Ramit Sethi, empathy, the value of mistakes, and the perfect mentor

In the last five years, I've noticed the rise of what I call "internet personalities." Just like Oprah on TV, there are people who give advice on the best ways to manage your life. Their advice is aimed at the highly educated, tech savvy audience. A few examples of internet personalities: Tim Ferriss of the Four Hour Work Week, Leo Babauta of Zen Habits, etc. They build up a big audience on the internet, write a book and market the hell out of it to get it on the New York Times Bestseller list, and then repeat.

Recently, I've been reading Ramit Sethi's blog, which has the outrageous title, "I Will Teach You To Be Rich." Ramit's goal is to teach young (relatively well-educated) people how to manage their lives. The world is changing so fast, we are bombarded with information, and we are overwhelmed by choices. Our parents can't help us because frankly, they don't know anything. Ramit's particular angle is to use his educational background in behavioral psychology to reach young people.

You can find lots of life management advice scattered across the internet, but that is a time-consuming way to learn. Ramit packages his advice in a way that is accessible and shows empathy for young people. I find that our so-called elders can be pretty arrogant and dismissive of young people's concerns. They don't understand what we go through. Ramit does. He expresses sympathyand then yells at his audience (something along the lines of "wake up, what you're doing is stupid, stop doing that and do this.") This strange combination of empathy, admonishment, and enthusiasm is somehow endearing and persuasive.

Ramit started his blog in personal finance, but now he has turned to the greater challenge of leading people to their "dream job." I've talked to various middle-aged people about the career search and they are uniformly dismissive of the anxiety us young people have about the job search. Some of these people are really nice but it's clear that in the back of their minds, they think that the anxiety is really cowardice. I suppose that's easy to think when they were able to get their first couple jobs without any significant roadbumps. Ramit actually takes the time to talk about the psychological barriers we face when embarking on a job search: "I'm not qualified", "I don't like networking", "I don't want to rule out jobs because I'm closing doors," etc. Our "old-fogey" elders would find this kind of stuff is stupid, but Ramit takes the time to explain why these barriers don't make sense.

For example, one thing I always wondered about is why do people (even students from Ivy League schools) have so much trouble finding jobs. Ramit explains that they are wasting time on ineffective techniques like polishing their resume or shotgunning their resume on monster.com. They should really be networking to find jobs they are excited about. It seems paradoxical that eliminating choiceis the right way, but it works because when you focus on just a few jobs and companies, you can research the hell out of these places and tailor your approach to the specific job title/company, rather than submitting a generic resume that is sure to be rejected.

Ramit recently talked about "the top seven mistakes for finding a dream job." I like how he focused on mistakes as opposed to telling you what to do. I frequently find that it's more valuable to find out what not to do rather than what to do. It's much easier for me to remember people's mistakes and avoid them (my mind is screaming "no, no, no"). If someone tells me to do something that I don't want to do, I just feel annoyed (my mind is going "nag, nag, nag").

Ramit is a guy who is really putting his psychology skills to work and I admire him for that. Personally, I think mentoring and giving advice is very hard [1]. The perfect, ideal mentor would give you the exact advice you needed at exactly the right time and avoid burdening you with irrelevant or anxiety-provoking thoughts. That is hard. An example of what is not good mentoring: your mother shrieking in your ear about how you'll be robbed by gypsies if you travel to Europe. Maybe those guys and gals in artificial intelligence should program the perfect mentor.

[1] This reminds me of a post I wrote about the book A River Runs Through It.

Stack Overflow and question-and-answer websites

I found that I learn a lot by reading forums. I learned about hockey equipment at ModSquadHockey and about musical theater at Musicals dot Net. This is a great way to learn about relatively obscure topics. Unfortunately, this method is also very time consuming because forums are almost completely unorganized. Even if you search for keywords, you have to filter through a lot of noise.

Wikis are much more structured and easier to read. Unfortunately, they require a lot of work because the contributors need to write decent articles and there are the issues of who can edit the wiki and multiple authors of the same article. These difficulties are the reasons you see a lot of incomplete wikis on the web.

A nice compromise between forums and wikis are question-and-answer websites like Quora and Stack Exchange. Instead of having threads like on forums, question-and-answer websites organize by question. For each question, other users post answers. This seems pretty much the same as forums so far. The key difference between forums and question-and-answer sites is that the users can dynamically tag questions and vote on how much they like a particular question or answer. The users do the filtering and that makes the website so much easier and enjoyable to read.

Quora is a very general Q&A site, with the philosophy that you have to stand by your answers. You're supposed to use your real name when you answer and you are asked to give qualifications as to why you are an "expert" in the topic. The site is closed to the public. You have to register and login. I think the reason is it is semi-private is to prevent Quora from becoming like Yahoo Answers which attracts a lot of random, "bad" answers. Stack Exchange is a group of Q&A websites on mostly technical topics. You don't have to login to see the answers, which is why I think Stack Exchange is more popular. I see Stack Exchange websites show up in Google searches whereas I never see anything from Quora. The most famous Stack Exchange site is Stack Overflow, which is focused on non-expert programming (though "expert" is subjective). I have fun reading through the top voted Stack Overflow questions for particular topics like Python and Mathematica. So far I like Stack Overflow better than Quora. Jon Evans wrote a comparison of the two sites in TechCrunch.

Link of the day: Our internet traffic goes through just a few hands

According to Wired, most of our internet traffic now goes through limited hands, including Google.

Link of the day: Yahoo search pad

This looks like a fantastic way to compile research and share it with others, especially for travel plans. To see what I mean, check out the demo video. Great job, Yahoo.

Link of the day: "The Web Browser Address Bar is the New Command Line"

The title of the post pretty much says it: "The Web Browser Address Bar is the New Command Line." By the way, I love the command line. It's fast and succinct. The only problem I can think of is that the command line relies on a good memory. If I don't use commands after a while, I forget them. When you add the shell to the command line, you get Unix magic!

The post mentions the site yubnub which really is the embodiment of the address bar as command line. I've tried yubnub but for some reason, I've never really felt a need for it.

Free mailing lists on the web

I recently wanted to create a mailing list. I was familiar with creating and administering mailing lists on university servers, but that wasn't an option for this mailing list because most of the people on the list wouldn't be affiliated with a university. The obvious choices for free, web-based mailing lists were Yahoo Groups and Google Groups.

Google Groups was more sophisticated than Yahoo Groups, but it doesn't allow you to create a private mailing list that doesn't require members to have Google accounts. If you want to allow non-Google members, you have to make the mailing list public and I didn't think people would appreciate that. I also wanted people to be able to subscribe, unsubscribe, and post to the mailing list via email and not through a web interface. Yahoo Groups fit those requirements. It allows the mailing list administrator to moderate posts and approve new members (if desired). Members also have the option of receiving daily digests instead of individual emails. So, in the end, I went with Yahoo Groups.

Public communication, web 2.0, and all that

I'm not the most wired person out there, but I think I'm definitely above average. The web presents enormous opportunities to communicate with the general public and connect with people who have specific interests. This is very different from personal, one-on-one conversation, which I discussed in an earlier post. The idea of an interactive, user-defined internet is frequently called "Web 2.0."

I'll discuss some of my personal experiences with Web 2.0. (See Tim O'Reilly's article for an in-depth discussion of what Web 2.0 means.)

• Blogging
  Well, this here is a blog! Blogging is a great way for me to practice writing and expressing myself. If you're a really popular blogger like Tim Ferriss, you can have very lively conversations with your internet audience. No one really talks to me about my blog. Not that I really expect anyone to, given that I write about random topics of personal interest and make no effort to connect with a target audience. But if you want to communicate with people via blogging, you can definitely make that happen. Even if it's on a small scale like sharing infant photos with the family.
  I really like using Blogger because of the tags, anonymity, and free storage space.
  
• Facebook
  I like Facebook a lot. I will frequently double-post on Facebook and Blogger. I post on Facebook to let my friends know about a link I like. It's much less intrusive to do so via Facebook than via email. I also get faster feedback. When people log onto Facebook, they know consciously that they are having fun and blowing time. They are in the mood to respond. Facebook is viral in the sense that when people see one or two comments to a posted link, they themselves feel compelled to join in the discussion. In contrast, email is this awful catch-all for communication. My email is probably sandwiched in between a reminder about a meeting and a message from the boss. I also post on Blogger so that I can have a personal record for myself.
  The main difference between Facebook and other Web2.0 tools is the sophisticated privacy tools on Facebook. So depending on the user, Facebook is not as "open" as other platforms.
  
• Flickr
  Photography is only a minor hobby of mine, so I don't spend too much time on Flickr or not as much time as some people do. I use Flickr pretty much the same way I use Blogger, to keep personal records that happen to be public. The main reason I chose Flickr is the excellent interface for tagging and viewing photos.
  Sometimes I'll get some nice, unexpected comments on my (amateur) photographs. That's the magic of tagging and geotagging on Flickr. It's so easy for people to find photographs of a specific location or specific tag. Two of my photos have been chosen for the Schmap online travel guides. I think it's because I did such a detailed job of tagging my photos. There are probably better photos out there, but mine were easy to find. I'm glad to pitch in my bit to make Web 2.0 the great resource it is. Flickr allows me to explore other people's interests and photographic creativity. Many photos, including mine, are licensed under Creative Commons so they can be re-used for non-profit purposes. I'm not too familiar with the social aspects of Flickr, but it appears there's quite a community there. You can join all sorts of groups. I was asked to submit photo to a Sharpie pen group!
  
• Forums
  I'm a member of the ModSquadHockey forum and I used to hang out a lot in musical forums like Finishing the Chat and BroadwayWorld. Reading forums is a fantastic way to quickly acquire knowledge for a new hobby. I figured out how to pick my own hockey equipment and learned what theatregoers look for when they attend a play or musical. I'm still a member of the hockey forum because I really liked the atmosphere on the board (vigilant administrators are a must) and I periodically answer questions. I try to give back.
  
• Wiki
  Wikis can be interactive but not on the level of blogs, Facebook, Flickr, and forums. The interaction is with the members of the wiki who write and modify the contents of the wiki. My only experience so far is submitting reference cards to the Starting Strength Wiki. I did get a nice note from the Starting Strength Wiki administrator, praising my contribution. I'm interested in doing more with wikis but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

Calendar setup

In a previous post, I described how I use my calendar to send myself "strategic reminders." Reminding yourself to take your vitamins, look at your finances, schedule a haircut, etc is a pretty obvious idea and it's not surprising that Gina Trapani wrote about it in an article called "Tickle yourself with Yahoo Calendar."

I thought people might like a more detailed look at my calendar. I used Yahoo Calendar for over two years and it worked very well. However, recently I wanted to transfer my calendar from one Yahoo account to another. There was no good way of performing the transfer because I had too many events (Yahoo should fix this!). I became very annoyed and switched to Google Calendar.

One nice thing about Google Calendar is that I can manage many calendars and label each calendar with a different color. I have different calendars: "Daily reminders," "Weekly reminders," "Monthly reminders," "To do," "Appointments," and "Special events." I chose colors for the reminder calendars in the bluish-purplish part of the spectrum, allowing for easier identification.

Reminders are exactly what they sound like. They are to-do items -- reminders to do something. In general, I only require that the reminder be done the same day but I put a time on the reminder so that I get the reminder at the time-of-day when I should do that item. I should go to the gym in the morning, so the reminder email gets sent at 5 am. I don't want to worry about cleaning my room in the morning, so that reminder gets sent out at 7 pm. Often, I am so used to doing certain items on a daily basis that I will just do them without the reminder. Whenever I complete a to-do item, I delete the corresponding reminder email from my inbox.

Now for your amusement, here is my calendar for all of you to see. The first screenshot is only the daily reminders. There are a ton of them, which is why I turned off viewing for the other calendars. Most of the items are self-explanatory. "Temptation blocker" is a piece of software that prevents me from wasting time on the internet. You probably noticed that I track various information including my bedtime, wakeup time, my mood that day (on a numerical scale), and the work I planned and actually did that day (which I call a "worklog").


There are too many daily reminders, so they get cut off in the monthly view. Here's a detailed view.


As I already mentioned, these same daily reminders show up in my inbox. Since I use Gmail for personal communication and don't want to mix that up with to-do items, I setup a Gmail filter to forward calendar reminders to my Yahoo account.


Here's a view of my other calendars. The "To do" calendar consists of to-do items that don't reoccur, e.g. that only happen once. The "Appointments" calendar consists of to-do items where I need to be somewhere at a certain time. The "Special events" calendar current includes birthdays, though I might decide to add other types of events later.



Not everyone may agree with this method, but I always associate an email reminder with every calendar item. I like to be able to open my inbox and look at what needs to be done that day. I don't want to open up Google Calendar and look at the big picture unless I'm doing a weekly or thirdly review. My calendar operates on a need-to-know basis, which I believe is the most efficient setup.

Link of the day: Google to host large scientific data sets

Apparently, if you're willing to give Google your scientific data, they will host it for you and make it open to everyone. For more details and links, see Jose's post at Academic Productivity.

Link of the day: Is Google making us stupid?

I came across this Atlantic Monthly article via Lifehacker called "Is Google making us stupid?" Unfortunately, the description sounds a lot like me. I wrote a bit about a similar topic in an old post called "ADD in geeks."

There is an interesting discussion about how technology can change the way we write. Nietzsche's prose style changed when he switched from writing long hand to using a typewriter. I notice that I can be very shy and restrained in face-to-face conversation, but in email, because I can type so fast and because the text seems virtual, I'll say all sorts of crazy things that I would never say out loud.

How do you stop "internet-thinking" from taking over your life? You should schedule unstructured time to explore places, build things, read books, take long vacations, etc.

Link of the day: Gin and the cognitive surplus

I got this link from a high school friend. It's a video of a talk by Clay Shirky about cognitive surplus.

Shirky gives two examples of cognitive surplus. Right before the Industrial Revolution, people were in shock because the transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden. So they passed the time by drinking large quantities of gin. The second example is post-World War II American society. People only had to work five days a week so they had to do something with their time. They spent it watching sitcoms like "I Love Lucy." So cognitive surplus is the freed time we have from technological advances. Note this is different than just being rich and hiring people to clean and cook for you. This is free time on a society level.

Shirky claims that we are now at the beginning of an age where people have realized there are more options than just watching TV. That was the era of consumption and that is the model that current media companies have. Now we can also produce and share via the Web 2.0 model. We can share links via del.icio.us, share photos via Flickr, blog, etc.

I think there's a great deal of truth to Shirky's idea of "cognitive surplus." It's true that people have been playing sports together, gathering for farm competitions to show off animals and vegetables, etc for years. But the advent of the web makes these things much easier. If you like theater but don't live near a major city, you aren't completely hamstrung anymore. You don't have to move to New York. You can watch illegal clips of theater on Youtube and participate in forums like musicals.net.

I've been moving my life into Web 2.0 in the past few years. Two of my Flickr photos were selected for the Schmap guides. I make my del.icio.us, Flickr, and LibraryThing accounts public. I blog. I actively contribute to forums like musicals.net and ModSquadHockey. There are a lot of really smart people out there and they are much easier to find on the web. I've learned a lot about how to watch a play and how to select the right hockey equipment from these forums.

Internet lockdown

There are times when I just can't seem to stop surfing the web. I've finally figured out a way that I can still be connected to the internet and not waste time zoning out on the web.

My approach is two-pronged. First, I use a program called Temptation Blocker to turn off access to Internet Explorer, Opera, Netscape, and all other browsers except for Firefox. Now the only browser I can use is Firefox. (If I'm really desperate, I can turn off Temptation Blocker, but I have to enter a 32 character string.) For Firefox, I have installed an add-on called Leech Block. The user can enter the domain names of websites into Leech Blocker's options. These websites will be blocked. Examples of websites I have blocked are hockey sites, news sites like the New York Times, and Facebook.

Naturally, I could just turn off all this software. But it provides enough of a deterrent to work. If I regress to doing something I'm not supposed to, the software slows me down long enough for my discipline (what little I have) to kick in.

Yahoo Pipes for more efficient reading

One of my colleagues complained that there are too many journal articles. I think a way to fix that problem is to use Yahoo Pipes. A good place to start is a nice tutorial from Lifehacker. You just give Yahoo Pipes one or more feeds, some filtering criteria, and then Yahoo Pipes will generate a custom feed for you. I haven't tried it yet, but it sounds like a great idea.

Link of the day: Abramowitz and Stegun

The famous reference Handbook of Mathematical Functions by Abramowitz and Stegun is on the web!

If you're stuck on a desert island with internet access:

http://www.math.sfu.ca/~cbm/aands/

If you're stuck on desert island with a laptop but have no internet access, you can get a very large electronic file:

http://www.lacim.uqam.ca/~plouffe (71 MB)
http://www.math.sfu.ca/~cbm/aands/dl/abramowitz_and_stegun.tar.gz (43 MB)

Homepage

There are all kinds of homepages nowadays including iGoogle, Pageflakes, and Netvibes.

I'm still a fan of the hand-written HTML homepage. I've posted my personal homepage below. Recently, I added search forms for Physical Review, Wikipedia, and yourDictionary. I prefer to read my RSS feeds elsewhere (enough distraction as it is). Too bad I don't know how to add weather and calendar widgets.

GTD with Google Notebook

I currently use Backpackit for my GTD system, but Gina Trapani at Lifehacker demonstrates how you can also use the (completely free) Google Notebook to implement a GTD system.

Link of the day: Colloqium talk on community-based data management

I learned about a really interesting talk via Dave Bacon's blog. Here Raghu Ramakrishman talks about the emergence of social websites (e.g. flickr, del.icio.us, etc) and how the future of the web may lie in leveraging community input to improve data extraction. In the beginning, we had the web which was just static text and pictures. Then Alta Vista and other search engines used anchor text to improve searching. After that, Google came up with the concept of page rank. By looking at the many levels of linkage and giving more reputable sources a higher weight, you can come up with the most relevant search result. The next step in the evolution of the web may be using the direct input of users (e.g. tags) to improve data extraction.

Ramakrishman has been doing research on a very small-scale example called DBLife. It is a site that tries to extract data about academic researchers in the field of databases. If you search for a particular researcher, DBLife will attempt to generate pictures of the researchers, his/her list of publications and talks, and other information. You (the user) can then submit input on whether you think the information is accurate. So Ramakrishman's great hope is that we can develop software that is easily maintained by a community of users, that it will be easy to abstract the underlying structure of DBLife and apply it to other communities like Hollywood (e.g. HollywoodLife). In other words, one could give the software to another community without them having to look at any code.

The video of the talk is available here.

Social cataloging websites compared: LibraryThing, Shelfari, Gurulib

It seems that LibraryThing has more competition now! Shelfari and Gurulib are two new servies, though they are still in beta. I noticed that Shelfari is owned by Amazon (hmm...) and they offer unlimited storage of data (unlike LibraryThing). Here is a preliminary review of the three services by librarytwopointzero.

Electronic GTD: Using Backpack

I've finally decided to implement a unified GTD system. Before, I would keep some lists in text files, blog about some goals, use a checklist, etc. Backpack was highly recommended by many GTDers. I tried it and am very happy with it. Backpack is basically a web-based personal management system. You keep a collection of webpages. The webpages can be filled with lists, dated notes, links, images, and files. It's a little bit like a blog but private and more specific to planning.

So far I have four pages. 1) Home page - contains next-actions, 2) @projects - mix of project ideas and next-actions for them, 3) @waiting-for - nothing in here yet, 4) @someday - stuff I'd like to do someday when I have time, 5) Weekly review - log of what I've accomplished this week, what I need to work on based on this week's performance, and plans for next week.

NHL Google Video

At long last, you can watch NHL games on the internet via Google Video! The NHL posted this press release on their webpage today.