipside, if you’re paying a loan and you don’t pay at least the interest each period (such as a negative amortization loan), then compound interest is definitely NOT your friend.

I think fitness is a feedback loop too: the more fit you are, the more enjoyable and rewarding working out is, and the easier it is to stay fit. Unfortunately, the reverse is also true: the more out of shape you are, the harder it is to work out and keep at it until you reach your desired fitness level.

A final example: confidence. The more confidence you exhibit in general, the greater your likelihood of success. And the more you succeed, the more your confidence will grow. On the flipside, a lack of confidence (aka desperation) will inhibit your success at every turn, only making it harder for you to build confidence.

Addictions are an example of feedback loops: you become more and more dependent on something each time you do it, which makes it harder and harder to resist doing in the future.

Feedback loops are powerful because they build on themselves, growing stronger and more powerful with each step, usually until you reach a plateau of some kind. If it’s a good plateau, we call it “maxing out”. If it’s a bad one, we call it “bottoming out”.

If you’re in a good feedback loop, then you have it easy: just keep going. But what if you’re caught in a bad feedback loop?

You have three choices:

1. Wait until you hit rock bottom – generally a bad option, because it’s often further down than you realize, and the damage can be permanent.

2. Mount a herculean effort – sometimes possible, but it depends on where you are in the feedback loop. Almost never a sustainable form of change.

3. Change the context – To stop an audio feedback loop, you have to change the system in some way: kill the power, cut the levels, etc. Often you have to do the same with a behavioral feedback loop: throw out all the junkfood in your house, cut up the credit cards, etc.

4. Get help – This might come in concert with the first three. In many cases, escaping a feedback loop will be difficult or impossible without external support, motivation, and encouragement.

What feedback loops have you noticed in your own life, and how have you used or defeated them?

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Why I Don’t Answer My Phone

Posted in Misc, Personal, Posts by

If you call my phone right now, I probably won’t answer unless:

  1. We have a call scheduled for right now (and I try to avoid those)
  2. You’re my wife, immediate family, or cofounder
  3. You’re in my address book (which is family, friends, and a few clients)

If #1 or #2 applies, I try to pick up 100% of the time. If #3 applies, it’s more like 25%. If it’s not one of the above, the chance is about 0%.

I know what you’re thinking: “How rude! Who is he to decide that he’s just not going to take my call?”

I know it’s frustrating to call someone and have them not pick up. That’s why I’m writing this post, actually…maybe it will shed some light on why I think this rude, antisocial behavior is actually polite.

I spend most of my day writing. It might be sales copy, a blog post, emails, or code, but it’s all hard. Maybe not for some people, but it’s hard for me. So hard that I have to get into a particular mental state to be able to do it with any degree of quality. And that mental state is ever so delicate (read Paul Graham’s Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule for more). The cost of a 15-minute call that comes in the middle of that time and derails my mental state isn’t 15 minutes, it’s hours, maybe the whole day.

Everyone wants to be the only and most important thing in the world, but they can’t all be. We all have to shuffle and prioritize and decide who we’re going to take care of right now. Trying to please everyone all the time is a recipe for failure. Trying to pick up your phone for every call is a recipe for never getting anything done.

However, I do understand that there are emergencies, so I try to always check my voicemail, email, and text messages within a few minutes after a missed call, to ensure that I’m not dropping the ball. Typically it’s something that can wait, so I wait until I’ve gotten to a good stopping point, and deal with it then.

So while it might seem rude that I don’t answer my phone, it’s actually my best attempt to be respectful. I want to deliver the best I can for my readers, my clients, and my customers. And when we do get on the phone, I want to be able to give you my full attention, instead of being distracted and frustrated by the interruption.

So if you need to talk to me and I don’t pick up my phone, you can leave a voicemail, send me an SMS, or send an email. Just don’t call back later, because I probably won’t pick up then either.

You’re welcome :)

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