How Running A Business Changes The Way You Think

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How Running A Business Changes The Way You Think

A few months ago I had the opportunity to have dinner with Ramit Sethi.  We shot the breeze about business topics for a little while — optimizing email opt-in rates, A/B testing to victory, pricing strategies, and the like.  Writing and selling software is solidly in my comfort zone and is what I usually talk about on this blog.  If you want that, skip this post .  We are going deep, deep into the fluffy bits!

The conversation wandered into the softer side of things: psychology, and how running businesses has changed us as people.  I told Ramit a story, and he encouraged me to share it a little more widely, so here we go.

Knowing What Motivates You

Have you ever heard the expression “That really pushes my buttons”?  The notion that there is a particular set of things that uniquely motivates a person has always been a very powerful one with me.  I don’t always have the best handle on what I want in life, but I have enough introspection to know where my buttons are.  A big one, for as long as I can remember, is labeled “Praise To Release Dopamine.”  When I was growing up, I was a praise-seeking missile.  I got very good grades.  I got very good at getting very good grades — not because I wanted good grades for their own sake, and not out of some notion that good grades would get me something valuable in the abstract future, but mostly because I learned very early that parents, teachers, and other people I respected would say “Attaboy, Patrick” if I brought home the A.

That particular story might evoke shades of Tiger Mom parenting.  That would be overstating it: I love my parents deeply, they never pushed me into anything I didn’t want to do, and we’re rather paler than most of the folks in the Tiger Mom crowd.  (Though friends in high school often joked that we’re the most Asian white people they know — and seeing as how my siblings and I can together handle Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, that might not be totally off the mark.)

I realized something fairly early on, though: being a good, hardworking student and getting good grades are two very distinct skill sets.  I was not a particularly “good student”, I just got particularly good at being a student.  I got hooked on a lifetime love of optimizing systems when I realized that 89.5% rounds up to 90% rounds up to an A. That meant I could blow off one more homework assignment than if I didn’t understand decimal arithmetic. Math gives you superpowers.

That’s also why I got started writing.  You see, after you set a multi-year expectation of always getting good grades, the praise mostly dries up.  Drats!  But if you particularly impress a teacher with your flair for writing, and she reads it out to the entire class, then you get to beam a little bit and you collect a story redeemable for an Attaboy at the dinner table.  So I got hooked on writing.  Roughly contemporaneously, I got introduced to the Internet, which if you write well and enjoy having an audience praise your ideas is like your own personal Skinner box.  (If anyone ever wonders why I spend a wee bit too much time on message forums, well, there you go.)

Is there a point to that anecdote?  Sort of.  If you have a good handle on what really motivates you, you probably have a good handle on things which do not really motivate you.  At the top of the list for me: money.  Don’t get me wrong, I am fascinated by money, in the same fashion that the engineer in me is fascinated by bits and electricity and experience points and red blood cells and everything else that whirs around animating interestingly complex systems.  The notion of seeking money strikes me a lot like the notion of seeking red blood cells: ewww.  As long as I don’t drop dead from lack of them, honestly, I could take it or leave it.  (At least qua currency.  Money is also the convenient method of keeping score for optimizing businesses, which feels like a game to me.  I really enjoy winning games with complicated rules sets, especially by optimizing the heck out of play, because optimization is often as much fun as actually playing the game.)

Careers as a Multi-Dimensional Preference Space

My preference set is more complicated than the above micro-sketch, but suffice it to say that I have a good handle on what I value.  One would think I used that introspection to actually achieve happiness.  Was I happy a few years ago?  No, I was very unhappy.

There was a point in my life where I thought what I really wanted was a safe, comfortable, professional career at a big freaking megacorp.  I even had the position picked out: I wanted to be the Project Manager in charge of the Japanese version of Microsoft Office.  If that sounds like a curiously specific goal in life, just call me quirky: I had set about optimizing for a safe middle-class...