Trust Me, I’m Lying isn’t actually a “playbook for the dark arts of exploiting the media.” It’s more like a straight description of everyday PR work that failed to shock me, even if it did contain some clever ideas for how to trade a story up through a media system that performs no quality control. I don’t recommend this book as an instruction manual. I would warn against using some of the techniques that he the author (likely using a pen name) describes. Fraud always decays in the long run. As a 20-something working in the field, I know that I need to build a reputation that’ll last me for the next ~50 years of my working life, and doing so on a foundation of half-truth isn’t a sensible career strategy.

I should also note that Holiday confesses to many, many violations of FTC regulations in this book, but none of the reviewers that I’ve noticed have brought up this fact. Agree or disagree with the nature of those laws, one can’t help but remark on the fact that an author can brag about flouting regulations without anyone (indeed, even the author himself) noticing.

One observation that I agree with wholeheartedly is that the CPM system that major blogs use as a performance for advertisers is wholly misleading, and even dangerous to brands that rely upon them. From the book:

These advertisements are paid for by the impression (generally a rate per thousand impressions). A site might have several ad units on each page; the publisher’s revenue equals the cumulative CPM (cost per thousand) multiplied by the number of pageviews. Advertisement × Traffic = Revenue. An ad buyer like me buys this space by the millions—ten million impressions on this site, five million on another, fifty million through a network. A few blogs produce a portion of their revenue through selling extras—hosting conferences or affiliate deals—but, for the most part, this is the business: Traffic is money. A portion of the advertising on blogs is sold directly by the publisher, a portion is sold by sales reps who work on commission, and the rest is sold by advertising networks that specialize in the remaining inventory. Regardless of who sells it or who buys it, what matters is that every ad impression on a site is monetized, if only for a few pennies. Each and every pageview is money in the pocket of the publisher. Publishers and advertisers can’t differentiate between the types of impressions an ad does on a site. A perusing reader is no better than an accidental reader. An article that provides worthwhile advice is no more valuable than one instantly forgotten. So long as the page loads and the ads are seen, both sides are fulfilling their purpose. A click is a click. Knowing this, blogs do everything they can to increase the latter variable in the equation (traffic, pageviews). It’s how you must understand them as a business. Every decision a publisher makes is ruled by one dictum: traffic by any means. (Kindle Locations 422-434).

Sounds reasonable, right? Actually, paying by page view doesn’t make much sense, and neither does paying by the action for brand ads. ‘Holiday’ describes an online media fixated on delivering pageview metrics at the expense of validating whether or not the information they provide has utility to readers.

As far as advertisers are concerned, a view that doesn’t increase propensity to buy the product being advertised is money wasted. These publishers are designing content that maximizes the amount of wasted advertising spending. ‘Views’ with no regard to promoting and sustaining long term purchasing habits are wasteful, particularly when ‘views’ can be purchased through advertising on Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon, and elsewhere at lower CPM rates than those offered by advertisers themselves.

Key Takeaways

As a search engine marketer, I see some clear parallels to some of the problems that have developed over time in search. In the pre-Panda/Penguin days, agencies that optimized for number of links built prospered in the short term, because PageRank naively tends to assume that all links are created close to equal, and it’s possible to inflate the value of web pages doing the linking beyond the informational value that they provide to real readers. As PageRank has improved, it’s become more challenging to manipulate the algorithm.

I’ve written already about my predictions for Google Authorship and how I expect that it’ll change the media environment. Reading this book sharpened my convictions. I doubt that many of the temporarily successful media companies that have built empires on bad measurement through CPMs, which treat every “view” as if it were equal, will be able to sustain their brands in the long run. Holiday’s conclusions as to the likely future of the market are similar to my own in this: paid media is the only system that provides incentives to media companies to perform quality control.

While Google has traditionally penalized paywalls, I expect that more loopholes will be opened to make it possible for more publishers to charge for access without forsaking search for distribution.

The technological infrastructure to support more reputation-based systems is currently, I speculate, being built out a couple miles away from me at Google’s Mountain View headquarters. Most of the modern media companies that rely on the post-first-verify-never model aren’t structured to be capable of weathering the volatility that these technical changes will impose on their editorial and advertising models.

As authorship signals work their way into changing search results, it’ll severely damage media promotion models that rest on the ‘quality-control free’ method of daisy-chaining links together from the anonymous muck up to high ‘authority’ publications. While I’m unsure of what methods that Google will use to determine what information is valid and what’s not, I’m confident that it’ll be a much more significant trend than almost anyone gives it credit for.

Workers in the anonymous web have become complacent, because so little has changed in the fundamental nature of tasks like link-building for such a long period of time. The hype around identity and reputation technology has risen and fallen over the last several years, but I expect that some of it is going to ripen soon.

Antifragile is a book of practical philosophy that will improve your ability to make intelligent decisions. Its author, Nassim Taleb, is famous for his council against ignoring hidden risks in financial markets and for making hundreds of millions of dollars by trading options to profit from those discounted risks.

This is an important book that most people will ignore. It’s currently only #27 on the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction best seller list and #122 on Amazon’s sales rank for the US according to Sales Rank Express. Of course, that’s not bad, but in terms of cultural impact, the book currently ranks below such sure-to-be-classics like Sonia Sotomayor’s autobiography and a book about the Kennedy assassination by Bill O’Reilly. Neither of those top books will generate much of utility to anyone who reads it beyond providing some crass entertainment value.

The book argues that organic systems benefit from some measure of disorder, and that the workings of almost all of those systems are challenging for outsiders to understand. The greater the complexity of the system, the more challenging it becomes to predict the effects of intervening into it. This has implications for the fields of economics, medicine, art, and politics.

A core message of the book is Taleb’s observation of frequent iatrogenic effects from foolish intervention into complex systems. This rhymes with the observation by economists that legislative interventions into the economy tend to have unforeseen and usually negative consequences. These effects can also be seen in the realm of reactive medicine as compared to preventative medicine: drugs have sometimes terrible negative side effects, while only general health prevents the most severe medical ailments. Lipitor, for example, may reduce the chances of heart disease in patients, but not as well as good health does without the negative side effects.

The notion of antifragility is one that only tends to appear in functional ecologies and in human systems that resemble ecologies. The restaurant industry as a whole gains from the disorder of its component parts. Each individual restaurant tends to be fragile to volatility in the market, but the community of restaurants gains from every failure. This is true in any functioning market economy. When legislators and others prevent individual failures from occurring, the entire system becomes more prone to failure.

Evolution as a whole is an example of antifragility in action. Over time, a species evolves in response to stressors in the environment. The genes that are adaptive tend to propagate, and those that don’t tend to fail. The variation in genetics produces a more resilient overall system, as different genes adapt to different environments appropriately over time.

Attempting to subsidize failures encourages ‘genes’ — whether metaphorical or real — that are mal-adaptive to propagate. Companies that would fail without intervention continue operating for too long, producing products that don’t serve their customers well. People learn techniques that are unwise, cultural fashions that would die out persist longer than they would otherwise, and an ecosystem becomes more vulnerable to catastrophic, generalized failure instead of localized and containable failure.

Taleb writes

A complex system, contrary to what people believe, does not require complicated systems and regulations and intricate policies. The simpler, the better. Complications lead to multiplicative chains of unanticipated effects. Because of opacity, an intervention leads to unforeseen consequences, followed by apologies about the “unforeseen” aspect of the consequences, then to another intervention to correct the secondary effects, leading to an explosive series of branching “unforeseen” responses, each one worse than the preceding one.” [1]

Innovation derives from adaptation to stressors. It’s not the result of bureaucratic funding resulting from grand initiatives from politicians:

[W]e tend to think that innovation comes from bureaucratic funding, through planning, or by putting people through a Harvard Business School class by one Highly Decorated Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (who never innovated anything) or hiring a consultant (who never innovated anything). This is a fallacy— note for now the disproportionate contribution of uneducated technicians and entrepreneurs to various technological leaps, from the Industrial Revolution to the emergence of Silicon Valley, and you will see what I mean. [2]

 

Taleb attacks the character-type of the fragilista: someone who causes fragility, usually by using legislation to redistribute volatility to others, and then rationalizes the process. An example of this would be the Federal Reserve fixing interest rates at nothing, which benefits established bankers (fragilistas), while harming savers (the victims) who would otherwise be earning money on the fruits of their labor. The bankers who would otherwise make it their job to manage the risks of interest rate volatility instead are able to make risk-free profits.

This is the ecological equivalent of temporarily chasing all the predators out of an ecosystem. The former prey animals propagate themselves with no limit, devouring the plants that sustained their herd, until the over-eating causes a massive die-off for the species in question. Interest rates are a factor that slows down the rate of capital consumption and forces investors to carefully consider the merits of various investments. Removing that brake leads to an ironclad guarantee of a major crisis in the future or at least an ‘unforeseen’ shock when the ‘predators’ return to the system.

Like his other famous book, The Black Swan, Antifragile will most likely be praised after the next major global financial crisis strikes the markets. The folks who spent their scarce attention reading yet another book of silly theories about how an insignificant president had his head blown off will be shocked, just shocked, by the inevitable iatrogenic crisis brought on by the vast intervention intended to resolve the previous financial crisis.

At the individual level, what you can learn from this book is the importance of seeking out stressors that are just enough to improve your capacities without actually killing you or causing financial ruin. You want to lift just enough weight to strengthen your muscles, but not so much that you break your bones.

Go buy Antifragile and read it.

[1]Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2012-11-27). Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Kindle Locations 473-476). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition

[2]Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2012-11-27). Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Kindle Locations 918-922). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

I don’t remember who recommended this book to me, but I bought it on impulse for a few dollars.

It comes from an earlier era — 2007 — a strange period in which companies like Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and Microsoft were still widely respected on college campuses. During this strange time, elite college students wanted to be working in derivatives, consulting, or working on Windows Vista.

I’m being inappropriately rude here, because it’s actually a useful book packed into a small package. It distinguishes why some organizations succeed over the long run and others don’t: top-tier companies have a better understanding of how to recruit, train, and motivate young employees:

“Time to face the facts! Students do not think about what’s best for your organization during the recruiting process. They may start to think about the company once they actually begin to work, but while they’re deciding where they will work, they think about only one thing: keeping their options open.”

While it may seem like the book’s advice — to give college graduates some measure of responsibility, to give perks like travel, to give them role flexibility — are obvious, they’re actually not to people who suck at business or are ignorant about how to get new recruits motivated.

The book is geared towards companies doing college recruiting. There’s almost nothing about how to find and hire candidates who are already out of college — which disappointed me. I hoped to get a book that was a more general guide to spotting talent — because as Mark Suster writes, everyone at a startup should Always Be Recruiting.

What also surprised me was to learn about how much spying and intelligence-gathering top corporations do at the best universities. I went to two very good schools, but I dropped out before I could encounter recruiting-mania, so it was interesting to read about how those networks function.

I bought this book on introversion immediately on the advice of my old friend (and recent Brooklyn transplant) Ned White.

Yes, dear reader, if I trust your recommendation enough, I’ll buy a book on your say-so, read the whole thing, and then tell you what I think of it at the end. I can call multiple witnesses to attest to this perverse habit of mine.

I’ve not typically thought of myself as as introvert, despite the massive quantities of evidence in favor of the adjective being applied to me. I went roughly four years working in an apartment by myself, with only e-mails and the occasional Skype call to keep me company during the workday.

I enjoy talking to people. I’m comfortable performing in front of an audience. I can run a meeting. I enjoy casual banter. All of these made me think that I’m some kind of hybrid.

After reading this book, I’m not so sure anymore. The author, Marti Laney, defines introversion and extroversion in terms of whether social activity energizes you or drains you. Reviewing my own life, I know that chatting with people is exhausting. I don’t need as many casual friends as most other people that I’ve met. I tend to keep a small number of close friendships. Parties with large numbers of strangers alternately exhaust and terrify me.

I feel most comfortable in crowds of people who don’t know me. What I love about New York City (even though I don’t live there anymore) is how easy it is to be alone in a crowd.

I learned that I’m not fucked up because I dislike keeping a lot of random people in my life, and that it takes me an onerous level of effort to do something like “hang out” with “bros” on a couch, slamming “brewskies” and chatting about sporting events. It’s because that kind of activity drains the hell out of me.

It also explains why I can’t tolerate roommates — the mere presence of someone else in an apartment when I’m trying to get myself together for the next day prevents me from restoring my brain:

The more introverted you are, the more you need a serene environment for processing stimuli and for recharging. Why is processing time so crucial? Without it, you get information overload. New input lands on top of old input, and suddenly, your threshold is reached and you shut down. Crash. Circuits are jammed. Numbness sets in.

The book also taught me a measure of empathy for extroverts. I have usually found typical socialization habits of extroverts to be incomprehensible. Now, I’m starting to understand — a party for an extrovert is as enjoyable and relaxing as solitude is for me.

The author describes it simply:

They may be the ones who are raring to go after a party, asking, What shall we do next? Often the harder part for them is relaxing and giving their bodies a rest. Introverts, on the other hand, are energized by the internal world—by ideas, impressions, and emotions. Counter to our stereotypes of introverts, they are not necessarily quiet or withdrawn, but their focus is inside their heads.

The book’s title is about the advantages of introverts, because apparently pro-extrovert propaganda dominates America, which makes introverts feel deficient about themselves.

One observation that resonated with me (and may resonate with you) is the introverted tendency to attempt to learn as much about a topic as possible before feeling confident about it:

Many introverts don’t feel as if they know enough about a subject until they know almost everything, and that’s the way I approached this project. This happens for three reasons. First, introverts can imagine the vastness of any subject. Second, they have had the experience of their brain locking, so in an attempt to avoid that awful blank-mind moment, they overprepare by accruing as much information as they can.

I want to say that I don’t ‘over-prepare,’ but it usually takes me around three to six books read on a topic before I feel confident enough to win debates on it.

An introverted character brings sometimes-unpopular skills to any group:

We bring important attributes to the party—the ability to focus deeply, an understanding of how a change will affect everyone involved, the capacity to observe, a propensity for thinking outside the box, the strength to make unpopular decisions, and the potential to slow the world down a notch.

Extroverts cohere groups. They seem to focus on surface interactions. For introverts, the world of thought is brighter than the sensory world that we share with others. When I’m speaking with someone, I attempt to understand the inner world of the other person I’m talking to. I consider what’s being said to be the small exposed peak of an island that’s mostly submerged.

This book is easy to recommend, unlike most of the other psychology books that I’ve read. Most psychology books require too much effort from the reader to be applied effectively. Anyone can understand this one and make use of it.

Also, it seems like reading about introverts is chic these days, especially now that nerds are becoming billionaires again.

Read my notes on Hewitt Book List, my Quora board about what I’m reading.

I was glad to find pictures of tits in this book when I didn’t expect them.

Ogilvy on Advertising is one of those books that I routinely thought “you should buy this book, JC” many times over the last two years. It took me a long time to act on my self-nagging, because it  costs $35, and I experience conniptions whenever I spend more than $20 at a time.

It’s embarrassing to me that I avoided reading this for so long. It’s not that I couldn’t have afforded the $35 earlier. It’s just that I was always reading something else, and had grown to prefer digital books. All of those were dumb rationalizations.

This is more than just a useful book for people interested in advertising. It’s valuable for anyone even vaguely interested in managing people, running a business, or persuading others to your point of view. Even though I’ve probably read dozens of blog posts and articles about Ogilvy’s work, I still learned something new on almost every page.

Also, as I mentioned earlier, there are tits in this book. It ostensibly demonstrates differences in mores between advertisements from different cultures.

Reading Ogilvy made me feel like I was in the presence of a powerful mind. He writes on knowledge and advertising:

“What distinguishes the great surgeon is that he knows more than other surgeons. It is the same with advertising agents. The good ones know more.”

It’s not always easy for people to make this connection. I don’t always make this connection with myself (hence why I delayed reading this book for years after I put it on my Amazon wishlist).

This is probably because it took me a long time to actually think that business was worthwhile. I thought that business was for stupid chumps. I wanted to write about politics — African wars, Russian corruption, and American scandals. I wanted to be a big-shot writer.  I never wanted to be a plebian pusher of products. I was much too brilliant to bother.

I had it backwards, intellectually, and it’s taken me a long time to go into reverse and drive myself along a more productive route. I had to develop a little humility. I had to develop the wisdom that selling products to people is a lot more helpful than lecturing them about obscure political topics that “they should” care about.

No busybody intellectual ever clothed anyone, fed the hungry, or cured the sick. The tailor, the baker, and the doctor did all three — and the ad-man told the people that their services were worthwhile and explained where to find them.

On leadership, Ogilvy writes

“The best leaders are be found among those executives who have a strong component of unorthodoxy in their characters. Instead of resisting innovation, they symbolize it — and companies cannot grow without innovation.”

Principles like these don’t expire. Innovation requires unconventional characters.

Speaking again of breasts in advertising, Ogilvy counsels against cheap stunts that fail to feature the product:

“Some copywriters, assuming the reader will find the product as boring as they do, try to inveigle him into their ads with pictures of babies, beagles, and bosoms. This is a mistake.”

Many young online businesses continue to struggle with this concept. That which people click on does not necessarily sell a product. People will click for the boobs, but leave the product behind.

Ogilvy knows how to make a reader feel like he’s the only person in the room. Reading his work, I felt like I was the only guy that the author cared about, even though he died when I was 13 years old. It was like reading a long letter with beautiful illustrations by a guy who cared ferociously that I would learn everything that he could teach me in as short and appealing a package as possible.

I feel ashamed that I was that copywriter guy who wrote advertisements without caring to educate myself about the field until I had been working in it for a couple years. I coasted on “talent,” which is to say that I muddled through on youthful passion and privilege until it stopped working. Avoid the same mistakes that I did, no matter what field you work in.

What I’m starting to understand is that real knowledge compounds rapidly. That ‘genius surgeon’ doesn’t emerge fully formed into the emergency room jamming scalpels into brain matter.

He gets that way by accumulating more knowledge than the lazier surgeons and applying it more effectively.

Apply Ogilvy’s advice in general and not just specifically to advertising:

“If you follow the advice I have given you, you will do your homework, avoid committees, learn from research, watch what the direct-response advertisers do, and stay away from irrelevant sex.”

Damn! If only I’d read this when I was younger.

Finishing The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman leaves me feeling like I’ve just joined a high-end cult.

Reading it made me feel like an uneducated rube that had just gone through a crash course taught by a genius-level professor. Norman respects his readers. He’s earned respect in industry that goes back decades.

This is a book of principles. It’ll hold up decades from now.

The book used to be entitled The Psychology of Everday Things, but as Norman explains in the introduction, it lead to the book being mis-categorized in bookstores. It felt almost as revelatory as one of the many affecting psychology books that I’ve read. Instead of human on human relations, this book puts man-on-thing relations on the couch.

The author writes

“Each time a new technology comes along, new designers make the same horrible mistakes as their predecessors. Technologists are not noted for learning from the errors of the past. They look forward, not behind, so they repeat the same problems over and over again.”

This is much like other human endeavors, from politics to love relationships. Technologists often find new ways to reincarnate ancient errors. Norman writes that ”we are surrounded with objects of desire, not objects of use.” Bad but flashy products that succeed on the marketplace are like beautiful girls with big breasts that also have vacuous minds and cruel temperaments.

Norman suggests that designers should “Analyze a task, and… see how it can be made easier.” Developers are more likely to analyze some existing interface and how its aesthetics can be altered. Instead, it’s better to ask what task you want the user to accomplish and to remove any impediments to them.

The author’s observation that…

“It is the rare organization that is content to let a good product stand or to let natural evolution perfect it slowly. No, each year a “new, improved” model must come out, usually incorporating new features that do not use the old as a starting point. In far too many instances, the results spell disaster for the consumer.”

…left a bitter feeling in me. Companies like Twitter seem to be superb at this (ignoring a few mis-steps). Most others aren’t. There’s nothing wrong with picking a popular problem that a lot of people want solved and then delivering a more effective solution for it at a great price.

The Design of Everyday Things fits well with a running theme in most of the books that I’ve read recently: the limitations of the mind. A major error that I grew up believing was that there were “no real mental limits” — that mental exhaustion was some combination of moral failing and laziness. It’s been rough for me to learn my own limitations and to understand those of others.

It may not be as cathartic a discovery as a personal psychological breakthrough, but the book persuaded me to stop blaming myself and to never again blame a user for a failure to understand a product. Once you accept this, it becomes easier to critique existing designs — because when you fail to understand something, you can halt the impulse to self-attack for screwing up and blame the product instead.

Be the kid in the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes when it comes to design. It seems like so many products are build from the perspective of that emperor and his sycophantic courtiers. This short (~200 page) book provides a usable toolkit for both critiquing existing design and building usable products.