A friend pointed out this quote from a Vanity Fair profile of Obama.

This time he covered a lot more ground and was willing to talk about the mundane details of presidential existence. “You have to exercise,” he said, for instance. “Or at some point you’ll just break down.” You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.”

It is hard not to love it when the President of the United States makes your case for you.  I haven’t gone so far as to wear the same clothes every day, but I have done some careful buying so that any two random items from my closet will match each other.  And that, I think is the next step in choice reduction and my main reaction to its critics: it isn’t about not choosing, it is about choosing when to not choose.

I think it is good to have expressions of your personality and selfness in your life.  Johnny Cash went with all black, I picked cowboy boots, and I’m sure one day I’ll raise kids with some equally odd way of going about it.  But even though I sometimes want to wear something distinctive, I’ve setup my life so that I don’t have to if I don’t want to.

Take, for example, the incredibly burdensome decision of “what to eat for dinner”.  Yes yes, first world problems, but a real one none the less; when I was a kid, my mother never minded cooking dinner nearly as much as she did trying to figure out what to cook (resulting in her trying to force my brother and I to plan the menu, which we were smart enough to avoid).  I hate trying to choose what to have when I get home now, which is why I have a default: the Matt Wallaert Salad.  Entire bag of lettuce, peanuts, cheese, fat free honey mustard dressing.  Instant dinner, and I make sure to always have the components in my fridge.

I also have the New York lifestyle down: a standard rotation of four resturants that I know are good, where I can always order the same thing, and I can go to any of them randomly when I feel like outsourcing food choice.  Sure, in some sense, I’m “choosing” but not in the active, cognitive-resource depleting way the President is pointing out.  And when I really care about what I’m eating, when I want to make that choice, I can.

Setting up defaults doesn’t mean you always have to go with them, just that they are there when we need them, and I think that is something we often forget.  Which may be the start of a followup post…

(Thanks to Sarah Duve for pointing out the original article.)

Update: Apparently, Zuck does the same thing.

My most recent post got made into a Someecard, so I’m feeling pretty good.  Sure, its not something that my parents would understand (being made into a joke on a site that 800K people visit religiously) but it is still a high moment.  I was also on FoxNews, trying to help more women get raises.  Again, not everyone’s idea of having made it in the world, but something that I walked away from with a light step and the urge to crow.

Both of those two moments made me feel successful: good, accomplished, like I had achieved something.  And yet only one of them is also about progress: having actually changed the world for the better in a tangible way.

You could take a flying leap and suggest that if I died tomorrow, my Matt-inspired-Someecard still would have made a few people laugh and that is valuable (because the stick really is that far up my ass and I graduated from Swarthmore, I would be likely to kill a discussion by debating that).  But in reality, the Someecard is really just about me feeling personally validated; it doesn’t really do much for anyone else.  GetRaised, on the other hand, has helped thousands of women earn millions in raises, a feat that few others can say they’ve accomplished and with an undeniable positive impact on society.

What is interesting is how often success and progress don’t full overlap and how rarely we consciously make sure that we’re getting a balance of both.  People love to endlessly complain to me about their lack of work-life balance, but I think what many of them actually may be complaining about is their lack of success-progress balance.

For example, GetRaised wasn’t all that much fun to create.  It was built on the side, outside of our direct line of business, so that it meant it had to be cobbled together in between other projects.  The problem itself wasn’t particularly intellectually challenging, we didn’t get to use any whizbang technology or pyrotechnic tricks, and it is abundantly clear how much better it could be (I still have a wishlist a mile long).  And yet it was still a project worth doing: it made real progress, every day, and even if the high moments of launch and press and helping women aren’t constant, there are enough moments of success to make it maintain a healthy and rosy glow.
And that is what is missing for so many progress-driven projects: there is not nearly enough celebration.  I’m reminded of a quote From Dusk Till Dawn.

Are you such a loser you can’t tell when you’ve won? The entire state of Texas, along with the F.B.I., is looking for you. Did they find you? No. They couldn’t. You’ve won, Seth, enjoy it.

Too often, when working on something that truly matters, work really does feel like work.  The aching, grinding pressure that is doing the 100th wireframe to try to get a particular product point right is not fun, no matter what anyone tells you.  If we don’t look for moments of success, ways to feel good and accomplished, then we will quit long before we finish anything worthwhile.

Equally dangerous (or, given our current culture, perhaps more dangerous) is the feeling of success that comes without any progress at all.  The problem with attention from Someecards is that it can be addictive: it makes you want to get attention, to simply feel good, while removing any responsibility for actually doing anything worthwhile.  Success without progress is the flip side of the coin and it is the ugly underbelly of a lot of American culture right now.

There are plenty of Paris Hilton-like examples but those are too easy.  Even the business and political worlds have plenty of successes without progress.  You know them, people who are constantly telling you how important they are but you can’t figure out a damn thing they’ve done.  Sure, they’re great at promoting themselves within a community and may even feel genuinely good about their success (although most psychologists would suggest they don’t), but when they look back on their accomplishments, they’re still docked on shore while others are quietly sailing away.

We need enough success only to keep us making progress.  But we still need it.  And it is something worth looking around for in people.  Who do you need to congratulate on their progress?  Who do you need to offer a chance to make some?

Chris Dixon recently wrote (in an incredibly brief post) that recommendation systems are features, not products, and pointed out that Hunch was only compelling after being bought by eBay, where it successfully powers both recommendations and discovery on the site (not 100% sure on this).  I agree with Chris and have a few notes.

1) Recommendation takes initial desire and channels it: you want a TV but you’re not sure what is the right kind, it tells you the right kind and thus makes it easier (lowered inhibiting pressure).  Discovery creates desire (higher promoting pressure): you weren’t thinking about food, but you are now.  People tend to mix the two up.

2) The reason that recommendations don’t stand on their own is because the intended action is to satisfy a desire.  If you are looking to buy a TV, the end state is the purchase and telling you which one to get doesn’t end the needstate.  So you’ll get outcompeted by anyone that does (like Amazon).  The only place where you can have just a recommendation engine is where you can’t complete the needstate in that medium: I can recommend recipes, for example, because there is nothing more than can be done online.    But these are dangerous plays, because you can get outcompeted by anyone who brings it closer to closing the needstate. Recommendations worked until Amazon made it so you could get recommended and complete the transaction in one place (just ask CNET).

3) Discovery, in contrast, can work on its own.  Not just because of SEO (Chris’ explanation), but because true discovery isn’t the same as a recommendation: it actually creates desire, often from adjacent desires.  Take Pandora.  Nobody puts on Pandora to purchase new music – that isn’t the point.  But in the course of satisfying one desire (good background music), it occasionally creates another (the urge to buy a song).  If you are browsing blogs about fashion for entertainment, sometimes you find things that you then want independently of your previous desire: buying something doesn’t make you want to stop reading fashion blogs for entertainment  That is generally a clue that discovery happened, when you do something but it doesn’t diminish the need that you came for in the first place.

Bonus: discovery and recommendation map to the two ways I break advertising down for people often as well.  Some ads are about creating a desire for a thing you didn’t previously want, often by coupling them with other things you want (like selling beer with naked women).  You didn’t want a beer, you did want a naked woman, now you do go get a beer, though it doesn’t quench your thirst for a naked woman (studies suggest it may even enhance it).  Other ads, in contrast, are about taking existing desires and channeling them.  You were already thinking about buying a car, you should buy our car, because it is the best car.  It fits your need.  Buy it and you will no longer need to buy a car.

I was lucky enough to get to act as an advisor at USV on Saturday as part of Gary Chou’s great weekend program that allows startups to get three perspectives from field experts on the products they are planning to release.  I say lucky enough because as Matt Smith of Shutterstock pointed out, being an advisor forces you to articulate your perspective.

Which was actually a big part of my advice to startups: have a perspective.  All three of the products I was assigned to review were taking giant stabs at a market, building platforms on an internet that is increasingly becoming about niches.  If you don’t know what you want your users to do, chances are they won’t either.  They were almost all trying to be everything to everyone, and in each case it hampered them from actually launching.

You see it in the UX.  When you’re trying to be everything, users tend to get just dumped into results or dashboards.  If there isn’t a wizard flow, at least for the first time user, than you probably haven’t articulated a clear enough vision.  Even Twitter, the great unwashed platform, onboards users by trying to get them to follow people initially.  “Oh, this is a thing for following what people say” leads to “Oh, and people will follow me and I can say things too”.  Even in the most indefinite product there is, still you find a coherent perspective.

You see it in engineering.  Every engineer everywhere should force their product team to articulate a coherent product perspective and refuse to build new features until they do.  Otherwise, you will either end up building the entire world or you’ll start building the entire world and then watch them cut code as they drop features to pivot into having a narrative.  Engineering time is the most valuable, most expensive time a startup spends, and running down blind alleys is the product team’s fault.

You see it in bizdev.  Having a business model isn’t enough: you need to know who your customer is and what they want.  If you aren’t meeting their need and either taking their perspective or incorporating their needs into your perspective, you will produce a product that no one will pay for and that does nothing.  The greatest fear of every bizdev person, and therefore the thing to fight hardest against, is that they will build a product that everyone “likes” and no one uses.

While I’ve never been big on Powerpoint decks, I do like elevator pitches.  And it is precisely because of the requirement of perspective: a very quick summary forces people to say “what does my product do?” and provide a coherent answer.  It is tremendously hard to face a blank page and come up with something, and dramatically easier to respond to a question, and yet we always think of the marketing of a product from the blank perspective.  The very first expectation I have as a user after learning the name of something is what it does.  Is it a game?  A utility?  Again, you can pull up examples where it is tough to do this, but those are mostly just foils: a large majority of products are defined by their function.

Think of your product like a person.  My name is BRAND and I…?  Now fill it in.

The New York Times recently wrote about variable price shopping: the idea that some grocery stores are starting to think about changing the price of items depending on your individual purchase patterns.  And this is a spectacularly bad idea.

I’ve spoken in the media about the psychological consequences of dynamic pricing before, particularly in relation to Groupon and other deal sites.  The basic argument from stores is this: pricing in capitalism is built on a demand curve – the more you want it, the more you will pay – so by moving from understand the demands of the groups to the demands of the individual will allow for a closer fit to the true underlying demand.  It is a perfectly rational economic argument, and one that was used with Groupon: if your current demand is low, make it cheaper so that people sample your product, which increases their demand, which allows you to charge them the non-discounted price next time.

The problem is that it is a spectacularly bad psychological argument (which is why economists created behavioral economics in the first place).  Our willingness to pay for something depends not just on our absolute need for it, but also our understanding of it in a complex web of other prices and other motivations, including powerful anchors.  Which many merchants using Groupon’s found out: giving people something at a discounted price made them anchor their demand on that price and made it “not worth it” at a higher, non-discounted price.

The grocery plan suffers from this problem: you don’t gain nearly as many new loyal customers for an item by making it temporarily cheaper, especially if every other item in your category is also doing the same thing.  Indeed, let’s imagine that this became highly successful.  I don’t normally drink bottled water but I have bought Brand A juice, so Brand A offers it to me cheap ($1) to see if they can get me to buy it more regularly at a higher price ($1.50).

So I buy a case of discounted water from Brand A at $1.  Now Brand B, seeing that I’m a water buyer, offers me a discounted case at $1 to get me to switch to Brand B.  Brand A has gone back up to regular price ($1.50) and my setpoint for water is now $1, so I buy Brand B.  Which Brand C notices and…you get the idea.

But why isn’t this good for the consumer?  After all, I now get water for a constantly discounted price, if I play the game correctly.  And that’s the problem: I have to play the game.

The most volatile current pricing in a grocery store centers around produce and it is one of the things that people hate shopping for the most.  Indeed, stores sell much larger quantities of more stable-priced produce (like apples) than volatile-priced produce (like peaches) because of simple expectations.  I can go to the store and buy an apple with very few psychological ramifications: apples are mostly always the same price, I don’t feel like I’m getting swindled by my desire for it when out of season, and so I have very little regret.  But beware of falling in love with berries, which fluctuate wildly in price depending on season.  I’m happy, very happy, when they happen to be particularly cheap but otherwise tend to ignore them, because I fixate on the higher price: seasonal goods, in essence, have become premium goods.

So now apply that model to everything in the store.  If everything I love becomes more expensive the more I love it, suddenly I’m playing a vast and constantly shifting game of regret balancing.  I really want the cereal, but because I have bought it before and not this other cereal, the other cereal is now “discounted” to a significantly lower price and I constantly have to be making the tradeoff calculations of my want against this new and shifting price.  And what’s more, I know if I don’t buy the cereal I actually like for awhile, they’ll offer me a lower price at some point, so I should resist my urge to buy it now so that it comes down in price.

It doesn’t take a psychologist to figure out that is not a world anyone wants to live in.  Stability is a human component of human happiness, and while the occasional seasonal fruit might make me enjoy a particular day, the world is mostly powered by apples: price stable, quality stable, and thus the staple of the lunch bag.