I’ve been putting off an item on my TODO list for years. Years! I had an insight about a Laws of Physics style Definition of Business that would help technical types understand that building a great product isn’t enough, and that they also need to engineer their marketing and sales. I never found the right way to phrase it, but it was something like this:

“Business is when a customer is convinced that you can solve their problem for less cost than the pain of the problem, and you can do so profitably.”

Even though it’s not perfect, it stuck with me because it was a sentence you could mine for insights:

• Building a product is not enough, customers have to know the solution exists
• Customers being aware of you isn’t enough, they have to be convinced of your claims
• Solving a customer’s problem is not enough, you have to do it a profit that lets you justify continuing to work
• and more.

To anyone experienced in business, all of these are “duh” insights. To a young, inexperienced, myopic nerd turned slightly outgoing engineer, they were blindingly eye-opening.

I no longer need to to write that blog post, because Michael Ellsberg’s book The Education of Millionaires covers these topics oh so much better than I would have.

[Read more…]

[EDIT: I’m a dork – there’s already a transcript on Michael’s Forbes blog: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3]

It’s no secret that I have a man-crush on Michael Ellsberg’s writing, and being a modern writer, he has a book, a website, a column in Forbes, and some videos of talks he has given. One of the talks he calls out is his counsel to young geniuses from the Thiel Fellowship Retreat. As expected, I loved it and took time-stamped notes so that others can benefit as well.

One note: the video is a little shaky and the lighting goes in and out. Don’t let that get in your way! The conditions were not ideal for producing a video: they’re in a room with bright windows, and Michael, the Thiel Fellows, and the cameramen all move around so it takes time for the focus and exposure to catch up. THE CONTENT IS STILL GOLDEN!

[I tried to embed the video but WordPress defeated me]

Michael Ellsberg at the Thiel Fellowship Retreat from Michael Ellsberg on Vimeo.

00:00 Explode the myth that you need to go to college to get an education
00:20 People hate Peter Thiel because he suggests that smart young people should not go to college
01:50 Education is hanging around smarter, wiser people and learning from them
02:00 College is one way to do this because there are brilliant people there, but it’s often inefficient because many professors haven’t accomplished anything in the real world
05:00 At college, some amount of learning and mentorship is given to you on a silver platter, so you don’t learn how to find them in the real world
05:40 The mentors you want in the real world don’t have office hours or published contact info
06:20 How do you find mentors?

07:10 The best thing you can do to recruit mentors is to GIVE to them
08:40 What do you have to give

08:50 FIRST THING TO GIVE: Advice. How can you give great people advice? You know things that people you want to meet want to know about
10:25 MYTH: Accomplished people have nothing left to learn; REALITY: You have valuable knowledge and accomplished people learn a lot
11:00 Ellsberg’s experience with copywriting
11:45 Entrepreneurs know and need to learn lots of areas of expertise
12:20 Youth is a valuable area of expertise that people pay consultants millions to know
13:30 Technical skills should never be underestimated
14:15 Beginning of interactive portion discussing how to connect to potential mentors
15:35 Start with chit-chat, move to inquiry about what they’re working on and ways you can add value, then offer
16:10 Role-play of how to connect with someone at a networking event – connect by giving. Ellsberg plays the role of seeker
20:55 Steer the conversation to areas where you can add value, then offer it
21:10 Givers gain, givers get
22:30 When you help someone get closer to their goals, they’re more willing to help you
23:10 Proactively look for ways to add value – people rarely admit or profess their weaknesses. That’s why you steer to ways you can help
23:50 “All the world loves a giver, all the world hates a taker”

24:55 SECOND THING TO GIVE: Connections
25:55 Giving a connection takes a couple minutes but can change someone’s entire business – it’s a highly leveraged activity
26:25 Key: it has to give value to both parties being connected
29:30 You can’t give with strings attached – people can tell. Trust that goodness will come back to you. Don’t be a used car salesman
30:40 Connections don’t need to be business only – they can be social, romantic, etc
31:50 Role play on making a connection
34:40 Connections are a network game – the rich get richer, so the sooner you grow your network the larger and more valuable it will be
35:40 Networking had a bad rap because most people do it poorly, as takers
36:25 Focus on giving. It’s not totally selfless because you’re choosing to give to powerful, valuable people, but in that context, give liberally
36:50 Measuring time taken – half of Ellsberg’s time was spent networking. One connection can completely transform your business and your life, so the time is highly leveraged
37:55 Put yourself in the right environment – i.e. business conferences like the Summit Series – and the returns can be tremendous
39:00 Social Networking – the non-useful ways are just entertainment. FB/Twitter/RSS people that you want to connect with – that is valuable and worthwhile
40:20 When your business grows, other people will be doing work for you, and your role will be the rainmaker, so there’s never too much networking
41:20 The best contacts/clients/investors/partners come through referrals

42:35 THIRD THING TO GIVE: Willingness to bust ass putting their advice into practice
43:00 Successful people want to leave a legacy, want to see more people use what they learned
44:40 The wrong way is to leach off of successful peoples’ knowledge and effort
45:05 Right way: do your homework, Google them, read news about them, read their Twitter feed, find connections, read their book, etc
46:00 When you contact them, have a SPECIFIC reason. NEVER say “I want to pick your brain” And it should be a question that they are uniquely positioned to answer. Their effort to answer is multiplied by your willingness to put it into action
47:40 Old models of education are crumbling, 22% of people with BA’s under 25 are unemployed, another 25% are doing jobs that don’t require a BA
49:30 These tools will help you get the teachers and mentors that will give you the education that will give you the success you want

BONUS ELLSBERG!

Michael also gave a great interview on Mixergy. It’s worth reading or listening to the whole thing, but he gave two calls to action for people that want to improve their direct response copywriting skills.

1) Create a separate email address and sign up for copywriting newsletters(alternate: Create a sub address in gmail and create a filter for it)

• Eben Pagan: has a $30 million a year info marketing business, absolute master copywriter
• Dan Kennedy: master copy-writer, extreme hard sell
• Matt Furey
• Marie Forleo: brings in a more feminine touch to the art of copywriting and does it totally different style
• Jonathan Fields: much more of a soft sell, a master at very sweet, authentic, like you would, there\’s just no sleaze with him at all

Get on all these lists. It\’s free and read what they send you. These people are masters and you can just read their e-mails and see how they do copywriting.

2) Read these books:

• Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples ~$9 A legend in advertising for more than 60 years, John Caples’s classic work has been updated to retain all of the candid analysis and invaluable award-winning ideas from the original while bringing it up to date on the many changes in the field.
• Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins ~$7.50 or $1.99 on Kindle – Claude Hopkins expresses powerful, statistically tested truths about “salesmanship in print” which remain relevant through the decades and across all media – including today’s internet marketing.
• On Advertising by David Ogilvy ~$17 – “Advertising is salesmanship.”
• Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz – $lots (expensive because out of print) – “The person who should get this book is the person who would like to create a million-dollar business with an idea, a product, or a division of an existing business. There is simply no other resource that will show you how to do that with marketing.”

Expensive workshops are just people regurgitating the material from these great old books.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Michael Ellsberg for being inspring at a time I needed it.

I just read the first issue of a new magazine called Distance. In their own words:

Distance, a new quarterly publication featuring long-form essays about design and technology.

There’s a lot of writing about the hows and whats of design, but we wonder where the whys are. So much of the writing about why we design, and the ramifications of our work, lacks the research and analysis that is critical to any serious discourse. We want to change that.

I just finished reading the first issue and I wanted to give feedback, both on how the magazine measures up against its goals and what I personally thought of it.

Distance does a great job of measuring up against its goals. The articles were thorough, long (~15-20 pdf pages), and well researched. There was empirical, historical, and reference data to support or refute any claims made. These are definitely not opinion pieces. Any of these articles would be a useful reference or starting point for further research into a topic. For instance, I know a lot about the rise of Zynga and modern social gaming because I was very plugged into that industry as it was developing. Ben Jackson’s article in Distance #1 covered the important points in that story, both historical and critical. If all Distance essays are held to the same standard of research and documentation, I would have no problem trusting them.

My own personal opinion of the magazine is not so rosy, but that’s because I’m not the target market. Like any scholarly material, you have to really care about the topic to read the much denser, less narrative material. I’m not a designer, so the specific topics (research as part of the design process and local design community organization) were not very interesting to me. The writing and research was of the same caliber but I was less invested in the subject. Also, since the goal is research and analysis, the writing isn’t necessarily entertaining. Given the goals of the project, that’s a feature, not a bug. But don’t expect a page turner.

Finally, I’d like to offer Nick Disabato (creator of Distance) praise for a job well done and the following advice:

• Consider switching from footnotes to end notes. There were a ton of footnotes on every page and it chopped up the flow of each article. For electronic versions, jumping back and forth between text and endnotes is super easy. (I read the pdf version)
• Require an abstract for each article. These are too deep to summarize with a title or sentence, and too long to skim. It will also make Distance a better research source.
• As the number of articles grows, have all the abstracts on the site and a searchable index of the articles on the site. Then you can provide different options for accessing single articles.

If you wonder about the “Whys of design”, you should subscribe to Distance.

I read. A lot. In fact, I’d probably write more if I read less. Blogs have a special place in my heart, because reading a few special blogs back in the mid aughts guided me to where I am professionally today.

Three classic tech blogs were especially influential on me:

• Joel on Software – most of my understanding of the software business comes from Joel or things Joel linked to. It’s also interesting to see his evolution, given his early emphasis on slow, Ben and Jerry growth and desktop software, to heading a VC funded Amazon-style monetize later service like Stack Exchange and Trello. He defined many terms that people use to describe the software business today.
• Paul Graham – full of powerful, challenging ideas. He has about half of the entries on my list of “Life-changing, perception-altering quotes.” Again, interesting to see how he changed his leverage from spreading ideas through writing to spreading ideas through investing, mentoring, and execution.
• Raganwald – doesn’t have as many “big idea” posts that stand out in my memory, but his writing felt closer to home. Unlike Joel and pg, Raganwald always felt like a programmer, exploring issues that programmers cared about. Joel and pg felt like something else, but Raganwald seemed like a better version of what I could become.

Even though they’re 5+ years old, you’d still be better off today reading their old essays than most of what’s new. None of my three favorites still write much, but there’s so much gold on the table already.

I’m in a very different place than I was in 2005, 2006 when I started reading blogs. The cutting edge thoughts and ideas from back then have spread and in many cases become common knowledge. So I want to mention three new writers that excite me the way Joel, pg, and Raganwald did back then:

• Ramit Sethi – I came across Ramit’s blog several years ago and I thought he came off as a cheesy hustler. His cockiness and attitude kept me from believing his savings tactics. I wrote him off until a few months ago he came onto my radar again, and it’s different between us now. Now he dives deep into the psychology of high performance, how to make changes when most people fail, and more. Very strategic things. Now I think Ramit’s writings are some of the most exciting things for an ambitious person to read. Here’s a good recent post about mastering the game being played around you.
• Michael Ellsberg – Speaking of exciting, I can’t get enough of Michael Ellsberg since I heard him on Mixergy. He covers a lot of the same ground as Ramit but in a different way. Ramit seems to dance around the point more and use sales and persuasion techniques like testimonials a lot, but Ellsberg just attacks like a tiger wielding Thor’s hammer. I believe Ramit because he’s convincing, but I believe Ellsberg because he’s so aggressively open and confident. My favorite example of this is his article about his brand promise – to shatter limited thinking.
• Venkatesh Rao (also has a book called Tempo)- While Ramit and Ellsberg cover a lot of the same ideas, Venkatesh is completely off the wall. He explores history, technology, psychology, culture, business, and whatever he feels like, and he does it in a way unlike anyone else I’ve read. I don’t always agree with or understand everything he says, and I’m never sure if it’s because my thinking is too limited or if he’s off in left field. But there’s no one else today who has repeatedly reshaped my perception of things I didn’t even know I didn’t understand. Good places to start are his articles about leaving the middle class and a brief history of the corporation.

Give these writers a try and maybe they will reshape your mind forever too!

Discussion: Who do you think is writing the best stuff right now?