It has been an interesting first year as CEO of Bond Holdings (the company that bought the Scribe Media brand.) There’s no faster way to learn to run a company than jumping into the deep end. That’s where I’ve been for the last 12 months.

There has been a lot of confusion about the Scribe Media acquisition after the bankruptcy of the old company last year. I’ve tried to answer common questions about my work with Scribe Media here.

What Happened to Scribe Media? [Updated 2024]

The Scribe Media brand went through an acquisition in August 2023.

The company was founded in 2014 by Tucker Max and Zach Obront.[0] They left Scribe in December 2021.[1] [2] JeVon McCormick took sole leadership of Scribe Media, LLC. The old company suddenly transitioned in May 2023, and the Scribe Media brand was purchased by a new company started by Enduring Ventures called Bond Holdings.

Some veteran Scribe team members were hired by this new company. In August 2023, Eric Jorgenson was hired to become CEO of Bond. This new company is serving some former Scribe Authors, and offering writing and publishing services to new authors.

What does Scribe Media Do?

Scribe Media helps experts, executives, and entrepreneurs turn ideas into books. We surround you with a professional publishing team to help you position, write, edit, design, publish, and market your book.

Why did Scribe Media Shut Down?

Scribe Media, LLC transitioned because of poor financial decisions. During that time it was led by former President & CEO JeVon McCormick. There are some ongoing legal proceedings in Travis County, TX regarding these actions. Some of the allegations are quite serious, you can read more about them here.

How did Eric Jorgenson become CEO and owner of Scribe Media?

Eric Jorgenson was an author publishing his second book with Scribe Media in 2023. Since publishing his first book with Scribe in 2020, he believed in the company and supported its vision. Finding out the company was in financial distress after a large layoff, he worked to find a solution. Eventually, a new company was created to purchase the Scribe Media brand and hire key team members. A few months later, they hired Eric Jorgenson as CEO.

Is Scribe Media Back In Business?

The old company is bankrupt, but the Scribe Brand is back in action! The Scribe Media brand was purchased by a new company which hired many of the most tenured team members. Authors can hire this new company to perform updated versions of Scribe’s services.

Who owns Scribe Media now?

The Scribe Media brand, process, and some of the team are now part of a new company called Bond, with new ownership. The owners of the new Scribe Media are author Eric Jorgenson and Enduring Ventures (owned by Sieva Kozinsky and Xavier Helgesen).

Where is Scribe Media Now?

The Scribe Media team operates with 27 full-time employees and dozens of freelancers. We have published nearly one hundred books since beginning operations in August 2023, and have 100+ more currently in progress.

Who works at Scribe Media Now?

The team includes many veteran Scribe employees and publishing industry experts. You can read their team bios at scribemedia.com/team.

Sources, Citations, and Links about Scribe Media

Who works at Scribe Media?

scribemedia.com/team

When did Tucker Max leave Scribe Media?

https://www.tuckermax.com/the-scribe-resignation/

When did Zach Obront leave Scribe Media?

https://obront.substack.com/p/443a5bc6-63eb-4871-b625-eab243044b4c

Did Enduring Ventures buy Scribe Media?

https://www.enduring.ventures/letters/2023

What happened with the Scribe Lawsuit?

https://documents-legal.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/PLAINTIFFS++ORIGINAL+PETITION+(2).pdf

I haven’t written anything on Medium since 2020. Medium was the first home to my writing and we had a few good years, but it’s time to say goodbye.

The reader experience isn’t what it was, and I’d rather have a more direct connection with you. I’ve decided to move entirely to my own site, which will give us much more room for activities.

For the past couple of years, I’ve experimented with my personal site, ejorgenson.com. If you haven’t visited yet, please subscribe to my newsletter to get all of my recent work. There are already 14,500+ subscribers to my weekly posts and podcasts.

Also, I’ve moved the very best articles of Evergreen to my new blog. As I went back and read my Evergreen posts, I realized that they are, well, Evergreen. I hope you still find these posts useful today!

I build side projects there too, like the Leverage Course and Community, to learn how to increase our impact in business and in life.

Finally, you’ll get updates about my books, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, and the upcoming Almanack of Balaji Srinivasan.

Hope to see you at the afterparty,

Eric Jorgenson

I’ve created a book! The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A guide to Wealth and Happiness is a compilation of all of Naval’s wisdom from tweets, talks, and interviews over the past 10 years.

There are a few unique things about the Navalmanack. Not all of these are completely original to this project, but the combination has made for something that feels… more… than just a book. Let’s break these down and explain each one for readers and future authors. Here’s the list:

• Created entirely from public sources
• Rich with Insights
• Fractal Format
• Readable and re-readable
• Freely Available Online
• QR Codes

Created entirely out of publicly available information.

The raw material of this book is Tweets, Podcasts, Videos, Articles, Books, and Blog Posts. I didn’t write one word past the Author’s note.

(Though don’t let that fool you — I did work my ass off to build an incredible reading experience with the existing raw material.)

Rich with Insight

The original amount of raw material was enormous. ~80 sources, ~20,000 tweets, Well over 1,000,000 words. Over a decade of creation to curate from.

A book distilled from this much raw material is the most insight-dense book possible. Here’s a test: open this book to any random spot, read one page, then close the book and think interesting thoughts for an hour afterward.

As I organized building blocks, I could see ideas germinate and develop, as Naval articulates them more and more clearly over time. We could select the very best version of an idea, and pair it with another complementary idea from a different platform to strengthen each insight.

While it all flows smoothly, you don’t have to read every word to learn something. Most books are 1 idea expanded into a book. The Navalmanack is 100 ideas woven together into one conversation.

Fractal Format

The unique constraints led to the creation of a new book format. Inspired by the internet origin of the content, and some solid advice from Nivi and Sean O’Connor, this book is fractal. You can zoom in and out of it. If you read just the Table of Contents, you would learn something valuable.

Next, you could read just the tweets, which are formatted like pull quotes, in large text throughout the book. Read in this way, it’s almost like a book of aphorisms (pithy statements of general truth) and koans (puzzle within a statement (from zen buddhism)).

As you read the body, it feels like a conversation with Naval about the depth of each of these ideas. Reading feels invigorating and engaging.

Maybe most interestingly, the final section of the book is “Naval’s Recommended Reading.” It shows the sources of his worldview, the books and blogs that informed it. For readers who really want to dive deeper into the first principles, the foundation of Naval’s ideas… this is the beginning of years of interesting reading.

Readable and Re-readable

While many Alpha Readers just binged the book in 2 days, it is also easy to bounce in/out of. This is partly due to the structure (each section and chapter stands on its own), and in homage to Naval’s own reading style. He “treats books like blogs” — picking up, putting down, and skipping around.

One early reader called this an “ADD — friendly reading experience.” And while the book format is timeless, the bar for holding a reader’s attention is certainly higher now. I can say this book lives up to that.

Tweets and short punchy statements are formatted like pull quotes as seen below, but they are unique content (unlike normal pull quotes.) These are almost like notes — you can flip through reading just the large-print to refresh your memory on the ideas. Here is an example:

Freely Available Online

We’re providing the full content of the book available free online in a variety of formats. Information wants to be free. Open sharing of information is how we can help create equality of opportunity around the world.

Not only that, but now the full text is: Indexed, Searchable, Sharable, Highlightable, and Copy-and-paste-able.

QR Codes

I’ve expected QR codes to make a comeback for a long time. Now, a QR code reader is built-in to smartphone cameras, it’s accessible to everyone instantly.

Many books recently have included URLs in footnotes or at the end of the book. It’s not many readers who will type out a whole Url with a blog post extension. There has to be a better paradigm for this.

In the Naval’s Recommended Reading section, where so much of the content is links to books and blogs, QR codes are the perfect way to be most helpful to readers as they move from physical book to web sources.

These images transition you quickly between text and web. The camera reads the link instantly and pops up a notification. Open the camera, tap the notification bar. 0.3 seconds at most.

After a little ‘user testing’ with a few friends and family members… I did realize these images needed a small instructional caption. But if more books adopt this in a few years, maybe everyone will pick up the habit!

Try it now — pop open your phone camera and point it at this image:

To purchase a copy of the Navalmanack, head to Amazon. To read for free or download the pdf online, head to Navalmanack.com. To see more of what I’ve been working on, head to ejorgenson.com.

Thanks for reading! I’ve moved to ejorgenson.com — feel free to visit and catch up on my latest content.

Course Correctly is the home of helpful, unbiased reviews of Online Courses. Join our email list to receive reviews of new courses!

What is Reforge?

Reforge conducts courses for experienced professionals. Education is focused on the skill and discipline of Growth in high-speed, high-scale startups. Typical backgrounds for participants are those already working in startups or tech companies as a marketer, product manager, data analyst, engineer, or founder.

Reforge offers three different programs:

1) Growth Series (comprehensive and foundational course on growth)

2) Retention + Engagement Deep Dive

3) Advanced Growth Strategy (this review)

Is Reforge Advanced Growth Strategy for me?

This course is primarily for professionals working in tech startups. While people in any role could benefit, it is focused on executives, marketers, engineers and product managers who are focused on growth.

If you are on a career path toward management in a startup, this is a valuable experience. If you are currently on a growth team or the founder of a startup that is seeking growth, this is meant exactly for you.

Without a startup or workplace to apply these lessons, this course may be overkill for learning growth basics.

Reforge is specifically geared toward high-speed, high-scale startups. You will have a hard time applying these frameworks to a plumbing business. Reforge applies mostly to technology companies, and specifically those with Network Effects and a high ceiling on growth.

Thanks for reading! I’ve moved to ejorgenson.com/blog — feel free to visit and catch up on my latest content.

Read the rest of this review at CourseCorrectly.com

We host the complete review of Reforge Advanced Growth Strategy on CourseCorrectly.com — please click here to finish reading this review, and see what else we have to offer.

About the Reviewer

Eric Jorgenson is a Product Strategist at Zaarly. He writes Evergreen Library and is publishing the Almanack of Naval Ravikant.

Get Unbiased & Helpful Reviews of Online Courses

Review of Reforge: Advanced Growth Strategy Course was originally published in Course Correctly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Thankfully, I’ve gotten into the habit of weightlifting in the past two years. It has been transformative for me in a few different ways, and I’ve tried to lay out the lessons I’ve learned here.

(There are many subcultures within weightlifting (Powerlifting, Crossfit, Bodybuilding, etc), and I’m not particularly an adherent to any of them. I think these points are general enough to belong to them all.)

1) Load-bearing Habits

Weightlifting is only 15% about weightlifting. The other 85% is about diet, sleep, and other habits.

You can work your ass off in the gym, but if you don’t have the right diet and sleep habits, your work will be completely wasted. Building muscle happens with the proper nutrition and recovery practices. Workouts are only a catalyst to the process that every other habit has to support.

This is super obvious in weightlifting, though I’m sure the same foundational habits are key to any other area of progress.

2) Benefits of precision

Since making progress in weightlifting is 80% about nutrition, I’ve learned a lot about diet. Serious weightlifters are probably the smartest amateurs about diet (at least in short-term, fitness related areas.)

An optimal diet is planned, calculated, and followed precisely. You buy a food scale. You weigh out 40g of oats. You eat 16 almonds. Precise. This might seem insane, but the benefits of this kind of precision are incredible.

What are you doing that should be more precise? Where is growth slipping through your hands because of vague estimates where you should have exact numbers?

3) Measure, Record, and Track

On long-term projects, incremental progress can be hard to visualize. You can’t necessarily see every pound you lose, or every rep you add… unless you are measuring and tracking carefully.

It is incredibly rewarding to have a record of that progress. If you’re feeling discouraged, having an easy way to see that ‘the system is working’ can go a long way.

Weigh in every day, record every set. It keeps you honest, and it helps you ensure that you are pushing yourself and improving. Lots of people do the same workout with the same weight, month after month. This is not how you build strength.

To move forward in your career, your fitness, or your relationships it is not enough to do the same thing week after week. You have to do more. When you set today’s bar above last week’s and hold yourself to it… now you’re getting somewhere.

4) Progressive overload

The key to progress is progressive overload. Lifting more than you have previously. Your body will rebuild to adjust to this new task you’ve asked of it. Then, you increase the weight, and your body rebuilds stronger.

Progressive overload is the practice of constantly finding your limit, so that your limit moves a little. Then pushing it again.

Whether you’re running, reading, stacking cups or lifting weights… progressive overload is the path to progress. And to reach “overload” you have to be willing to fail…

5) Train to failure, on purpose.

Failure is the threshold of growth. If you’re not failing sometimes, you are not growing as fast as you could be. Push yourself to failure to find your maximum output. It’s more than you think.

Growth goes to those operating closest to their limit. It isn’t about who can lift the most, but who is pushing themselves the hardest.

The salesperson who endures the most “No”s will hear the most “Yes”s. The filmmaker who creates the most shitty early films refines technique the most. Fail to fail, and you will fail to improve.

6) Variation is key to growth

Your body gets efficient at what it practices. This is a good thing. But it also means that to build muscle, increase stamina, and prevent injury you need to vary your routine.

In weightlifting, variation can mean varying strength/hypertrophy workouts, breaking down lifts, or changing range-of-motion (deficits, negatives, etc.)

For other goals, variety builds slightly different strengths. It makes you creative, adaptable, and robust. If you want to learn to paint, sketch. If you want to fight, dance. Find ways to dissect your skill, find tangents to bring a new strength to your main purpose.

7) Patience

“It takes 10+ years to build a world-class body”

— Arnold Schwarzenegger

Do you think building a business, a career, or a mind are built any faster? It takes years and years to do anything worthwhile. Having a fitness practice that is building something has been a great reminder for me to have patience for other things I’m building in my life. Like raising a tortoise, it creates a longer-term mindset.

You have to be patient. You have to grow slowly. If you try to move too fast, you injure yourself. Be patient.

Just do your work each day, and get on with the rest of your life. You can’t do more than a day’s work today. Do your workout, cross it off, and smile.

8) “Training is the opposite of hoping”

This thought gives me so much peace. A perfect segue from patience, this reminds me that if I am training, I don’t need to be hoping. I can be patient.

I spend less time wanting, and more time getting. For many years I had fitness-related goals that I was hoping to achieve. Now, I don’t hope. I train.

Whatever you are hoping for… start training for. It doesn’t matter where you start, or what you do.

Feel anxious when hoping. Feel peaceful when training.

“Stress comes from unaddressed problems — ignoring something that you should be working on. Stress doesn’t come from the work itself.”

— Jeff Bezos

9) Normal is… not ok.

Hold yourself to standard above the default “normal”. It isn’t normal to workout every day. It isn’t normal to weigh out your food as you prepare it to be sure you’re not accidentally eating double the calories of pesto you intended.

It is normal to be sedentary, weak, and overweight. It is normal to eat yourself into sickness, malnutrition, and obesity. It is normal to hope for fitness, without training for it.

It is not hard to be better than normal. It just requires doing something different. Even good-natured people who love you will experience strange subconscious urges to subtly convince you not to try so hard, to be more like them, to be normal. (We all do this.)

To do anything abnormal, you will experience ‘social drag’ from people around you. Learn to ignore them, politely point out their unsupportive behavior, or tell them to “Eat Shit” and march on your merry way.

10) Choose (or create) a peer group that supports your goals

Workouts are an easier habit when you have a fixed time with a close friend. This makes your reward for going to the gym not just intrinsic or biological, but also social. It’s fun to workout with friends, to gently compete, to support each other, and to bullshit at the gym.

Whatever you want to do — find good people you enjoy to do it with, and you will all be richer for it. Their expectations and their habits enable your goals.

11) “Programming” Yourself

Your prescription of workouts and diet is called your ‘Program.’ Just like you program a computer, you program yourself. Inputs yield outputs. Do these workouts, eat these things, you will lose fat and add strength.

Review. Rewrite the program. Execute.

I now believe you can ‘program’ for nearly everything. The Navy knows and executes the ‘SEAL’ program. Stanford executes the ‘Neurosurgeon’ program.

It doesn’t take much research to learn the programs to become an author, a comedian, or a millionaire.

Create your programs like you’re playing ’The Sims’ with yourself — prescribe the activities as though someone else is executing them.

Then, execute the program.

Once you see a program ‘run’ and you embody the result as a changed person, it is incredibly addicting.

Before you start, you expect execution to be the hard part. Once you see the feedback loop, the execution becomes the fun part. Programming, precision, and patience become the hard parts.

Discipline becomes fun.

Closing

I under-estimated how much fitness is a foundation. When I make weightlifting my first priority, my diet and sleep fall perfectly in line. I’m more productive at work. I have more willpower. More calm. More energy.

I used to think I was sacrificing health for the sake of work or fun or time to relax. The beautiful paradox is that when I put my workout first… every one of those is better than ever before.

This idea connects right back into #1, because positive habits enable other positive habits. Whatever your foundation is, find it and put it first.

On Twitter: @EricJorgenson

I'm working on a book about Wealth & Happiness, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. It is coming soon.

I also write other less meathead-y things like The Evergreen Library, for building a better business brain. And random posts like this one about How Building Startup Teams Above 20 is really hard.

Thanks to my gym buddies Zach Anderson Pettet and JK for reading drafts.

Thanks for reading! I’ve moved to ejorgenson.com — feel free to visit and catch up on my latest content.

Evergreen is a collection of links to the best learning resources in business, collected by a group of managers, founders, and investors. We contribute resources about one topic, which are synthesized and shared in this Collection. The goal is to learn more efficiently through increased context and focus.

Remember, these are designed to feel like short books, you’re meant to meander and spend ~3 hours on this topic. Save these links and read them throughout the week. Immerse yourself in this topic and leave the week smarter than you started it!

Prioritization is hard. It’s always hard, and it’s always a high-leverage area of improvement. Working on the right things at the right time is 90% of the battle.

This is an area that I’ve personally and professionally sucked at lately, so I’m quite excited to dive into this and see what we can learn. Here’s the structure of the post:

• Start with Strategy
• 3 Models of Opportunity Cost (order of projects)
• 3 Models of Leverage (importance of projects)
• 3 Models for Avoiding Prioritization Mistakes

If you need a primer on Mental Models, there’s none better than Farnam Street’s.

Let’s do it.

Can’t have a priority without a strategy

Before we even get to prioritization, there is a prerequisite — strategy. You know your strategy is lacking when everything looks equally important. If prioritization seems impossible, it’s not because you need to work harder (or smarter) on prioritization. You need to go up a level and work on your strategy.

Your strategy should help make it clear which work is most important, or at least cut away huge chunks of possibilities. If it doesn’t, it probably needs improvement.

3 Models of Opportunity Cost

Much of the challenge of prioritization is one of Opportunity Cost. Where to allocate resources and effort, given our goals and strategy. (Even with infinite money, we’ll always be constrained by time.)

Find the Bottleneck

One of the most commonly-assigned readings in business schools is The Goal, by Eli Goldratt. This book explains the “Theory of Constraints” and the summary is “Find and improve the constraining factor — no other work will matter.”

If you’re not up for reading the whole book Taylor Pearson has a good post that captures the basic idea well. As he puts it, once you have defined the goal there are really only two questions:

1. What’s the current limit?
2. What’s the obvious way to improve the limit?

The key is to look at the whole system to find the limit. In a company, is the limit sales? Some aspect of production? Delivery? (Lots more great examples in Pearson’s post.)

If you’re working on anything that isn’t improving the bottleneck, then you’re not improving the throughput of the system. Essentially wasting time and resources, where any improvement to the bottleneck would be a massive payoff.

Cost of Delay

Cost of Delay is the newest (to me) and most exciting of the ideas and resources sent in for this edition. I had a vague, intuitive sense that we weren’t measuring the right things, or properly appreciating the cost of misprioritization, and this is the framework that made it “click.”

From the site BlackSwanFarming.com:

Cost of Delay is a way of communicating the impact of time on the outcomes we hope to achieve.

Cost of Delay combines urgency and value — two things that humans are not very good at distinguishing between. To make decisions, we need to understand not just how valuable something is, but how urgent it is.

Click here to watch a 3-min intro video about Cost of Delay.

In the example in video above, the Cost of Delay for this feature was actually more than $200,000 per week! So, the 38 weeks that this opportunity spent waiting in various queues cost the organization nearly $8m in lost revenue.

Knowing this puts the cost of waiting into perspective, doesn’t it? If they had taken the 5 minutes needed to estimate the Cost of Delay for this feature then a number of key decisions would have been made quite differently.

It’s one thing for an organisation to be blind to queues. It’s another level of blindness to have no clue what those queues are costing. If we’re going to make better decisions, we really need to understand the Cost of Delay of the things flowing through the system.

So the key questions to ask yourself are:

1. How urgent is this?
2. How valuable is this?
3. What is the cost of not having this done yet, each week? (relative to other options)

There are so many great insights on these posts, and there are too many posts to link to, so go dive into BlackSwanFarming.com and read for yourself. I’m going to read deep into it this week, for sure.

Forever indebted to Denis Krizanovic for sending this in. Super valuable.

Eisenhower Matrix (Urgent vs. Important)

This is a classic tool for personal productivity, and is explained well in this post contributed by Kevin Indig.

A quick 2x2 that asks only two questions:

1. How urgent is this?
2. How important is this?

And it gives you immediate next steps based on the answers to those questions. You’ve probably seen something like this box before:

Super handy lightweight mental “tool” for quickly triaging ideas and to-dos.

The problem I find with it is inflation of importance and urgency… you wind up with too many things in the top-left box, and can’t prioritize amongst those. Then you ask yourself “what is the MOST important? What is the MOST urgent?” which is when some of these other methods come in handy.

The Black Swan Farming post on Urgency Profiles can help answer “what is most urgent?”, and hopefully this next section will help you answer “what is most important?”

(Master of segues, at it again)

3 Models of Leverage

Understanding which possible feature, initiative, or task is the “most important” is not an easy task. There are a few tools or mental models we can use to find out which projects will get us the most leverage (most progress toward our goals, given resources needed).

What project solves the most problems?

My buddy Zach Pettet recommended we check out Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky’s to-do list process, as he describes in his interview with Reid Hoffman.

This is how Chesky does his to-do lists:

I make a long list of tasks, as exhaustive as possible. Then I try to group them. It’s like a game of leverage. What one action can take care of those 3? And I do this over and over again.

If you have a list of 20 things to do, you often realize that if you do 3 big things, these other 20 things are going to be solved in some way by 3 big things. So it’s my way of finding out how to do fewer, bigger things.

There is a subtle shift there, from looking at tasks to looking at problems. It’s also something that Matt Donovan taught me at Zaarly. Look at the problems you need to solve and the possible solutions on separate levels. They triage very differently.

Multiple problems can be solved with one project, but it rarely works by accident. You need to do this exercise to find out which solutions can knock out a few problems for you.

There’s also an similar version of this question from Tim Ferriss:

What is one thing that, if completed, makes the rest of these tasks easier?

So it doesn’t have to remove the need to complete the other tasks — just ordering projects in a way that makes the other easier, faster, or cheaper can be a great investment of time.

The 80/20 Rule (and Fractal 80/20)

I’m quite sure if you’re reading this, that you know all about Pareto’s Law. Basically that 80% of the outcome is decided by 20% of the inputs. From Farnam Street’s Mental Models:

Named for Italian polymath Vilfredo Pareto, who noticed that 80% of Italy’s land was owned by about 20% of its population, the Pareto Principle states that a small amount of some phenomenon causes a disproportionately large effect.

The Pareto Principle is an example of a power-law type of statistical distribution — as distinguished from a traditional bell curve — and is demonstrated in various phenomena ranging from wealth to city populations to important human habits.

My friend Jesse Koltes recommended the book 80/20 Sales and Marketing, which is about getting the most impact from your inputs.

The most interesting thing about the book was the concept that the 80/20 rule is Fractal — meaning that of the top 20%, there is a disproportionately impactful top 20%, etc. As Jesse said:

“There are very likely 5 minutes each year that account for 50% of your output. I try to think hard about what those 5 minutes are.”

I’m going to work hard on that, too.

Look at long-term ROI for skills and systems

Some projects (even super small ones) can have enormous payoffs over a lifetime, if they save you time and mental clutter.

My favorite example of this is Tim Urban’s (Wait But Why) answer to the question “What’s Something I Can Learn or Do in 10 Minutes That Would Be Useful for the Rest of My Life?”

He said: Learn Gmail Keyboard Shortcuts.

I learned them, and now agree completely. Now, I’d also add: Use Gorgias (or another text expander).

Where are there other super high-leverage skills (or decisions) like that?

• Set up automatic savings? Bill pay?
• Get groceries delivered?
• Learning to prioritize? (oh look, you already are!!)

Aside from skills, another approach is to see where you can apply tools or systems that will automate some of the rote tasks of your life. Saas tools for low-value tasks at work or setting up IFTTT for daily or weekly tasks can pay off very quickly by removing distractions and freeing up time.

Jason Evanish has a good post about this specifically for managers on the lighthouse blog. Find out the hourly cost of your time, and do the simple math to find out how long the ROI is of simple tools $10/month seems like a lot until you realize it’ll save you one hour ($40) per week. That’s a no-brainer.

If you see something with that kind of payoff, where a 10-minute investment in a skill or system will save you time every day, every week, or every time you repeat an action.

3 Models of What to NOT do when Prioritizing

As always on Evergreen, we like to look at what NOT to do. How to avoid problems, not just what the solutions might be. Here are some tools to avoid common pitfalls in prioritization.

Find Your Worst Enemies

Or: “Don’t have too many priorities”

The most annoying prioritization tool I’ve come across is Warren Buffett’s “2 List Strategy.” It’s annoying because it presents a reality that I was very much in denial about, and it seems so correct about that pleasing piece of denial being very unproductive.

Here’s the (maybe apocryphal) story:

Flint (Buffett’s pilot) was talking about his career priorities and Buffett instructed him to do this:

STEP 1: Buffett started by asking Flint to write down his top 25 career goals. So, Flint took some time and wrote them down.

STEP 2: Then, Buffett asked Flint to review his list and circle his top 5 goals. Again, Flint took some time, made his way through the list, and eventually decided on his 5 most important goals.

STEP 3: At this point, Flint had two lists. The 5 items he had circled were List A and the 20 items he had not circled were List B.

Flint confirmed that he would start working on his top 5 goals right away. And that’s when Buffett asked him about the second list, “And what about the ones you didn’t circle?”

Flint replied, “Well, the top 5 are my primary focus, but the other 20 come in a close second. They are still important so I’ll work on those intermittently as I see fit. They are not as urgent, but I still plan to give them a dedicated effort.”

To which Buffett replied, “No. You’ve got it wrong, Mike. Everything you didn’t circle just became your Avoid-At-All-Cost list. No matter what, these things get no attention from you until you’ve succeeded with your top 5.”

Doesn’t that just feel like a punch in the gut? Are you telling us that we can’t do absolutely everything that we ever dreamed possible for ourselves? Hm, shit. Yea. I guess that’s probably right.

So, the lesson here is to cultivate a healthy fear (bordering on paranoia) about your “secondary” priorities leeching productivity from your main priorities.

(This exact problem is a large part of the reason for the intermittence of these posts over the past 18 months, to be honest with you.)

After reading this a little bit ago, I changed the name of the “Business Ideas” list in my phone to “Worst Enemies” — a helpful little reminder to keep focus on the things that matter most.

All Possibilities should have Probabilities

I’m assuming you’ve all bought a copy of Principles, by Ray Dalio already. If not, please take a second to do so now. It’s a must read.(I don’t say that often.)

There are a TON of lessons on prioritization in there, through the larger study on decision-making. One specific principle jumped out as a “don’t”:

Watch out for unproductively identifying possibilities without assigning them probabilities, because it screws up prioritization.

You can recognize this with phrases like “It’s possible that…” then going on to say something that’s improbable and/or unimportant, rather than something like, “I think there’s a good chance that…” followed by something that’s important or probable. Almost anything is possible. All possibilities must be looked at in terms of their likelihoods and prioritized.

If you’re trying to prioritize and everything looks equally important, a pass through to assign probabilities to your possibilities will loosen up the impasse.

Rule: Don’t let uncertain outcomes look equally uncertain. Assign probabilities.

Don’t be a Prioritization Pansy

The sad truth is that the secret to prioritization is not in the tools; it’s in you. The discipline is what makes the method work, not the method itself.

As my friend Adam Hofmann points out: the reason there are 1,000,000 prioritization methods is because people fail using one and try the next. Really, bringing discipline to any of them would work well enough. It’s not the method, it’s how thoroughly you follow it.

So don’t be a pansy when it comes to prioritization. Just like Strategy, you know you’re doing well then the decisions you’re making feel agonizing, but clear.

Make the hard choices.

Then, stick with the plan. Don’t creep into your “B List” or sneak in a small feature that doesn’t have a high score on the Cost of Delay chart.

Be disciplined in your behavior.

Extra Reading (More tactical tools/methods)

20 Product Prioritization Techniques — Thanks Chris Butler!

Using Power Laws in Prioritization — Thanks Mike Smith!

Essentialism — Our most recommended book on Prioritization!

Focus on Unique Value Proposition — Thanks Roger Cauvin!

Use a Spreadsheet as your GTD Manager — Thanks Jesse Koltes!

Getting Things Done — The oft-recommended classic of productivity

Thanks for reading! I’ve moved to ejorgenson.com — feel free to visit and catch up on my latest content.

If you enjoyed this, you’ll get more like it by joining Evergreen:

My Other Projects

Upcoming Book: The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Mini-book: Career Advice for Uniquely Ambitious People

Personal Site: EJorgenson.com

Evergreen Lives on Donations

Evergreen requires time and money. If you find this project helpful, please consider buying me a coffee, or sending some Bitcoin.

BTC Wallet: 3KiLX3bjnpmb3a4YiBhm3vSNiV2Erxk1fX (If you’ve never used Crypto before, Coinbase is the easiest way to start.)

Thank you very much! ❤ ☺

Thank you

Massive appreciation for those who suggested pieces of content (or wrote something new) for this Edition of Evergreen: Chris Butler, Eugene Tsyrklevich, Nabila Amarsy, Julie Lyle, Anthony Suporia, Denis Krizanovic, Aaron Johnson, Ali Grovue, Mark Stansbury, Taylor Pearson, Khanh Tuong, Jesse Koltes, Mike Smith, Scott Norris, Amy Young, Roger Cauvin, Colin Hewitt, Matt Donovan, Mike Dariano, Greg Meyer, Tiago Forte, Kevin Indig, Derek Baynton, Blas Moros, Zach Pettet, Benjamin Kinnard.

Many thanks for being a part of this project! Not every suggestion is able to make it to the final edit, but every single suggestion is read and appreciated.

Never Enough

As my Father always says: “There’s always room for the best.” There’s always a better resource out there. These collections can always get better, and I hope that they do. If you can think of anything that was missed, I welcome you to share it.

To share your thoughts, improvements or additions: Email or Twitter.

If you liked this, check out other Editions of Evergreen:

Building and Managing a Team:

How to Find and Recruit the Team you Need
How Not to Hire like a Clownshow
Compensation Rules Everything Around Me
Why Employee Onboarding is holding you back
How to Boost Employee Retention
How Performance Reviews are being Reinvented
Secrets to Perfecting Organizational Communication
How to Manage Scale, and Operate in Scaling Organizations
How to Fire an Employee
What you actually need to know about Company Culture
How to Interview Prospective Hires

Strategy and Competitive Advantage:

How to Master the Craft of Strategy
Competitive Advantage: How to Build a Winning Business
The Power of Network Effects
How Cost Leadership Builds Powerful Businesses
Why the Best Brands Stand Out
Scale as Competitive Advantage
Barriers to Entry are Confusing
Flywheel Effect: Meta-Competitive Advantage

Building the Business:

How to get good business Ideas: Mental Alchemy of Ideation
How to Choose the Right Business Ideas
Product/Market Fit: What it really means & How to Measure it
How to Failure-proof your business with Customer Development
How Strategy and Psychology Work Together to Perfect Pricing 
The Most Important Equations in Business - CAC (Part 1)
The Simple Math Behind Every Profitable Business - CLV (Part 2)
How Psychology behind Word-of-Mouth Works
The Secret Core of Every Successful Business--Distribution
The Most Important Lessons in Sales
Why Value Creation is the Foundation of Business
Why Value Capture is the most important idea you haven't read about
The Misunderstood and Underestimated Genius of Advertising

How to be a Great Human:

How to Start a New Job: Handling Career Transitions like a Boss
How to Master the Discipline of Product Management
The Ancient Origins of Storytelling, and how to Apply Them
How to Prioritize Using These 9 Mental Models

I've also written about How & Why we started Evergreen:

How a prototype's failure created the next iteration
Mission & Method of Evergreen

Follow me on Twitter: @EricJorgenson

And Please... Join Evergreen.

How to Prioritize using these 9 Mental Models was originally published in Evergreen Business Fortnightly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Evergreen is a collection of links to the best learning resources in business, collected by a group of managers, founders, and investors. We contribute resources about one topic, which are synthesized and shared in this Collection. The goal is to learn more efficiently through increased context and focus.

Remember, these are designed to feel like short books, you’re meant to meander and spend ~3 hours on this topic. Save these links and read them throughout the week. Immerse yourself in this topic and leave the week smarter than you started it!

I admit, I was not completely sure what I was talking about when I chose “Flywheel Effects” as a topic. But that’s part of the fun.

This turned into a fascinating adventure through Competitive Advantages, Mental Models, and practical lessons for operators. Also lots of fun pictures and diagrams in this one!

Here’s the “Table of Contents”:

• What is the Flywheel Effect?
• Applications of Flywheel Effect (and Meta-Competitive Advantages)
• The Best Examples of Flywheels
• How to Push the Flywheel

I think we ended up in a good place, but as always I’d love to hear if you think I’m wrong on any of this so I don’t stay quite as ignorant as I am now.

What is the Flywheel Effect?

Definition…?

There doesn’t seem to be a generally agreed-upon definition of the Flywheel Effect. It was used because it was a metaphor to help readers visualize momentum.

Visualization

Jim Collins originally used the Flywheel as a metaphor in Good To Great:

Picture a huge, heavy flywheel — a massive metal disk mounted horizontally on an axle, about 30 feet in diameter, 2 feet thick, and weighing about 5,000 pounds. Now imagine your task is to get the flywheel rotating on the axle as fast and long as possible.

Pushing with great effort, you get the flywheel to inch forward, moving almost imperceptibly at first. You keep pushing and, after two or three hours of persistent effort, you get the flywheel to complete one entire turn.

Dissection

The Flywheel Effect is used to describe a handful of concepts at once, which are rarely split apart. Here is each component piece I could identify, and how it relates to the Flywheel illustration.

Momentum — An object at rest tends to stay at rest, and object in motion tends to continue in motion. Newton’s first law, applied to business. Flywheels (being massive heavy objects) are hard to get moving. If they get moving, they are likely to continue.

Feedback Loops — The faster the wheel is spinning, the easier it is to add incremental speed. The faster it moves, the more energy it generates. And the more excited everyone is about how great this Flywheel is!

Compounding Return on Effort —No “one push” makes it happen. Continuous small inputs add up into an impressive output, eventually.

Direction — Sustained effort must be focused in one direction in order to maintain momentum and compounding returns. Misplaced effort is either wasted or counterproductive.

You can see each of these concepts in this one paragraph from Good To Great explaining the effect:

The momentum of the thing kicks in your favor, hurling the flywheel forward, turn after turn … whoosh! … its own heavy weight working for you. You’re pushing no harder than during the first rotation, but the flywheel goes faster and faster. Each turn of the flywheel builds upon work done earlier, compounding your investment of effort. A thousand times faster, then ten thousand, then a hundred thousand. The huge heavy disk flies forward, with almost unstoppable momentum.

Definition, again

Though really this whole post is an attempt to define and understand The Flywheel Effect, it seems like a let-down without a one-sentence explanation. So with all that said… here’s my shot at a definition.

Flywheel Effect: Positive feedback loops that build momentum, increasing the payoff of incremental effort.

Or, Flywheel Effect in Normal English: When good things you do lead to more good things “just happening”.

Applications of The Flywheel Effect

In resources mentioning the Flywheel Effect, it is often conflated with ideas that co-occur, but are distinct concepts. It seems like an easy mistake to make.

My current thinking is The Flywheel Effect, as we’ve defined it, is a kind of meta-competitive advantage.

It can accelerate the growth of a business and the widening of a moat, but it is not itself a source of competitive advantage. It is a force-multiplier of existing competitive advantages.

Let’s see how the Flywheel Effect interacts with Competitive Advantages:

Supply-Side Economies of Scale

The most basic and old-school competitive advantage — the bigger you get, the cheaper you can produce things and the more available your product is. Think Wal-Mart and Carnegie Steel.

The bigger these companies got, the cheaper they could sell their goods for, the more leverage over suppliers, and the bigger the brand became.

Another example, from Ben Gilbert’s talk (more later) is Disney. As their empire of entertainment grew, the positive feedback loops between their various businesses became stronger:

Brand

Another basic Flywheel Effect exists for Brand. To use an oddball example to isolate the effect better — think of College Basketball programs recruiting players.

Every time they have a player drafted or win a championship, it becomes a more desirable school for the next round of players, and on it goes. Each win makes the next win slightly easier.

Another example, Munger’s explanation of the powers of scale for Coca-cola.

Another advantage of scale comes from psychology. The psychologists use the term social proof. We are all influenced — subconsciously and to some extent consciously — by what we see others do and approve. Therefore, if everybody’s buying something, we think it’s better. We don’t like to be the one guy who’s out of step.

The social proof phenomenon which comes right out of psychology gives huge advantages to scale — for example, with very wide distribution, which of course is hard to get. One advantage of Coca-Cola is that it’s available almost everywhere in the world.

Network Effects (Demand-side Economies of Scale)

Network Effects and Flywheel Effect are very commonly conflated, because they so commonly occur together.

Network effects almost always lead to or create a Flywheel Effect, but the Flywheel Effect can occur where network effects do not, as we’ve seen in the previous examples.

Network Effects are the most powerful source of the Flywheel Effect.

This is because Network Effects (past a certain tipping point, especially when combined with virality), can be auto-catalytic.

Auto-catalysis — A “runaway feedback loop” describes a situation in which the output of a reaction becomes its own catalyst. (Thanks Farnam Street)

The compounding return on effort is massive, and accelerates as it grows. These combined factors are maybe best exemplified in Facebook, and explain more about how insanely fast it became globally-dominant.

This takes the Flywheel Effect to a whole new level. It becomes like a magical physics-defying Flywheel that uses it’s own momentum to speed itself up even faster without additional input. “Flywheel” so inadequately describes a run-away Network Effect that we really need a whole new way to explain it. (And Magic Flywheel probably won’t stick.)

Examples of the Flywheel Effect

Amazon

Obviously. With their long-term perspective and fanatical focus on price, selection, and convenience, it shouldn’t be a surprise to see Amazon has been pushing the Flywheel.

I stole this screenshot from Ben Gilbert’s talk about Network Effects, which I highly recommend. He highlights these complex overlapping Flywheel effects very well. He also has a great example from Airbnb:

(Which will make much more sense if you hear his voice-over.)

Uber

This great post by Andrew Chen, contributed by Itamar Goldminz, gives an overview of the Positive Feedback Loops in Uber’s business, and how their business model is driving their growth.

If this napkin drawing isn’t self-explanatory, Bill Gurley’s post about Uber’s Valuation (mainly assessing Total Addressable Market and Market Share limit) is a very thorough look at each of these effects.

Pick-up times. As Uber expands in a market, and as demand and supply both grow, pickup times fall. Residents of San Francisco have seen this play out over many years. Shorter pickup times mean more reliability and more potential use cases. The more people that use Uber, the shorter the pick up times in each region.

Coverage Density. As Uber grows in a city, the outer geographic range of supplier liquidity increases and increases. Once again, Uber started in San Francisco proper. Today there is coverage from South San Jose all the way up to Napa. The more people that use Uber, the greater the coverage.

Utilization. As Uber grows in any given city, utilization increases. Basically, the time that a driver has a paying ride per hour is constantly rising. This is simply a math problem — more demand and more supply make the economical traveling-salesman type problem easier to solve. Uber then uses the increased utilization to lower rates — which results in lower prices which once again leads to more use cases. The more people that use Uber, the lower the overall price will be for the consumer.

(Homework Option)

If you want to work this idea out a bit, pick a company not already an example here and draw one of these swoopy charts that tracks their positive feedback loops and see where they are building momentum and growing their moats. Level 1: Coke or WalMart.

Atlassian

One more unique example is Atlassian, and thanks to Khanh Tuong for sending me these links, because this was definitely a new one to me.

Atlassian has been quietly dominating…

And Tom Tunguz has written a great short post about how they’re doing it. He calls it The Flywheel Saas Company.

The Flywheel Model differs from the Traditional Model in one fundamental regard. The enterprise sales team is exclusively inbound. They are explicitly denied the option of seeking business outside the customer base, and must gin up business from only existing customers. The enterprise sales team is an up-sell and cross-sell team. In fact, so is the mid-market sales team. Only the SMB marketing team is permitted to acquire new leads.

The company famously touts that it has grown without sales reps, precisely because its mid-market and enterprise teams farm exclusively within the pool created by the company’s marketing engine.

Flywheel models have a simple beauty about them. The entire company is focused on the same thing: building the momentum in one main customer acquisition mechanism.

I like this example because it doesn’t rely on Network Effects or Economies of Scale. This was a bootstrapped company with fantastic growth because they ignored conventional wisdom and found a way to focus more effort on one specific goal of the business.

How to Push the Flywheel

Pick the right direction as early as possible

Changes in direction (except small corrections) reset the Flywheel. The earlier you can get moving in the right direction, the sooner the efforts will compound and the momentum will build.

Focus Efforts

Find the things really moving the Flywheel the most, and focus efforts on those pieces of work. Find ways to eliminate work that doesn’t push on those core pieces (like Atlassian), or fold them into current efforts.

Make Progress Visible

One of my favorite pieces of Good To Great is about strategic alignment:

We learned that under the right conditions, the problems of commitment, alignment, motivation, and change just melt away. They largely take care of themselves.[…]

What do the right people want more than almost anything else? They want to be part of a winning team. They want to contribute to producing visible, tangible results. They want to feel excitement of being involved in something that just flat-out works. […]

When they begin to see tangible results, when they can feel the flywheel beginning to build speed — that’s when the bulk of people line up to throw their shoulders agains the wheel and push.

Reading this, the visible results piece becomes incredibly important. Show the team you’re starting a winning streak, and they’ll be motivated to get onboard.

Look for additional positive Feedback Loops

There are a huge number of possible feedback loops in any business. Ways to increase visible consumption (like a stamp on a coffee cup) create a small viral advertisement, or creating a beautiful Instagram-worthy drink.

There are probably ways to add positive Feedback Loops to your business if you think hard about it. For inspiration, this is the full version of Walt Disney’s original sketch of the feedback loops of his business.

Find Every Incremental Gain

This is a game of long-term compounding where every contribution to the momentum makes the next step easier, and effort pays off for years afterward. In games like this, every little gain will be surprisingly valuable in the long run.

This means you should look for ways to eke out every improvement possible. This HBR article contributed by Kathryn O’Day about Gold Medal Cyclers will help you get in the mindset and break down the goals.

Keep Pushing

Patience. This is a long game, and you’ve chosen a strategy that looks slow at first, and builds into an invincible behemoth over time. Own it.

Stay focused and keep pushing.

Thanks for reading! I’ve moved to ejorgenson.com — feel free to visit and catch up on my latest content.

If you enjoyed this, you’ll get more like it by joining Evergreen:

My Other Projects

Upcoming Book: The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Mini-book: Career Advice for Uniquely Ambitious People

Personal Site: EJorgenson.com

Evergreen Lives on Donations

Evergreen requires time and money. If you find this project helpful, please consider buying me a coffee, or sending some Bitcoin.

BTC Wallet: 3KiLX3bjnpmb3a4YiBhm3vSNiV2Erxk1fX (If you’ve never used Crypto before, Coinbase is the easiest way to start.)

Thank you very much! ❤ ☺

Thank you

Massive appreciation for those who suggested pieces of content (or wrote something new) for this Edition of Evergreen: Itamar Goldminz, Vignesh Srinivasan, Kathryn O’Day, Vinish Garg, Nick Seguin, Khanh Tuong, Ben Gilbert, Stewart Scougall, Karthik Rajeshwaran, Taylor Pearson, Aaron Wolfson, Desmond Duggan, and Derek Baynton.

Many thanks for being a part of this project! Not every suggestion is able to make it to the final edit, but every single suggestion is read and appreciated.

Never Enough

As my Father always says: “There’s always room for the best.” There’s always a better resource out there. These collections can always get better, and I hope that they do. If you can think of anything that was missed, I welcome you to share it.

To share your thoughts, improvements or additions: Email or Twitter.

If you liked this, check out other Editions of Evergreen:

Building and Managing a Team:

How to Find and Recruit the Team you Need
How Not to Hire like a Clownshow
Compensation Rules Everything Around Me
Why Employee Onboarding is holding you back
How to Boost Employee Retention
How Performance Reviews are being Reinvented
Secrets to Perfecting Organizational Communication
How to Manage Scale, and Operate in Scaling Organizations
How to Fire an Employee
What you actually need to know about Company Culture
How to Interview Prospective Hires

Strategy and Competitive Advantage:

How to Master the Craft of Strategy
Competitive Advantage: How to Build a Winning Business
The Power of Network Effects
How Cost Leadership Builds Powerful Businesses
Why the Best Brands Stand Out
Scale as Competitive Advantage
Barriers to Entry are Confusing
Flywheel Effect: Meta-Competitive Advantage

Building the Business:

How to get good business Ideas: Mental Alchemy of Ideation
How to Choose the Right Business Ideas
Product/Market Fit: What it really means & How to Measure it
How to Failure-proof your business with Customer Development
How Strategy and Psychology Work Together to Perfect Pricing 
The Most Important Equations in Business - CAC (Part 1)
The Simple Math Behind Every Profitable Business - CLV (Part 2)
How Psychology behind Word-of-Mouth Works
The Secret Core of Every Successful Business--Distribution
The Most Important Lessons in Sales
Why Value Creation is the Foundation of Business
Why Value Capture is the most important idea you haven't read about
The Misunderstood and Underestimated Genius of Advertising

How to be a Great Human:

How to Start a New Job: Handling Career Transitions like a Boss
How to Master the Discipline of Product Management
The Ancient Origins of Storytelling, and how to Apply Them
How to Prioritize Using These 9 Mental Models

I've also written about How & Why we started Evergreen:

How a prototype's failure created the next iteration
Mission & Method of Evergreen

Follow me on Twitter: @EricJorgenson

And Please... Join Evergreen.

Flywheel Effect: Why Positive Feedback Loops are a Meta-Competitive Advantage was originally published in Evergreen Business Fortnightly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Evergreen is a collection of links to the best learning resources in business, collected by a group of managers, founders, and investors. We contribute resources about one topic, which are synthesized and shared in this Collection. The goal is to learn more efficiently through increased context and focus.

Remember, these are designed to feel like short books, you’re meant to meander and spend ~3 hours on this topic. Save some of these links and read them throughout the week. Immerse yourself in this topic and leave the week smarter than you started it!

We’re back with a new Edition about Job Interviews. Here’s what you get in this post:

• Why Job Interviews are (Nearly) Useless
• Manage a Good Job Interview Process
• What To Not Do (What not to do? Idk which is right)
• What to Look for When Interviewing
• A Shitload of Great Interview Questions

Skip around as you please — enjoy and please add any great content or concepts you think are missing.

Why Interviews are [Nearly] Useless

The first interesting fact that I learned researching how to do job interviews well is that they are nearly useless. This is actually proven with academic studies.

I didn’t know this when I chose it as a topic, but here we are. We’re all going to keep doing them anyway so we may as well eke out all the benefit that we can from them.

Here’s why interviews have so many flaws.

The Observer Effect

The act of observing something will influence the thing being observed. This absolutely seems like the right place to start. The Observer Effect turns an interview into a professional lying session. What I hear in a typical interview:

Interviewer: “Welcome! Please lie to me about your relevant work experience?”

Employee: “[Extrapolates, expands, and exaggerates]”

[…]

Employee: “Now, please lie to me about a typical day at your company?”

Interviewer: “[Skips, skims, and smoothes over].”

This seems unlikely to create a strong lasting relationship. It is like getting married after the first few dates, when everyone is only sharing their most generous assessments of themselves.

The *Utter* Uselessness of Job Interviews

According to the NY Times, job interviews aren’t just useless, they are *utterly* useless. Citing studies they had done on whether interviews where additive in a GPA prediction challenge:

In the end, our subjects’ G.P.A. predictions were significantly more accurate for the students they did not meet. The interviews had been counterproductive.

Research that my colleagues and I have conducted shows that the problem with interviews is worse than irrelevance: They can be harmful, undercutting the impact of other, more valuable information about interviewees.

To go even farther to illustrate the point, they also conducted a round of the study where some prospects, unknown to the interviewer, were to give answers determined at random.

Strikingly, not one interviewer reported noticing that he or she was conducting a random interview.

Granted, maybe these people sucked at interviewing, but it does show the weaknesses of the interview structure rather well.

The key psychological insight here is that people have no trouble turning any information into a coherent narrative. People can’t help seeing signals, even in noise.

The Job Interview Process

No matter your process, have a plan. Have it down on paper so your whole team is aware, and you can communicate clearly with your prospect.

Division of Labor

Evaluating prospects is a nuanced skill. It requires practice. Managers who are hiring only a few positions per year are NOT coming from a good place to evaluate talent. They have no sense of base rates.

Chet Cadieux, the CEO and legendary operator of QuikTrip, has a great take on Interviewing. He has dedicated full-time interviewers. Not just an HR screening call, but full-time expert hirers for every position in QuikTrip, down to cashiers in convenience stores.

QuikTrip is a case study in genius operators using simple principles. To read more about QuikTrip, check out Intelligent Fanatics, a wonderful book about some of the world’s best operators.

And thanks to Sean Iddings for contributing Chet’s talk!

Extreme Reference-Checking

My friend Jonathan Howard sent in a post by VC Josh Hannah about Extreme Reference-Checking. It was the only post submitted that talked about it in any detail, and I think it completely nailed it. Everything I’d wish for in a post about Reference Checks.

Here are the gems:

Resumes, CVs and interviews are all sales pitches. The candidates have carefully crafted the attributes they show you in order to seem perfectly suited to the job.

Base 80 percent of your hiring decision on thorough reference checking

But not the way you’re currently doing reference checks… because you’re probably doing them wrong.

In my experience, the leading cause of executive hiring mistakes can be traced to waiting to make (perfunctory) reference checks until the final step in the hiring process, perhaps even after the decision has been made.

You call those references with a confirmatory bias, practically begging them to tell you that the interviewee is a great marketer, so you can get her on board and get back to work.

If you’re not making these calls seeking truth, you shouldn’t even bother. Be in the mindset to dig for negativity, take any answer as an opportunity to drop a prospect.

Expect at least a 50 percent chance of eliminating the candidate based on references. If you are not in this mindset, you will only hear what you want to — that you’ve found the perfect person.

Keep that confirmation bias out of your reference checks — do them early, and do them thoroughly. Read the rest of Josh’s post, there was too much great stuff to excerpt all of it.

Tryouts are better than Interviews

Get as close as you can to a real work environment with a prospect. Contract project, Shadow day, a few sales calls, research sample, etc.

Matt Mullenweg is known for an extreme implementation of this:

The most significant shift we’ve made is requiring every final candidate to work with us for three to eight weeks on a contract basis. Candidates do real tasks alongside the people they would actually be working with if they had the job. They can work at night or on weekends, so they don’t have to leave their current jobs; most spend 10 to 20 hours a week working with Automattic, although that’s flexible.

The goal is not to have them finish a product or do a set amount of work; it is to allow us to quickly and efficiently assess whether this would be a mutually beneficial relationship. They can size up Automattic while we evaluate them.

It’s not always possible to do this scale of “tryout”, but the more you can stretch for, the better.

Evaluating prospects during actual work with the team is the strongest predictor of success in the role, according to a fancy academic study shared with us by Itamar Goldminz.

What Not To Do

As always, we try to learn by inversion. Not just what to do, but we take the steps to find and avoid common pitfalls. Avoiding stupidity is usually easier than achieving brilliance.

No Ghosting

Ben Center shared this great short post by veteran recruiter Beth Scheer called “The Maybe Pile”. The short version? You don’t get a Maybe pile.

I had the confidence to tell hiring managers and executives that putting people in the “maybe” pile was likely to give the candidate a bad experience. “Maybe” really means “no for now.” Better to tell a candidate that you don’t have a role for them right now so they can put their energy into finding a job somewhere else. If something changes, you will be in touch, but for now the park is closed.

Toughen up, buttercup. You want to run a good process for prospects? Don’t leave them hanging. (This has the added benefit of forcing decisions and keeping your hiring funnel clean and clear.)

Don’t Talk Too Much

I once witnessed someone conduct a 90-minute interview in which they talked at least 80% of the time. This interviewer decided that they loved the candidate and hired the prospect on the spot. He was fired in less than two weeks. Not a happy ending for anyone.

Roger Toor has corresponding advice:

Don’t fall into the trap a lot of interviewers do, of making it about you. All too often I see interviewers asking questions to show off how smart they are or that they happened upon something obscure. Or they end up talking a lot about themselves.

We’re all smart and like to show off a bit. An interview provides an imbalance of power uncommon in everyday life, and it can be tempting to use that to bask in our own egos for a while. But that is not going to help you build the right team. Shake it off.

The Other Mistakes

I was going to collect all of the mistakes managers make when hiring… but it turns out I don’t have to because Jason Evanish already did it for me on his Lighthouse Blog.

What to Look For When Interviewing

Ok — Here’s the heart of this Edition. The good stuff on what to look for, and how to find it.

Have a Blueprint

It seems like most companies have a loose idea of what they want in a hire, and a set of questions… but few are truly connected. An interview process should be seeking confirming and disconfirming evidence. Having a rubric-type document to work through the process seems the best way to stay organized, impartial, and intellectually honest.

Tucker Max, founder of Book In A Box, shared with us some of the objective measures they use in their interviews.

Find Proof of Internal Motivation

Is there proof of internal motivation or external motivation?

Does their resume focus on credentials and titles (inputs), or results (outputs)?

Do they talk about high status people or places they worked, or about the actual work they did?

Why do they do what they do?

Find Proof of Ethics and Character

Are they a good person? How do I know?

Do they do the right thing, even when they don’t have to? Why?

Do they speak truth to power?

Do they try to bullshit you at any point in the interview?

Pay attention to the little things — Do they interrupt me a lot? Do they respect me? Do they respect all people, e.g. how did they treat Rick (our driver) when he picked them up from the airport?

Having all of these “proof points” written out, and as a structured guide to the interviewer reduces the dangers of confirmation bias, liking bias, narrative bias… It keeps things more organized, more effective, and more honest.

Keeping this sheet updated throughout the process, by different interviewers can help keep candidates straight, and ensure your process gets deep, rather than 4 different people conducting the same surface-level interview.

Trajectory, Not State

It is much easier to assess a snapshot in time (state) than correctly predict a pattern (trajectory). I can tell you the score at half-time, for sure. I’m less certain who is going to win the game.

Be sure you are evaluating a candidate’s trajectory, not their current state. When you’re going to have a long and happy working relationship with someone, you want to know they are growing with you, not in stasis or declining.

This short post, Trajectory Matters More Than State, covers this dynamic in candidates and companies. Pay attention to trajectory and do your best to understand what this candidate might be like in months or years.

Thanks to Vinish Garg for submitting this!

Look for those “Soft Skills”

If you’ve ever worked with a talented jerk, you have an appreciation for the importance of soft skills. Internal Communication and coordination are incredibly important to the function of a company, and these are doomed if your team lacks soft skills.

This post by Seth Godin talks about how you can make a plan for assessing soft skills, and how to look for them.

Wisdom — Have you learned things that are difficult to glean from a textbook or a manual? Experience is how we become adults.

Perception — Do you have the experience and the practice to see the world clearly? Seeing things before others have to point them out.

Influence — Have you developed the skills needed to persuade others to take action? Charisma is just one form of this skill.

There are many more examples in the post, and you’ll need to develop your own set of desired attributes for each position.

Finding Attributes through Questionnaires

Matt Frost shared this post by Adam Grant: “What’s wrong with job interviews, and how to fix them.” Grant covers all the ways Interviews miss the mark, and has a novel suggestion for solving them.

The most effective questions are called situational judgment questions. Instead of asking candidates to describe how they handled a unique situation in a previous job or organization, it’s more fruitful to describe consistent situations that candidates could face in this job or organization, and ask them what they would do — or how they would reason.

That’s not the novel part. That’s just the setup for this:

Interestingly, these situational questions don’t require interviews at all; they can be completed and scored online. Researchers have validated situational tests to assess applicant characteristics as diverse as integrity, personal initiative, emotional intelligence, and aggression. In one study with Dane Barnes of Optimize Hire, we gave salespeople a situational questionnaire about their tendencies to take initiative, and then tracked their annual revenue. Here’s what we found:

Low initiative: $53,798

Moderate initiative: $118,808

High initiative: $155,663

If this works, it should mean big things for hiring — knowing what to look for, and having scalable, cheap online tests that look for them is a dream come true for companies. Of course, it means honest cooperation from applicants.

I’m super interested to see how processes like these find their ways into hiring over the next few years. It seems like pure hubris that has kept more objective research from entering the hiring process thus far.

Why Google Loves Structured Interviews

Google has some of the highest standards for its employees of any company today. Solving the challenge of how to keep this bar high across every hiring manager in the company has some challenges:

In other words, most interviews are a waste of time because 99.4 percent of the time is spent trying to confirm whatever impression the interviewer formed in the first ten seconds.

This article in Wired (submitted by Kathryn O’Day, thank you Kathryn!) talks about how they’ve solved it.

The goal of our interview process is to predict how candidates will perform once they join the team. We achieve that goal by doing what the science says: combining behavioral and situational structured interviews with assessments of cognitive ability, conscientiousness, and leadership.

To help interviewers, we’ve developed an internal tool called qDroid, where an interviewer picks the job they are screening for, checks the attributes they want to test, and is emailed an interview guide with questions designed to predict performance for that job.

This makes it easy for interviewers to find and ask great interview questions. Interviewers can also share the document with others on the interview panel so everyone can collaborate to assess the candidate from all perspectives.

The article is excellent, but it is just the start — get the book, Work Rules! by Laszlo Bock for the full Google hiring playbook.

Here’s a Shitload of Great Interview Questions

As promised — all of the best questions and collections of questions we could find for you. There’s a lot of them so I kept the context short.

Ask “Why? Why? Why? Why?”

Until they start crying or just walk out. Kidding. This post shows you how to use “Why?” to get past the interview-level bullshitting and see what people are actually made of.

Thanks to Vignesh Srinivasan for contributing.

How to ask about a candidate’s “Grit”

Grit (determination) is a key attribute for success in most roles. But you can’t just ask if someone is a determined person. Here is how to ask questions that will show you the secret of Grit.

One Question to ask to find the top 5%

Shane Mac learned something valuable from Navy Captain David Marquet. One question that would help identify people most likely to be top performers. And here it is:

“Did you feel at your last job that you were appropriately appreciated?”

Read (slightly) more in Shane’s short post.

Vinod Khosla’s Giant List of Questions

This amazing list of questions is the final section in Khosla’s magnum opus on hiring. It has all kinds of great advice and suggestions that are worth setting aside some time to work through.

This post also from Vinish Garg, thanks Vinish!

Another Giant, Comprehensive Hiring Guide

There’s a ton of info in this “How to Hire The Right Person” post from NYT Business, from questions to the setting in which to ask them. Too much great stuff to excerpt, but a valuable resource for those about to hire.

What to Ask and What it Tells you

We couldn’t make it through an Edition of Evergreen without linking to some fantastic post on First Round Review, and here it is. Excellent Questions about surfacing soft skills, and interpreting candidate answers that aren’t always easy to parse.

The Importance of Great Follow-Ups

Lastly, let’s look at Book in A Box again. Tucker’s company doesn’t just have a great rubric to work against, they keep a great bank of questions to have on hand. Importantly, they ALSO plan follow-up questions, which is where the good stuff really comes out.

Here’s a sample:

“Tell me about your all-time biggest professional screw-up.”

Wait for their full answer. THEN follow up after they tell you about it, and ask: “What did you do about it?”

“Tell me about the best idea you’ve ever had that your boss/collaborators/client didn’t go for. The idea that got away.”

Wait for their full answer. THEN follow up after they tell you about it, and ask: “What did you do when they said no?”

“What’s your favorite thing or activity to do, work or non-work related? Why?”

Wait for their full answer. THEN follow up after they tell you about it, and ask: “What have you started or initiated in that area?” If nothing, ask why not.

And to close out, here’s my favorite question off any of these lists:

“If we don’t hire you, why do you think that would be?”

Final Thoughts

There are a ton of opinions about how to do job interviews. I think this huge variety is possible because of how little any kind of interview seems to impact the ability to get the right person in the seat.

At the end of all of this research, I came away thinking: “It seems like everything else AROUND the interview actually matters much more.”

Things that matter more than your Interviewing Skills:

• Your company’s “brand” to employees
• recruiting strength of the organization
• available talent pool, the marketing of the position
• ability to “sell” prospective hires
• employee onboarding
• company culture shapes how employees work

Sure, try to do it well. But don’t obsess over perfecting it. Work harder on skills with higher returns.

Thanks for reading! I’ve moved to ejorgenson.com/blog — feel free to visit and catch up on my latest content.

If you enjoyed this, you’ll get more like it by joining Evergreen:

My Other Projects

Upcoming Book: The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Mini-book: Career Advice for Uniquely Ambitious People

Evergreen Lives on Donations

Creating Evergreen takes a lot of time and decent amount of money. If you find anything helpful and interesting here, please consider buying me some BBQ ($11 Z-Man & Fries at Joe’s KC), or really anything between a coffee and a good dinner. Thank you very much! ❤ ☺

Thank you

Massive appreciation for those who suggested pieces of content (or wrote something new) for this Edition of Evergreen: Tucker Max, Sean Iddings, Shane Mac, Itamar Goldminz, Vignesh Srinivasan, Kathryn O’Day, Matt Frost, Vinish Garg, Roger Toor, Edson Rigonatti, Jonathan Howard, Nick Seguin, Ben Center, Dominic Bouchard, Peter Fenyo Fenyvesi, Kenny Fraser, Stephane Gosselin, and Erik Martin.

Many thanks for being a part of this project! Not every suggestion is able to make it to the final edit, but every single suggestion is read and appreciated.

Never Enough

As my Father always says: “There’s always room for the best.” There’s always a better resource out there. These collections can always get better, and I hope that they do. If you can think of anything that was missed, I welcome you to share it.

To share your thoughts, improvements or additions: Email or Twitter.

If you liked this, check out other Editions of Evergreen:

Building and Managing a Team:

How to Find and Recruit the Team you Need
How Not to Hire like a Clownshow
Compensation Rules Everything Around Me
Why Employee Onboarding is holding you back
How to Boost Employee Retention
How Performance Reviews are being Reinvented
Secrets to Perfecting Organizational Communication
How to Manage Scale, and Operate in Scaling Organizations
How to Fire an Employee
What you actually need to know about Company Culture
How to Interview Prospective Hires

Strategy and Competitive Advantage:

How to Master the Craft of Strategy
Competitive Advantage: How to Build a Winning Business
The Power of Network Effects
How Cost Leadership Builds Powerful Businesses
Why the Best Brands Stand Out
Scale as Competitive Advantage
Barriers to Entry are Confusing
Flywheel Effect: Meta-Competitive Advantage

Building the Business:

How to get good business Ideas: Mental Alchemy of Ideation
How to Choose the Right Business Ideas
Product/Market Fit: What it really means & How to Measure it
How to Failure-proof your business with Customer Development
How Strategy and Psychology Work Together to Perfect Pricing 
The Most Important Equations in Business - CAC (Part 1)
The Simple Math Behind Every Profitable Business - CLV (Part 2)
How Psychology behind Word-of-Mouth Works
The Secret Core of Every Successful Business--Distribution
The Most Important Lessons in Sales
Why Value Creation is the Foundation of Business
Why Value Capture is the most important idea you haven't read about
The Misunderstood and Underestimated Genius of Advertising

How to be a Great Human:

How to Start a New Job: Handling Career Transitions like a Boss
How to Master the Discipline of Product Management
The Ancient Origins of Storytelling, and how to Apply Them

I've also written about How & Why we started Evergreen:

How a prototype's failure created the next iteration
Mission & Method of Evergreen

Follow me on Twitter: @EricJorgenson

And Please... Join Evergreen.

Why Interviewing Prospective Hires is Futile, and How to make it (only slightly) Less Futile was originally published in Evergreen Business Fortnightly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

From here the jokes are so obvious I won’t bother with them. It’s enough to say if this was fiction it would be a little too convenient, but as non-fiction I find it hilarious.

Here is a short interview with Joe Malcoun about his investment into a Biogas company (turning manure into energy to resell to a utility). I’ve always been fascinated with renewable energy, especially reusing waste material, so I particularly enjoyed this post.

Joe’s is an interesting story because of the depth of his expertise. Even knowing everything there was to know about the industry, the economics, and the mechanics of the company… the thesis crumbled because of one variable that wasn’t included in his investment process (and another input the was a red herring).

Here’s Joe:

Who are you, what is your story?

My name is Joe Malcoun and I’m a midwest born and raised, three-time Michigan alum with a very high appetite for risk. I invest in a lot of different things including startups, real estate, energy projects and progressive political activism. My “first career” was in sustainability and energy, and I’ve since become a tech entrepreneur. I’m the CEO of a software company called Nutshell. We provide elegantly designed and easy to use sales software for growing teams. I am also very actively involved in building out the Ann Arbor, MI startup scene. As co-founder of Cahoots — a nicely appointed and amenity-filled work and play space for entrepreneurs in downtown Ann Arbor — I’ve really put my money where my mouth is.

Where did you get the investment idea?

Before business school I worked for a corporate sustainability consulting firm called, GreenOrder. One of the Principals at the company was partnering with a fairly impressive group of accomplished businessmen to develop biogas energy projects on dairy farms near Bakersfield, CA. I was tasked with supporting his research for this opportunity. Fast forward…after business school I spent nearly four years as a on DTE Energy’s Strategy and M&A team and was about to embark on a new career as an independent investor. When I shared my status update with my contacts, I received a reply from the partner at GreenOrder asking me if I’d like to participate in a new capital raise for the biogas projects.

What was the idea?

The management team had partnered with the largest dairy operator in California to secure a substantial source of cowshit for their biogas operations. They also hired an engineering and operations team to build out biogas digesters and generator sets on two different locations. The electricity generated from these systems was contracted for PG&E to buy under a specific requirement the utility had to source a portion of their renewable energy from precisely these types of projects. Additionally, the federal government was providing significant tax credits that would help return the initial capital investment quickly.

What did you do to research, understand, de-risk, and diligence the plan?

I already knew a lot about this area. I was probably as much of an expert on the economics of renewable energy projects as one could be at this point in time. I spent a ton of time digging into the financial model and researching the state and federal policies that would impact the project. I even got in touch with contacts I had at PG&E to ensure the power purchase agreement assumptions were valid.

What did you think would happen?

I was really confident that this investment was going to be a nice source of cashflow. The model and economics seemed to make a lot of sense given all that we had assumed.

What happened?

The project has been a disaster. It has significantly underperformed in every way for the entirety of its existence. Mechanical failures. Digester efficiency problems. Cancellation of the federal tax credits. Absolutely shit communication from the management team. To date, I have only recovered a small portion of my capital.

Why did that happen?

I think the biggest failure here was a management team that, on paper seemed like rockstars, but in reality was simply inexperienced. They relied more on who they knew than what they knew and have not been very effective at quickly mitigating the downside. I had WAY too much confidence in them. This was the first of many failures that I describe as “never invest in something because you are impressed with the other investors”. This has always failed me, including an investment I made alongside big names like Sheryl Sandberg.

How did this all end?

It hasn’t. I can’t decide if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I continue to harass them every few months for information and plans and continue to be wholly disappointed by what I get back.

What did you learn?

First, when someone tells you there is an absolute minimum investment, don’t ever believe them. One of the reasons I have been particularly upset by this deal is that I took them at their word that there was a minimum and then later found out that they allowed others in for much lower amounts. This was my FIRST big investment and it was substantial for me. I wish I hadn’t put so much at risk.

Second, don’t ever invest in something because you are impressed by the investor list. I definitely told myself “Oh wow, the former Secretary of Agriculture definitely knows what he’s doing.” and “Well, if my former boss is in this, it’s gotta be a good deal.” Total bullshit.

What should we learn from you?

Never invest in biogas deals. Never.

From this story, two things jumped out to me:

The main cause of failure (from Joe’s perspective), which was the inexperienced management team, wasn’t a part of the research process. We tend to focus on our areas of expertise. Joe knew well how to due-diligence the economics, so that was where he focused.

Another thing was that some additional confidence came from a data point barely correlated with the success of the project (other investors). It is hard to throw out evidence like this which is “comforting” but not necessarily supporting evidence of success.

The “meta” part of the analysis is very difficult to see — zooming out to a layer above each piece of evidence, and sorting out which variables should be counted, which should be ignored, and how to be sure you’re looking everywhere at all risk points possible.

If you have a story of losing money and getting your ass kicked — write it up and share it with us! I’ll publish stories of all kinds contributed from readers as posts (anonymously if you prefer).

You are welcome to write it yourself. If it’s easier for you, I’m happy to hear the story over the phone and turn it into a post for you.

Email me about your stories: Eric@iamaterribleinvestor.com

I look forward to learning with you.

If you liked this, read other posts on I Am A Terrible Investor:

Intro to I Am A Terrible Investor
The Beginner Bravado Effect, and the "shit shit shit" implication
How Horsehead Holdings made me look like a Horse's Ass
How Pranav took a 50% loss after being up 5x on Ricoh India

I also write deep-dives into business topics with the help of an awesome community in Evergreen.

Follow me on Twitter: @EricJorgenson

And Please... Join I Am A Terrible Investor.

How Investing in the Cow Shit Industry can Go Wrong (A Misadventure in Biogas) was originally published in I Am A Terrible Investor on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.