Steven Kovar

Create Meaning

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 02:03:00 -0500

Think about what your work means beyond its face value—its significance. As Tony Robbins suggests, the context of our experiences is what defines how we develop as people; it has less to do about what happens than what meaning we extract from the situation.

You see, it’s never the environment; it’s never the events of our lives, but the meaning we attach to the events—how we interpret them—that shapes who we are today and who we’ll become tomorrow.

From the opposite perspective, we can also inject meaning into an experience as a product creator. A book is only a collection of paper and ink until a deliberately crafted sentence leaps from the pages and plants an idea in the reader; something they can adopt and later spread on their own. A story is capable of empowering someone to overcome their fears and reach for new heights.

Just as a reader can finish a book having a new sense of purpose kindled within themselves, an app can inspire people to finally become healthy (Fitocracy) or give friends a lens into the world from your own perspective (Instagram). Skype and Facetime, to a traveling parent, means bedtime stories with their children when they’re away from home. Amazing products create meaning, representing not just a function, but a story. What story does your product tell to those who use it; why do they want to crack open your book or use your app?

Fail Forward

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 16:01:00 -0500

Our concept of failure is broken. We fear failure, feel defeated by it, and can be discouraged by just the prospect of failure alone. To many, the term “failure” is a simple heuristic—a mental shortcut that we create early on—representing an end-state of humiliation, shame, etc. This is completely backwards: Failure can be one of our most powerful tools.

It starts at a young age. As children we are taught to strive for success and that falling short isn’t acceptable; non-success is quickly associated with punishment as a bad grade is given in school or a starting position in sports is given to the better player. With a little intuition, we can resolve that different people react to and anticipate failure in varying ways. Take this excerpt from a 2008 study, The Social Dynamics of Mathematics Coursetaking in High School:

Members of a social context can influence an adolescent’s personal valuation of math and, therefore, the psychological loss for failure to engage math, the adolescent’s sense of the importance of math, or the adolescent’s popularity as a result of engaging in math.

This suggests that one’s external environment influences both how important we perceive a particular action to be and whether or not failing that action is a big deal. Replace “math” in this example with something like “startups” and we can see how the social context of Silicon Valley varies with other areas.

Imagine the responses of people from different areas to hearing that your startup died: in certain cities you might expect a response like, “don’t quit your day job” and others you might expect, “so what’s your next project?” In his book Failing Forward, John Maxwell makes an argument that “the difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.”

Changing our perception of failure is a subtle act in and of itself; realizing that disconnecting the emotional distress from failure strips it down to existing purely as a data point. Khan Academy does a great job of visualizing this with their Class Profile data:

This graph (showing practice modules successfully completed over time) exemplifies the importance of looking at failure as a data point. What we see is a plot line of mastery for each student, showing when they get “stuck” (horizontal) trying to understand a concept and when they master concepts (vertical)—every student learns at a different pace.

In a traditional scenario, students who don’t grasp a concept will be given a bad grade and the class will move on as a whole, predisposing “stuck” students to further failure. Khan Academy provides a new context for failure, allowing students to fail forward by shedding the pressure of deadlines and displacing the cognitive dissonance and self-blame resulting from bad grades; it prioritizes progress and rewards intrinsic motivation by removing the importance of getting good grades.

In the case of a business or system which relies on resources to continue existing, things become more complex. With an operational cost assumed, failure is the default state from which success emerges. This isn’t inherently bad; it just means your business needs to find success before it reaches the end of the runway. Lean approaches and “fail fast” processes have their merits in this environment by encouraging small, calculated risks and making data-driven decisions to maximize this runway. At AppSumo, nearly 85% of our tests fail, yet we are a healthy and growing company. That said, the idea of failing forward isn’t a process.

Failing Forward is a change in mentality regarding how you react to failure. In business, individually, and in relationships, failure is just a data point that adds value at a later time. Failure provides experience and wisdom to add to your repertoire—it’s an investment in your future. It’s easy to become emotionally entwined with a failure due to pride or hope, which is why we commonly see mention of the “trough of sorrow” in the startup industry. A supportive social system helps remove that emotional attachment by exemplifying that failure is a fact of life and it happens to everybody; sometimes we get stuck. It’s not how you fail that matters, but how you respond.

Don’t be afraid to fail. When you do, fail forward.

Tell me what you think via Twitter.

Social Vanity

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 03:51:00 -0600

So vain are we. Pinterest, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter. We Like it; we Love it; we spend countless hours on it. For what?

Social media is a talent trap. It’s where good, honest manhours go to die. If only we spent as much time producing something with our passion as we do seeking karma and self-gratification. Don’t Re-pin that recipe because the cake looks delicious; go make it yourself and post a picture of your creation! Don’t obsess over your Facebook Likes or Twitter Follower counts; these numbers are meaningless without context—without that actual 1-to-1 relationship.

This, in my mind, is the next obstacle for the social web to overcome. How do we turn each marginal minute of our time online from ‘wasted’ to ‘invested’ with these tools? A rather sobering perspective on this time wasting is described by Youssef Sarhan as the Facebook Like Paradigm.

Today Facebook enjoys 800 Million users; I’d guess, very conservatively, that Facebook processes about 2 billion Likes a day now.

This is where it gets depressing..

Let’s say it takes just 1 second to click a Like button.

2 billion Likes per day * 1 second = 2 billion seconds per day.

2 billion seconds equates to… wait for it… 63 years.

That’s 63 years of collective time people don’t get back, every day, spent clicking buttons on websites; and that number is only for Facebook. This time sink total is an indicator of Facebook’s prosperity, but at what cost does such prosperity come? Reid Hoffman observes that the success of a social network often correlates with its connection to one of the seven deadly sins.

Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins… With Facebook, it’s vanity, and how people choose to present themselves to their friends. It’s the feeling of being connected. I like to emphasize the importance of the deep universal, psychological structure in people’s minds… These are fundamentals for having a fulfilling quality of life.

Additionally, Hoffman suggests acting on these vices via social networks is important because it improves social connectivity versus traditional media, which I agree is true. However, an obsession over vanity metrics has driven down the quality of content generation. If I post more of what other people will like, I’ll get more Followers, Likes, or Re-pins. Ultimately, the social stream is re-run after re-run as the popular content works its way to the top, from rageface memes to designer dresses.

We need to remove this emphasis on empty metrics from social media so people can stop looking in the mirror at their own Likes and Followers and focus on the real benefits that lie beneath: the relationships they’ve fostered, the things they’ve learned, the good they’ve done for someone else… the context that numbers can’t articulate.

Join the conversion on Hacker News.

Producer vs. Consumer

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 15:19:22 -0600

Found this insight in Reddit’s Fitness section, of all places. Read it and let it sink in; make it a habit starting tomorrow. Props to Redditor aceex.

I make sure to start every day as a producer, not a consumer.

When you get up, you may start with a good routine like showering and eating, but as soon as you find yourself with some free time you probably get that urge to check Reddit, open that game you were playing, see what you’re missing on Facebook, etc.

Put all of this off until “later”. Start your first free moments of the day with thoughts of what you really want to do; those long-term things you’re working on, or even the basic stuff you need to do today, like cooking, getting ready for exercise, etc.

This keeps you from falling into the needy consumer mindset. That mindset where you find yourself endlessly surfing Reddit, Facebook, etc. trying to fill a void in yourself, trying to find out what you’re missing, but never feeling satisfied.

When you’ve started your day with doing awesome (not necessarily difficult) things for yourself, these distractions start to feel like a waste of time. You check Facebook just to make sure you’re not missing anything important directed at you, but scrolling down and reading random stuff in your feed feels like stepping out into the Disneyland parking lot to listen to what’s playing on the car radio - a complete waste of time compared to what you’re really doing today.

It sounds subtle, but these are the only days where I find myself getting anything done. I either start my day like this and feel normal and productive, or I look up and realize it’s early evening, I haven’t accomplished anything and I can’t bring myself to focus no matter how hard I want to.

Be Quirky

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 02:38:00 -0600

At the core of every company is its culture—an embodiment of the founders’ personalities. It’s massively important to embrace your quirks as a founder and company as a whole, both good and bad. One of the driving forces behind AppSumo’s success is how well we play up our humor and creativity, utilizing them as tools that transform how professionals shop for educational videos and software.

For instance, the AppSumo logo is a caricature of a sumo wrestler with a burrito-eating grin on his face, Noah Kagan’s “title” is Chief Sumo, and our copy is specifically tailored to produce laughs while still being insightful and enticing. Similar to Gary Vaynerchuk, we probably scare off a handful of great potential customers with our approach, but the level of engagement and dedication we get from those we do attract is much more valuable to us. Perhaps what best exemplifies our culture is the new addition to the site: the Taco Rating System.

This isn’t because using taco instead of star icons is funny and remarkable (which it is), but because the culture at AppSumo encourages rapid ideation; there is no idea too simple or too stupid. The team is conditioned to set inhibitions aside and ask questions like…

Hey Noah, what if we use taco icons instead of stars for our ratings? Everyone uses stars—they’re boring.

Sharing and testing ideas at AppSumo has turned into a quirk of ours—a part of our personality—allowing us to balance our fun-lust and passion to scale while providing a unique experience for customers. How can you leverage your personality to enhance your personal brand or company? We all have weaknesses, so don’t get hung up on overcoming them; instead, execute on what makes you distinctly you.