His main point is:

“What you do for a living is not be creative. Everyone is creative. What you do for a living is SHIP.”

He then explains how your “lizard brain” will sabotage you right before the finish line, because it is scared of criticism and being judged. You need to quiet that part of your brain and SHIP it anyway.

I like that Godin has the honesty to say most of what he tried to do in his own life (from writing books to starting companies) has failed – but he is still successful because he kept shipping.

Of course, this isn’t new to Developage’s readers – it goes right along Tom Selleck explaining that you can’t be successful without failing a lot, or Bloomberg saying:

“You can’t have the good stuff unless you’re willing to try the big things, and if you try, sometimes you’re going to lose. What do you do? Keep doing them.”

Godin also mentions the concept of Resistance, which comes from Steven Pressfield, whose book The War of Art was already on my radar. I’ll definitely get on that one soon. I’ve just ordered the audiobook.

Some of the most interesting solutions [to get more out of your time] ]involve figuring out how to do two things at once. [...]

For instance, I met a woman named Audrey Carlson several years ago who was struggling to figure out how to spend time with her friends and take care of her growing family. She started a group called “Chop and Chat.” Every Sunday six friends got together to cook at a member’s home. Each member brought the ingredients to make a different recipe that was then split into six portions. Members took home six different main courses for the week. Chop and Chat was an inventive way for the women to cook together, socialize, and prepare meals for their families.

Another example is venture capitalist Fern Mandelbaum. You would assume that meetings with Fern take place in her office… and you’d be wrong. Fern is an avid athlete and her meetings take place on hiking paths. Everyone who knows Fern knows to wear walking shoes and carry a bottle of water to their meetings in anticipation of a strenuous hike. Fern finds that this strategy is a great way to get to know each entrepreneur while also getting exercise.

Doing two things at once is something I practice with a passion. For example, if I’m not eating with someone, I’m always reading or listening to something interesting. When commuting or cooking or even brushing my teeth, I am usually listening to an audiobook on my mp3 player. It’s astonishing how much more you get done when you use this trick.

By the time they have been retired for two years, 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress because of joblessness or divorce.

Within five years of retirement, an estimated 60% of former NBA players are broke.

The reason: ignorance, poor planning, relying on friends instead of professionals, hiring dishonest professionals (no due diligence), going for tangible assets (real estate, newly invented products) instead of intangibles (stocks), and of course, reckless spending.

Key points:

1. Over-eating to “gain muscle” is counter-productive

Gaining muscle doesn’t mean you should eat THAT much to sustain it. Muscles doesn’t need that much energy. 10 labs of extra muscle only burns 40 calories a day. So if you think you can eat like crazy because you are more muscular than before, think again. That’s actually how/why people who exercise get FATTER.

This was a trap in which I fell into myself. After exercising for a year or two I was actually fatter because I was eating too much in order to “gain muscle”. This is a common misconception. See the truth about bulking for more.

2. The ‘post-exercise reward’ factor

The average person can only have so much self-control. So when that person has had the self-control to exercise that day, later his self-control “muscle” is weaker. Then he will rationalize that he can allow himself a double muffin since he just exercised anyway. AND he will post-rationalize that he needs extra calories for bulking and sustain his new muscles anyway – see the point above.

3. Spread exercise around your day

It’s unrealistic to get fit by exercising for 30 or 60 minutes a day but sitting on your ass the rest of the time. You may be better off distributing your exercise in short bursts thorough the day – walking, running a flight of stairs, do some push-ups, etc. This is what we used to do back a few centuries ago – small physical activities all day long.

4. Focus on food

To lose weight and keep it off, focus more on food than on exercise; it’s what and how much you eat that matters most.

Check out this other article for more details on exercise, the truths and the myths.

How did eBay make a boring tech firm look sexy? By inventing its own ‘creation myth’. David Rowan reports

It was the warm, smalltown story of a corporate giant’s humble beginnings that enticed Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, even the fact-obsessed New Yorker. When Pam Wesley wanted to boost her collection of Pez sweet dispensers, her fiance, Pierre Omidyar, built a website for her to trade them. That website grew to be the huge online auction house eBay, one of the internet gold rush’s few success stories – even though, in the words of the company’s PR chief, Mary Lou Song, it began simply “as kind of a love token”.

It was a touching tale, recounted in endless profiles on both sides of the Atlantic, with only one flaw: it was a lie. As Song admits in a new book by Adam Cohen, The Perfect Store: Inside eBay, she invented the story five years ago to generate publicity for an otherwise dull tech company. “No one wants to hear about a 30-year-old genius who wanted to create a perfect market,” Song confesses. So she constructed what corporate PRs call a “creation myth”, and hoodwinked some of the world’s most respected reporters.

[...] “Reporters didn’t show much interest in marketplaces, or battered keyboards or Star Wars artefacts for sale,” he says – until they heard the Pez story. “Inevitably, the finished story would mention the Pez angle but leave out virtually all the other factors.”

Tech companies, often those hardest to sell to journalists as “sexy”, are those most commonly linked with creation myths. Apple Computers and Hewlett-Packard even ran commercials celebrating their garage origins. When three management consultants launched an online betting site, Flutter.com, three years ago, it was widely reported that it stemmed from their own betting competitions during a Super Bowl party. “That wasn’t the case,” says a source close to the team, “but it didn’t stop them winning the column inches.”

Mulally instituted color coding for reports: green for good, yellow for caution, red for problems.

Managers coded their operations green at the first couple of meetings to show how well they were doing, but Mulally called them on it. “You guys, you know we lost a few billion dollars last year,” he told the group. “Is there anything that’s not going well?”

After that the process loosened up. Americas boss Mark Fields went first. He admitted that the Ford Edge, due to arrive at dealers, had some technical problems with the rear lift gate and wasn’t ready for the start of production.

“The whole place was deathly silent,” says Mulally. “Then I clapped, and I said, ‘Mark, I really appreciate that clear visibility.’ And the next week the entire set of charts were all rainbows.”

“If something is off-track, we are much better at identifying it and resolving it,” says CFO Booth. “Not everything turns to green. If it doesn’t, we have to modify the plan.”

Compare that to the prevalent culture in other companies, where bad news or even (God forbid!) talking about the competition is strongly frowned upon.

I thought the explanations on why companies grow rigid and complacent was quite nice. And the tips on how to stay nimble, too.

Below are my (rough) notes.

———-

The “keeper test” managers use at Netflix: which of my guys would I fight hard to keep if he told me he was leaving?
The ones you wouldn’t fight for should be let go to open the position for a star
Only keep the stars
Great workplace is made by great colleagues

Why so important to have team of stars? –> Huge premium in creating teams of “best”

It’s about effectiveness (results) not effort
Don’t measure yourself by the amount of effort you put in
Effort doesn’t pay the bills

The rare responsible person is:
self motivating
self aware
self disciplined
self improving
acts like a leader
doesn’t wait to be told what to do
never feels ‘that’s not my job’
picks up the trash on the floor
behaves like an owner

Growth increases complexity and potential for errors; therefore most companies as they grow limit freedom to avoid errors, and the talent density shrinks (number of high performance employees drops)
Procedures emerge – nobody likes them but they feel good compared to the pain of chaos
But procedures-focus drives more talent out – the innovators-mavericks leave
Who remains? Process-oriented employees, who follow existing process.
This makes for an efficient business…for a while.
BUT rigidity, politics, mediocrity and complacency go up.
Then: market shift or disruption.
Innovators being gone, the company doesn’t respond.
Slides into irrelevance.

SO…you need a culture that supports rapid innovation AND excellent execution.
There is a tension between the two, between creativity and discipline.
The other (netflix) option: avoid chaos as you grow by getting even more stunning people on board
Use high perf people – not rules
If you can keep running the business informally and not too rigidly, you can retain and attract creativity, high perf people

What about mistakes? Rapid recovery, not avoidance, is the right model
High performers make few mistakes, and when they do, they recover fast
Therefore it is better to have less rules and a bit more mistakes than having less mistakes but lots of rules that strangle creativity and speed of decision-making

Processes tend to creep in – because preventing errors sounds so good.
Try to get rid of rules when you can just to reinforce the point
Example 1: no vacation policy or tracking. Just be responsible.
Example 2: most companies have complexe policies on what you can expense, refund etc. AND whole department to check that those policies are respected. Netflix’s policy is simply “Act in netflix’s best interest”.

High performance people will perform better if they understand the context
Be open internally about strategy and results

Pay the max you can pay for each person (remmebert they are all stars)

Develop people by surrounding them with stunning colleagues and giving them big challenges to work on.
Unchallenging work and bad colleagues kills progress.

Formalized development (courses, mentor assignement, rotation around the firm, multi year career paths etc) is rarely effective.

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

Exercise physiologists have studied caffeine’s effects in nearly every iteration: Does it help sprinters? Marathon runners? Cyclists? Rowers? Swimmers? Athletes whose sports involve stopping and starting like tennis players? The answers are yes and yes and yes and yes.

[...] “There is so much data on this that it’s unbelievable,” [a researcher] said. “It’s just unequivocal that caffeine improves performance. It’s been shown in well-respected labs in multiple places around the world.” [...]

For many years, researchers thought the sole reason people could exercise harder and longer after using caffeine was that the compound helped muscles use fat as a fuel, sparing the glycogen stored in muscles and increasing endurance. But there were several hints that something else was going on. For example, caffeine improved performance even in short intense bursts of exercise when endurance is not an issue.

Now, Dr. Tarnopolsky and others report that caffeine increases the power output of muscles by releasing calcium that is stored in muscle. The effect can enable athletes to keep going longer or to go faster in the same length of time. Caffeine also affects the brain’s sensation of exhaustion, that feeling that it’s time to stop, you can’t go on any more. That may be one way it improves endurance, Dr. Tarnopolsky said.

The performance improvement in controlled laboratory settings can be 20 to 25 percent, Dr. Tarnopolsky said. But in the real world, including all comers, the improvement may average about 5 percent, still significant if you want to get your best time or even win a race.

Now a public speaker on fraud, his advice is “Don’t trust, and always verify.”

As criminals we learned that the most effective way to commit our crimes was with a smile. In the Godfather movie Michael Corleone said, “Keep your friend close, but your enemies closer.”

As a criminal I followed Michael Corleone’s philosophy all too well. We corrupted our auditor’s professional skepticism by giving them extraordinarily rich consulting work in addition to their audit engagements. Today, at least under Sarbanes-Oxley accounting firms cannot engage in consulting work for the clients they audit.

Our auditors felt too comfortable with us as “good, respectable human beings with high integrity.” We would socialize with our auditors by having so-called “three martini lunches” and we would invite them to attend Antar family functions. They believed we were pillars in our community as we gave large amounts of money to charity and were involved in a number of good community causes.

If anyone has ever seen the movie “The Devil’s Advocate” starring Al Pacino they would know that the devil’s favorite sin in vanity. The white collar criminal is equivalent to the devil. We took advantage of the vanity of our auditors.

For example, during the fiscal year end inventory audits, we would climb over stacks of inventory that were piled 10 high and 3 deep and instead of telling the auditor there were 30 items of merchandise in stock we would tell them there was 100 items (10 high and 10 deep).

The different audit staff members in many locations simply never climbed up the stacks of inventory to see what was behind them. It was beneath their dignity to climb boxes and count inventory. After all, they were well dressed in nice suits. As white collar criminals we were all too happy to accommodate their self importance and desire not to get dirty.

When the auditors finally came to our offices to conduct field work we were all too accommodating of their desires. We knew that most of them were relatively young kids who thought their field work was boring. We engaged in a campaign of “obstruction by distraction.”

I instructed Crazy Eddie staff involved in the fraud to do anything to keep audit staff members from focusing on their work. They would talk about baseball, sex, or anything else in an effort to stop them from focusing on the work.

For example, if the auditors had ten weeks to complete an audit, they would be expected to complete about 10% of their field work each week. However, as a result of our “obstruction by distraction” campaign, for example, by the 8th of 10 weeks instead of having 80% of their field work completed they would have only about 25% of it done.

When people have to rush they make mistakes. They skimp over important issues such as red flags and they omit key important work in an effort to make up for lost time and complete their work. The auditors could not blame us for their lack of time. After all we were all too “accommodating” with them.

For the fiscal years 1986 and 1987 the auditors never completed key field work. For example, regarding fiscal year 1986 they failed to conduct proper sales cut-off testing and did not thoroughly review our cash balances.

Had they conducted the required field work for fiscal year 1986 they would have discovered over $1.5 million in fictitious sales. We took money that was previously skimmed from Crazy Eddie as a private company (1969-1984) from secret Antar family bank accounts in Israel and deposited them into the bank accounts of certain stores (included in the computation of comparable store sales) and counted them as sales.

Those deposits of previously skimmed funds were made after the fiscal year closed. Such deposits made after the fiscal year for sales made during the fiscal year would be considered as reconciling items on bank reconciliation. Had the auditors carefully examined our bank reconciliations they would have seen open deposits for drafts in round amounts of $25,000, $50,000, $75,000, and $100,000 for fictitious sales listed side by side with actual sales in amounts of, for example, $318.31, $26.29, $914.26, etc. They were in too much of a rush to complete the audit since they wasted too much time from our distractions.

During audit for the fiscal year 1987 audit the staff member whose job was to audit accounts payable had only 6 months audit experience and no accounts payable experience. He started his major field work on the accounts payable audit on April 27, 1987 – the same day Crazy Eddie’s auditors signed off on a “clean” audit opinion. He did not finished auditing accounts payable until about 3 weeks later. The auditors missed a phony debit memo fraud which reduced accounts payable from about $70 million to $50 million.

The auditors only ended up receiving 3 accounts payable confirmations from hundreds of Crazy Eddie’s vendors. Even those confirmations from vendors showed significant material differences between what we claimed we owed the vendors and what they claimed was the proper amounts owed to them. The auditors failed to adequately investigate those differences.[...]

As a person who used words to deceive and lie to others in the commission of my crimes I say you must judge people by their actions and not by their kind words. Too often we are moved by well meaning but empty words.

As a criminal I used well sounding words too exploit you in an effort to commit my crimes. I knew as good human beings you would feel compassion for me.

However, the white collar criminal uses your humanity such as compassion as a weakness to be exploited.